Miss Lothrop, with as many bows and ruffles as ever, congratulated me. There was none of the doubt she had shown before. I don’t think she would have chosen a woman doctor for the mission, but now that one was available, I think she was resigned. In an indifferent voice she said, “We are very pleased.” And then she smiled at me and said, “How proud your father would be.”
FOURTEEN
I made a last trip to Stagsway. Over the years it had changed. There was less of Grandfather there and more of the Royal Bird Society.
Mr. Duggen complained. “They tramp right through my roses to see the birds what don’t get close enough for them. I believe they’d like ’em served up on a silver platter.”
Still, I knew Grandfather would be pleased to see how enthusiastic his visitors were and how, in spite of Mr. Duggen’s abused roses, Stagsway kept its charm. Ellie and Arthur had married, and Mr. Pernick shyly confided, “I’m pleased to say I’m engaged, Miss Pritchard, to a charming woman who is particularly knowledgeable about the migrating habits of the Motacilla trochilus.”
Though he made no effort to stop me, Mr. Grumbloch was astounded that I wished to go back to Tumaini. “You are leaving civilization for heat and dust and wild animals. I don’t see it.”
Frieda was delighted. She had very odd ideas of what was worn in Africa and took me to Liberty on Regent Street to buy silk frocks, “for garden parties,” and to Brigg in St. James’s Street to buy umbrellas and parasols, “to keep the sun from your complexion.”
“I’ll never have an occasion for a silk dress,” I pleaded, “and a straw hat will take care of my complexion.”
The Grumblochs saw me off, Mr. Grumbloch furnishing me with money orders and Keating’s insect powder and Frieda with Cadbury chocolates and Virginia Woolf’s latest novel. Frieda promised to visit me. “I want to see if Tumaini really exists.”
I thought the four-week voyage would never end. So eager was I to reach Africa that at times the ship seemed caught in the water like a leaf endlessly turning around in a pool. I ate my chocolates, read my books, dined, and chatted with the other passengers, but my mind was always sailing ahead of the ship. Would I be able to rebuild Tumaini? Would the lives of the Kikuyu and Masai be safe in my hands? Would the Kikuyu and Masai trust me? One day I answered the questions one way and the next day another way. I was like the leopard at the moment before it springs, tasting only what was to come.
We suffered through a terrible storm with rolling seas. We saw flying fish and dolphins follow the ship like obedient puppies. We had singsongs after dinner, and there were masquerade balls and tea dances. There were charades and games of bridge and backgammon and shuffleboard tournaments and badminton contests. There were flirtations and quarrels and visits to ports. This time I saw Alexandria, but mostly I was bored and impatient, so that finally, when Mombasa’s ancient fort came into view, I wept with relief.
The train from Mombasa to Nairobi chugged along slowly, but now I didn’t care, for on either side of the railway were the familiar tall grasses and flat-topped acacia trees, and in the distance my old friend, Mount Kenya. Medicines and surgical equipment were waiting for me in Nairobi, and so was my automobile, a Ford truck that I could use to carry supplies to Tumaini. The gentleman at the garage where I picked up the truck was obviously surprised to see that R. Pritchard was a young woman; however, the car had been paid for and he turned it over to me. He pointed out the superior gear shift, the double-beam headlights, and the hand-operated windshield wipers and then waited for me to drive off.
When I stood there for some minutes, he asked, “Is there some difficulty with the truck, Madam?”
With a scarlet face, I murmured, “I’ve never driven an automobile.”
“Ah,” he said. “Perhaps I might just demonstrate the basic workings of it for you.” More uncertainly he added, “And then I could accompany you while you gave the truck a little run about the city.”
So began what must have been the most terrifying moments of the gentleman’s life, but after a bit I caught on, and leaving him at the garage, I collected all my equipment and a large cat, for I had not forgotten the rats that had wandered into our house. The cat was the tawny color of a lion, and for a name I gave it the Swahili word for lion, Simba. Full of joy, I drove to Tumaini, stirring up a plume of red dust like the veil of a bride on her way to the happiest day of her life.
Time in Africa is not like time in England, where an ancient ruin stands stone on stone for the centuries. Man is not the master in Africa. As I turned off the main road from Nairobi onto the road that led to Tumaini, a road that I had known well, I hesitated. It was no longer a road, but an overgrown track, a trail that might have been made by animals traveling to and from a waterhole.
Seeing what even a few short years had done, I had my first doubts. With the grasses sweeping the bottom of the truck, I pushed on, afraid that any minute it would plunge into an antbear hole or get stuck in soft sand. When at last I reached Tumaini, just as I feared, Tumaini wasn’t there.
The rains had dissolved the mud bricks. The bati, the corrugated iron of the roof, had been carried away to become someone else’s roof or perhaps to make bracelets. Ants had made a meal of the wooden doors. If someone dies in a Kikuyu hut, the Kikuyu think it unlucky and burn down the hut. It was like that with Tumaini. There had been deaths, and now everything had moldered away. After my initial shock I scoured the grasses, determined to find some evidence that Tumaini had existed, but the only proof I found were the crosses that marked my parents’ graves and the graves of Kanoro’s father and the missionary. And Valerie’s grave. Someone was tending the small graveyard.
As I stood there telling my parents that I had returned and what I meant to do, I noticed a movement among the bushes. I was ready to run back to the truck when Kanoro stepped out. Or I thought it was Kanoro, the Kanoro whom I recalled from my childhood.
“Bibi Rachel?” He backed away from me as if I were a spirit, and no telling whether good or evil.
“Kanoro?”
“Nina itwa Ngigi.”
Nina itwa: “I am called.” The first Swahili words I had heard since leaving Tumaini. Of course, years had passed. It was Kanoro’s son, Ngigi, the mtoto whose leg I had nursed. I saw that around his neck was a cord and strung onto the cord a small black-and-silver ornament. A part of a stethoscope! That remnant of Tumaini gave me hope. Swahili words came back to me in a rush. “Ngigi, you are a young man.”
“Yes, and I have a wife and a bit of land and soon a child. Are you truly here?”
“Oh, yes. I’ve come to stay. I mean to open the hospital again. Will you help me, Ngigi? And tell me where your baba is and Ita and Wanja and Nduta and everyone from the hospital.”
He seemed surprised that I did not know these things. He explained as if to a small child, “They are all at their shambas except Nduta, who has gone to live with her husband’s family. My baba is at his shamba also, but he shivers and sweats and does not stir about much. If you bring back the hospital, will a doctor come to make him well?”
“Ngigi, I am a doctor now. I’ll come and see your baba at once.” Ngigi did not seem in the least surprised to find I was a doctor, and I remembered that there were women witch doctors as well as men. At least here I would have no battle to fight.
I took up my medicine bag and followed Ngigi, learning as I hurried along the familiar path that Ngigi came regularly to keep the graveyard from disappearing into the bush. “Baba sends me,” Ngigi said. “You gave a promise to him to return, and he would not have you find the graves of your parents gone to nothing. For us a grave means little, but with you it is different.” The Kikuyu carried their dead into the fields, and the insects and the vultures cleaned the bones. It was not unusual to find a bleached bone or even a skull. I thought it would not be a bad thing to end your days scraped clean and resting in the sun.
I all but ran to Kanoro’s shamba. He had aged. When I threw my arms around him, it was like embracing the
small bones of a sparrow.
“Nzuri! Nzuri!” Kanoro said, and I thought how there is no word in English that means both wonderful and terrible and yet at this moment it was the perfect word, for it was wonderful to be back and to have my arms around Kanoro and it was terrible that Tumaini had disappeared and Kanoro was so ill.
“Now, tell me of your sickness,” I said. When I examined him, I found Kanoro was suffering from a severe bout of malaria. Relieved that it was something I could treat, I gave him medicine and ordered rest.
With all of Kanoro’s family about, I was escorted to the one bench in the hut. “Let us hear your story,” Kanoro said. They were amazed at my long journey across the ocean to the land where snow fell. “The house I lived in,” I said, “had enough rooms for a whole Kikuyu village.” They did not quite believe what I told them, but they enjoyed the hearing of it. At last they wanted to know of my plans for the hospital.
“We must find many people to make bricks,” I said, “and we will have to dig a new well, a large one, and we must do it quickly, for the cots have been ordered and the laboratory equipment and a generator as large as your hut. This time the hospital will have all it needs, Kanoro. Now you must get well so that you can help me. I’ll be back tomorrow,” I promised.
Ngigi stood in front of me as I started to leave. “You will need someone at your side,” he said. “Until my baba is well, let me be that person.”
I was grateful to Ngigi. Even as a child I had known that though we imagined ourselves in charge, the Kikuyu understood very well that we would perish without them.
Though the evening was cool, I slept in the bed of the truck, Simba curled at my feet. I could smell the smoke from fires set by the Masai to burn off grass for planting. A male and female spotted owl courted one another. A toad shrilled. At last, and from a great distance, I heard the sound for which I had been hungering, the low roar of a lion. When I fell asleep, it was to the sounds that had been my lullaby as a child.
In the morning Ngigi awoke me. He had brought a dozen men. By afternoon I had a mud-walled house with a thatched roof and a line of people, some of them ill and some who merely said that they were ill so that they might see the red-haired witch doctor. Once I had to leave the line of patients to hide in the cab of the truck and cry, for I was where I wanted to be and doing what I had dreamed of doing.
The next day I was up at dawn. I waited impatiently for the men to return so that we could begin work on the foundation of the hospital, but though I waited until noon, no men came and Ngigi would not explain their absence, though I was sure he understood the reason. Just as I was ready to go to Kanoro’s shamba and ask his advice, Ngigi came to me with a worried frown puckering his young face. “Bibi Rachel, Wangombe comes.”
“Who is Wangombe?” From the fear in Ngigi’s voice, I knew it must be someone bringing trouble with him.
“The old chief of your father’s time, Mabui, is dead, and Wangombe is chief now. He is a man who is a chief at all times, even when he eats and sleeps.”
Wangombe appeared with a small retinue of followers. He was splendid in strings of shells and beads, a cloak of monkey fur, and a headdress of ostrich plumes. I stood up and greeted him formally, bowing. He did the same, and we faced each other warily, waiting to see who would speak the first word. At last I said, “Wangombe, I am honored to see you here.”
“Msabu, you would not come to me, so I have come to you.”
I saw at once what my mistake had been and was furious with myself, for I knew better. I was in Wangombe’s territory. Wangombe’s men had worked all day for me. All this without my consulting with Wangombe. “Wangombe, I have been away from this land for many years and in the land of another chief.” When I saw his face cloud, I hastened to add, “One not so great as you. Because that other chief was not so great, I had forgotten the power of a chief and his importance. I see my mistake. You were very generous to allow your men to come here yesterday. I have many, many days’ work ahead. I hope you will allow your men to help me.”
“I would be honored to have my men give help, but there is the matter of their crops. The planting must be done and the crops cared for. They cannot be spared.”
It was the women who planted the crops and tended them. The men would have nothing to do with crops. “Wangombe, I know it will be a great sacrifice for the men to give up the tending of the crops. You will tell me what a suitable wage is for such a sacrifice.”
After that there was heavy bargaining, with Ngigi whispering in my ear that Wangombe was asking too much. At last we came to an agreement, and as if by magic the men appeared and cheerfully went to work.
I had been making plans for the hospital for years, but I had been young when the hospital had been there, and I didn’t know what its problems had been. Ita and Wanja and Jata were found. We all sat together at Kanoro’s shamba, and I drew pictures with a sharp stick on the packed dirt floor of Kanoro’s hut. Jata was as bossy as ever, but her ideas were useful. “There must be space in the children’s room for the mothers to sleep.” And I agreed, for I remembered many a mother who would not leave her child at night and slept under the child’s cot.
Ita was a great help, for he had worked in the operating room. “We must have doors that close firmly, Bibi Rachel, so that the relatives don’t gather to look over our shoulders.”
Kanoro said, “There must be a place without trees or dried grasses for the families to cook their posho and roast their goats without setting fires.”
Chief Wangombe came often and had his own suggestions. He had once been to Nairobi and had seen the three-story hotel. “One house sits on another house,” he said, “and on that other house yet one more house. The putting of houses on top of one another would save more land for growing crops or for pasture.”
I grew fond of Ngigi. He was more solemn than his father and thought of things beyond the shambas and villages. He confided to me, “A Kikuyu from Nairobi visited the shambas and spoke of ‘Africa for the Africans.’ He told of a leader called Jomo Kenyatta. My father ordered the man to go away, but I followed him and listened. The government gave land to the English soldiers who fought in the war. Some of that land had been farmed by the Kikuyu. The government gave no land to the Kikuyu who went to war for them. That is not fair. The Kikuyu are not allowed to own land. Why is that? The man, Kenyatta, spoke of uhuru. Was I wrong to listen?”
The word uhuru means freedom, a word dear to me. “I don’t think you were wrong to listen,” I told Ngigi.
Not only patients came, but peddlers arrived at my doorway with eggs and chickens, squash, bananas, and even goats and sheep. I had been gathered in by the people. I had ordered a small piano, and on Sundays there were church services again. Kanoro, who was much better, came with his family and sang in a loud, sure voice, for he had not forgotten the hymns.
I had one sad duty. I wrote to Mr. Grumbloch to contact the Pritchards about Valerie’s grave. An answer came. The Pritchards wished to have Valerie’s coffin returned to England. At last Valerie left the country she so disliked, and I thought of the pony I had seen galloping happily through the grasses and wildflowers of the New Forest.
While waiting for the operating room to be finished and the delivery of a generator to give us electricity, I could attempt little surgery. Instead I treated the lepers, the infections, and the fevers, and brought babies into the world when they were stubborn about coming. By day I was overwhelmed by wasiwasi: a crooked wall, men who did not show up for work, constant trips into Nairobi to bring back supplies in the little truck.
In the evening when the last patient left and Ngigi went home, I counted the new rows of brick that had been laid that day at the hospital and ate a supper of cold chicken and beans. I sat on my porch looking out at the way the hills leaned against the horizon, thinking often of Mother and Father, sure that they would be pleased with the hospital.
It was February, hot, and too early for the rains. All around me were the rustling sounds of
small night creatures, like the light fingers of a child tapping your shoulder for attention. In the distance I could hear the lions, restless in the heat, roaring their complaints. I thought of the lions in the zoo at Regent’s Park and mourned for them in their captivity. The little green monkeys bickered with one another in the baobab tree, and the bat-eared foxes that slept by day crept out to hunt for termites. A gecko climbed the mud walls of the house to catch the insects attracted by the hurricane lamp. When I awoke at dawn, it was to the sad calls of the wood doves with pale-pink breasts the color of the sunrise.
I knew there would be wasiwasi, troubles that no medicine could cure. Drought might come, and with drought, starvation. The government was raising the hut tax and taking land from the Kikuyu reserves. How long would the Kikuyu put up with that? I could not tell the government what to do or bring the rains. I had dreams for Tumaini, dreams of a large hospital with the latest equipment and many doctors, a school for the children, and a nursing school. Many of my dreams for Tumaini might come to nothing, but Tumaini was the Swahili word for hope.
GLOSSARY
Swahili is an African language that incorporates words from a number of different languages, including Arabic and English. It is pronounced just as it is written.
baba: father
bati: corrugated iron
bibi: miss
bwana: mister or master
memsahib: mistress; pronounced msabu by some
Listening for Lions Page 13