Nine Faces Of Kenya

by Elspeth Huxley

  A meeting of white farmers was called at Nakuru and the arch-enemy invited to address them. By a coincidence of history the son of that Lord Delamere who had virtually started off white settlement was in the chair. It was a glum and hostile audience. This is part of what Kenyatta had to say:

  I am a politician, but I am a farmer like you … I think the soil joins us all and therefore we have a kind of mutual understanding. If you want to understand each other, then the best thing is to talk together … I believe that the most disturbing point among us is suspicion, fear. These are created by not knowing what the other side is thinking. If we must live together, if we must work together, we must talk together, exchange views. This is my belief. And one thing which I want to make clear is this. It is, that we must also learn to forgive one another. There is no perfect society anywhere. Whether we are white, brown or black, we are not angels. We are human beings, and as such are bound to make mistakes. But there is a great gift that we can exercise, that is to forgive one another. If you have done harm to me, it is for me to forgive you. If I have done harm to you, it is for you to forgive me. All of us, white, brown and black, can work together to make this country great … Let us join together and join hands and work together for the benefit of Kenya. This is what I beg you to believe, that this is the policy of your government.

  I was not at this meeting, held in mid-1963, but those who were told me that tension and hostility almost tangibly eased, and that Kenyatta’s next few sentences drew laughter

  Many of you, I think, are just as good Kenyans as myself. I think some of you may be older than myself a little bit. I am 73 myself and I have my age-group among you. Therefore you are just as good Kenyans as myself. I think some of you may be worried – what will happen if Kenyatta comes to be the head of the government? He has been in prison, maybe he has given trouble. What is he going to do? Let me set you at rest. That Kenyatta has no intention whatever to look backwards. Not at all. I want you to believe what I am saying now, that we are not going to look backwards. We are going to forgive the past and look forward to the future. Because if we start thinking about the past, what time shall we have to build the future?

  The M’zee, as he had become, sat down to an enthusiastic clapping of white hands. His words did much to persuade some, at least, of those white farmers who had contemplated leaving to stay on and give the future a chance.

  This message of “forgive and forget” was not addressed to Europeans only. Kenyatta’s own people were deeply divided. Those who had taken an active part in Mau Mau were in a minority; many had joined a Home Guard recruited by the administration, and the chiefs, as well as the numerous Christians, had stayed loyal to the Government. Civil war had left its inevitable bitterness, and many feared that a night of the long knives would follow for those Kikuyu who had fought the freedom-fighters. Kenyatta knew that, unless he could overcome these festering enmities, he could have little hope of leading his nation to a peaceful future. In a speech he made a few months later he told his people that ignorance, sickness and poverty – not, by implication, Europeans – were Kenya’s true enemies, and that only hard work and unity could overcome them. Only the burial of hatchets and the dismantling of tribal barriers could create a contented country. We must work together, strive together, join together – harambee! That cry so familiar to drivers stuck in the mud became the rallying call of the nation.

  The night of the long knives – or the sharpened pangas – never happened. Wild-eyed “generals” with matted hair emerged from the forests, and “rehabilitated” oath-administrators with “Jomo beards” from the detention camps, to mingle with “loyalist” home guards and stalwart Christians and turn back together into ordinary citizens. Harambee worked. How much, so quickly, was really forgotten none but a Kikuyu could say, but forgiveness was apparent, thanks to the wisdom of Jomo Kenyatta, the M’zee.

  Out in the Midday Sun Elspeth Huxley.

  On 12 December 1963 the Union Jack was hauled down and the flag of the independent Republic of Kenya raised in Nairobi, thus ending sixty-eight years of colonial rule. The M’zee died in Mombasa on 22 August 1978, and on the same day the vice-president, Daniel arap Moi, was sworn in as President, an office that the incumbent can enjoy for life.

  1 Walter Mayes was a political officer whom Meinertzhagen had accused of fraud and brutality. He was transferred and demoted, and became Meinertzhagen’s implacable enemy.

  2 Northern Frontier District.

  3 Gikuyu and Mumbi are the legendary Adam and Eve of the Kikuyu, whose daughters gave rise to the nine clans.

  PART V

  Environment

  THE LANDSCAPE OF Kenya has infinite variety, great beauty, and runs to extremes. Africa’s second highest mountain and the tropical verges of the Indian Ocean lie within its bounds. From the coast the land rises slowly to the highlands, roughly between 4,000 and 8,000 feet above sea-level, and is bisected by the Great Rift Valley, whose wide-spreading floor is broken by extinct volcanoes and adorned by a chain of lakes stretching from the soda-impregnated Natron on the Tanzanian border to Turkana, whose tip thrusts into Ethiopia. Beyond the Rift’s western wall the land falls again to the fertile basin of Lake Victoria and the border with Uganda; to the north lies a region of dusty deserts, lava rock and thirst that occupies about one half of Kenya’s total area. Here nomads trek from well to distant well, and elephants once dug for water in the sand. The Republic’s rainfall varies from an inch or two, and sometimes none, to a hundred inches and more in a year, and is the key to man’s existence in Kenya: where rain falls plentifully but not excessively he prospers, where it is scant and unreliable he endures. The human population, formerly sparse, scattered and more or less static, now rockets upwards at a rate that threatens to exhaust the country’s natural resources. Nearly two centuries ago Jonathan Swift observed that geographers in Afric maps “O’er unhabitable downs/Place elephants for want of towns.” Technological man has hammered the elephants and supplied the towns.

  The Bush

  The bush embodies the intrinsicality of Africa. It can be vicious, deadly, dangerous and cruel; also verdant, lovely, seductive and kind.

  Put your foot down and more often than not you tread on rough volcanic rubble; where there is not volcanic rubble there is fine dust that rises in clouds when herds of cattle or game move over it. Touch a tree and it is thorny; camp near water and you are eaten alive by mosquitoes, although you need not fear the lions that will still roar around you in the wilder parts. Sit in the shade and you will sit on a thorn, if not something worse. Such country is not for those who like an easy life, but it has its attractions for lovers of wild landscape and the freedom of the bush.

  The Mystery of the Flamingos Leslie Brown

  “The vegetable image of democracy.”

  I have so often used the word “scrub,” and it is so important an element in East African geography and scenery, that I must describe exactly what it is. The chief constituents are thorny acacias, generally with flat tops and white stems. In dry weather they look gaunt, bare, and bony; in wet weather they are connected and partly covered with a network of creepers, and may even acquire a certain grace when draped with masses of convolvulus. Occasionally, too, one finds in the scrub flowering shrubs of marvellous beauty. But this is rare: what strikes one most about it is its formlessness, its utter want of distinction, and its terrible strength. It is the vegetable image of democracy. It grows no great trees and makes no fine views, but it has taken entire possession of the country, and you cannot turn it out. At present one merely regrets that so much land should be wasted, but before the construction of the railway the journey across the Nyika was the most formidable part of the march to Uganda, especially the forty miles between Samburu and Maungu, where there was no water. The horrors of the scrub are increased by the number of thorns, “the tyrants of the forest,” as Krapf called them. The vegetation is spiny, spiky, and forbidding. Almost all the plants bear thorns: some bear nothing else, and ex
ist solely in order to be disagreeable and obstructive. The “Wait-a-bit” thorn tells its own tale. Had it been desired to erect an artificial barrier for preventing the entry of civilization into the interior, it would have been very hard to invent one more effective than that which Nature has provided.

  The East Africa Protectorate Sir Charles Eliot.

  The spirit of the bush.

  Whether you are observing the bigger and more dangerous varieties of game, or the lovely profusion of gazelles in their infinite variety, you should always – if your spirit is akin to the spirit of the bush – act with consideration, and should not inflict human presence too closely or inconsiderately on those to whom it is not welcome. Then, if you act in proper manner, you reap your reward because you will see the elephants talking together as they drowse away the heat of the day under the cool shade of the trees along the river banks; you can watch the lion cubs playing hide and seek among grass tussocks in the sinking rays of the westering sun while their mothers stretch, and stand up, and sniff the evening air, and the black-maned lions lift their heavy heads and yawn.

  And, while you wait and watch, the tall and elegant giraffes will approach almost within touching distance while they nibble the young leaves from the flat tops of thorn trees and look around them with soft and wondering eyes.

  The bush is alive in the early morning, around dawn and sunrise, before the comfortable heat of the day drives all living things – including man when man is in the bush – to laze and drowse in the shade, and it is alive also in the coolth of the evening when those who live by grazing come out into the open to graze, and those who live by hunting come out to hunt. But the animals which may be hunted do not live in terror of the hunters; it is only the individual which is hunted that is terrified and his terror is only momentarily communicated to those around him. Just for a moment terror is there; in a few moments terror has gone; and a lion will walk through a herd of game which will be no more than wary of him and do no more than give him his distance. Nature, by allowing only the fittest to survive, makes wariness and alertness an integral part of her creatures, but fear is not a persistent part of them; it comes and is gone again, and that is all. That is why man can find beauty and peace among the denizens of the bush, and in the bush itself, and a satisfaction that is beyond the comprehension of those who only dwell in cities.

  We Built a Country J. F. Lipscomb.

  The pyramid of life.

  Most typical of the trees in the nyika [bush] are the thorny acacias – above all the flat-topped tortilis. By the river some of the elatior acacias are eight hundred years old. Out in the bush the baobabs, whose bulbous trunks hold water like sponges, can live to a thousand. My friend Malcolm Coe, the zoologist, discovered that baobabs depend on fruitbats or bushbabies, brushing through their branches, for fertilization. Indeed most of our plants and trees can reproduce only if their seeds are dispersed by animals or birds.

  Ninety per cent of the energy harnessed by these myriads of leaves is burned up in the process of growth, flowering, fruiting and seeding but the rest is available for other forms of life to exploit. There is little enough grass along the banks of the river to satisfy the impala, zebra, buffalo and hippos; there is still less further inland. Yet there is plenty of nourishment on the shrubs and the trees for the specialist browsers. The lowest shoots are nipped off by the dik dik. Higher up Joy’s favourites, the lesser kudu, with their lovely spiralling horns and crescents of cream on their pale grey flanks, and the lumbering rhinos, make their mark. But the elegant gerenuk, with its long curving neck, will rise up on its hind legs to reach even higher.

  The trees are beyond the reach of the gazelles and the antelopes, but not of the giraffes. The whole of this animal is a miracle of adaptation. Its neck, its mouth, its long twisting tongue and even its viscous saliva are all designed to make the most of the furthest tips of the branches, rich in their protein, if sometimes uncomfortably thorny. A giraffe makes do with exactly the same number of vertebrae as we have, but it has a special lightweight skull, valves in its arteries to stop it blacking out when it bends to drink and neck muscles of extraordinary strength. I have seen a photograph of a drinking giraffe whose head had been seized by a crocodile: in a second frame the giraffe has managed to straighten up and the crocodile is hanging vertically by its jaws. Only the elephant can compete with the giraffe in getting at the tree canopy. It will stand on its hind legs to extend the range of its trunk and, if it is still frustrated, will use its forehead and tusks to knock the tree over. It will also tear open the baobabs with its tusks to get at their moisture.

  Ten per cent of the energy trapped by the plants, at the base of the food chain, has now gone up one level as it has been consumed by this vast and diversified army of herbivores. They, too, use up ninety per cent of this energy in movement, digestion, fighting, fleeing, courtship and breeding: only ten per cent remains for the flesh-eating hunters at the top of the chain. Because the reservoir of energy shrinks each time it goes up a step, the structure of life has been seen by some scientists as a pyramid. The carnivores prowl at the top.

  My Pride and Joy George Adamson.

  In Tsavo East National Park: drought, death and deliverance.

  Day after day the merciless sun beat down from a brassy sky with a fierce, dry, intensity. It was pitiful to see the decline of such large numbers of elephant as they wearily hung around waiting for the end with mute resignation and silent apathy. It was not uncommon to see entire herds fast asleep beneath the scant shade afforded by a few gnarled trees, lying flat on their sides, or standing dejectedly in a huddle patiently waiting for an old, emaciated leader to make the move she plainly never would. It was pitiful also to see the attempts made to raise a dying comrade, or lift a far gone calf to its feet, but what was most tragic, day after day, was the great grief of a mother who had lost her calf, or a calf standing pathetically beside an inert mother. On one occasion a cow, whose small calf had collapsed, spent several hours painstakingly trying to urge it to its feet again.

  Alas to no avail, and when the calf had breathed its last, she felt every inch of the lifeless little body as though to imprint it on her mind forever, before turning deliberately away and slowly ambling off. One could sense the intense emotional suffering of this cow, which was far worse, I am sure, than the physical pain connected with the drought. Post-mortem examinations carried out on several carcases revealed that the stomachs were in fact full, but that the protein value of the contents was as low as two per cent….

  The first half of November came and went, and although the clouds banked up promisingly each afternoon and the humidity was oppressive, still the rain held off – and more elephant died. This pattern was repeated day after day until the end of November, when the heavens suddenly opened one afternoon and those elephant in the eastern belt that had had the tenacity to cling to life until this day were spared.

  Joyfully everyone hurried outside to savour the first life-giving drops; to watch them fall in a puff of dust on the powdery soil, and to see them come with ever increasing intensity until the ground began to glisten and the water creep along in little rivulets. One could almost sense the quickening of the earth; the hidden excitement of the birds, the insects, the frogs and the animals and the revival of the poor old elephants, as that soothing liquid straight from heaven poured over their emaciated bodies and brought with it the promise of renewed life….

  And, before the week was out, not a single elephant remained in the stricken eastern belt. Somehow the survivors managed to trek again, and they deserted that area of so much misery to congregate where the heaviest falls of rain had made the nyika burst again to life. For although elephant maybe very conservative in the dry season, as soon as heavy rain falls, even many miles away, they somehow seem to know and overnight they migrate en masse. How they know where to go will remain a secret of Nature, probably forever, but the fact that they do is demonstrated every single year in Tsavo. Water in the inland pans means that
fresh feeding grounds are now accessible, and the elephant are able to fill their stomachs again.

  The Tsavo Story Daphne Sheldrick.

  The Plains

  The Athi plains.

  After a cup of tea we drove along a rough track towards the Athi in search of a pride of lions seen the day before at a place called the Camp of Stones. This, one would say, is the perfect hunting-ground: neither open plain where a man finds no cover, nor thick bush where thorns obstruct him. The twisted combretum bush, its thin trunks nobbly as apple trees and mellowed by a westering sun, rise from a sward now succulent and springy, and the tall graceful acacias quietly spread their branches against the sunset. A flash of brilliant blue and cinnamon brought the car to a standstill while my companions debated whether a bird eyeing us from the branches was the European or the lilac-breasted roller; the point settled, we clambered up a clump of high granite boulders.