The next morning Piet and Dris came over on horses to see the fun; and I was glad of their company for the operating manual of the harvester had so many “be sure” instructions that I had become utterly confused. I managed to start the engine just as they arrived.… I let the wheat trickle through my fingers like dry sand as it fell from the hopper to the sacks and felt the glow of satisfaction that comes to those who see the fruition of their labours. It had been a long wait from that January day when I first chose the land to plough.
The expression on my face as I got down from the harvester must have been loaded with self-satisfaction, for Dris said in a voice calculated to take the smugness from anyone, “You got rust. You didn’t say you got rust.”
I didn’t say because I hadn’t known.
“Have I?” I asked.
He showed me the straw he had pulled. “Them little black spots on the stem. Them’s black stem rust, they cut the sap and make the heads so light you could blow them away. It ain’t so bad on this shamba. If she had come two weeks earlier she would have cut your crop by half.” …
Every day, as the fifty or sixty bags of wheat were taken into the incomplete store, I stepped out the acreage cut in an effort to estimate the eventual total. It did not get me very far, my forecast varied from day to day.
“You can never tell till them’s all weighed and in the store”, said Dris when I asked him what he thought he was going to get.
What I did notice in those over-anxious reckonings of my wealth-to-be was that as we went from shamba to shamba, larger and larger patches were cut for the same number of bags. This puzzled me for the stand of wheat, all over the farm, was so even. Then I remembered Dris and black stem rust. Sure enough I found, on closer examination, that the ears were getting lighter and lighter. The earliest planted was the least affected, because when the disease struck the ears were practically full. As the rust took hold of all the wheat at the same time, it followed that the more immature it was the more it suffered. And so the yield got less and less as the harvest progressed, from the promised eight bags per acre to five or sue and then finally to four; until my hopes of wealth, in this my first year, vanished.
The Gate Hangs Well James Stapleton.
On his farm on the slopes of Mount Elgon, the Earl of Portsmouth devised a Christian-pagan celebration of harvest home.
Even in the early 1950s I had understood something of the dullness we had injected into indigenous African life. The missionaries imposed boredom because they condemned the outward manifestations of sin and paganism. The Administration discouraged dances and orgiastic occasions because it meant fewer broken heads and blunted emotional outlets. The settler followed suit partly from lack of imagination and partly to keep within the framework of the law. Yet the promise of the golden age of good citizenship, perhaps to rise to be chairman of a committee on drains, was a sorry substitute for the lion head-dress and the lion dance. I felt this to be true of a farm-worker’s life in spite of its freedom to come and go between African land units.
The school and the football ground was not enough, especially as police were always raiding beer-drinking parties in huts in the bush. Sometimes, when a circumcision party was raided for beer over and above the legal amount allowed, I almost wept with frustrated rage. As I have said earlier it is a great moment in a boy or girl’s life, it is also a great family, clan and tribal moment, and demands the ancient convivial hospitality. To break this occasion up, often for no better reason than that a few gallons of home-made beer are outside the law’s permission, seemed a crass interference in normal private occasions.…
I was determined to make an effort to relieve the tedium of day-to-day farm life. So some eleven years ago I decreed a three days’ holiday at the end of coffee harvest in February. Christmas occurs in the full flush of coffee and corn harvest and so is a truncated affair as far as merrymaking goes, but in normal years the end of February or early March is the moment of pause on the farm and of preparing for the new year crops. On the Equator there is no winter solstice, or there is no feeling of it. The Equinoxes, when one casts no noonday shadow, are far more marked, for in March one sows and towards Michaelmas comes the slackening of growth and the first filling of the ears for harvest.
I think in all true festivals there should be solemnity followed by its reverse in merrymaking. Bank holidays are the contrivance of uprooted city minds. The idea of Easter preceded by Good Friday and committal to the earth and the joyous rising on Easter Day is as old as pagan Europe. The dedication of the King or Queen at Coronation followed by fireworks and dancing in the street is the true pattern for making merry England. Hence, we planned on the first day to have a service of dedication to the new season and thanks for the rhythmic ending of the old.
At nine o’clock on a bright cool morning all the workers assembled on the football ground. The school children arrived singing in procession, and took their place on one side of a square formed on the other three sides by the farm-workers and ourselves. In the centre were tractors, ox-teams and ploughs, bags of coffee, a few green leaves of tea, also bags of wheat, maize, oats and barley from last season’s harvest ready for new sowing. I had managed to secure a Roman Catholic Father, a Church of England Chaplain and a Church of Scotland African Reverendi. I wrote a hymn; as near-pagan as I dared, and two or three very simple prayers specially for translation into Swahili. Meanwhile, the tractors and oxen and wagons for the grain had appeared and been decorated with green branches, sprays of bougainvillea and flowers mostly taken from our garden secretly at dawn. It was a heart-warming touch of African spontaneity and I gladly turned a blind eye on the ravaged garden. Each minister took his allotted part in the impromptu service, and the Catholic Father blessed the people and the workers’ uplifted hands were sprinkled with holy water; also he blessed the tractors and oxen, and the new seed for sowing. Below us Africa was spread before us almost to infinity, cloud-stippled in the sunlight. The shaded coffee shambas climbed up the mountain above us. The solemn service ended in this clear serenity of vision.
Then small ox-teams moved into the coffee to do a cultivation competition between the rows of coffee trees. I had asked my friend Chief Jonathan Baraza from Elgon Nyanza, a few miles farther round the mountain, to judge the ploughing and cultivation matches, and stay with us for the festival. At that time he told me he was on the Mau Mau black list. If his life was in danger he showed a cheerful God-trusting indifference to the threat. All that morning we had the ploughing match followed by a prize-giving, and rested in the afternoon. The next day we had sports and a football match. Saturday was given to lighter things. We had an African play (home-made and home-produced) and much comic miming. Our West Kenya people are born impromptu actors with a glorious sense of the ridiculous. We saw ourselves and themselves and the DC taken off until we almost broke our ribs with laughing. At the farm committee’s request the Lloyd family, father, mother and children, gave a horse-jumping display, which caused more happy cheering as one fell off and the odd horse refused at some home-made obstacle.
Eight hundred pounds of maize had been brewed into beer and two oxen had been killed so that feasting, merriment and dancing in the firelight continued until moonset close to dawn. Sunday followed for recuperation, and when work resumed on Monday two just discernible black eyes were all the damage noted. For the next two or three months afterwards the whole round of work on the farm went with marked smoothness and far more laughter even than usual. Man not only needs to create by work but to have recreation of himself in the rhythm of the year. This is especially true where man is far closer to the elements than he is in the west, in suburb and factory, where eye and ear are tuned to ready-made diversion in which the body and spirit can have little or no awareness and spontaneity. This numbing dullness should have no part in the new Africa, impatient as she may be for technical education and material standards of living to approximate older industrial countries.
A Knot of Roots Earl of Portsmouth.
I loved going to this quiet place. Even before clearing, it was delightful to sit there in the green gloom, and to feel the prickly dead leaves – so unlike their brethren in the old country – small and hard and greyish, rustling under my hand. Twisted scabrous stems of creepers writhed upwards, like antediluvian reptiles, into a dense canopy overhead, but one could still catch the crimson flash of a crested plantain-eater’s wings, as it flitted among the tree-tops high above.
Sometimes, if one sat very still, there would be a quick thudding of tiny feet, and a little brown mouse-deer (dik-dik) would scamper by with lowered head, so close that one could have touched it. Before our dogs had become numerous enough to hunt these pretty creatures, they were strangely fearless, and one of the most charming glimpses of jungle life I have ever stumbled upon was a fight between two diminutive bucks.
With shrill squeaks of fury they flew at each other, their two-inch long prick horns bent with murderous intent, and it was only after repeated charges that one of them turned tail and fled, hotly pursued, out of sight.…
We cut down all the tangling parasites and weedy saplings, leaving only the gnarled trunks of some large olives and a few grey-stemmed, thick-foliaged, smaller trees. A withy fence was put up round the irregular garden patch, and the main part was roughly levelled and planted with fast-spreading, bright-green, Kikuyu grass. Borders were mapped out, and paths, but I felt that some central feature was lacking, until I noticed a natural hollow in the bank, and decided at once to make a round rose-bed there, encircled by a sunk stone wall.…
Grass swept to the edge of my horse-shoe-shaped wall. Along the top, and among its very stones, blazed the pinks, reds, and yellows of dwarf snap-dragons; below ran a narrow path of crazy paving, and then came the low mound of the round rose-bed. It is true that my roses obstinately refused to flourish there, but pansies, asters, petunias, and carnations did, and provided me with a riot of colour after the rains.
There was a cultivated annexe beyond, in which I tried to grow vegetables, rambler roses, and honeysuckle, but, alas! lack of regular rain, and insufficient watering, prevented its ever being a great success, except in the wet season.
For a few precious months in the year, however, the garden bloomed delightfully, and then was the time to retreat there, alone and at peace, the burden of farm worries for a brief hour forgotten. There is surely something primitive in the deep content that fills one’s soul, while fine warm earth runs through outspread fingers, giving soothing promise of sheaves to come. It is a happy solitude, an ecstatic if silent communion with nature, and it rests the mind as few other recreations can.
The fascination of my garden was so strong upon me that often I would visit it by moonlight also. Then the bizarre beauty of those slanting olives, the tremulous silver lights and inky shadows, the pale sweet ghostliness of white blossoms and dark mysterious depths of the jungle beyond, all lent it an enchantment not easily conveyed in words.
A Kenyan Farm Diary V. M. Carnegie.
I too will something make
And joy in the making:
Although tomorrow it seem
Like the empty words of a dream
Remembered on waking.
Robert Bridges
From the second week in September to Christmas, Kenya is usually at its glorious best. For eleven months Of The Year the Highlands boast the finest climate in the world; and of these eleven months, those following September are the real jewels. February, March and April are always dry and sometimes dusty, though never unbearably hot.
All the world over the farmer is, traditionally, a grumbler; a grouser with whom things are never just right. True to form, we in Kenya rave and curse in the dry weather and sag dispiritedly in our one depressing wet month. No farmer anywhere has a better climate than ours, but like all the others of our trade we magnify our ills and talk a lot about the bad weather. But in the middle of September everything usually is all right; wet, mud, and dust are forgotten, and it is hard to fault a single thing.
Flowers, from the garish bougainvilleas to the bursting blimpish hydrangeas, from the sky-high hollyhocks to the earth-bound pansies, face up and thumb their noses at depression. We watch the strong pipes push up from the leafy wheat fields; while, regimented in even squares like guards at a tattoo parade, the giant twelve-feet tall maize plants throw out their tasselled plumes and wave boisterously at the pageant.
The bounty of the kitchen garden is at its sweet-tasting best. New potatoes are really new; corn on the cob is milk-full and tender; peas are sugar steeped and beans are fleshy and crisp and still without string. The lettuces and cabbage are big and succulent. It is a time when soil, moisture and sun are all mixed in the right proportions and the resultant dish is fit for a King.
And then the pipes of wheat unwind to expose the thickening ears. Powdered with pollen, they put a nap on the bright green carpet of the grain fields. Broken ploughs, unserviceable tractors, hot wearying days of preparing the land, the long hours on the planting machine, are now nothing but a bad dream.
Cattle grow fat and sleek and browse contentedly in the lush pastures, and the natives, hypnotized by the colour, the warmth, the verve of the world, leave their blankets behind and work with an enthusiasm that is foreign to their nature.
And Elizabeth and I forget our overdraft and worries; for this year will surely be a bumper, and trouble and debts will be no more.
New Kenyans.
Susan was in high school in Nairobi. Towards the end of term she would write, “Only three more weeks and then I’ll be home.”
Patricia’s school was just outside our town. Copied from the blackboard in irregular, joined capitals she would write “Term ends on 28 July. Then we come home.”
Home. I still looked upon that small corner of the English Midlands as home; the place that was so full of sisters and brothers and aunts and uncles and relatives; the place that was steeped in warmth and love; the place hewn out of generations of traditions and stability – that was home as I knew it.
And here were our children calling an unkempt bit of Africa home. A place cut out of the bush, with insecure foundations temerariously laid by me. A place without tradition and very little stability – to our children this had become home.
Born of a chance seed sown in a war-scarred mind, fertilized by a restlessness, nurtured in the struggle to bring order where there had been only wildness and disorder before, something we had not dreamed of had sprung up: something our children, and their children, and perhaps their children’s children, would call home.
The Gate Hangs Well James Stapleton.
Early in 1960 the “wind of change” struck Kenya with gale force. Britain’s Tory government had decided to pull out of Africa without reservation and, in Kenya, to liquidate the policy of white settlement begun less than sixty years before. In January 1960 delegates representing all political factions in the colony, black and white, were summoned to a conference at Lancaster House in London to hear the British Government’s intentions for the colony’s future. These were to introduce immediately majority rule based on universal suffrage, followed by withdrawal of the British authority. To the European settlers, this came as a bolt from the blue. To satisfy the pressing African demand for land, a scheme was introduced to buy immediately about one million acres of the “white highlands’’ and subdivide it into plots on which to settle African small-holders with individual title to their parcels of land.
Happy Valley, 1963.
We were looking down over the Wanjohi, the once notorious Happy Valley, haunted perhaps by the raffish ghosts of people like Lady Idina, six times husbanded, and Joss Erroll, one of the husbands, destined to be the victim, in middle age, of a crime passionel; and Boy Long, whose handsome looks and gaudy shirts and broad-brimmed hats dazzled eyes and broke numerous hearts. And many others. All this took place a long time ago, in the twenties; the great depression of the early thirties obscured and eventually disp
ersed those Happy Valley dwellers who had survived delirium tremens, Muthaiga Club parties, needle pricks, and being shot at by jealous lovers on railway stations.1
Gin-soaked as they were, they enhanced rather than damaged the natural charms of their valley by leaving the native trees alone and creating gardens of outstanding beauty, by paddocking green pastures for butter-yellow Guernseys, stocking streams with trout and building attractive, rambling, creeper-festooned bungalows of local timbers with shingle roofs.
After they faded out, a different lot of settlers – white still – replaced them; they changed the valley, still without abusing it. They planted pyrethrum, an attractive crop with sheets of white flowers and sage-grey foliage; they bred good sheep, some of the finest in Kenya, from imported rams and ewes; and sold butterfat off pastures they improved by modern methods of grassland management. The Wanjohi became a productive valley: still happy, on the whole, but on more bourgeois lines than in the days of its notoriety.
Now it has passed to a third lot of settlers. The plan is to settle fifteen hundred Kikuyu families here and on the slopes of Kipipiri, between forest and plateau. Many of the small-holdings extend to only seven acres – not much at an altitude too high for maize, the Kikuyu staple, and best suited to livestock, for which most of the plots are too small. On poorer land, plots are larger: but poorer land produces less.
The industry of these Kikuyu women is phenomenal. When they are on their own land, working for their own families, they never pause. In their different sphere the men, no doubt, are just as busy, but it is a sphere more of tongue and wit and less of muscle: buying and selling, bargaining, seeking out new opportunities in old lorries.
Nine Faces Of Kenya Page 19