The Limits of the World by Jennifer Acker

Author:Jennifer Acker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Delphinium Books
Published: 2019-02-06T18:44:36+00:00

16.

[03 h: 31 m]

The State of Emergency lasted eight years, until 1960. This whole time Kenyatta is in jail, but the Mau Mau fight without him. It is very bloody. Not only black against white, but in some pockets there is civil war: Mau Mau kill the Kikuyu loyal to the British, village against village. There is burning and hacking people to pieces. The rallying cries are about land. It is stealing, plain as day. Even the Asians can see this. We, too, have been denied.

But Mau Mau cannot hold forever, not with so many jailed and disappeared. Not with their top leader in prison, and then the main military chiefs are captured and arrested. One of them is executed. Soon Ghana becomes independent. We are nowhere close to Ghana, hardly we can find it on a map, but we know it is Africa, and that Africa is changing. Everyone can feel the independence movement growing, even though day-to-day we do more or less the same. We cheer the improvements as they come along—the radio broadcasting services, then the big new hospital, Aga Khan, opens in 1958. It is so shiny; we are so impressed. Premchand goes to India for medicine, the first in our family, to bring back what we do not have, doctors of our own, and when he is employed at Aga Khan as a physician, we all boast and go in to visit him like children to a factory where miracles are made.

Finally Kenyatta is released into house arrest. The KANU party is formed by these men, Tom Mboya and the name I love to say, Oringa Odinga. In just three more years Kenyatta will be prime minister. We are on the brink of enormous change.

The British have been so strong, so merciless, these years of the emergency, but the colonials see they have to give some few concessions to the natives. Higher wages, allowance to grow coffee, things like this.

They are creating space for the Africans, and we do not make much of a fuss. Our goal is to hold on. We Asians are now even in the police force, in all aspects of bureaucracy, but we do not know if it will last. The Asians long against the colonials become even more vocal, men like Makhan Singh involved in the unions. Eventually he is arrested.

Even in these days of so much activity, it is hard to believe independence will one day come, and that soon after we will have to choose between two countries, neither of which wants us. By the end of the fifties, I myself am fifty years old. All of my children graduated secondary, knowing no other life, starting jobs. We are arranging marriages, paying dowries.

Your grandmother got very sick one year—1960. A year in the thick of everything, but when illness comes the world shrinks to just you and your family. I wish you never experience this. We were worried for polio, but it was another fever, and she was in bed for three months.

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