Dreams in a Time of War (5 page)

I don’t know how long it was after Kabae’s visit, but more magical happenings followed. A white man came to our homestead. Although white people owned the tea plantations on the other side of the railway, and I had even heard that there were white owners of the Limuru Bata Shoe factory, the nearest thing to a white man I had seen at close quarters were the Indian shopkeepers. But here was a real white man, on foot, in our homestead, and we ran by his side calling out,
Mũthũngũ, mũthũngũ
. He said something like
bono
or
buena
and then asked for eggs. My mother gave him some, even refusing his money in exchange, and he uttered something like
grazie
and went away saying
ciao
, which we took for yet another word for “thank you.” We followed behind him, a crowd of children, still calling out
Mũthũngũ
. And then came the shock.

We saw white men making a road, white men who were not supervising blacks but were actually breaking the stones themselves. Later more of these workmen came to our place asking for eggs,
mayai
, throwing words out like
buonasera, buongiorno, pronto, grazie
, but the word that was most frequent and common to all of them, the one that lingered in
the mind, was
bono
. We nicknamed them Bono: I would learn that they were Italian prisoners of war taken between May and November 1941 when the Italians surrendered at Amba Alage and Gondar, ending the East African Campaign. The prisoners were imported labor, charged with building the road from Nairobi to the interior, parallel to the railway line that was first built by imported Indian labor. The prisoners became a regular sight in our village, and every house had an Italian tale to tell.

Ours concerned Wabia, Kabae’s sister, who could not take a step let alone walk without the aid of two walking sticks. After many months, it could even have been a year, the first Bono visitor came back to our homestead. This time, after collecting his eggs and a chicken for which he paid, his attention was attracted to Wabia, and in his halting Swahili he asked many questions about her. I cannot recall what words he actually uttered, but one of my half brothers claimed that he said that he could bring her some medicine that could cure her. I loved Wabia. It would be wonderful if she could get back the gift of sight and the power of walking without support. It would mean that white people’s medicine was more magical than anything we could ever imagine, even in the stories that Wabia told so well.

We waited for the Italian. He became the white Ndiro of our imagination, the medicine man in the story my mother told, except that he had an Italian accent, and we were not looking for his dwelling place; he was coming to us, and we were simply waiting for his return. The road was now past Limuru and the Bonos did not haunt our area as regularly as
they used to do, but we did not lose hope: The Italian would surely bring a cure. What a welcome it would be for Kabae to come back from the war and be welcomed home by a sister with all her powers of walking and sight restored!

Images of Kabae’s visit, despite being blurred by time and, now, overtaken by our new expectations, would not go away, and sometimes they came back with the full weight of their unreality whenever the subject of the war reappeared in conversation or in performance. Most popular was
mũthuũ
, a boys’ call-and-response dance in which, among other verses, the soloist-narrator, who had never left the village, boasts of many heroic deeds including fighting in the jungles of Burma, and finally returning home having dropped bombs in Japan and routed Hitler and Hirohito. These fictional accomplishments were reasons that the heroic soloist should be feared and obeyed by his chorus. Indeed, the lead singer-dancer looked ferocious as he suddenly whipped out a wooden sword that had been tied around his waist, twirled it in his hands, then threw it in the air, catching it deftly while keeping in step with the dance. Burma, bombs, Hirohito, new words were added to my ever-increasing vocabulary of the war. But we still waited for the Italian.

A time came when I no longer saw the Bono Mayai in any of our villages walking about or asking for anything. They did not come back. Our white Ndiro did not return. Wabia, my dear half sister, was never cured. But the Bonos left their architectural mark in the church they had built by the road on the edge of the Rift Valley in their hours of rest; and their
sociobiological mark in broken families and fatherless brown babies born in several of the villages they had visited.

And then our half brother came home finally. It was 1945; the war was over, the soldiers demobilized. There were tears and laughter. Cousin Mwangi, first son of Baba Mũkũrũ, had been killed in action; nobody could tell us where, but Palestine, the Middle East, and even Burma were variously mentioned. But Kabae had survived, a legend, big to us, bigger and even more educated than the sons of Lord Reverend Stanley Kahahu. There were even whispers of a dalliance with one of the daughters of the landlord.

Kabae, the ex-soldier, became a ladies’ man, a chain-smoker, and partial to beer, which he bought from Indian-owned licensed liquor stores but drank off premises, on the grass just outside the backyard; he was one of the few Africans who could afford bottle after bottle of beer made by the European-owned East African Breweries. Later an African shop owner, Athabu Muturi, was allowed to sell the European beer at the Limuru marketplace, and the drinking shifted to the backyard of his store.

I was disappointed that Kabae rarely came home, and when he did he hardly ever talked in depth and elaborate detail about the big war, at least when I was present. He did not even talk about Cousin Mwangi, whether they had met or not, during the war. Once he mentioned Madagascar, but briefly, as if he had only made a stop there. Another time he commented on the
mũthuũ
dancers and their reference to Burma and Japan. “The jungles of Burma proved to be death traps for us in the East African Division,” he
said.
^*
“Monsoon rains turned the dirt roads into rivers of mud. And the Japanese were fierce fighters. But we from East Africa proved ourselves as jungle fighters. As for the bombing of Hiroshima, well, I wasn’t there. And it should not be a subject of dances. The world will never know what and how much we the Africans gave to this war.” That was all, his most detailed reflection on the war. I would have liked to hear about the battles he had fought; whether he had met Mussolini and Hitler face-to-face before their surrender or shaken hands with Churchill and the Russian generals.

In one of the rare times that he came home, the visit coincided with a storytelling session at his mother’s. The war and its aftermath were becoming a thing of the past. That night the topic of general discussion was languages and the habit of talking behind people’s backs. It was then that Kabae chimed in reflectively on the dangers of backbiting others. He then told his story.

Once, before demobilization, he worked in an office next to that of a European woman. His friends from the army used to visit him and they talked in Gĩkũyũ about the woman, wondering what it would be like to sleep with her, but sometimes teasing him that he had probably done it already. He himself chose not to respond and cautioned them against such talk. In Kenya in those days it was illegal for an African male to have a dalliance with a European
woman. But it was also because he genuinely felt uneasy about small talk about a person who was present but, it was assumed, could not follow what was being said about her.

One day when they were engrossed in such talk, the woman happened to pass by. She greeted them in perfect Gĩkũyũ, adding that in her view, every woman, black or white, had the same anatomy. The men literally flew through whatever opening they could easily access, never to be seen anywhere near that building. Thank you, she said, turning to Kabae.

After demobilization Kabae set up his own secretarial and legal services in the African shopping center in Limuru. He was reputed to be one of the fastest typists on a Remington typewriter; the rapidity and volume of the raucous noise could be heard from the streets, attracting attention. People lined up outside his office for legal advice and to have him write letters for them in English. His became an all-purpose information center in matters of colonial bureaucracy. This enhanced Kabae’s reputation as among the most learned in the area. For us, the Thiong’o family, he was by far the best educated. This may have sparked my desire for learning, which I kept to myself. Why should I voice desires impossible to fulfill?

As a child, I wanted to be with my mother all the time. If she went anywhere without me, I would cry for many hours. It earned me the nickname Kĩrĩri, “Crybaby,” because no lullabies or admonitions from others would stop me. I would cry myself to sleep, and somehow by the time I woke up my mother would be around. Conveniently forgetting the few times I woke up and she was not there, which meant more crying and more sleeping and waking up, I assumed that my crying had had something to do with her reappearance.

I must have slept, at one time, so long that when I woke up I found my mother holding a baby in her hands. I remember being outdone in my crying by this baby who would not leave my dear mother’s breasts or back or hands. His cries had more power than mine because my mother would stop everything and attend to him. My crying ended when I was told that my mother had been to some place to get me the baby so that I could have a younger brother for a playmate. We were one year apart. He was named Njinjũ, after Baba Mũkũrũ, and despite sibling rivalry we later became inseparable, especially after I taught him to walk, or so I assumed because there came a time when he would imitate me in
everything. My crying had really been a call for a younger playmate. My mother, almost by magic, had divined and acted on my teary desire. This belief in her magical capacity to anticipate my needs was later buttressed by her other deeds.

My eyes used to trouble me as a child. My eyelids swelled, my eyes ran. I cried a lot with pain. My mother used to take me to a traditional healer, at Kamĩri’s place near Manguo’s only tap water center. The healer would make small razor blade incisions along the eyebrows above the swollen eyelids. He would bleed them and then rub some medicine on the cuts, and somehow I would feel better. But this well-being would last only a few weeks. I was in and out of the healer’s shrine. I used to squint the better to see, and people teased me and called me Gacici, the little one who can barely see. I did not like it, because nicknames, even those that originated in a passing negative habit, sometimes stuck. I had succeeded in outgrowing Crybaby; I did not want it replaced by Squinting Baby.

Lord Reverend Stanley Kahahu came to my rescue. I don’t know if it was my mother who approached him or the other way around. But one day my mother bathed me and took me to the road, just outside the gates of Kahahu’s house, where the reverend picked us up in his car, an old Ford Model T. I had never been inside any motor vehicle before, and I wished that my eyes didn’t hurt so that I could enjoy the ride to King George VI Hospital, Nairobi, previously known as Native Civil Hospital, but now named after the king for whom my half brother Kabae had gone to war. It
was the first time for my mother and me in the big city. Several looks at my eyes and the doctor said I had to be admitted. I don’t know if this was necessitated by the eye condition or the fact that there were no pharmacies, that certain medicine was available only at the hospital. I was left alone in a hospital bed alongside other patients, the first time that my mother had ever left me among complete strangers. Everything including the smell was so different from the fresh-air environment at home. But somehow I managed to adjust. The other patients were kind. The doctors were kind. The togetherness of people in times of sorrow was touching.

My mother and Reverend Kahahu came to see me once. Then they left me there with a promise to return soon. I don’t know how long I stayed in the hospital, two weeks, three weeks, or a month, but it felt like a long time, a long way from home. The better I felt, the more I missed my mother and home. Eventually I was discharged but I could not leave the hospital premises. I had nowhere to go, and I did not know when Lord Reverend Kahahu and my mother would come for me. I was tired of the hospital but I had no means of contacting my mother. So I did what we the children believed would effect contact with the spirit of an absent loved one. If you whispered in the mouth of a clay pot the name of a loved one, he or she would hear you. There was no clay pot around. So I took whatever looked like a pot, a jug, and whispered my mother’s name. I could not believe it when soon after, the next day or so I took it, my mother turned up. I was so happy to see her without pain in my eyes. But why had she not been to see me? And why was she alone?
She explained that Reverend Kahahu had been very busy and kept on postponing the day of another visit. Eventually she could not bear it. She took the matter in her own hands, asked people how and where to catch a bus for King George, and she came for me. I was happy to be leaving for home, but I felt sad for those I was leaving behind.