At this point, Auma and Granny began to speak at length, and Granny said something that again made the others
laugh. Everyone except Auma, who stood up and began to stack the dishes.
“I give up,” Auma said, exasperated.
“What did Granny say?”
“I asked her why our women put up with the arranged marriages. The way men make all the decisions. The wife-
beating. You know what she said? She said that often the women needed to be beaten, because otherwise they would
not do everything that was required of them. You see how we are? We complain, but still we encourage men to treat us
like shit. Look at Godfrey over there. You think, when he hears these things Granny and Dorsila have said, that this
won’t affect his own attitudes?”
Granny couldn’t understand the precise meaning of Auma’s words, but she must have caught the tone, for her voice
suddenly became serious.
“Much of what you say is true, Auma,” she said in Luo. “Our women have carried a heavy load. If one is a fish, one
does not try to fly-one swims with other fish. One only knows what one knows. Perhaps if I were young today, I would
not have accepted these things. Perhaps I would only care about my feelings, and falling in love. But that’s not the
world I was raised in. I only know what I have seen. What I have not seen doesn’t make my heart heavy.”
I leaned back on the mat and thought about what Granny had said. There was a certain wisdom there, I supposed; she
was speaking of a different time, another place. But I also understood Auma’s frustration. I knew that, as I had been
listening to the story of our grandfather’s youth, I, too, had felt betrayed. My image of Onyango, faint as it was, had
always been of an autocratic man-a cruel man, perhaps. But I had also imagined him an independent man, a man of his
people, opposed to white rule. There was no real basis for this image, I now realized-only the letter he had written to
Gramps saying that he didn’t want his son marrying white. That, and his Muslim faith, which in my mind had become
linked with the Nation of Islam back in the States. What Granny had told us scrambled that image completely, causing
ugly words to flash across my mind. Uncle Tom. Collaborator. House nigger.
I tried to explain some of this to Granny, asking her if our grandfather had ever expressed his feelings about the white
man. Just then, Sayid and Bernard emerged, groggy-eyed, from the house, and Zeituni directed them to the plates of
food that had been set aside for them. It wasn’t until they had settled down to eat, and Auma and the neighbor’s girl
resumed their positions in front of the older women, that Granny returned to her story.
I also did not always understand what your grandfather thought. It was difficult, because he did not like people to
know him so well. Even when he spoke to you, he would look away for fear that you would know his thoughts. So it
was with his attitude towards the white man. One day he would say one thing, and the next day it was as if he was
saying something else. I know that he respected the white man for his power, for his machines and weapons and the
way he organized his life. He would say that the white man was always improving himself, whereas the African was
suspicious of anything new. “The African is thick,” he would sometimes say to me. “For him to do anything, he needs
to be beaten.”
But despite these words, I don’t think he ever believed that the white man was born superior to the African. In fact, he
did not respect many of the white man’s ways or their customs. He thought many things that they did were foolish or