Out In The Midday Sun

by Elspeth Huxley

  All this did not quench my parents’ optimism. Jos was working on plans to start a small hotel on Mombasa island, a plan which really could not go wrong. He had borrowed six hundred pounds from a sister-in-law, and taken on a partner who was supervising building operations at Mombasa. All Jos’s previous partners had proved to be broken reeds, and this one was to be no exception.

  Nellie took me round the farm to see many new enterprises, several of which were aimed at growing things that no one else had thought of, and for which a market might therefore be found. Almonds were one. Kenya imported almonds – not, it was true, on a large scale, consumption being virtually confined to the needs of three confectioners in Nairobi, but no one in Kenya grew them, so here was a gap that could be filled. Nellie did a lot of research, and the house was full of pamphlets about stocks, varieties, the art of grafting and culture generally. Some sturdy little trees from South Africa were established in a small plantation.

  Then there were angora rabbits, attractive bunnies with long, white, silky fur. I forget where she had discovered a market for angora wool, but she had, and corresponded at length with prospective buyers who were prepared to take her crop. The rabbits were in home-made cages behind the kitchen, and in Nellie’s little office, full of files and seeds and catalogues and dachshunds and knitting, were carefully kept pedigrees and mating records; it was all done on the soundest scientific lines. The one task she really hated was punching holes in the rabbits’ ears for identification. They had long, silky, floppy ears and screamed when these were punched.

  Another project, which I think came later, was breeding white mice for the veterinary laboratories near Nairobi. The lab supplied her with foundation mice, and at first they bred prolifically. Then things went wrong, and they began to eat each other. I suppose one might say that Nellie anticipated the actions of the animals’ lib movement by some fifty years. Disgusted with the whole affair, she took the white mice into the forest and set them free.

  Profits from these and other projects lay in the future; her principal standby in the present was the kikapu trade. (The kikapu is a large woven basket with handles, adaptable to almost any use.) She had always delighted in vegetable culture and grew the most excellent produce under irrigation by the riverside. Once a week she filled a number of kikapus with a selection of vegetables, loaded them into the car and spluttered off to Nakuru where, if she reached it, she delivered the kikapus to the doors of her customers, I think for five shillings a time.2

  The doyen of the Kikuyu on the farm was Njombo, who had come to us at Thika as a lad, and signed on as a syce, or groom. With the move to Njoro he had changed course, and was now the headman. All the Kikuyu on the farm were squatters: that is, the head of each family was given a shamba of indeterminate size, as a rule about two or three acres, where he built his huts and where his wife, or wives, grew their crops. His sheep, goats and cattle were allowed to graze on the undeveloped parts of the farm, which also provided the family with firewood. All this was free. In return, the squatter undertook to work for six months of the year for the farm’s owner, and for the usual wage. This was a low one, but the families were self-supporting on their plots, and if they had a surplus they usually sold it, though they were not supposed to.

  This was a system that had grown up spontaneously to meet the conditions of the time, when farms were being made out of bush and there was plenty of land for everyone. It created difficulties later, when undeveloped land grew scarcer and people multiplied. Today it is hard to realise how sparsely populated the country was at the start of British rule. The usual estimate was two and a half to three millions up to the early 1920s when the increase began, slowly at first, then with gathering and now frightening speed, doubling every fifteen or sixteen years.

  During my absence Njombo had become an elder, though he was not really old; people, in general, married young, and passed into the elders’ grade when their eldest son was circumcised, which normally took place when the boy was between twelve and fifteen years of age. So a man of thirty-five or so could be an elder, and therefore entitled to sit on the kiama, a council of elders who met to settle disputes and impose fines (in sheep and goats) on offenders. The Kikuyu were a disputatious people, so there were many cases, some of which went on for years, for the kiama to hear. A lot of these involved disputes about the bride-price paid by a young man’s father to the father of the bride.

  Circumcision, bride-price, kiama – the whole social system of the people had been transferred in microcosm from their homeland to European-owned farms. This had advantages for both sides. For the Kikuyu, there was no traumatic break with custom and routine; life went on much as before in a new environment. If the altitude was too high to grow bananas, you switched to potatoes instead. From the employer’s point of view, he had a stable and reasonably contented work-force living with their families on the spot, and unlikely to vanish overnight; for certain tasks he could call on women; and the gathering of firewood helped to clear his land.

  Where the squatter system could not operate, as for example on big tea and sisal plantations, men had to be recruited on contract, without their wives, housed in ‘labour lines’ which, though no doubt adequate, looked ugly and dreary, and fed on prescribed rations – an altogether harsher and cruder business for the labourers. The Kikuyu were on the whole reluctant to join recruiters’ gangs, whereas people from the Lake Victoria basin, especially the Luo, were more willing to forsake their homes.

  Njombo, now that he was an elder, had become more dignified, less prone to laughter, than before. He wore a heavy goatskin cloak trimmed with tiny shells, a great many bangles and charms, and a snuff-horn suspended from his neck by a fine chain made by a Kikuyu smith. I always admired the fineness of these chains made with the crudest of tools, and with a bellows fashioned from the hind leg of a goat.

  Njombo’s face had become quite wrinkled, and so had that of his wife Wanjui, who greeted me warmly in their round thatched hut with its fire burning in the middle – the fire, lit on marriage, must never be allowed to go out – and three rounded cooking stones. There was no chimney, so the smoke had to find its own way out through the thatch. Naturally this made the atmosphere inside thick and chokey – there were no windows – and at first your eyes smarted and you coughed. But you got used to it after a while. Smoke had covered the timbers supporting the roof, and everything else inside, with a thick black crust that glistened in the firelight. Wanjui offered me a calabash of uji, a gruel made of home-pounded maize-meal which I had always found dull and rather sour, though herbs from the bush were used as flavouring. I had brought Njombo one or two simple gifts – I think a blanket and a metal cash-box in which people stored their shillings buried in the earthen floors of their huts. We conversed in our basic Swahili, a fine language when properly spoken but alien alike to Europeans and to the up-country tribes, so we did not speak it properly, but used a kind of kitchen version nicknamed Ki-settla. As Swahili was a Bantu language, the Bantu-speaking tribes found it much easier than English to learn, and you could get along in it throughout most of eastern Africa.

  While Europeans also found it easy to learn, some did not trouble to speak even the Ki-settla version well. There was a sad story of a man who, about to leave his farm for the day, summoned his headman to give instructions. He had a flock of valuable high-grade sheep of which he was particularly proud, and his final words were: ‘Chinja kondoa yote, chinja sana’, which he thought meant ‘Look after all my sheep, look after them very well.’ The headman looked surprised, but replied ‘ndio, bwana’ – yes, sir – and the farmer returned to find a hundred sheep with their throats cut lying in rows on the lawn. Unfortunately he had confused the word ‘chunga’, which means ‘look after, care for’, with the word ‘chinja’, which means ‘kill’.

  Njombo had prospered and so had his eldest son, Mbugwa, who was now on my parents’ household staff of three, or four if you counted the kitchen toto. Karanja was the cook, Mbugwa was Nellie’s p
ersonal ‘boy’ and Jos had, as his, one of the few non-Kikuyu on the farm, a Kipsigis ex-askari. The term ‘boy’, then in universal use, has come to seem derogatory and insulting, as of course in English terms it is; these were men, not boys. On the other hand French waiters do not object to being called garçons, so far as I know. At the time, no one thought anything of it; it was just the custom; now it is seen as an example of colonialist arrogance.

  It might be asked how Jos and Nellie could afford any servants at all, however low their wages, in such hard times. Strictly speaking, perhaps they could not; but to do without them in the circumstances would have been virtually impossible. Firewood had to be hewn, sawn and carried; washing done by hand, often by banging the garments on stones in the river; paraffin lamps cleaned; the old wood-burning Dover stove kept stoked, and so on; there were no labour-saving devices. Without help, there just would not have been time to get through all the work in a day, let alone to run the farm as well. The kitchen was a smoke-filled hovel full of Karanja’s friends and relatives looking in for a cup of thickly sweetened tea. Nellie, who enjoyed cooking, had given up worrying about hygiene and become a virtual exile from her own kitchen. Had she cleared it of its shifting population, shockwaves would have spread throughout the neighbourhood, and even beyond.

  Mbugwa possessed a wide grin, a lively sense of humour and a stutter. On the first occasion when Gervas came to the farm, he (Gervas) brought with him a trick he had picked up somewhere, a variation of the three-card trick, played with three little bells which you put on a table. One of these bells tinkled, the other two were mute. You challenged your audience to pick out the bell that rang. They invariably lost the bet. Karanja and Mbugwa greeted each failure with incredulous gasps. Then Gervas unfolded the solution. None of the bells had clappers, but on his left wrist, concealed under a shirt-sleeve, was a bracelet with a bell that rang. When he moved one of the mute bells with his left hand, the bell concealed in his sleeve tinkled. The other two bells, moved with his right hand, remained silent. I suppose an experienced three-card-trick player would have spotted the deception, but Karanja and Mbugwa did not. When it was revealed, both of them literally rolled about the floor in ecstasies of mirth. Whenever they saw Gervas after that, even when bringing in a tray of early morning tea, Mbugwa roared with helpless laughter and cried: ‘Those bells! Those little bells!’

  Gervas presented the bells to Mbugwa and I have no doubt that he grew rich by playing the trick on his many friends and relations – if he managed to keep a straight face. Mbugwa was a most endearing character. Some years later, Nellie told me, he grew a certain variety of potato whose seed she herself had tried in vain to obtain; when he had shown the potatoes to her – they often compared notes on horticultural matters – she had much admired them. The following Christmas, he brought in with the tea-tray a small sack of these potatoes tied with red ribbon, and deposited it on her bed. The characteristic that Nellie found most sympathetic about him, apart from his sense of humour, was that he loved the dogs, and they loved him.

  Arrivals and departures at or from the farm were generally regarded as excuses for a party. My arrival was no exception. Njombo, Mbugwa, Karanja and various others decided to organise an ngoma, or dance, in my honour. For an ngoma, everyone dressed to the nines. The attire of the men consisted mainly of intricate patterns painted in chalk on bodies oiled with castor oil, or with fat and red ochre. There were clappers on the ankles, beaded belts and necklaces, and elaborate head-dresses, the smartest ones involving ostrich feathers; the whole effect was exciting and, to our eyes, rather barbaric. These were the warriors and they were meant to look intimidating, even though their weapons had been laid aside. Elders took no active part in the dance itself, but a very active one in the consumption of refreshments. Plenty of beer, made as a rule from fermented maize-meal, was brewed in big gourds with narrow necks that bubbled away by the fireside until the brew was ripe and potent.

  Jos and Nellie were expected to contribute a bullock. The selection of the beast led to a good deal of manoeuvre and argument; the Kikuyu had their eye on the fattest, sleekest of the herd, Jos and Nellie were determined that the oldest and scraggiest should be sacrificed. A day or so before the ngoma the herdsman, another Karanja who wore an old felt hat at a jaunty angle, came to Nellie and said: ‘That ox Mafutu, memsabu, has become very, very ill. I do not know exactly his disease but he is wasting rapidly and there is only one thing to be done to save him – he must be killed before he dies and his flesh turns so rotten that it cannot be eaten.’

  ‘Then I will summon the vet,’ Nellie replied.

  ‘No, no, that would be foolish, memsabu; you would have to part with many, many shillings and then what would you have? A dead ox just the same.’ This was probably true, but Nellie stood firm.

  ‘The ox Mafuta looks perfectly healthy to me. It is the ox Goygoy who will be killed for this ngoma.’

  Karanja went off shaking his head and muttering at his employer’s stupidity, and Nellie knew that the affair was by no means settled. It might well be that Karanja ngombe, the herdsman, would come to her next morning shaking his head again and looking mournful to say that, by some extraordinary misfortune, the ox Mafuta had put his foot into an ant-bear hole, broken his leg and perished in the night. She won that trick by having Mafuta driven into one of the sheds that had grown up near the house and locking it in for the night. There was still the possibility that Karanja would report that a hyena had broken into the shed and savaged Mafuta. She put an extra padlock on the shed’s door and hoped that the dogs would give her warning of any skulduggery. Mafuta came through the night in safety and poor Goygoy had his throat cut next morning.

  African dances differed from most European ones in that they went on much longer, sometimes for several days and nights, and that the dancers chanted most of the time. The male dancers jumped up and down with tremendous energy and thumping, the ground seemed to shake under their feet, and all the time they chanted a refrain. Drums beat – no other instruments were played – with a compulsive rhythm. The young women, with bunches of grass fore and aft and masses of beads, like the men painted with chalk and smeared with red ochre, also jumped and thumped, but went in even more for swaying and rolling their hips. After a while the dance became what was generally called suggestive; explicit would be a more accurate word. No bones were made about the dance being a thoroughly erotic affair.

  The ngoma started at around seven o’clock, and was lit by bonfires; chairs were placed for us on the perimeter, and there we sat, enjoying the spectacle, for about two hours. Firelight threw into relief the leaping figures, red like flames themselves, and flickered on the breasts of the girls which bobbed up and down like corks on a wind-whipped water. Long leaping shadows gave an eerie, almost demonic dimension to the scene. But it was monotonous and, for sedentary spectators, after a while tended to bore rather than to excite. The elders sat around the bonfires getting quietly sozzled and devouring bits of poor old Goygoy, which they roasted on the end of long sticks.

  The drumming went on all night, throbbing like an elemental heartbeat in the darkness. There is something savage and disturbing about distant African drums: hints of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and of O’Neill’s Emperor Jones. One thinks of human sacrifice and secret rites, of leopard-men and the ‘walking dead’ and all sorts of forest mysteries and orgies as one draws the blankets over one’s head to shut out that insistent rhythmic throb.

  I heard a strange story about African drumming which I believe to be true. A friend of mine was working on an aid project in the land of the Azande, on the border of Zaire and Sudan. The Azande, he said, are particularly skilled at drumming, and send coded messages for great distances which are relayed from village to village. Jonathan, this friend, asked one of the drummers to teach him the technique, but did not get very far with it, and of course the messages were in the Azande language which he did not speak. One day he was idly tapping the drum when he noticed that some sort of patt
ern was emerging from his taps. When he laid the sticks down, the Azande drummer said:

  ‘Do you know that you have been sending a message?’

  ‘What have I been saying?’ Jonathan asked.

  ‘My father is dying. My father is dying. My father …’

  Astonished, Jonathan noted down the time and date. On his return to England he learned that his father had suffered a heart attack from which he had not been expected to recover. Jonathan’s wife, desperately concerned, had consciously attempted to will a message from her mind to his. The time coincided with that on which, in faraway Azande country, Jonathan had unknowingly tapped out, in the Azande code, the message: ‘My father is dying.’ (His father did, in fact, recover.)

  Nellie’s party was shorter and more sedate than the ngoma. About a dozen of her neighbours came for a Sunday pre-lunch drink. They were a mixed bag, none of them as glamorous, if that is the word, as the small circle of those who had been dubbed by London gossip column writers the Happy Valley set, and lived some fifty miles away in a valley called Wanjohi running down from the Aberdare mountains. The core was very small, never more than perhaps a dozen individuals. (Nairobi had a temperance society with many more members.) They were visited by rich friends from England with a taste for gambling and for sexual promiscuity – how promiscuous we had no idea, nor indeed did we learn of it until years later; at the time, they seemed much like everyone else.3 My parents did, in fact, know Lady Idina, the queen of this tiny hive, then married to Josslyn, Earl of Errol, who was murdered nine years later. Nellie went over to their house, called Clouds, occasionally to swap plants, the Wanjohi being a splendid gardening region, and must have been unlucky, for she never struck an orgy; though she did once find one of the visitors, Alice de Janzé, asleep on the floor at four in the afternoon. Jos, my father, knew Joss, the Earl, through the Caledonian Society of which Jos was a strong supporter and Joss the chieftain; they met at Caledonian dinners in Nakuru and no doubt had orgies, of sorts, of their own.