It looked as if what had befallen on Makove and his wife with regard to their son could be likened to the cow that had given birth to fire. However, when the cow wanted to lick the calf, it burnt its lips; but when it wanted to leave the calf, it couldn’t because it would be like abandoning its child.
Talking to a psychiatrist one day Makove explained, “Doctor, you see, it would have been better if my wife and I did not have that son. Also, by getting him it looks as if we dug our own grave. We invested the best of both our health and finance to educate him and we were the happiest parents when we sent him to the United States for university studies.
“Least did we know that when he departed at the airport that that day was going to be the last time we would ever see him; and least did we know that we were sacrificing our son to the American material god.”
“Do you have only one child?” asked the doctor.
“Three children.One son and two daughters who are married and have got big families. They live outside Kenya, but, once in a year or two, they pay us visits and bless us with seeing our grandchildren. The son is our last born. What is the value of bringing up children who run away from you when you are old?”
“You are not alone in that misfortune,” the doctor tried to calm the father suffering from hypertension.
“Doctor,” cried Makove, “I just want to see my son before I die. Don’t try to heal me with the crab of what too many parents, who have lost their children to the United States, have tried to tell me. Can you believe that I have not seen him for seventeen years. We hear that he has not got married; God forbid if he has become homosexual.”
Makove had been receiving psychiatric treatment for a long time. His wife had sought spiritual treatment in the church.. But of late she had been losing weight and her eyes had sunk deeper into the sockets. Year after year they had been praying for the return of Mboka. But it looked as if either God did not listen to them, or he had decided to turn a deaf ear to their faith.
“I want to try the only other option left,” said the desperate father to his wife. When she asked anxiously which option, he replied, “What you people call ‘witchdoctor’.”
If he had said that to her ten years ago she would have hit back sharply by reminding him that she was a born again Christian and believed God would answer her prayers by bringing the son back home. However, this time she kept silent for a while before she asked, “Which witchdoctor?”
“I don’t like the term ‘witchdoctor.’” He replied. “I call them traditional spiritual healer or diviner. I want his power to dig my son out of the American mud and bring him home.”
“Are there such healers?” she asked.
“I’ve heard of someone like that,” he said. “He who seeks doesn’t give up until he gets.”
Those words inspired his wife, although she didn’t believe in them. She had given up praying for Mboka’s return and started quoting what the biblical Job saying: “I was born to this world with nothing: so I should return with nothing.” Now her husband’s words made her remember that a drowning person catches any floating straw. May be there was something in trying to catch the straw. She had married a man who loved saying, “To give up is to sign THE death warrant of your life.”
Stories about witches, witchdoctors, diviners, dreams, spiritualism, and healers were not new things to Makove. But his colonial Christian education had brought him up biased to believe that those were devilish things and, spiritually, THE traditional Africa had nothing to offer to the modern person.
But now, as necessity is the mother of discovery and invention, his desire to see his son before he died had forced him to put down the Bible and go beyond the frontiers OF the Christian belief because, after all, God must be everywhere, even in the frontiers. At least, he who tries and fails is better than he who fails but never tried.
He had just heard of a special spiritual healer. “Ngutu,” the reporter had said, “helps people to recover items they have lost. Now that you have lost your son, why don’t you try on him?”
“My son is not an item,” said Makove.
“What’s the difference?” asked the reporter. “At least try, you never know. I hear he sees things which you and I can’t see, and tells you how to reach them. May be he has a voice that can call out to your son and your son hears. There are people who say Ngutu is like no other traditional healer because he has university education.”
Makove traveled for a full day to reach the healer. Thirty two miles from Kitui town, his hired car reached the end of the road. “From here,” he was told, “you’ll cross the Ngandi River, follow a livestock path which will lead you to a place with a giant white granite stone. Ask anybody you meet and he will direct you to the healer’s home.”
Makove arrived at five o’clock in the afternoon. Ngutu, a gloss black man of small stature bearing a face that defied saying what his age was, had two wives. The second wife was heavily expectant. He lived in a modest mud and grass thatched home that had a large compound. He had two guests when Makove arrived. So Makove had to wait until the next day.
“Eat and sleep,” said Ngutu. “But you’ll have to get up at dawn. That’s when my ears can hear well.”
By sunrise Makove had explained to Ngutu everything about his lost son. Ngutu tested him by asking, “Do you really believe I can help you to bring your son home from America?”
“Someone said you can.”
“And you believed him?” asked Ngutu.
“When you are trapped in a dangerous place you try any opening that appears to offer you way out. I thought I should just try.”
They sat in a dim and small house that was exclusive for Ngutu’s business. The room was meanly lighted by a wooden window that overlooked a vast valley. At that moment Ngutu fidgeted, froze and stared through the window motionlessly for a good while. When he returned into action he cried as if someone had poured cold water on him. He made a series of sniffs as if trying to detect something. He brought up his trunk to say, “Your son is taller than you. He has dimples and a gap between his upper set of teeth.”
“Yeeez!” cried Makove excitedly. “That’s my son, Mboka.”
“But I see that his birth name is different.”
“True,” accepted Makove. “Ndeto was his birth name. I nicknamed him Mboka and the nickname eclipsed the birth name.” Curiosity struck him and he thought aloud, “How come you can see him but I can’t?”
Ngutu went silent meditatively for a while before he finally said, “You can’t see him because your spirit is blind. Mine is not blind.”
“Oh yeah?” cried Makove.
“Yes. Some people are born with a hypersensitive spiritual antenna capable of helping us see, feel, and understand our world. That’s why certain children can detect an oncoming death, just the way cockroaches are capable of sensing an earthquake long before it strikes.” He changed the subject and asked, “How far in education did you go?”
“Ten years of schooling,” replied Makove then asked a clearing question, “I hear you’ve university education, is that true?”
“That’s not true,” replied Ngutu. “I lost interest and dropped off after one and a half years at the university. But that is a subject for another day. Since then I’ve been in this business.”
“Where did you learn it or is it an inborn gift?
“That’s a giant question, which demands extensive an explanation. I can help you to understand me by giving you a brief summary. However, I must start by saying, if you came to see a witchdoctor in me, I’m afraid, you came to see the wrong person. I am a spiritual scientist.”
“What’s that?”
“It started when I was born psychic. I went to school during colonial days and was inspired by one of the subjects we learnt. It was called Rural Science, which introduced me to take interest in observations. One crucial observation was on my grandmother who took neither a bath nor drank water even during prolonged droughts. When she finally took water then we knew within one to two days the rains would pour. She refused wearing modern clothes and kept her traditional clothes, which included one small cloth outfit designed to fall over her and cover her genital.
“Secondly, she was fond of sitting at a particular spot outside the house. There was a local tree that poured seeds all over the compound. When the rains came the seeds germinated. I noticed that those seeds which germinated near her sitting place grew faster than those which germinated from elsewhere. I got curious why that happened. Later I learnt that my grandmother’s spot was charged by special energy conducive to the fast growing of plants.”
“Interesting,” said Makove.
“Yes, it is,” replied Ngutu. “Then one day she did something that confirmed she had a special bodily charge. We used to have a wild bull that terrorized people when they passed near it. One day the bull hit a villager, nearly killing him. My father decided to kill it, but my grandmother pleaded, ‘Give me a day or two and I’ll kill its sting.’
“My father agreed to her request. I was a boy that time. One day when the cattle were in their shelter and everybody except me and my grandmother had gone, she called me and instructed, ‘Take this thing and go and beat that bull in the head when it charges toward you.’ The thing was her genital covering.
“I took it and, holding it by the two strings used for fastening around her waist, I advanced to the charging mad bull. When it came close to me in an attempt to hit me, I beat the face with the dirty cloth. Suddenly, the bull responded with strange sounds as if it had been badly hit.
“You know what? The bull lost its charge completely and from that day onwards it could be touched and be played with by children without attacking them. From that day I knew the dynamics of bodily charges and my curiosity drove me into many researches and frontiers in which I discovered how to exploit the dynamics of environmental, natural and human spiritual waves.”
Makove was astounded by the revelation. The scientist explained, “However, if you want me to help you, go home and bring me any items your son used privately, like clothes, shoes, hat, pen, handkerchief, which had never been used by someone. If only you could get me his hair!”
“How much will you charge me?”
“You’ll pay me nothing until you’ve seen your son.”
“Not even the least advance?”
“No!” he said emphatically.
Makove returned, believing that Ngutu didn’t want any payment because he knew too well he would fail to bring the son home. However, after a few days Malove returned with everything. He was absolutely lucky to bring the comb his son used, which carried some hair threads.
“Wonderful!” cried Ngutu when he received the items he asked, “Is there any phone communication between you and your son?”
“Yes, once in a while he rings us. He also writes to us although rarely. This is his latest letter,” he showed it to Ngutu who was happy to receive it saying, “Thanks, it’s an important material.”
It took three days for the healer to prepare the concoction. One of the concoctions was made from water which had washed those items Makove had brought, including herbs. The concoction was put into as bottle and Ngutu explained what it was. He was given small pieces of sticks which Makove would chew following certain instructions. He would have to drink the water. The healer said, “Drink all the water in the bottle; don’t be afraid of it; it has been treated against germs.”
“After you have accomplished the instruction, wake up just before sunrise and make sure you are alone in the house. Remove all your clothes and anything else – wrist watch or ring. Stand on the earth without any covering and look in the direction of the sunrise. Just at the breaking moment of sunrise, cry out, calling the words written on this paper. It would help if you give your son a phone call and if he answers the call, greet him then hang up.”
“What if he calls back?” asked Makove.
“Say you just wanted to hear his voice and don’t engage him in anything else. If he wants to talk, let him do so. After finishing that, put on your clothes and do not eat anything until sunset. That’s everything. If things work out, your son will tell you when he will come home.”
“He has repeatedly told me that and failed to come home,” said Makove.
“He’ll not fail this time,” said Ngutu and added an important detail, “If you want him to get married when he comes home, look for the girl you think would be the right one for him to marry. Invite her to your family and let her eat with your family. Put this powder into her food; it is harmless. Let her live in your home as a guest until your son’s arrival. But don’t disclose to her that you are looking for a daughter in-law. When your son comes home and asks who she is, simply tell him that she is a guest.”
By the time Makove finished taking the herb, he discovered that his voice had changed appreciably and acquired a hoarse and wavy tone. Even his wife wondered, “What’s happening to your voice?”
It was a chilly morning when he stood outside the house absolutely naked facing the sunrise direction. With a shaken voice he recited the words addressing his lost son. After delivering the message he dressed and left hurriedly for the market, nearly a mile away, the only place where he had access to the phone. By ten o’clock he had accomplished everything and returned home with a wish to take some sleep. He had hardly slept the previous night for thoughts.
Just three days after Makove’s call, Mboka shocked his parents with another promise of coming home in a fortnight and emphasized, “Believe me, this time it’s real; I’m coming home.”
The emphasized promise gave them a slim hope. However, to be on the safe side, they went ahead to implement the healer’s advice on how to trap the son. For their daughter in-law-to-be they chose one beautiful and high school graduate girl called Katua from an old family friend, then invited Katua to live with them while they waited for Mboka’s arrival.
For Mboka, the call from his father left him mysteriously badly wounded at heart and he not only lost his sleep but appetite for the next days, gripped by the fear that if he didn’t go home something terrible would strike him. In fact, if he had had all his traveling papers ready he would have left immediately; however it took nearly ten days to have them processed.
Exactly fifteen days after Mboka’s promise to come home, he astounded his family by his arrival. It had been seventeen years since he left Kenya. Unfortunately, he shocked them when he said, “I’ve got only three weeks to stay and return to my job.”
However, Mboka alias Ndeto never returned to the United States of America. He married Katua urgently and dropped the idea of going back to the States. By that time his father had returned to Ngutu bursting with excitement and asked, “What do I pay you for returning my son?”
“One thousand five hundred shillings,” he astonished Makove.
“I can’t believe it!” cried Makove. “That little?” He tried to shock the healer by giving him twenty-five thousand shillings, just half of what he wanted to give him, then bring the balance later when the land buyer had paid him up. Hew had sold a portion of his land to raise the money. Ngutu refused the money by saying, “That’s your money; mine is just one thousand and five hundred shillings only.”
Makove paid him the small amount and went home puzzled not only by the small price but by the bigger puzzle of the mystic power in Ngutu’s herbs which had changed Mboka’s mind so drastically.
THE END
