Ngũgĩ Thiong - Wizard of the Crow

In the midst of their prayers they heard a cat meow. Upon opening their eyes, they saw a man followed by a cat emerge from a door near the altar at the far back of the cathedral. The man and the cat stopped by the altar where the bishop stood. Maritha and Mariko looked at each other: Why did he come out when we asked him to wait in the back room? Why did he not leave everything to usr

“I am the one they call the Wizard of the Crow, and I don’t want anybody hurt on account of me. I, like other homeless, have sought shelter in the refuge of your basement. I thank you all for that. I brought myself here in peace and I will take myself from here in peace.”

All watched as the man, followed by the cat, walked down the aisle and out of the church. Officer Tumbo himself put handcuffs on him.

Sweeper-of-Souls and Soul’s Walking Stick were among the hundreds who had not found a seat inside and so had remained outside, from where they had witnessed the entire drama. The two, now veterans in the war against Satan, knew this to be the same figure that once appeared before them at the city dumpsite and later followed Soul’s Walking Stick from bar to bar. The Devil had once again eluded them. But they would not lose heart, and, with fellow Soldiers of Christ, they broke into their song of defiance, renewing their vows to crush Satan, stepping on the ground in unison so hard that the earth beneath their feet shook, increasing their joy as if they could see their enemy squirming and writhing beneath their united onslaught.

Just then Soul’s Walking Stick saw two green eyes watching from behind the hedge that enclosed the church grounds, and he immediately remembered that the cat that followed closely behind Satan down the aisle had disappeared mysteriously the moment the police had put handcuffs on the body of Satan. It was a revelation. Satan had allowed the police to capture his human shadow while all along he was hidden inside the body of the cat. He added new lyrics to the melody, alerting the others to the eyes that watched them.

When the others understood the import of his gestures, they formed two flanks to encircle Satan, but it was as if the cat read their intentions. It jumped out of its hiding place and ran away, with the ever-determined Soldiers of Christ in pursuit, shouting, Catch him! Catch the coward!

“True! Haki ya Mungu!” A.C. would later say, talking of the Sunday, shaking his head in remembrance of what had happened. “I had just gotten to the grounds of All Saints. Wonderful Tumbo seemed delighted with his success, but I was saying to myself, You fool, you think you have arrested the Wizard of the Crow? His other self is free. “But when they threw him in the back of the Land Bover and drove off, I became angry. A faithful servant of the State, I had lost my job and had no way of knowing where they were taking him. I cannot explain the depth of my resentment at no longer being an insider.

Only weeks before I had stood in the State House, a daily witness to the workings of power; now I stood outside the walls of All Saints, powerless.

“I watched the Christians sing with gusto and I wondered why they were so obsessed with Satan when they had just narrowly escaped a bloody Sunday. Where was the outrage at what had just happened? My perplexity turned to amazement when I saw the dancing youth darting after a cat. The crowd watching the songfest seemed equally astonished and started to disperse.

“It was then that I saw my ex-workmates, Njoya and Kahiga, moving away. Apparently they had been part of the crowd of onlookers. I was happy to see them and I hastened toward them. I told them that as soon as I got a tip that the Wizard of the Crow was in the environs of the cathedral, I had gone to look for them, just as we had agreed to do on the day we parted, only to be told that they had already left for the church. I saw them cast quick glances at each other; then they told me that they had actually talked to the wizard in the homeless shelter but he had revealed nothing. What were they now going to do? I asked them, hoping, I must admit, that they would ask me to join them to discuss the extraordinary happenings of the day. They muttered something about everything being iffy and quickly excused themselves, citing other commitments. Their behavior struck me as a little odd, as if they were withholding information from me, and I thought that maybe… had they betrayed the Wizard of the Crow by revealing his whereabouts to his enemies?

“For a few days I wandered from place to place to see if I could somehow catch a glimpse of the Limping Witch, the wizard’s other incarnation. Why? I don’t really know; it wasn’t only about the secret of growing money. Something else drove me. I thought that if I bumped into the Wizard of the Crow in his other form, he might tell me something that would enable me to hear clearly this thing that I felt forming in my heart…”

Nyawlra was engrossed in the activities of the People’s Assembly, the brainchild of their movement, when news reached her that the Wizard of the Crow had surrendered to the agents of the regime outside All Saints. She felt as if she had been hit on the head with a club. Since their escape she had not found a safe moment for them to meet, but she had thought that as long as he was in the church basement under the care of Maritha and Mariko, that moment would come. But now this? Had he given up hope, or what? She felt worse when later she got news from Maritha that not even Vinjinia knew where they had taken him. Have they disappeared him the way they did Machokali?

She and the other cadres of the movement put their heads together for an appropriate response, but they could not immediately think of anything to thwart the Ruler’s triumph. Helpless, she sought, as usual, solace in work, burying herself even more deeply in the day-to-day details of the People’s Assembly. But to what end, all these activities? The movement had not started the queues; it had simply inserted its ideas into what were, initially, spontaneous demonstrations and given them a united purpose in a march to Parliament, rallying around the call for the return of their collective voice. Would they be able to sustain the assembly without a clear, attainable goal? What if the recapture of the wizard signaled the beginnings of a more heightened and determined assault on the assembly?

They came up with a short-term solution, which was also a response to the recapture of the wizard.

Their activities would climax in a day of self-renewal during which the people would call for the dictator to move or be moved and renew their vows to step up efforts to steer the country along a different path. They settled on a date and named it the Day of National Rebirth or Self-Renewal, announcing it by word of mouth and in thousands of leaflets. They also called for a one-day general strike and festivities throughout the country to mark and celebrate the day. A joyous revolution, they hoped.

Even the police who ushered the Wizard of the Crow to the Ruler’s chamber in the State House knelt down and automatically crossed themselves before retreating to the door. The captive did not follow suit, but nothing in his last encounter with the Ruler could have prepared him for the scene.

The ceiling, painted white, blue, and gray, gave an impression of a sky with sun, moon, and stars. The walls and the canvas covering the Ruler’s tummy and extending outward to the walls and down to the carpet were painted green, yellow, and orange, a realistic rendering of an undulating earth. A staircase spiraled from the carpet and disappeared in a mist that also enveloped the head of the seated figure. The lamps that lit the stairs and the mist generated by a hidden smoking machine had turned the Ruler into a righteous deity looking down from the sky in judgment over a sinful earth.