Petals of Blood by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Moses Isegawa

rushed to the fields between bouts of heavy downpour.
    But he tried to understand and he even made a lesson out of it all: ‘There is dignity in labour,’ he told the children. He made them sing even more fervently:
    Cows are wealth
    Work is health
    Goats are wealth
    Work is health
    Crops are wealth
    Work is health
    Money is wealth
    Work is health
    God the Almighty Giver
    God Bringer of rains!
    So within six months he came to feel as if Ilmorog was his personal possession: he was a feudal head of a big house or a big mbari lord surveying his estate, but without the lord’s pain of working out lossesand gains, the goats lost and the young goats born. When the rains had come and seeds sprouted and then, in June, flowers came he felt as if the whole of Ilmorog had put on a vast floral-patterned cloth to greet its lord and master.
    He took the children out into the field to study nature, as he put it. He picked flowers and taught them the names of the various parts: the stigma, the pistil, pollen, the petals. He told them a little about fertilization. One child cried out:
    ‘Look. A flower with petals of blood.’
    It was a solitary red beanflower in a field dominated by white, blue and violet flowers. No matter how you looked at it, it gave you the impression of a flow of blood. Munira bent over it and with a trembling hand plucked it. It had probably been the light playing upon it, for now it was just a red flower.
    ‘There is no colour called blood. What you mean is that it is red. You see? You must learn the names of the seven colours of the rainbow. Flowers are of different kinds, different colours. Now I want each one of you to pick a flower . . . Count the number of petals and pistils and show me its pollen . . .’
    He stood looking at the flower he had plucked and then threw the lifeless petals away. Yet another boy cried:
    ‘I have found another. Petals of blood — I mean red . . . It has no stigma or pistils . . . nothing inside.’
    He went to him and the others surrounded him:
    ‘No, you are wrong,’ he said, taking the flower. ‘This colour is not even red . . . it does not have the fullness of colour of the other one. This one is yellowish red. Now you say it has nothing inside. Look at the stem from which you got it. You see anything?’
    ‘Yes,’ cried the boys. ‘There is a worm – a green worm with several hands or legs.’
    ‘Right. This is a worm-eaten flower . . . It cannot bear fruit. That’s why we must always kill worms . . . A flower can also become this colour if it’s prevented from reaching the light.’
    He was pleased with himself. But then the children started asking him awkward questions. Why did things eat each other? Why can’t the eaten eat back? Why did God allow this and that to happen? Hehad never bothered with those kind of questions and to silence them he told them that it was simply a law of nature. What was a law? What was nature? Was he a man? Was he God? A law was simply a law and nature was nature. What about men and God? Children, he told them, it’s time for a break.
    Man . . . law . . . God . . . nature: he had never thought deeply about these things, and he swore that he would never again take the children to the fields. Enclosed in the four walls he was the master, aloof, dispensing knowledge to a concentration of faces looking up to him. There he could avoid being drawn in . . . But out in the fields, outside the walls, he felt insecure. He strolled to the acacia bush and started breaking its thorn-tips. He remembered that his first troubles in the place had started because of taking the children into the open. How Nyakinyua had frightened him! and at the thought, he instinctively looked to the spot where she had once stood and questioned him about the city and ladies in high heels.
    For a few seconds Munira’s heart stood still: he could hardly believe his eyes. She left the village path and walked toward him. A