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fall, the trousers also rolled to the floor. The telephone wires had been cut, Mahee could not get help from the outlying posts. Caught unawares, the police made a weak resistance as Kihika and his men stormed in. Some policemen climbed the walls and jumped to safety. Kihika’s men broke into the prison and led the prisoners out into the night. The garrison was set on fire and Kihika’s men ran back to the forest with fresh supplies of men, guns and ammunition to continue the war on a scale undreamt of in the days of Waiyaki and Young Harry.
    People came to know Kihika as the terror of the whiteman. They said that he could move mountains and compel thunder from heaven.
    A price was put on his head.
    Anybody who brought Kihika, dead or alive, would receive a huge sum of money.
    A year later, Kihika was captured alone at the edge of the Kinenie Forest.
    Believe the news? The man who compelled trees and mountains to move, the man who could go for ten miles crawling on his stomachthrough sand and thorny bush, was surely beyond the arm of the whiteman.
    Kihika was tortured. Some say that the neck of a bottle was wedged into his body through the anus as the white people in the Special Branch tried to wrest the secrets of the forest from him. Others say that he was offered a lot of money and a free trip to England to shake the hand of the new woman on the throne. But he would not speak.
    Kihika was hanged in public, one Sunday, at Rung’ei Market, not far from where he had once stood calling for blood to rain on and water the tree of freedom. A combined force of Homeguards and Police whipped and drove people from Thabai and other ridges to see the body of the rebel dangling on the tree, and learn.
    The Movement, however, remained alive and grew, as people put it, on the wounds of those Kihika left behind.

Three
    ‘We are not staying long,’ Gikonyo said, after a silence. ‘We have really come to see you about the Uhuru celebrations on Thursday.’
    Looking at Gikonyo, you could not believe that he was the same man whose marriage to Mumbi almost thirteen years before had angered other young suitors: what did Mumbi see in him? How could a woman so beautiful walk into poverty with eyes wide open? Now four years after returning home from detention, Gikonyo was one of the richest men in Thabai. He had recently bought a five-acre farm plot; he owned a shop –
Gikonyo General Stores
– at Rung’ei; and only the other day he had acquired a second-hand lorry for trading. On top of this, he was elected the chairman of the local branch of the Movement, a tribute, so people said, to his man’s spirit which no detention camp could break. Gikonyo was respected and admired as a symbol of what everyone aspired to be: fiercely independent, bending all effort to success in any enterprise.
    ‘What – what do you want?’ Mugo asked, raising his eyes to Warui.
    Warui’s life was, in a way, the story of the Movement; he had taken part in the meetings of Young Harry, had helped in building people’s own schools and listened to Jomo’s speeches in the ‘twenties. Warui was one of the few who saw in that recent employee of the Nairobi Municipal Council, a man destined for power.
    ‘He will do great things,’ he used to say of Jomo. ‘You can see it in his eyes.’
    Warui looked at the hearthplace. An oil-lamp with soot around the neck and sides of the glass, stood on the stone.
    ‘We of Thabai Village must also dance our part,’ he started, hisvoice, though low, embracing the whole room. ‘Yes, we must dance the song the way we know how. For, let it never be said Thabai dragged to shame the names of the sons she lost in war. No. We must raise them – even from the dead – to share it with us. Our people, is there a song sweeter than that of freedom? Of a truth, we have waited for it many a sleepless night. Those who have gone before us, those of us spared to see the sun today, and even those to be born tomorrow, must join in the