Nine Faces Of Kenya

by Elspeth Huxley

  It rained every day for a week. The lake began to swell and rise. The joyous feeling of a few days before turned to anxiety. The weather forecast announced heavy rain and storms across the country. Dorian arrived and rushed upstairs to my room.

  “We’ll lose the crop if it goes on like this,” he bellowed with disappointment and rage. “Bloody rain,” he muttered, as he moved out onto the terrace and looked down at the sodden world around us. We had been caught again. I tried to find some words with which to console him but I knew it was hopeless. It rained for two months. The lake rose seven feet and our new acres went under. We called in men and women and children from all around. Knee deep in mud and water, they once again pulled up the crops from the gooey ground and fought off the fat black leeches that clung to their legs with engine oil and grease. I had to use my horse for transport, as no vehicle could approach our flooded fields.

  Each new day began clear and crisp. In the early mornings, before the work began, I visited the silent fields and momentarily forgot the battle we were fighting. I wondered whether it was not better to let nature take her course, and bow our heads to Africa and gracefully retreat. Pelicans drifted across the fields, catching fish among the cabbages and turnips. Saddle-bill storks, herons, crested cranes and egrets picked their way on delicate legs among the lacy carrot tops and rose, on graceful wings, in front of my chestnut mare, Malaika. Taka-Taka, my Doberman, yapped as he chased after them in a spray of water.

  But by midday the fat, white clouds had fused and become dark and menacing. Thunder rolled in the hills and echoed across the lake. At night I listened to the raindrops fall, and in my room the ceiling leaked. Three weeks later, we lost the crop.

  African Saga Mirella Ricciardi.

  And the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail.

  Ecclesiastes xii. 1.

  5 Nov, 1928. “Drove through swarms of locusts.…”

  It was on our way through Gilgil that we first met the fateful “hoppers” – precursors of those vast swarms of locusts that winged their way later, like a red shadow, over the devastated land.

  The whole road was alive with them – a teeming, moving mass, as if tea-leaves had been scattered two or three inches deep on the dusty road by some diabolical housemaid. And as the black heaps and drifts struggled across, more and ever more came forward from beneath the leleshwa bushes to take the place of those that had gone.

  Each insect resembled a tiny grasshopper, and was no more than three-quarters of an inch long, if so much – yet their countless billions gave an impression of horror out of all proportion to their size.

  I think part of the loathing inspired by locusts is due to the effect they have upon one’s mind. It is like being suddenly forced to look through the wrong end of a telescope – one finds oneself wondering what it must feel like to be a “hopper” down there in the suffocating dust, without individuality, without room to move freely – in that involved, tangled, overwhelming heap possessing but one instinct in common to its atoms – an appetite.

  And after weeks of hopping over hot arid ground, razed as bare as a board by the advancing hosts, the locust swarms become winged, and then their horror still continues in a different shape. For now they are like brown snow-storms whirling over the plain day after day, settling at night in huge, grotesque, pinkish or, as maturity approaches, yellow swathes. Every bush and shrub is deformed by them, and will raise stripped imploring branches to the morning sun when the swarm takes to its wings once more. At mid-day one may come upon it feeding on the plain, and then the ground seems to move in hideous tremors underfoot, while with a dry rustling of countless wings the spindrift of locusts flies up under one’s feet, only to settle again a few yards farther.

  One insect is exactly like another with its blank, glassy stare, and suggests a Robot transmigrated to a lower sphere.

  A Kenyan Farm Diary V. M. Carnegie.

  Locust swarms invaded, the country for the next five years, devastating crops and pastures and bringing famine and ruin in their wake. First came the desert locust (Schistocerca gregaria) followed by the migratory species (Locusta migratoria).

  All that Sunday – all day Monday – all day Tuesday, from nine in the morning till five in the evening, that swarm was going over; sometimes they would get caught in a pocket of wind and come rattling down on the roof like hail. All those three days we lived in a kind of twilight, always conscious of the muffled roar of their going overhead. When one lot got up, another came down, warming themselves at the smudge fires they were by way of detesting, and at night the country for miles round was literally carpeted with locusts.

  Amakobe and I gave up the useless fight. I had been rushing about among the brutes, ringing the dinner-bell in their faces, but they only cocked an eye at me and went on eating. The bell, bought years before in the Cairo Mousky, was of fine Damascene work and had once been the helmet of a Crusader; and as I sat with it in my hand, I found myself wondering how many swarms of greg. and mig. its wearer had ridden through on the march in Palestine; and whether his batman, after a long day’s fighting, went out and collected the helmet full of them as a dainty for the gallant knight’s supper.

  By twelve o’clock all the boys were back from the maize fields. All the maize was eaten and there was nothing to wait for. Amakobe sat down under a tree and told me stories while we watched the locusts bustling about, searching for provender on the former lawn.

  “Truly, I have seen bigger swarms,” he said. “Swarms that would break that great tree yonder into firewood.”

  “How many years ago was that?”

  “That was when I was a boy, in the year of the Great Sickness.” (Rinderpest, in 1892.) “It killed all the cattle of the Kavirondo and the Masai; only the Maragoli had any cattle left. There was nothing to eat; the locusts had eaten all the grass and the grain. For five years, men ate locusts only; the women ate them before their babies came, and the babies as soon as they were born ate locusts. This year the locusts are thin and have no meat on them. In the old times they were very fat and good to eat.” …

  On Monday, at 9 am, they were getting up and more coming over, thicker than ever, and washing-day had to be postponed, for locusts will settle on garments unwarily left outside and eat large holes in them. Everywhere in sight, instead of being green with young grass as it was early the day before, the country was brown, as it is at the end of a long dry weather.

  They laid over our farm and all the surrounding farms, including a big sisal plantation, and we knew that we had only a month or five weeks’ respite before the young hoppers would begin to hatch out. The locust digs a little hole in more or less open ground and deposits from seventy to a hundred eggs in it, and the young are at first small, black grasshoppers, increasing in size and voracity with every moult.

  The farmers of the districts met, and called upon the Government to open a station for mixing poison bait, the method being to mix arsenic powder with bran; but needless to say, the entire supply of bran throughout the country was finished in a few days. After that, everything was used – maize refuse, coffee pulp, cow-dung, and as soon as it was mixed, it was bagged and sent out by rail and lorry to the districts and the Reserves day after day for months.…

  By the time they had completed their first moult and were ravenous, the bait was ready. Every morning we set out in different directions, starting early and carrying on till the sun was hot. When we had gained a little experience, we found it better policy to wait until they had climbed down from their roosting places in high grass and low shrubs, and put the bait down damp, in front of and through the ranks of the army on the march. They marched along roads, paths and especially along the railway, and as soon as the sun became really hot they took the bait greedily. By baiting a swarm in this way, every other day, we destroyed countless millions, for the survivors eat their dead friends and not a spot of arsenic is wasted.…

  The worst time was when we found, after tea, that a swarm about four miles lo
ng by half a mile deep was settling for the night within fifty yards of the house and boma – we were not keen on putting down quantities of arsenic round the cattle boma…. All I remember of the next day is walking round for hours in masses of those loathsome insects, grown to two inches long, and sowing bait among them.…

  The whole country smelt of bad fish, for the rain washed the carcasses together in heaps and they smelt to Heaven. The locust-birds disappeared altogether – killed, it was feared, by the poisoned hoppers. Hens did not seem to be affected by the arsenic, but they all laid eggs with red yolks!

  The Youngest Lion Eva Bache.

  Most European farms were starved of capital between the wars. Kapsiliat was lucky.

  On reaching the hills, we motored through a lovely green valley forested with every variety of acacias. We were now on Mervyn’s estate, and climbing through the undulating wooded country it reminded me of England, a mixture of Sussex Wolds and smooth green hills like the Cumberland Fells. To our right flowed the Moiben River, which Mervyn (Ridley) has stocked with trout. Always ascending higher through woods, which here and there opened to show us glimpses of green hill and blue mountain afar, we passed through some gates which led us by green lawns, past groves of flaming shrubs, to the red-brick house, which, with its gables, brick pavements and wide loggias, gave the impression of an Old English cottage; a cottage within which were beautiful rooms, surprisingly big, and rare furniture; bedrooms a marvel of comfort, several bathrooms and electric light. The shingled roof and rose-pink bricks had all been made on this estate, while the fine panelling in the dining-room was cut by the saw-mill from the forest cedars.

  Here, nearly 8,000 feet above sea-level, perched on the slope of Kapsiliat, was this charming home, created by the genius of my host and hostess on what had been a bare hillside. Great podo and cedar trees, the last remains of the old virgin forest, threw shade on the acres of grass lawn, while wide herbaceous borders filled with every variety of English flower, petunias purple and pink, phloxes, iris, delphiniums, led to further gardens enclosed in clipped hedges. A fountain played in a basin, round which ran a pavement of red bricks, carpeted with many-coloured verbenas, while roses, lilies and heliotrope made a tangle of loveliness and cannas bore immense trusses of flower that would raise the envy and astonishment of a gardener at home.

  In the shade of the podo trees were clumps of yellow daffodils, grape hyacinths, and blue cinerarias. Beyond this enchanted garden was a park-like country, stretching down to a valley through which flowed the river Moiben, and farther on rose the forested hills of the Elgeyo Reserve.

  The cattle on this estate of 10,000 acres, which is mainly agricultural land, number roughly a thousand head. There is a large herd of graded cows, the result of pure-bred Red Poll bulls, imported from Suffolk, and the native cows, and after one crossing the cows have already lost their horns and humps. Masai herdsmen look after the animals; they are the best cattle-men in the colony, and take a great pride in the welfare of the herds.

  This estate, which is most perfectly run and has absorbed an immense capital, is self-supporting in everything except sugar and flour, and next year Mervyn hopes to be able to grow enough wheat to keep the house going in the latter. The capital sunk had yielded no return as yet, and while the prices of dairy produce remain beneath the cost of production there is no promise of better times. Let us trust that all the labour, hope and capital that helped to make this land fruitful will one day reap its reward.

  Kenya: The Land of Illusion Lady Evelyn Cobbold.

  Mervyn and Sybil Ridley are buried at Kapsiliat, now the property of many families of the Elgeyo tribe.

  The Last Lap

  After the Second World War the colonial government set up a second settlement scheme, better planned than the first, to help new settlers develop new farms. The land was excised from undeveloped parts of existing European-owned farms and ranches, and in some cases from forest reserves. A former RAF pilot, disenchanted with the prospect of a career in the family firm of stocking manufacturers in the Midlands, chose a stretch of former forest on the borders of the Uasin Gishu plateau.

  Once or twice before I’d had that terrible alone, on-your-own feeling – like the time I did my first solo in an aircraft. But just as the child who has been lost on a crowded beach forgets its panic at the sight of its mother, they too were temporary experiences that left no scar on my memory. It was a different and more helpless feeling of loneliness that came over me when I found myself on that large tract of Africa, surrounded by dark high forest, without a real access road, thirty-five miles from the nearest town, and with the knowledge that I had to make it our home. The finality of the step I’d taken was an awful thought. I even had nostalgia for the smell of the dye-works and all the industrial horror from which I’d escaped; I would have given anything at that moment for the warmth and friendliness of Uncle George’s pub. The picture of it in my mind’s eye was embellished until it became a sort of paradise lost.

  Thirteen hundred acres is a lot of land. I knew the boundaries to the south and west. The thick, black, impenetrable forest would always keep me on my own pitch in that direction. The other boundaries had been vaguely pointed out to me as “about there”, “and there” and “over there”. “About there” and “over there” were a long, long way from the hill in the middle.

  The farm I had known in England, the one on the edge of the Charnwood Forest, had small orderly fields bordered with neat, well-cut hedges and white low-roofed buildings. If you stood on the north side boundary of the farm, you could shout and be heard on the south side. But it would need a wireless set to carry my voice from the hill in the centre of my African farm to “over there”. And there were no hedges or buildings in between.

  The first thing to do, obviously, was to plant some sort of cash crop. But before you plant you have to plough. No doubt ploughing is easy in England on land that has been farmed since 1066. It might even be easy on the virgin soils of Africa if the ploughman had ten generations of farmers in his family tree; but to a new farmer on new land with a new, insufficiently powered, tractor and a decrepit plough, the situation was a little difficult. It wasn’t as if I could start at one end of the farm and just plough till I reached the other. There were patches of rocks and tree stumps, parts were too steep and other parts too damp and swampy. So the ploughed lands were irregular in shape and varying in size. The biggest plot was fifty acres and the smallest seven.

  From January until May the tractor chugged round every minute I could keep it working. But breakages and stoppages were frequent, and often it meant a journey of thirty-five miles for a spare part.

  What I would have done without Piet, my neighbour, is hard to imagine.…

  He took me under his wing when he saw how hopeless I was. A note would bring him over at the double. I tried setting the ploughs with string as we were taught at the school and they bounced out of the furrow. Piet set them by eye and they stayed in. The spot of sunlight to the left of his nose and both those on his neck appeared the day he cut washers for my tractor from the brim of his felt bush hat, after the paper ones I had made proved useless. The brim of Piet’s hat looked like a crocheted table mat so many gaskets and washers had been taken from it. It gave his face a mottled effect, as though he had ringworm or was plagued with leprosy. Yes, if a thing could be patched up or any improvisation made, Piet was the boy. He lent me nuts and bolts and bits of iron, he even stripped threads from the tail of his shirt to seal a petrol union in my truck: I can’t imagine what I should have done without Piet.…

  Good rains came in late March. The massive, rough-turned sods were soaked through and through. The plough was pulled aside and a decrepit disc harrow, that I had bought at an auction sale for more than its price new, worked overtime cutting the large turfs to a reasonable tilth. Then the ploughs were put back and the furrows worked in the cross direction. Once again the harrow, more decrepit than ever and braced with angle iron and tied with wire, was hurried o
ver and over, until by the middle of May I had 200 acres that could be planted in wheat.

  From 18 May I spent my life on the running board of that planter – watching, fascinated, the seed and fertilizer pour into the earth. And I felt good. There is no time like planting time. All the hopes of life are there. It is like saying, “I commit this seed to the good earth for Your blessing, Oh Lord!”

  And then, one morning, the first bright green rows appeared in the brown soil, glistening in their virginity.

  By 15 June planting was over. One by one, patched out in brilliant green, the contours of the wheat-fields appeared against the backcloth of the coarse brown veldt. Here indeed was magic. I knew that rain and sun and good rich earth would make the seed grow. But the mystery of the embryo is beyond my ken. The quietness and the quickness of the miracle is a wonderful thing.…

  Harvest time.

  Ever since it arrived on the farm the combine harvester had been standing on blocks, oiled and greased and in absolute readiness for the “off”. It was new, shining, and a complete mystery to me. By borrowing up to the hilt on the planted wheat, and promising immediate payment of the balance as soon as the crop was in the store, I had induced the trusting agent to allow it to come out and take pride of place among the farm implements.