Kirinyaga Read online

  “I remember seeing a circus when I was in England,” I said, raising my voice so that all could hear me, though I directed my remarks at Sambeke. “In it there was a chimpanzee. He was a very bright animal. They dressed him in human clothing, and he rode a human bicycle, and he played human music on a human flute—but that did not make him a human. In fact, he amused the humans because he was such a grotesque mockery of them … just as the Maasai and Kikuyu who wear suits and drive cars and work in large buildings are not Europeans, but are instead a mockery of them.”

  “That is just your opinion, old man,” said the Maasai, “and it is wrong.”

  “Is it?” I asked. “The chimpanzee had been tainted by his association with humans, so that he could never survive in the wild. And you, I notice, must have the Europeans' weapon to hunt an animal that your grandfathers would have gone out and slain with a knife or a spear.”

  “Are you challenging me, old man?” asked Sambeke, once again amused.

  “I am merely pointing out why you have brought your rifle with you,” I answered.

  “No,” he said. “You are trying to regain the power you lost when your people sent for me. But you have made a mistake.”

  “In what way?”

  “You have made me your enemy.”

  “Will you shoot me with your rifle, then?” I asked calmly, for I knew he would not.

  He leaned over and whispered to me, so that only I could hear him.

  “We could have made a fortune together, old man. I would have been happy to share it with you, in exchange for you keeping your people in line, for a safari company will need many workers. But now you have publicly opposed me, and I cannot permit that.”

  “We must learn to live with disappointments,” I said.

  “I am glad you feel that way,” he said. “For I plan to turn this world into a Utopia, rather than some Kikuyu dreamland.”

  Then, suddenly, he stood up.

  “Boy,” he said to Ndemi, who was standing at the outskirts of the crowd. “Bring me a spear.”

  Ndemi looked to me, and I nodded, for I could not believe that the Maasai would kill me with any weapon.

  Ndemi brought the spear to Sambeke, who took it from him and leaned it against Koinnage's hut. Then he stood before the fire and slowly began removing all his clothes. When he was naked, with the firelight playing off his lean, hard body, looking like an African god, he picked up the spear and held it over his head.

  “I go to mtfisi in the dark, in the old way,” he announced to the assembled villagers. “Your mundumugu has laid down the challenge, and if you are to listen to my counsel in the future, as I hope you will, you must know that I can meet any challenge he sets for me.”

  And before anyone could say a word or move to stop him, he strode boldly off into the night.

  “Now he will die, and Maintenance will want to revoke our charter!” complained Koinnage.

  “If he dies, it was his own decision, and Maintenance will not punish us in any way,” I replied. I stared long and hard at him. “I wonder that you care.”

  “That I care if he should die?”

  “That you care if Maintenance should revoke our charter,” I answered. “If you listen to the Maasai, you will turn Kirinyaga into another Kenya, so why should you mind returning to the original Kenya?”

  “He does not want to turn Kirinyaga into Kenya, but into Utopia,” said Koinnage sullenly.

  “We are already attempting to do that,” I noted. “Does his Utopia include a big European house for the paramount chief?”

  “We did not discuss it thoroughly,” said Koinnage uneasily.

  “And perhaps some extra cattle, in exchange for supplying him with porters and gun bearers?”

  “He has good ideas,” said Koinnage, ignoring my question. “Why should we carry our water from the river when he can create pumps and pipes to carry it for us?”

  “Because if water is easy to obtain, it will become easy to waste, and we have no more water to waste here than we had in Kenya, where all the lakes have dried up because of farseeing men like Sambeke.”

  “You have answers for everything,” said Koinnage bitterly.

  “No,” I said. “But I have answers for this Maasai, for his questions have been asked many times before, and always in the past the Ki-kuyu have given the wrong answer.”

  Suddenly we heard a hideous scream from perhaps half a mile away.

  “It is finished,” said Koinnage grimly. “The Maasai is dead, and now we must answer to Maintenance.”

  “It did not sound like a man,” said Ndemi.

  “You are just a mtoto—a child,” said Koinnage. “What do you know?”

  “I know what Juma sounded like when fisi killed him,” said Ndemi defiantly. “That is what I know.”

  We waited in silence to see if there would be another sound, but none was forthcoming.

  “Perhaps it is just as well that fisi has killed the Maasai,” said old Njobe at last. “I saw the building that he drew in the dirt, the one he would make for visitors, and it was an evil building. It was not round and safe from demons like our own huts, but instead it had corners, and everyone knows that demons live in corners.”

  “Truly, there would be a curse upon it,” agreed another of the Elders.

  “What can one expect from one who hunts fisi at night?” added another.

  “One can expect a dead fisi!” said Sambeke triumphantly, as he stepped out of the shadows and threw the bloody corpse of a large male hyena onto the ground. Everyone backed away from him in awe, and he turned to me, the firelight flickering off his sleek black body. “What do you say now, old man?”

  “I say that you are a greater killer than fisi” I answered.

  He smiled with satisfaction.

  “Now,” he said, “let us see what we can learn from this particular fisi” He turned to a young man. “Boy, bring a knife.”

  “His name is Kamabi,” I said.

  “I have not had time to learn names,” replied Sambeke. He turned back to Kamabi. “Do as I ask, boy.”

  “He is a man,” I said.

  “It is difficult to tell in the dark,” said Sambeke with a shrug.

  Kamabi returned a moment later with an ancient hunting knife; it was so old and so rusty that Sambeke did not care to touch it, and so he merely pointed to the hyena.

  “Kata hi ya tumbo,” he said. “Slit the stomach here.”

  Kamabi knelt down and slit open the hyena's belly. The smell was terrible, but the Maasai picked up a stick and began prodding through the contents. Finally he stood up.

  “I had hoped that we would find a bracelet or an earring,” he said. “But it has been a long time since the boy was killed, and such things would have passed through fisi days ago.”

  “Koriba can roll the bones and tell if this is the one who killed Juma,” said Koinnage.

  Sambeke snorted contemptuously. “Koriba can roll the bones from now until the long rains come, but they will tell him nothing.” He looked at the assembled villagers. “I have killed fisi in the old way to prove that I am no coward or European, to hunt only in the daylight and hide behind my gun. But now that I have shown you that I can do it, tomorrow I shall show you how many fisi I can kill in my way, and then you may decide which way is better, Koriba's or mine.” He paused. “Now I need a hut to sleep in, so that I may be strong and alert when the sun rises.”

  Every villager except Koinnage immediately volunteered his hut. The Maasai looked at each man in turn, and then turned to the paramount chief. “I will take yours,” he said.

  “But—” began Koinnage.

  “And one of your wives to keep me warm in the night.” He stared directly into Koinnage's eyes. “Or would you deny me your hospitality after I have killed fisi for you?”

  “No,” said Koinnage at last. “I will not deny you.”

  The Maasai shot me a triumphant smile. “It is still not Utopia,” he said. “But it is getting closer.” />
  The next morning Sambeke went out with his rifle.

  I walked down to the village in the morning to give Zindu ointment to help dry up her milk, for her baby had been stillborn. When I was finished, I went through the shambas, blessing the scarecrows, and before long I had my usual large group of children beside me, begging me to tell them a story

  Finally, when the sun was high in the sky and it was too hot to keep walking, I sat down beneath the shade of an acacia tree.

  “All right,” I said. “Now you may have your story.”

  “What story will you tell us today, Koriba?” asked one of the girls.

  “I think I shall tell you the tale of the Unwise Elephant,” I said.

  “Why was he unwise?” asked a boy.

  “Listen, and you shall know,” I said, and they all fell silent.

  “Once there was a young elephant,” I began, “and because he was young, he had not yet acquired the wisdom of his race. And one day this elephant chanced upon a city in the middle of the savannah, and he entered it, and beheld its wonders, and thought it was quite the most marvelous thing he had ever seen. All his life he had labored day and night to fill his belly, and here, in the city, were wonderful machines that could make his life so much easier that he was determined to own some of them.

  “But when he approached the owner of a digging stick, with which he could find buried acacia pods, the owner said, ‘I am a poor man, and I cannot give my digging stick to you. But because you want it so badly, I will make a trade.’

  “ ‘But I have nothing to trade’ said the elephant unhappily.

  “ ‘Of course you do,’ said the man. ‘If you will let me have your ivory, so that I can carve designs on it, you may have the digging stick.’

  “The elephant considered this offer, and finally agreed, for if he had a digging stick he would no longer need his tusks to root up the ground.

  “And he walked a little farther, and he came to an old woman with a weaving loom, and he thought this was a wonderful thing, for with it he would be able to make a blanket for himself so that he could stay warm during the long nights.

  “He asked the woman for her weaving loom, and she replied that she would not give it away, but that she would be happy to trade it.

  “ ‘All I have to trade is my digging stick,’ said the elephant.

  “ ‘But I do not need a digging stick’ said the old woman. ‘You must let me cut off one of your feet, that I may make a stool of it.”

  “The elephant thought for a long time, and he remembered how cold he had been the previous night, and finally he agreed, and the trade was made.

  “Then he came to a man who had a net, and the elephant thought that the net would be a wonderful thing to have, for now he could catch the fruits when he shook a tree, rather than having to hunt for them on the ground.

  “ ‘I will not give you the net, for it took me many days to make it,’ said the man, ‘but I will trade it to you for your ears, which will make excellent sleeping mats.’

  “Again the elephant agreed, and finally he went back to the herd to show them the wonders he had brought from the city of men.

  “ ‘What need have we for digging sticks?’ asked his brother. ‘No digging stick will last as long as our tusks.’

  “ ‘It might be nice to have a blanket,’ said his mother, ‘but to make a blanket with a weaving loom we would need fingers, which we do not have.’

  “ ‘I cannot see the purpose of a net for catching fruit from the trees,’ said his father. ‘For if you hold the net in your trunk, how will you shake the fruits loose from the tree, and if you shake the tree, how will you hold the net?’

  “ ‘I see now that the tools of men are of no use to elephants,’ said the young elephant. ‘I can never be a man, so I will go back to being an elephant’

  “His father shook his head sadly. ‘It is true that you are not a man—but because you have dealt with men, you are no longer an elephant either. You have lost your foot, and cannot keep up with the herd. You have given away your ivory, and you cannot dig for water, or churn up the ground to look for acacia pods. You have parted with your ears, and now you cannot flap them to cool your blood when the sun is high in the sky’

  “And so the elephant spent the rest of his unhappy life halfway between the city and the herd, for he could not become part of one and he was no longer part of the other.”

  I stopped, and stared off into the distance, where a small herd of impala was grazing just beyond one of our cultivated fields.

  “Is that all?” asked the girl who had first requested the story.

  “That is all,” I said.

  “It was not a very good story,” she continued.

  “Oh?” I asked, slapping a small insect that was crawling up my arm. “Why not?”

  “Because the ending was not happy.”

  “Not all stories have happy endings,” I said.

  “I do not like unhappy endings,” she said.

  “Neither do I,” I agreed. I paused and looked at her. “How do you think the story should end?”

  “The elephant should not trade the things that make him an elephant, since he can never become a man.”

  “Very good,” I said. “Would you trade the things that make you a Kikuyu, to try to be something you can never become?”

  “Never!”

  “Would any of you?” I asked my entire audience.

  “No!” they cried.

  “What if the elephant offered you his tusks, or the hyena offered you his fangs?”

  “Never!”

  I paused for just a moment before asking my next question.

  “What if the Maasai offered you his gun?”

  Most of the children yelled “No!”, but I noticed that two of the older boys did not answer. I questioned them about it.

  “A gun is not like tusks or teeth,” said the taller of the two boys. “It is a weapon that men use.”

  “That is right,” said the smaller boy, shuffling his bare feet in the dirt and raising a small cloud of dust. “The Maasai is not an animal. He is like us.”

  “He is not an animal,” I agreed, “but he is not like us. Do the Kikuyu use guns, or live in brick houses, or wear European clothes?”

  “No,” said the boys in unison.

  “Then if you were to use a gun, or live in a brick house, or wear European clothes, would you be a true Kikuyu?”

  “No,” they admitted.

  “But would using a gun, or living in a brick house, or wearing European clothes, make you a Maasai or a European?”

  “No.”

  “Do you see, then, why we must reject the tools and the gifts of outsiders? We can never become like them, but we can stop being Kikuyu, and if we stop being Kikuyu without becoming something else, then we are nothing.”

  “I understand, Koriba,” said the taller boy.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  He nodded. “I am sure.”

  “Why are all your stories like this?” asked a girl.

  “Like what?”

  “They all have titles like the Unwise Elephant, or the Jackal and the Honeybird, or the Leopard and the Shrike, but when you explain them they are always about the Kikuyu.”

  “That is because I am a Kikuyu and you are a Kikuyu,” I replied with a smile. “If we were leopards, then all my stories would really be about leopards.”

  I spent a few more minutes with them beneath the shade of the tree, and then I saw Ndemi approaching through the tall grass, his face alive with excitement.

  “Well?” I said when he had joined us.

  “The Maasai has returned,” he announced.

  “Did he kill any fisi?” I asked.

  “Mingi sana” replied Ndemi. “Very many.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “By the river, with some of the young men who served as his gun bearers and skinners.”

  “I think I shall go visit them,” I said, getting carefully to my f
eet, for my legs tend to get stiff when I sit in one position for too long. “Ndemi, you will come with me. The rest of you children are to go back to your shambas, and to think about the story of the Unwise Elephant.”

  Ndemi's chest puffed up like one of my roosters when I singled him out to accompany me, and a moment later we were walking across the sprawling savannah.

  “What is the Maasai doing at the river?” I asked.

  “He has cut down some young saplings with a panga? answered Ndemi, “and he is instructing some of the men to build something, but I do not know what it is.”

  I peered through the haze of heat and dust, and saw a small party of men approaching us.

  “I know what it is,” I said softly, for although I had never seen a sedan chair, I knew what one looked like, and it was currently approaching us as four Kikuyu bore the weight of the sedan chair—and the Maasai—upon their sweating shoulders.

  Since they were heading in our direction, I told Ndemi to stop walking, and we stood and waited for them.

  “fambo, old man!” said the Maasai when we were within earshot. “I have killed seven more hyenas this morning.”

  “Jarnbo, Sambeke,” I replied. “You look very comfortable.”

  “It could use cushions,” he said. “And the bearers do not carry it levelly. But I will make do with it.”

  “Poor man,” I said, “who lacks cushions and thoughtful bearers. How did these oversights come to pass?”

  “That is because it is not Utopia yet,” he replied with a smile. “But it is getting very close.”

  “You will be sure to tell me when it arrives,” I said.

  “You will know, old man.”

  Then he directed his bearers to carry him to the village. Ndemi and I remained where we were, and watched him disappear in the distance.

  That night there was a feast in the village to celebrate the slaying of the eight hyenas. Koinnage himself had slaughtered an ox, and there was much pombe, and the people were singing and dancing when I arrived, reenacting the stalking and killing of the animals by their new savior.