Nine Faces Of Kenya

by Elspeth Huxley

  The last of the forest is going up in smoke from dozens of small fires, scenting the air so sweetly that we drew in deep breaths for the sheer pleasure of it. Perhaps I was sentimental to regret the trees. But our guide said: “In a few years’ time what will have happened to the streams? They’re bound to dwindle, in a drought they’ll dry up altogether. This is a catchment area. It’s sheer lunacy to let the forest go.”

  Forks and Hope Elspeth Huxley.

  At midnight on 12 December 1963, in the presence of the Duke of Edinburgh, the Union Jack was hauled down and Mzee Jomo Kenyatta became Prime Minister of an independent Kenya. Harry Thuku, for many years a champion of African freedom, with Tabitha his wife celebrated uhuru in their own way.

  Let me say how my wife and I spent our independence day in 1963. There was one very flat piece of land in our farm, and Mr Mirie with the other agricultural people had said that I must not plant coffee there – only beans. Well, when independence came round, I was sent a ticket as a director of KPCU (Kenya Planters’ Coffee Union). It was very heavy rain at the time, and I could see that many people would be losing their shoes in the mud of the stadium. So I told my wife, “Now is the time; everybody – government, agriculturalists, and all people – have their eyes fixed on the independence stadium. But as there is very good rain, we shall have our independence here. We have in fact received our political independence whether we actually go to the stadium or not. We shall therefore celebrate our independence by planting our coffee where it is forbidden by the agricultural people.” We had our own nursery for seedlings, and we reckoned it would be at least four months, with the change-over of administration, before officers came round, and by then there would be more than six inches of growth. So we celebrated our political and economic independence by planting something like 15,000 little trees! Eventually when they came round, they were astonished, and I told them it was a fitting celebration of independence because I had been fighting for Africans to grow coffee ever since 1921.

  An Autobiography Harry Thuku.

  Farewell happy fields

  Where joy forever dwells.

  John Milton

  And so my farming life ended as it had begun, with me sitting and eating my sandwiches under the big cedar tree.… Gitau, Kimani, and Kamiri, who had been helping to get the furniture out of the house, went off to their own huts; and I sat down under the tree to eat my lunch as I had done when I had first come there and dreamed – a generation earlier.

  I had sat under this same tree which then was the outpost tree at the edge of the forest, and I had looked at the open grassland before me, and at the mountains – green, grey, and purple – rising clear-cut into the sunlit sky as a backcloth to the scene that I saw and the scenes that I foresaw.

  More than thirty years had passed since I had first sat there, and almost all that I had foreseen and planned had come to pass. I had dreamed of a house and a garden like to the country houses and gardens I had known as a boy, and now around me were the sweeping lawns under shady trees and the flowerbeds bright with the flowers of Africa and Europe; there were the trim clipped hedges, and beyond the hedges was the orchard with the rich fruit hanging on the branches. In front of me was the sprawling house of grey stone with flowering creepers growing up the walls and “home” written all over it; and the ghosts of the dogs that had shared it with us were lying on the door-steps and in front of the french windows. Beyond it was the old wooden house where we had lived when our children were small and where, in later years, had lived the farm manager and his wife and their children.

  There was the tennis court where there had been tennis from the days when it was all that the players could do to hit the ball over the net to the days when the tennis was worth watching for its own sake. There were the farm buildings, now empty and deserted and with weeds beginning to grow in the yards, which had always been noisy and warm with well-tended livestock. There were the paddocks on the ridge beyond the buildings.…

  There were the water tanks and the drinking troughs, and I remembered how we had saved and skimped to get the money to lay the pipelines, and had rejoiced to see the life-giving water extend from place to place. In those earliest days, that did not in retrospect really seem so far away, I had pictured, as a dream that might come true, the days when pedigree stock might perhaps be shown off to visitors in fit surroundings, and when the trophies they had won might also be shown. That was a dream that had also come true, and that had brought a lot of satisfaction in its realization.

  But the farm and what had gone into it and what had come out of it – satisfying though it all had been – had only been the means to bigger things, and those dreams also had come true. Now they walked the earth in the reality of young men and women who had grown to maturity in the surroundings that we had made for them – our children and the children of others who had spent their holidays with us. They had played in the garden and had ridden their ponies round the farm; they had fished the river for the speckled trout that lay below the waterfalls, and they had gone shooting along the edge of the forest glades; they had climbed the mountains and had camped on the moors; they had grown up strong and self-reliant; and filled with that humanity that comes from close contact with nature.

  What we had done was good in concept and in the carrying out of it, and – whatever may come to Kenya – no one can take that certainty from us, and no one can take that background from those young people who grew up with it, and who have it to sustain them through their lives.

  I doubt if anyone who did not know the spirit of the old Kenya of the early farms, and the enthusiasm and the spirit of endeavour that pervaded it, and the hard work and the sacrifice of easy things that accompanied it, can ever comprehend our feeling of utter certainty that what we were doing was good and constructive and would last, and then our bitter disillusion when the evil in others broke out and swamped our efforts, and when those who know not Africa blamed us for the evil. Many of those who started their time in Kenya later than we did, and who, maybe, were not quite so steeped in that early atmosphere, have not taken the knock so hard. Perhaps those who merely grew up in the old Kenya will be, by virtue of their youth, more adaptable than those of my generation; let us hope so.

  But certain it is that those of us who began at the beginning, or near the beginning, have lost something in our lives that had meant much in our lives, and I doubt if we can ever be the same again. It is not that we doubt whether what we did was good; we still know with complete certainty that it was good. It was the sense of this something that we have lost that softened the wrench of leaving the results of thirty years’ work, and of seeing those results beginning to revert. If I could have handed the farm over to someone else who would have carried it on as I had started it I would not have minded so much: but if, on the other hand, I had had to abandon it when the old spirit still lived I should have minded much more.

  All this, and more besides, I thought to myself as I ate my sandwiches in the garden under the cedar. But even so I realized that if what had happened had to happen I could count myself lucky that it had happened when it did. At least the time allowed to me had seen my family through. The picture left to us, and the picture left to them, is a complete picture and a picture to which we can always look back in the knowledge that it is a picture that would take a lot of beating anywhere in the world. I doubt if it could be beaten. By that measure we have been fortunate.

  We Built a Country J. F. Lipscomb.

  Tailpiece.

  By now it was dark. Through the portholes of the plane I saw the red glow from the exhaust of the engine and beyond it the faint shadows of cumulus clouds bobbing in the high thin air. The woman sitting next to me lit a cigarette. When I had first taken my seat I had noticed her, like a fading figurehead from the prow of a tall ship. Her hands, covered with calluses, resembled old taproots, and her sunburned face seemed to be lost in a sea of white hair.

  She was a pioneer of Kenya, she explained to me. She leaned
back into the seat and puffed on her cigarette. With her parents, she continued, she had trekked onto the highlands in an ox wagon. She remembered the thatched hut which was their first home in Kenya, the struggle the family had made to discover what crops grew best, the mornings when they found that elephants had trampled the shamba and the nights when lions slept on the veranda. She paused for a second to look out into the night through the porthole. She lit another cigarette and told me about her old servants, of those who had broken the trust to take the Mau Mau oath and of the others who even to this day remain loyal.

  The plane began to lose altitude and out of the starboard window I saw the lights of Machakos and Athi. Somewhere to the right of the wing tip was her old farm. “It was sold last week,” she explained. “I’d always been able to run it by myself ever since my parents died, but these days everything has begun to change. This country no longer belongs to white people like you and me.” She paused to look out the window. “I’m not bitter that the black man has finally come into his own but I know that there is no place left for me out here.” The airplane was making its final approach and soon I saw the lights of the runway flashing under the wings and felt a soft nudge as the tires met the runway. “Tomorrow I’m booked on a flight to Australia. I’ve already bought a farm out there and I plan to start all over again.”

  The Imminent Rains John Heminway.

  1 Alice de Janzé, one of the dwellers, shot Raymond de Trafford in the stomach at the Gard du Nord. He recovered.

  PART IV

  Wars

  WARS HAVE BEEN endemic in East Africa, as in the rest of the world, since records began and no doubt before that. The Arab/Swahili city states were often at odds; Mombasa and Malindi were old rivals. Warriors from the interior such as the Galla were a constant threat to the safety of the civilized inhabitants of the coastal settlements. The first wars to be recorded by Europeans were those fought during the intermittent Portuguese occupation, 1505–1729. In the interior the tribes, or ethnic groups, fought each other to capture livestock, sometimes women, and slaves, the latter mainly at the instigation of Arab and Swahili traders. In the early days of the twentieth century both Britain and Germany engaged in minor wars, then called punitive expeditions, to enforce a major peace. They did away with inter-tribal wars but soon involved their respective colonies in international wars, the tribes of which those colonizing powers were originally composed having coalesced into nations. Three major wars have left their mark on Kenya during its short period of colonial history.

  The Portuguese Wars

  Vasco da Gama’s visit to Mombasa and Malindi in 1498 ushered in more than two centuries of intermittent conflict between the “Moors” and the Portuguese. In 1505 Dom Francisco d’Almeida attacked and burned Mombasa.

  The Grand-Captain ordered that the town should be sacked and that each man should carry off to his ship whatever he found: so that at the end there would be a division of the spoil, each man to receive a twentieth of what he found. The same rule was made for gold, silver, and pearls. Then everyone started to plunder the town and to search the houses, forcing open the doors with axes and iron bars. There was a large quantity of cotton cloth for Sofala in the town, for the whole coast gets its cotton cloth from here. So the Grand-Captain got a good share of the trade of Sofala for himself. A large quantity of rich silk and gold embroidered clothes was seized, and carpets also; one of these, which was without equal for beauty, was sent to the King of Portugal together with many other valuables.

  When night came the Grand-Captain ordered all the men to a field which lay between the town and the sea. A section of it was allotted to each captain and a watch was set for the night. They were at a distance of a gun shot from the palm grove where the Moors were with their king. On the morning of the 16th they again plundered the town, but because the men were tired from fighting and from lack of sleep, much wealth was left behind apart from what each man took for himself. They also carried away provisions, rice, honey, butter, maize, countless camels and a large number of cattle, and even two elephants. They paraded these elephants in front of the people of the town before they took it, in order to frighten them. There were many prisoners, and white women among them and children, and also some merchants from Cambay.

  On Saturday evening the Grand-Captain ordered that all should return to the ships in a disciplined manner, keeping a watch for the Moors as they went on their way. And as the Christians left by one way, so the Moors entered by the other to see what destruction had been done. For the streets and houses were full of dead, who were estimated to be about 1,500.

  The distress of Mombasa’s ruler prompted him to write to the king of Malindi as follows.

  May God’s blessing be upon you, Sayyid Ali! This is to inform you that a great lord has passed through the town, burning it and laying it waste. He came to the town in such strength and was of such cruelty, that he spared neither man nor woman, old nor young, nay, not even the smallest child. Not even those who fled escaped from his fury. He not only killed and burnt men but even the birds of the heavens were shot down. The stench of the corpses is so great in the town that I dare not go there; nor can I ascertain nor estimate what wealth they have taken from the town. I give you these sad news for your own safety.

  There were more than 10,000 people in Mombasa, of whom 3,700 were men of military age.

  The East African Coast: Select Documents G. S. P. Freeman-Grenville.

  In 1587 a Turkish brigand named Amir Ali Bey captured Mombasa Island. A Portuguese fleet sent from Goa to dislodge him found unexpected allies in a tribe of cannibals, the Zimba, who had eaten their way up the coast from the mouth of the Zambesi river. A Dominican friar, Father Joao dos Santos, gave his version of these events.

  At Tete, on the other side of the River within Land to the East and North-East, are two kinds of Man-eating Cafres, the Mumbos and Zimbas or Muzimbas, who eate those they take in warre, and their slaves also when they are past labour, and sell it as Beefe or Mutton. The Captayne of Tete with his eleven Encosses, and their Companies slue sixe hundred of the Mumbos in a Battell, not leaving one alive, and carried away their Wives and Children Captives. This was at Chicoronga a Mumbos Towne, in which was a slaughter-house, where every day they butchered their Captives; neere which the Portugals found many Negroes, men and women, bound hand and foot, destined to the slaughter for the next dayes food, whom with many others they freed….

  These Zimbas worship no God, nor Idol, but their King, who (they say) is God of the Earth: and if it rains when hee would not, they shoot their Arrowes at the Skie for not obeying him; and he only eates not mans flesh. These are talle, bigge, strong; and have for Armes, small Hatchets, Arrowes, Azagaies, great Bucklers, with which they cover their whole bodies of light wood, lined with wild beasts skinnes. They eate those which they kill in warre and drink, in their skuls. If any of their own Cafres be sicke or wounded, to save labour of cure they kill and eate them….

  One of these Zimbas ambitious of that honour, which they place in killing and eating of men, to get himselfe a name, adjoyned others of his Nation to him, and went Eastward, killing and eating every living thing, Men, Women, Children, Dogs, Cats, Rats, Snakes, Lizards, sparing nothing but such Cafres as adjoyned themselves to their companie in that designe. And thus five thousand of them were assembled, and went before the Ile of Quiloa; where the Sea prohibiting their passage, a traiterous Moore came and offered his service to guide them over at the low ebbes of spring tides, upon condition to spare his kindred, and to divide the spoyles with him. The Zimba accepted it, and effected his cruell purpose, slaying and taking (for future dainties to eate at leasure) three thousand Moores, and tooke the Citie Quiloa, with great riches, the people escaping by hiding themselves in the wildernesse till the Zimbas were gone; then returning to their Citie (antiently the royall Seat of the Kings of that Coast) and to this day are seene the ruines of their sumptuous Mezquites and Houses. Now, for the reward of the Traytor, he sentenced him with all hi
s kindred to be cast into the Sea, bound hand and foot, to bee food for the fishes; saying, it was not meet that one should remayne of so wicked a generation, nor would he eate their flesh, which could not but be venomous.

  After this he passed along the Coast, till he came against the Ile of Mombaza; which foure Turkish Galleyes of the Red Sea defended, and slue many of them with their Artillery: but Thome de Sousa arriving with a fleet from India tooke the Turkes, and withall destroyed Mombaza in the sight of the Muzimbas. The Captaine said that the Portugals were the Gods of the Sea, and hee of the Land; and sent an Ambassadour to Sousa, professing friendship to them, and requesting that seeing they had honourably ended their enterprise, he might beginne his, namely, to kill and eate every living thing in the Iland, which by their consent he did accordingly, burning the Palme-trees and Woods where many men were hidden, whom hee tooke and eate with all hee could get.

  Thence he returned to the Coast, and went to Melinde, where Mathew Mendez with thirty Portugals ayded the King, and three thousand warlike Cafres, called Mossegueios, came also to his succour, which came suddenly on their backes when they had gotten up the wall, and were almost possessed of the Bulwarke, and chased them with such a furie, that only the Captaine with above one hundred others escaped; having found none in three hundred leagues march, which durst encounter them. And thus much of the Zimbas….