Kiti Moto

Farawe · 1985

Mokaya made the stool in the week before school opened. He cut a block from one of the cypresses the settler had planted along the road, split it, shaped the seat with an adze, and bored three holes for the legs with an iron he heated in the cooking fire until it glowed. The smoke from the holes smelled like Christmas. On the last evening he set the stool on the floor in front of his son and stepped back from it, the way he stepped back from a cow he had just bought.

“Sit,” he said.

Nicodemus sat. The stool did not move. His father nodded once, which was what he did instead of smiling, and gave the only instruction he would ever give about it. “A stool you leave is a stool you lose.”

Everybody called the boy Demo, because nobody in the village could say Nicodemus without stopping halfway to rest. He was seven, and the school was five kilometres away. In the mornings the road filled with children carrying furniture, a procession of small removal men in khaki shorts, and Demo learned to read the households of Farawe by what their children carried. A stool like his meant a father with tools. A paraffin tin meant a father with a shop, or a thirst. A plank on two stones, carried in three trips by two sisters, meant a mother doing the work of somebody who had left. On the way back the same procession went home with the same furniture, because everybody’s father had said the same thing.

Farawe Primary School had one long block with mud walls and a grass roof, for the big classes, and a wide acacia at the edge of the compound, for Standard One. The blackboard was a painted plank nailed to the trunk. On Fridays the big classes mixed cow dung with water and smeared their floors until the cracks closed and the dust lay down, and Demo envied them with his whole heart. That was where real school happened: inside, on a floor somebody looked after. Standard One had roots.

It was the first year of the new system. In 1985 the government had changed the shape of school to eight years of primary, four of secondary and four of university, and Mwalimu Wekesa wrote it on the plank in the first week, 8-4-4, and made them chant it until it sounded like a times table. Nobody in Standard One knew what any of the numbers held. They chanted it walking home. The cattle did not seem to mind.

Kiprop came in the second week. He was a Sabaot boy from the slopes of the mountain, thin and quick, with a shirt that had belonged to a bigger brother and a way of looking at a ball as if it owed him money. He carried nothing. Each morning he rolled a flat stone from the edge of the compound to the acacia, and each evening he rolled it back, because a stone left under the tree was a stone somebody else sat on. Somebody laughed at the stone, once. Kiprop could throw.

On a Monday in the third week the headmaster came out to the tree with his hands behind his back. An inspector was coming from town on Thursday to see the new system with his own eyes. Every pupil would be clean. Every pupil would be seated. He said “seated” again, looking at the stone, and went back inside.

“On Thursday,” said Mwalimu Wekesa, when he had gone, “every one of you is on the kiti moto. The hot seat.” The class laughed. Demo did not. He was thinking of his father’s iron, glowing in the fire.

After the bell Mwalimu kept him back. “You will share,” he said.

The stool was Demo’s the way his name was his. Nobody shared a name. He did not say this. In Farawe children did not say no to teachers; they said yes and arrived late.

On Thursday he arrived late. Under the acacia the ground had been swept smooth as a plate. The headmaster had had the stones carried away before the bell, because a stone is not a seat, and Kiprop was standing at the end of the row with his arms folded and his shirt washed and his eyes on the road. Demo put his stool down. He looked at it, and at Kiprop, and at Mwalimu Wekesa, who was looking at the sky. Then he sat on one half of it.

Kiprop sat on the other half. A three-legged stool made for one boy will hold two only if each holds on to the other, so they held on, an arm each across the other’s back, like men at a funeral. Kiprop smelled of woodsmoke. Neither of them looked at the other.

The inspector came at eleven, in a white Land Rover that brought half the road with it. He wore a grey safari suit and carried a notebook. “Hamjambo, watoto?” “Hatujambo!” He walked along the row counting with the end of his pen. At Demo and Kiprop the pen stopped for a moment, considered, and counted two.

“Who can tell me,” he said, “what is eight-four-four?”

The acacia was very quiet. Demo put up his hand, carefully, because his other arm was holding Kiprop. “Eight years of primary,” he said, “four years of secondary, four years of university.”

“Very good. And what is a university?”

Demo did not know. Kiprop leaned so close to his ear that the stool tilted, and whispered, “Town.”

“It is very far,” said Demo, which was true of both.

The inspector laughed, a big pleased laugh, and wrote something in his notebook, and Demo was certain it was his name. Afterwards, at the Land Rover, the headmaster’s voice carried across the compound. “Here we are self-reliant, sir. Every child brings his own.” The inspector wrote that down too.

The milk had come that morning in crates, the way it came every week, and before he left the inspector stood by the crates and reminded Standard One that the President loved them and that this was why there was milk. The packets were small and triangular, two hundred millilitres each, and you bit a corner off and squeezed. Kiprop drank his in one long pull and then looked, for a while, at Demo’s. Demo drank his own, slowly, all of it, and did not look back.

In the notebook travelling back to town, every pupil in Standard One at Farawe Primary School was seated, and every pupil had milk.

On the way home the stool rode on Demo’s head with one leg loose now, ticking against his skull at every step. Kiprop walked beside him as far as the fork by the dam, carrying nothing, as usual, and talking about the Land Rover, and at the fork he went on towards the mountain without a word.

At home Mokaya turned the stool over in the lamplight and found the loose leg at once. He worked it with his thumb. “Who has been sitting on this?”

“Standard One,” said Demo.

His father looked at him for a long time, and Demo could not tell what he was looking for, or whether he found it.

That night Demo woke to the sound of the adze. In the morning there were cypress shavings by the door, pale as milk, and a block of wood the size of a boy’s seat drying on the kitchen roof. His father did not say who it was for. In that house you did not ask a man what he was making until he had made it.