Ngũgĩ Thiong - Wizard of the Crow

“What? Some Aburo-Asians?”

“Yes, for it does not mean that all the Asians in Aburfria support the current program of ogres. Like black Aburlrians, some work with the forces of repression, while others toil on the side of the people. This was also true in our anticolonial struggles, but the regime tries to suppress this knowledge. Anything pointing to people being able to unite across race and ethnic lines is suppressed so that people may not realize the sources of their strength and power.”

They took him to another room. He felt tears press against his eyelids. All his carvings of African deities were here.

“We brought them here long before you came back from America. For us they stand for a dream. We were hoping that you can complete them and even add the gods of all the other black and related peoples.”

A global conversation of the deities, he said to himself, remembering his thoughts as a bird in the sky.

They walked the streets of Eldares one afternoon as crowds pushed past them in all directions.

“Every day, the same story,” commented Nyawlra. “People continue to pour into the capital for jobs they know are hard to come by.”

“It reminds me of those days when I walked these streets expecting that my academic degrees would land me a job,” said Kamltl. “Then conditions looked really bad, and I could not see how much worse they could become. But they are so now, and I find myself with the same thought: can conditions become worse than this?”

“What is to prevent them from worsening? When the farmer and the manufacturer grow and make things within, the neoimperial class imports en masse the cheapest from abroad and undermines the efforts within. We live in a corporate globe under imperial corporoni-alism, as proudly claimed by the new ogres.”

The streets they passed told the same old story. The potholes had multiplied; there was garbage everywhere for want of collection.

“The bright side of people in the streets is that we are hiding among them,” Kamltl observed.

“Why don’t we go for coffee somewhere and enjoy this bright side while seated?” Nyawlra suggested. She was trying to find a place where she could address a tension that seemed to have grown between her and Kamltl. “Let’s try the Mars Cafe?”

“Gautama, the owner, might he not recognize us?”

“No, not Gautama, his mind is always on Mars or some other planet,” Nyawlra said trying a light touch. “Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Pluto? Which of those do you think he would like to make a home?”

“Actually it is not only Gautama,” said Kamltl, not picking up the lighthearted tone. “There is also Kaniürü.”

“Don’t you remember the statement from his wife, Jane Kanyori, that he has disappeared? SID?”

“And the new Emperor? He still has his business. Modern construction. Your old workplace?”

It became a walk down memory lane, back to the bad and the good that had happened to them in Santamaria. Nyawlra winced as she recalled the day she narrowly escaped arrest with the inadvertent help from A.G., thanks to his belief that she was the other manifestation of the Wizard of the Crow. They sat down almost at the same roadside spot where they sat on the day they first met.

“Whatever drew me to you on that day was blessed.”

“And who would have thought that the place where you took the test would later become the starting point of the queuing mania? Or Tajirika’s imperial journey?”

“Well, let’s say that even then he was an emperor of wood and construction. I wonder if they restored the original board with NO VACANCY…” Kamltl started.

“For Jobs Come Tomorrow,” they said in unison, and they laughed together.

Their laughter and this reunion with their beginnings considerably reduced the tensions that lingered between them.

“Okay let’s go and get our coffee before it gets cold,” Kamltl said.

“Did you make an order through an invisible phone?”

They rejoined the human traffic, but after a few blocks they realized that they had gone past the place and so they turned and went back the way they came. Again they missed the place a second time and they went back, looking at each and every building carefully.

“No, it is not that we are going past it,” said Nyawlra. “Look.”

The building that used to house the Mars Cafe had been demolished. The site was fenced off with a wall of corrugated iron sheets. By the side was a big billboard: UNDER CONSTRUCTION: GLOBE INSURANCE CORPORATION: THE TALLEST BUILDING IN AFRICA; A REAL MARCHING TO HEAVEN.

“What happened to Gautama, I wonder,” Kamltl said. “Did he go to one of the planets you just recited?”

“Most likely he moved his business elsewhere in the city” said Nyawlra. “Let’s leave Gautama and his Mars Cafe alone and look for another place.”

“What about Chou’s Chinese Gourmet?” Kamltl suggested.

“It is a restaurant, not a coffeehouse,” Nyawlra said.

At the Santamaria market they bought the day’s issue of the Eldares Times and went inside another coffeehouse and found a corner to themselves. They took separate sections of the newspaper and bent down to read as they waited for their order.

Nyawlra’s eyes caught another reference to joint military exercises, and she commented, “I don’t know why they would want to mount these Euro-American-Aburlrian exercises when the cold war ended long ago.”

“And what are you going to do about your caves?” asked Kamltl.

“It does not mean that these exercises will involve looking for our hideouts in the mountains. But even if they were, remember that in Aburlria there are many hills and mountains, and where would they begin and end their search unless they decided to put permanent military camps in all the hills and mountains?”

“I don’t mean they would mount such exercises merely to look for possible hideouts for possible rebels, but they could stumble upon them,” argued Kamltl.

“Even if they did, remember, the people provide the best hideouts. To their joint military exercises we respond with joint political exercises with our people.”

“All the same, your people should be careful,” said Kamltl.

“Why do you talk as if you are outside it all?”

Kamltl did not answer immediately.

“What is the matter, Kamltl?” she asked. “These last few days, you have not been the Kamltl I know.”

“I’ve been thinking about why the love of my life hid so much from me.”

“But you were not then a member of the movement; how could I have entrusted you with its secrets? Would you respect me for that? What if everybody were to do likewise, be indiscreet with their spouses or lovers?”

“Well, I thought you were all too close to one another…”

“Yes, we are close-so?” Nyawlra asked, a little defiantly.

“I felt as if you had put me aside,” Kamltl said.

Nyawlra laughed. “Are you jealous?”

“A little, yes.”

“Only a little? I’m disappointed.”

“More than a little!”

“Take your mind away from those thoughts. It is true that we are very close. We have gone through a lot together. That is a bond of politics and it is as it should be. Yours and mine is a bond of love. And it is also as it should be. But today our relationship is much stronger because to the bond of love we have now added that of politics. Mind you, I would be lying if I said I was not happy to see you wriggle with a little jealousy. Thank you. But jealousy beyond acceptable limits is bad for love, for it means that whenever you see me talking or laughing with a guy or coming home late you will be stricken with grief and pointless suspicions. A little jealousy warms love. But too much of it harms love.”