Ngũgĩ Thiong - Wizard of the Crow

Dr. Kaboca looked up, and soon Tajirika found himself bent over the doctor’s prostrate body, fanning him with a handkerchief, trying to revive him.

“It looks as if the doctor himself is in need of a doctor!” came a voice from the ceiling.

“It is the heat,” Dr. Kaboca said after he had regained consciousness. “Now, Mr. Tajirika, please leave the room.”

“No,” said the Ruler. “Tajirika is my special adviser. In all matters. Feel free to treat me in his presence.”

The Ruler was quite candid with the doctor. He explained that when he read the news from the Global Bank, he had become so angry that his body started to expand even more. He had called his special adviser to have somebody to talk to in the hope that this would ease the anger within. While waiting for Tajirika, he had read some more newspapers, only to feel his anger mount until it almost choked him, and that was when he felt himself lifted uncontrollably. He could not tell exactly when it started, but it was definitely when he was already in the air that his tummy began to ache. At first the pain was manageable, but now it had become unbearable.

With the help of some carpenters who rigged a platform of sorts, Dr. Kaboca and Tajirika were able to pull the Ruler down and secure him with straps for a medical exam.

They did such a good job that it now looked as if the Ruler was actually seated on a high chair of authority, his voice reaching those seated below his feet as if it were God’s voice from above. The men were made permanent state carpenters and they would leave the State House only when the Ruler willed it.

Dr. Kaboca climbed onto the platform, examined the Ruler’s tonsils, and took his temperature and blood pressure. Nothing seemed amiss. He felt the Ruler’s stomach and, recalling prevalent rumors in the country that he might be in a certain way, thought it best to prescribe the need for a team of medical doctors. He reminded the Ruler that when they left America it had been decided that Dr. Clarkwell and Professor Furyk would be invited to Aburlria to look further into his condition. Now was the time, he suggested, to confer with them on this new complication of symptoms: further bodily expansion, lightness of the body, and bellyache.

“What? His legs dangling in the air?” Vinjinia asked Tajirika.

The image of a Ruler suspended in the air with only the soles of his shoes visible from the floor made her laugh until her ribs ached.

It was the same day, late at night. Tajirika did not always tell Vinjinia about the goings-on in the State House, but this story he could not keep to himself. Yet he took the precaution of swearing Vinjinia to secrecy.

“Do you think this is the work of the Wizard of the Crow? Or the Limping Witch?” Vinjinia whispered.

“With the wizard you cannot rule out anything.”

“What if the house did not have a ceiling and a roof?” she wondered loudly.

“He would have reached Heaven before Marching to Heaven,” Tajirika responded, but Vinjinia was the one who saw the fun in the quip and laughed again.

When Vinjinia next met with Maritha and Mariko she took Maritha aside, made her also swear not to tell anybody, and whispered the Ruler’s story. But of course Maritha told Mariko, and he did not see any harm in telling Dove, and Dove did not see any harm…

And so on, until the story reached the People’s Assembly, which meant that soon all of Aburlria was talking about it.

“His SIE has hypertrophied beyond our wildest imagination,” Dr. Wilfred Kaboca wrote to Clarkwell and Furyk, urging them to come to Aburlria at once, all costs, of course, to be picked up by the Aburlrian State. Uppermost in Kaboca’s mind was the note the Wizard of the Crow had once written and the rumors of the Ruler’s pregnancy circulating in the country. A sonogram was definitely in order, he added.

In his diary, Furyk records his astonishment at the content of the letter, especially the reference to contractions and sonograms. But he also saw opportunities. Research into this phenomenon might throw scientific light on age-old theological disputes about virgin births. He also saw a commercial side to it and formed Clem &Din Productions Company, which sought and got the Ruler’s guarantee that, subject to some royalties to the Ruler, the company would have the sole global production and distribution rights of all the films and videos on all aspects of SIE.

Din Furyk and Clement Clarkwell became the only beacons of hope for Kaboca and the Ruler. If only they could stop his body from conspiring against him!

Kaniürü had just gotten news about the Wizard of the Crow and was preparing to break it to the Ruler in person when he learned that His Mightiness had suffered another bout of bodily expansion and was now floating in the air. The Wizard of the Crow must be behind this, he thought, and, fearing that he might be the next target, decided to keep the news to himself until he learned more about the situation. And, to be on the safe side, he retreated to Kanyori’s place. The ever-faithful Kanyori did not raise any questions, not even when Kaniürü asked her to chain one of his legs to the bedpost and lock the door from the outside. She left a plate of food and a jar of water next to him. Kaniürü stayed inside the apartment the whole day. Whenever the wind shook the windows, Kaniürü would hold the bedposts with both hands. But in asking to be chained he had forgotten to seek support for other needs, and so when in the evening Kanyori unchained him he dashed past her without a word and stayed in the toilet for a long time. He feared that the noises he had emitted had reached Kanyori in the living room, and, embarrassed, Kaniürü returned to his own place to work out better preventive measures against any attempts by the Wizard of the Crow to take him by surprise.

For a few days, he drove everywhere, even the shortest of distances, to make it impossible for the Wizard of the Crow to use the wind to blow him into the sky. For short walks, he got himself boots with soles reinforced with iron, but dragging the boots became cumbersome and after a while he settled for the much simpler idea of weights in his jacket. After a couple of days without anything stranger than constipation happening to him, he felt his courage come back. The news he had was too important to keep to himself, and he would not let slip an opportunity to endear himself to the Ruler.

As his Mercedes-Benz sped through the streets toward the State House, Kaniürü reviewed things, and it dawned on him clearly that he was the only person who had crossed swords with the Wizard of the Crow and come out of the encounter with only minor bruises, a thought that further deepened his confidence.

Though Kaniürü believed the claims that the Ruler was floating in the air, he retreated two or three steps in fright when he heard the Ruler’s voice come from above. But on raising his head and seeing the Ruler on a platform in a chair with a back that seemed to touch the ceiling, he thought of the final judgment, fell to his knees, and clasped both hands to his chest as if humbling himself before an angel of the Lord. He started moaning, Oh God, oh my God. Then he burst into a hymn of prayer: Nearer My God to thee… Nearer to thee…

“Kaniürü, did I not command you and the others to stop comparing me to God?” the Ruler rebuked him from above.

“What is the difference?” Kaniürü asked, with apparent sincerity that amused the Ruler.

“What do you want from the Lord?” the Ruler said, smiling, and his slightly bantering tone was so calming to Kaniürü that his heart was no longer aflutter.

“I know where the Wizard of the Crow is hiding out,” he exclaimed, unburdening his soul before the Lord.