Green City in the Sun (82 page)

     "I don't know
exactly
where he is, and I don't know how to pass these letters on to him. He told me that if I should need to communicate with him, I should go to his mother. He said that she would know what to do."

     "Yes," Grace said sadly, feeling for the first time since the onset of hostilities the true crime of this obscene war. "There's an underground network. Messages are left for them in hollow trees."

     "Mama Wachera will know how to get my letters to David."

     "And what do you want me to do?"

     "She doesn't speak English, and I know only a little Kikuyu. Will you go with me and explain it to her?"

     Grace looked up. "To Wachera's hut?"

     Mona nodded.

     "I haven't spoken to that woman in years. Not since the
irua
... when I tried to save Njeri."

     "Please," Mona said.

     T
HE POLO FIELD
had not been used since Rose's suicide. Mona always spoke of opening it up again or of turning it into a large garden, but she never got around to it. Now it was overgrown with weeds, its fence rusting. Grace had lately been thinking it would make a nice addition to her mission, as a playing field for the three hundred African students in her school.

     A beaten path went along the grassy bank. Mona and Grace followed it after passing under the iron archway of the mission gate. Two British soldiers offered to accompany the women, but they assured the men that there was nothing to fear from Mama Wachera. Africans in both camps respected the legendary medicine woman and left her in peace.

     As she neared the cluster of humble huts, Grace was assailed with memories:
of the rainy day she had arrived back in 1919 in the ox wagons, baby Mona in Rose's arms; of her first handshake with James; of the day Valentine had had the fig tree cut down, on a spot near the southern goalposts; of the night of the fire and the subsequent days recuperating in Wachera's hut. Walking now along the edge of the medicine woman's shamba, where beans and maize awaited the rains, Grace felt her modern mission with its electricity and latest medical equipment slowly slide away behind her as she stepped into another era—the Kenya of long ago.

     Mama Wachera was sitting in the sun, stripping leaves off what Grace recognized to be a healing plant. The medicine woman chanted as she made her medicine and then stored the mixture in gourds marked with magic tokens. Wachera wore the costume for which she was known: beaded necklaces; copper bracelets; massive earrings that had stretched her earlobes down to her shoulders. Her shaved head gleamed in the sun; ceremonial charms and sacred talismans jingled on her wrists.

     She looked up at the silver-haired memsaab in white coat and metal-rubber ornament around her neck. They had not spoken in many harvests.

     Mona was apprehensive in the presence of the elderly African woman. She had heard so much about Wachera; this hut had stood here for as long as Mona could recall. And there was an elusive, dreamlike memory: of a fire, and then of rain, and finally a bed of goatskins and gentle hands cooling her fever. Mona knew that Mama Wachera had once saved her life.

     Grace addressed David's mother with extreme politeness and respect, speaking in the excellent Kikuyu that she had perfected over the years. In return, Mama Wachera was exceedingly polite and modest but did not, Grace noticed, offer a calabash of beer.

     "These letters, Lady Wachera," Grace said, holding out the bundle tied in a string, "are for your son, David. We were wondering if you could get them to him for us?"

     Mama Wachera gazed up at Grace.

     They waited. Flies buzzed in the heat; an errant cloud covered the sun. But the medicine woman didn't speak.

     Mona said, "Please," in English, and then tried to explain in her own rudimentary Kikuyu how much the letters would mean to David.

     Wachera's eyes went to Mona's waist, then back up to her face. There was contempt in the look, as if the African woman knew what secret lay beneath Mona's shirt.

     "Lady Wachera," Grace said, "your son would be very happy to read these letters. We don't know where he is. We only know that he went into the forest. But when he left, he told my niece that she could contact him through you. He said that you would help."

     Mama Wachera looked up at the woman who had long ago built a strange hut comprised of nothing more than four posts and a thatch roof but who now owned many stone buildings with paved roads and automobiles. She said, "I do not know where my son is."

     Nonetheless, Grace laid the bundle on the ground next to the medicine woman, said,
"Mwaiga,"
which means, "All is well, go in peace," and turned away.

     As they took the path back to the mission, Grace said to Mona, "Don't worry. She knows where David is. And she would want to carry out his wishes. She will get the letters to him."

S
IMON
M
WACHARO, ONE OF THE CAMP WARDERS, BOTH HATED
and lusted after Wanjiru Mathenge. He had her brought to his office again and again, at all hours of the day or night, interrupting a meal or rousing her from sleep, to interrogate her, to break her spirit.

     "Who is your immediate superior in Mau Mau?" he asked her a hundred times. "What are the lines of communication? How do you receive your orders? Who is Leopard? Where is his camp?"

     Mwacharo conducted these random interrogations in his office, a hastily constructed shack of corrugated tin walls and roof, with just a table, chair, and radiophone inside. He always questioned Wanjiru in the presence of a white officer and four askaris, and he kept at it for hours, keeping her standing on the stone floor, whether it was a fiercely hot day and the hut turned into an oven or cold rains filled the office with a biting cold. Wanjiru either shivered or sweated, she was weak and exhausted, but she always remained silent. Since coming to the Kamiti Maximum Security Camp, she had uttered not one word to the authorities.

     Eventually, after an hour or two of rapid-fire questions, Simon Mwacharo, having learned nothing, would release her.

     But he was a determined man. Wanjiru Mathenge had been given the rank of field marshal by Mau Mau; she had been labeled "hard-core" by the authorities and given a black card, which meant she was among the most dangerous of the detainees. To wrest information from her, Mwacharo knew, would be to earn praise for himself and possibly a promotion from his superiors.

     He had been interrogating Wanjiru for five months. He knew that she was bound to break eventually.

     "W
ATCH NOW
, H
ANNAH!"
Wanjiru said to her four-year-old daughter. "Pay careful attention to what I do because someday you are going to be a medicine woman like your grandmother."

     Stories about Mama Wachera, her father's mother, were what little Hannah liked best, even better than tales of Mount Kenya. She wished her mother would tell one now, instead of showing her how to remove a nasty old jigger from a toe.

     "There," Wanjiru said to the elderly Embu woman who sat on the dirt with her back against the barracks wall. "Wash it well, mama, and be careful where you step."

     She cleaned her needle, one of her most precious possessions, pinned it to her collar, and turned her attention to the next woman.

     The three thousand female detainees of the Kamiti Detention Camp occupied only a quarter of the eleven-thousand-acre prison; they were segregated from the men's section by a high chain link fence, guard towers, and rolls of barbed wire. The inhabitants of Kamiti were considered dangerous political prisoners, and therefore, it was a maximum security camp; conditions were harsh for both the men inmates and the women and children, the food was deplorable, the cells were overcrowded, and medical help was stretched too thinly to be of any help. That was why Wanjiru, because of her training as a nurse, had become almost the sole health care worker in Compound D.

     After examining the next woman's arms, which had festering wounds as a result of torture, Wanjiru said gently, "Be sure to keep them clean, mama. And let the sunlight of Mother Africa heal them."

     Wanjiru felt so helpless. With no medicines, no bandages, and no proper food it was impossible for her to do much for these suffering, outcast women. Still, she did her best. She drew upon her formal training received from British nursing sisters, who had taught her modern medicine and hygiene, and upon the traditional healing she had learned from Mama Wachera. Sometimes just having Wanjiru Mathenge look at their ailments or listen to their troubles made the inmates feel better. They were lucky to have her, the women all agreed.

     Having seen to the last woman, Wanjiru stood and took hold of her daughter's hand. It was time to collect the water from the communal borehole.

     She walked with Christopher strapped to her back. He was two years old and getting heavy. Wanjiru could have left her children in the care of other women in the compound, as most mothers in the camp did, but she had never, since the day each was born, let them out of her sight. She would not be separated from them now.

     The sky was gray and lowering as she trudged under the eyes of the white and African guards up in their tower, where the British Union Jack fluttered in the wind. She passed large groups of women, sitting or lying in the dirt or lined up against the barracks walls, out of the cold, many of them inadequately dressed. She wondered again what crimes these poor creatures had committed. Surely, she thought, out of the three thousand women in the camp, there were perhaps only fifty who were Mau Mau like herself. So what had the rest done to deserve such treatment?

     
They have no husbands
, she thought.
They are unwanted. They are considered useless. And that is their great crime.

     The water was brackish and dirty; but it was better than no water at all, so Wanjiru constantly urged the women of her compound to keep themselves and their children clean. Disease was the biggest enemy in the Kamiti camp, and Wanjiru was forever lecturing on the tactics of how to fight it.

     She paused with her calabash gourd to look out through the enormous rolls of barbed wire that coiled around the camp. This was a desolate place.
She could see far into the distance, where heavy rain fell upon the mountains. In the rising wind she heard again the pronouncement at her trial:
Charge: terrorist activities against the Crown. Sentence: governor's pleasure, maximum security, life.

     Life...

     Were they truly going to do that to her? Keep her and her children behind wire for the rest of their lives? Wanjiru was only thirty-six years old;
life
was a very long time.

     She felt Christopher, warm and heavy on her back, and Hannah's tiny hand in hers, and she was suddenly gripped with panic and fury. What crimes have these little ones committed, except to have been born with the right to freedom?

     A female warder came along. She was a tall Wakamba woman leading two vicious dogs, who prodded Wanjiru to go back to her barracks. Wanjiru thought of David. Where was he? What was this war doing to
him?