This short story was written after I’d come to the realization that a lot of Western writing about Africa was still very colonial in nature; that is, the protagonists were nearly always white adventurers doing their thing against the beautiful and mysterious backdrop of the “Dark Continent,” while any African characters tended to be one-dimensional sideshows—the dutiful servant, the savage poacher, the corrupt official. I was as guilty as anyone in this. And so with this particular story, I was intentional in trying to write African characters who were more fully developed, less caricatured. It was certainly an interesting exercise in cross-cultural thinking. The story is set in Kenya during the Mau Mau Uprising of the mid-1950s.
The Honey-Guide
Late afternoon sunlight slanted in through the doorway and cast angular shadows across the red clay floor. A rooster pecked idly at a discarded maize cob in the corner. Julius Wainaina sat at his customary table near the front wall under an open window—this position was best to catch the light he needed for his reading. The newspaper was now neatly stacked on the table in front of him, and his tea glass stood nearly empty. He removed his wire-rimmed spectacles, carefully folded in the earpieces, and placed them on the paper.
Earlier he had read aloud to the café patrons, as was his daily ritual. The headlining news item told of a Scottish farmer named Clifton Bell whose farmhouse near Thika had burned, but Julius had withheld this story from his listeners. Speculation was rife that the Kikuyu Central Association was behind the fire, and Julius had no desire to excite the young men of the village with thoughts of open rebellion. Best to let political matters alone. Instead he had told them of a flash flood in Embu District and then gone over the prices of a few agricultural products on the Nairobi commodities market. Eventually his listeners had begun to drift away, and now most were engrossed in a heated game at the bao board near the rear entrance. For some, the novelty of his daily readings was beginning to wear thin.
Daniel Mwangi squatted just inside the doorway in tattered shorts and a stained tunic. He absently picked at a scab on his shin, and a rope of saliva clung doggedly to his lower lip. He never missed one of Julius’s readings. How much he really understood, Julius could only guess, but no matter the topic he would listen intently with a smile playing across his crusted face, his gaze fixed on the open beams which supported the corrugated mabati roof of the café. Now, with Julius obviously finished for the day, Daniel was no longer smiling. He stood and began to wander around looking for scraps left by the customers. Julius had been told that the boy had been struck by a fever in his infancy, and that he had never uttered a word.
Mama Afya, the establishment’s owner, came through the kitchen doorway. She made her way with a ponderous momentum through the tangle of tables and chairs like one of His Majesty’s mail-ships negotiating a harbor full of Chinese junks. She carried before her generous bosom a huge, steaming black kettle, and with it she filled her customers’ glasses with sweet, milky tea just off the boil.
Julius felt a certain bond with Mama Afya. Other than Mr. Singh, the deranged Indian shopkeeper next door, she was the only non-Kikuyu in the village. She was a Kamba from Machakos, and the general gossip held that she had been forced to flee her homeland after relieving herself on the verandah of a sub-chief with whom she had argued. Julius enjoyed his conversations with her, the only other person not embroiled in the politics of the village, and she in turn welcomed his presence because his newspaper readings had increased her business during the two years since Julius had returned.
Mama Afya approached and tipped the black kettle toward his glass. He waved her off.
“Natosha, Mama, I am full up,” he said to her in Kiswahili, for she claimed to speak no Kikuyu. “Besides, it is time for me to go. No one wishes to hear the news tonight.”
“News is good,” said Mama Afya, “but bad news is better.”
Julius watched with a half-smile as she glided on toward the back of the room. After a moment, he swallowed the last of his tea, picked up his spectacles and the newspaper, and stood to go. As he reached the doorway, he turned and called to Daniel. “When the sun rises tomorrow, come to my house. I wish to show you something.” The young man blinked without expression, and Julius did not know if he understood. He turned and walked out.
Next to Mama Afya’s café stood the only proper building in the village of Kagwe. Built of stone block in the days before the reserves had been set up, it had originally belonged to a red-faced Afrikaner named Verwoerde who had trekked overland from the Transvaal after the Boer War. When the Great War had rolled around, the Afrikaners were looked upon by many as Kaiser sympathizers, so Verwoerde sold out for five shillings on the pound to Mr. Singh, an Indian merchant from Limuru. The sign-board hanging over the door read “Singh & Son Supply and Sundry.” Julius walked up onto the verandah and entered the shop.
“KARIBUNI!” shouted Mr. Singh, incorrectly using the plural greeting as always, and staring some inches above Julius’s head. “YOU ARE WELCOME IN MY SHOP!”
“Thank you, sir,” said Julius, eager as ever to exercise his English even if it was with a lunatic. He bowed slightly and approached the counter. The giant Sikh stood at perfect attention, his pressed linen suit buttoned to the throat and his maroon turban perfectly wound around his massive head. Behind him, the shelves were neatly organized if somewhat sparsely filled. Various tinned foodstuffs shared space with hardware items, soap, and a few bolts of cloth. A legend throughout the district, Mr. Singh could be found at his counter at any time of day or night. He kept a small room at the back of the shop, but no one had ever seen him sleep. When the native reserves had been set up by the government, the British authorities had tried for some time to force him to relocate into one of the cities. However, each time they arrived with a new notice of eviction, they were summarily WELCOMED TO HIS SHOP and provided with immaculate service. They had finally given up the effort.
Julius drew an empty bottle from his coat pocket and placed it on the polished counter. “I would like some oil for my—”
Before he could finish, Mr. Singh snatched the bottle from the counter and disappeared into the dark storage room at the rear of the shop. Within seconds he emerged with the full bottle. “ONE SHILLING FIFTY. HOW ELSE MAY I BE OF SERVICE?”
“That is all I need today, thank you. Perhaps tomorrow the lorry will come with more newspapers?”
“AS GOD WILLS!”
“Indeed,” said Julius, placing the correct coins on the counter. “Good night, Mr. Singh.”
As he descended the steps and turned up the road, he heard Mr. Singh shout, “REALIZATION OF TRUTH IS HIGHER THAN ALL ELSE. HIGHER STILL IS TRUTHFUL LIVING!”
He was not sure if this nugget of advice was directed at him or not.
#
Julius walked with his usual measured stride in the gathering darkness. The hard-beaten path curved with the contour of the hillside. At this point it was still wide enough for two men to pass abreast without either having to step off into the tall grass. To his left, the land sloped gently down toward the river, the shambas of the village stretching away into the shallow valley. Open fields of pyrethrum and young, green maize alternated with stands of banana trees, citrus, tea bushes, and—here and there—some purple-green coffee trees. Growing coffee was of course prohibited in the Kikuyu reserve, but the agricultural inspector for Murang’a District usually turned a blind eye if farmers kept a small number of trees for their own use.
Above the path, the ground rose more steeply and disappeared into a thick forest of mature black wattle. Julius could hear the first eerie screams of the tree hyraxes out in the darkness under the arboreal canopy. Higher up, the wattle gave way to hardwoods—mahogany and towering podocarpus—and above these grew a dense belt of bamboo that encircled the mountain range like the sash around a young girl’s waist. Finally, the mountains themselves rose. Although the white colonists had renamed them the Aberdare Range after one of their Lords, they would always be Nyandarua for Julius, because their treeless, heath-covered peaks resembled a hide stretched across curved sticks to dry.
As he continued to walk, a bushbuck dashed out of the trees and stood for a moment on the path staring at him and trembling. The spray of indistinct white markings along its red flank and its tiny, needle-sharp horns marked it as a young male. The buck tensed, spun, and plunged back into the forest, instantly disappearing into the gray of the twilit undergrowth.
Julius smiled. I have diverted you from your dinner, my friend, he thought. Those young shoots of maize would have been tasty, indeed. Never mind. I will pass by, and then you may come out again. Better to eat the maize of Ephraim Kimathi than the maize in my shamba.
He started out again and soon came to a place where the path divided. The main branch veered left and down the slope between Kimathi’s maize field and a fenced pasture in which he kept three milk cows and a number of goats. This part of the path was well used as it was the quickest route to the river for many of the nearby farms. The other branch, which proceeded straight along and above the fence, was wide enough for only a single person—the stalks of grass, burdened by their heavy seed heads, nearly met in the middle.
Julius was about to enter this narrow path when he heard the heavy thunk! of a jembe striking the earth below and behind him. He turned toward the source of the sound. In the corner of the maize field stood his neighbor, now leaning against his long-handled hoe.
“Wimwega, Ephraim. Are you well?” Julius called out brightly. Idiot, he thought. He thinks everyone actually believes that he works. That jembe has never seen a good day’s work except in the hands of his wife.
“Dimwega muno,” said Ephraim Kimathi, wiping his brow dramatically. “I see you are coming from the dukas. What have you bought?”
Julius held up the clear bottle in his hand. “Only some oil for my lamp.”
“Of course. Some oil for the lamp of our reader.” Kimathi spat a stream of brown juice from the wad of nyuwe bulging under his lip. “It is lovely to have time for such idle pursuits.”
“Better a full head than an empty one,” said Julius with a grin, and he started up the narrow branch of the path. “Give your wife my greetings!”
From the corner of his eye, he could see the smile disappear from the face of his neighbor as the latter caught his implication. Julius had gained a certain measure of respect for his education and accomplishments, and since his return to the village, he had assumed a fairly prominent role in the life of the community. This alone would have been enough to bother his neighbor, but Julius knew Kimathi’s hatred ran deeper. When Wainaina Gitau, Julius’s father, had died ten years earlier, Julius had chosen to remain with his English employer at the coast rather than return to his family farm. As nearest neighbor, Kimathi had been appointed by the elders to act as muhoi, caretaker of Wainaina’s land. This Kimathi had turned to profitable gain, for the plot’s soil was rich and well-watered. And so when Julius had finally chosen to return and claim his land, Kimathi found that his income had dropped considerably.
Beyond the edge of Kimathi’s property, Julius crossed through a narrow belt of trees and then he was standing on the land of his father—his land. Through luck and high elevation, the family’s land had fallen within the bounds of the reserve; they had not undergone forced relocation like so many of their Kikuyu brethren. He stood for a moment and looked out in the dying light. Across the small maize field, he could just make out the house he had built upon his return. It stood next to the eroded ruin of his father’s house. Kimathi had had no reason to maintain the old place, so the rains had eventually worn down its mud walls. Around the houses stood a tidy grove of banana trees and a thicket of passion fruit vines. Below stretched the main pasture where he had tended his father’s herd in his youth. He kept no cattle now, just a few goats, so the grass was high. He walked on.
Arriving at the house, he lifted the latch on the wooden door and stepped through into the dark interior. He reached forward carefully until his hand met the table. He felt around on the surface to find the box of matches he knew he had left there. The room came into being as the match flared—not existing, then existing. He lit a candle and walked over to the rough mantel above the hearth. He took down a tarnished brass lamp, filled the reservoir with Mr. Singh’s lamp oil, and touched the candle to the wick. A clean flame rose, and, after trimming it slightly, he lowered the glass globe.
Julius sat down in his one straight chair and looked around his one room. He felt a certain pride as he took in the straight walls of milled cypress, the plank flooring, the stone hearth and chimney. His possessions included the table, the chair he was sitting in, a chest, a bed, and the lamp, but they were enough. What else did he need?
The house was indeed small and modest in appearance, but it was also one of the most sturdily built in all of Kagwe. And this Julius felt he deserved. He had pursued his education at the mission school like a hyena after a bone, hadn’t he? He had worked for Mr. Smeades at the plantation for thirty-nine years, hadn’t he? He had saved his shillings one by one! And now he would live out his days on his father’s farm in peace.
He slid open a drawer under the table and pulled out a thin ledger. He flipped it open, put on his spectacles, and carefully recorded his expenses for the day (Newspaper: 1/=; Lamp oil: 1/50). Mama Afya allowed him to pay on account, so the tea needn’t be entered. He had served as the bookkeeper for one of the largest cashew and nutmeg producing plantations in the colony—Smeades Enterprises (East Africa) Limited—and the habit of writing in a ledger was a hard one to leave behind.
He read a few more articles from the eighteen-day-old Nairobi Standard he had purchased from Singh’s shop. Nothing much of interest had happened in Nairobi three weeks ago. Perhaps Mama Afya was right. He extinguished the lamp and undressed by the light of the candle. The night chill of the Kenya highlands was beginning to overtake the room.
#
As he slept, the dream came again. There were four of them—one before him, one on either hand, and one behind. They shook and danced behind their wooden masks. The masks bore white blazes; he had seen many like them at the elders’ gatherings. In turn the figures said in voices muffled by the masks: “He has not taken the oath.” “He has not taken the oath.” The one before him said: “He is not one of us.” The dancing and chanting continued for what seemed like hours. At last the bird came, and he knew that it had been sent by his mother. He rose and followed the bird, the masks and voices fading away behind him.
#
Julius awoke before dawn. After dressing, he walked outside and headed toward his outhouse. As he passed the dark doorway of his father’s house, a figure stepped out into his path. Julius started and stepped back. Then he laughed. Daniel Mwangi stood before him with a timid smile on his face.
“Daniel!” Julius said with his heart still racing. “You have come. Good. Go into my house and prepare a fire. We must take tea for our strength before we walk.”
When Julius returned and entered the house, Daniel was kneeling over a small flame on the hearth. Soon a fire was crackling, and Julius set a kettle to boil. He divided a cold, thick chapati and gave half to the boy. Daniel wolfed the dry bread with a passion that made Julius sick with pity. He handed him the other half.
As they drank glasses of hot tea, Julius prepared for their outing. He placed several empty gourds into a burlap sack. He wrapped another two chapatis in paper and put them in the sack as well. He slipped a box of matches into his pocket and then took his panga down from the wall where it had been hanging on a nail. Testing the edge of the blade with his thumb, he nodded with satisfaction. With the panga in one hand and the burlap sack in the other, he strode out the door.
“Come, Daniel,” he called over his shoulder. The boy scampered up behind him and took the sack, throwing it over his shoulder. The two rounded the corner of the house and struck out across the top field toward the forest. Dew lay heavy on the grass.
They continued walking until they came to the upper edge of the cleared field. Just below the tree line stood several low earthen mounds topped by cairns of stone. Julius stopped in front of two mounds that were slightly separated from the others. He stood silently for a few seconds, then said, “Here rest my father and my mother. Baba na Mama.” He looked back at Daniel, who was maintaining a healthy distance between himself and the mounds. His eyes were wide with fear.
Julius went down on one knee to straighten the rock pile on his mother’s grave. It had been his mother, Tamusa, who had given him his coppery skin and his lithe physique, setting him apart in a land of portly Kikuyus with dull brown skin. She was of the Okiek people, hunter-gatherers from the Mau Forest, the ones the British called Wandorobo. While hunting in his youth, Wainaina Gitau had found her and her brother near death at the bottom of an untended pit-trap. When he had pulled them out, tended their wounds, and tracked down their grieving clan, the family had been so overjoyed that they had offered Tamusa’s hand as his reward. He had had little choice but to return to Kagwe with a young Okiek bride. Before long, she had mastered the Kikuyu language and proved herself so valuable and attentive that Wainaina had, much to the consternation of the village, decided against marrying a daughter of Mumbi, as the Kikuyu tribeswomen were known. Intermarriage was not unheard of, but to engage in it to the exclusion of a “proper” Kikuyu marriage was seen as bad form. That she was able to provide him with only a single son was taken by many in Kagwe as proof that the marriage was cursed.
Julius stood and beckoned to Daniel. They left the graves and entered the forest beyond. Daniel showed patent relief that the mounds had not been the object of their journey. The ground sloped upward, and the undergrowth was so thick in places that Julius was forced to use his panga to hack an opening for them to walk through.
After some time, the character of the forest began to change. The trees were taller, and the dense canopy overhead kept the ground clearer. As they crossed game trails, Julius showed Daniel the spoor of many forest animals and expounded upon their habits. This was the other major gift his mother had bestowed upon him: a knowledge of the natural world that no Kikuyu could have given him.
As they passed over a ridge, Julius held up his hand. Below them in a shallow ravine they could hear the sound of men talking. The pair waited and before long they could see a line of four men approaching. Leading them was Ephraim Kimathi. Julius recognized two of the others as men from the village, but the fourth he did not know. The men did not notice Julius and Daniel until they were nearly abreast their position.
Kimathi jumped back when he saw them, and the second man in line ran into him with a grunt. “Wainaina,” Kimathi said as he tried to regain himself. “It is dangerous to be in the forest alone.”
“As you can see, my neighbor, I am not alone.”
“That thing with you? I hardly think he would do you much good if you met up with a leopard or a buffalo. Rather he would go slobbering into the trees to join his family, the monkeys!” The four men laughed loudly at this. Then Kimathi continued, addressing the man Julius did not know. “This is my neighbor who has refused to take the oath. But that is hardly surprising, as he is not even a true son of Gikuyu.”
The fourth man said nothing, but his eyes were cold. The ceremonial scars on his cheeks and forehead showed him to be of one of the northern clans. Without another word, Kimathi started off toward the village. The other three followed closely behind.
Julius watched them disappear over the ridge, then turned to Daniel. “Never mind, son. They don’t know how clever monkeys are!” The young man smiled, and the two continued on their way.
Before long, Julius stopped once again. Ahead they could hear a bird calling loudly: Weet-eer! Weet-eer! This was the sound Julius had been listening for. He motioned for Daniel to follow. They edged around a thicket of young ebony and the bird was there ahead of them on a low branch. It skittered about excitedly, and took off up a wide game track. Weet-eer! The two men followed the gray-flecked bird as quickly as they could—it stayed just at the edge of their field of vision. The track twisted and rose for several furlongs, then dove steeply down into a rocky gorge. Julius and Daniel clambered down the rocks and crossed the floor of the gorge to find that the bird was leading them up the other side. Exhausted now, they pulled themselves up using roots that protruded from the embankment. When they crested the rim, the bird was just ahead, running back and forth along a branch perhaps thirty feet over their heads. Its song had changed; it now rasped a harsh ke, ke, ke, ke, ke!
Julius grinned. Panting, he told Daniel to gather some dry sticks. The youth complied without even waiting to catch his breath, and soon a substantial pile had materialized on the trail. Julius selected a spot slightly upwind of the trunk of the bird’s tree, and built a small fire. As it crackled, he noticed that Daniel was staring up at the bird, which was still prancing on the branch. “Look not at the bird, Daniel. The bird is only the messenger. Look at the tree.”
Daniel shifted his gaze toward the trunk of the tree. Some way up from the bird’s branch there was a split in the trunk. Flitting into and out of this aperture was a nearly constant stream of airborne activity. Recognition slowly dawned on his face.
Julius broke off a leafy green branch from a nearby bush and tossed it onto the fire. Thick gray smoke billowed up and enveloped the tree. Soon it obscured the opening in the trunk. He continued to feed the fire with both dry and green branches to produce a constant pillar of smoke. The boy watched intently. After some time it became apparent that the stream of bees had slowed nearly to a stop.
With a swiftness that belied his age, Julius climbed up to the honey-guide’s branch. He looked down. “Throw me that brand,” he called. Daniel took up a long branch that was burning on one end and heaved it upward. Julius snatched the unlit end, then stood up on the bough. His face was at the level of the opening. Balancing lightly, he rubbed out the flame of his torch against the trunk and then slowly inserted the smoking stick into the hive. After waving it gently within for a few minutes, he withdrew it and tossed it to the ground. He removed his panga from his belt, and with it he pried off a large piece of the comb just inside the entrance. Looking down, he saw that Daniel was ready and waiting with the gourds. One by one the boy tossed them up, and one by one Julius filled them with thick honey and waxy chunks of comb. When the work was done, Julius climbed down and the two sat side by side on the burlap sack and ate their fill of the leftovers.
#
A large crowd had gathered at Mama Afya’s. For the last few weeks, the groups of listeners had been increasing in number again. Much was going on in the world, it seemed, and Julius Wainaina was only too happy to provide the people of Kagwe with the stories. He relayed tales of famine in Bangladesh and accounts of torture in the prisons of Central America. He told of daring adventures and scandalous affairs of state. He did whatever he could to keep the discussions in the café away from the rising tide of insurrection in the colony, and to that end he was not above fabricating a story now and then. Whenever he thought of a particularly good one, Mama Afya would give him a wink from across the room.
On this night, he scanned the paper for ideas. There wasn’t much to work with. He had already updated most of his running storylines and was eager to come up with something new. He was flipping through the pages when a small piece about an astronomical discovery by a German scientist caught his eye. Outer space was not something he had tackled before.
“Here’s something,” he announced to his listeners. “It seems that the German government, in cooperation with the . . . South African regime, has announced that it will be launching a space-machine next month. This machine will be used to transport undesirables to the moon for detention.”
He looked over his spectacles to judge the reaction of the crowd. They seemed suitably horrified. He was about to go on when he noticed for the first time that one of the rear tables was occupied by a group of men that included Ephraim Kimathi and the man with the scarred face he had seen in the forest. Kimathi called out to him. “Why don’t you read us some real news, eh? Why don’t you tell us about things that matter?”
Julius did not respond.
“Why do you never tell of our struggle against the English dogs who control us like cattle in our own land?” The attention of the patrons was on Kimathi now. “Don’t the rest of you know that this man you are listening to is not even one of us? No, he has not taken the oath. He is probably even a government informer!”
A murmur went through the assembly. The scarred man stood and strode over to the table where Julius sat. He snatched the paper from his hand and paged through it. With a sneer he said in a low voice, “Not so comfortable now that there is another reader of English around?”
He turned and addressed the crowd. “This man is a liar. Nothing he tells you is true. He makes it all up. How can you believe the rubbish he feeds you? It is not the time to listen to tall tales. It is the time to fight!” He tossed the paper to the ground and strode out into the night, Kimathi and the other men from his table close behind.
The rest of the people in the café sat in stunned silence. Mama Afya was frozen beside her counter, kettle in hand. No one would look at Julius. Finally, after several minutes had passed, Daniel Mwangi crawled from his position beside the door, slowly and carefully gathered up the scattered pages of newsprint, and slid them onto Julius’s table. He sat back on his haunches and looked up expectantly.
* * *
~ pk
