Out In The Midday Sun

by Elspeth Huxley

  By this time, Genessie had married Lord Claud Hamilton, a tall and handsome former Guards officer whose taciturnity was a perfect foil to her lively eloquence. They had taken over Nderit, and Boy Long had also found another wife.

  The time had come for me to move on. Gervas arrived from South Africa and we planned to fly back together after spending a few days at the tea plantations of Kericho on the way. So, after a short stay at Njoro, we borrowed Mbugwa and Jos’s old Ford and drove over the escarpment to Kericho, which lies on the western flank of the Mau hills in a lush and fertile region where rain falls almost every afternoon. This had been another of those buffer zones between two hostile tribes that had been given out for white settlement. It separated the Kipsigis, then called Lumbwa,6 who lived in the hills, and the Luo, who occupied part of the flat, hot, steamy basin of Lake Victoria lying below. Just as the warlike Maasai descended with spear and club upon the Kikuyu, so did the Kipsigis, who were no less warlike, descend upon the Luo, and also upon the neighbouring Kisii.

  Part of this buffer zone had been leased after the First World War to a group of partially disabled officers who formed themselves into a body known as BEADOC – the British East Africa Disabled Officers Cooperative. Each man was to have his own block of land, but marketing was to be centrally organised and so was the purchase of implements, seeds, fertilisers and so on.

  This seemed a fine idea on paper – compassionate might be the word used today – but in practice it was crazy, even cruel. Scarcely any of these men possessed experience of farming, nor had they any of the practical skills needed by pioneers. They received no training. Few could raise much capital, and their disability pensions were miniscule. Nothing had been made ready: they had to start by clearing bush and putting up shacks to live in. They spoke no African language, though most of them had picked up a smattering of Swahili on the voyage out. The nearest railway station was twenty-two miles from Kericho along a track which was impassable for a great part of the year. Kericho itself was a small government boma with a DC, a post office, a police post, a few dukas and little else. Malaria was rife, and other tropical diseases of which little was known were endemic. The nearest hospital was at Kisumu, nearly sixty miles by rail from Lumbwa – if you could get to Lumbwa.

  So, in 1919, at this remote spot there had arrived between seventy and eighty war-damaged men, some one-armed or one-legged, some on crutches, some with sight or speech impaired, others shattered by shell-shock, and all inspired by a belief that here in a new land they would make for themselves a new life of action. Poverty and unemployment in Britain were already destroying the hopes of men back from the trenches and reducing some to hawking matches and shoe-laces on city pavements. In Africa, they believed, sunshine, highland air and wide horizons would heal them, and tasks beyond their damaged capabilities would be done by able-bodied Africans.

  The scheme was doomed to failure, and it failed. Yet, despite all that was stacked up against it, the Beadoc men might have succeeded had it not been for a catastrophic collapse in the price of flax. I have never understood why this happened so suddenly and completely at this time (1922). You would have thought that people would have gone on wanting linen. But seemingly they did not; the price plummeted almost overnight, and expensive machinery that had been imported to process the fibre was never used. The settlers had already suffered various setbacks and this was the last straw. Beadoc went into liquidation, the disabled men dispersed, and the land, some 25,000 acres, was put on the market for an asking price of £3 an acre. No one wanted it.

  There is an ironic ending to this tale. A couple of years later the manager of a tea estate in southern India visited Kenya on holiday, heard the story, inspected the land, reported favourably to his employers, and in 1925 some 20,000 acres were bought by James Finlay and Company of Glasgow. The rest of the Beadoc holding went to Brooke Bonds. That was the start of the tea industry in the Kericho district, though not of tea-growing in Kenya; a few small plantations had been established at Limuru for some time. The irony was that this Kericho land proved to be some of the very best in Kenya. Fortunes have been made out of tea, now one of the country’s most efficient and productive enterprises. If the Beadoc settlers had planted tea instead of flax, and provided that someone had taught them how to deal with it, they might have survived.

  Some of the Beadoc men refused to be beat. Years later, I met in a Gloucestershire village the widow of one of the disabled men. In 1915 he – William Dawson – had been blown up by a shell and sustained such terrible head wounds that he spent three years in hospital and suffered one operation after another. He had other injuries as well. After Beadoc’s failure he managed to get a job on the railway supervising the building of bridges, saved a few pennies, went into partnership with another Beadoc man who had only one leg, and bought some undeveloped land in the Sotik district. Here they planted coffee which did not thrive, so they scrapped it and replaced it with tea, which did. William Dawson married, bit by bit enlarged his operations, raised a family and prospered in a modest way. ‘We thought we were going to live there forever,’ Sylvia Dawson said. Forever turned out to be thirty years. Shortly before Kenya’s independence they were bought out by the Government for just enough to enable them to buy a cottage in an English village. Kipsigis farmers took over the land.

  By the time we visited Kericho in 1933, Anglo-Indian expertise had turned about one-fifth of the original Beadoc land into tea plantations and built an imposing factory to process the leaves. This was the achievement of William Lee who, with his wife, had exchanged the comforts of a prosperous plantation in Travencore for pioneering in the bush. No one had warned them, Mrs Lee told me, of the cold; at first the office was in a tent, and she had relays of hot-water bottles to keep her hands warm while doing the accounts. Labour had been the greatest problem. ‘The Kipsigis would cut the bush all right,’ Mr Lee said, ‘but they wouldn’t dig.’ (Women’s work again.) Mounds of seeds kept arriving from India before the nurseries were ready. No sooner had the first plantations been established than the world depression struck, resulting in the international scheme, in which Gervas was involved, to restrict production and increase demand.

  Few Africans had as yet acquired the tea-drinking habit; but might they not be persuaded to do so? Instead of putting all their tea into chests for export, the companies started to put some of it into little packets, a couple of ounces at a time, which could be sold for a few cents and which Africans could afford. Brooke Bonds chose the name Simba (lion) for their product, and had a lion printed on the packets. African Highlands, their principal rival, baulked of the lion, chose a Crested Crane and called their tea Ndege, meaning bird (or aeroplane). They were delighted when subsequently an African, observing a flock of cranes, exclaimed: ‘Look – tea-birds!’ Tea drinking was encouraged by the medical authorities because it involved, or should involve, boiling the water, and the habit spread.7

  While Gervas and I enjoyed our visit, Mbugwa took a poor view of it and was anxious only to shake Kericho’s mud off his feet. He had fallen, if not among thieves, among Kipsigis, which from his point of view was worse. So he welcomed our departure, but encountered a new peril. Our route lay up the forested escarpment and towards the Nandi hills where there lurked a savage monster known to Europeans as the Nandi bear and to local Africans as the chemosit. The name, that is, was known, but the creature itself remained elusive. Many sightings had been claimed but descriptions varied and, despite many attempts, no one had succeeded in securing a specimen. Traps had been set and sprung but only tufts of hair found at daylight; shots had been fired and hits claimed but no corpse retrieved. People had heard its blood-curdling cry at night and found evidence of its ferocity: dead sheep, and other animals, whose skulls had been cracked and brains removed. It seemed to have a penchant for brains.

  An extra-large hyena; an outsize baboon; an aardvark or ant-eater; a giant ratel; survivor of a vanished colony of chimpanzees; these were among the theories advanced as to it
s identity. The Nandi and the Kipsigis drew on their imaginations when describing it. The historian A. C. Hollis recorded in 1909 that the Nandi believed the chemosit to be ‘half man, half bird, to have only one leg but nine buttocks, and his mouth, which is red, is supposed to shine at night like a lamp’. Possibly the prototype of Edward Lear’s Dong with the Luminous Nose? On the other hand the DC at Kabsabet, who had actually set eyes on it, described it as ‘about three feet high to the back, round and even pudgy, with a small pointed head’.8

  We were heading for Kapsiliat, which I was tempted to think almost the most beautiful of Kenya’s many beautiful farms. It belonged to old friends, the Ridleys; Mervyn had kept a pack of foxhounds at Makuyu, not far from our Thika coffee farm, and we had enjoyed many weekend hunts over the plains in pursuit of jackals or steinbuck. One day in 1923 the Governor, Sir Edward Northey, had taken part in such a hunt, and it occurred to me that the East African Standard might accept a brief account of this event. Governors were always news. Copying out the composition in my best handwriting, I sent it off, and anxiously awaited the arrival of the next weekly edition of the newspaper. A week or so later I rode in trepidation the five miles to Thika to collect our mail, and back again not daring to open the package. Perhaps I expected some exclamation from my parents such as ‘Look! They’ve printed a bit about our run last Sunday week.’ No such comment came. Nevertheless, tucked away on a back page was my effort – in print. Some weeks later I got a postal order for five shillings. I was hooked.

  Now Mervyn and Sybil were living with their daughter Susan at Kapsiliat on a flank of the Cherangani mountains in a long, comfortable bungalow built of local brick and timbers and roofed with cedar-wood shingles. Tall native trees surrounded it, the lawns were green and smooth, the borders full of colour, and the whole place had a tidy, cared-for look about it, the farm an air of ticking over happily. There were well-groomed ponies, pedigree bulls, proper fencing, fine-woolled sheep. Mervyn was a large, broad-shouldered, jovial man whom everybody liked.

  Many British emigrants to Africa carried in their hearts an ideal of what they wanted to create, and that was a little piece of England, Scotland or Wales as it ought to be, not necessarily as it really was, and as they thought it had been in their childhood days. It was a feudal vision. The squire rode among his smiling peasantry who touched their caps or doffed them, inspecting his beasts and crops and returning to a well-ordered household where cooks were roasting venison, still-room maids baking cakes, gun-dogs wagging their tails and ale always on tap. It was, of course, an absurd, romantic and outdated dream impossible to translate into reality; in Africa the smiling peasantry could be sullen and thievish, crops droughted and rust-ridden, beasts diseased and cooks drunk, but here at Kapsiliat the dream seemed more nearly to be realised than in most places. It was such generous country, towns with their discontent and squalor so far away, and the Ridleys’ rule benign. But then, we only stayed there for a couple of days. And I believe that stock-thefts inflicted on the enterprise a running sore.

  We drove up through the forest along a winding track – not a glimpse of the chemosit – to the crest of the Cherangani hills, where a staggering prospect hit us like a thunder-clap. Beneath our feet lay a sheer drop of over four thousand feet into the Kerio valley, parchment-coloured, shimmering in the heat, speckled with bush and patterned by cloud-shadows. Down far below the Kerio river found its way towards the Northern Frontier deserts and Lake Rudolf beyond. Across the valley rose its other wall, the Kamasia hills. It was as if some primeval god had split a great slice of his creation with a colossal scimitar.

  A dry-weather track ran along the crest, and we followed it for some way, encountering from time to time small parties of women carrying loads, and men carrying spears. They were Elgeyo people, travelling to distant markets, and had a coppery, Maasai look about them. The women were bright as macaws in wide, stiff collars made of coils and coils of copper wire, and heavy ear-rings made of blue and scarlet beads stitched on to strips of leather. The wire was wrapped so tightly round their limbs that their flesh bulged out above the coils. How could they endure these hot, heavy embellishments like tourniquets, and why was their circulation not choked? The quantities of wire wound round their limbs, and of their bead ear ornaments, were measures of their husband’s wealth – status symbols, like diamond rings, emerald brooches and mink coats in our society. At least our symbols are more comfortable.

  From Kapsiliat we drove past fields of withered maize and clouds of dust over the Uasin Gishu plateau and on across the Trans Nzoia to the slopes of Mount Elgon, and next day inspected that mountain’s famous caves. I believe they are the only caves in the world frequented by elephants, who come to eat the mineral salts with which the rocks are impregnated, picking a path delicately in the darkness to avoid crevasses, and feeling their way with their trunks. They use their tusks to scrape off chunks of rock.

  These ancient caves were also used by Africans who drove their cattle in to lick the salty rock; as nesting sites by swallows and swifts; and as roosts by great colonies of bats: furry-faced, soft-bodied, hanging upside down like fruits of darkness, and emitting a constant suspuration of squawks and squeaks. Their eyes looked red when we shone our torches up at them. Bats, I am sure, are amiable animals, marvellously equipped to navigate by echo-location and so avoid bumping into things, devoted to their young and thinking no evil; their faces, when you can see them, are appealing with big, sad eyes. In ancient China, I have read, they were a symbol of long life and happiness. So the weakness is in me that I find them repellent. Such great communities seething overhead are mysterious, beyond comprehension. These were fruit-bats, Rousettus aegyptiacus, one species of many. At dusk they emerged in swirling clouds to feed on the fruit of various forest trees. I think it is excess that one finds so unnerving – termite castles alive with their scurrying inmates; relentless armies of siafu, the terrifying soldier ants; great, evil swarms of locusts – and close-packed crowds of nameless humans. Suppose something were to spark off a surge of hatred and anger? However, these fruit-bats were friendly, but smelly, and it was a relief to emerge into the sunshine and shadow of the forest with its rich scent of moss and fallen logs and spent leaves, and to see overhead the flash of a turaco’s wings and the graceful leaps of Colobus monkeys.

  So, back to Njoro for a few days, and then the time came for our return to London. Imperial Airways’ Croydon to Cape Town flight was just over a year old. Nairobi to Croydon took six days and a bit. You flew in four-engined biplanes of the Hannibal class that looked like ugly metal sausage-beetles, and came down every few hours to refuel, and then for the night. On this occasion we started off by train to break the journey at Entebbe, where we stayed a couple of nights with the Mitchells. I had met him in Nairobi when he was Chief Secretary in Tanganyika; now, in 1936 he was governor of Uganda, a country then basking in peace and prosperity – ‘the pearl of Africa’, it had been called. Kenyans envied it for its affluence, good roads and other amenities but considered it smug and full of thieves, while Uganda, for its part, looked with mingled disdain and irritation at its neighbour which, in their view, was full of uncouth settlers and down-trodden natives, and kept a stranglehold on Uganda by reason of its control over the Railway, the landlocked Protectorate’s only outlet to the sea.

  Philip Mitchell was possibly the ablest of the Governors who had come and gone in East Africa, up to that date. He had spent the whole of his career in Nyasaland and Tanganyika, so was a professional colonial servant, in contrast to the Army and Air Force commanders, varied by an occasional politician, who had been tossed a governorship to sweeten their retirement, or to get them out of the way. He was tall, good-looking – a little florid perhaps – outspoken and incisive, realistic and far-sighted, a perfectionist who did not suffer fools gladly – ‘a complete feckless nonentity’ was his verdict on a Governor under whom he had served. He kept fit by playing golf and riding every morning along the lakeside and among the shambas, which ap
peared as forests of banana trees, talking to passers-by in his flawless Swahili; and very handsome he looked in his well cut white breeches and open-necked shirt on a thoroughbred pony brought from Kenya.

  Government House had a pillared portico, spacious rooms kept cool by overhead fans, and view to the Lake over green lawns set with shady trees. The atmosphere was business-like and informal, and I felt sure that Lady Mitchell would see to it if any gubernatorial pomp was allowed to intrude. She was an oddity: short and tubby, almost as broad as long and, while not at all unfriendly, without that veneer of manner that can ease encounters between strangers. I can see her now, sitting on a chair too high for her, her feet dangling some distance from the floor, clutching a whisky and soda in her hand and looking like an amiable frog. The story was that Philip Mitchell, on departing to take his leave in South Africa, announced that he would marry the first woman who beat him at golf. Lady Mitchell, then Miss Margery Trywitt-Drake, did.

  He took us to see the college that had recently started to arise on Makerere hill just outside Kampala. It was one day to become, he said, a university serving the whole of East Africa, the seedbed of an African élite whose men and women would take over the leadership of their country and take their place on equal terms with people of a wider world. Higher education for Africans was a cause dear to his heart. ‘They have it in them’, he wrote, ‘to become as civilised as any other race of men.’9 The college, when we saw it, had ten tutors and 156 pupils drawn from all four territories, fifteen of them girls. One of Mitchell’s aims was to equip the future university with a single chapel for Christians of all denominations, which would help to bridge the gulf, still deep and wide, between Protestants and Roman Catholics. In this he was disappointed; two chapels were to arise.