Ngũgĩ Thiong - Wizard of the Crow

Kaniürü, too, waited on the Wizard of the Crow. As he looked back to the night the sorcerer was brought to the State House, he found many things unclear. What a coincidence that Machokali should vanish on the very day the Wizard of the Crow was found? What, if any, was the connection between the two events? He recalled being excused to leave after Sikiokuu, which he did reluctantly, for it meant Machokali and Tajirika remaining behind to bask in the glory of greatness. What happened after his departure? he now wondered. Did Tajirika have a hand in Machokali’s disappearance? Had the new governor been tasked with dispatching the minister? At the thought Kaniürü felt a mixture of fear and envy. If Tajirika had been so entrusted, he was very close indeed to the Ruler, which meant that he would have even greater clout in the future. Kaniürü feared retaliation for the misery he had caused Tajirika and his family; he was angry with himself for not having foreseen that the chairperson of Marching to Heaven might well turn out to be a trusted keeper of the gate.

He tried to figure out how to make amends with Tajirika, but in vain. What consoled him in the weeks that followed was to know that the findings of his commission on the queuing mania were being used by the government to explain away the minister’s disappearance. But when he thought that the false confessions attributed to Tajirika may have contributed to the man’s rise to the top of those controlling the circulation of money in Aburlria, Kaniürü ‘s heart sank. He could outsmart Tajirika and seize more power for himself only by crushing all the queues old and new by apprehending Nyawlra before his other rival Sikiokuu did. The Ruler had already congratulated Kaniürü for teaching those racist, meddlesome foreign journalists a lesson or two, but this had been done privately. Were he to bring in Nyawlra, the Ruler would no doubt congratulate him in public to greater acclaim.

But only the Wizard of the Crow could lead him to Nyawlra, and that is why he was eager to hear what the wizard had proclaimed. For him, information had literally been power. That was why he was restless for not having the slightest clue as to what had transpired in the State House. He tried to make contact with his erstwhile assistant, Kahiga, but pointlessly. Kahiga was always at the State House, and there was no way of getting in without an invitation or a permit.

And then one day, while bathing, he jumped out of the bath and ran around the room, naked, shouting Eureka! at the top of his voice. He would crush a certain number of queues every week and then request to visit the State House to report his weekly progress. He would have a weekly audience with the Ruler and while there would try to see Kahiga and buy from him the information he so desperately needed. He was certain that he would find out what the Wizard of the Crow had disclosed about Nyawlra. Eureka! he shouted again.

The Ruler was growing anxious, too. Regarding the captive in the State House, he felt torn by numerous and often conflicting desires. He wanted him dead and alive at the same time. He wanted him alive so the man could disclose the secret of how money grows and dead so that he could never reveal it to another soul or reveal that he had revealed it to the Ruler. He wanted him alive so that he could help in the capture of Nyawlra and the leaders of the Movement for the Voice of the People, and dead for having heretofore kept privileged information to himself. He wanted him alive to cure him, the Ruler, of his bodily expansion, but dead for claiming that he was pregnant, attracting, to the Ruler’s chagrin, the pest known as world media. But what chagrined him even more was that on weighing the two desires he found the one for the body alive outweighing the one for the body as corpse. The captive carried much knowledge that, harnessed properly, could benefit the Ruler enormously, but this thought made him angry, because with it he was admitting that the Wizard of the Crow had powers that he, the Almighty, lacked, and this would not do in a country where he had come to believe the claims of his praise singers that he was the number one in everything. How to unlock the words of knowledge trapped in the larynx of the Wizard of the Crow? The

Ruler agonized over this, and that is why he kept Tajirika by his side at all times. It was not a matter he wanted to discuss with any of his ministers, for he did not want any of them to acquire the knowledge of how money grows on trees. Tajirika was different.

The Ruler had not always been so enamored of Tajirika. He had appointed him chairman of Marching to Heaven initially as an interim measure, pending the release of funds by the Global Rank. But he had started to think well of Tajirika the moment he realized that the man was a crook, better at the art than any of his counselors. It was Tajirika’s disclosure that as chairman of Marching to Heaven he used to demand payment in dollars from potential contractors that first impressed the Ruler and made him decide that he could certainly do business with this man. A person who could make others beg to pay in fresh dollars for services yet to come was way ahead of the game. Kaniürü and Sikiokuu suffered by comparison. These two had asked for kickbacks in Aburirian Runs: what a different approach to wealth and well-being! This showed that Tajirika could be entrusted with any task that required bending or breaking the law under the guise of legality.

Even more, the Ruler was impressed with Tajirika’s discreetness. The contrast with Kaniürü was telling. Kaniürü had rushed to share his plan of crooked gains with Sikiokuu, but Tajirika never so much as whispered a word to Machokali. Not even under torture did he let the secret out. The Ruler needed such a person of unalloyed loyalty by his side.

Events took on a logic of their own, making the unlocking of the wizard’s words of knowledge even more urgent. The queues, which had seemed random and pointless, took on greater organization. The students and the youth, mostly unemployed, were beginning to gather outside Parliament buildings, courts of law, and radio and television stations, media outlets serving as the Ruler’s mouthpiece. Skirmishes with the police occured with greater frequency, and not only in Eldares! Reports suggested that queues were spreading in all urban centers of the country with an intensity not seen before.

Coincidentally questions about the missing minister from all corners of the globe gathered momentum, especially those from London and Washington. Even after the government issued its statement implicating Machokali in a coup plot, the barrage of questions was unrelenting. These trends could not be allowed to continue: his alleged pregnancy made him a laughing stock, insurgents were wreaking havoc all over the place, and pressure from abroad was building. His absence from public view only intensified the pressure and the questions.

He tried to silence the tongues of those wondering why he was not seen in public by recalling the deputy ambassador in Washington to become, effective immediately, the official national hostess at receptions and other functions that required his ceremonial presence. She accepted and signed her e-mail of acceptance as Dr. Yunique Immaculate McKenzie, PhD, NOH, thus changing her name yet again to fit the new rung in her rise to power.

The appointment and acceptance, announced on the radio and carried in all the other media, only fueled the rumors of a debilitating pregnancy as the cause of his absence from the public. The Wizard of the Crow was the only person who, in addition to providing knowledge of money growing on trees, a knowledge that would lessen the Ruler’s dependence on the Global Bank, could squelch all these rumors of pregnancy immediately. The Ruler would force the wizard to confess in public that it was his letter to Machokali, which had generated tales of pregnancy as part of the minister’s coup plot. The only hitch to these solutions was again the tiny word, if, that blocked the wizard’s speech. A wizard to cure the wizard had to be found.