Dreams in a Time of War by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o

  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.

  My younger brother used to talk about his journey by train. He enumerated with special emphasis the stations he had passed through, Naivasha, Gilgil, Nakuru, Molo, at least the ones he could remember. He even claimed that Kisumu and Kampala were very near Elburgon, and he would have gone there but for his busy life at Elburgon playing with Grandmother and Auntie Wanjirũ and her daughter, our cousin Beatrice. I learned from him that Auntie Wanjirũ, a trader, was a single parent. He talked about Grandmother’s tenderness though without offering many details. His was a narrative I was not very keen to hear, and I would counter his triumphs by talking about my glorious days at school, a subject that he too was now not very keen to hear. Our unspoken contention became an undeclared duel; he exaggerated his exploits in Elburgon and I, my educational adventures in school. But he always got the better of me by reminding me that Mother had promised to sell some of her harvest for his tuition to resume schooling at the beginning of a new term. He would have schooling as well as the train experience. Even though I was envious of his journey, I was also happy that he would eventually join me in school. But as days came and went, we increasingly became anxious about Mother’s return, our increasing anxiety tempered only by the daily routine of social life at our father’s homestead.

  One day my brother and I were playing with our siblings in an open space between Kahahu’s land and Baba Mũkũrũ’s with a ball made of cloth and tied tight with a string. Even the girls had joined in. My father suddenly turned up. He stood at a distance and beckoned my brother and me to accompany him. My father had never called me to him before, let alone come all the way to a field outside our homestead to do so. We ran to him, sure that he was going to tell us news of our mother’s return.

  I want you to stop playing with my children. Go, follow your mother, he said, pointing in the general direction of my grandfather’s place.

  We did not have a chance to say farewell to the other children and tell them that we had been banished from their company and from the place that up to then had defined our lives. But before leaving home, I was able to dash into my mother’s hut to retrieve my school material, among which was my beloved torn copy of stories from the Old Testament.

  The expulsion was, if not from paradise, from the only place I had known. I was baffled more than pained. My mother had always been the head of the immediate household, so home would always be wherever she was, and in that sense I was headed home to Mother. But it is not a good thing to have your own father deny you as one of his children. The move deepened my sense of myself as an outsider, a feeling I had harbored since I learned that the land on which our homestead stood was not really ours. I had been an outsider at Kamandũra, where it seemed that others belonged more than I did, and at Manguo upon moving there. Now I was an outsider in my father’s house. But there are aspects of the old homestead that will always be a part of me: the storytelling sessions, daily interaction with the other children where alliances changed from time to time; fights and tears even. Some of the scenes flitted across my mind: the games we played, the songs we sang, and the dances in the yard welcoming rain for it meant blessings and made the children grow. At the sighting of raindrops we dashed into the yard, formed a circle:

  Rain may you fall

  I offer you a sacrifice

  A young bull with bells

  That sound ding dong

  Once a host of children, including my half sisters and half brothers—Wanja, Gacoki’s daughter; Gacungwa, Wangarĩ’s daughter; and Gakuha and Wanjirũ, Njeri’s son and daughter—and I were playing the game of Catch Me If You Can. I was running around each of the four huts, all of them chasing after me, when suddenly I tripped over something and fell. The sand scraped the skin off my left shoulder. The scar remained; it will always be there, a memory. Now banished from my larger family by my father, I was lucky to have my younger brother and the book of stories for companions and the solace of reunion with my mother in her father’s place, the place of her birth.

  I had met my maternal grandfather but only briefly. Given the absence of her mother, who lived in Elburgon, while her father lived in Limuru with Mũkami, his youngest wife, my mother may not have felt the need to make frequent visits. As for the children, our identity was always with the family of our father and not the in-laws, even when one was named after a relative on the mother’s side. I was named Ngũgĩ after my maternal grandfather. But my mother used to call me Njogu, “Elephant,” or the diminutive Mũkũgĩ, or “Little Papa.” Other women, particularly her co-wives, always referred to her as “Ngũgĩ’s daughter.”

  My grandfather was an imposing figure, dressed in a white undergarment, one side under his left arm, the ends pinned together over his right shoulder, a kind of one-sleeved tunic, and an equally long outer garment, a blanket of sorts, under the right arm and tied over his left shoulder. As Limuru was often cold and drizzly, particularly in July, he would sometimes wear a long coat over both. He was a big landowner in his own right, and, as the head and trustee of his entire Kamami subclan, he had flexibility over the rights of use of the clan’s extensive patrimony. Unlike my father, whose ancestors had no roots in Limuru, my grandfather, his extended family, and his entire subclan did, owning and controlling acres of cultivated and virgin lands. After the death of one of his cousins, he had inherited two widows, so he was also the titular head of the Ndũng’ũ family. Ndũng’ũ’s children, including Kĩmũchũ, the eldest, accepted and looked up to him as the head of the extended family. With Njango, the younger of the two widows, he had sired a son, Uncle Gĩcini. The whole web of family interconnections was a bit complicated, and I am not sure that I was able to understand all the nuances. The family lived in three different compounds in the same area.

  Having separated from his first wife, Grandmother Gathoni, Grandpa Ngũgĩ may have wondered if they had passed the germ of separation onto their daughter, and he was probably at a loss as to what to do after my mother left my father. Custom demanded he wait for the husband to sue for the return of his wife, which would open the door for discussions. My mother lodged in Njango’s hut, assumed to be a temporary arrangement by everyone. The arrival of my brother and me complicated matters.

  My father may have thought that our presence would exert pressure on her to come back and sue for peace on h
is terms, but our appearance may have actually made it easier for her to stick to her decision not to return to his domestic violence. Without us there, she would have found it difficult to stay away. Now she wanted her father to allow her to put up a hut of her own on his land. He was cautious. Being wise in the ways of customary law and practices, he wanted to wait for my father to send a delegation for formal talks. After all, she had been married legally, my father had paid the required dowry, and divorce would mean my grandfather would have to give back the dowry, goats. Besides, the community had no procedure for the divorce of a couple with grown-up children like my older brothers and sisters. Divorce was not an option, only separation. So my mother lived in limbo, estranged from her husband’s place and not quite accepted in her father’s. She who had always enjoyed her independence now felt like a trapped animal, forced to live in a crowded hut, sharing a common cooking space with no utensil she could call her own, and without her own food, because her harvest had been taken from her.

  I try to figure ways of helping her but I am actually more worried about tuition. I come up with a scheme to trade in school materials: pencils and slates and exercise books. My younger brother thinks I am a genius. I then approach Uncle Gĩcini. Gĩcini is only a couple years older than I, and I don’t actually call him uncle. My other uncles, Gĩkonyo and Mũthoga, are older, with families, and I have always assumed that “uncle” is a term children use to honor those older than they are. But Gĩcini and I had even attended the same school, Kamandũra, though he had been a few classes ahead, so I think of him more as an equal than an uncle. He is excited about the idea, which now becomes a joint dream: buying pencils and erasers from the Indian shops and then selling them to needy schoolkids for a higher price. We start calculating the money we would make by continually reinvesting the profit in more goods. Soon we are rich, in our minds, and this spurs us to realize our plans. At my grandfather’s forest we cut down trees to create four corner posts and thin sticks for crossbeams. At first it is a secret, known only to Gĩcini and my younger brother, Njinjũ. But our enthusiasm knows no bounds, and we hint at the riches to Gĩcini’s brother. He does not laugh at the idea. Instead he tells us a story of a poor man whose chicken laid two eggs. He was hungry but he restrained himself, collected them in a bowl, sat in a chair, and closed his eyes to work out what to do with them. He would take them to market, he thought to himself, still leaning back in his chair, the bowl on the floor. With the money, he would buy some more eggs and sell them at a profit, buy some more till he had a pile. He would reinvest all the money into buying and selling other things, again at a profit. Soon, in his mind, he ended up owning a house and getting married. He and his wife lived happily until one day they had a small dispute and his wife answered back. He got so angry at her perceived ingratitude that he kicked her. He hit the bowl and the eggs were yolk and broken shells. Stop daydreaming. How many pencils are you likely to sell? How many kids go to school around here? Why would anybody refuse to buy cheaply at the Indian shops only to walk all the way to a forsaken place to buy the same things more dearly? He has deflated our dreams of easy riches. The structure of four posts and a few crossbeams stands there for many months, a forlorn monument to a dream.

  Uncle Gĩcini feels guilty about our collapsed scheme. He tries to mollify me by offering to teach me how to catch moles. Moles are a scourge to farmers. They eat plant roots, and after a while you can see the mounds they make and the desolation. The mole is an invisible enemy because it travels underground. How can one catch such a creature? Easy, he tells me. A trap: a piece of wood, hollow inside, three strings, two are nooses at both ends, and the middle, carrying the bait, is firm. Dig a trench and place the trap in the mole’s path, cover it with soil, and then tie the strings to a bent elastic stick in the earth aboveground. As the mole goes through the noose to eat the bait in the middle, the stick straightens up, and the noose tightens around the mole. I don’t believe him but we try anyway. We make two traps, one for me. His fails. Mine catches a mole at the first attempt. News of my skill spreads. I become a professional mole catcher, charging a fee, and earning gratitude from the farmers. I might even become a hero, like the rat catcher of the village legend.

  There was a period, during our lives in my father’s homestead, when big fat rats, almost the size of a cat, invaded the village. It was said they carried plague, so whenever such a rat was spotted, women, men, and children, with sticks, would pursue it. The noise sometimes attracted workers in the fields who would join in the chase with whatever tool they held in hand. Caught, the rats became objects of fury. A few escaped. One in particular completely outsmarted hunters, traps and all. Even the cats seemed afraid of it. It would disappear into one house, or bush, only to reappear in another setting as if taunting humans. Or maybe they were many rats, shaped similarly. There was talk of witches inside the rat’s body.

  One day a man with a box with a trapdoor, all made of wire screen, appeared from nowhere. He had heard of the mysterious rat. He asked a few questions, and otherwise spoke few words. He hung something inside the box. He left the trap in one of the affected houses, and, lo and behold, the following day, when he came back, there was a big rat inside the box. The whole village followed the rat catcher, who disappeared as mysteriously as he had come. He did not ask for a reward. He never returned; and the rats, that size, did not reappear. Or so people claimed. Disagreements remained: Had it been just that one rat or many? The rat catcher became a legend.

  I hope that as a mole catcher I can become as famous and have a grateful village follow me. But a mole catcher is not as glamorous as a rat catcher and nobody follows me except my younger brother. Moles can be elusive. A catcher needs a mix of skill, patience, and luck. The waiting is stressful, the pay meager and makes no dent in our needs.

  There is the question of tuition particularly. My brother and I set out to do what we have always done: seek work at Lord Stanley Kahahu’s farm, but now for tuition not wheels. Kahahu’s estate and my grandfather’s are separated by a hedge. Vast pyrethrum fields stand between our new home and our former homestead. I feel strange, joining my siblings in these same fields, coming as I now do from my grandfather’s household. But the reunion with my other siblings, though only as workers in Kahahu’s fields, goes quite well except for a sad awkwardness at evening time when we have to part and go our separate ways. Our earnings are not much. Besides, the work lasts for as long as there are flowers to pick, which means seven days or so.

  Sometimes I accompany my mother when she goes to the Indian shops to look for work. Maybe I can also get something that pays more than what I get from picking pyrethrum and catching moles. The place has a different feel from that other time when she and I had gone to get my school uniform. Then my mind was focused on clothing stores. Now I pause at groceries: bags of beans, peas, sugar, and salt, and bins displaying packets of flour, green, red, and yellow peppers, garlic, onions, chiles, purslane, and fruits, papayas, mangoes, and dates. I also note the same picture of the frail Indian with eyeglasses, dressed in white trousers with a shawl flung over his shoulders, the one I had seen before. I now ask my mother who the man is and why his picture hangs on the walls of many shops. He is one of the Indian gods, she says without really paying much attention to the picture. Her mind is really set on getting work, any work, that will pay. Govji, in one of the shops, has a job for her: sorting potatoes. The good unblemished ones are put in sacks. The tiny ones are collected to be sold as seedlings. Damaged ones are thrown away. I help my mother. It is the most tedious thing I have ever done, more boringly repetitive than picking tea or pyrethrum. Catching moles and rats and building a store for trade are adventures, even though they don’t pay. My enthusiasm wanes as days go by. But she needs the money to buy food she should not have had to buy and also for my tuition. She continues working at the potatoes without me. Sometimes she is allowed to take home some of the damaged potatoes as payment in kind.

  There was an Indian shopkeeper named Manu
bhai but generally known as Manu. He spoke Gĩkũyũ fluently, though he sometimes mixed it up with Kiswahili. He had set up a bakery, Manubhai Limuru Bakery. His bread was also known as Manu as opposed to that baked in Elliot’s Bakeries in Nairobi, which was simply referred to as Elliot. Manu and Elliot, as the loaves were named, were in competition. The Manu bakery produced more loaves than there were buyers, and sometimes he was forced to throw away piles of unsold bread in different stages of fermentation and decay. When this happened, word would quickly spread and many people, adults, children, women, and men, would descend upon the piles, and in no time every bit of bread would be gone. Once this coincided with our job hunt. I found myself among a horde grabbing at discarded bread and brought some home in triumph. Too bad Manubhai did not do this every day, and there was no way of telling when he next would.

  I am becoming closer to my grandfather than I had been to my father. I am flattered when one day he asks that I go to his house. He sits on a finely carved three-legged stool. I sit on another, smaller one. Mũkami nourishes me with a glass of warm milk. Then he asks her to bring “the box.” He takes out a bag from the box, dips into it, and comes up with a bunch of letters. Read that, he says, which I do. No, no, not that one, he would say, and I would go to the next, and so on until I got the right one. Yes, read it all, he says. He nods time and again as I read it. Hey! Hey! he exclaims with approval and delight. I am proud that my reading skills are recognized. Bring him some more tea, he calls out to his wife. Next he hands me paper and a pen, with ink. He dictates a reply word for word, line by line, paragraph by paragraph, asking me to go over what I had written till the letter has captured the tone he wants. Hey! Hey! he says, now laughing quietly in admiration and approval. “He can really hold a pen!” He raises his voice to his wife, who approaches with tea. He seems to be genuinely impressed with my learning. I become his scribe. He would often ask me to go to his house to help him write a letter but more often to read him old letters and help him sort out documents, including tax receipts. A headman at one time, he has developed a reverence for government-related papers. But he values any written documents and has bags of them in nice boxes. He would ask me questions about this or that document, what it said; then he would tell me how to arrange them. I have become his confidant though he never asks me for my opinion about the content. I am simply his personal scribe. In the process, I also get to eat nice food and drink tea with lots of milk. My grandfather has many cows. My mother likes this because it means one tummy less to feed. I get the impression that she and my grandfather’s wife are not close.