Wizard of the Crow

refused to grant the Ruler an interview when he was in America, now begged for an exclusive with the Ruler. Anyone with a radio or television was glued to his set, crowded by those without.

The speaker of the house struck the table with a mallet. The eagerly awaited session was about to begin.

“True, Haki ya Mungu, I kept wondering how he would come to the Parliament,” said A.G. “What carriage was he going to ride in? How would he enter the building, for I had not heard anything about the doors being enlarged. Would he be pushed through the entrance the way he was once squeezed into the jumbo jet? What would he talk about? Would he mention the fate of the Wizard of the Crow? And what would he say about the rumors of his pregnancy? Questions upon questions…”

Some workers had taken the afternoon off, a few unofficially, for nobody wanted the news to pass him by. A.G. knew of a tea shop, Wvra-no-nda, with a television, and he got there early only to find that others had gotten there before him, but he positioned himself where he could see the screen clearly. All crowded around the television set the way bees swarm around a hive, buzzing. When they saw the Ruler appear, they fell silent.

3

The Ruler entered Parliament and walked down the aisle on a red carpet. To his right was a woman dressed magnificently, wearing a diamond tiara. Was Rachael, the Ruler’s wife, being trotted out for a public viewing?

A.G. could hardly believe his eyes. This Excellency on television was hardly the Excellency he had last seen at the State House. This Excellency was tall and thin. He was dressed in a dark suit, with a boutonniere, a white handkerchief in the breast pocket. In his left hand he held a club and a fly whisk. The usual patches of leopard skins were there. His head was the size of a fist, but his eyes bulged, resembling the late Machokali’s.

A.G. did not hear himself as he shouted, No, no, that is not him! over and over again, the others looking at him as at a crazy person, some of them barking impatiently, Shut up! How do you know? without allowing him to explain, to which he responded, What happened to his inflated body? And at this the people laughed, but when he tried to say, Look at his tongue, look at that tongue, they silenced him with poisonous looks. Yet some also noticed that when the Ruler was not talking he would sometimes flick his tongue in and out involuntarily, but most saw nothing strange in this, attributing it to his not having used his tongue in public for a long time. When A.G. now further insisted that the tongue was forked, people around started saying: The smog-see what it has done to this man’s head! And maybe he is not the only oner

The Ruler started by saying that he wanted to take the opportunity to introduce the person seated next to him, because when he gave her the job she now holds he had been in seclusion and so in no position to anoint her in person before the eyes of the nation, but there was a time for everything and he was now glad to tell the nation that this was Dr. Yunique Immaculate McKenzie, Official National Hostess.

By the time the audience recovered from the shock, for in truth since her appointment she had never been seen in public, the Ruler was already in full speaking gear. He asked people, wherever they were, in Parliament, their homes, their workplaces, or on the roads, to stand up and observe one minute of silence in memory of those who died recently on the grounds of the Parliament buildings and the law courts. He said that the deaths were the result of the activities of some bad elements in the country who had hoped to bring about confusion as a first stage in a vast conspiracy to overthrow the government. I have only one question for them: Don’t they know that we defeated communism in the twentieth century? Communism is now as dead as a dodo. The so- called Movement for the Voice of the People had urged and agitated the mob to queue not because the movement genuinely cared for the real needs and grievances of the people but because it wanted to use the populace as instruments of its own evil designs. It had even hired sorcerers to confuse the minds of the innocents with very bad magic. The movement was exploiting genuine grievances, and he would be the first to admit that the country faced a few economic problems. But the whole world faced similar problems because these had to do with global economic forces and a global economic recession due to the oil crisis brought about by the selfish policies of OPEC.

Let me now turn to recent matters, the thunder and smog about which we are all concerned, he told an attentive Parliament and a curious nation.

It was the same self-styled Movement for the Voice of the People, in collusion with fundamentalists from the Middle East, who dropped bombs on the State House, but luckily the Ruler, aided by his experts, had managed to detonate them before calamitous harm could be done to the nation. When the evildoers realized this, they fired tear gas in the air to frighten the population and ignite a revolution. The point of the queues and agitation and the timing of the bombing was clear, but he would not say more about this for security reasons, because the matter was still under investigation.

He paused, in fact he had no choice, because members of Parliament were giving him a standing ovation with no end in sight because no MP or minister wanted to be the first to stop.

To the bemusement and then the discomfort of the foreign diplomats who sat through it all, the Ruler let the ovation go on for one hour and seven minutes before gesturing to the MPs to sit down, for he had a lot more to share with them. As for these misguided followers of the Movement for the Voice of the People, he continued, yes, those who had killed innocent citizens whose only crime was to celebrate their Ruler’s birthday, he had only one message for them: his security forces would hunt them down and bring them to justice.

The Ruler allowed that there were a few wrongs he wanted to set right so that the Movement for the Voice of the People would never again find grounds for deceiving the nation. He told Parliament that Marching to Heaven had been conceived by Machokali, a scheme so absurd as to boggle the mind. There was devilish cunning in it, and he, the Ruler, had gone along with the scheme only for the purpose of finding out the man’s real intentions. Well, unfortunately Machokali was not around to explain what he had in mind, so we shall never know what he was up to, and there is no point in speculation. The Ruler now lowered his voice and said that he was sad to say that the government had not yet been able to find out how or where the late Markus had met his fate, or even the nature of that fate. However, the private detectives he had hired from abroad had reported to him that this was a case of SID, self-induced disappearance. Let the scheme, like its author, go the way of SID.

Next, the Ruler said, he would respond to rumors that he was pregnant.

4

The Ruler thanked all those who had come to the grounds of Parliament and the law courts to celebrate his birthday, renaming it the Day of National Self-Renewal because according to an age-old African custom, cycles of birth and rebirth are celebrated through well-known rites of passage. He was also aware that there were those who were talking about his birthday, the Day of National Self-Renewal, as the day he would give birth.

“Well, they were not mistaken. The fact is, my people, I was pregnant. Yes, I was pregnant,” the Ruler emphasized to an astonished Parliament. “Every Aburlrian child knows that I am the Country and the Country is Me, which means that this Excellency, this Country, and this Nation are like the mystery of Three in One and One in Three creating the Perfect One.” That was why when the Ruler spoke, the nation spoke, and when he sneezed, the nation sneezed. Because the country and the head are one and the same, it follows that his birthday is the nation’s birthday and his day of giving birth is as that of the nation giving birth. “You want to see the pictures of the baby?”

On cue, Kaniuru, using crutches, hobbled into Parliament followed by four people carrying a huge board wrapped up in a white cloth and set it up in front of the Ruler.

And now, said the Ruler, I ask the official hostess to step forward and reveal what I have brought into the world. Dr. Yunique Immaculate McKenzie walked to the board and lifted the cloth, revealing a drawing of the Ruler holding a baby vaguely resembling Aburlria in his fatherly arms. At the foot was the inscription in large Aburlrian national colors: BABY D. Behold Baby Democracy, he called.

The Ruler then grandly proclaimed the advent of multiparty democracy in Aburlria, to everyone’s shock. But he