Minutes of Glory Read online

  Minutes of Glory

  ALSO BY NGŨGĨ WA THIONG’O

  Fiction

  Wizard of the Crow

  Petals of Blood

  Weep Not, Child

  The River Between

  A Grain of Wheat

  Devil on the Cross

  Matigari

  Plays

  The Black Hermit

  This Time Tomorrow

  The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (with Micere Mugo)

  I Will Marry When I Want (with Ngũgĩ wa Mĩriĩ)

  Memoirs

  Wrestling with the Devil: A Prison Memoir

  Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir

  In the House of the Interpreter: A Memoir

  Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Writer’s Awakening

  Essays

  Globalectics

  Something Torn and New

  Decolonising the Mind

  Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams

  Moving the Centre

  Writers in Politics

  Homecoming

  Minutes of Glory

  And Other Stories

  NGŨGĨ WA THIONG’O

  © 2019, 1975 by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

  Preface to the 2019 New Press Edition © 2019 by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to: Permissions Department, The New Press, 120 Wall Street, 31st floor, New York, NY 10005.

  First published in the United Kingdom in the Heinemann African Writers

  Series as Secret Lives and Other Stories, 1975

  A new edition was published in the United Kingdom by

  Harvill Secker, 2018

  This edition published in the United States by

  The New Press, New York, 2019

  Distributed by Two Rivers Distribution

  ISBN 978-1-62097-466-7 (ebook)

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 1938–

  Title: Minutes of glory, and other stories / Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

  Other titles: Secret lives, and other stories

  Description: New York : The New Press, 2019. | “First published in the Heinemann African Writers Series as Secret Lives and Other Stories, 1975. This edition published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2019.”

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018052222 | ISBN 9781620974650

  (hardcover : alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Kenya—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR9381.9.N45 S43 2019 | DDC 823.914—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018052222

  The New Press publishes books that promote and enrich public discussion and understanding of the issues vital to our democracy and to a more equitable world. These books are made possible by the enthusiasm of our readers; the support of a committed group of donors, large and small; the collaboration of our many partners in the independent media and the not-for-profit sector; booksellers, who often hand-sell New Press books; librarians; and above all by our authors.

  www.thenewpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Contents

  Preface to the 2019 New Press Edition

  Preface to the Original 1975 Edition

  Acknowledgements

  PART I Of Mothers and Children

  Mugumo

  And the Rain Came Down!

  Gone with the Drought

  PART II Fighters and Martyrs

  The Village Priest

  The Black Bird

  The Martyr

  The Return

  A Meeting in the Dark

  Goodbye Africa

  PART III Secret Lives

  Minutes of Glory

  Wedding at the Cross

  A Mercedes Funeral

  The Mubenzi Tribesman

  PART IV Shadows and Priests

  Without a Shadow of Doubt: My First Lesson in Art and Film

  The Ghost of Michael Jackson

  For Nyambura and Wanjiku

  Preface to the 2019 New Press Edition

  My daughter wanted a story for a gift. This is a tradition we developed at our place in University Hills, Irvine, California, exchanging poems, stories or drawings for birthdays and other seasons. The story, Without a Shadow of Doubt, was Mũmbi’s Xmas present for 2012. I wrote it in Cape Town, South Africa. It was inspired by my memory of the sibling rivalry between my younger brother, Njinjũ, and me. We were otherwise very close and when, in April 1974, I lost him to a car accident, it left a big hole in me. But there are times when I feel an intense reunion with his spirit, and for some reason, Cape Town was such a moment. The story is certainly imbued with his spirit; the games he and I used to play.

  It has other biographical elements. In 1985, I took a six-month intensive filmmaking course at the Dramatiska Institutet in Stockholm. The study of light took me back to our evenings of storytelling, with the shadows made by the flames of the wood fire, playing on the walls and on the faces of tellers and listeners. The story is thus a kind of documentary fiction, and it was first published in Black Renaissance of 16 June 2016.

  The Ghost of Michael Jackson is seeing print for the first time. It was also a gift, this time to Thiong’o K, our youngest. But the story has origins in a visit of my wife’s nephew and his family to our house on University Hills, Irvine, from their place in New Jersey. One evening when Njeeri and her nephew were reminiscing about their different experiences of growing up in Mang’u Village in Kenya, he told of a young Catholic priest admired for his holiness. But Nephew knew another side of the priest, who, on Saturday nights, changed from his robes of holiness into a Michael Jackson type of outfit, would visit social gatherings at night, and did moonwalks. The priest used to win the hearts of the young ladies, to the chagrin of his rivals. The problem was that the older folk were so sure of his holiness that they would never believe any ‘lies’ about their beloved Padre, and were more likely to punish the ‘liars’ who told on him. Their priest was holy and celibate, definitely not one to compete in dirty dancing and its consequences.

  These two stories make Part IV of this collection: Minutes of Glory. Otherwise the bulk of these stories, Parts I, II, and III, were previously published under the general title Secret Lives. I wrote them in Uganda and Kenya. They cover my writing career from 1961 to 1971, and were published in the Heinemann African Writers Series but never in the United States. They are more sombre in tone, and they contrast well with the more playful Without a Shadow of Doubt and The Ghost of Michael Jackson.

  I hope that altogether they will make the reader enjoy a few minutes of glory.

  NGŨGĨ WA THIONG’O

  2018

  Fuertes Street, Irvine, University Hills, California

  Preface to the Original 1975 Edition

  Sometime in 1960 I met Mr Jonathan Kariara outside the Main Hall of Makerere University College and on an impulse stopped him: I had written a short story and would he care to look at it? Mr Kariara was then in his final year as a student of English: he was very involved in Penpoint, a journal then at the centre of the creative efforts on Makerere Hill. I had told him a lie. I was then in my second preliminary year, and the story was only in my mind. But with my impulsive lie, I knew I had to write a story. This later became The Fig Tree (Mugumo in this collection) and Mr Kariara was very excited about it: had I been reading D. H. Lawrence, he asked, and I was impressed and very encouraged. That was the beginning of a fairly creative three-year period during which I wrote The Return, Gone with the Drought, T
he Village Priest, The Martyr, A Meeting in the Dark, And the Rain Came Down! and the first sketches of The Black Bird and The Mubenzi Tribesman, alongside two novels and a play. In 1964 the well for short stories dried up. I attempted to write about my encounter with England and failed. Yorkshire Moors, Brontës’ Countryside, the Scottish Highlands, especially Inverness of yellow gorse and silver birches: all these were beautiful yes, but they only made me vividly live the Limuru landscape with its sudden drop into the Rift Valley. Memories of beauty and terror. I wrote A Grain of Wheat.

  In 1971 I returned to Kenya from a one-year spell teaching African Literature at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. I looked at the tired and bewildered faces of the people: I went to places where people went to drown their memories of yesterday and their hopes and fears for tomorrow in drinking. I visited various bars in Limuru, drinking, singing and dancing and trying not to see or to remember. A friend told of an interesting episode. A barmaid had been arrested for stealing money from an aged trader, her one-night lover. The friend who told the story was condemning the rather petty and amateurish theft. But I was intrigued by the fact that the girl had returned to the same bar and for a whole day lived in an ostentatious display of wealth and well-being. That was the beginning of the three stories (Minutes of Glory, Wedding at the Cross and A Mercedes Funeral) which were meant to be the first in a series of secret lives. I also started working on a novel: how could I not see and hear and remember?

  So that in a sense the stories in this collection form my creative autobiography over the last twelve years and touch on ideas and moods affecting me over the same period. My writing is really an attempt to understand myself and my situation in society and in history. As I write I remember the nights of fighting in my father’s house; my mother’s struggle with the soil so that we might eat, have decent clothes and get some schooling; my elder brother, Wallace Mwangi, running to the cover and security of the forest under a hail of bullets from Colonial policemen; his messages from the forest urging me to continue with education at any cost; my cousin, Gichini wa Ngũgĩ, just escaping the hangman’s rope because he had been caught with live bullets; uncles and other villagers murdered because they had taken the oath; the beautiful courage of ordinary men and women in Kenya who stood up to the might of British imperialism and indiscriminate terrorism. I remember too some relatives and fellow villagers who carried the gun for the white man and often became his messengers of blood. I remember the fears, the betrayals, Rachael’s tears, the moments of despair and love and kinship in struggle and I try to find the meaning of it all through my pen.

  On this road I have been helped and encouraged by many: Kariara, Joe Mutiga, G. G. Kuruma, Karienye Yohana, Ime Ikiddeh, Peter Nazareth, Hugh Dinwiddy, Chinua Achebe, and several others from Limuru. Encouraging, and touching too, have been the many letters from numerous boys and girls all over Kenya and whom I have never met. Currently I am deriving much pleasure and faith and hope from the exciting work being done at the University of Nairobi on African Literature, both oral and written. Taban lo Liyong, Okot p’Bitek, Eddah Gachukia, Chris Wanjala, Bhadur Tejani and other staff: hardly a month passes without our celebrating a literary event. And of course there is Busara, and the students’ Writers Workshop, and the drama society, and new exciting names on the Kenyan literary scene: Kibera, Kahiga, Charles Mangua, Mwangi Ruheni, Jared Angira, to mention a few.

  And above all there’s Nyambura, beautiful Nyambura: from her I have derived the strength to rise from constant moods of despair and self-doubt to celebrate a few minutes of glory. Hence the present offering of secret lives.

  NGŨGĨ WA THIONG’O

  1975

  Acknowledgements

  Many of these stories have been published in various magazines including Penpoint, Kenya Weekly News, Transition, The New African, Zuka, Ghala, Joe, and some Russian and German journals. Some have appeared in anthologies too numerous to mention. And the Rain Came Down!, Minutes of Glory, Wedding at the Cross, A Mercedes Funeral and The Black Bird are appearing in book form for the first time. The Mubenzi Tribesman and Goodbye Africa are being published for the first time.

  PART I

  Of Mothers and Children

  MUGUMO

  Mukami stood at the door: slowly and sorrowfully she turned her head and looked at the hearth. A momentary hesitation. The smouldering fire and the small stool by the fire-side were calling her back. No. She had made up her mind. She must go. With a smooth, oiled upper-garment pulled tightly over her otherwise bare head, and then falling over her slim and youthful shoulders, she plunged into the lone and savage darkness.

  All was quiet and a sort of magic pervaded the air. Yet she felt it threatening. She felt awed by the immensity of the darkness – unseeing, unfeeling – that enveloped her. Quickly she moved across the courtyard she knew so well, fearing to make the slightest sound. The courtyard, the four huts that belonged to her airu, the silhouette of her man’s hut and even her own, seemed to have joined together in one eternal chorus of mute condemnation of her action.

  ‘You are leaving your man. Come back!’ they pleaded in their silence of pitying contempt. Defiantly she crossed the courtyard and took the path that led down to the left gate. Slowly, she opened the gate and then shut it. She stood a moment, and in that second Mukami realized that with the shutting of the gate, she had shut off a part of her existence. Tears were imminent as with a heavy heart she turned her back on her rightful place and began to move.

  But where was she going? She did not know and she did not very much care. All she wanted was to escape and go. Go. Go anywhere – Masailand or Ukambani. She wanted to get away from the hearth, the courtyard, the huts and the people, away from everything that reminded her of Muhoroini Ridge and its inhabitants. She would go and never return to him, her hus—No! not her husband, but the man who wanted to kill her, who would have crushed her soul. He could no longer be her husband, though he was the very same man she had so much admired. How she loathed him now.

  Thoughts of him flooded her head. Her young married life: Muthoga, her husband, a self-made man with four wives but with a reputation for treating them harshly; her father’s reluctance to trust her into his hands and her dogged refusal to listen to his remonstrances. For Muthoga had completely cast a spell on her. She wanted him, longed to join the retinue of his wives and children. Indeed, since her initiation she had secretly but resolutely admired this man – his gait, his dancing, and above all his bass voice and athletic figure. Everything around him suggested mystery and power. And the courting had been short and strange. She could still remember the throbbing of her heart, his broad smile and her hesitant acceptance of a string of oyster-shells as a marriage token. This was followed by beer-drinking and the customary bride-price.

  But people could not believe it and many young warriors whose offers she had brushed aside looked at her with scorn and resentment. ‘Ah! Such youth and beauty to be sacrificed to an old man.’ Many a one believed and in whispers declared that she was bewitched. Indeed she was: her whole heart had gone to this man.

  No less memorable and sensational to her was the day they had carried her to this man’s hut, a new hut that had been put up specially for her. She was going to the shamba when, to her surprise, three men approached her, apparently from nowhere. Then she knew. They were coming for her. She ought to have known, to have prepared herself for this. Her wedding day had come. Unceremoniously they swept her off the ground, and for a moment she was really afraid, and was putting up a real struggle to free herself from the firm yet gentle hands of the three men who were carrying her shoulder-high. And the men! the men! They completely ignored her frenzied struggles. One of them had the cheek to pinch her, ‘just to keep her quiet’, as he carelessly remarked to one of his companions. The pinch shocked her in a strange manner, a very pleasantly strange manner. She ceased struggling and for the first time she noticed she was riding shoulder-high on top of the soft seed-filled millet fingers which stroke
d her feet and sides as the men carried her. She felt really happy, but suddenly realized that she must keen all the way to her husband’s home, must continue keening for a whole week.

  The first season: all his love and attention lavished on her. And, in her youth, she became a target of jealousy and resentment from the other wives. A strong opposition soon grew. Oh, women. Why could they not allow her to enjoy what they had enjoyed for years – his love? She could still recall how one of them, the eldest, had been beaten for refusing to let Mukami take fire from her hut. This ended the battle of words and deeds. It was now a mute struggle. Mukami hardened towards them. She did not mind their insolence and aloofness in which they had managed to enlist the sympathy of the whole village. But why should she mind? Had not the fulfilment of her dream, ambition, life and all, been realized in this man?

  Two seasons, three seasons, and the world she knew began to change. She had no child.

  A thata! A barren woman!

  No child to seal the bond between him and her!

  No child to dote on, hug and scold!

  No child to perpetuate the gone spirits of

  Her man’s ancestors and her father’s blood.

  She was defeated. She knew it. The others knew it too. They whispered and smiled. Oh, how their oblique smiles of insolence and pride pierced her! But she had nothing to fear. Let them be victorious. She had still got her man.

  And then without warning the man began to change, and in time completely shunned her company and hut, confining himself more to his thingira. She felt embittered and sought him. Her heart bled for him yet found him not. Muthoga, the warrior, the farmer, the dancer, had recovered his old hard-heartedness which had been temporarily subdued by her, and he began to beat her. He had found her quarrelling with the eldest wife, and all his accumulated fury, resentment and frustration seemed to find an outlet as he beat her. The beating; the crowd that watched and never helped! But that was a preamble to such torture and misery that it almost resulted in her death that very morning. He had called on her early and without warning or explanation had beaten her so much that he left her for dead. She had not screamed – she had accepted her lot. And as she lay on the ground thinking it was now the end, it dawned on her that perhaps the others had been suffering as much because of her. Yes! she could see them being beaten and crying for mercy. But she resolutely refused to let such beating and misgivings subdue her will. She must conquer; and with that she had quickly made up her mind. This was no place for her. Neither could she return to her place of birth to face her dear old considerate father again. She could not bear the shame.