Ngũgĩ Thiong - Wizard of the Crow

He felt people pressing against him on one side but quickly dismissed this as one of the inconveniences of walking on crowded streets. Eldares is attracting too much riffraff from the rural areas, he said to himself, slightly irritated. But when he tried to push forward and he still felt the pressure, he looked about him only to see people in head masks with two menacing slits for the eyes. Even then he did not immediately associate this with himself. He had always read and heard about victims of kupigwa ngete. Was he about to become an eyewitness to that kind of daylight robbery?

But before he could figure out what was happening, he felt rather than saw himself being lifted and pushed inside the back of a waiting van, which then took off immediately. The whole thing occurred so quickly that none of the passersby noticed the activities around the van as anything unusual. Inside the dark van, Tajirika found himself firmly held by his left and right arms and seated between two of the captors. He tried to extricate himself from their grip but he could not even move his hips, so tightly did they hold him. His first reaction was that these were thieves.

“I don’t have much money on me. Where are you taking me?” he asked, but received no response.

He thought it best to keep quiet and wait for their arrival at wherever they were taking him, and once outside the van he would try to escape. But as soon as the van stopped, his captors blindfolded him, took him into a house, and pushed him into a chair. When now they removed the cloth and Tajirika found himself surrounded by masked persons, beads of sweat appeared on his forehead. Who are you? he asked again, his voice trembling.

They removed the masks. What! Women? He was shocked, deflated, and ashamed, all at the same time. He, a man, to be kidnapped by women? Then came contempt and defiance. There was no way nine women could hold him against his will, he thought and quickly dashed toward the door. It was locked.

“Go back to the chair and wait for the ceremony,” one of the women told him, but Tajirika did not heed her.

“Open this door or I will teach you to know a man when you see one,” he told them, kicking the door with his shoes.

Tajirika did not even know who touched him first or from what direction, but the next second he found himself lying flat on the floor with three women sitting on his back; one at the neck, another at the waist, and the other one at the feet.

“What is your name?” the one on his feet asked him.

Fury blocked his throat. How could he, a man, be wrestled to the ground by a bunch of women?

“You are being asked. What is your name?” the one who sat on his neck asked.

“Tajirika,” he said, from the side of his mouth, breathing heavily under the combined weight of the three women.

“And other names?” the one in the middle asked.

“Titus.”

“Just wanted to make sure that we did not pick up the wrong man.”

“Get off my back,” he hissed. “What do you want from me? A ransom?” he said as he tried to shake them off, to no avail.

“Let’s introduce ourselves. We are not killers. We are not robbers. We want you to count all the money in your possession because we do not want to ever hear you claim that anybody here has taken even a penny from you.”

“No need for that. I have one thousand Burls, and you can have them all.”

“We don’t need your Burls,” one of the women standing told him; the others laughed.

“What, then, do you want? Surely women don’t rape men?”

“See how his mind works?” one of them said. “Rape is entering another person’s body by force. It is violence, and if that’s what you want we can certainly…”

“No, no, I mean if it is sex you want, we can make a deal. Work out a routine, a time, and the order…”

“He does fancy himself a man,” another one said. “Nine women all to himself?”

“Who are you?”

“A new order of justice created by today’s modern woman. You are now appearing before a people’s court.”

“I refuse to recognize your authority,” Tajirika replied with a little bit more defiance.

“Don’t worry yourself. By dawn you will.”

“Get off my back,” he said again, annoyed with himself for sounding as if he was pleading.

“Not so fast. We want you to feel the full force of our weight.”

“What is this all about?”

“Justice. We are hawkeyed justice. We float in the air, our ears wide open to the cries of women. Now it has come to our ears that you beat your wife night and day”

Tajirika felt himself choking with anger. How dare these hussies interfere with his business?

“Listen to me. There is no power on earth that can tell me how to run my home.”

“That might very well be so, but man, woman, and child compose a home, and if one pillar is weak, the family is weak, and if the family is weak, the nation is weak. So what happens in a home is the business of the nation and the other way around.”

“I don’t need to be lectured. My wife is not our wife; she is mine.”

“You said, ‘my wife,’ but I did not hear you say, ‘my slave. “

“Listen. Tradition is on my side; it is the man who wears the pants in the house.”

“You talk of tradition. Remember that in the past husbands who ill treated their wives faced trials before a council of women.”

“Even the Bible says that woman is man’s rib,” Tajirika said.

“Why don’t we pluck out one of his ribs so that he can show us how a rib turned out to be a woman?” another one added.

Now a big woman wielding a shiny machete emerged from another room. “Why do you let this man give you so much trouble? Let me show you how it’s done. Take his pants off. Let us cut off his penis.”

The woman looked and sounded so serious that Tajirika felt he was about to piss on himself as he let out a single involuntary groan. Suppose these women were actually crazy? Possessed of female daemons intent on destroying man? It was much safer for him to go along with their so-called court proceeding. He would keep them busy while figuring out how to escape.

“Please get off my back; let us talk. There is no court of law that decides cases solely on the basis of a plaintiff’s story, and especially one who is not even present.”

“Let’s give him a chance to defend himself.”

They allowed him to take his seat again but warned him not to show contempt, or else…

“Listen to me,” he said in a disingenuous respectful tone. “I don’t know who you are. And I don’t even know who has accused me of wife beating. Vinjinia and I are one of the happiest couples in the world. I don’t believe in domestic violence. Ours is a Christian home, and we belong to the middle class. Wife beating is for the poor pagans, you know, people without any understanding of what it means to be modern. I suspect that all this talk of my wife beating and whatnot may have come about when some neighbors saw my wife with a swollen face and a few scratches sustained when she slipped and fell on the cement floor. You are women, and you know how clumsy your kind can be sometimes. I really despise neighbors who have nothing better to do than poke their noses into other people’s affairs.”

“There are only two people who know what happened. You and your wife. You say she is clumsy and she fell on the cement floor. So we are now asking you: do you want us to summon her here?”

Tajirika was taken aback. This was the last thing he expected, the summons of his wife. But he believed that Vinjinia would never say anything untoward about their domestic affairs to perfect strangers. The Vinjinia he knew was the key to his freedom, and he was sure that she would stand by her man.