In the industrial areas the mere difficulty of getting hold of a house is one of the worst aggravations of poverty. It means that people will put up with anything — any hole and corner slum, any misery of bugs and rotting floors and cracking walls, any extortion of skinflint landlords and blackmailing agents — simply to get a roof over their head. Some people hardly seem to realise that such things as decent houses exist and look on bugs and leaking roofs as acts of God; others rail bitterly against their landlords; but all cling desperately to their houses lest worse should befall. In the town of Wigan, for instance, there are over 2000 houses standing which have been condemned for years.

My notes bring back what I have seen, but they cannot in themselves give much idea of what conditions are like in those fearful northern slums. Words are such feeble things. What is the use of a brief phrase like ‘roof leaks’ or ‘four beds for eight people’? It is the kind of thing your eye slides over, registering nothing. And yet what a wealth of misery they hide! Take the question of overcrowding, for instance. Quite often you have eight or even ten people living in a three-roomed house, sleeping in at most four beds. In one house, I remember, three grown-up girls shared the same bed and all went to work at different hours, each disturbing the other when she got up or came in. Then there is the misery of leaking roofs and oozing walls, which in winter make some rooms almost uninhabitable. Then there are the bugs. Once bugs get into a house they are in it till the crack of doom; there is no way of exterminating them.

In such places as these a woman is only a poor drudge muddling among an infinity of jobs. She may keep up her spirits, but she cannot keep up her standards of cleanliness and tidiness. There is always something to be done, and no conveniences and almost literally not room to turn round. No sooner have you washed one child’s face that another’s is dirty; before you have washed the crocks from one meal the next is due to be cooked.

The squalor and the confusion! A tub full of filthy water, a basin full of unwashed crocks there, more crocks piled in any odd corner, torn newspaper littered everywhere, and in the middle always the same dreadful covered with sticky oilcloth and crowded dreadful table covered with sticky oilcloth and crowded with cooking pots and irons and half-darned stockings and pieces of stale bread and bits of cheese wrapped round with greasy newspaper! There are scenes that stand out vividly in my memory. The almost bare living-room of a cottage in a little mining village, where the whole family was out of work and everyone seemed to be underfed; and the big family of grown-up sons and daughters sprawling aimlessly about, all strangely alike with red hair, splendid bones and pinched faces spoiled by malnutrition and idleness.

A School window in Wales

I first became aware of the unemployment problem in 1928. At that time I had just come back from Burma where unemployment was just a word. And I had gone to Burma when I was still a boy and the post-war boom was not quite over. When I first saw unemployed men at close quarters, the thing that horrified and amazed me was to find that many of them were ashamed of being unemployed. I remember the shock of astonishment it gave me, when I first mingled with tramps and beggars, to find that a fair proportion of them were decent young miners and cotton-workers gazing at their destiny with the same sort of dumb amazement as an animal in a trap. They simply could not understand what was happening to them. When a quarter of a million miners are unemployed, it is part of the order of things that Alf Smith, a miner living in the back streets of Newcastle, should be out of work. Alf Smith is merely one of the quarter million, a statistical unit. But no human being finds it easy to regard himself as a statistical unit. So long as Bert Jones across the street is still at work, Alf Smith is bound to feel himself dishonoured and a failure. Hence that frightful feeling of impotence and despair which is the worst evil of unemployment.

There is no doubt of the deadening, debilitating effect of unemployment upon everybody. Take a miner, for instance, who has worked in the pit since childhood and has been trained to be a miner and nothing else. How the devil is he to fill up the empty days? It is absurd to say that he ought to be looking for work. There is no work to look for, and everybody knows it.

Edited from The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell, Secker and Warburg, London, 1986.

In the village of Ilmorog, in Kenya, Africa, the rains have failed for the second year running. The village Elders blame the drought on shopkeeper Abdullah’s donkey. But others, like village schoolteacher Karega and Nyakinyua the old woman have other ideas. They hold a meeting. What should they do?

The meeting was well attended. Njuguna told the people what Mwathi wa Mugo had said:

‘We send this donkey away. If it was a goat we would beat it and then send it away and ask it to pass the plague to others. This animal is not a goat. But we are using it for the same illness: I say we shall beat it and when it is about to die we shall send it away into the plains to carry this plague away.’

A few other elders spoke and agreed with the idea: a donkey was truly the stranger in their midst!

‘But perhaps the teachers of our children might have a modern cure for an old illness,’ another elder suggested.

Karega trembled. In school debates he had talked and argued. But he had never before talked to a gathering of elders. He could not now think of an appropriate riddle, proverb or story with which to drive home his points. So he made a plain speech:

‘A donkey has no influence on the weather. No animal or man can change the laws of nature. But people can use the laws of nature. The magic we should be getting is this: the one which will make this land so yield in times of rain that we can keep aside a few grains for when it shines. We want the magic that will make our cows yield so much milk that we shall have enough to drink and exchange the rest for things we cannot grow here. That magic is in our hands. If we kill Abdullah’s donkey we shall all be cutting our other leg in a season of drought. I come from Limuru where donkeys have proved to be motorcars that don’t need petrol. When the last grain in your stores is finished, will any of us be able to walk afar and fetch food and water on our backs? Let us rather look to ourselves to see what we can do to save us from the drought.’

He told them the idea of a delegation to their MP in the city. ‘We give him our votes so that he can carry our troubles. But if we do not show him that we have troubles so he can pass them to the government, can we blame him?’

They started talking and whispering among themselves. Yes, that was right…we should let those in authority know. Yes, yes, maybe if they knew of our plight they would not send men to collect taxes and others to demand money for organisations the village knew nothing about…

A Kikuyu witchdoctor

Njuguna stood up and opposed the idea of going to the city. ‘My ears have heard strange words. That we should send a whole community to beg. Have you heard of a whole people abandoning their land and their property to go and beg in strange highways? We shall send the young man to the city and he will tell the MP to come to us. Yes, it is the MP who should come to us.’

There was renewed argument. Nyakinyua stood up:

‘I think we should go. It is our turn to make things happen. There was a time when things happened the way we in Ilmorog wanted them to happen. We had power over the movement of our limbs. We made up our own words and sang them and we danced to them. But there came a time when this power was taken from us. We danced, yes, but somebody else called out the words and the song.

‘First the Wazungu1. They would send trains here from there. They ate our forests. What did they give us in return? Then they sent for our young men. They went on swallowing our youth. Ours is only to bear in order for the city to take.

‘In the war against Wazungu we gave our share of blood. A sacrifice. Why? Because we wanted to be able to sing our song. But what happened? They have continued to entice our youth away. What do they send us in return? They send us messengers who demand money. They send others with strange objects and they tell us that they are measuring a big road. Where is the road? The MP also came once. Have we seen him since? Aca!

‘That is why Ilmorog must now go there and see thing that only takes but never gives back. We must surround the city and demand back our share. We must sing our tune and dance to it. Ilmorog must go as one voice.’

She sat down to a thought-charged silence.

The white man, in Kenya’s case British colonialists.

Edited from: Petals of Blood, by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Heinemann, 1986, pp. 114-6

Ngugi wa Thiong’o was born in 1938 in Limuru, Kenya. Novelist, playwright and social critic, he wrote on life and times in Kenya since its independence. As he became sensitive to the effects of colonialism in Africa, he adopted his traditional name and started writing in the language of Kenya’s Kikuyu people. Petals of Blood (1977) is his fourth novel and the last one he wrote in english. An increasingly radical writer, he now lives in London exiled by the Kenyan government.