Nine Faces Of Kenya

by Elspeth Huxley

  Then in the end in the early morning, while it was still dark, and I was lying in bed, I heard the wagons, loaded high up with coffee-sacks, twelve to a ton, with sixteen oxen to each wagon, starting on their way in to Nairobi railway station up the long factory hill, with much shouting and rattling, the drivers running beside the wagons. I was pleased to think that this was the only hill up, on their way, for the farm was a thousand feet higher than the town of Nairobi. In the evening I walked out to meet the procession that came back, the tired oxen hanging their heads in front of the empty wagons, with a tired little Toto leading them, and the weary drivers trailing their whips in the dust of the road. Now we had done what we could do. The coffee would be on the sea in a day or two, and we could only hope for good luck at the big auction-sales in London.

  Out of Africa Karen Blixen.

  Not all settlers were white. Indians had been settled on the coast for generations, and moved up-country in the wake of the railway. Relatives joined them, and a network of Hindu, Sikh and Muslim communities spread from Nairobi’s humming bazaar to the remotest outposts. Everywhere you came upon dukas where everything from blankets to tea in ten-cent packets, paraffin lamps to cigarettes, hoes and pangas to pulses and spices, were bargained for in crowded little wood-and-iron bungalows, often with a tailor treading at a peddle sewing machine on the narrow veranda. Asians – called Indians before the subcontinent’s partition – manned post offices, railway stations and dispensaries, owned lorries and butcheries, made shoes and clothing, succeeded as merchants and money-lenders. Many worked as fundis (artisans) on whose skills, until Africans had been trained in sufficient numbers to replace them, the country’s superstructure mainly depended. One such fundi worked on Karen Blixen’s farm at Ngong.

  Pooran Singh’s little blacksmith’s shop down by the mill was a miniature Hell on the farm, with all the orthodox attributes of that place. It was built of corrugated iron, and when the sun shone down upon the roof of it, and the flames of the furnace rose inside it, the air itself, in and around the hut, was white-hot. All day long, the place resounded with the deafening noise of the forge – iron on iron, on iron once more – and the hut was filled with axes, and broken wheels, that made it look like some ancient gruesome picture of a place of execution.

  All the same the blacksmith’s shop had a great power of attraction, and when I went down to watch Pooran Singh at work I always found people in it and round it. Pooran Singh worked at a superhuman pace, as if his life depended upon getting the particular job of work finished within the next five minutes, he jumped straight up in the air over the forge, he shrieked out his orders to his two young Kikuyu assistants in a high bird’s voice and behaved altogether like a man who is himself being burnt at the stake, or like some chafed over-devil at work. But Pooran Singh was no devil, but a person of the meekest disposition; out of working hours he had a little maidenly affectation of manner. He was our Fundee of the farm, which means an artisan of all work, carpenter, saddler and cabinet-maker, as well as blacksmith; he constructed and built more than one wagon for the farm, all on his own. But he liked the work of the forge best, and it was a very fine, proud sight, to watch him tiring a wheel.

  Pooran Singh, in his appearance, was something of a fraud. When fully dressed, in his coat and large folded white turban, he managed, with his big black beard, to look a portly, ponderous man. But by the forge, bared to the waist, he was incredibly slight and nimble, with the Indian hour-glass torso.…

  The Native world was drawn to the forge by its song. The treble, sprightly, monotonous, and surprising rhythm of the blacksmith’s work has a mythical force. It is so virile that it appals and melts the women’s hearts, it is straight and unaffected and tells the truth and nothing but the truth. Sometimes it is very outspoken. It has an excess of strength and is gay as well as strong, it is obliging to you and does great things for you, willingly, as in play. The Natives, who love rhythm, collected by Pooran Singh’s hut and felt at their ease. According to an ancient Nordic law a man was not held responsible for what he had said in a forge. The tongues were loosened in Africa as well, in the blacksmith’s shop, and the talk flowed freely; audacious fancies were set forth to the inspiring hammer-song.

  Pooran Singh was with me for many years and was a well-paid functionary of the farm. There was no proportion between his wages and his needs, for he was an ascetic of the first water. He did not eat meat, he did not drink, or smoke, or gamble, his old clothes were worn to the thread. He sent his money over to India for the education of his children. A small silent son of his, Delip Singh, once came over from Bombay on a visit to his father. He had lost touch with the iron, the only metal that I saw about him was a fountain pen in his pocket. The mythical qualities were not carried on in the second generation.

  Out of Africa Karen Blixen.

  Errant earls and dashing barons.

  The Sherbroke-Walkers opened the Outspan Hotel (at Nyeri) on 1 January 1928, and soon afterwards Lady Bettie’s sister, Lady Victoria Feilding, arrived on a visit. The sisters came of a family of ten born to the 9th Earl of Denbigh and his wife. The earl had been Lord-in-Waiting to Queen Victoria, who had consented to stand as godmother to the Denbighs’ newest offspring, but had died before she could fulfil her promise. The child was nevertheless christened Victoria. The Denbighs owned five thousand acres and their residence had one hundred rooms – or so it was thought; no one had actually counted them. In the garden was an elm tree in whose branches the children had built a house from which to watch rabbits. Eric Sherbroke-Walker, when a guest and prospective son-in-law, had observed this tree-house and said to himself: “If rabbits, why not elephants?” That, so the story goes, was the origin of Treetops.

  The resources of the family did not run to supporting their brood, and after she came to Kenya Taffy, who had decided to stay on, rubbed along in a number of jobs, such as delivering milk and helping on a poultry farm, before marrying Miles Fletcher, a brawny and impecunious Tasmanian. Instead of an engagement ring, he gave her a second-hand tyre for her lorry which was so dilapidated, she wrote, that “it wouldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding”.…

  Taffy could turn her hand to anything – decarbonizing engines, plucking fowls, repairing tractors, dosing sheep, icing cakes, rearing lambs – though not so artlessly as a Turkana woman she saw suckling her baby from one breast and a lamb from the other – and she was generous, witty, good fun and rather stout. Eventually her marriage foundered, Miles took another wife (and then another), their two sons sought their fortunes in Australia, and thither, in the evening of her days, Taffy followed them to come to roost in a caravan.…

  But it would be wrong to assume that most of the white farmers discarded the standards of their race and class to live like tinkers. It was only a few who did so, and they only did so sometimes. The apparent prevalence of earls and Old Etonians in Kenya’s white society has created an impression that the settler population was drawn mainly from Britain’s aristocracy. This was far from the case. Afrikaner transport riders, Scottish cattle traders, Italian mechanics, Irish garage owners, Jewish hoteliers, and farmers drawn from the despised and mediocre middle classes, were all there too, in much greater numbers. They did not make news, whereas errant earls and dashing barons did. These were in a small minority. We hear a lot about small minorities these days, always making headlines by blowing up, gunning down and outrageously offending the great, virtuous, law-abiding majority. It is naive to dismiss such activists because they are few. The yeast moves the dough. It was, after all, a very small minority of Jews – eleven, to be precise – who started the spread throughout the world of the Christian religion. The errant earls and dashing barons did set a certain stamp on the colonial society they adorned, and sometimes scandalized.

  They came in quest of adventure, stayed to make a colony, and, in the process, destroyed what they had come to seek. They brought wives, and wives make homes. An inexorable process began. Patterned chintz replaced the sacking and a
merikani spread over packing-cases to be used as tables; curtains went up over unglazed windows; china cups bought at local sales replaced tin mugs. Soon prints of the Midnight Steeplechase hung on mud-block walls, followed by the Laughing Cavalier and Van Gogh’s sunflowers on roughly chiselled stone ones; creepers half-concealed corrugated-iron roofs; then came dressed stone bungalows with wide verandas, and tennis courts and stables, herbaceous borders, tea on the lawn. By stealth, civilization had arrived.

  Out in the Midday Sun Elspeth Huxley.

  Evelyn Waugh enjoyed the hospitality of several up-country farmers, mainly of the up-market kind, during his visit to the colony in 1930.

  The houses of Kenya are mainly in that style of architecture which derives from intermittent prosperity. In many of them the living-rooms are in separate buildings from the bedrooms; their plan is usually complicated by a system of additions and annexes which have sprung up in past years as the result of a good crop, a sudden burst of optimism, the influx of guests from England, the birth of children, the arrival of pupil farmers, or any of the many chances of domestic life. In many houses there is sadder evidence of building begun and abandoned when the bad times came on. Inside they are, as a rule, surprisingly comfortable. Up an unfenced cart-track, one approaches a shed made of concrete, match-boarding, and corrugated iron, and, on entering, finds oneself among old furniture, books, and framed miniatures.

  There are very few gardens; we went to one a few miles outside Njoro where an exquisite hostess in golden slippers led us down grass paths bordered with clipped box, over Japanese bridges, pools of water-lilies, and towering tropical plants. But few settlers have time for these luxuries.

  Boy and Genessie, with whom I spent a week-end, have one of the “stately homes” of Kenya; three massive stone buildings on the crest of a hill at Elmentaita overlooking Lake Nakuru, in the centre of an estate which includes almost every topographical feature – grass, bush forest, rock, river, waterfall, and a volcanic cleft down which we scrambled on the end of a rope.

  On the borders a bush fire is raging, a low-lying cloud by day, at night a red glow along the horizon. The fire dominates the week-end. We watch anxiously for any change in the wind; cars are continually going out to report progress; extra labour is mustered and despatched to “burn a brake”; will the flames “jump” the railroad? The pasture of hundreds of head of cattle is threatened.

  In the evening we go down to the lakeside to shoot duck; thousands of flamingo lie on the water; at the first shot they rise in a cloud, like dust from a beaten carpet; they are the colour of pink alabaster; they wheel round and settle further out. The head of a hippopotamus emerges a hundred yards from shore and yawns at us. When it is dark the hippo comes out for his evening walk.…

  Again the enchanting contradictions of Kenya life; a baronial hall straight from Queen Victoria’s Scottish Highlands – an open fire of logs and peat with carved-stone chimney-piece, heads of game, the portraits of prize cattle, guns, golf-clubs, fishing-tackle, and folded newspapers – sherry is brought in, but, instead of a waistcoated British footman, a bare-footed Kikuyu boy in white gown and red jacket. A typical English meadow of deep grass; model cowsheds in the background; a pedigree Ayrshire bull scratching his back on the gatepost; but, instead of rabbits, a company of monkeys scutter away at our approach; and, instead of a smocked yokel, a Masai herdsman draped in a blanket, his hair plaited into a dozen dyed pigtails.…

  “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.” Sometimes it doesn’t come.

  One year the long rains failed.

  That is a terrible, tremendous experience, and the farmer, who has lived through it, will never forget it. Years afterwards, away from Africa, in the wet climate of a Northern country, he will start up at night, at the sound of a sudden shower of rain, and cry, “At last, at last.”

  In normal years the long rains began in the last week of March and went on into the middle of June. Up to the time of the rains, the world grew hotter and drier every day, feverish, as in Europe before a great thunderstorm, only more so.

  The Masai, who were my neighbours on the other side of the river, at that time set fire to the bast-dry plains to get new green grass for their cattle with the first rain, and the air over the plains danced with the mighty conflagration; the long grey and rainbow-tinted layers of smoke rolled along over the grass, and the heat and the smell of burning were drifted in over the cultivated land as from a furnace.

  Gigantic clouds gathered, and dissolved again, over the landscape; a light distant shower of rain painted a blue slanting streak across the horizon. All the world had only one thought.

  On an evening just before sunset, the scenery drew close round you, the hills came near and were vigorous, meaningful, in their clear, deep blue and green colouring. A couple of hours later you went out and saw that the stars had gone, and you felt the night-air soft and deep and pregnant with benefaction.

  When the quickly growing rushing sound wandered over your head it was the wind in the tall forest-trees – and not the rain. When it ran along the ground it was the wind in the shrubs and the long grass – and not the rain. When it rustled and rattled just above the ground it was the wind in the maize-fields, – where it sounded so much like rain that you were taken in, time after time, and even got a certain content from it, as if you were at least shown the thing you longed for acted on a stage, – and not the rain.

  But when the earth answered like a sounding-board in a deep fertile roar, and the world sang round you in all dimensions, all above and below, – that was the rain. It was like coming back to the Sea, when you have been a long time away from it, like a lover’s embrace.

  But one year the long rains failed. It was, then, as if the Universe were turning away from you. It grew cooler, on some days it would be cold, but there was no sign of moisture in the atmosphere. Everything became drier and harder, and it was as if all force and gracefulness had withdrawn from the world. It was not bad weather or good weather, but a negation of all weather, as if it had been deferred sine die. A bleak wind, like a draught, ran over your head, all colour faded from all things; the smells went away from the fields and forests. The feeling of being in disgrace with the Great Powers pressed on you. To the South, the burnt plains lay black and waste, striped with grey and white ashes.

  With every day, in which we now waited for the rain in vain, prospects and hopes of the farm grew dim, and disappeared. The ploughing, pruning and planting of the last months turned out to be a labour of fools. The farm work slowed off, and stood still.

  On the plains and in the hills, the waterholes dried up, and many new kinds of ducks and geese came to my pond. To the pond on the boundary of the farm, the Zebra came wandering in the early mornings and at sunset to drink, in long rows, two or three hundred of them, the foals walking with the mares, and they were not afraid of me when I rode out amongst them. But we tried to keep them off the land for the sake of our cattle, for the water was sinking in the ponds. Still it was a pleasure to go down there, where the rushes growing in the mud made a green patch in the brown landscape.

  The Natives became silent under the drought, I could not get a word on the prospects out of them, although you would have thought that they should have known more about the signs of the weather than we did. It was their existence which was at stake, it was not an unheard of thing to them, – and had not been to their fathers, – to lose nine-tenths of their stock in the great years of drought. Their shambas were dry, with a few drooping and withering sweet-potato and maize plants.

  After a time I learned their manner from them, and gave up talking of the hard times or complaining about them, like a person in disgrace. But I was a European, and I had not lived long enough in the country to acquire the absolute passivity of the Native, as some Europeans will do, who live for many decennaries in Africa. I was young, and by instinct of self-preservation, I had to collect my energy on something, if I were not to be whirled away with the dus
t on the farm-roads, or the smoke on the plain. I began in the evenings to write stories, fairy-tales and romances, that would take my mind a long way off, to other countries and times.

  Out of Africa Karen Blixen.

  The Rocco family lived on the shores of Lake Naivasha and their vegetable crops thrived on its fertile margins.

  A passing horticultural expert from England told us he had never imagined such bountiful yields possible. The blue-grey cabbages, fat and round, weighed up to ten pounds each. Only a few lucky farmers with abundant water could produce such crops in the dry season. Lorries came from everywhere to buy and take them away.…

  Then one day the weather changed. The blue sky was spattered with fleecy clouds like snowflakes hanging in the air. The sun rose in an orange haze and tinged the wispy clouds with pink and gold. Longonot was suspended in a misty curtain. For the first time in many months I did not feel the bite of the sun on my back. That night I lay and listened to the sound of distant thunder. My heart began to sink.

  Every day the sky began to fill, the fleecy clouds turned grey and pregnant with rain. We were well past the rainy season. But the rhythm had somehow been upset. The wind rose and hurtled through the trees. They bent and sighed and shed their leaves. The dust-devils spiralled once again high into the sky. At noon, heavy silence hung over the farm – the hush before the thunderclap.

  Two inches of rain fell that night. The thirsty ground drank its fill and the surplus ran in rivulets along the roads and lay in puddles everywhere. The scent of rain and damp earth filled the air. The flowers smiled with rain drops on their petals, fish eagles screamed as they glided on the wind, cavorting in the sky, giant ibis left the ground with raucous cries and rain birds ululated from every tree. Everything that lived and breathed rejoiced.