Ngũgĩ Thiong - Wizard of the Crow

They did not find Satan among the sculptures. They looked inside high-rise and low-rise buildings, side by side with shacks made of discarded cardboard and sheets of plastic. Italian, Chinese, Indian, and Greek restaurants faced kiosks serving soul food of collard greens and ugali. From the big restaurants issued the smell of sizzling steaks; from the sidewalks came the smell of cracking corn and hazelnuts on charcoal.

Results were not good. Like the wise men from the East who encountered numerous difficulties on their way to see the infant in the manger, the Soldiers of Christ endured many hardships in their search for Satan inside the many buildings of Eldares. In some bars they were met with derisive laughter, and once some drunks threw orange peels at their faces. In the seven-star hotels they were often thrown out and eventually banned as nauseating to guests. And outside, in the streets, where sleek Mercedes-Benzes, donkey carts, and hand-pulled carriages competed for space and the right of way in pot-holed roads, the sun and dust were not anymore merciful; not to speak of the police who sometimes chased them, suspecting them of being beggars, and tourists who ran after them with cameras, taking them to be holy beggars. They were often hungry and thirsty and tired, and the stench in the streets of Eldares did not improve matters.

Those were the days when instead of being lined with trees the streets of Eldares were lined on either side with mountains of garbage. Some shop owners paid private garbage collectors to clear access to their premises, so that here and there, particularly in the central business zone, there were some clean patches. In many other streets there was nothing but flies, worms, and the stench of rot.

Was this stench part of Satan’s arsenal with which to drive us away? they wondered. For all we know he could be hiding in the garbage hills, laughing at us even as we look for him among people, buildings, and the sculptures of the Ruler? No, he is not going to stink us out of our search, they said defiantly.

But no matter how brave they felt, the more they talked about the wiles of Satan, the more they came to realize that fighting with someone they could not actually see with their own eyes was not easy. In these low moments, they would remind themselves that they were Soldiers of Christ, and as the Bible says, they had to fight the good fight. Happy are they who suffer for my sake. Revived by such thoughts, they would hold their crosses aloft with renewed vigor and sing themselves hoarse.

This place amazes me

At the cross

Because there is joy after sorrow

At the cross

One Friday afternoon in the outskirts of Santamaria as they were feeling good about themselves, three men ran toward them shouting in pure terror, Satan! Satan! They hid behind the banner of the Soldiers of Christ. Please help us… Satan is after us…

The soldiers, who had been singing and speaking in tongues, were struck by the irony of the situation. When they were thinking only of Satan, they did not find him. But now, at the height of joy and consciousness of Grace Abounding, when they were thinking only of Jesus, they heard news of Satan.

“What are you talking about?” they asked in unison.

“Satan… he is giving us hell! Help us!”

“Where is he?” asked the Soldiers of Christ excitedly, though still baffled and a little frightened by this dramatic turn of events.

Perhaps battling Satan in the spirit was less daunting than facing him in the flesh… but this was their moment and they were not about to shun the call.

He was tired, hungry, and thirsty and felt beaten down by the sun. He wanted to climb to the top, when suddenly he felt very weak in the knees and collapsed at the foot of the mountain of garbage. He could not tell whether he was in a temporary coma or a deep sleep, but when a slight breeze blew it lifted him out of himself to the sky, where he now floated. He could still see his own body lying on the ground and the mountain of garbage, where children and dogs fought over signs of meat on white bones. The body needs a rest from you and you need a rest from the body, he heard himself saying to himself. He decided to let his body lie there in the sun, and, free of the body, he wandered Aburiria-why leave the exploration and enjoyment of our country to tourists? he said with a chuckle to himself-comparing the conditions in the different towns and regions of the country.

This is really funny, he said to himself when he saw that he looked like a bird and floated like a bird; he enjoyed the rush of cold air against his wings. He now recalled a Christian song he had once heard:

I. will fly and leave this earth

I will float in the sky and witness

Wonders never seen before

Being done with the earth below

He started to sing but because he could not open his beak as wide as his mouth what came out was a whistling reminiscent of the song of the birds he had listened to in the mornings in the wilderness.

From his vantage point, he had a bird’s-eye view of the northern, southern, eastern, western, and central regions of Aburiria. The landscape ranged from the coastal plains to the region of the great lakes; to the arid bushlands in the east; to the central highlands and northern mountains. People differed as much in the languages they spoke as in the clothes they wore and how they eked out a living. Some fished, others herded cattle and goats, and others worked on the land, but everywhere, particularly in towns, the contours of life were the same as those of Eldares. Everywhere people were hungry, thirsty, and in rags. In most towns, shelters made out of cardboard, scrap metal, old tires, and plastic were home to hundreds of children and adults. He found it ironic that, as in Eldares, these shacks stood side by side with mansions of tile, stone, glass, and concrete. Similarly, in the environs of cities and towns huge plantations of coffee, tea, cocoa, cotton, sisal, and rubber shared borders with exhausted strips of land cultivated by peasants. Cows with udders full with milk grazed on lush lands as scrawny others ambled on thorny and stony grounds.

So I am not alone, he heard himself say to his bird self. Maybe he should abandon his human form and remain a bird, floating effortlessly in the sky, bathing in the fresh air of Skyland, but then he started sneezing as a whiff of gases from the factories below reached him. Is there no place on earth or in the sky where a person might escape this poison? A bit confused, he thought that before making any decision about the form in which he would lead the rest of his life he should return to his body lying in the sun to recover and review the shocks of the day. But what if his body had been completely scorched by the sun? At the thought he flapped his wings and hurried back to Eldares.

He arrived not a minute too early. A rotation truck full of garbage had just pulled up at the foot of the trash mountain. He was about to reenter his body but he held himself in check and floated a bit longer to see what they would do with his shell.

The driver and two men got out and looked at the body for a few seconds. Then one of them bent, put his ear to the chest, and proclaimed the body dead, provoking an exchange as to what they should do with the corpse. They did not want to call the police; it would take the cops a whole day to come, and they had work to do. In any case they did not want to get caught up in endless court proceedings. There was always the possibility that they might be accused of murder and end up in prison or have their heads chopped off or lose a lot of money to bribe their way out. But to leave the body there might result in as much.