Ngũgĩ Thiong - Wizard of the Crow

They hugged and clung to each other even longer, as if they wanted to seal that sense of eternal security with an eternal embrace.

“It’s back to work,” Nyawlra said, finally pushing him away.

“Let me appeal,” said Kamltl, still clinging to her hands.

“Against going back to work?”

“The recent ban on checking each other’s scars in daytime.”

“Not in daytime, in the evening,” she said.

They always looked forward to their mutual explorations, but now the lingering feeling that she could be captured intensified the hunger.

But in the evening, when all the clients and workers had gone and she thought the exploration would soon begin, Nyawlra spied Kahiga and Njoya in the yard.

“Let me talk to them,” Kamltl said, trying to calm her with a confidence he did not feel. “Stay hidden here, ready to flee. You know our agreed signal and the path to take.”

“Listen,” Njoya told the Wizard of the Crow, “the Minister of State wants to see you tonight.”

“What does he want?”

“We are only messengers.”

“Go back to the one who sent you and tell him that he is very welcome to visit me in my shrine,” the wizard told them. “If I am to administer to his needs…”

“He has no need of healing,” explained Kahiga.

“So why does he seek me out?”

“He is simply issuing an invitation,” said Njoya.

“You will be his personal guest. A guest of honor,” Kahiga added.

“Tell him that though I am honored by his invitation, he needs to propose a date and time that are good for him and me.”

Njoya and Kahiga looked at each other, wondering how they were going to make the sorcerer nicely understand that he had no choice in the matter.

Njoya cleared his throat and said, “Mr. Wizard of the Crow, we know that you may not be too familiar with what we in government call protocol, and, quite frankly, I don’t blame you. Oh, I am sorry for speaking to you in English. What I meant is that you may not know all the rules of good manners in dealing with the government.”

“No need to explain,” the Wizard of the Crow replied in perfect English. “Even witch doctors are not strangers to languages. Manze enda mtell buda na masa wenu ati sitago. Mürogi wa Kagogo hachore-wangwi na mtu. Haneed vinaa. Hello-na-zuribye,” the Wizard of the Crow said in Sheng.

Hardly had Njoya and Kahiga recovered from their amazement at this witch doctor who spoke not only good English but also the latest lingo in town when they saw the Wizard of the Crow start walking back to the house as though his business with them was finished.

“Hey, wait a minute,” they shouted in unison, and the Wizard of the Crow stopped.

“I am very sorry,” Njoya told him, “but we cannot leave without you.”

“Is it your intention to arouse my wrath?”

“Oh, no, no, nothing of the sort,” Kahiga quickly explained, made uneasy by the menace in the wizard’s voice. “But you know how it is in our country. A citizen cannot refuse an invitation from the government without good reason.”

Why this odd mixture of fear and authority on the part of the police officers? wondered Kamltl. Had they really come to arrest him, or was the whole thing a cruel sport, their intention all along being to pounce on Nyawlra? Kamltl pondered his options. Play the angry Wizard of the Crow, threatening fire and brimstone? But suppose they called his bluff? Befuse to go? They could still drag him away by force. Besides, resistance might make them suspicious and lead them to probe more deeply into the affairs of the shrine. Suppose they raided the shrine and captured Nyawlra? He would never forgive himself. Far better for them to take him away from her hiding place.

“Is that so?” the Wizard of the Crow asked innocently. “Wait just where you are; I shall be ready in no time,” he told them, aware that if they had come to arrest him they would not let him out of their sight.

And sure enough one of them did make a move to follow him, but the Wizard of the Crow turned around and glared at him.

“Are you sure you want to follow me? Cross my magic lines?”

“Oh, no! No!” both police officers said in unison. “Take all the time you want, Mr. Wizard of the Crow.”

He went straight to Nyawlra and apprised her of the situation, instructing her to stay under cover until he and his newfound acquaintances left the compound.

“It is better this way,” the Wizard of the Crow told her. “It takes their noses away from the shrine and you.”

As the Wizard of the Crow and the police officers were about to leave, Nyawlra suddenly emerged from the shadows and ran toward them, an open gourd in her left hand and a fly whisk in her right. The threesome stopped in their tracks. The play of light and shadow on Nyawlra made her look otherworldly. She stood in front of them without saying a word, and for a moment Kamltl thought she had lost her mind. Where was the Nyawlra he left cowering speechlessly? Why was she doing this? Nyawlra then dipped the fly whisk into the gourd and shook it over their heads while chanting incantations.

“If he comes back with even one strand of his hair missing, I will hold you two accountable, accountable, accountable.”

She circled them and repeated her ritual time and again and with different variations on the same warning.

At the end of the seventh round, she stopped abruptly and stood a few inches from their stupefied faces. Then, slowly and firmly, as if she did not want them to miss any of her words, she said:

“And should he become a missing person, you who took him away shall be swallowed by this earth thus!”

And, saying so, she raised high the bowl and poured the remaining water onto the earth.

“Or break into pieces like this calabash!” And she crushed the calabash to the ground.

She then ran back into the house.

Njoya and Kahiga stood motionless; when they tried to lift their feet, it was as if their legs were chained to the ground.

“Don’t worry,” the Wizard of the Crow told them. “She is my guardian spirit. My eye of life. As gentle as a lamb. But oh, once aroused to anger, she is possessed by a dangerous daemon. Even to me her word is law.”

The spell was broken. Mobility returned to the police officers’ feet and they took the Wizard of the Crow to Sikiokuu, Minister of State in the Ruler’s Office.

As they drove him away, Kamltl thought about Nyawlra and the scene outside the shrine. Since meeting Nyawlra his life had changed in ways he could never have foreseen. He often felt as if he were walking in a field of dreams. The most fleeting images of her would make his blood rush, suffusing him with a sense of goodness, peace, hope, and great though yet unknown expectations.

What most amazed him about Nyawlra was her humor and laughter in spite of her travails. But no matter how much he thought he knew her, every day brought new surprises. He would never have imagined that, instead of staying inside the house as agreed until he and the police had left, Nyawlra would appear with the force of a hurricane and stage so spellbinding a performance. The police had now spirited him away from her hiding place.

But soon he was awash in doubts, his knees suddenly weak. What if the police officers were already on to Nyawlra? If not, what if they suspected him of really knowing her whereabouts? What if they tortured him?

He decided not to worry about that which he could do nothing about. Even if they tortured and interrogated him about Nyawlra and the Movement for the Voice of the People, there was very little he could tell them. Of Nyawlra’s hiding place, he would die rather than reveal it. And what he knew about the movement was only what Nyawlra had told him, which was not much.