BEYOND

There she was, about to hang as a strange Muthongo (white man) tried to bewitch her with his strange black cloak and funny half-bald haircut. He raised a cross with a small idol on it, pulled out a piece of cloth and bewitched her with some water from a funny cup. Holy water, they had told her.

 

She just found their customs strange… why would you bewitch someone before you kill them?

 

Even stranger was the fact that this white man was speaking two different tongues…

 

‘In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, ’ the white man said.

 

According to another muthongo, very few white men understood the strange tongue, which she remembers hearing during a mass in kasoneki (Catholic).

 

Then the other muthongo whose head was covered in a gakonia (Sack) walked up to the gallows to pull a lever that they had told her would open a trapdoor and hang her…

 

She flashed back to her wedding, she was so shy, so innocent all those years ago. She remembers the muthongo (white man) trying to understand what was going on…

 

It felt like yesterday… There he was, her husband…

 

Marriage can be a heavy burden for newlyweds more so for a young woman. Only yesterday she had to wait in a room for the marriage to be consummated. She had heard that white people have birth control pills, they plan for children. What a stupid idea, she thought. Children are a gift from Mwene Nyaga (God). How do you turn down a gift or choose when to receive it?

 

She looked around; she was young again, waiting in a dark hut for him to come in. He loved her in a way that their time did not allow. She remembered her first pregnancy, stillborn… a tear down her cheek.

 

And her second pregnancy, another stillborn... she hid her face.

And then they came, her in-laws. She was not invited for the talks, but she knew what they wanted. Another wife, one who could give them children, living children…

 

She heard him shout; he stood his ground for her, refused to take another wife...

 

“reke tugerie ringie’ (let us try again), she heard him say. They left them alone.

 

Then she felt it again. Another child, this one will be born, she told her body. But it happened again…

 

She woke from her memories. The white man, a judge, was muttering something in their strange tongue. She closed her eyes, drifting back to her memories…

 

She saw her, her co-wife, the one they had chosen, the other woman.

She knew he had to; she even talked him into it. She would always be his first love, she told herself…

 

Then her co-wife gave birth to a child, a boy.  How could the gods be so cruel? It should have been a girl; then she would have stood a chance to reclaim her place as the first wife… She knew she needed a child too; a boy or his love would fade.

 

She got pregnant again, she looked to the mountain, to Mwene Nyaga. This white man’s God had failed her, she had been told of Thera, mother to Aisaka (Sarah, mother to Isaac) whose husband had even married a slave... Just another white man story, she thought… She sought the God of her fathers and He gave her a boy too.

 

She was happy; her husband was happy…

 

Then it began. The war, haro ya wiathi (fight for self-rule), they had called it…

 

He was called into the forest to stand with the Mau Mau, he had taken the oath (muma wa uigano) , which was just a pledge of loyalty to the struggle, until he took the last two oaths, Muma wa Githaka (forest oath) and Muma wa Batuni (Platoon Oath) …

 

She could not understand why him?

Why now? They are happy…

Then they came…

They were armed, stupid Ngati (home guards).

She hid her son below her bed, behind the ripening bananas, she was not sure what they wanted. He will be safe, she told herself…

They searched her house for her husband. They could not find him.

They beat her, over and over again… She told them nothing.  

Her co-wife begged them to stop… but they would have none of it…

Her stepchildren were crying…

 

Then one of them grabbed a match; she begged them to let her go in and get her baby, under the bananas where she had hidden him…

She tried to pull free they were too strong…

She was crying, yelling, screaming, kicking with all her might…

But her voice was drowned in their noise; they spoke Swahili and that strange white man’s tongue…

 

She shouted the only Swahili word she knew: ‘mototo… mototo… mototo…’  (child)

 

She could hear his cry in the flames…

One of them heard her, let her go….

But it was too late she could hear her child crying, choking in the smoke as his light flesh torched in the flames. She jumped into the flames; she would not let him die, she would rather die with him… He was Mwene Nyaga’s gift to her…

 

Her hands were burning as she pushed through the flames…

Then they pulled her back… his cry had died down now…

‘mototo… mototo...’ she kept screaming, but they would not let her go…

Then the white man slapped her as if to silence her…

She went into a rage, grabbed one of the home guards' knives, and stabbed the silly muthongo in his left leg…

Then he pulled out his gun and pointed it at her…

Her co-wife jumped up in front of him as he pulled the trigger…

The thundering sound tore through the night….

Instantly her children came running to their mother…

The white man turned, limping away to his car…

 

‘Stupid natives, kill them all,’ she heard him say in his strange tongue.

 

She could tell from their eyes and the way they held their thundering sticks that they would all die tonight…

 

She grabbed the children away from their mother and looked up at the home guards like a mother whose children have betrayed her… they said something in Swahili. Then they shot in the air two times each…

 

She woke again from her daydream…

The white man with a sack on his head was kneeling before the strange man from kasoneki, he was also being bewitched…

 

Her mind drifted back to her sad life. She remembers the loud, thundering shot that killed her co-wife, the blood on her skin as the bullet tore her apart… putting out the fire… frantically looking for her son, pulling her infant son’s remains out of the ashes…

Digging two graves, one small one and one big one… and four more pretend graves…

 

She remembers her husband coming out of the forest at night to a burnt-down home, a dead wife… the pain in his eyes as he dug up his dead son…

 

His raging voice as he asked for the white man's name…

She sat back and remembered their fifth son, her joy in a time of war…

She remembers carrying food to her husband in the forest, hiding stolen bullets in her child’s clothes… trafficking guns to the Mau Mau…

The Day they killed Kimathi…

The kipande (Large ID card hung around the neck) she had to wear…

 

Watching her son grow… taking care of her co-wife’s children

Sending one of the boys into the forest to fight with the Mau Mau, he was only 12 years old… but had he not gone, they would have arrested him, maybe even killed the boy… How could he have a childhood in a concentration camp where being a man is a crime…

 

Then she remembered the day they killed her husband. She was pregnant again, she had not seen him in months… it was too risky, they had them in concentration camps now… too difficult for a pregnant woman to run guns and food by night; the walls were too high to climb, and the barbed wire too sharp, the trenches too deep, the dogs too fast…

 

He came to her to await the birth of their child. Then that stupid Ngati sold them out…

They came in the dead of night. They kicked in the door, but he was gone, hiding in the cowshed… running through the dark to safety.

 

The white man said something in his strange tongue, and the ngati asked her where he was… she said nothing. They pulled her out of bed… dragging her out into the moonlight. They asked again, she said nothing.

 

Then the white man came to her side, lit a cigarette, touched her unborn baby, blew smoke in her face…

He looked up at the home guard… they asked her again… she said nothing…

Then he stood up. Looked at her…

From his eyes she knew what was coming next; she rolled over, turning her back to him as he began to kick her… Still she said nothing, then the white man put out his cigarette and told them to hold her down. She fought them as best she could…

They were too strong for her…

She had sworn to herself she would not scream, she knew that if he heard her cry, he would turn back and be captured…

 

Then the white man raised his boot and thrust it straight on top of her unborn child, and she let out a scream…

 

They asked her again… She spat blood in their faces…

The white man hit her again and again as she mourned… not in pain but for her unborn child… she knew he could not survive…

 

Then she saw him in the undergrowth, a faint shadow in the moonlight.

She wanted to tell him to run, but her voice was too faint…

‘Teng’era mwedwa teng’era...’ (run, my love, run) …

Too faint…

 

Then she saw it, a light in the dark followed by the sound of thunder…

He came back for her…

 

The white man fell like an old tree cut down for timber…

The two guards began to run toward their guns…

Then she saw another light and more thunder as another one fell…

She could not hold on, but she heard the last sound of thunder and saw the other guard fall…

And then she heard his voice…

He was here with her…

He was holding her…

 

She felt for her womb…

She could feel the warm blood running between her legs…

Her child, no… no…

How could Mwene Nyaga be so cruel to her?

She opened her eyes she could barely see his face in the moonlight.

He was holding something…

Her baby… violently born before its time… dead…

She was crying now… ever so faintly

He carried her to her bed…

 

Then she heard the dogs, saw the bright car lights shine through her mud, grass-thatched hut… ‘

thie’ (go), she told him… ‘teng’era’ (run)

 

He got to the door then the sound of thunder hit him. He kept walking one last sound… then she went into a faint…

 

When she woke up, she was in chains, a prisoner of war on a hospital bed…

 

She knew he was gone; she knew she was next… why did they not just send her to the grave with the sound of thunder?

What torture is this?

Why must she live through it?

 

When they dragged her out of her hospital bed, they told her she was to be hanged for her role in the murder of a white man and two colonial officers…

 

A white man came; he spoke her tongue… mokasoneki (a catholic)

He told her he was here to give her a chance to go to heaven. She laughed.

 

‘Wa thekio nikie? (Why do you laugh) he asked

 

‘Matuini kwa ngai wanyu ndikweda guthii, mwandunya indo siothe nginya wendo, ona ciana itana ciara’ (I do not want to go to a heaven with this white god who took away everything, my love, my unborn child)  

 

He told her that she should repent for helping to kill a white man.

She laughed again and asked him what their god would do to the white man who killed two of her children; he burnt one and kicked one out of her.

 

The white man vomited on the floor… The weak priest had no stomach for it….

 

Then they came for her two white men, carrying her to the gallows…

She could now feel the noose tightening around her neck…

She could almost feel the sound of her ancestors calling her, her unborn child, her husband… her family… she hoped that in the land beyond Mwene Nyaga would be kinder and that the white man’s god would not haunt her…

 

She looked around as the white man in a sack pulled the lever.

She did not scream; she would not give them the satisfaction…

 

As the trap door opened, she felt the noose tighten and her breath instantly depart from her being…