The instant Torn Ear had seen the men, even before the shot rang out, the rest of the herd knew there was extreme danger because Torn Ear had uttered an alarm call just as she charged. All the others heard it and knew who made it and acted accordingly. Most of the elephants immediately began to run away from the source of the danger, but Torn Ear’s bond group instantly came to her aid. They ran toward her and even when they heard the shots and saw her fall they kept coming. The men turned and began to run but let off one volley of shots, missing most of the elephants but catching Tina in the chest with a shot that went into her right lung. These shots turned the Ts and they too began to run away from the danger. In the meantime, the rest of the herd ran to the north, which is what the poachers had hoped for, and two more men were waiting there. The WA family was in the front, led by their matriarch, Wendy, closely followed by the next oldest female, Willa. Wendy ran straight into the guns, but these men were not as experienced as the others, and it took seven shots in her head and neck and shoulders before Wendy fell and died. Willa behind her veered off and caught a bullet through her tail, severing it in half except for one bit of skin that kept the lower portion from falling off.
The whole aggregation was now tightly bunched and running at full speed. The mothers were literally pushing their babies forward to keep their pace up. They ran to the north and then to the east, skirting around the wet slippery lake bed. The Ts, having been farthest west and delayed by trying to aid Torn Ear, were at the rear and Tina was the very last. Her family knew she was hurt; they could smell the foamy pink blood dripping from her mouth. She managed to keep up until she got to the ridge, but the incline slowed her down and she groaned with the pain. Her mother, Teresia, kept dropping back to run beside her, reaching over and touching her with her trunk, but finally Tina had to slow to a walk.
Teresia took them to the far side of Meshanani, a small hill upon the ridge above the lake. There was some protection here, and Tina could go no farther. The blood pouring from her mouth was bright red and her sides were heaving for breath. The other elephants crowded around, reaching for her. Her knees started to buckle and she began to go down, but Teresia got on one side of her and Trista on the other and they both leaned in and held her up. Soon, however, she had no strength and she slipped beneath them and fell onto her side. More blood gushed from her mouth and with a shudder she died.
Teresia and Trista became frantic and knelt down and tried to lift her up. They worked their tusks under her back and under her head. At one point they succeeded in lifting her into a sitting position but her body flopped back down. Her family tried everything to rouse her, kicking and tusking her, and Tallulah even went off and collected a trunkful of grass and tried to stuff it into her mouth. Finally Teresia got around behind her again, knelt down, and worked her tusks in under her shoulder and then, straining with all her strength, she began to lift her. When she got to a standing position with the full weight of Tina’s head and front quarters on her tusks, there was a sharp cracking sound and Teresia dropped the carcass as her right tusk fell to the ground. She had broken it a few inches from the lip well into the nerve cavity, and a jagged bit of ivory and the bloody pulp was all that remained.
They gave up then but did not leave. They stood around Tina’s carcass, touching it gently with their trunks and feet. Because it was rocky and the ground was wet there was no loose dirt; but they tried to dig into it with their feet and trunks and when they managed to get a little earth up they sprinkled it over the body. Trista, Tia, and some of the others went off and broke branches from the surrounding low bushes and brought them back and placed them on the carcass. They remained very alert to the sounds around them and kept smelling to the west, but they would not leave Tina. By nightfall they had nearly buried her with branches and earth. Then they stood vigil over her for most of the night and only as dawn was approaching did they reluctantly begin to walk away.
Elephant Memories Cynthia Moss.
Cynthia Moss spent over fourteen years studying elephants in the Amboseli Park. In 1989 the Kenya Government launched a campaign, headed by Dr Richard Leakey, to quell the poachers.
Two Points of View
Manhood I am, therefore I me delyght
To hunt and hawke, to nourish up and fede
The greyhounds to the course, the hawk to th’flyght
And to bestride a good and lusty stede:
These thynges become a very man in dede.
Sir Thomas More
I hold in all seriousness what seems to most Englishmen the fantastic opinion that it is wrong to kill any animal – whether an elephant or a partridge – for pleasure. The temper which makes a man who sees a beautiful antelope walking in its pride across the plain long to bring his rifle up to his shoulder and convert it into a bleeding mass of lifeless flesh seems to me devilish.
The East Africa Protectorate Sit Charles Eliot.
Now, much as I might desire to shoot an elephant in self-defence, I have never had any desire to kill them for sport. They are such wise animals, and might be so useful to humanity. Domesticated elephants are delightful characters, and to kill them for the fun of killing, or for the monetary gain of the value of their ivory, is to my mind immoral. It is a pity that an intelligent creature like the elephant should be shot in order that creatures not much more intelligent may play billiards with balls made from its teeth.
Kenya Diary 1902–1906 Richard Meinertzhagen.
1 Temporary Occupation Licence.
2 Scientists studying these elephants identified each family by a letter of the alphabet.
PART VIII
Lifestyles
THERE ARE SOME forty tribes, or ethnic groups as they are today more often called, in the Republic of Kenya, as well as people drawn from many other races, nations and faiths. Animists and Christians, Muslim and Hindu, Bantu cultivators, Hamitic pastoralists, Cushitic nomads, Dorobo hunters, Nairobi politicians, Bajun fishermen, British entrepreneurs (and a few surviving farmers), witch-doctors and consultant surgeons, peasant women bartering in open-air markets and bankers’ wives dancing in discos, all co-exist within the country’s borders in relative, if not absolute, amity and peace. Each tribe, each community, each national group has its distinctive lifestyle, its own way of living, dying, being born, marrying, toiling, worshipping its god. An encyclopedia would be needed to reflect them all. This is a random selection drawn from past and present, from experiences as diverse as those of the Maasai moran to the colonial DC, and from environments as contrasting as the nomad’s encampment to the palace of the Sultan of Zanzibar.
Childhood
Ripeness is all.
One day, Ibrahim brought a small deputation of elderly notables to the house (at Marsabit). We sat round in a circle, drinking tea out of saucers – they seemed to prefer it that way and I followed suit. Conversation lagged at first. The very oldest was going on the Haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, and he mumbled something which Ibrahim interpreted.
“He say he pray for you on this Haj,” he explained.
I bowed and murmured my thanks, and we all sucked appreciatively at our tea. After a pause there was more mumbling.
“He say he pray for very long life for you and the Bwana.”
I nodded brightly and replied that it was very good of him. There were more murmurings into his meagre grey beard.
“He pray for many children for you,” translated Ibrahim impressively. At that everybody wagged their heads.
“Many, many children!” they chorused. It seemed ungracious to say that just a few would do.
Perhaps Ibrahim doubted that the old man’s piety by itself would prove effective, for soon after that he waited on me, cradling a strange shape cocooned in a yellow silk cloth in his arms. I felt like a child about to open a birthday present. What could it be? I adored surprises. Slowly and importantly Ibrahim unwrapped the shining silk and revealed the offering. I moistened my lips and felt remarkably short of words.
“Fertility embl
em, Mumma,” he murmured delicately, lowering his gaze as he handed it over.
“Yes …” I said, swallowing hard, “I guessed that.”
For indeed, there was no understatement here. The huge, mellowed ostrich egg, festooned with suggestive sea-shells, shrieked its significance. It was the ugliest thing I had ever seen, and it took a little getting used to. Reverently Ibrahim took it back from my trance-like clutch. He walked to my bed and hung it on a nail at the head.
“There!” he said with satisfaction, stepping back to admire it.
After this, I would wake in the night to see it looming over me like a featureless face wreathed with little snakes. I hated it. But I knew it would break Ibrahim’s heart if I took it down from the wall before it had fulfilled its mission.
Fulfil its mission it did: the District Commissioner’s wife was soon able to announce her pregnancy. She also injured her thumb.
Soon after this Ibrahim asked if the “ladies of the town”, as he called the wives of the leading merchants of the small community, could pay their respects. We arranged a time. Gerald was away again on safari, and I did not have his support, but with the help of a Swahili dictionary and the Police Officer, I prepared a speech of welcome which I hoped they would understand….
As soon as I appeared Ibrahim gave a signal and they all let out a fearful warbling yell such as one associated with old-world cannibals sighting a new missionary. They stood on the lawn, some forty or fifty of them with their daughters, hullabalooing with zest and clapping their faces to ululate the better. I was unprepared for such a greeting and found it unnerving, but Ibrahim, as master of the ceremonies, beamed approval and said in a reassuring way: “Somali welcome, Mumma.”
The leading matrons in their gorgeous silks advanced towards me as gracefully as swans sailing before the wind, their hands outstretched. The bandage on my thumb was enormous; I could not imagine how anyone could fail to notice it and hoped they would let me off lightly, but the first stout lady grasped my hand with both hers, and then in Somali style seized my thumb tightly and shook it separately. This took me completely by surprise and the effort to keep quiet about the pain she innocently caused left me speechless. The bandage came off. The lady looked at it in considerable embarrassment and threw it deftly behind the nearest bush. After that there was nothing to warn the others and now that the ice was broken, they advanced on me eagerly with the loveliest smiles – Somali women are almost always beautiful – and tortured me with their enthusiastic thumb-grips. The pain was excruciating, and my face felt frozen with the effort I was making to keep a grin, however stricken, on it. As for my speech, it was now quite beyond my power to make it.
The emblem worked but only partially: the first-born was a girl.
When things had calmed down and returned to normal I realized that nobody of any importance had come to call on me. After the interest they had shown beforehand I had rather expected a visit from the “ladies of the town”. One or two unmarried girls had come out of curiosity to examine the baby’s clothes and bath things and toys, but no one else. Ibrahim sighed when I drew his attention to it.
“They would have come if it had been a son, Mumma,” he said gently, as one who tried to share the burden and help me over a bad patch in my career as an NFD wife. “It is not the custom for a daughter.”
“In our country we like daughters,” I said indignantly.
Ibrahim smiled tolerantly but shook his head. It was clear that he still felt responsible and it weighed on his mind that his emblem had been second-hand.
It was, however, no surprise to me when he brought it back.
“Allah will do better for you next time,” he said piously, with one of his reproachful looks….
Ibrahim’s emblem was finally vindicated and we achieved our first son in 1945. It was something of a relief in the cicumstances. I could return with him from Nairobi, where the baby had been born, with my head high, and prepare to receive a formal visitation from the charming “ladies of the town”. There would be no more condolences and sorrowful head-wagging. Everyone would be beaming with congratulation and would remind me that they had been long praying for just this. That much I expected, but I was totally unprepared for what actually happened.
The day after we got back presents began to pour in from all over the mountain. The local Boran headman presented our son with the prettiest black and white bullock we had ever seen. My dear old friend Harub, the Arab butcher, brought a fine ram, and so did several other old local residents. Sergeant-Major Gabbra Mikhail loaded up two donkeys with sacks of oats for Andrew’s pony. Nor was it only the well-to-do folk who brought presents: some of our humbler friends brought chickens or a stem of bananas or a few eggs with their genuine good wishes, and perhaps their smaller gifts were even more touching than the splendid bullocks and rams. Before our son was two months old he seemed to have acquired considerable property, and I myself felt fully reinstated with the local people.
To My Wife – Fifty Camels Alys Reece.
A different view of the birth of daughters was held by the Kikuyu.
From the moment of her birth a girl baby is even more welcome than a boy; her work at home is valuable, and when she is marriageable she will fetch thirty goats. The Kikuyu baby makes its first acquaintance with the world from the point of view of its mother’s back, where, secure in her cape in the form of a hood, it becomes inured to sun and flies, and takes part, generally head downwards, in the work of the day. The elder children, as all the world over, act as nursemaids to their little brothers and sisters, and endeavour in quaint fashion to carry them after the manner of their elders. The children of both sexes are singularly quiet and well behaved; they are never to be seen playing games, and they seem to need no occupation. I have counted as many as twenty-two children together at one time, under the age of some fourteen years, all sitting quietly, and none of them engaged in any way, with the exception of some of the little girls who were making bags. This quiet apathy of childhood is in singular contrast with the energy put forth in movement and dances in later years. When a girl is from ten or twelve to fifteen years, comes the great day of her initiation into the tribe. No man would marry a girl who has not gone through these rites; but they do not marry very young, not apparently before sixteen or seventeen years, and possibly later.
These young years are very cheerful ones to the Kikuyu maiden. She of course assists her mother in the household and fields, but she has an amount of gaiety which many an English girl would envy. Almost every moonlight night she can go to a dance, where she chooses her own partner. The young men come in properly adorned and turned out, for if they did not, as they inform us, “none of the girls would dance with them.”
With a Prehistoric People W. S. and K. Routledge
Muslim custom forbade Swahili girls the freedom and indulgence enjoyed by peoples of the interior.
A girl is called kigori when she is seven years old. At fifteen she is called mwari. It is usual for such children to remain at home. First the ears are pierced with a thorn, and the day of piercing them is celebrated like a wedding. The child is taught how to behave in the house, to wash pots, plates, and basins. Then she is given the beginning of plaiting, and her daily occupation is to plait mats and to learn to cook.
She may never go out except at night to visit near relations, but not alone. She is escorted by a slave girl or an old lady. If she strays all over the place, her elders beat her, and she finds it hard to get a good husband. People call her a gadabout who is familiar with every place.
In addition, if she is in the house and a stranger comes to the door, whether man or woman, but they do not know, she must hide in another room and not talk to the stranger. If her elders hear her they reprimand her severely, saying, “If you hear a call do you poke your face in so that anybody can see you?” When people hear that she does not hide her face, they say, “So-and-so’s face is sunburned; she has no shame; she is not a girl to marry.” She may get a husband, but not
quickly. When a girl reaches the age of ten, a woman comes who is her kungwi and puts around her loins her utunda. This is her most intimate friend, and the utunda means love, to attract a man to want her as his wife. If a woman has no utunda it is said her loins are paralysed.
The Customs of the Swahili People Mtoro bin Mwinyi Bakari.
African childhood ended, as it often ends today, in circumcision, perhaps the most important event in the life of every boy and girl. Everything depended on unflinching courage. A Kikuyu writer describes his own experience.
As far as I was concerned my ceremony was to be very simple. Yet, on the night of 20 August 1940,I did not sleep at all. I lay there wondering how a circumciser’s knife would feel upon my delicate flesh. One of Karanja’s brothers was to be my aide. He went out at 5 am to get a circumciser named Macharia wa Muriu to come and circumcise me. At about 6 am I saw my aide and Macharia coming across Kayahwe River. I felt like a soldier just before he is given his orders and is ready to go to the front to face the enemy!
After they had arrived at Karanja’s home I was asked to go and wash myself in the Itare River on the western side of Karanja’s home about half a mile away. It is usual for candidates to wash their bodies, and especially the penis that there may be no offensive dirt thereon. It is also considered a bad thing if one should engage in sexual relations before the day of circumcision. So Muchaba, my aide, followed me to the river. Along with him were fifteen or twenty women and girls. I did not want to be followed by a large number of people like that who might later on see me naked! However, I could not help it. I was very embarrassed.
Nine Faces Of Kenya Page 48