Ngũgĩ Thiong - Wizard of the Crow

It took a few seconds for the meaning of Big Ben Mambo’s words to sink in. Some in the crowd stood up defiantly. How dare you accuse us of being possessed by daemons? Did you say that we need to be cleansed! others shouted menacingly. Why don’t we chase the

682 daemons of arrogance from the minister with a few blows to his buttocks? others suggested, surging forward to execute their threats.

The situation would have turned ugly, but the master of ceremony intervened and asked people to stop any foolishness because Big Ben Mambo might well be provoking them to give the armed forces an excuse to break up the assembly. Let us listen to the Wizard of the Crow, because if he is truly a sorcerer, then there must be a method to his witchcraft.

Even the Buler, who had caught bits of Big Ben Mambo’s comments, was angered by the minister’s presumptuousness. His arrogance and exaggerations were about to thwart the Buler s intended outcome. So despite his stomachaches the Buler called the minister and told him to stop straying from the script. He was to rescind his comments about the Wizard of the Crow having to earn his freedom. Had the minister forgotten that the sorcerer was supposed to have come there of his own volition? What on earth had made him threaten the wizard with a firing squad? He had better recant his threat, immediately.

Big Ben Mambo had no problem in reversing himself.

“I want to remind you all that the Wizard of the Crow is here of his own volition. He volunteered to use his facility with mirrors to locate Nyawlra’s whereabouts,” he said, and then added, “I want to apologize to him. I was only being mischievous when I talked about a firing squad. It was a figure of speech. Pambo la lugha kama alivyosema Shabaan Roberts. Wizard of the Crow: In the name of the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the Free Bepublic of Aburlria, I now call upon you to do your thing with mirrors and give us Nyawlra, public enemy number one of the Aburlrian State.”

While this was going on, Kaniürü pondered his next move. He had felt a little betrayed when he saw the Wizard of the Crow enter the field under police escort. Had the Buler not entrusted him and his youth with the task of escorting the Wizard of the Crow to the platform? But when thinking about it he realized that this did not in any way change the real responsibility he felt the Ruler had bestowed on him. The crocodiles of the Red River awaited the Wizard of the Crow.

As he reveled, he heard Minister Big Ben Mambo call on the Wizard of the Crow to disclose Nyawlra’s hiding place. Kaniürü felt a knot in his belly whenever her name cropped up in conversation or in print. He could no longer deny it. He was jealous of the sorcerer. He had once seen this man talking to Nyawlra at the roadside near Tajirika’s offices. He also recalled Tajirika saying, in his confessions, that when words had gotten stuck in his throat, Nyawlra had led him to the wizard. There had to be an intimacy between her and this man. He crept closer to the platform. He now wanted to catch each and every word that came from the mouth of the Wizard of the Crow. If he revealed her whereabouts, Kaniürü would leave the execution of the Wizard of the Crow to his gang and get to Nyawlra himself. His vision of a reunion with Nyawlra on his own terms never varied. He still entertained the madness: he would capture her and appeal to the Ruler to pardon her sins. Grateful and chastened, she would now sing praises to her husband. Glory, glory to Kaniürü, he sang quietly to himself. He was glowing with optimism when one of his most fearless youths crouched behind him trembling.

“That man is not a man,” he told Kaniürü in a whisper. “Listen to me. I used to be a garbage collector. We were three. I was the driver. That man was once dead. We buried him. He rose from the dead before our very eyes and he chased us across the open field. We were saved by a group of Soldiers of Christ. One of us joined the sect right away. The other one went to hide in bars. I joined the youth. That man is Satan in human form.”

Even though Kaniürü was unnerved, the words echoed his own when he had seen the man vanish without a trace from the public toilets not far from Paradise. He realized that if this youth were to ramble on like this to the others, he would instill terror in them and all of his own well-laid plans would come to naught.

“Have you told the others about this?” Kaniürü asked.

“No,” the man said.

“Don’t go back! Stay here with me,” Kaniürü told him. “And stop shaking,” he added, pointing to the pistol he carried in his pocket.

When Sikiokuu, who kept watchful eyes on the sky for any signs of a helicopter, heard Big Ben Mambo ask the police to bring some packages to the platform, he leaned against his car and focused his binoculars on the packages. He recognized the paper wrappings and knew at once that these were the mirrors he had ordered from abroad. His heart leapt in joy: so the Buler had really hearkened to his plea? All the energy he had put into locating the best glass manufacturers would not go to waste. He would have liked to have been the one officiating instead of Big Ben Mambo, but that was nothing compared to the benefits he would reap from the role his mirrors were about to play in Nyawlra’s capture. History had its ironies, he thought, seeing that the recovery of his life was now dependent on a successful mirror performance by a sorcerer he was planning to kidnap! Sikiokuu was so anxious about the outcome that he forgot that he was supposed to lie low, and he now climbed onto the roof of the car to get a better view of the performance.

As the police unwrapped each parcel and showed its contents to the crowd, with Mambo announcing the country each mirror came from before the police put it at the feet of the Wizard of the Crow, the ex-minister’s joy knew no bounds.

And then he suddenly realized that as they were shown to the crowd the mirrors were capturing the shadows of Aburlrians. Minister Mambo had totally missed the point behind the importation of mirrors from abroad and even why they were so carefully wrapped. He went back to the driver’s seat and called the State House, but nobody picked up the phone.

Besting his head on folded arms on the steering wheel, Sikiokuu, the Ex-Minister of State in the Buler’s Office, began to weep. His heaving made the car shake, and he came back to himself only when the car started honking and he realized that he had pressed the horn in error.

The Ruler continued groaning and, remarkably, still sneaked glances at the television screen. Many things crucial to the drama outside, like the signal for the helicopters to start dropping money from on high, were dependent on him. But the contractions were clearly affecting his concentration.

Then suddenly came a strange sound. Furyk quickly climbed up the staircase to Heaven, from where he beckoned Clarkwell and Kaboca. The cloth on which Kaniürü had painted the colors of the earth was splitting, and the belts that secured the body to the chair were breaking.

A little scared, the three doctors descended the staircase and went into conference.

“The body is rising again,” said Furyk, in obvious dismay. “What is the meaning of this?”

“It beats all scientific logic,” said Clarkwell.

“The question is, what can we do to contain the expansion before it fills up the whole room?” Furyk asked, looking at Kaboca.

“What did the sorcerer do to contain the expansion in New York?” asked Clarkwell.

“The Wizard of the Crow? I don’t know what he did or how he did it,” admitted Kaboca.

“He should be called from the assembly,” Furyk suggested.