The People of Ostrich Mountain by Ndirangu Githaiga

Author:Ndirangu Githaiga
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Kenyan books, Kenya, African authors, Colonialism in Africa, Mount Kenya, Black authors, Immigrant tale, Friendship stories
Publisher: Bon Esprit Books
Published: 2020-05-09T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty

Joel Mwangi was a soft-spoken individual, the type of person someone might not remember after meeting him at a social gathering. His wife, Wambũi, was the extrovert of the two, which suited him just fine. He was a civil servant who’d been employed in the Ministry of Works for almost forty years, having started off as an accountant and rising up through the ranks to become the head of the Water and Sewerage Department.

He was a modest man and seemed content with his humble but reliable government salary. In general, these salaries hadn’t risen over the years and had been vastly outpaced by inflation—so that what might have been comfortable in 1963 was far from adequate in 1999. Most employees responded to this discrepancy either by leaving government service or finding another means of generating income outside of their routine responsibilities.

For some, this meant using their official position to extort money from hapless citizens for even minor services. A water bill that was supposed to be one or two thousand shillings might be inflated by a morally derelict water-meter reader to a hundred and forty thousand shillings. And when the distraught customer went to the water department assuming this was a mistake easily remedied, they’d be informed that the records were accurate and they needed to pay up to avoid having their water turned off immediately, with a surcharge for reconnection. Taking advantage of their distress, they would next be approached by another employee, usually in cahoots with the first, who would offer to rectify the complicated situation for a small sum of four or five thousand shillings. At the end of the day, the spoils of their malfeasance would be divided among the crooked officials.

Over the years, Mr. Mwangi had observed the ethical gangrene spread through the department, but had remained untainted by it. Consequently, he found himself the recipient of an ever-increasing stream of referrals from friends and friends-of-friends, people who believed he could resolve their problems without paying a bribe. The need to devote so much time to undoing the work of his venal colleagues irked him, but it also heightened his commitment to his job. In fact, it was probably the very reason he’d remained in it so long. Whenever he considered leaving, he always asked himself what would happen to all those people who relied on his intervention.

When he married Wambũi, he was pleased deep down that she enjoyed working at the hardware store because he did not. It had always been his father’s dream that Kĩng’ori and Sons would grow from strength to strength with both Mwangi and his brother Mũchoki working there, and that they would eventually take over the reins of the business when he was too old to handle it. But Mũchoki, the younger son, made it abundantly clear he had no such plans for his own life. After completing high school, he went on to Makerere to study engineering, and thereafter took a teaching position at the University of Nairobi where he continued to thrive in his academic career.

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