Nine Faces Of Kenya

by Elspeth Huxley

  The temple was a peaceful abode to which I always returned gladly. Within the bare walls of my room there was nothing except the iron bedstead and mattress, my bags and a huge rotary electric three-speed ceiling fan. A number of similar rooms were set aside for other needy travellers. We all shared tiled shower and wash facilities. My door gave on to the courtyard which was the haunt of thousands of pigeons cooing contentedly all day except when they inexplicably panicked and the whole flock took off in a tornado of flutterings to settle on the gutters and the temple spire. There were concrete benches around the courtyard, warmed during the day by the hot equatorial sun, and when at night I returned from my evening meal I would find them still warm and would sit and talk with temple residents or with fellow travellers until the air was cool enough for sleeping. Sometimes in the morning I woke up before the temple service started, for outside my room on the street side was the depot where newsboys collected the early editions of the papers, and on such occasions I could hear the haunting cry of the muezzin at the Baluchi Mosque not far away calling the faithful to prayer, and I might reflect for a few minutes on the undisturbed peace between the faiths which especially distinguishes life in Kenya.

  The Kenya Magic John Schmid.

  Dhows –

  It was so old a ship – who knows? who knows?

  –And yet so beautiful, I watched in vain

  To see the mast burst open with a rose,

  And the whole deck put on its leaves again.

  James Elroy Flecker

  Once the kaskazi, the north-east monsoon, is established, the Old Harbour prepares to receive the dhows. These sturdy, adventurous little craft have been coming to Mombasa since time immemorial across the Indian Ocean from Arabia, India and Somalia, transforming the Old Harbour from a sleepy backwater into a hive of activity.

  There are several different kinds of dhow. Many are the large double-enders, with stem heads thrusting upwards and forwards. The rounded end of the projection is painted black with a white band, and often, near the tip, on the jackstaff, is a model aeroplane. These are the Booms which, in the main, come from Iran. Their raised poops narrow to a strong rudder post from which the rudder hangs. A tall painted flagstaff dominates the stern, and two pointed “toilet” boxes hang from the ship’s side flanking the rudder.

  The Sambuks are the next most numerous. These square-sterned vessels vary according to their port of origin, but all show the stem head curving upwards from the water-line to end just above the hull, with the forward edge reaching higher than the after edge. It resembles a scimitar cleaving the waters ahead….

  The most delicately carved and decorated ships are the Ghanjabs from Sur and the Kotias from India. The transom arches are usually much broader than those of the Sambuks, and looking out from the stern are five windows with curved pillars between them. Many parts of these ships are blessed with attractive carving. It is said that these are the females of the dhow fleet and therefore much care and attention is lavished upon their decoration. The Booms are their masculine counterpart.

  There are several other varieties to be seen at the height of the season, including the quaint Badan or Bedeni with their tall rudders and rudder posts, the small Babnus with their masts raked far forwards, the Zarooks, and a small Baghla that is a constant visitor. Dhangis and a variety of ships that go under the general name Barig (a corruption of brig) come from India.

  The dhows bring wares of many kinds for sale. Brass-studded chests are piled one on top of the other around the walls of the Customs House main hall, whilst the floor is covered with a great variety of carpets. Coffee pots and small money boxes fill up the unoccupied corners. Milling around are merchants and visitors eager to strike a bargain, while the dhow men sit and survey the scene. There are cargoes also of salt, fish, dates and, until recently, tiles.

  In the Old Harbour the dhows lie four or five abreast alongside the jetty. Stevedores carry sacks of coffee and other foods on their backs to be tipped into the holds while the ships await the change of the monsoon which will speed them on their homeward journey. Very few rely on sail these days, and the sight of a dhow moving out of the harbour in full sail with the large lateen billowed out by the wind is comparatively rare. The small coastal dhows from Lamu are an exception.

  The harbour empties rapidly once the kusi is established, the bustle in the godowns and on the jetties dies away, and the Old Port settles down to a period of comparative lethargy until the next season comes round. Ocean-going dhows are now almost extinct.

  Pioneers’ Scrapbook, eds. Elspeth Huxley and Arnold Curtis.

  – and the men who sailed in them.

  It was one of those motionless afternoons in April when everything is veiled in a shroud of heat, the time of the year when the east coast of Africa holds its breath, a period of silence between the monsoons. The white and purple bougainvillaea bushes and the great baobab trees around my house stood out against the pale, hot sky, looking withered and exhausted as they waited for a breath of air to ripple through their leaves. Sibillo, my cat, lay panting on the straw mat beneath the rustic Arab bed on the veranda where I was reading. It was too hot to concentrate. The effort to hold up the book was too much and I let it fall to the floor. I looked out at the sea through the wide arches that frame the outer reef and the mlango – the passage into Kilifi Creek.

  I heard a faint rustle in the bushes that flanked the tiny path leading to the beach. Three men moved slowly up the path; they did not see me. When I greeted them they looked at me in startled surprise; their haggard faces dripped with perspiration. They managed a tired smile when I asked them in Swahili what they wanted. “We are in trouble, Bwana,” they said. One of them came forward and clutched my hand with both of his, bowing slightly as though he were going to kiss it.

  The men wore faded kikois knotted round their waists and held in place with a leather belt. They carried khanjars, those magnificent curved silver daggers, fastened to their buckles. Limp cotton turbans were wound around their heads. Their weather-beaten faces, the distant look in their eyes, and their gnarled hands made me recognize them as sailors. They needed water: they came from a dhow, they said, and had been drifting at sea for ten days with a broken rudder. A passing jahazi, a small Lamu dhow, had brought them ashore and they needed help.

  Lorenzo Ricciardi loaded up his motor-boat with water containers and, with the three sailors, sped out to the distressed dhow. She was carrying at least fifty passengers.

  Bare to the waist, they wore dirty grey pieces of cloth and faded turbans; they were mostly tall and thin, with long sinewy muscles and sharp features, their glittering black eyes set in gaunt faces. I guessed the passengers were Somalis, and the crew were Arabs or Omani from the Arabian Gulf. The dhow was a sambuk, with one huge mast.

  Their captain, the nakhoda, was one of the three men I had brought back with water and some timber to repair the rudder. It was only when we saw him among his people that we realized his rank. He gave orders in a soft yet firm voice; and the glances that he threw at his men and at the passengers as they moved the water-containers on to the dhow were enough to make everyone know he was in command.

  A cargo of dried dates was piled high in the stern, with large cans of fat and dried fish. These were squashed under a faded green tarpaulin through which brown stains of sticky juice seeped on to the deck. Mysterious bundles wrapped in straw matting were strewn around, together with smaller packages of long rectangular shape – perhaps skins. Worn manilla ropes were heaped in brown hairy piles, and makeshift bedding had been arranged against them. Above all this mess towered the great mast. The tattered sail provided some shade. Sliced kingfish, their flesh orange and gold, hung from the spars and sent an evil stench downwind.

  I tried to talk to the nakhoda using my sailor, Said, as interpreter. Said was a Bajun from Lamu Island and spoke some Arabic. Through him I learned that the dhow was out of Salalah in Oman, bound for Mombasa with a cargo of dried fish, dates and other merchandise. In a
month or two it would load up with boriti (mangrove) poles in Lamu and sail home. I suspected that the passengers were mercenaries joining the Tanzanian Army – Somalis make good warriors.

  When he bid them farewell they thanked us profusely, bending themselves in half and praising Allah akbar: He had heard their prayers, but I was the instrument He had chosen to save their lives. It was very moving.

  The Voyage of the Mir-el-Lal Lorenzo Ricciardi.

  Lamu

  After the siesta.

  My favourite time of day in Lamu is the late afternoon. Around 4.00 pm the town slowly begins to reawaken. Almost everyone has retired after the midday meal for a siesta, and upon re-emerging from their houses, the shopkeepers unlock the bolts on their doors and begin the best part of the day’s business. This is the time when the fishermen and dhow crews come to buy their goods, having been too busy in the morning to do so. The shops are friendly places and news flickers from one to another. A crier goes past all the shops through the main streets, bellowing out advertisements for the film that will be shown in the evening which will very probably be an Indian musical. Many of the men make their way to the mosques to say their prayers and to chat with friends, for mosques in Lamu serve as social meeting places. Here the talk may well centre on religious topics interspersed with titbits of news from the Hadhramaut or elsewhere in the Indian Ocean where Lamu people may have friends or relatives. Strangers to Lamu usually gather at the mosques in the afternoon and, upon telling their news, they receive a hospitable welcome from the residents. The strangers have been led to the mosques by the sound of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer, (now on cassettes).

  By sunset, the town is a hub of activity. It is a traditional and particularly enjoyable pastime to walk along the seafront just as the sun begins to go down. There is a tendency for the various groups of people to walk together. The Swahili and Arab ladies, covered from top to toe in their black buibuis, but with their eyes carefully made-up with kohl, dart back and forth, visiting friends’ houses and gossiping about who is with whom. The Ithnaashariya women gather in little groups together, their buibuis usually being a dark royal blue. The Arab men look the most aristocratic of Lamu’s populace, and though they now lack the money to buy the colourful silks that they wore way back in Vasco da Gama’s time, their waistcoats are still beautifully embroidered in front, sometimes in matching white thread, sometimes in pale beige. Often whole families gather together on the benches looking out to the sea towards Manda and the mangrove swamps.

  In the early part of the evening, the aroma of charcoal-roasted meat pervades the streets throughout the southern part of town. Tiny kiosks sell roasted beef on skewers to the passers-by, and there are also small restaurants which offer Swahili cakes and other sticky sweets along with tea. Inside these places are long benches and trestle tables where mainly the Bajuns gather to spend the evening together. They take their tea in the old-fashioned manner, pouring it from their cup into the saucer and sucking it up.

  Later on, the coffee vendors appear on the streets. They have lovely old brass pots which they set up on charcoal braziers on any street corner. They also have with them little buckets (sometimes old paint tins), filled with water in which they rinse the china cup that is used by everyone who buys a cup of coffee. Lamu coffee is not as thick as the Turkish variety, but it is heavily sugared and has a superb aroma. After supper, you find many men sitting on the benches outside their houses or outside the restaurants playing dominoes, the favourite game in Lamu. There are also games of bao and draughts. The boards vary considerably; at one time an enterprising soap company in Kenya printed the checkered squares on the back of their boxes of soap powder which must have boosted their sales in Lamu tremendously! Lots of these are seen around Lamu, but there are also many home-made boards. Quite a few of the Arab, Swahili, Bajun and African residents play rummy with dog-eared cards that have been cherished for years. It is said that the Portuguese introduced playing cards to East Africa.

  Meanwhile, the ladies are up to other activities. Women’s Lib takes a peculiar turn in Lamu. When a little girl reaches puberty she is usually strictly guarded inside the women’s quarters of her home until a suitable husband is agreed upon by the family members. Before she is married, the older aunts explain to her the art of love, and both the Swahili and Arab women of Lamu are notorious for their skills in making love. The prospective bride is almost always a virgin, but she already knows how to give pleasure to a man. Quite often she is still under sixteen when married. Once she has a husband, she is freer than she has been since reaching puberty. She may not remain faithful to her husband, but keeps up appearances. If her husband loses his temper with her he may divorce her; indeed divorce is common in Lamu.

  The wife’s girl friends are very helpful in arranging rendezvous with lovers. Since men are not allowed at the parties women give for one another, it is very easy for a woman to borrow a friend’s pair of shoes at such a time and if she wraps herself modestly up in her buibui, no one will recognize her when she goes out on the street. With the borrowed shoes (she usually borrows them from someone with an entirely different shape, so that woman won’t be thought to be the one “out on the loose” either), she slips out of a back entrance of the house where the party is being held to go to wherever it is that she has agreed to meet her lover. If her husband happens to come to the house to pick her up from the party and take her home, the one who opens the door will of course not allow him entry to the women’s quarters and will instead offer to go and fetch his wife for him. She finds out who knows where the wife has gone and sends a friend to get her while the husband waits. Back to the house via another entrance, the wife changes into her own shoes and demurely meets her husband. He accepts having had to wait for her, for everyone knows how difficult it is for a woman to break off a gossipy conversation with another woman! Besides, he may have come just at the time when tea and cakes were served and it would have been rude for the wife to leave without sampling the delicacies provided for guests.

  Lamu rats.

  At high tide, when the seawater level is almost as high as that of the drains, rats are forced up through the drains. Little boys enjoy catching them and showing them to little old ladies from Chicago. After such a display of doubtful goodwill, it is highly unlikely that the ladies will want to make another visit to Lamu. Attempts have been made to eliminate the rats, many of which are much larger than the Lamu cats. The last really major effort was made in the late 1950s. In 1959 the District Commissioner proudly reported that 949 rats were caught, but a little later he lamented, “Again the courage and stamina of the Lamu cats failed them and it is believed that the rats actually eat the cats here.”

  Cargoes of the East Esmond and Chryssee Bradley Martin.

  Malindi beach, 1947

  Gaiety here is indigenous, speed exotic. The sun sparkles on a blue ocean and pours with intensity on to dense dry bush and dusty road, forcing men to seek shade and hammering the very vigour from their blood. From the road you can see little but bush and forest. Here and there your eye is caught by a flower whose creamy, wax-like petals are fringed with deep flamingo-pink, and whose soft fragility seems strangely at variance with its harsh surroundings, even with the fleshy spikes on which it is borne. This is the adenia, a desert plant whose water-storing bulb is so heavy that two men are needed to lift it.

  Small palm-thatched houses stand in a wide arc above Malindi bay within sound of breaking chocolate-coloured rollers – brown with the topsoil of the highlands washed hundreds of miles down the Sabaki river. The mouth of this river lies four miles north, yet the whole bay is red with particles of soil, millions of tons of it held in suspension.

  A wind off the sea blows all day long, keeping the air fresh; and when it drops at night the breakers subside into wavelets which spill on to the sand gently, their moonlit crests the colour of Ovaltine. In front dance the little crabs, in such multitudes that the whole beach seems agog with them; where the waves spread
out in a fine film they dart in, gliding sideways like ballet-dancers in crinolines.

  These little monsters wear their eyes on the end of long springy stalks. Sometimes, as if in contemplation, a crab will put up its front claws, pull down the stalks and then rub its hands together, while the eyes spring back into place. At night in the quiet moonlight on this deserted beach they dance in and out of the waves as swiftly as dragon-flies, until the tremor of one’s foot on the wet sand sends them scuttling into a thousand invisible burrows. They are queer and exquisite, and the purpose of their nightly ballet is to snatch morsels of offal from the waves.

  Dawn over Malindi bay is monochromatic, in all shades of steel-blue and indigo. The sea is like grey silk, the sky dark, but pale blue above a marine horizon, and light puffy clouds of heliotrope hang over the water. To-day the moon was a silver thread, the old moon in its arms; over it shone a bright morning star; to the right, the lighthouse winked with steadfast tranquillity, all was gentle and still. Then salmon-pink intruded and the monochrome quality of an early water-colour faded; in a few minutes the sun burst forth and the first bathers ran down the beach to meet the waves before they lost their bite.