Ngũgĩ Thiong - Wizard of the Crow

“Yes, call her,” he said with braggadocio.

“Give us directions and describe her to us,” one of the women said, to indicate that they were not in league with Vinjinia. “We know only about you.”

After an hour or so Vinjinia was in the room. The women seated her opposite her husband. One of the women chaired the council. The others were the jury. Vinjinia had covered her head with a shawl. Her eyes showed fear, and she did not look at her husband directly. Tajirika gave her a stern look, which he tried to hide with a false smile.

“Tell them the truth that I did not touch you,” Tajirika hastened to say before the chairperson could utter a word. “Is it not a fact that your swollen face resulted from your falling on the cement floor?”

The judge told her to speak her truth as she knew it. The silence in the room was riveting. Vinjinia glanced at Tajirika, at the women, and then looked away.

“I fell on the cement floor,” she said, in a barely audible voice.

The women looked stunned. Tajirika made no attempt to hide his triumph.

“You have heard for yourselves,” he crowed, openly arrogant.

“There is nothing more to say about this sad affair,” the judge said.

Tajirika wished he had the means to wreak instant vengeance on these women. At the door he put his arms around his wife and whispered: “You did well. Anything else and the last beating would have paled in comparison with the one I would have given you tonight.”

Vinjinia trembled. He simply had gone too far. If he could threaten her just outside the hearing of these women, what was he not capable of at home? If she was going to die, at least let there be witnesses. She quickly disengaged herself from him and turned around.

“I am sorry” she said, directing her remarks to the judge. “I have lied to you, and lied to myself while lying for my husband. This man rains fists on me whenever it suits his temper. If he has a disagreement with others in his workplace or in a bar, he takes it out on me. The heart of my husband is as hard as a concrete floor.”

Tajirika lost it before the woman who had just betrayed his manhood. He jumped on her and was going to beat her yet again, but the women were too quick for him. They restrained him before he landed a blow. But even as they dragged him away from his wife, Tajirika continued wagging his finger at her.

“You wait till I get you home! Just you wait!” he shouted at her, throwing caution to the wind.

“But who told you that you are going home?” the machete-wielding woman said as she rushed toward him, waving the machete in the air menacingly. Tajirika jumped back a step, convinced that these women were prepared to kill him if he gave them the slightest cause.

The judge told them to sit down, which they all did, including Tajirika, who was inwardly grateful to the judge for keeping the machete woman at bay.

“You,” the judge said, pointing at Tajirika. Your own actions before our very eyes confirm what we’ve heard. But this court will not condemn you without giving you a chance to defend yourself. Why did you beat your wife?”

“Don’t call her my wife,” Tajirika said, panting with frustration at his inability to teach his wife a lesson. “This woman is a hypocrite. When the police detained me recently, she seized the opportunity to hire dancing prostitutes and gangsters to entertain her.”

Vinjinia, who had not the slightest clue what Tajirika was talking about, shook her head in disbelief. But the mention of dancing women made her recall the women who had forced the government to admit that it was holding Tajirika.

“Who lied to you that I did nothing about your arrest? That I was partying with women dancers? Some people are truly incapable of gratitude. When the police arrested me a while ago, this man did nothing. I even came across a press statement in which he was going to denounce me. But when he was arrested and held in secrecy, there was no police precinct, hospital, or newspaper office I did not set foot in to find out what his so-called friends had done to him. But when he came out of his tomb, instead of asking me how it was at home when he was away, he went about sniffing for gossip, and whatever his drunken friends told him he took as the gospel truth and sound basis for killing blows.”

“The woman has asked you a question,” the judge said, turning to Tajirika. Who made allegations against her? Tell us so that we may fetch him and bring him here to testify.”

Tajirika remembered that Sikiokuu had forbidden him to talk about the photographs or the dancing women because of ongoing security investigations. He did not respond.

“Do you have anything else that you want to tell this council?” the judge asked Vinjinia.

“I just want to say before you all that I will not accept blows on my body anymore.”

“Stop lying, woman. I have never touched you with these hands the way a real man should,” Tajirika shouted, standing up and clenching his fists.

The women pushed him back to his seat.

“Your actions before our very eyes testify against you,” the judge told Tajirika. “We have enough evidence for the jury to issue a just verdict. Vinjinia will be taken back to her place,” the judge said with a tone of finality.

As he saw Vinjinia being escorted out of the room, Tajirika felt like crying out to Vinjinia: Please don’t leave me here with these crazy women! But he did not. How could he, a man, call on his wife, a woman, to save him from other women?

The judge fixed her eyes on Tajirika.

“You are sentenced to receive as many blows as you rained on your wife.”

“But if you ever appear before us again, you will not leave here with your penis dangling between your legs,” said the woman with the machete as she did a little war jig while brandishing her weapon. Even as the women pummeled him, his eyes were focused on the machete. His pain was dull; his stare was blank.

When Tajirika finally found himself outside the gates of his residence, he simply could not believe it. Had they let him go? Was he really safe at Golden Heights? His initial impulse was to enter the house and immediately set upon Vinjinia and break her legs and arms. But the last words he remembered hearing were unambiguous: “Bemember: resume your wife beating and you will surely feel the full force of female daemons.” So he had been right, after all, about who the women really were. As he imagined them suddenly emerging from the surrounding cornfields for retribution, he started trembling, overcome by a mixture of relief, shame, anger, and helplessness.

Instead of opening the door, Tajirika leaned against it and started to sob. Tears raced down his cheeks and fell onto the veranda. They increasingly became bigger and faster, soon turning into torrents that gushed down as from a broken dam, making two tunnels on the earth just outside the veranda. But he was not aware of the tunnels as he eventually opened the door and quickly locked it from the inside.

The drama of the female daemons was not something Tajirika was overly eager to shout from the rooftops. He could imagine the nasty derisive comments of passersby: There goes the man beaten by women. So he confined himself within the walls of his house and ran his business over the phone.

Vinjinia was also keen to avoid questions about her bruised face, and, like him, she stayed indoors.

Thus they found themselves spending their nights and days inside the house, avoiding each other. They even tried to hide their bruised faces from each other, Tajirika by donning a wide-brimmed hat and Vinjinia with a cloth over her head.

Vinjinia had been so sure that Tajirika would exact vengeance that she became more worried when after a few days no violence had surfaced. But, under the cover of silence and calculated indifference, was he planning something more sinister? After a few days of this, Vinjinia started wondering: What did those women do to him? Did they cut his manhood off?