Ngũgĩ Thiong - Wizard of the Crow

Jesus! And this was the woman I used to think dumb? He, Kaniürü, could not even remember where, how, or when he got the lines from Armstrong.

“Listen to me. Why don’t you go home and we’ll talk about all this tomorrow, after a good night’s rest?”

“But I am home. Or do you want us to go to bed and resume this talk early in the morning, after a night of relaxation?” she asked mischievously as she leaned toward Kaniürü and pinched his nose playfully. “Singing Dirty Diana’ in my ear all night, oh, my dashing soldier!”

Kaniürü and Kanyori were married the following day at the district commissioner’s, almost a repeat of his wedding with Nyawlra.

When Tajirika learned that Kaniürü had married without fanfare, he suspected that there was more to this than met the eye. Modesty was not Kaniürü’s style. Tajirika’s suspicions deepened when later he learned that Jane Kanyori worked in a bank. Weren’t all banks now under his ministry?

He decided to investigate.

The investigation turned out to be quite easy, especially after Tajirika got copies of the bank records and saw that the signatures that approved all the transactions involving Sikiokuu and Kaniürü were all Jane Kanyori’s. Thereafter it was a matter of common sense and simple calculation, and now, armed with his new knowledge and the bank records, Tajirika went straight to the Ruler, confident that once the Ruler realized that Kaniürü was the only person who had made money out of Marching to Heaven he would strip him of his defense portfolio. Now nothing would save Kaniürü from the Ruler’s wrath.

The Ruler took the documents, examined them very carefully, then shook his head from side to side in apparent disbelief that such a fellow could so successfully trick them all. Then, to Tajirika’s surprise, he suddenly started laughing.

“What a crook!”

“Yes, a first-rate crook,” quickly agreed Tajirika.

“And what is such a crook doing as my Minister of Defense?”

“Very dangerous, Your Excellency,” Tajirika agreed.

The Ruler sent for Kaniürü.

A glance at Tajirika, the Ruler, and then at the papers on the table and Kaniürü knew he had been cornered, but instead of panicking Kaniürü saw this as his opportunity to avenge himself against Kany-ori, or at least paint her character with so much dirt that were she ever to reveal his forgery of the Ruler’s signature, the Ruler would not believe her. So when confronted with the accusations of making money out of Marching to Heaven and laying the blame on others, he seemed to relish gushing out all the details. He did not know what had come over him to make him take the word of a woman seriously. “Having been bitten once by the woman who later turned out to be an enemy of the State, I should have learned my lesson, but I was caught again in Kanyori’s web of lies.” But he was not going to blame himself too much, because even Samson, a war hero, was once lulled to sleep by Delilah.

“Your Ever Mighty Excellency, my Delilah is actually my second wife, Jane Kanyori,” said Kaniürü, claiming that the conception of the grand deception and its execution was all Kanyori’s.

“And why did you marry her knowing all this about her?” asked Tajirika, fearing that the Ruler was being taken in.

“Do you want to know the truth?” asked Kaniürü rhetorically. “She threatened to expose the whole thing and blame it on me. Pure whitetnail.”

“You mean, she is a bigger crook than you?” asked the Ruler, smiling a little.

The art of his tongue and the strategy of blaming everything on Kanyori was working, Kaniürü thought, so he invented a few more details.

“Even though she is my wife, I cannot tell lies before Your Mighty Excellency: My wife Kanyori is dangerous. She can lie with numbers like nobody’s business. She can deceive the Devil himself.”

The Ruler put on a serious face as the others anxiously looked on. “Kaniürü, you are in the wrong ministry. The Defense Ministry needs somebody trustworthy, not a crook, at least not a crook that would lead his commander in chief astray. It needs somebody I can trust completely, somebody who can make enemy forces surrender with scare tactics but who is scared enough not to try anything against his Lord and Master, somebody who can lie for me but not to me, somebody who has shown that he would rather dig his own grave in the prairie than cross me, somebody like Tajirika, and in the era of the Baby D, I need such a man at the head of my armed forces. Tajirika, you are my new Defense Minister.”

Today I will open a bottle of champagne, Tajirika said to himself, and even Vinjinia, who does not drink, will have to have a glass.

“And now I come back to you,” he said, looking at Kaniürü and barely holding back his laughter at the thought of a male being outdone in crookedness by a female. “I want fifty percent of all the money you stole from Marching to Heaven, and the interest, to go to the Ruler’s Smog Disaster Fund. But I will give you another chance. Your kind of cunning is best for youth and money matters. You are my new Minister of Finance and Youth. As for your wife, Jane Kanyori, I want her transferred immediately from the National Bank of Commerce and Industry and placed in a strategic position in the Central Bank. I want her as the new comptroller of the Central Bank. But let me warn you. I am giving you and Mrs. Kaniürü a long rope with which to hang yourselves. No more lies! Otherwise let me have crooks about me,” said the Ruler, as if expressing satisfaction at his reshuffle and the appointment of a new female technocrat to a position of monetary authority. “Real crooks are guided by realism.”

The lines were straight out of the Ruler’s Political Theory, wherein Machokali had written that crooks are often more realistic in their assessment of a situation than moral idealists.

The two ministers looked at each other as if neither knew exactly who had gained more than the other from this first cabinet reshuffle in the era of Baby D. But they knew that the struggle between them, like the one between Machokali and Sikiokuu in the previous era, had only just begun.

The reshuffle was overshadowed by the news that Julius Caesar Big Ben Mambo, Minister of Information and Honorary Officer of the Armed Forces, had been arrayed before a court-martial to answer charges of plotting against the State.

Bumors claimed that the minister had been asked to plant some elderly men and women in key positions in the public gallery for the Buler’s address to Parliament so that when the Buler asked the public to offer their opinions on the speech the groomed few would stand up to bless Baby D, but the first on his feet was actually the old man who talked about cheap presidential arseholes. This angered Dr. Yunique Immaculate McKenzie so much that she spontaneously whispered to the Buler regrets over an affair she once had with Mambo when she worked in the Ministry of Information soon after her return to political grace from exile. This stung the Buler, and Mambo’s unusual induction into the military as an honorary officer was the Buler’s ploy for vengeance.

But what was cited in the trial was the history of Mambo’s relationship with the late Machokali: Machokali once rescued Mambo from a permanent physical disability by sending him to Germany for surgical correction of his protruding tongue. Big Ben Mambo always sided with Machokali. So what a coincidence that the old man whom the late Machokali once prearranged to ridicule the Buler during the original unfurling of plans for Marching to Heaven had somehow reappeared in the public gallery during the Buler’s speech rejecting the madness of Marching to Heavenr