A Grain of Wheat Read Online Free PDF Page B

them to join the Movement and find strength in unity.
    They talked of him in their homes; they sang his praises in teashops, market places and on their way to Gikuyu Independent churches onSundays. Any word from the mouth of Harry became news and passed from ridge to ridge, right across the country. People waited for something to happen. The revolt of the peasant was near at hand.
    But the whiteman had not slept. Young Harry was clamped in chains, narrowly escaping the pit into which Waiyaki was buried alive. Was this the sign they waited for? People went to Nairobi; they took an oath to spend their days and nights outside the State House till the Governor himself gave them back their Harry.
    Warui, then a young man, walked all the way from Thabai to join the procession. He never forgot the great event. When Jomo Kenyatta and other leaders of the Movement were arrested in 1952, Warui recalled the 1923 Procession.
    ‘The young should do for Jomo what we did for Harry. I’ve never seen anything to match the size of that line of men and women,’ he declaimed, gently plucking his beard. ‘We came from ridges here, ridges there, everywhere. Most of us walked. Others did not bring food. We shared whatever crumbs we had brought. Great love I saw there. A bean fell to the ground, and it was quickly split among the children. For three days we gathered in Nairobi, with our blood we wrote vows to free Harry.’
    On the fourth day they marched forward, singing. The police who waited for them with guns fixed with bayonets, opened fire. Three men raised their arms in the air. It is said that as they fell down they clutched soil in their fists. Another volley scattered the crowd. A man and a women fell, their blood spurted out. People ran in all directions. Within a few seconds the big crowd had dispersed; nothing remained but one hundred and fifty crooked watchers on the ground, outside the State House.
    ‘Something went wrong at the last moment,’ Warui said, and stopped plucking his beard. ‘Perhaps if we had the guns …’
    The revolt of the peasants had failed; the ghost of the great woman whose Christian hand had ended the tribal wars was quietened. She would now lie in the grave in peace.
    Young Harry was sent to a remote part of the country.
    The Movement was temporarily dismayed. But it was at this time that the man with the flaming eyes came to the scene. Then few knewhim. But later, of course, he was to be known to the world over as the Burning Spear.
    Mugo once attended a meeting of the Movement held at Rung’ei Market because it was rumoured that Kenyatta, who had recently come from the land of the whiteman, would speak. Although the meeting was scheduled to start in the afternoon, by ten o’clock there was hardly any sitting-room at the market place. People stood on the roofs of the shops. They appeared like clusters of locusts perched on trees. Mugo sat in a place where he could command a good view of the speakers. Gikonyo, then a well-known carpenter in Thabai, sat a few feet away. Next to the carpenter was Mumbi. She was said to be one of the most beautiful women on all the eight ridges. Some people called her Wangu Makeri because of her looks.
    The meeting started an hour later. People learnt that Kenyatta would not attend the meeting. There were, however, plenty of speakers from Muranga and Nairobi. There was also a Luo speaker from Nyanza showing that the Movement had broken barriers between tribes. Kihika from Thabai was one of the speakers who received a big ovation from the crowd. He talked no longer in terms of sending letters to the whiteman as used to be done in the days of Harry.
    ‘This is not 1920. What we now want is action, a blow which will tell,’ he said as women from Thabai pulled at their clothes and hair, and screamed with delight. Kihika, a son of the land, was marked out as one of the heroes of deliverance. Mugo, who had seen Kihika on the ridge a number of times, had never suspected that