Secret Lives and Other Stories Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Preface

  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

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is renowned for his political novels and plays, yet he honed his craft as a short story writer. First published in 1975, Secret Lives and Other Stories brings together a range of Ngũgĩ’s political short stories. From tales of the meeting between magic and superstition, to stories about the modernising forces of colonialism and the pervasive threat of nature, this collection celebrates the storytelling might of one of Africa’s best-loved writers.

  About the Author

  Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is one of the leading writers and scholars at work in the world today. His books include the novels Petals of Blood, for which he was imprisoned by the Kenyan government in 1977, A Grain of Wheat and Wizard of the Crow; the memoirs, Dreams in a Time of War and In the House of the Interpreter; and the essays, Decolonising the Mind, Something Torn and New and Globalectics. Recipient of many honours, among them ten honorary doctorates, he is currently Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine.

  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

  Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary

  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

  For Nyambura and Wanjiku

  Preface

  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, The 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

  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 ti
ghtly 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 stroked 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.

  The cold night breeze brought her to her present condition. Tears, long suppressed, flowed down her cheeks as she hurried down the path that wound through the bush, down the valley, through the labyrinth of thorn and bush. The murmuring stream, the quiet trees that surrounded her, did these sympathize with her or did they join with the kraal in silent denouncement of her action?

  She followed the stream, and then crossed it at its lowest point where there were two or three stones on which she could step. She was still too embittered, too grieved to notice her dangerous surroundings. For was this not the place where the dead were thrown? Where the spirits of the dead hovered through the air, intermingling with the trees, molesting strangers and intruders? She was angry with the world, her husband, but more with herself. Could she have been in the wrong all the time? Was this the price she must pay for her selfish grabbing of the man’s soul? But she had also sacrificed her own youth and beauty for his sake. More tears and anguish.

  Oh spirits of the dead, come for me!

  Oh Murungu, god of Gikuyu and Mumbi,

  Who dwells on high Kerinyaga, yet is everywhere,

  Why don’t you release me from misery?

  Dear Mother Earth, why don’t you open and swallow me up

  Even as you had swallowed Gumba – the Gumba who disappeared under mikongoe roots?

  She invoked the spirits of the living and the dead to come and carry her off, never to be seen again.

  Suddenly, as if in answer to her invocations, she heard a distant, mournful sound, pathetic yet real. The wind began to blow wildly and the last star that had so strangely comforted her vanished. She was alone in the gloom of the forest! Something cold and lifeless touched her. She jumped and at last did what the beating could not make her do – she screamed. The whole forest echoed with her scream. Naked fear now gripped her; she shook all over. And she realized that she was not al
one. Here and there she saw a thousand eyes that glowed intermittently along the stream, while she felt herself being pushed to and fro by many invisible hands. The sight and the sudden knowledge that she was in the land of ghosts, alone, and far from home, left her chilled. She could not feel, think or cry. It was fate – the will of Murungu. Lower and lower she sank onto the ground as the last traces of strength ebbed from her body. This was the end, the culmination of her dream and ambition. But it was so ironic. She did not really want to die. She only wanted a chance to start life anew – a life of giving and not only of receiving.

  Her misery was not at an end, for as she lay on the ground, and even as the owl and the hyena cried in the distance, the wind blew harder, and the mournful sound grew louder and nearer; and it began to rain. The earth looked as if it would crack and open beneath her.

  Then suddenly, through the lightning and thunder, she espied a tree in the distance – a huge tree it was, with the bush gently but reverently bowing all around the trunk. And she knew; she knew, that this was the tree – the sacred Mugumo – the altar of the all-seeing Murungu. ‘Here at last is a place of sanctuary,’ she thought.

  She ran, defying the rain, the thunder and the ghosts. Her husband and the people of Muhoroini Ridge vanished into insignificance. The load that had weighed upon her heart seemed to be lifted as she ran through the thorny bush, knocking against the trees, falling and standing up. Her impotence was gone. Her worries were gone. Her one object was to reach the tree. It was a matter of life and death – a battle for life. There under the sacred Mugumo she would find sanctuary and peace. There Mukami would meet her God, Murungu, the God of her people. So she ran despite her physical weakness. And she could feel a burning inside her womb. Now she was near the place of sanctuary, the altar of the most High, the place of salvation. So towards the altar she ran, no, not running but flying; at least her soul must have been flying. For she felt as light as a feather. At last she reached the place, panting and breathless.