Nine Faces Of Kenya

by Elspeth Huxley

  This was the day for goggling. We drove first down an avenue of flamboyants whose brilliant scarlet flowers burnt like fires in the green branches, overtaking as we went the morning procession of Giriama women marching in with baskets of frothy white cotton on their heads. These women, naked to the waist, wear short skirts apparently made of palm-leaves, but actually of cloth cunningly pleated to resemble the older and traditional material. They look sleek and sturdy, but their figures are clumsy.

  My Swedish companion, a sort of Viking burnt mahogany-colour by this equatorial sun (by trade a coffee planter near Nairobi), keeps a small canoe which he fashioned from a seaplane’s float. We pushed this little vessel through shallow water as warm as a bath and chugged out to the reef.

  A Swahili proverb says: “Where there are breakers, there is also a door through the reef.”

  The question is always to find the door; many wrecks along these coral barriers are the gravestones of vessels who failed; but the Viking did not hesitate and we passed safely over, leaving behind us the long creamy line of foam that, at low tide, marks the reef.

  It was low tide now. The boat was anchored. Wearing heavy goggles, we swam over the rock-pools on our tummies, our faces thrust into the sea.

  A fantastic, unimagined world lay under water: a Walt Disney world of corals, some waving like plumes, some fixed like calcified brains, all in pink and beige and carmine; a world of fishes of brilliant colourings and bizarre shapes. In and out of the mountain ranges and deep caverns of coral swam these little fishes: one plum-brown with two broad bands of light blue and orange feathery fins, another with blue peacock’s-feather eyes on fins and tail. Some were slim, some square, some waved long graceful bristles; butterfly fish, angel fish, box fish, zebra fish – scores of different kinds. Tiny powder-blue creatures hovered in shoals over clumps of coral and melted away into crevices before our shadows.

  Bigger shapes darted by twenty or thirty feet under water, and after these the Viking vanished, clasping a harpoon. He pursued them into a great cave, disappearing completely into the bowels of the sea for so long that I felt sure he had stuck in the caverns and drowned; as I began to look anxiously for bubbles, his feet appeared and he swam out backwards, two plaice-like fishes wriggling on his spear. They were a vivid orange covered with electric-blue spots. He threw them into the canoe, and their colour died with them; in a few minutes all the brilliance had gone, they had become a drab and ordinary brown.

  Off Casuarina Point the sea is so warm that you can spend all day in it, climbing out to rest now and again on a nobbly rock of coral or to suck an orange in the boat. Sun, not cold, is the enemy. Those with white unhardened skins must go warily until they have baked themselves, little by little, to the Viking’s mahogany.

  The water round the horn of the bay is so limpid that you can see every waving branch of coral fathoms deep, and the spots, bars and whiskers of every fish. You enter an Aladdin’s cave of brilliance and romance seen from a hot sea-bath under a blue sky with the sun and the air all round you. If the world can offer greater pleasures, they must be far to seek.

  The Sorcerer’s Apprentice Elspeth Huxley.

  Gedi

  Sixty-five miles north of Mombasa and ten miles south of Malindi lie the ruins of an old Arab city. In 1948 Gedi was declared a National Park and an archaelogist, James Kirkman, appointed to investigate it. The tangled forest was peeled away to reveal the lineaments of a walled city covering forty-five acres and containing a palace, a Great Mosque, lesser mosques, pillar tombs, wells, baths, courts, and all the appurtenances of a civilized Arab city.

  The main block of the Palace is in itself a typical Gedi house, but in this case it serves as the anteroom for the two wings, one possibly for staff and storage, the other for women, since it leads down to another reception court. This is one of the most interesting rooms in the Palace. It is entered at one end over a fingo or spell, which consisted of a pot containing a piece of paper with words written on it which was buried in the floor with appropriate incantations and by which it was believed that a djinn had been induced to take up residence in the pot. If anybody came in with evil intentions he would be driven out of his mind. The pot was buried near the door so that the miscreant would not have an opportunity to do very much before the djinn got him. Once a week incense was burnt over the pot, just to remind the djinn that he was there for a purpose….

  The story of the Palace would appear to be as follows. A building consisting of the earlier audience court, the main block and the west wing or women’s quarters was constructed in the early fifteenth century. In the second half of the century it was extended and the Annexe was built. At the beginning of the sixteenth century it was abandoned, but at the end of the century a large programme of renovation and tenementization was undertaken which was never completed.

  Fourteen large houses in recognizable condition have been cleared, ten of them in the main excavated areas. They have been named after an architectural feature or the most interesting find in them. The majority are semi-detached, but unlike a semi-detached house of today the front doors are not side by side, so you do not have to know what your neighbour is doing. Of course you did, or your wife did, but it was not forced on your notice. The oldest surviving house in its original state is the House of the Cowries, built at the end of the fourteenth century. Some of the others are probably not much later but have been modified in the course of the fifteenth or at the end of the sixteenth century….

  The people who lived at Gedi were neither wealthy, luxurious nor artistic, but had most of what contributed in their day to good living. “Colonial and comfortable” would be an apt expression for their way of life. Outside the Palace were two large houses: the House of the Chinese Cash and the House of the Porcelain Bowl. The House of the Chinese Cash had been destroyed in the early sixteenth century. In the court a Chinese cash of the Emperor Ning Tsung (AD 1195–1224) was found. Copper cash were exported from China, but they have only occurred sporadically in Kenya, always in context much later than the date of the coin. The House of the Porcelain Bowl was small, with only two rooms and a lavatory, built in the ruins of a larger house which had been destroyed by fire….

  Sometime in the second quarter of the seventeenth century this thriving Arab city was abandoned forever. No one knows for certain why. The most likely theory seems to bean imminent threat of invasion from the warlike Galla people of the hinterland. The citizens departed, the forest closed in, only ghosts remained.

  When I first started to work at Gedi I had the feeling that something or somebody was looking out from behind the walls, neither hostile nor friendly, but waiting for what he knew was going to happen. Some of the houses have a thick as opposed to a thin, empty or meaningless atmosphere. The something or somebody behind the walls has gone, but some houses still retain for me their peculiar aura.

  The coastal African does not only conceive of ghosts as we see them, but he also believes in spirits as creatures in their own right. One of the most unpleasant is a monstrous sheep that follows you wherever you go. One can sympathize with the unpleasantness of having always as a companion the symbol of the essential oneness of the human race.

  The ghost stories of the Europeans are mainly associated with inexplicable misfortunes and inconveniences associated with a visit to Gedi. One of the best is of a camping party whose hurricane lamps would not burn and whose torches would not go on, finally the car lamps failed, so they felt they were up against more than they could take and went back to the main road. When they reached the road the lights came on again. This haunting is now a thing of the past. People have camped at Gedi with permission of the authorities and nothing particularly unpleasant or interesting seems to have happened to them which could not have occurred anywhere else. The hand of man, even an archaeologist, has restored Gedi to normality. The local inhabitants say that it is still bad, but not as bad as it used to be in the past. This grudging admission concedes more than it reserves. The ghosts of Gedi ha
ve gone, yet if you walk round the walls between half past five and six in the evening you may well have all the authentic feelings that precede or accompany an apparition. The things that were not in Horatio’s philosophy are still there, though we are living in the best of all materialist eras.

  Men and Monuments of the East African Coast James Kirkman.

  Wajir

  Wajir lies in the remote north-eastern district of Kenya, a dusty little town in the middle of a desert. Bristling thorn bushes grow out of the grey sand for miles in every direction. Anyone so ill-advised as to leave the road can get lost within minutes, so flat and monotonous, so spotted with thorn bush, is the landscape. Wajir is famous for its wells. Legend has it that some three thousand years ago the Queen of Sheba watered her camels here. Today the scene could easily be the same, as thousands of camels stand in orderly groups round the wells, waiting their turn to drink.

  The wells are only about twenty feet deep and are undoubtedly of great antiquity. Old skin buckets are let down and raised in a rhythmic motion, the water splashing amid cries, singing, the grunts of camels and the bleating of goats. The buckets are emptied in a circular trough surrounding the well head and the camels drink soberly, patiently, after their long weeks of browsing through the barren country.

  The white buildings of the town with little minarets rising above tessellated houses have the atmosphere of a Foreign Legion fort. On the wall behind the DC’s desk are recorded the illustrious names of former DCs of the colonial era, now passed into history. On the outskirts of the town a strange-shaped building, named by some humourist in the colonial service “The Wajir Yacht Club”, used to be a meeting-place for officers of all services. The streets of soft dust have few vehicles to scatter the small children playing on the ground and a few whitewashed stones, arranged in a circle, act as a traffic roundabout at one end of the main thoroughfare. There are two or three grocers’ shops, a butcher’s, a maker of sweet cakes, a cemetery hidden behind a low stone wall overgrown by weeds, and then the desert, containing and dominating everything. A timeless quality seems to pervade the whole atmosphere. On this particular morning, as David (Coulson) and I flew in on our medical missions, the flat arid land looked, from the air, like the floor of an ancient lake, an old sea-bed from the far-off geological past.

  This oasis in the north east of Kenya is inhabited largely by Somalis. These lean Moslem nomads live with their camels in symbiotic fashion. The camel walks to its grazing, accompanied by its owner and his family, and only needs to return to the wells after three weeks’ absence. The family survives on the camel’s milk, while the camels carry the few possessions of the family, who walk alongside them. They are the only domesticated animals designed to survive without water in these pitiless wastelands. Their huge spongy feet are adapted to walking on the soft sand, but it is their ability to survive without water and still give milk that makes them not only indispensible but the basis of human life in the desert.

  The freedom of this life lies deep in the hearts of these nomads. They defend it fanatically and are only happy in their natural environment. They are fierce and cruel, and indulge in fighting among their clans and with their neighbours, particularly the Ethiopians. In the past, as their grazing areas became exhausted they would raid southwards, extending their territory. The colonial era put a stop to this, but since Kenya’s independence they have tried politically, and through poaching and banditry, to annexe the north-eastern part of Kenya. These days they are often armed with modern automatic weapons captured from raids over the border. Life is cheap and the will of Allah is inexorable, accepted with the fatalism that is part of their strength.

  Different Drums Michael Wood.

  Michael Wood, a surgeon, came to East Africa after the Second World War to combine a practice in Nairobi with wheat growing on Mount Kilimanjaro. Piloting his light aircraft between farm and surgery, he observed the lack of roads and towns, the isolation of scattered huts and villages. So was born the Flying Doctor service, whose trained personnel fly to the remotest places, hold clinics under thorn trees, inoculate children and treat patients who trudge for many miles to seek aid. The service grew, by degrees, into the African Medical Research Foundation, whose many projects work towards the betterment of life among African peoples. Michael Wood was knighted in 1985, and died of cancer three years later.

  PART VI

  Wildlife

  THE VARIETY AND abundance of East Africa’s wildlife was formerly one of the wonders of the world. Then came the opening up of large parts of the highlands to European farmers and ranchers, most of whom shot most of the animals on their land or drove them out, and the escalation of the African population which led to the same result. “Human islands in a sea of elephants changed to increasingly small islands of elephants in a sea of people”, Dr Richard Laws remarked. For elephants, read almost every other kind of mammal. First the colonial government, then its African successor, endeavoured to preserve as much wildlife as possible by setting aside National Parks and game reserves, mainly in areas too barren for cultivation to thrive, where animals have right of way and resident humans are, so far as possible but not always, excluded. In recent years poaching of the animals, formerly mainly for meat but now for money, has all but exterminated the black rhino in the wild, cut the elephant population to a fraction of its former size, and threatened several other species as well. Whether the parks and reserves can themselves resist the mounting pressure exerted by humans for more land and timber remains to be seen. While the animals have dwindled in numbers, understanding of their behaviour has grown through studies made in situ, and the use of modern techniques such as electronic radio collars. The passages that follow range from descriptions of sights no longer to be seen recorded nearly a century ago, to present-day accounts of animal behaviour observed in parks and reserves.

  At the turn of the century the Uasin Gishu plateau, now altogether conquered by hoe, plough and fence, still belonged to the first-comers.

  Here may be seen large herds of giraffes as one might see cattle peacefully standing about in an English park…. Elephants may be seen in great herds close by, but they affect more the scattered forest than the open plains. Where you see the giraffes you also see numerous rhinos in couples, male and female, or a female alone with her snub-nosed calf….

  It is a glorious sight, say an hour after the sun has risen and the shadows have begun to shorten, to traverse this grass country and see this zoological gardens turned loose. Herds of zebras and Jackson’s hartebeest mingle together, and in face of the sunlight become a changing procession of silver and gold, and the sleek coats of the zebras in the level sunlight mingle their black stripes and snowy intervals into a uniform silver-grey, whilst the coats of the hartebeests are simply red-gold. Dotted about on the outskirts of this throng are jet-black ostriches with white wings, a white bob-tail and long pink necks. Red and silver jackals slink and snap; grotesque warthogs of a dirty grey, with whitish bristles and erect tails terminating in a drooping tassel, scurry before the traveller till they can bolt into some burrow of the ant-bear. Males of the noble waterbuck, strangely like the English red deer, appear at a distance, browsing with their hornless, doe-like females, or gazing at the approaching traveller with head erect on the maned neck and splendid carriage of Landseer’s stags. Grey-yellow reed-buck bend their lissom bodies into such a bounding gallop that the spine seems to become concave as the animal’s rear is flung high into the air. The dainty Damaliscus, or sable antelope, with a coat of red, mauve, black and yellow satin bordered with cream colour, stands at gaze, his coat like watered silk as the sunlight follows the wavy growth of glistening hair.

  Once black buffalo would have borne a part in this assembly, but now, alas! they have all been destroyed by the rinderpest. The eland still lingers in this region, but seems to prefer the scattered woodland to the open plains. Lions and leopards may both be seen frequently in broad daylight, hanging about these herds of game, though apparently causing no d
ismay to the browsing antelopes.

  The Uganda Protectorate Sir Harry Johnston.

  Before they were constrained by wire fences, the antelopes, zebra and other plain-dwellers migrated in vast numbers along the Rift Valley. Such migrating herds were to be seen as late as circa 1910.

  It is a wonderful sight to see the game on trek when the rains have begun. The kongoni move, as soon as the first shower falls, in search of the new grass of which it brings promise, but the great treks are those of the smaller antelope, which shun the long grass where enemies may hide. In East Africa we do not see the vast herds of “trek-bok” known in the Kalahari, but nevertheless, the migrating herds are of enormous size at times. I have seen these movements in the Southern Reserve when, growth of the herbage prompting, the smaller game travels south to the dry country near the border; but there is a spot between Mount Menengai and the forest where the trek is to be seen at its best, the animals being on their way past Nakuru towards Elmenteita. The roads used on these occasions are well marked, and on these the animals may be seen. They do not, of course, come trooping past with the purposeful air of people in a London street. They drift along in seemingly aimless fashion, feeding, playing, or love-making as they go, but always on the move towards their Promised Land of short grass and change of food.