Dreams in a Time of War (10 page)

Because my father stood aloof from the rituals of both tradition and Christianity, considering himself modern, he was haughty vis-à-vis Baba Mũkũrũ and Lord Reverend Stanley alike. His attitude toward his brother may have been conditioned by his having rubbed shoulders with a white
person in the big city, having worked as his servant. As to Kahahu, my father always thought himself the rightful owner of the land Kahahu occupied, and so in the reverend’s preaching my father saw hypocrisy. Even the news of Paul Kahahu going to South Africa would not have fazed my father who, despite the fact that he did not actively embrace education, could still boast of a son, an ex-military man, who had been overseas and had come back with learning.

From Lord Reverend Kahahu I myself learned to revere modernity; from Baba Mũkũrũ, the values of tradition; and from my father, a healthy skepticism of both. But the performance aspects of both Christianity and tradition always appealed to me.

My father was known all over the region for having quality
mũratina
, a homemade wine made out of a mixture of the purest of sugarcane that he himself grew, the richest of honey, and the finest of natural yeast, stored in gourds that were finely cut and shaped. But he had developed remarkable discipline in how he used his time. He would never drink during the workday. Those invited for wine at his home on a weekend had to show respect for his wives and children. If they misbehaved, he would send them away. A revered patriarch, he nevertheless acknowledged that his wives headed their respective households.

In my mind, my father’s patriarchy established itself in two distinct phases. I had a vague early childhood recollection of his kraal, a space surrounded by a fence of wood and an outer hedge of thorny bush, part of the homestead: images of his coming home in the evenings leading his enormous herd of cows into the vast kraal, sometimes aided by the older sons, or one of his wives, and then, after securing the herd inside, he would go to his
thingira
, equidistant to those of his four wives. He was careful not to show any preference for any one of his wives’ huts. When the women
brought him food, he would invite us children to share. We enjoyed a daily feast. He was not a great storyteller but he was keen on teaching us good eating habits, like not biting off more than we could chew, and not swallowing what was only hastily chewed. Take your time, the food is not going anywhere. Sometimes his fellow elders came to visit him, to deliberate issues of the moment. My father had one of the best smiles ever, but his laughter could also be ironic, sinister sounding at times, when he was reacting to matters of which he disapproved.

Although it was never clear to me how the transition occurred, the second phase followed my father’s expulsion from the fields around the homestead, because now his hut was rarely occupied and we did not share meals with him anymore. The women still took food to him daily, but to the edges of my maternal grandfather’s forest of blue gum and eucalyptus trees, not far from the Limuru African market shops. A new
thingira
was built next to his property, quite a distance from the old homestead. He came home mostly on Saturdays or Sundays when he had
mũratina
to share with his friends. If he stayed for the night, he would sleep in one of the women’s huts.

I had always wanted to help in the herding like some of the older boys but he never asked me. One time, long before I started school, I had accompanied one of the boys, my half brother Njinjũ wa Njeri, to my father’s new abode. Indians burned their dead among the eucalyptus and blue gums. My mother said that if you stood on the dump site at home, you could see Indian ghosts walking about, holding a light.
Have you seen the spirits with your own eyes? Yes, she would say, and described how on some nights she had seen the tiny light move to and fro in pitch darkness. Pressed for more details, if she had actually seen the body of the spirits for instance, she would close the subject, slightly irritated that we were questioning the veracity of an eyewitness account. She spoke with total conviction as if she were describing an encounter in the marketplace. I may not have believed her, but I was still a little scared of the place. The grounds were vast; the trees tall, the undergrowth thick in some places, and I assumed that the strange scent emanating from the trees and the undergrowth was really that of the burnt flesh of the Indian dead. The cattle and goats roamed everywhere but mostly at the outer edges of the forest, where there were long treeless patches. After a market day, my half brother would let the herds roam about in the African marketplace and sometimes let them eat the tall grass in the shops’ backyards. The owners did not mind this because it saved them from having to cut it short. Through the forest, near my father’s new kraal, was a path that led to the railway station and the Limuru marketplace. My half brother would stop some of the girls passing by and chat them up, asking them to “give it to my brother,” pointing at me, vowing that I knew how to do it very well. The ladies would smile and walk away or call him names. I did not understand what he meant by those words or the girls’ response. Whatever the case, it felt good just to hang around or go exploring inside the forest, not being particularly worried about where the goats and cows were, except in the evening when we collected them
and led them back into the kraal and closed the gates. When I grew up, I thought, I would ask my father to let me be his regular assistant herd boy so that I would learn how to milk the cows the way my half brother did, and talk to the girls the way he did.

But I never got a chance, not only because I had started school but because a disaster struck. His goats and cows caught a strange illness. Their tummies puffed up, followed by diarrhea and death. Traditional medical expertise was no match for the disease. There were no veterinary services for African farmers at the time. His animals died one by one. Rumors swirled that his goats and cows had once strayed to the backyard of some tea shop in the African marketplace, and ate some of the clothes drying on a line and drank the clean water in containers. The irate owner, in vengeance, had later poisoned the grass and the water.

Whatever the explanation, the disaster that befell my father was long cited in arguments between proponents of holding money in banks and those who believed that livestock was the only real measure of wealth. One fact they would not dispute: The man who had everything had now lost all.

His loss of wealth devastated my father. The proud, aloof patriarch who had always left each wife to tend her house as she saw fit now tried to micromanage the entire homestead, even questioning the comings and goings of his daughters, saying aloud that he did not want any of them to go the way of Baba Muũkũrũ’s daughter. His interference became worse after he abandoned his
thingira
near the empty kraal and moved into Njeri’s, the youngest wife’s, place, while insisting that the other wives deliver his food to him there. This upset the delicate balance of power that the women had worked out among themselves. When he tried to assuage the resulting tension among them, he only made it worse.

Although we all feared our father, I had never once seen him beat a child. If anything, he had been very strict about mothers beating children; he discouraged it, a very unusual attitude in those days. Also unusual was that he had seldom beaten his wives, yet he commanded their respect and his word was law. Now he engaged in domestic violence, particularly against my mother. The only woman he did not touch was Njeri. She was big-limbed, strong-bodied, and the story goes that once, when drunk, he tried to discipline her, but,
with him inside the hut, she locked the door from inside to shut out eyewitnesses and beat him, while shouting, loudly enough for all the world to hear, that he was killing her. This was among many stories now bandied about to show how low he had sunk.

The proud patriarch who would never have gone to someone else’s house to drink liquor unless invited, the man who would never have drunk on a weekday, now started drinking all the time, and, no longer brewing his own, going to other people’s houses for
mũratina
. My father hated those husbands who waylaid their wives on their way from the market for a share of the money they had earned from their sales. But now he started doing just that. It was painful to see him waiting for the end of the week to demand the wages that his daughters, my sisters, had earned for working in the pyrethrum fields of Lord Stanley Kahahu or in the tea plantations in the White Highlands. They would dodge him, some even escaping into marriage.

He tried his hand at farming, but because he had no land of his own he still depended on the cultivation rights from his father-in-law, my maternal grandfather. Before he lost everything, he used to grow crops like sweet potatoes, arrowroot, sugarcane, and yams, on a parcel of land near the Indian shops, but more as a hobby than for subsistence. He was very proud of the quality of what he produced. His was a model garden. But now cultivation for subsistence was all. As he struggled to eke out a living from the soil, his sense of his manliness and public standing was compromised.

Good as he was with his hands turning the soil, he was
competing with his women, my mother particularly. His parcel of land was next to hers, and it was as if the playfulness of his wooing her had now become a serious competition between them for power. But when it came to coaxing the land to yield, not my father, not the other women, nobody was a match for my mother. She put mulch around the crops: Even with goats my mother now had an edge over my father. He had none; she had two he-goats that she fattened inside a pen in her hut. She had three others that she sometimes fed in the hut but that otherwise used to follow her wherever she went in daytime without straying.

The year she came back from the short visit to Elburgon with my younger brother saw her work magic on the land. While other people’s crops seemed to wilt under the sun, hers bloomed. People sometimes stopped by the road to admire the peas, beans, and corn in her various parcels of land. By the end of the season, my mother had harvested just about the best crop of peas and beans in the region. Corn as well. Other women offered to help her harvest and shell, filling ten sacks with peas, four with beans, and her barn with corn, a feat that brought gawkers from nearby.

My father decided that the harvest was his to dispose of, even to sell. My mother, used to the independence of her household, firmly refused. One day he came home, picked a quarrel with her, and started beating her up, even using one of the walking sticks that my half sister Wabia used for support, till it broke into pieces. My brother and I were crying for him to stop. Mother was screaming in pain. Despite their fear, the other women tried to restrain him, beseeching him
to stop, screaming in solidarity, for all the world to hear, that their husband had gone crazy. As he turned toward them in fury, my mother managed to slip away with only the clothes she wore, and fled to her father’s house, my grandfather’s, leaving behind her goats and harvest.

For many days after, the family talked about the beating, some even claiming that her goats had screamed in protest. Nobody seemed able to fully explain the fury that my father had shown. But there were whispers here and there that the cause of it was the youngest wife, Njeri, the only one who worked on the European-owned tea plantations. She was having an affair with one of the overseers. The women said that somehow my father had gotten it into his head that my mother was at fault. They surmised that because Njeri had once fought him, he took his anger and frustrations out on the easier target.

With the departure of our mother, the other wives, Gacoki and Wangarĩ in particular, took care of my brother and me. We waited for her to come back or for my father to go to his in-laws to plead with them for her return. That was the procedure: talks that would almost certainly end in warnings, fines, and reconciliation. Everybody knew that it was simply a matter of time. But my younger brother and I missed her terribly, and this sharing of a common loss and need made us even closer.