Weep Not, Child (Penguin African Writers Series Book 3)

by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

It was better to give up the attempt and be content with knowing the land you lived in, and the people who lived near you.

It did not matter if anyone died poor provided he or she could one day say: ‘Look, I’ve a son as good and as well educated as any you can find in the land!’

‘There are some people, be they black or white, who don’t want others to rise above them. They want to be the source of all knowledge and share it piecemeal to others less endowed.

Both men admired this shamba. For Ngotho felt responsible for whatever happened to this land. He owed it to the dead, the living, and the unborn of his line, to keep guard over this shamba. Mr Howlands always felt a certain amount of victory whenever he walked through it all. He alone was responsible for taming this unoccupied wildness.

a mother’s silence is the worst form of punishment for it is left to one’s imagination to conjure up what is in her mind.

‘Education is everything,’ Ngotho said. Yet he doubted this because he knew deep inside his heart that land was everything. Education was good only because it would lead to the recovery of the lost lands.

Even there where they go, they will learn that mere salary without a piece of land to cultivate is nothing. Look at Howlands. He is not employed by anybody. Yet he is very rich and happy. It’s because he has land. Or look at Jacobo. He’s like that because he has land…Boro has no land.

For every race had their country. The Indians had India. Europeans had Europe. And Africans had Africa, the land of the black people. (Applause)

Ngotho had come to think that it was Jomo who would drive away the white men. To him Jomo stood for custom and tradition purified by grace of learning and much travel. But now he was defeated.

a man rises and opposes that law which made right the taking away of land. Now that man is taken by the same people who made the laws against which that man was fighting. He is tried under those alien rules. Now tell me who is that man who can win even if the angels of God were his lawyers…I

There was only one god for him – and that was the farm he had created, the land he had tamed.

Previously he had not thought of them as savages or otherwise, simply because he had not thought of them at all, except as a part of the farm – the way one thought of donkeys or horses in his farm except that in the case of donkeys and horses one had to think of their food and a place for them to sleep.

The Mau Mau had come to symbolise all that which he had tried to put aside in life. To conquer it would give him a spiritual satisfaction, the same sort of satisfaction he had got from the conquest of his land.

No. He would not give in to either Mau Mau or his wife. He would reduce everything to his will. That was the settlers’ way.

What if all people were destroyed and he alone was left? What could he do with his learning that he had hoped to use in rescuing the country from ruin?

‘Is it possible for a whole nation to sin?’ ‘One man sins, God punishes all.’ He thought: She is right. God had done this often to the children of Israel. But He always sent somebody to rescue them.

At the beginning of the emergency, when he had been called from the farm, he had been angry. He had at times longed to go back to the life of a farmer. But as the years passed, the assertive desire to reduce the blacks to obedience had conquered, enabling him to do his work with a thoroughness that would not have been possible with many of his age.

‘Don’t you believe in anything?’ ‘No. Nothing. Except revenge.’ ‘Return of the lands?’ ‘The lost land will come back to us maybe. But I’ve lost too many of those whom I loved for land to mean much to me. It would be a cheap victory.’

Whatever their differences, interest in knowledge and book learning was the one meeting point between people such as Boro, Jacobo, and Ngotho.

‘You are always talking about tomorrow, tomorrow. You are always talking about the country and the people. What is tomorrow? And what are the People and the Country to you?’

If you knew that all your days life will always be like this with blood flowing daily and men dying in the forest, while others daily cry for mercy; if you knew even for one moment that this would go on forever, then life would be meaningless unless bloodshed and death were a meaning. Surely this darkness and terror will not go on forever.

It’s strange how you do fear something because your heart is already prepared to fear

‘Where will you go?’ ‘To England.’ ‘But that’s your home?’ ‘No. It isn’t. I was born here and I have never been to England. I don’t even want to go there.’

Fear in the air. Not a fear of death – it’s a fear of living.

He tried to bring out the good qualities in all, making them work for the good name of the school. But he believed that the best, the really excellent, could come only from the white man. He brought up his boys to copy and cherish the white man’s civilisation as the only hope of mankind and especially of the black races. He was automatically against all black politicians who in any way made people feel discontented with the white man’s rule and civilising mission.

Perhaps death was not bad at all. It sent you into a big sleep from which you never awoke to the living fears, the dying hopes, the lost visions.

For the first time Njoroge was face to face with a problem to which ‘tomorrow’ was no answer.

Life too seemed like a big lie where people bargained with forces that one could not see.