Thuku's face says, How do you think they fare? but his voice answers, "They miss you, Burning Spear, and every day they ask the British to release you."
"Please thank them for their efforts on my behalf," says Kenyatta. Then, "Are they well fed and fairly treated?"
"Well, they are not in prison," answers Thuku. "At least, not all of them."
Stupid, thinks Kenyatta. Here I give you an opportunity to say what the British wish to hear, and instead you tell me this. I doubt that they will allow you back here again.
"More farms have been attacked?" asks Kenyatta.
Thuku nods. He doesn't care if the British hear. After all, it is in all the papers. "Yes, and they have mutilated hundreds of cattle and goats belonging to the British."
"They are foolish," said Kenyatta in a clear voice, loud enough to be heard beyond the cell. "The British are not evil, merely misinformed. They are not our enemies, and mark my words, someday they will even be our allies."
Thuku looks at him as if he has gone mad.
"They are a handsome race," continues Kenyatta. "They have strong faces and straight backs." He switches from English to Kikuyu, which is much more complex and difficult to learn than Swahili, and-he hopes-beyond the abilities of the guards to understand. "And they have large ears," he concludes.
A look of dawning comprehension crosses James Thuku's face, and the next ten minutes consist of nothing but a discussion of the weather, the harvest, the marriages and births and deaths of the people Kenyatta knows.
Finally Thuku goes to the door. "Let me out," he says. "I am done here."
The door opens, and Thuku turns to Kenyatta. "I will be back next week, Burning Spear."
"I wouldn't bet on that," remarks one of the guards.
Neither would I, agrees Kenyatta silently.
He waits until the evening meal is done, and the new guards have replaced the old. Then, while there is still enough light to read, he unfolds the message and reads it:
It has begun! Tonight we spill the blood of the British!
The news is slow to trickle in. For six months after Thuku leaves, Kenyatta is allowed no visitors at all. Finally he learns what has happened, not from the Kikuyu, but from the British commander.
Kenyatta has requested an audience with him daily since he learned that he has been denied any visitors, and finally it is granted.
The black man with the gray beard is brought, in chains, to the commander's office. The commander sits at his desk, fanning himself in a futile attempt to gain some slight degree of comfort in the hot, still air.
"You wished to see me?" he demands.
"I wish to know why I have not been allowed to have any visitors," says Kenyatta.
"We're not about to let them report on their missions to you, or receive new orders," says the commander.
"I don't know what you are talking about," says Kenyatta.
"I'm talking about your goddamned Mau Mau, and the massacre they committed at Lari!" yells the commander, pounding the desk with a fist. "We're not going to let you black heathens get away with this, and when we catch Deedan Kimathi-and we will-I will take great pleasure in incarcerating him in the cell next to yours. I won't even care about your exchanging information with him, since you're both going to be here until you rot!"
And with that, Kenyatta is escorted back to his cell.
"What happened at Lari?" he asks his guard.
"You ought to know. You were in charge of it."
"I am a prisoner who is not even in charge of his own life. How can I possibly know what happened?"
"What happened is that your savages went out and butchered ninety-three loyal Kikuyu in the town on Lari," says the guard. "Chopped them to bits."
"Loyal Kikuyu," repeats Kenyatta.
"That's right."
"Loyal to who?"
The guard curses and shoves the black man into his cell.
Kenyatta knows what will come next. It will not happen to him. He's probably safer in his cell than any of the Mau Mau are in their hideouts. But the British cannot tolerate this. They will strike back, and in force. He has to get word to his people, to warn them-but how is he to do so when he is allowed no visitors?
He begins smoking, begging an occasional cigarette from the guards. One day, months later, a guard gives him two, and he thanks him profusely, lights one, and explains that he's keeping the second one for the evening. Then, when the guards have changed, he unwraps the cigarette and scrawls You must get me out of here! in Swahili on the paper. He doesn't dare write it in English for fear the guards may find it, and by the same token he can't write it in Kikuyu for he is sure that the prison doesn't employ any members of the Kikuyu tribe now that they are at war with each other.
Day in and day out he stands by his window, watching and waiting with the patience of a leopard. Finally, almost two weeks after he has written his message and carefully folded it up, a black groundskeeper is trimming the bushes near his window. The man is a Samburu, and the Samburu and Kikuyu have never been allies, but he has no choice other than to hope the man realizes that the British are the blood enemy of both races. He coughs to catch the man's attention, then tosses the folded note out through the bars.
The Samburu picks it up, unfolds it, stares at it.
Can you even read? wonders Kenyatta. And if you can, will you take it to my people, or to the guards?
The Samburu stares expressionlessly at him for a long moment, then walks away.
Kenyatta waits, and waits, and waits some more. He has not seen the Samburu again, and he has been given nothing else to write on. Burning day follows freezing night, and he tries futilely to exercise in his nine-by-seven-foot universe. He begs for tidbits of information, but the guards have been instructed not to speak to him. He thinks it has been two years since James Thuku passed him the note, but he could be wrong: it could be eighteen months, it could even be three years. It is hard enough to keep his sanity without worrying about the passage of time.
And then one night he hears it: the sound of bare feet on the uneven ground outside his window. There are more sounds, sounds he cannot identify, then a crash! and a thud!, and suddenly four Kikuyu men, their faces painted for war, are in his cell, helping him to his feet. One of them strips off his prison clothes and wraps him in a red kikoi. Another brings his trademark flyswatter, a third his leopardskin cap. They gently help him walk out the door.
"Where is your car?" asks Kenyatta, looking around. "I am too weak to walk all the way to Kikuyuland."
"A car would be searched, Burning Spear," says one of them. "We have brought an ox wagon. You will hide in the back, under a pile of blankets and skins."
"Skins?" says Kenyatta, frowning. "The British will stop you, and once they see the skins, they will search the wagon."
Another warrior smiles. "The British are too busy fighting for their lives, Burning Spear. The Nandi or the Wakamba will stop us, and if we let them take the skins, they will look no further."
And it is as the warrior has predicted.
Kenyatta asks them not to announce that he is free. He will go to his village, regain some of his strength, some of the weight he has lost, and try to learn what has been happening.
"I do not know if we can spare you that long, Burning Spear," says one of the warriors. "The war does not go well."
"Of course it doesn't," says Kenyatta.
"They bomb the holy mountain daily, and some fifteen thousand of us are captives in the camps along Langata Road."
"Are you surprised?" asks Kenyatta.
"Did not you yourself tell us that we could not lose, that freedom was within our grasp?"