"Resnick, Mike - A Little Knowledge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

I turned to Karenja and held my two hands in front of me, palms up. "In my left hand is the meat of an impala that I killed today," I said. "In my right is the meat of an impala that I killed five days ago and left to sit in the sun. It is covered with ants, worms crawl through it, and it stinks." I paused. "Which of the two pieces of meat will you eat?"
"The meat in your left hand," he answered.
"But both pieces of meat came from the same herd of impala," I pointed out. "Both animals were equally fat and healthy when they died."
"But the meat in your right hand is rotten," he said.
"That is true," I agreed. "And just as there can be good and bad meat, so there can be good and bad facts. The facts Ndemi has related to you come from books written by the Europeans, and facts can mean different things to them than they mean to us."
I paused while they considered what I had said, and then continued. "A European may look upon the savannah and envision a city, while a Kikuyu may look at the same savannah and see a shamba. A European may look at an elephant and see ivory trinkets, while a Kikuyu may look at the same elephant and see food for his village, or destruction for his crops. And yet they are looking at the same land, and the same animal.
"Now," I said, once again looking at each of them in turn, "I have been to school in Europe, and in America, and only I, of all the men and women on Kirinyaga, have lived among the white man. And I tell you that only I, your mundumugu, am capable of separating the good facts from the bad facts. It was a mistake to allow Ndemi to speak with my computer; I will not allow it again, until I have given him more of my wisdom."
I had thought my statement would put an end to the matter, but as I looked around I saw signs of discomfort, as if they wished to argue with me but lacked the courage. Finally Koinnage leaned forward and, without looking directly at me, said, "Do you not see what you are saying, Koriba? If the mundumugu can make a mistake by allowing a young boy to speak with his computer, can he not also make a mistake by not allowing the Elders to speak to it?"
I shook my head. "It is a mistake to allow any Kikuyu except the mundumugu to speak to it."
"But there is much that we can learn from it," persisted Koinnage.
"What?" I asked bluntly.
He shrugged helplessly. "If I knew, then I would already have learned it."
"How many times must I repeat this to you: there is nothing to be learned from the Europeans. The more you try to become like them, the less you remain Kikuyu. This is our Utopia, a Kikuyu Utopia. We must fight to preserve it."
"And yet," said Karenja, "even the word Utopia is European, is it not?"
"You heard that from Ndemi, too?" I asked without hiding the annoyance from my voice.
He nodded his head. "Yes."
"Utopia is just a word," I said. "It is the idea that counts."
"If the Kikuyu have no word for it and the Europeans do, perhaps it is a European idea," said Karenja. "And if we have built our world upon a European idea, perhaps there are other European ideas that we can also use."
I looked at their faces, and realized, for perhaps the first time, that most of the original Elders of Kirinyaga had died. Old Siboki remained, and I could tell by his face that he found European ideas even more abhorrent than I myself did, and there were two or three others, but this was a new generation of Elders, men who had come to maturity on Kirinyaga and could not remember the reasons we had fought so hard to come here.
"If you want to become black Europeans, go back to Kenya!" I snapped in disgust. "It is filled with them!"
"We are not black Europeans," said Karenja, refusing to let the matter drop. "We are Kikuyu who think it is possible that not all European ideas are harmful."
"Any idea that changes us is harmful," I said.
"Why?" asked Koinnage, his courage to oppose me growing as he realized that many of the Elders supported him. "Where is it written that a Utopia cannot grow and change? If that were the case, we would have ceased to be a Utopia the day the first baby was born on Kirinyaga."
"There are as many Utopias as there are races," I said. "None among you would argue that a Kikuyu Utopia is the same as a Maasai Utopia or a Samburu Utopia. By the same token, a Kikuyu Utopia cannot be a European Utopia. The closer you come to the one, the farther you move from the other."
They had no answer to that, and I got to my feet.
"I am your mundumugu," I said. "I have never misled you. You have always trusted my judgment in the past. You must trust in it in this instance."
As I began walking out of the boma, I heard Karenja's voice behind me.
"If you were to die tomorrow, Ndemi would become our mundumugu. Are you saying we should trust his judgment as we trust yours?"
I turned to face him. "Ndemi is very young and inexperienced. You, as the elders of the village, would have to use your wisdom to decide whether or not what he says is correct."
"A bird that has been caged all its life cannot fly," said Karenja, "just as a flower that has been kept from the sun will not blossom."
"What is your point?" I asked.
"Shouldn't we begin using our wisdom now, lest we forget how when Ndemi has become the mundumugu?"
This time it was I who had no answer, so I turned on my heel and began the long walk back to my hill.
* * * *
For five days I fetched my own water and made my own fires, and then Ndemi returned, as I had known he would.
I was sitting in my boma, idly watching a herd of gazelles grazing across the river, when he trudged up the path to my hill, looking distinctly uncomfortable.
"Jambo, Ndemi," I said. "It is good to see you again."
"Jambo, Koriba," he replied.
"And how was your vacation?" I asked, but there is no Swahili word for vacation so I used the English term and the humor and sarcasm were lost on him.
"My father urged me to come back," he said, bending over to pet one of my goats, and I saw the welts on his back that constituted his "urging."
"I am glad to have you back, Ndemi," I said. "We have become like father and son, and it pains me when we argue, as I am sure it pains you."
"It does pain me," he admitted. "I do not like to disagree with you, Koriba."
"We have both made mistakes," I continued. "You argued with your mundumugu, and I allowed you access to all that information before you were mature enough to know what to do with it. We are both intelligent enough to learn from our mistakes. You are still my chosen successor. It shall be as if it never happened."
"But it did happen, Koriba," he said.
"We shall pretend it did not."
"I do not think I can do that," said Ndemi unhappily, protecting his eyes as a sudden wind blew dust across the boma. "I learned many things when I spoke to the computer. How can I unlearn them?"
"If you cannot unlearn them, then you will have to ignore them until you are older," I said. "I am your teacher. The computer is just a tool. You will use it to bring the rains, and to send an occasional message to Maintenance, and that is all."
A black kite swooped down and made off with a scrap of my morning meal that had fallen beside the embers of my fire. I watched it while I waited for Ndemi to speak.
"You appear troubled," I said, when it became apparent that he would not speak first. "Tell me what bothers you."
"It was you who taught me to think, Koriba," he said as various emotions played across his handsome young face. "Would you have me stop thinking now, just because I think differently than you do?"