intelligent, or the tool of an as-yet unseen intelligence.
“And Gichichi?” Is mail the barber asked.
The French general spoke now.
“You will all be evacuated in plenty of time.”
“But what if we do not want to be evacuated?” Most High asked. “What if we decide we want to stay here and take our chances with the Chaga?”
“You will all be evacuated,” the general said again.
“This is our village, this is our country. Who are you to tell us what we must do in our own country?”
Most High was indignant now. We all applauded, even my father up there with the UNECTA people.
The Nairobi political looked vexed.
“UNECTA, UNHCR and the UN East Africa Protection Force operate with the informed consent of the Kenyan government. The Chaga has been deemed a threat to human life. We’re doing this for your own good.”
Most High drove on. “A threat? Who ‘deems’ it so? UNECTA? An organization that is eighty percent funded by the United States of America? I have heard different, that it doesn’t harm people or animals.
There are people living inside the Chaga; it’s true, isn’t it?”
The politician looked at the French general, who shrugged. The Asian scientist answered.
“Officially, we have no data.”
Then my father stood up and cut her short.
“What about the people who are being taken away?”
“I don’t know anything…” the UNECTA scientist began but my father would not be stopped.
“What about the people from Kombe? What are these tests you are carrying out?”
The woman scientist looked flustered. The French general spoke.
“I’m a soldier, not a scientist. I’ve served in Kosovo and Iraq and East Timor. I can only answer your questions as a soldier. On the fourteenth of June next year, it will come down that road. At about seven thirty in the evening, it will come through this church. By Tuesday night, there will be no sign that a place called Gichichi ever existed.”
And that was the end of the meeting. As the UNECTA people left the church, the Christians of Gichichi crowded around my father. What should they believe? Was Jesus come again, or was it anti-Christ?
These aliens, were they angels, or fallen creatures like ourselves? Did they know Jesus? What was God’s plan in this? Question after question after question.
My father’s voice was tired and thin and driven, like a leopard harried by beaters toward guns. Like that leopard, he turned on his hunters.
“I don’t know!” he shouted. “You think I have answers to all these things? No. I have no answers. I have no authority to speak on these things. No one does. Why are you asking these silly silly questions? Do you think a country pastor has the answers that will stop the Chaga in its tracks and drive it back where it came from? No. I am making them up as I go along, like everyone else.”
For a moment the whole congregation was silent. I remember feeling that I must die from embarrassment.
My mother touched my father’s arm. He had been shaking. He excused himself to his people. They stood back to let us out of the church. We stopped on the lintel, amazed. A rapture had indeed come. All the refugees were gone from the church compound. Their goods, their bundles, their carts and animals.
Even their excrement had been swept away.
As we walked back to the house, I saw the woman scientist brush past Most High as she went to the UNECTA hummer. I heard her whisper, “About the people. It’s true. But they’re changed.”
“How?” Most High asked but the door was closed. Two blue berets lifted mad Gikombe from in front of the hummer and it drove off slowly through the throng of people. I remembered that the UNECTA woman looked frightened.
That afternoon my father rode off on the red Yamaha and did not come back for almost a week.
I learned something about my father’s faith that day. It was that it was strong in the small, local questions because it was weak in the great ones. It believed in singing and teaching the people and the disciplines of personal prayer and meditation, because you could see them in the lives of others. In the big beliefs, the ones you could not see, it fell.
That meeting was the wound through which Gichichi slowly bled to death. “This is our village, this is our country,” Most High had declared, but before the end of the week the first family had tied their things onto the back of their pickup and joined the flow of refugees down the road to the south. After that a week did not pass that someone from our village would not close their doors a last time and leave Gichichi. The abandoned homes soon went to ruin. Water got in, roofs collapsed, then rude boys set fire to them. The dead houses were like empty skulls. Dogs fell into toilet pits and drowned. One day when we went down to the shamba there were no names and stones from the Ukerewe house. Within a month its windows were empty, smoke-stained sockets.
With no one to tend them, the shambas went to wild and weeds. Goats and cows grazed where they would, the terrace walls crumbled, the rains washed the soil down the valley in great red tears. Fields that had fed families for generations vanished in a night. No one cared for the women’s tree anymore, to give the images their cups of beer. Hope stopped working in Gichichi. Always in the minds of the ones who remained was the day when we would look up the road and see the spines and fans and twisted spires of the Chaga standing along the ridge-line like warriors.
I remember the morning I was woken by the sound of voices from the Muthiga house. Men’s voices, speaking softly so as not to waken anyone, for it was still dark, but they woke me. I put on my things and went out into the compound. Grace and Ruth were carrying cardboard boxes from the house, their father and a couple of other men from the village were loading them onto a Nissan pickup. They had started early, and the pickup was well laden. The children were gathering up the last few things.
“Ah, Tendeleo,” Mr. Muthiga said, sadly. “We had hoped to get away before anyone was around.”
“Can I talk to Grace?” I asked.
I did not talk to her. I shouted at her. I would be all alone when she went. I would be abandoned. She asked me a question. She said, “You say we must not go. Tell me, Tendeleo, why must you stay?”
I did not have an answer to that. I had always presumed that it was because a pastor must stay with his people, but the bishop had made several offers to my father to relocate us to a new parish in Eldoret.
Grace and her family left as it was getting light. Their red tail lights swung into the slow stream of refugees. I heard the horn hooting to warn stragglers and animals all the way down the valley. I tried to keep the house good and safe but two weeks later a gang of rude boys from another village broke in, took what they could and burned the rest. They were a new thing in what the radio called the “sub-terminum,” gangs of raiders and looters stripping the corpses of the dead towns.
“Vultures, is what they are,” my mother said.
Grace’s question was a dark parting gift to me. The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that I must see this thing that had forced such decisions on us. The television and newspaper pictures were not enough. I had to see it with my own eyes. I had to look at its face and ask it its reasons. Little Egg became my lieutenant. We slipped money from the collection plate, and we gathered up secret bundles of food. A schoolday was the best to go. We did not go straight up the road, where we would have been noticed. We caught a matatu to Kinangop in the Nyandarua valley where nobody knew us. There was still a lively traffic; the matatu was full of country people with goods to sell and chickens tied together by the feet stowed under the bench. We sat in the back and ate nuts from a paper cone folded from a page of the Bible. Everywhere were dirty white United Nations vehicles. One by one the people got out and were not replaced. By Ndunyu there was only me and Little Egg, jolting around in the back of the car.
The driver’s mate turned around and said, “So, where for, girls?”
I said, “We want to look at the Chaga.”
“Sure, won’t the Chaga be coming to look at you soon enough?”
“Can you take us there?” I showed him Church shillings.
“It would take a lot more than that.” He talked to the driver a moment. “We can drop you at Njeru. You can walk from there, it’s under seven kilometers.”
Njeru was what awaited Gichichi, when only the weak and poor and mad remained. I was glad to leave it. The
