Green City in the Sun (8 page)

     From this overlook Rose could see, a hundred feet below her, a cluster of huts on the wide, flat riverbank. A little girl tended a small herd of goats; a pregnant woman milked a cow; there were other women in the little vegetable plots, preparing for planting.
What a delightful scene
, Rose thought.

     "You'll never guess what I plan to do with that bit of ground," Valentine said. "That's where the polo field is going to be."

     "Oh, Val!" Grace laughed. "You won't be happy until you've turned Africa into another England!"

     "Is there room for a polo field?" asked Sir James.

     "Those huts will have to go, of course, and that fig tree will have to be pulled up."

     They fell silent and listened to the light rain begin to patter in the foliage around them. Each pictured the great coffee plantation that was going to fill the valley and the hospital Grace was going to build down by the river. Lady Rose, holding her baby in the warmth and dryness of her ermine coat, stared down at the native village.

     A figure, a young woman wearing hides and great necklaces of beads, came out of one of the huts. She crossed the compound, and Rose saw that she carried a baby in a sling on her back. The African woman stopped suddenly, as if she sensed being watched, and looked up. High on the ridge above her an apparition in white was looking down.

     The two women stared at each other for what seemed like a long time.

W
HEN THE YOUNG WOMAN ENTERED THE HUT, SHE SAID
respectfully, "
Ne nie Wachera
, ""It is I, Wachera," and handed her grandmother the gourd of sugarcane beer.

     Before she drank, the older woman poured a few drops of beer onto the dirt floor for the ancestors, then said, "Today I will tell you of the time when women ruled the world and the men were our slaves."

     They sat in the watery light that came through the open doorway, there being no windows in the mud and cow dung walls of the round hut, and listened to the rain patter on the papyrus thatch roof. Following Kikuyu tradition, the elder Wachera was passing the legacy of her ancestors on to her son's eldest daughter, and they had been at it for many days. The instruction had begun with lessons in magic and the healing ways because the grandmother was the clan's medicine woman and midwife; she was also the keeper of the ancestors and guardian of the tribe's history. One day the girl, a young wife carrying her first child on her back, would also become these.

     While she listened to her grandmother's words, recited in the smoky air of the hut as former grandmothers had done all the generations back, young Wachera wrestled with impatience. She wanted to ask a question, but it was unthinkable to interrupt an elder. She wanted to ask about the white spirit on the hill.

     The old woman's voice was dusty with age; she spoke in chanting fashion, her body swaying, causing the great loops of beads on either side of her shaved head to rattle softly. Every so often she leaned forward to stir the soup simmering on the fire. "Today we call our husbands 'lord and master' after Kikuyu custom," she said to her granddaughter. "We are owned by men; we are their possessions to do with as they please. But always remember, my son's daughter, that our people call themselves the Children of Mumbi, the First Woman, and that the nine clans of the Kikuyu are named for the nine daughters of Mumbi. This is to remind us that we women were powerful once and that there was an age in the mists when we ruled and the men feared us."

     While the young woman listened and committed every word to memory, her hands worked quickly and nimbly on a new basket. Her husband, Mathenge, had brought her the bark of the
mogio
shrub, but then he had promptly left, for it was taboo for a man to engage in basket weaving.

     Young Wachera was proud of her husband. He was one of the new "chiefs" recently appointed by the white men. It was not the Kikuyu way to have chiefs—the clans were governed by councils of elders—but the
wazungu
saw a need, for some reason beyond Wachera's comprehension, to appoint individual Kikuyu chiefs over their own people. Mathenge had been chosen because he had once been a famous warrior and had fought in many battles with the Masai. That was before the white man said the Kikuyu and Masai must no longer fight.

     "In the mists," the aged voice was saying, "the women ruled the Children of Mumbi, and one day the men became jealous. They met secretly in the forest to discuss a way to overthrow the domination of women. But the women were cunning, the men knew, and would not be easily vanquished. Then the men remembered that there was a period when women were vulnerable, and that was in their pregnancy. So the men decided that their revolt
would be successful if launched when the majority of the women were pregnant."

     Young Wachera had heard this story many times. The men had conspired to impregnate all the women of the tribe, and then, months later, when many of their wives and sisters and daughters were heavy with pregnancy, they had launched their attack. And they had been triumphant in overthrowing the old matriarchal laws and setting themselves up as lords over the subjugated women.

     If there was bitterness in the old woman's heart over this ignominious history, she never betrayed it, because of the tribal code of etiquette and manners: Kikuyu women were brought up to be docile and shy and uncomplaining.

     It was because of this upbringing that young Wachera had never questioned the wisdom of her husband's decision to work with the white man or her brothers' choice to run north with their shields and spears to seek employment on the white man's cattle shamba. Indeed, the wives of those few Kikuyu men who had gone to work for the white man were now envied in the village because their husbands brought home sacks of flour and sugar and a much coveted cloth called americani. Thus were the two Wacheras wealthy because of Mathenge; they owned more goats than any other women in the clan.

     Wachera missed her husband terribly now that he was the "headman" on the white man's shamba. She had fallen in love with Mathenge Kabiru because of his flute playing. During the season when the millet was ripe and had to be protected from birds, the young men would go through the fields playing their bamboo flutes, and Mathenge, tall for a Kikuyu because of Masai ancestry, and handsome in his
shuka
and long, braided hair, had traveled through villages, delighting the people with his melodies. But Mathenge's flute was silent now because white man's duties called him away.

     "It is time now," the grandmother said as she stirred the banana soup, "for you to hear the story of your famous ancestress, the great Lady Wairimu, who was taken as a slave by white men."

     The Kikuyu had no form of writing, and therefore, their history was an oral tradition. From early age every child was taught the lists of generations
and was called upon to recite them. Young Wachera knew the history of her family all the way back to the First Woman. "The earliest generation was called the Ndemi Generation," she would say, "because they were unruly and waged war; their children were called the Mathathi Generation because they lived in caves;
their
children were called the Maina Generation because they danced the Kikuyu songs; after these came the Mwangi Generation, so called because they wandered ...." And years were counted not in numbers but by descriptive names so that when the grandmother said that Lady Wairimu had lived during the
Murima wa Ngai
, "the trembling sickness of heavenly origin," Wachera knew to place her ancestress in the year of the malaria epidemic five generations back.

     She listened in breathless wonder to the heroic account of how Wairimu, having been stolen from her husband and taken in chains to a "great field of water on which giant huts floated," had escaped from the white slavers and made her way back to Kikuyuland, fighting lions and subsisting on the boiled stumps of banana shoots. It was Wairimu who had first told the Children of Mumbi about a race of men with skin the color of turnips, and that was how the word
muthungu
came to mean "white man," because in those days it meant "strange and inexplicable."

     Young Wachera remembered when she had first seen a
mzungu.
It had been two harvests ago, while she was still pregnant with her son. The white man had come into the village, and the women had run in terror, Wachera fleeing into her grandmother's hut. But Mathenge had been unafraid. He had gone forward and spit on the ground in greeting. While the women had watched from their hiding places, the two men had conducted a strange business which involved the receiving of beads and americani on Mathenge's part and in return his pressing his thumb to what looked like a large white leaf. Later, around the fire and drinking sugarcane beer, he had told Wachera and the other two women he owned about something called a "land sale" and a "deed" which he had marked with his thumb.

     The white men baffled young Wachera. Since that first meeting she had seen them but a few times—they were clearing the forest from the hill above the river—but this morning she had seen the arrival of many more, and it had startled her. Then she had seen the apparition in white, looking down
at her, and now, as she listened to the end of Wairimu's remarkable tale, Wachera began to wonder if it had not been a spirit at all but a white
woman.

     She said,
"Ee-oh!"
"hurrah," when the story was over, but the elder Wachera stayed her with sad words: "Unfortunately Wairimu was captured a second time and taken away upon the field of water which stretches to the end of the earth, and she never returned to Kikuyu-land."

     The girl was spellbound. What must it have been like for poor Wairimu? What strange fate had awaited her on the other side of the great water?

     Feeling the baby stir against her back, Wachera laid aside the basket she was weaving and reached up to bring him down to her breast. His name was Kabiru. In Kikuyu tradition, the souls of forebears lived on in children, and so the firstborn son always received his grandfather's name. In this same way grandmother and granddaughter were both called Wachera. The name meant "She Who Visits People," and it had been handed down through the generations from the first Wachera, who had visited people as the clan's medicine woman.

     The grandmother smiled as she watched the young mother nurse. The old woman knew the ancestors were pleased with this young Kikuyu woman who was receiving the clan's secrets and accumulated knowledge, for she was quick and bright and respectful. Elder Wachera's son had raised his daughter well; young Wachera was a model Kikuyu wife: She kept Mathenge's hut clean, tended a bountiful garden, was always cheerful, and never spoke unless spoken to. Everyone enjoyed the sweet Wachera; mothers pointed her out to their daughters as an example to follow. During her circumcision, they would say, when she was sixteen years old and all the women of the clan had looked on, young Wachera had not flinched under the knife. It had come as no surprise, therefore, when the handsome and brave Mathenge Kabiru had approached old Wachera to buy her granddaughter. Sixty goats he had paid for her, a price still talked about among the people.

     The grandmother's heart swelled. Young Wachera had gotten pregnant almost at once. Surely this granddaughter was going to produce many children for the perpetuation of the ancestors. Sad was the Kikuyu family with fewer than four children, for then one grandmother or grandfather would not gain immortality.

     Elder Wachera lapsed into thoughtful silence as the rain pattered on the roof. The air in the hut became thick with the smells of wet earth, cooked bananas, smoke, and goats. Timelessness descended upon the two women. They formed a tableau identical to those of their ancestors because the Kikuyu were governed by tradition, the customs and laws set down by Ngai, their god who lived on Mount Kenya, and change was abhorrent to them. By her bare foot lay elder Wachera's divination gourd. It had been hollowed and dried and filled with magic tokens in an age so remote that not even she knew which ancestress had made it. The gourd was the symbol of Wachera's power; with it she read the future, healed sick bodies, and communicated with the ancestors. Someday the gourd would be passed on to the younger Wachera, and in this way the grandmother would live on, as her own grandmother now lived in her.

     While the rain fell, elder Wachera's thoughts went to the rest of the clan across the river.

     Forty harvests ago a terrible curse had fallen upon the Children of Mumbi. Drought had struck first, followed by starvation, and then a sickness had swept through the Kikuyu and Masai people, killing one in three. In that time elder Wachera had lived with her husband and his other wives across the river in a large settlement. Wachera had been unable to save the clan from the sickness, but the ancestors had spoken to her and told her that she could save her own small family by moving to the other side of the river, where the ground was blessed by Ngai and where there were no evil spirits of sickness.