Out In The Midday Sun

by Elspeth Huxley

  In 1940 he had been sent to Malta to organise supplies during the siege of that island, and there was a story, true or not I do not know, that his duties had included the prosecution of a baker for breaking the law about the composition of his bread. An offending loaf was one of the exhibits. Launched on a tirade about the wickedness of those who tampered with the staff of life, Andrew Cohen seized the loaf to add point to his oratory, and absent-mindedly began to tear off bits of it and chew them as he warmed to his theme. By the time he reached his peroration, he had eaten the evidence.

  An exceptional man, he became an exception to the tradition I have mentioned of apartheid between home and overseas. He persuaded the current Colonial Secretary, Arthur Creech Jones, to let him go out and govern Uganda, not with the happiest results. In 1953 he fell out with the Kabaka, king of the Buganda people, and had him deported to England, only to find himself obliged, two years later, to welcome back the young king with due pomp and ceremony and restore him to his kingdom. It was a short summer for King Freddie Mutesa, thirty-fifth Kabaka of his line. After independence, Uganda’s first President, Milton Obote, ordered his troops to occupy the Kabaka’s seat of government, a show of force intended to crush an alleged Baganda plot to secede from Obote’s unitary state. Tanks rolled in and flattened the Baganda’s ancient seat of government and the Kabaka’s palace with its sacred associations, and the graves of former Kabakas guarded day and night by relays of old women, and the fire that never went out. King Freddie escaped over a wall, fled to London and died there miserably five years later, ostensibly of alcoholic poisoning; the rumour was that he was murdered, though this was never confirmed. The name of the army commander who took in the tanks was Idi Amin.

  CHAPTER 6

  Umbrellas, Tea-birds and the Nandi Bear

  African journeys were best started in the early mornings when everything was mint-fresh and sunlight mild and gentle as it slid down the boles of trees, and you did not need to screw up your eyes. Heading north-west from Nairobi you met streams of people coming in to work or market on foot and on bicycles, and flocks of goats herded by thin-shanked boys in wisps of cotton cloth. A blue smoke-haze seeped through thatch, goat-bells tinkled and warm greetings sounded like water gurgling over rocks. It is the smells that one remembers: wood-smoke, red dust, Kikuyu body-smell compounded of castor oil and red ochre, cowdung, then some aromatic scent from the bush, and once, driving through a tongue of forest, a whiff of jasmine.

  The main up-country road has altered its course several times since I first knew it. If you go back far enough, much of it followed the old caravan route from the coast to Uganda, a foot-slog of some seven hundred miles. Then came a wagon-track, and the first motor-cars bumped along it. The wagons took a different route but re-joined the so-called motor road at the bottom of the escarpment, near a little stream where everyone paused to take on water. On the way up, the water in your radiator always boiled and you had to stop at intervals, pause until the boiling subsided, cautiously remove the cap and fill up. If you didn’t pause, a fountain of boiling water flew into your face.

  The main roads were surfaced with a red laterite murram which had, and still has, the habit of forming into corrugations, like a sheet of asbestos or galvanised iron roofing. This made your vehicle bound about like a jellybean and shake itself to death. There was a trick, however: if you drove at a certain speed, generally about forty miles an hour, your tyres skimmed along the crests of the corrugations and over the valleys, and you could enjoy a comparatively smooth passage so long as you didn’t have to slow down. When the corrugations reached a certain stage and the frequent pot-holes deepened into caverns, a grader was deployed to smooth it out. A recently graded road was a dreadful hazard. Either you slithered about in thick red dust that blotted out your visibility, or you skidded uncontrollably in deep mud. On the escarpment there was a precipice on one side. A lot of dead vehicles were strewn about the rocks and bush on that wall of the Rift Valley. You were sure to have punctures. Altogether a road journey was quite an adventure and took a long time. Nairobi to Nakuru, about a hundred miles, took five or six hours or more. Nairobi to Mombasa was a three-day journey, with one night spent at Kajiado in the Maasai reserve and the second at Moshi in Tanganyika.

  I was bound for Elmenteita, a lake set among rocks and low craggy hills and flat-topped acacias, fringed with a thick crust of rose-pink flamingos. It was here that Delamere had had his ranch, Soysambu, and his simple home on a ridge overlooking the lake. A belt of tall umbrella thorn trees imparted, with a bit of imagination, something of the look of an English park; instead of deer, herds of impala and eland, waterbuck and zebra, gazelle and hartebeest grazed beneath the shade of the trees. Delamere had allowed no shooting on his ranch except when this was essential to protect his pastures and, in the case of predators, the lives of his domestic stock.

  In 1905 and 1906 he had bought and put together a number of undeveloped leaseholds in this waterless stretch of the Valley’s floor as a refuge for his flocks and herds, which were dying in droves on his Equator Ranch at Njoro. The Njoro land had looked fertile and promising and was quite unoccupied, simply waiting for development. Delamere stocked it with sheep and cattle, but instead of thriving they wasted away. The Maasai, who had grazed their livestock all along this section of the great Valley, had given these Njoro plains a wide berth. It was not until years later that scientists working in Scotland discovered a shortage of minerals, notably cobalt, to be the cause of the trouble.1

  At Soysambu I stayed with the Dempsters, the manager and his wife. He and two young men, John Byng-Hall and Frank Howden, ran this 40,000-acre ranch. Starting with tiny, humped Zebu cattle and equally small, hairy Maasai sheep, by crossing them with imported pedigree English bulls and Australian rams, and then crossing their progeny again with pedigree animals, Delamere and his staff had built up herds and flocks many times more productive than their forebears. The trouble was that these graded-up animals were also highly susceptible to disease, and had to be driven at least once a week through arsenical dips. Another trouble was a shortage of water. Only one river ran along one of Soysambu’s boundaries and that sometimes ran dry. Delamere had laid a pipeline from springs in the hills some twenty miles away to feed troughs installed in his paddocks, and this needed constant policing and repair.

  Ticks were the main carriers of disease. They came in many sizes, from tiny red ones, pepper-ticks we called them, that made you itch like fury, to big purple ones that swelled like balloons as they engorged themselves with blood, and went pop when you squashed them. De-ticking the dogs was a daily ploy, and we used to keep an old cigarette tin full of paraffin to drop them into.

  At Soysambu, tea came with the dawn, and by sunrise I was away with one of the managers whose first task was to hear herdsmen’s reports, inspect sick animals or the corpses of dead ones, and give instructions for the day’s work. Sometimes disease or accident had killed an animal, and quite often lions or hyenas had enjoyed a night-time meal. Ewes would be mustered and put with the correct rams, others would be dosed, pastures inspected, flocks moved and herdsmen consulted. Then back for a late breakfast on the Dempsters’ veranda. No meal has ever tasted more delicious, with an appetite sharpened by fresh morning air and by that sense of expectancy and wellbeing that tingled in the blood at the start of each new day on these open savannahs.

  Distances seemed endless. The plain stretched away for miles and miles but always you could see mountains, scoured with ravines as if raked by lions’ claws and ridged with forest. Soysambu’s western boundary reached to a hump of hills called Eburru where hot steam spouted among the rocks. This was a harsh, wild, empty land where no one had ever lived and settled, only migrated according to the seasons, seeking fresh green grass that sprang up after rain. All the herdsmen were Maasai. They lived within their fenced manyattas in long, low, sausage-shaped mud huts, windowless and roofed with withies.2 You had almost to crawl on all fours to enter one, when you would find yourse
lf plunged into thick smoke from the cooking-fire. I have always been amazed that people, especially babies and tots, could live and thrive in this atmosphere without becoming human kippers, their lungs coated with tar.

  The young warriors with mops of red pigtails were free-striding, graceful, arrogant and proud, but when they stood still, often with one arm draped around another’s shoulders, there was a curiously soft, moulded, feminine look about their greased and well-proportioned limbs and torsos. Certainly there was nothing soft or feminine about their behaviour. From infancy they were trained for war, in the shape of raids to capture their neighbours’ cattle and sometimes women. You could say they were the fascists of East Africa, not to mention racists, but because of their physical beauty, their bravery and their uncompromising pride in themselves, a kind of Maasai-worship prevailed among many Europeans. Delamere had not worshipped them, but he had indulged them, forgiven their misdeeds and listened to their opinions. One of his forms of indulgence was a free issue of umbrellas once a year to his herdsmen to shelter them from the sun. The herdsmen preferred spears.

  From the administration’s point of view, the Maasai were tricky. A District Commissioner at Narok called Hugh Grant was speared to death by the infuriated owner of a favourite black bull included in a batch of cattle confiscated as a fine for some breach of the law. Some time before this event, Nellie, Jos and I stayed at Narok with Clarence Buxton, a district officer, who was thought by his colleagues to be a bit mad. He was an idealist who believed that you could change human nature, and especially African nature, for the better. I suppose most white people believed this, and that ‘for the better’ meant ‘more like us’. But Clarence – a descendant of the Buxton who had been Wilberforce’s right-hand man in the campaign to abolish slavery – chose unusual ways to effect such changes. How to turn Maasai warriors, as specialised in warfare as thoroughly as cacti are specialised for dry habitats, into peaceful, law-abiding, hard-working citizens? Clarence believed that one way to do this was to substitute manly sports for cattle raids, and cricket bats or polo sticks for spears. The Maasai kept donkeys, and Clarence had a plan to induce the warriors to play polo mounted on these animals. He also had a stadium built and tried to interest them in football.

  The more conservative among his colleagues did not really want to see the Maasai changed. At heart, I think, they envied these young men’s apparent freedom,3 their status, their physique, the spice of danger in their lives and their sexual opportunities – the warriors could take their pick of lovers among unmarried girls. In fact they had just about everything a young man could want, so why try to turn them into disgruntled, trousered clerks?

  That was the ‘zoo policy’, Clarence insisted. You couldn’t, and shouldn’t, fence the Maasai off and treat them as interesting and picturesque anthropological specimens. Sooner or later they would have to join the twentieth century and, if they put it off too long, people of tribes they despised would take all the best jobs and lord it over their former enemies. (As indeed was to come about.) The Maasai would become human dinosaurs, he said. Polo on lethargic donkeys might seem a peculiar way of trying to break the tribal mould, and it never caught on, but Clarence did succeed in getting the Maasai to do something just as contrary to custom – to handle picks and shovels. He got the warriors to make roads.

  He also got himself into trouble. The warriors were highly excitable. On very little provocation they would work themselves into a state of frenzy that induced a fit of quivering all over like a bowstring, a preliminary to going into battle. The road-making was going on quite smoothly when we were there, but soon afterwards there was an ‘incident’, which nearly resulted in disaster. The road-makers were in a particularly inflammable state, having only recently been circumcised and passed from boyhood into the warrior age-grade; custom demanded that they should now prove their manhood by blooding their spears. Two sections of this age-grade challenged each other to defy authority and attack its representative. The first thing Clarence knew about it was the approach of forty or fifty frenzied warriors armed with spears and clubs. They must have been a terrifying sight, with sunlight flashing on their spears and on their red greased bodies, although they were without the tall head-dresses made of lions’ skin and the war-paint with which the Maasai normally went into battle. In the defence of the boma Clarence had two armed police constables and four members of the tribal police who did have rifles, but very little training in their use.

  Clarence waited until the warriors were within a hundred yards before giving the order to fire over their heads. I do not know whether he could see the whites of their eyes but he did see ‘no trace of homo sapiens, no light of sense or reason’, as he wrote in his report, but an expression of ‘demonical insensate savagery’ as they came on.4 The volleys checked them, and Clarence stepped out and started to harangue them in their own tongue.

  The moment was fragile. There was a double hazard, that the warriors would come on, and that the policemen would panic and fire into the mob. Clarence was a tall, imposing-looking man and, miraculously it seemed, he held them. They lacked a leader and protective medicine which only the laibon, their witch-doctor-cum-priest, could supply. Their frenzy subsided as suddenly as a switched-off kettle ceases to boil. When everything was sorted out the Maasai resumed their road-making and there was no more trouble. But an undertow of protest remained. When a Maasai sees a shooting star, Clarence told us, he will say: ‘Away with you, and take all the Europeans with you.’

  Clarence Buxton’s own story ended sadly. Despite his attractive wife and their four children his eye roved, and he was named co-respondent in a suit for divorce heard in Nairobi. The wronged husband was another official, but very much junior in rank and status – in fact, the government analyst. This raised some unkind smiles, since Clarence not only had rather grand connections (son of a baronet) but had been looked upon as a model of rectitude. Such lapses were severely frowned upon in the Colonial Service. Clarence was not dismissed, but transferred to Palestine, the next worst thing. Two years later he resigned and returned to his farm at Limuru, having been divorced and re-married to the government analyst’s former wife.

  All this has taken us a long way from Soysambu and its Maasai herdsmen. Most of these were not warriors, but men who had passed through the Eunoto ceremony when their pigtails had been shaved and they had become elders free to marry, procreate and take a share in the governance of the tribe. They had shed excitability with their red locks.

  From Soysambu I moved further along the Valley to Nderit on the shores of Lake Nakuru, where Delamere’s former manager lived. Boy Long and his wife Genessie were a handsome pair. He had dark, curly hair, a ruddy complexion, lively dark eyes and looked like an English country squire with a dash of the cowboy, accentuated by a broad-brimmed Stetson hat and a bright Somali shawl (tomato red or electric blue) thrown across his shoulders. He once rode his horse round Glady Delamere’s nursery clad in this attire. Women adored him. He was said to be one of the best stockmen in the country; he would not have been employed by Delamere for fifteen years had it been otherwise.

  Boy – his real name was Caswell – went to great trouble to write down for me his recollections of those days. These included an episode when an American called Paul Rainey had kept a pack of bear-hounds at Soysambu to hunt lions. When the hunted lion turned to face the baying dogs, the hunters would gallop in with rifles to shoot it from the saddle. In fifteen days’ hunting they killed twelve lions. Then luck turned against them, and a man called Fritz Schindler was knocked off his horse by a lion and killed.

  Genessie Long was slim, elegant and rich; she wore long pendant ear-rings, had a well developed sense of drama and was tougher than she looked. She had come to Kenya as a bride in 1923 on safari with her first husband – Blix was their white hunter – and fallen in love with Africa, the safari life and the prospect of adventure. Subsequently she also fell in love with Boy Long, and they married. She bought the ranch Nderit on the shores of
Lake Nakuru, where she designed a splendid house with enormous rooms built round a patio with a fountain playing in the middle. Even larger stables accommodated, she told me, about seventy horses. She was an accomplished horsewoman and a good shot. A semi-tame hippo used to share the cattle’s drinking troughs.

  Boy and Genessie lived in style and entertained generously. The standard dress for house-boys was the kanzu, a long robe like a nightshirt, generally white and sometimes rather grubby; grander employers added an embroidered waistcoat of the kind worn by Arabs and Swahilis at the Coast, but Genessie went one better and dressed her house-boys in dark red kanzus with beautiful gold-embroidered waistcoats and scarlet turbans.

  She had a penchant for travel in the world’s remoter regions, inspired by Rosita Forbes, and an ambition to ride to Petra on a camel. By then Petra had ceased to be remote and mysterious, and people reached it by car. This she did, and then hired camels, a guide, a servant and two Circassion policemen and proceeded, on her own, to Shobak and two Crusader castles, sleeping in the open or, sometimes, in the women’s quarters of hospitable, if unhygenic, desert Arabs.5

  In those days this was a bold achievement for a woman, and I listened enthralled to her descriptions, but when I re-told some of them to Nellie, she was unimpressed. Nellie reacted with suspicion to anything that smacked of what she called swashbuckling. There was an occasion when Genessie arrived for lunch with mutual friends in Nakuru clad in beautifully cut white jodhpurs and a white silk shirt, a neat little revolver with a mother-of-pearl handle tucked into her belt. Nellie, eying the revolver coldly, asked Genessie whether she had found it useful when shopping in Nakuru. ‘Oh, yes,’ was the reply. ‘I’ve just shot a cobra in the drive.’ Nellie looked at her with scepticism, and was somewhat abashed when a dead cobra was brought in.