Dreams in a Time of War (9 page)

The railway line, which was started in 1896 in Kilindini, Mombasa, and reached Kisumu in December 1901 through the Kenyan heartland, had brought in its wake not only European settlers but also Indian workers, some of whom opened shops at the major construction camps that later bloomed into railroad towns. It also created the native African worker out of the peasant who, having lost his land, had only the power of his limbs that he hired out to the white settler, when his labor was not taken by force, and to the Indian
dukawallah
, or shopkeeper, for a pittance. The land over which he had been the sovereign became divided into White Highlands for Europeans only, the Crown lands owned by the colonial state on behalf of the British king, and the African Reservations for the natives. The Indians, not allowed to own land, became merchant dwellers in the big and smaller railroad towns between Mombasa and Kisumu. The railway line was the link between these towns long before the road built by the Bonos provided competition. This was the same railway line that had once terrified my father and his older brother but was now so normal a part of the landscape that my mother was talking about taking the train, with us clamoring to join her.

I cannot overstate the lure of the Sunday passenger train from Mombasa to Kisumu or Kampala. It always made a stop at Limuru, where the railway station was opened on November 10, 1899. The train usually arrived at midday. Europeans and Indians came there to meet relatives and say good-bye to others. Some Africans also came to do the same. But most Africans wandered there to see the train come and
go, the young left to loiter and mingle on the platform. The train whistle could be heard from our homestead, and even the smoke could be seen snaking its way in the sky when one stood on top of the dump site. Every Sunday my older sisters and brothers would wake up and get ready, not for church or native festivities, but for the train. Some sat in little groups in the huge compound, fussing over each other’s hair while others washed their feet in basins and smoothed their nails and heels with a scrubbing stone. The compound was a flurry of noisy activities, as friends from neighboring villages sometimes came to see if everyone was ready to go to the platform together.

There is one Sunday forever imprinted in my mind. As usual my brothers and sisters had performed their ablutions and preparations early. But they had not timed themselves properly. Suddenly they heard the train hooting as it approached the station. We will be late for the train! came the cacophonous cry. Within seconds they had all taken to their heels, running down the slope as if in an athletic competition. Sisters Gathoni, Kageci, Nyagaki, and their friends Wamaitha and Nyagiko; half brothers Kangi, Mbici, and Mwangi wa Gacoki, the tallest of all my siblings, and others were running as if for their lives. My younger brother and the siblings about our age—Wanja, Wanjirũ wa Njeri, Gakuha, Gacungwa—stood on top of the dump site and enjoyed this race to the platform of the Limuru railway station.

When minutes later we heard the train leave the station, we started singing what we thought the train was saying: TO U-GA-NDA, TO U-GA-NDA, with the train seeming
to acknowledge our song and dance with a prolonged hooting and smoke in the sky.

I had never been to the platform to witness the romance of the train, but of course we had heard many alluring stories about it. The passenger train was divided into sections: first class for Europeans only, second class for Indians only, and third class for Africans. I longed to be there, to see it all for myself. And here, at long last, was a chance not simply to stand on a platform and stare at a passing train, but to become a passenger myself. Why should I let school and my pact with Mother stand in the way?

True to her word, on the third day she posed the question and waited for our decision. My younger brother was prompt in his response. He would take the train; he would resume schooling afterward. It was now my turn. Would I let my younger brother be first to experience the magic of the train? But how could I leave school and live with the fact? I wished my mother would decide for me. There was no pressure from her either way. The choice was mine. Tears flowed down my cheeks. I could not bring myself to break the pact regarding school that I had made with Mother. I could not abandon my dreams. The train would have to pass me by!

In this phase of my life I inhabited a social space defined by Kahahu’s house, Baba Muũkũrũ’s house, and my father’s house. The three homesteads neighbored each other, though Baba Mũkũrũ’s was just a few yards outside the boundary of Kahahu’s land. Though they could never erect insurmountable walls between them, the three centers represented three different models of modernity and tradition.

Lord Reverend Kahahu’s modernity was visible in everything. He had had an elementary education, had trained as a reverend, and all his children attended school, two of them, Joana and Paul, becoming teachers. He always wore the white collar of his profession as a reverend; the entire family was always dressed in suits and dresses. He was the first to grow pyrethrum and an orchard of plums, the first to own oxen-pulled carriages and donkey-pulled carts, the first to introduce mule-pulled plows with the plowman at the handles, and the first to have a car and later a truck. His younger brother, Edward Matumbĩ, established the first wholly African-owned sawmill in the region. Lord Reverend Stanley Kahahu exuded modernity in his person and family.

Their homestead, however, remained a mystery to me.
I had never been beyond the outer gates. A thicket of pine trees surrounded the homestead, and I could only get glimpses of the house through gaps in the trees. But this changed when one day his wife, Lillian, invited the children of the families that worked on their land to a Christmas party.

Christians or not, we all celebrated Christmas. On Christmas Eve, children and young men and women moved from house to house, in the dark, with handheld glass-covered paraffin lanterns, singing carols. On the actual day, one did not wait for a special invitation to a neighbor’s house for tea and homemade parathas. All homes, except those, like the Kahahus’, that saw themselves as modern, were open to passing guests. Most of the homes made similar dishes: a vegetarian affair of curry broth with potatoes and beans or peas. It was not a matter of choice. Whenever families could afford to, they would add chicken, beef, or lamb into the curry. Most homes could not afford baked bread from the Indian shops. But all families were experts at making parathas. A few pounds of wheat flour could produce many of these flat breads. We stuffed ourselves with them, and I have always associated Christmas with parathas and curry. It was a festive season for all equally; there were no special parties for children. So to be invited to a children’s Christmas party, moreover in the mysterious landlord’s house, was something new in our lives. We tried to look our best. This was years before I had even dreamt of attending school and wearing shorts and shirts. My younger brother and I were
still in our cloth apparel but Mother made sure we were clean.

We kept on exchanging glances, and we bonded regarding the scene before us. Everything was a revelation. There was this huge compound covered with grass that had been cut and trimmed low with nice well-defined paths that connected the various buildings, a contrast to our compound of sand and dust. The main house was a four-cornered building with walls of thick wood and a corrugated iron roof with drainage pipes leading to two tanks that collected rainwater at the corners. Separate from the main building was the kitchen, similarly built but smaller, with water draining into a smaller tank. I was a little disappointed that the party took place in the kitchen, spacious as it was, and not in the big house, but still the pile of jam sandwiches in huge containers made up for any shortcomings in location.

I thought that after the long welcoming preliminaries and the discourse on the meaning of Christmas we would immediately be served the tea and the gleaming white bread sandwiches. Instead we were told to shut our eyes for prayer. My brother and I had never said prayers, let alone one for food. Food was there to eat not to pray over. And why close our eyes? Lillian started what to me sounded like an endless monologue to God. In the middle of it I opened my eyes to peep at the pile of sandwiches. I met my brother’s eyes doing the same. I quickly closed mine but after a while opened them again only to catch my brother doing the same. We knew exactly what the other was thinking about the endless
prayer that stood between us and the food. We could not help it. We giggled loudly. Lillian was not amused.

Her eyes were cold, her tone chilly, as now she gave my brother and me a stern lecture on Christian etiquette. Her children had been trained in Christian ways, and they would never have done what we had done in the eyes of God, and if they had, she would not have allowed them to eat the bread or any food for days. But she would forgive us because, being heathens, we did not know any better. All the children’s eyes, including Njambi’s and Njimi’s, were on us. The desire for the bread disappeared. Humiliated, I stood up and walked away. My brother followed me, but not before he had grabbed a couple of sandwiches.

I could not get relief by being angry with Lillian because deep inside I was ashamed of our behavior. Unchristian or not, what my brother and I had done was unbecoming. Besides, I still carried the memory of Lord Kahahu’s generous intervention in the healing of my eye infection. My mother held a similar view. While admonishing us for our bad behavior, she was clear that it had nothing to do with not being Christian. She also seemed to make a distinction between Lillian and her husband, and she encouraged me to forget the offending phrase “not brought up in Christian ways.” But the words would not go away. They were imprinted on my mind, and I was to hear them again after a clash between Kahahu and Baba Mũkũrũ.

Baba Mũkũrũ’s house was antithetical to Kahahu’s. He was as confident in the ways of his ancestors as Kahahu was in the ways of his Christian ancestors. For him, tradition was
sacrosanct. He and his children observed all the rites of passage, not only initiations from one phase of life to another but also forms of social education. It was in his house that I once witnessed the ceremony of being born again.

Nyakanini, “Little One” as she was fondly known, was the last born of the girls of Baba Mũkũrũ with his second wife, Mbũthũ. She was much younger than I. At the age of six or so she was made to lie between her mother’s legs in a fetal position. Amid songs from the semicircle of a chorus of women, Mbũthũ reenacted pregnancy and labor. The chorus members were also participatory witnesses. Some of them played midwives and brought Nyakanini into the world a second time. Gĩtiro was a poetic operatic form of improvisations, call-and-response, challenge and counter-challenge, narration of conflict and reconciliation. Baba Mũkũrũ poured a libation for the ancestral spirits that they might be with the living and the newly reborn. Nyakanini’s mother, Mbũthũ, performed the symbolic feeding of the newborn. Again, through song and dance, we saw the child grow from babyhood to puberty. Still in performance mode, Nyakanini literally followed her mother to the fields, where they worked together picking greens and digging for potatoes. The chorus did not go with them, but when mother and daughter returned with their token harvest, they were welcomed with ululations. Though the actual cooking had been done, they symbolically reenacted the preparation with what they had brought from the fields. Nyakanini did everything that her mother did, but she was the one who initiated the sharing out of what had already been cooked, giving a
little to her mother and the chorus, thereby suggesting that she had successfully moved from babyhood to the next stage of youth. If it had been a boy, he would have followed his father to the grazing fields and brought back some milk. At the end of the ritual, Nyakanini was a child approaching adulthood, at which stage she would undergo the initiation rites of circumcision. Finally a feast celebrated the young girl she had become, after being born again.

For Baba Mũkũrũ this was education enough, and he would not allow any of his kids to attend the mission school, let alone attend church services, although, ironically, one of his daughters with his first wife had married a Mũgĩkũyũ Muslim convert, and he had lost a son in the Second World War, the most modern of all wars. Another of his daughters, nicknamed Macani, “Tea Leaves,” who had not been to school, adopted the latest in Western-style dresses; she was one of the few who could openly defy him without bad repercussions. But by that time her mother and Baba Mũkũrũ had separated.

He never wanted to have anything to do with the Kahahus who, for him, represented every negation, every betrayal of tradition. Even when some of his daughters, whose beauty was the talk of the young men, worked in Lord Reverend Kahahu’s pyrethrum plantation, they did so secretly. He would rather they worked in the European-owned tea plantations than in the fields of a renegade.

Unfortunately for him a Romeo and Juliet affair was developing between one of his daughters, Wambũi, and Kahahu’s eldest son, Paul. Like his father before him, Paul had
graduated from Mambere, a Church of Scotland Mission primary school at Thogoto, Kikuyu, and worked as a teacher in Kamandũra. He and Wambũi had a secret liaison that was revealed by her pregnancy. Baba Mũkũrũ followed custom and sent a delegation of elders to Kahahu’s house to look into the matter. The Kahahus would not receive them: Our son has been brought up a Christian and would never do such a thing, Lillian was quoted as having said. Why, Lillian asked with cutting sarcasm, are you people unable to bring up your children the way we have done ours? Baba Mũkũrũ was wounded, furious with the Kahahu family for backing their son in his denial of responsibility, and he vowed to pursue the matter even if it meant protesting outside the doors of the very church where Reverend Kahahu preached on Sundays and where the son taught on weekdays. But before Baba Mũkũrũ could carry out his threats, the Kahahu family shipped Paul to a school in South Africa. The matter was not resolved, except that the girl to whom Wambũi gave birth looked exactly like Paul Kahahu. This gorgeous little girl who united the two families was rejected by the heads of both. Paul’s flight to South Africa, however, had the unintended effect of dramatizing overseas education in our region as both desirable and accessible. It also brought South Africa home to us and enhanced Kahahu’s modernity.