I remained with him a few more minutes, assured him that I would ask Ngai to welcome Ngala's spirit, and then I began walking to the colony of young men, which was about three kilometers beyond the village. It backed up to a dense forest, and was bordered to the south by the same river that wound through the village and broadened as it passed my hill.
It was a small colony, composed of no more than twenty young men. As each had undergone the circumcision ritual and passed into manhood, he had moved out from his father's boma and taken up residence here with the other bachelors of the village. It was a transitional dwelling place, for eventually each member would marry and take over part of his family's shamba, to be replaced by the next group of young men.
Most of the residents had gone to the village when they heard the death chants, but a few of them had remained behind to burn Ngala's hut and destroy the evil spirits within it. They greeted me gravely, as befitted the occasion, and asked me to utter the chant that would purify the ground so that they would not forever be required to avoid stepping on it.
When I was done, I placed a charm at the very center of the ashes, and then the young men began drifting away - all but Murumbi, who had been Ngala's closest friend.
"What can you tell me about this, Murumbi?" I asked when we were finally alone.
"He was a good friend," he replied. "We spent many long days together. I will miss him."
"Do you know why he killed himself?"
"He did not kill himself," answered Murumbi. "He was killed by hyenas."
"To walk naked and unarmed among the hyenas is to kill oneself," I said.
Murumbi continued staring at the ashes. "It was a stupid way to die," he said bitterly. "It solved nothing."
"What problem do you think he was trying to solve?" I asked.
"He was very unhappy," said Murumbi.
"Were Keino and Njupo also unhappy?"
He looked surprised. "You know?"
"Am I not the mundumugu?" I replied.
"But you said nothing when they died."
"What do you think I should have said?" I asked.
Murumbi shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know." He paused. "No, there was nothing you could have said."
"What about you, Murumbi?" I said.
"Me, Koriba?"
"Are you unhappy?"
"As you said, you are the mundumugu. Why ask questions to which you already know the answers?"
"I would like to hear the answer from your own lips," I replied.
"Yes, I am unhappy."
"And the other young men?" I continued. "Are they unhappy too?"
"Most of them are very happy," said Murumbi, and I noticed just the slightest edge of contempt in his tone. "Why should they not be? They are men now. They spend their days in idle talk, and painting their faces and their bodies, and at nights they go to the village and drink pombe and dance. Soon some of them will marry and sire children and start shambas of their own, and some day they will sit in the Council of Elders." He spat on the ground. "Indeed, there is no reason why they should not be happy, is there?"
"None," I agreed.
He stared defiantly at me.
"Perhaps you would like to tell me the reason for your unhappiness?" I suggested.
"Are you not the mundumugu?" he said caustically.
"Whatever else I am, I am not your enemy."
He sighed deeply, and the tension seemed to drain from his body, to be replace by resignation. "I know you are not, Koriba," he said. "It is just that there are times when I feel like this entire world is my enemy."
"Why should that be?" I asked. "You have food to eat and pombe to drink, you have a hut to keep you warm and dry, there are only Kikuyu here, you have undergone the circumcision ritual and are now a man, you live in a world of plenty...so why should you feel that such a world is your enemy?"
He pointed to a black she-goat that was grazing placidly a few yards away.
"Do you see that goat, Koriba?" he asked. "She accomplishes more with her life than I do with mine."
"Don't be silly," I said.
"I am being serious," he replied. "Every day she provides milk for the village, once a year she produces a kid, and when she dies it will almost certainly be as a sacrifice to Ngai. She has a purpose to her life."
"So have we all."
He shook his head. "That is not so, Koriba."
"You are bored?" I asked.
"If the journey through life can be likened to a journey down a broad river, then I feel that I am adrift with no land in sight."
"But you have a destination in sight," I said. "You will take a wife, and start a shamba. If you work hard, you will own many cattle and goats. You will raise many sons and daughters. What is wrong with that?"
"Nothing," he said, "if I had anything to do with it. But my wife will raise my children and till my fields, and my sons will herd my animals, and my daughters will weave the fabric for my garments and help their mothers cook my food." He paused. "And I...I will sit around with the other men, and discuss the weather, and drink pombe, and someday, if I live long enough, I will join the Council of Elders, and the only thing that will change is that I will now talk to my friends in Koinnage's boma instead of my own. And then one day I will die. That is the life I must look forward to, Koriba."
He kicked the ground with his foot, sending up little flurries of dust. "I will pretend that my life has more meaning than that of a she-goat," he continued. "I will walk ahead of my wife while she carries the firewood, and I will tell myself that I am doing this to protect her from attack by the Maasai or the Wakamba. I will build my boma taller than a man's head and lay thorns across the top of it, and tell myself that this is to protect my cattle against the lion and the leopard, and I will try not to remember that there have been never been any lions or leopards on Kirinyaga. I will never be without my spear, though I do nothing but lean on it when the sun is high in the sky, and I will tell myself that without it I could be torn to pieces by man or beast. All these things I will tell myself, Koriba...but I will know that I am lying."
"And Ngala and Keino and Njupo felt the same way?" I said.
"Yes."
"Why did they kill themselves?" I asked. "It is written in our charter that anyone who wishes to leave Kirinyaga may do so. They need only have walked to that area known as Haven, and a Maintenance ship would have picked them up and taken them anywhere they wished to go."
"You still do not understand, do you?" he said.
"No, I do not," I admitted. "Enlighten me."
"Men have reached the stars, Koriba," he said. "They have medicines and machines and weapons that are beyond our imagining. They live in cities that dwarf our village." He paused again. "But here on Kirinyaga, we live the life that we lived before the Europeans came and brought the forerunners of such things with them. We live as the Kikuyu have always lived, as you say we were meant to live. How, then, can we go back to Kenya? What could we do? How would we feed and shelter ourselves? The Europeans changed us from Kikuyu into Kenyans once before, but it took many years and many generations. You and the others who created Kirinyaga meant no harm, you only did what you thought was right, but you have seen to it that I can never become a Kenyan. I am too old, and I am starting too far behind."
