Read Online Petals of Blood by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Moses Isegawa - Free Book Online
Authors: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Moses Isegawa
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intimate air of conspiracy. Munira’s stomach tightened as he saw the malicious glint in Abdulla’s eyes. Does he need to tell the story? Does he? He suddenly felt a murderous hatred well up in him: at the same time, he desperately searched for fitting words with which to ward off the blow.
‘Do you, Mwalimu, think I am too old to join your school?’ Abdulla unexpectedly asked, almost as an afterthought. And Munira was grateful, so relieved that he could not help a loud sigh. ‘Then I can persuade Wanja also to join the school. I would not mind wrestling her to the ground, or playing wheelbarrows together.’
Wanja laughed and turned a grave face to Munira.
‘This one – with a crippled leg . . . he is wicked. But I would floor him a thousand times.’
Joseph brought them more drinks.
What fascinated Munira was the subtle, quick changes on her face: from a suggestion of open laughter to an unconscious gravity and back again, yet the face somehow remaining basically unruffled.
‘What can I teach a big man and a big woman?’
‘Read . . . write . . . speak English through the nose,’ Abdulla retorted.
‘And geography and the history of lands far away from here,’ chimed in Wanja.
‘What good would you do the school? You would turn the childreninto rebels. One of my teachers used to say: Discipline maketh a school.’
‘Make us prefects,’ said Abdulla.
‘Class monitors. Write down the names of those that make noise.’
‘Or those that backbite their teachers.’
‘Or those that smoke.’
‘Or those that write letters to girls . . . but I know why Mwalimu is scared of enrolling us. We might lead a strike. We might tear books and beat up the teachers. Down with our teachers . . . There will be a riot, the school will close and . . .’
Abdulla became absorbed in his mythical school strike. He unrolled idea after idea: image after image.
‘Why,’ he went on, ‘I know of a school where the children went on strike because a teacher had confiscated a love-letter.’
And suddenly he was seized with an irresistible urge to tell that story of a school which almost closed because the headmaster had been suspected of erecting a mountain of shit. He was about to start when he remembered that Nyakinyua was Wanja’s grandmother. He also noticed that Wanja and Munira were quiet, very quiet. They seemed to have inexplicably withdrawn from the drunken irrelevance of a few minutes before. He looked from one face to the other: what had gone wrong? The lamplight flickered. Shadows passed over the walls: shadows passed over the faces. Maybe also over their lives, Abdulla thought: the two after all were strangers to him, and only Ilmorog had brought them together. Munira’s voice when later he broke through the shadow of silence was reflective, sober, but underneath it, bitter.
3 ~ To be made a prefect, Munira started slowly, looking to the ground, absorbed in thoughts he did not know he had, speaking from a past he should have forgotten, crossing valleys and hills and ridges and plains of time to the beginning of his death, you must be able to lick the boots of those above you, you must be able to scrub a dish to a shine brighter than the original, or as we would say in Siriana, outpray Jesus in prayers of devotion. Siriana: you should have been there in our time, before and during the period of the big, costlyEuropean dance of death and even after: you might say that our petty lives and their fears and crises took place against a background of tremendous changes and troubles, as can be seen by the names given to the age-sets between Nyabani and Hitira: Mwomboko . . . Karanji, Boti, Ngunga, Muthuu, Ng’aragu Ya Mianga, Bamiti, Gicina Bangi, Cugini-Mburaki. But you understand we were protected from all that at Siriana, then both a primary and secondary boarding school. But I am straying. I could never quite lick anybody’s boots. I could never shine dishes to brightness brighter
‘Do you, Mwalimu, think I am too old to join your school?’ Abdulla unexpectedly asked, almost as an afterthought. And Munira was grateful, so relieved that he could not help a loud sigh. ‘Then I can persuade Wanja also to join the school. I would not mind wrestling her to the ground, or playing wheelbarrows together.’
Wanja laughed and turned a grave face to Munira.
‘This one – with a crippled leg . . . he is wicked. But I would floor him a thousand times.’
Joseph brought them more drinks.
What fascinated Munira was the subtle, quick changes on her face: from a suggestion of open laughter to an unconscious gravity and back again, yet the face somehow remaining basically unruffled.
‘What can I teach a big man and a big woman?’
‘Read . . . write . . . speak English through the nose,’ Abdulla retorted.
‘And geography and the history of lands far away from here,’ chimed in Wanja.
‘What good would you do the school? You would turn the childreninto rebels. One of my teachers used to say: Discipline maketh a school.’
‘Make us prefects,’ said Abdulla.
‘Class monitors. Write down the names of those that make noise.’
‘Or those that backbite their teachers.’
‘Or those that smoke.’
‘Or those that write letters to girls . . . but I know why Mwalimu is scared of enrolling us. We might lead a strike. We might tear books and beat up the teachers. Down with our teachers . . . There will be a riot, the school will close and . . .’
Abdulla became absorbed in his mythical school strike. He unrolled idea after idea: image after image.
‘Why,’ he went on, ‘I know of a school where the children went on strike because a teacher had confiscated a love-letter.’
And suddenly he was seized with an irresistible urge to tell that story of a school which almost closed because the headmaster had been suspected of erecting a mountain of shit. He was about to start when he remembered that Nyakinyua was Wanja’s grandmother. He also noticed that Wanja and Munira were quiet, very quiet. They seemed to have inexplicably withdrawn from the drunken irrelevance of a few minutes before. He looked from one face to the other: what had gone wrong? The lamplight flickered. Shadows passed over the walls: shadows passed over the faces. Maybe also over their lives, Abdulla thought: the two after all were strangers to him, and only Ilmorog had brought them together. Munira’s voice when later he broke through the shadow of silence was reflective, sober, but underneath it, bitter.
3 ~ To be made a prefect, Munira started slowly, looking to the ground, absorbed in thoughts he did not know he had, speaking from a past he should have forgotten, crossing valleys and hills and ridges and plains of time to the beginning of his death, you must be able to lick the boots of those above you, you must be able to scrub a dish to a shine brighter than the original, or as we would say in Siriana, outpray Jesus in prayers of devotion. Siriana: you should have been there in our time, before and during the period of the big, costlyEuropean dance of death and even after: you might say that our petty lives and their fears and crises took place against a background of tremendous changes and troubles, as can be seen by the names given to the age-sets between Nyabani and Hitira: Mwomboko . . . Karanji, Boti, Ngunga, Muthuu, Ng’aragu Ya Mianga, Bamiti, Gicina Bangi, Cugini-Mburaki. But you understand we were protected from all that at Siriana, then both a primary and secondary boarding school. But I am straying. I could never quite lick anybody’s boots. I could never shine dishes to brightness brighter
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