Nine Faces Of Kenya

by Elspeth Huxley

  At 6am the milking is done by the women and young girls…. The milker takes up her position on the right side of the cow. She milks with one hand, and holds her gourd in position with the other. At the same time, she holds the head of the calf under the arm nearest the cow. It is firmly believed in most parts of Kenya that a native cow will not give her milk unless her calf is near. This belief is shared by some European stockowners, who skin calves that die, and stuff the hides with grass, so that the dummies can be placed alongside the mothers at milking-time. The cows are never tied up during milking unless vicious.

  By 7am the milking is finished, and then the family feeds. Their menu is monotonous. The food may be either a stiff porridge made of wimbi, or of millet meal, or a thin broth which is really porridge diluted with water. Variety is lent to the menu by the addition of meat, milk and blood, green vegetable, or maize cobs when available. The meat (beef or mutton or goat’s flesh) is either dried over the fire on sticks, or boiled in water. In the latter case, the meat is removed when cooked, and the liquid, thickened with grain flour, is served as a broth. The vegetable, when boiled, resembles spinach. Maize cobs are roasted whole in embers – the Elgeyo have no means of grinding the grains to a fine meal. They do their cooking in earthenware pots, the food being stirred by a stick rubbed between the palms of the hands. Liquid foods are put in small crudely-shaped wooden basins, one for each person. Stiff porridge is served on plates made of ox-hide, whitened with flour. The plates vary in size, according to the ages of the different members of the family. The woman serves out the food, first to the husband, then to the children in order of seniority. She keeps only a small portion for herself, and supplements her share with such food as is handed back to her by the children. In times of famine, she keeps no portion for herself, and is dependent for her meal on these contributions from her children….

  After the morning meal, the man, if his hut is on the highlands, opens the cattle boma, and takes his herd to pasture – or, more usually, deputes a small boy to look after it. It is no uncommon sight to see a diminutive lad in sole charge of stock worth hundreds of pounds. The now empty kraal is cleaned out by a boy, who sometimes has also to keep an eye on the cattle while he works. In the Ndo valley, when the goats are let out to feed, the boy in charge of them is sometimes accompanied by another lad, whose job it is to climb an acacia tree, and walk along its horizontal branches, knocking down seed pods, to be eaten by the goats which are driven under the tree by the herd boy. It the pods were not thus removed when green, monkeys would strip the trees, and the goats would miss an important part of their meagre food-supplies.

  The girls meantime sweep out the hut with a broom, made roughly of green twigs tied together, which lasts about a week. The women go off for water, which is carried in two or three large gourds placed in a carrier made of very strong laced twigs, and strapped to the women’s backs. These tasks completed, the women-folk go off to work in the fields, taking with them their naked babies, which are laid on skins on the ground and then covered over with other skins. They toil steadily till about 3pm, gathering any edible weeds they come across. Then they go off in small parties to collect firewood. Burdening themselves with as much as they can carry, they make their long journey back to their homes chatting and laughing happily. Observing the size of these burdens and contrasting them with the small loads which my “warrior” porters found difficulty in managing, I asked one day if the men were not ashamed of their inferiority to the women in this respect. The question surprised the man, and he replied as if amused, “But why? The women are our transport.” Then they busy themselves grinding the grain for the evening meal, and fetching such water as may be needed. At 7pm the family reassembles for the meal. Visitors feed with them, but must themselves arrange for sleeping accommodation with members of their own age-clan. An hour later, the young children go to bed. About 10pm, the elders retire for the night.

  The Cliff Dwellers of Kenya J. A. Massam.

  Nomads take their primitive shelters with them and their daily round is one of plodding over sun-baked plain and desert.

  During the afternoon we came across an immense caravan, slowly winding ahead, like a trail of ants. They were Samburu moving towards their dry season grazing grounds in the Losai Hills. The tribesmen were accompanied by more cattle, sheep and goats than I had ever seen before. A few camels jogged along but they were not of a kind I should have cared to hire, even to supplement our own; they were scrawny beasts, emaciated by the loss of blood which is drawn from them once a week and drunk mixed with milk. Each family walked beside its own donkeys to which they had lashed everything lashable. As we drew near I peered inside the panniers on the donkeys’ backs. The uprights were distinctive objects, made of wood and thongs, not unlike two snowshoes, one on each side of the animal’s flanks and joined at a point above its back, in such a way that it gave the impression of a big tent.

  Inside these contraptions babies howled, goats bleated and puppies yapped. All the inmates were trussed like chickens, immovable except for their wobbling heads. When I tried to take a photograph of living cargo mixed up with mats and cooking pots, the indignant father dragged the donkey along so fast that I feared for the safety of the child’s wildly wobbling head. One blind old woman stumbled along with head bowed, her hand on her daughter’s shoulder; another dragged a foot that was severed at the ankle; it left an almost circular impression in the red earth. I had the feeling that if either of them had stopped they would have been left alone, probably to die. The caravan swept on with a disturbing sense of urgency. “Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth. Ringed by the flat horizons only.”

  The Samburu are a curious people. Closely related to the Masai in almost everything including hypertrophy of the ego, they are exceptionally good-looking, arrogant and lazy. Condemned to a life of incessant wandering they take their leisure seriously, existing for days on the principle of least effort. When I met the Samburu alone I sometimes had the impression that they were staring at me but their eyes showed that they were staring forward and I happened to be in the way. Like the Masai, the tribal braves or morans of the Samburu crop their hair except for a top-knot on the crown which is usually decorated with a bobbing feather. They also plaster themselves with brick-red pigments and stand with one leg curled around the other, leaning on their spears.

  Journey to the Jade Sea John Hillaby.

  Maasai life is centred on their cattle.

  The huts were invisible behind the zareba and small wonder for they are not as high as your shoulder and are made of dung and clay, grey and caked into cracks by the sun. We went in. On top of nearly every hut a woman was standing plastering the roof with fresh green cattle-dung, using her hands. They were half naked and round the neck wore rings of wire, rather like a big watch-spring, which stuck out like a huge ruff. It is said to assist them in the defence of their chastity but must be as uncomfortable for the wearer as for the would-be seducer.

  The moment of sunset was approaching and from every direction, like spokes to a hub, cattle and goats were streaming into the kraal. The barriers were opened at half-a-dozen points and the animals came tumbling into the space of caked mud and dung between the huts. Soon the kraal was a mob: nothing but a tangle of backs and horns: there was much lowing and bleating and rising of dust in the air. Yet, considering the numbers and the congestion, there was very little noise or confusion. I became completely engulfed in cattle, including big bulls, and had to use all my strength to push through them. But the gentle beasts showed neither fear nor resentment at my handling of them. Even the bulls, with their alarming up-curling horns did not so much as shake their heads at me. They were terribly scrawled over by the brandings they had been given. I noted that some of their throats bore the marks of small wounds. So the owners demonstrated for me their economical method of getting sustenance from their beasts. They chose a young bullock and tied two thongs tightly round its neck. They then shot a small arrow into the artery at the bulg
e of the neck between the thongs and caught the blood in a calabash. The arrow carried a crosspiece to prevent too deep a penetration. Having drawn the proper amount of blood they removed the ropes and the beast shook his head and walked away apparently little, if any, the worse. Blood and milk, with very occasional meat, are the main food for the Masai.

  I went down on hands and knees and crawled into one of the huts. It was dark, and darker still with the clouds of wood-smoke that hung in it. I crawled on and on, trying to feel the shape of the hut and the furnishing. Of the latter there seemed to be none. I could see only the red eye of a burnt-out fire but now and then I touched soft living creatures which struggled out of my grasp, kids and calves, women and children, and from the shadows came nervous twittering and giggling. Then I half saw that the hut was roughly cut up with a framework of branches, which held the little animals and perhaps the children, away from the fire. I was suddenly overwhelmed by the accumulated smells of smoke, human- beings, animals and manure and, fearing attack from the living offsprings of dirt, I crawled backwards into the throng outside.

  East African Journey Margery Perham.

  A modern man.

  Just a mile or two from Mathare Valley, in the heart of downtown Nairobi, Francis Thuo can look out of his window in the International House at the sprawling city below and can see, far off in the distance, the African plains where giraffes and zebras and antelope still roam in great numbers. Thuo, a prosperous businessman in his mid-forties who is chairman of the Nairobi Stock Exchange, wears a three-piece business suit with a Lions Club emblem in the lapel. He sends his five children to private schools and his office is tastefully and expensively decorated, with wall-to-wall carpeting and mahogany furniture.

  A long time ago, shortly after he had dropped out of school, Thuo remembers walking across a bridge in Nairobi with his father, a meatcutter who could not afford the fees to educate his eight children. They stopped to watch a dozen men, bare-chested and sweating, labour with pick and shovel along the roadside.

  “Look at them,” his father said. “If you do not take your studies seriously, you will end up like them. There will be nothing for you to do in life but dig ditches.”

  Thuo never forgot the advice. He went to work in a gas station, then for an accounting firm. He taught himself to read and write. He studied economics at night and took correspondence courses in history, and in 1964, the year after independence, opened the first African brokerage house in East Africa. He is proud that he bucked the odds and won, particularly when he recalls that in his youth the colonialists gave the Africans virtually no opportunity “to prove our worth” except as common labourers.

  “What concerns me these days is that our children are having it much too easy,” he mused. “Unless we push, they just don’t seem to be pulling their own weight. They want life handed to them on a silver platter.”

  His anxieties aren’t much different than those you might hear in Middle America. That’s not surprising, for Africans like Thuo – members of a new, emerging middle class – have dreams and goals and values with a distinctly Western flavour. They are educated, economically ambitious and dedicated to making their children’s lives better than their own. They sacrifice for their children, complain about inflation, worry about the unruly behaviour of today’s youth and are greatly concerned with increasing their own wealth and security.

  Thuo escaped from his past through sheer hard work and tenacity. Others moved up in class more through circumstance than design, being the beneficiaries rather than the creators of a system inherited from the colonialists. They simply stepped into the void left by the departing colonialists and expatriates, and as often as not, stayed there more because of tribal nepotism than merit.

  “Capitalism has been part of the African life since time immemorial,” Thuo says. “Measuring your wealth in cattle or the size of your family was a sort of capitalism. This is a new world we live in now and what we’re dealing with is just another form of capitalism – money instead of cows.”

  The Africans David Lamb.

  Politicians also have their daily tasks, more rewarding as a rule than those of peasants.

  “Uhuru [independence] is a sweet commodity,” he declared, “because it has enabled me to own several sleek cars, a twelve-room house, twelve wives and sixty-seven children. What else do we want?” Oloitipitip’s2 fleet included a Citroën DS20, a Mercedes-Benz 350SLC and a Range Rover. At his homestead, near the border with Tanzania, he built a school to accommodate all his children.

  Maasai Days Cheryl Bentsen.

  The old lady and the baboon.

  I came on an old Malakote woman planting out rice seedlings in a mudflat at the side of the river. Her back was towards me and I stopped to watch. The sight of elderly peasants working against desperate odds for the merest pittance is always moving, an act of faith in a setting of eternity. I wondered whether she would ever see any reward for her labours. The Tana is an unpredictable river and is often in flood after heavy rainfall miles away. When the floods subside it is sometimes found that the river has changed its course, and the river bed continually changes its contours. One cloudburst out of sight might mean the old lady lost her rice crop and went hungry for a season.

  While I stood there watching I had that curious sixth sense of not being alone. I looked round and at first could see nobody though the chill down my spine increased. There, almost invisible against the dark trunk of a palm in the shadows, only a yard or two away, was one of the biggest male baboons I have ever seen. He was absolutely motionless, and he too was watching the old lady out in the brilliant sunlight. It was an intriguing situation and, though he was remarkably unlovely and I could have wished he were not so close, I stayed to watch. He must have known I was there, but he was too absorbed in the old woman’s activities to take any notice of me. We watched for some time. The old woman set the last rice plant in the last hole and straightened up, her hands at her aching back. Then she lifted her dibber and empty container and plodded wearily away across the mud. The baboon chuckled evilly to himself, forgetting me, and with a hideous dancing gait came down from his perch and went to the newly planted rice. With studied malevolence he began to pull out each carefully planted seedling, one by one, and threw it away. It was the most wanton piece of mischief one could imagine, but he had forgotten me. I raised the alarm and soon, gibbering and cursing, he was routed by a few stray people armed with sticks and stones. The old lady came back, her impassive face the epitome of patience, and the last glimpse I had of her she was again bending down, replanting the rice.

  To My Wife – Fifty Camels Alys Reece.

  Good behaviour.

  To spit upon a person or thing is an expression of goodwill. The blacksmith spits upon the sword he has forged before handing it over to the owner: so, too, courtesy demands that a man should spit in his hand before offering it to a friend, and the female visitors spit on the newly-arrived youngster as a sign of welcome.

  I once saw an amusing instance of this spitting in accordance with politeness. An unarmed old man was going across the hollow camp square when a large boarhound puppy sprang on its legs and galloped after him for a frolic. The old fellow suddenly saw it coming, and never having seen such a creature, for the Akikúyu have no dogs, was very frightened, and turned to fly. Then it dawned on him that it was the strange beast of the white man, so he stopped, knelt down, spat into the palm of his hand and extended it to the pup so as to express amity in the same way as he would have done to its master. Now the dog had been taught to “shake hands,” so, of course, when it reached him, it sat up and extended its paw, and the friendliest relations were established between them.

  With a Prehistoric People W. S. and K. Routledge.

  The broad sun

  Is sinking down in its tranquillity:

  The gentleness of heaven is on the sea

  Wordsworth

  Every evening over the next week, as the sun lowered in the western sky, the Turkana and Me
rille fishermen hauled in their nets, rippling the surface of the dark water with crescents of phosphorescence as the nets bellied, dragged at both ends by willing hands. As they reached the shallows, the men brought the ends of the beach seines together and hauled them, dripping, hand over hand up on to the beach; the fine mesh bristling with tiny fishes which glistened whitely in the fading light and flapped jerkily about, caught by their gills. Coal-black children scampered about the narrow shoreline like wide-eyed leprechauns, their feet and ankles shiny with pearly fishscales, running naked through the flotsam of the tidemark and stopping now and then to help free the fishes from the beached nets.

  On one such evening, as I walked along the foreshore, scuffing the damp tangles of lake-weed and savouring the moist shoreline smells of old rope, wet dogs and stale sardines, a huddle of young girls hooked fingers and looked at me with traces of smiles playing about their lips, their dark unsophisticated eyes sprung with what seemed like awe and dreaming Heaven knows what.

  Some way out on the still, black water, fishermen poled their dug-outs to shore, the dull-red sun slipping quickly and cleanly beneath the horizon and painting a long, reflecting brushstroke of gold across the surface of the lake. As the dug-outs neared the shore I could hear the paddles plopping softly into the water at each stroke, the silhouetted bodies of the naked fishermen like ebony cut-outs, blacker than the night. The hushed sea fell slack, its polished surface mirroring the sky, and the wavelets slumped languidly on the shore in muffled rhythm, like the gentle breathing of a sleeping lover. All else was still, as the velvet darkness closed in on us.