Soon he was up and running again through the bush, now guided only by the sound of the beggar’s footsteps. Emerging from the bush he saw the outskirts of Santalucia. Were they running him in circles? Between the bush and the outskirts was an open space. The police officer could see only one beggar crossing it and reentering Santalucia. Where has the other one gone? he wondered, as the beggar he had in sight disappeared behind some houses.
The police officer ran to the corner of the street. He looked to his right and left and back, but he could not see a shadow or hear any sound. He had no way of telling where the beggar had gone. The streets of Santalucia are narrow and badly lit, and although there was moonlight, to the police officer, a stranger, the streets and the houses all looked alike. Not knowing whether he was looking for one or two beggars, the police officer wondered what to do, and for the first time since the chase began he was indecisive, but only for a moment, because a more insistent inner voice was urging him not to quit. He continued with the hunt. He would force whichever beggar he caught first to lead him to wherever the other was hiding.
By now the two beggars were ensconced in a house, crouched near a window, straining to hear the slightest sound outside. They heard the police officer’s footsteps clearly but could not see him and were uncertain as to where he was.
One beggar peered through another window, and, yes, he could now see the police officer and what he was doing: his gun drawn, the policeman was going from door to door, interrogating residents. The officer stopped in front of a house where what looked like a bundle was hanging. He hesitated and moved on, and an idea came to this beggar.
“Have you got a piece of paper?” he whispered to his fellow beggar. These were the first words they had exchanged since their flight from Paradise. The beggar addressed said nothing but looked through his bag and took out a piece of paper. “No, not so small, bigger. And see if there are any bones, dry cobs of corn, rags, and a piece of string in there.”
If he was surprised by the request he did not show it; he simply groped in the dark and came back and produced a cardboard, a bone, some rags, and a string, silently handing them over and continuing his watch at the window.
The other beggar tied the bones and the rags together. He then took a felt pen from his bag and wrote on the cardboard in big letters: WARNING! THIS PROPERTY BELONGS TO A WIZARD WHOSE POWER BRINGS DOWN HAWKS AND CROWS FROM THE SKY. TOUCH THIS HOUSE AT YOUR PERIL. SGD. WIZARD OF THE CROW. With great care not to make any noise, he slowly opened the door and saw something even better, a dead lizard and a frog. He added them to the bundle of bone and rags and hung the omen just above the door before quickly retreating to join the other beggar at the window.
Crouched together, the two beggars could just about make out the area around the doorway. Soon they saw the police officer walk near, anxiously wondering what he would do. Would he break the door down? But when the officer saw the bundle of rags and bones, he took a step back. He gathered courage and approached the bundle. He was about to touch it when he saw the leg of a frog and the tail of a lizard, and he was petrified. On reading what was written on the cardboard, he found his voice and let out an anguished cry: Oh, the Wizard of the Crow! He took to his heels, muttering to himself all the while: I knew they were not thieves; they were devils, djinns of the prairie, sent by the Wizard of the Crow to trick me to death. Woe unto me! I am now bewitched. Woe unto me! I am going to die! Actually, I am a dead man walking!
The two beggars were now beside themselves with laughter. One voice sounded male and the other female, but neither beggar registered the difference. The one who seemed to know his way about the house now put on the lights. The laughter stopped. The two stared at each other, not daring to trust the evidence of their eyes. When finally they spoke, their simultaneous questions collided in the air.
“Nyawlra?”
“Kamltl?”
8
At Brilliant Girls High School, Nyawlra went through a period when she really struggled with her names. There was a time when she called herself Engenethi Nyawlra Charles Matthew Mugwanja Wangahu, often writing it as E.N.C.M.M. Wangahu. She was not very keen on Engenethi and became Grace Mugwanja. Grace Mugwanja stuck, mostly in the village community, and she held on to it for a while. Her father liked Grace more than Engenethi, and Roithi, her mother, liked Engenethi more than Grace, and both hated Mugwanja with equal intensity, and so to her parents she would always be either Engenethi or Grace. She herself continued struggling with these markers of identity, and after going to college she eventually settled for Nyawlra wa Wangahu, though there were some who could not bring themselves to call her anything but Grace Mugwanja.
For his part, her father liked initialing his two African names, Mugwanja and Wangahu, to form Matthew M. W. Charles, and sometimes, leaving them out altogether, he was Matthew Charles or simply Mr. Charles. He was angry with those who called him Caruthi, the African-language version of Charles, even if prefixed with a title. He would not of course have raised any objections if they had called him Sir Charles, but in their ignorance the village folk insisted on calling him Bwana Caruthi.
Wangahu’s wealth came from timber, coffee, and tea. He had three children, two boys and the girl Nyawlra. The boys did not do particularly well in Aburlrian schools, and Wangahu sent them off to America, where they enrolled in colleges to study accounting and computer science, or so they claimed. They wandered from college to college without graduating, but every year Wangahu sent them money for tuition and room and board. Although as a parent he was concerned about their lack of progress, as a man of means he had something that would boost his already considerable standing among his peers: to pay full tuition and room and board for two in America was no easy task, and he was showing that he was indeed a man of some financial clout. He did not send Nyawlra to America, for he did not want his daughter to marry white, though he had no such reservations for the boys. Even so, he wanted her to have a lifestyle commensurate with his class. The rich bought their sons and daughters cars jokingly referred to as toys, Japanese in contrast to all German makes, which were of course for grown men and women. Nyawlra’s was a brand-new Toyota Corolla, and early on she bought into the lifestyle. Parties, keeping up with the latest fashion, speeding on the highways, these were the chief joys of her life, and she had not stopped to look under the surface of things. In those days, the likes of Yunity Mgeuzi-Bila-Shaka and Luminous Karamu-Mbu- ya-Itulka were often in the news, being denounced by the Ruler for preaching revolution. She hated the very mention of these rebels: Why were they so critical of the government? And why were they in exile?
Then there was this accident. She was driving on a highway, fascinated with speed, pushing her car to its limit when it skidded and crashed on the roadside. Though she suffered minor injuries, she knew that she had narrowly escaped. What surprised her then and later when she recalled her near fatality was the number of cars that simply passed her by; no one had stopped to see if anyone was hurt or needed help. The people who hurried to her rescue were the barefooted, mostly. One unloaded his donkey cart to rush her to the nearest medical center many miles away, the donkey announcing their arrival at the emergency room by braying loudly and shitting.
During the period of recovery she learned how to play guitar. At first it was hard pressing the strings and putting the chords together, but when she started strumming and producing music, it was strangely soothing. The music contributed to her healing. It was then that she started thinking seriously about her life. If she had died, what would she have left behind as her legacy to the living? There had to be more to life than fast cars, parties, and beauty parlors. She was in her first year at Eldares University, and from then on she started taking an interest in social issues. She became active in theater and student politics and acquainted herself with the activities in exile of Yunity Mgeuzi-Bila-Shaka and Luminous Karamu-Mbu-ya-Itulka, who inspired her teenage imagination. She also loved the stage, and nothing made her happier than playing this or that tragic or comic role, eliciting tears or laughter from an audience. She was a brilliant actress. She could change herself into any character, sometimes so realistically that even those who thought they knew her well because of seeing her on the platforms in many student political events were often unable to say whether it was really Nyawlra on the stage. As for history, it excited her curiosity the way a crime scene focuses a detective. History, particularly African history, was the scene of many crimes with many conflicting witnesses. Historians were detectives of time, and she loved the challenge of putting the different pieces of the puzzle together to make out the hidden shapes of things past. So, the pursuit of beau monde had given way to a search for a model society. This change in how she looked at the world is what
