Echoes From a Distant Land

by Frank Coates

  ‘Mostly.’

  ‘Will you be able to manage when my time comes?

  He hesitated a moment too long to give Dana the confidence she needed.

  ‘I will.’

  Dana was at the end of her patience. Her pregnancy seemed to have lasted years. The babies kicked — and seemingly fought — all night, keeping her awake even more than the heat. Her feet were like melons and her back constantly ached.

  She had lost all fear of the births and now simply wanted to be delivered of the twins and have her body, and her life, back under her own control.

  The garden, which had been her refuge, was now her prison. She often spent her time in its solitary shaded corners to replay the events that led to her present situation. Her existence had shrunk so much that she could scarcely believe she’d had a life in Kipipiri. She doubted that her grotesque body could have ever been locked in a passionate embrace. Her friends faded into obscurity and although she’d left him only months before, Sam was no more than a distant dream. There was no one in her life who she could call on for support; and now the imminent birth of her babies had condemned her to remain in Lamu until it was over. She felt trapped and afraid.

  Her self-confidence was shattered and she had come into the garden with pen and paper to write to Edward. She needed reassurance that everything would be all right after she gave birth. She wanted to tell Edward that she would leave for England with him as soon as she was able, if he was still of that view.

  Before she reached her chair, Dana gasped, and dropped the pen and paper. The pain was short, sharp and very intense. After a moment it eased, but it had frightened her, and she made her way from the fountain at the bottom of the garden back to the house.

  The pain came again. Worse. She bit her lip, thinking that it couldn’t be the time. It was only January and full term was not until next month.

  She paused to take a breath and it came again.

  A cry escaped her. She tried to be calm. What if it was the babies? It was too soon. What if it wasn’t? Something could be terribly wrong!

  ‘Amina!’ she called, holding the weight of her belly in her two hands.

  She felt water trickle down her legs. Or was it blood?

  ‘Amina!’

  Dana reluctantly returned to consciousness. She was in the airless heat of her small bedroom with the walls again threatening to close around her.

  She recalled Amina helping her to her bedroom. After what seemed like hours, Dr Cahill had arrived, looking more frightened than she felt. Then the smell of cinnamon and cloves filled her nose as he poured a quantity of ether onto a piece of gauze. It carried her away in a blessed release from pain.

  A voice came through, demanding she push.

  Dreamless sleep followed periods of intense pain.

  Push!

  She heard someone scream. It sounded like her voice. The gauze again. She drifted into a twilight place interspersed with visions or dreams. At no time was she sure what was real and what was not.

  Push!

  The pain returned, jolting her rudely awake.

  Push!

  Cloves and cinnamon filled her head.

  Dimly she saw Dr Cahill lift a white baby smeared with blood. She tried to hold onto the sight but she slipped quietly away — only to return to semi-consciousness moments or hours later to see another baby in his arms. A dark baby. A black baby.

  Now, fully conscious, she tried to resurrect the images. Some had been real while others, she thought, had to be the ether.

  Amina was at the bedside, nodding and smiling, and fanning herself with a large feathered fan. She waved it towards Dana, fluttering some air in her direction. It cleared her head.

  Also beside the bed was a crib, with two bundles loosely wrapped in cotton.

  Dana stared at her babies — the term strangely foreign to her mind. Two babies; two colours. A black baby and a white baby, just as in her dreams.

  She turned to Amina, who was still smiling, as if there was nothing odd about it. Had she even seen the babies? She wasn’t sure her eyes weren’t playing tricks on her. Perhaps she was still asleep.

  At that moment, Dr Cahill came into the room, his eyes on a book open in his hands and his spectacles at risk of falling off the end of his large red nose.

  ‘Ah! You’re back with us,’ he said. ‘Just in time.’

  He looked to the ceiling, thinking. ‘That is, you are just in time. No, that’s not right. I should have said I am just in time … to see you awake. Conscious, that is.’

  ‘Doctor …?’ she said in a quavering voice. She was unable to form the question she needed so desperately answered.

  ‘What? Oh, yes. As I say, just in time.’ He dropped his eyes to the book again and began to read from it. ‘Superfecundity: from the Latin; fecundus: fertile, and supra: better than average.’

  He lifted the book up to show her the cover. ‘Look at this — Ogilvie’s Dictionary of Medical Conditions. I knew I kept these old books for something. Had them since medical school.’

  Dana gave him a pleading look.

  ‘Yes … well. Superfecundity. The fertilisation of two eggs by separate acts of sexual intercourse.’ He looked over his glasses at Dana. ‘Quite rare, as you can imagine, but more to the point: how would we ever ordinarily know that we were looking at a case of superfecundity? I mean, these little ones might simply be dizygotic twins — non-identical twins. In which case we could only deduce if it was a case of superfecundity by discerning a marked difference in size, that is, one twin conceived in one ovulatory cycle and the other in the next.

  ‘Dr Cahill … please!’

  ‘Sorry, sorry. Where was I? So your twins are clearly a case of two ova released in the one ovulatory cycle, or superfecundation, or more correctly, heteropaternal superfecundation, meaning they are from different eggs and different fathers. Rather obviously, I should think.’

  ‘But …’ Dana said. ‘How is that possible?’

  ‘Quite simple, really. The white twin is a girl baby, conceived from the sperm of a white man, and the, um, mixed-race child is a boy, conceived from a black man.’

  Dana recalled that she had made love with Sam and her husband on successive days. Removed from the emotion of that time, the memory now brought with it a flush of embarrassment.

  She reached for the crib.

  Amina lifted the white baby girl to her. Dana took her and held her close to her face, inhaling what reminded her of the aroma from a baker’s shop when the loaves have been just taken from the oven. The little one squirmed and screwed up her watery blue eyes.

  Dana tucked her into the crook of her arm and asked for the other baby.

  He was slightly heavier but he had the same warm smell as the girl. His head was covered with a dusting of dark hair, where the girl had none. His skin was the colour of milky coffee, with only the palms of his hands to match his twin sister’s. He opened his mouth, puckered and made a squeak.

  Amina smiled. ‘He wants milk,’ she said.

  ‘Oh,’ Dana said, and Amina helped her loosen her blouse. She placed the darker face to one nipple and the pink one to the other. It took some balancing, but soon they were comfortably placed.

  It was only as she watched her babies contentedly suckling that she realised that her future had suddenly become a great deal more complicated, and she would very soon be forced to face the changed circumstances of her life.

  PART 3

  JELANI

  CHAPTER 32

  1945

  Sam sat back in the impressive new cart he’d been allocated and let the horse find its own pace. It was hot. Around him the country was tinder-dry and suffering the worst drought in living memory. It made his task that day even more difficult.

  He understood why the Governor had given it to him. He was the right man, perhaps the only man, who could do the job without causing widespread trouble.

  He hadn’t expected to be doing this kind of thing when he accepted the appointment
to the Legislative Council. Governor Mitchell had made it clear he wanted him to be more than a figurehead. He gave Sam every reason to believe he could make changes in the country.

  ‘I want you to get out and about, Mr Wangira,’ Mitchell had said at their meeting. ‘You have great support among the Kikuyu because of your small loans business. And I am told it extends to other tribes as well. I want you to use that goodwill to advance the government’s programs.’

  Sam said he would; and for some time did so enthusiastically. It took longer for him to comprehend the reality of British politics and how it trickled down to this far-flung section of the Empire.

  There were people in Britain who were pressing their government to dismantle the remaining colonial systems throughout the Empire, and when the Labour party under Clement Attlee was elected in July of that year, the movement gathered further momentum.

  In Kenya, the Governor allocated seats in the Legislative Council where the white settlers and Arab and Asian residents could vote for their candidate of choice. This was not the case for the African seats. The British were keen to support democracy, but only to a degree. Trusting their African subjects to make their own choice was apparently a step too far. The two African representatives were directly appointed by the Governor.

  While Sam was initially honoured by the appointment, he soon felt like a fraud. The appointment gave him no power in the Legislative Council and only earned him the disdain of his constituents as his promises repeatedly failed to materialise.

  He had come a long way from banker, to horse smuggler, to politician, but he had a deal more to travel before he would be allowed an effective voice to speak for his people in the governing of their country. He remained in his position because he believed that the necessary changes would eventually come.

  In the meantime, he often found himself in this role — the bearer of bad news. His message to the people of Kobogi in the hills above Embu was that the government wanted to move them from their traditional land.

  The Governor told Sam that before any decision was made he wanted to hear his first-hand assessment of the mood of the people in this first village chosen for resettlement. But Sam knew it didn’t matter what the villagers said, the resettlement would go ahead because the land was too valuable to leave in the hands of sustenance farmers.

  It made him sick to the stomach to be part of the charade, but he had sworn to act as a faithful servant of His Majesty when he assumed his office.

  However, he’d made no promise not to try to change those policies.

  When Sam entered the village, nobody realised he was a representative of the government. He wasn’t surprised. He had no staff — not even an askari — and nobody had been sent in advance to Kobogi to announce his imminent arrival. He just walked his horse into the village; and when the children flocked around him — they always became excited when a stranger arrived — he met them with equanimity, holding the hand of the boldest among them as he made his way to the chief’s hut. He knew that most white officials, even when they bothered to visit the villages, were reluctant to touch anything, let alone the children, whom they tended to avoid at all costs. And although not all representatives of the government wore a uniform, most did if they had the opportunity to do so. Sam wore a suit.

  A group of young warriors watched him walk past, trying not to appear too interested. It was for children to make a fuss, but he knew they were curious, especially when he greeted them in Kikuyu.

  Sam found the chief’s hut and introduced himself formally and properly. The chief, like everyone else, was taken aback by the stranger’s visit.

  Sam explained that the Governor had sent him to Kobogi to discuss various matters.

  The chief said they had never had a visit from someone in the government.

  ‘Before I give you the Governor’s message, I would like to hear from you, your elders, and perhaps your warriors, if that is your wish.’

  The chief arranged a chair for Sam and, with the elders sitting with him and the entire population of Kobogi in a circle around them, they began to talk.

  ‘We need food,’ the chief said. ‘Our food gardens have failed for three seasons. Our storages are empty, and we are eating next season’s seed stock. We have petitioned the DC, but he has done nothing for us.’

  Sam had prepared for this situation. The whole country was in a similar position, but he still found it difficult to answer in a way they could accept. After all, the British had taken possession of the country promising to bring peace and prosperity.

  He said he would speak to the District Commissioner and do what he could, but everywhere there was hunger. He told them that in the north, where the land was drier, matters were even worse. Many starving people had walked off their land, leaving their cattle, sheep and goats to fend for themselves, and were begging in the streets of Nanyuki, Thompson’s Falls and Nakuru.

  The chief and elders nodded. They’d obviously heard similar stories from the administration in Embu. He didn’t want to promise what he couldn’t deliver, but he knew the Embu DC had a stockpile of grain for needy cases. He promised the chief he’d raise their situation as a special request. It was the least he could do.

  One old man asked how it was that a Kikuyu was in the government.

  ‘I am an appointed member of the Legislative Council,’ he said. ‘Appointed by the Governor to represent the Africans.’

  ‘Then if you are a friend of the Governor, surely he will listen to you when you ask him to send food. Look at us,’ the chief said, indicating his gaunt colleagues. ‘We are all but finished.’

  ‘I can’t tell the district commissioners what they must do. And I can’t speak directly to the Governor; I can only make my thoughts known through the messages that pass between the Legislative Council and him. The Governor then decides what he should tell the district commissioners.’

  ‘Then why are you here?’ someone else asked.

  ‘I’m here because the Governor has asked me to —’

  He paused. What was the point in asking these people if they would move from their land? As a fellow Kikuyu, he knew the question was ridiculous; the answer totally predictable. Land wasn’t simply a matter of assets or even of livelihood. Land, traditional land, was an integral part of the Kikuyu psyche, handed down, father to son, through the generations. It would be an insult to ask the question, especially during such trying times.

  ‘I’m here because the Governor has asked me to send you his best wishes. He asks that you remain strong during these troubling times.’

  If the chief was perplexed by the banality of the message he didn’t show it, and asked Sam to thank the Governor for his good wishes.

  As Sam was returning to his cart, a group of young men stood in his path. The one who stood at their head was tall and broad of chest. At first Sam thought he and the others were warriors — they were about that age — but then he noticed they wore none of the traditional insignia of the warrior class.

  The young man said his name was Jelani Karura. He was quite fair-skinned, and Sam thought he might have been of mixed blood.

  Jelani told Sam he and his friends needed help.

  ‘We are not permitted to speak at village meetings,’ he said, ‘because we are uncircumcised. But as you can plainly see, we are of an age when we should already be warriors. Instead we are treated as children.’

  ‘Why is this so?’ Sam asked. ‘Isn’t it a matter for the chief and elders to set the date for your ceremony?’

  ‘It is,’ he said. ‘But the AIM have forbidden it.’

  The African Inland Mission had been in Kenya for more than fifty years with the stated objective to bring the Glory of God to the peoples of Africa. They’d done particularly well in Kikuyuland. Three-quarters of the Kikuyu people had been saved from paganism. They were called kirores — reformed Kikuyu. They believed in the word of Christ as taught by the African Inland Mission.

  The remainder followed the customs and tradition
s of their ancestors, which they considered to be moral and proper. This was completely at odds with the missionaries’ view, for they refused to forgo their belief in Mogai, the creator, and to otherwise change their ways to those of the Europeans. This group, about a quarter of the village, were called the aregi. They were a tribe within the tribe.

  ‘Those with me,’ Jelani said, indicating his group of friends, ‘are aregi. And we want to be initiated.’

  Sam looked around the group. Here at last was an issue where he may be able to help.

  ‘I’ll speak to the chief,’ he said, but he knew that convincing the old man was only part of the problem. The real issue was overcoming the influence of the African Inland Mission — a powerful group with strong connections to the colony’s administration.

  Sam climbed into the cart and trotted the horse out of the village. The track to the Embu road was deeply rutted and signs of the drought were everywhere. He could see the desolation in the food gardens and, although he was hopeful of getting some assistance from the DC, he left the village feeling inadequate and frustrated. He had some of the titles of office, but none of the power.

  If the DC was a polite person, he would listen and nod and say he would do what he could. If he were not, Sam would be shown the door soon after entering his office. Most of the old-timers had no sympathy for the recent trend towards localisation.

  After riding for three hours, Sam made a decision. He didn’t want to arrive at the DC’s office appearing dusty and hot. Instead he looked for somewhere to stay in Kutus, just sixteen miles short of Embu, and found a small hotel — the Settler’s Retreat. It carried a sign endorsing it as a government rest house, which meant he merely had to show his Legco credentials and sign an accommodation warrant to be given a room.

  He entered the hotel brushing the dust from his coat sleeves.

  The white woman who was standing behind the desk looked up. ‘No Africans,’ she said.

  Sam smiled in spite of his annoyance. It was a common reaction.