The land she had drawn lay in the Ithanga hills, not far from where we lived at Thika. I had stayed in these hills with a family called Risley who were trying to grow coffee where coffee did not want to grow – it was too hot and too dry. Buffaloes did much better: there were herds and herds of those. These rocky, bush-clad hills dropped down into the valley of the Tana river, a paradise for wild animals not yet under threat. There were no resident humans. Only foot safaris had gone there, and not many of those, for the valley had a bad reputation for malaria and blackwater fever. Ours was one that did so, a very small safari which my parents gave me in 1923 as a sixteenth-birthday present. Jos had to stay behind to look after the coffee, but Nellie, myself and a young man who was hoping to become a professional white hunter, together with about a dozen porters, trudged over the hills and camped under the shady trees that fringed the river, to watch many kinds of wild animal coming to drink there and, I regret to say, shooting some of them. (I did, that is; Nellie did not care to.) But there were so many; now there is a hydro-electric installation. Our young would-be hunter never achieved his ambition, for he died of blackwater fever within the year.
Elizabeth Cross built herself a shack in the Ithanga hills and shared it with a grey pony and a white bull-terrier, and found the attractions of hunting down the Tana irresistible. The manager of a nearby sisal plantation, van Breda, showed her the ropes. To start with, excitement made her hand so unsteady that she missed most of her targets, but as time went on she became more expert, and then reached the stage where, as she wrote to her father, ‘I love seeing the game just as much as trying to shoot it, and so does van Breda’.
With the influx of new settlers, a brisk demand arose for the hardy little native sheep and cattle to be crossed with imported rams and bulls. Demand soon outran supply; but in the north, where lack of water was endemic, livestock was easier to obtain. Since the demise of the Boma Trading Company, the Government had discouraged Europeans from going north because of dangers from bandits, and from getting lost and dying of thirst, and it was a no-go area for women; even the wives of district officers were banned. Somehow, Elizabeth managed to get a permit, and van Breda went with her.
She must have been one of the first European women to get as far as Marsabit, that forested mountain rising so improbably from a parched lava plain. Osa Martin Johnson camped there round about the same time with her husband; they irritated the touchier old hands by naming the lake that lay deep in the mountain’s cedar forests Lake Paradise, and implying that they had more or less ‘discovered’ it. There had been a government post there since 1910. They were American showmen, and pioneers in the business of filming big game. Osa was filmed narrowly escaping furious charges by rhinos, elephants and buffaloes, being stalked by lions and fondling baby antelopes. Raymond Hook had a tame buffalo which was supposed to charge towards a helpless Osa trapped on a river bank, but the animal, overweight from succulent homestead grazing, lumbered along until it spotted an enticing mud-bank by the river and settled down to a good wallow.
At some point in her travels, Elizabeth met and married a young South African called Alec Douglas, who had fought in the King’s African Rifles during the war. They settled in the Nanyuki district, and a daughter, Delia, was born. After three years Elizabeth left her husband, and took her daughter first to England, then to Tanganyika, where the movement to ‘open up’ the southern highlands round Iringa was getting under way. Elizabeth got the lease of about a thousand acres of untouched bush. She located the land, trained oxen to pull a plough, and made a fresh start on her own. Her mother arrived from England, made curtains for the unglazed apertures, and found Elizabeth’s mud hut preferable to the grander house built by a couple from Kenya, where rats plopped off the rafters at night.
To tide things over before her first crop was harvested, Elizabeth bought a lorry for £200 and ran transport to Tukuyu on the border of Nyasaland along bone-breaking roads; three trips almost recouped the cost of the lorry. Life became easier when Lord Egerton of Tatton came down from Kenya, obtained the leasehold next to hers, and took her on as manager. For herself she planted onions, carrots, lucerne, potatoes and maize. She never went back to Alec Douglas, who eventually agreed, with reluctance, to give her a divorce.
A romantic and doubtless apocryphal story relates how the romance between Elizabeth Douglas and Will Powys began. One day, while still living near Nanyuki, she was riding across the veld and dropped her revolver. Will Powys came upon it, traced its owner and returned it to her, and in this way they met. Will, a friend recalled, with his tall and fine physique and his tight dark curly hair, ‘looked like a young Apollo’. After the failure alike of her marriage and of the prospect of ‘opening up’ Tanganyika’s southern highlands, Elizabeth, together with nearly all her fellow settlers there, returned to Kenya. A lot of hopes were buried on those southern highlands. Elizabeth moved over to Kisima, and in due course she and Will Powys married.
Elizabeth became every bit as hard-working and as sheep-orientated as Will. At shearing times, she would be up before dawn every morning and at the wheel of their lorry taking wool-bales to the station. She bore one more daughter and two sons.
A couple devoted solely to hard work and sheep presents a somewhat drab picture, but their offspring recall a home full of laughter and affection. Their parents shared a rather childish weakness for practical jokes. One concerned a pudding, a round pudding smothered in a white sauce. The principal guest tackled it with a spoon but the spoon bounced off. Puzzled, she tried again with no better success. The spoon gave out a hollow ring, and the hosts could no longer suppress their laughter. Beneath the sauce was a hard, baked-earth termites’ nest – fortunately without the termites. April Fools’ day was faithfully observed. The family owned one of those silver entrée dishes with a compartment at the base to hold hot water and so keep warm the breakfast dish, covered by a revolving lid. When one of the daughters opened the lid to get at her breakfast, she recoiled before a live chameleon.
Despite lean times and credit freezes, Will Powys gradually added to, developed and consolidated his properties. He ended up with three separate but interdependent units which together totalled about 83,000 acres and supported 29,000 sheep and 7,000 cattle. There was also wheat at Kisima, two crops a year; Galloway cattle imported from Scotland and a property at Malindi on the Coast. This busy, productive, hard-working family life sounded, despite troubles like drought, diseases, thefts and predators, almost idyllic. ‘We are all as happy as can be,’ Will wrote, ‘and deal with all the difficulties that crop up together.’3
Throughout his life he took no part in politics, but Elizabeth became a strong supporter of the Capricorn Africa Society. This had been started shortly after the Second World War by Colonel David Stirling, who had won fame and glory as leader of the Long-Range Desert Group that had operated behind enemy lines in North Africa and, in one dramatic foray, nearly captured General Rommel. His Capricorn Society was the first organised attempt to put into practice the ideal of multi-racialism in Africa. Men and women of all races were invited to join. Politically, the aim was a franchise open to all regardless of race, and framed on the principle propounded by Cecil Rhodes of ‘equal rights for all civilised men’.4
The question, of course, was how to define civilised men. Capricorn’s proposal was to winnow from the great black multitude a bushel of people who might be expected to comprehend the issues presented to an electorate, and to cast their votes responsibly. A minimum degree of education or of ownership of property; so many years of public service; these were among the tests proposed. Many ‘fancy franchises’ were suggested with the aim of creating a balance between the races so that no one race would overwhelm the others. Government by meritocracy was the definition. The vote, attained in stages, would be a prize for achievement, not an automatic right.
David Stirling was a persuasive speaker deeply committed to his cause, and so were his principal colleagues, including the veteran missionary J. H
. Oldham, Michael Wood, who was to start and run the Flying Doctor service, and the famous writer Laurens van der Post. Born in Rhodesia, the society had branches in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and London, and recruited many of the more liberal-minded Europeans, but not many Africans, most of whom were indifferent to its ideals or, in the case of the young nationalists beginning to emerge, looked on it as a trap set by Europeans to thwart their aims. Power is something that few people, if any, want to share. They want to wield it. Capricorn thrived for some years, but in the end succumbed to the slogan-shouts that rolled like drum-beats down through Africa, the cry of ‘One man! One vote!’
Will Powys was first and last a farmer, not an intellectual; nevertheless the creativity that ran in his family was in him too. In undeveloped countries, farming is in itself creative; with virgin land as his canvas, the farmer translates his vision into fields and pastures, crops and cattle, as an artist will apply his paint. The artist in Will expressed itself both in husbandry and, like his sister Gertrude, in paint. He painted the landscapes he loved, and used to offer a picture as a birthday present to each of the children. ‘Choose any scene you like,’ he would say, ‘and I’ll paint it for you.’ The child in question would pick a scene and he would set up his easel. ‘Somehow or other,’ Delia told me, ‘Mt Kenya nearly always seemed to come in.’5
In old age Will would sometimes tire before he completed a painting, and call on his servant to finish it off under his direction – in the tradition, perhaps, of those Old Masters whose pupils would fill in the details. All his pleasures centred on his family, his sheep and cattle and his properties: Kisima, Ngare Ndare and Il Pinguan. ‘Don’t you ever need a holiday?’ someone asked him. ‘But all my life has been a holiday,’ he replied. Also in old age he acquired another skill: the shepherd learned to play the flute.
His life was happy and successful, yet from a self-portrait done in old age a sorrowful, almost tortured face looks out, spectacles on nose, a black skull-cap pushed on to the back of his head. Sorrows did indeed cloud his last years. Elizabeth died in 1963 when she was only sixty-seven. Less than eighteen months later his eldest son Charles, who had inherited the Powys charm and looks as well as the intelligence and energy of both parents, accidentally shot himself on Christmas Eve. He was twenty-five years of age, and left a widow and an infant daughter. One of Will’s legs turned gangrenous and had to be amputated, and the stump pained him for the rest of his life. But he drove out daily in a Land-Rover to see to his sheep, and kept his hand on the controls until the end. A friend who stayed with him in his last years, coming in to breakfast to find his place empty, enquired: ‘Where’s Will?’ Hearing that a batch of sheep needed worming, Will had gone out at four thirty a.m. to see that it was properly done.
He died in 1978 in his ninetieth year and was buried beside Elizabeth and Charles in Nanyuki churchyard. The year of his birth was that in which two Austrians, Count von Teleki and Lieutenant von Hohnel, set eyes on Lake Rudolf, the first Europeans to do so. Such has been the speed of change.
It was on the Powys’ Laikipia ranch, Il Pinguan, that Theodore, son of Will’s brother of the same name, met a tragic end. At the age of twenty-five he had gone out to join his uncle at Kisima. Il Pinguan was not then Powys property, but was Crown land rented from the Government by Nell Cole, Galbraith’s widow. It lay in a lonely, sparsely occupied, remote region, then part of the Northern Frontier District, between a settled area to the south and, to the north, the territory of the Samburu.
The Samburu are cousins of the Maasai and share the same social structure. In the recent past their young males formed a warrior caste trained to raid for cattle, and to blood their spears on human victims, before they could marry. The tribe had no chiefs as such: its real rulers were the laibons, who were believed to possess supernatural powers – rudimentary priest-kings. No raid or spear-blooding foray could be undertaken without a laibon’s approval, and without the medicines he provided to protect the warriors. District commissioners and other officials found such tribes, which included the Nandi, difficult to deal with because of the undercover influence of the laibons, and the pride and militancy of the young men. For their part, the Samburu no doubt found DCs even more difficult to deal with because of their constant interference with ancient customs such as spear-blooding, which everybody knew to be right.
Nell Cole engaged young Theodore Powys, called Dicky by his family, to look after her sheep at Il Pinguan. One morning in October 1931 he rode out as usual on his white pony to inspect the flocks. In mid-morning the pony returned riderless to camp. It was not until two days later that searchers found his scattered bones, fragments of clothing, and a pool of dried blood. There was no skull. A young policeman from Rumuruti concluded that the pony had shied at a lion and thrown its rider, who had probably broken his neck, and that the lion, together with hyenas and vultures, had done the rest. A thorough search failed to discover the skull. Accidental death was the official conclusion.6
Rumours soon began to circulate that Samburu warriors, not a lion, had killed young Powys. It was reported to the authorities that the warriors were openly boasting of having killed a European and were singing a ‘song of the vultures’ to celebrate their feat. Spear-blooding was common enough, but a European victim would constitute a feather in the killers’ caps.
Two months after Powys’ death, a man called Kiberenge reported to the police at Rumuruti that he had witnessed the arrival at the local headman’s dwelling of six Samburu warriors carrying the head and testicles of a European. The headman had sworn the warriors to secrecy ‘over spears’, and offered Kiberenge five cows to keep his mouth shut. Finding no proof of this story – not surprisingly, since the headman naturally denied it – the police charged Kiberenge with giving false information to a public servant, and the DC sentenced him to five months’ hard labour.
This bizarre procedure angered the scattered ranchers of the region, whose African employees were as convinced as they were that if the Samburu got away with Powys’ murder no one’s life, white or black, would be safe. After Kiberenge’s release from jail he disappeared and, despite exhaustive searches, was never seen or heard of again. Murder was presumed.
The windswept steppes of northern Laikipia might seem, and be, far from Westminster, but it was not long before the death of Theodore Powys, Samburu laibons and ‘the song of the vultures’ were cropping up at question time in the House of Commons, and forming the subject of despatches between the Secretary of State and Governor Sir Joseph Byrne. The outcome was a much more thorough enquiry which brought to light the implication of the local laibon in the spearing not only of Powys but of twelve Kikuyu men, living on lonely farms, as well. Authority then came up against a brick wall. No one could be found prepared to give evidence against the laibon; so as to remove his influence, he was sent into temporary exile at the Coast. By 1934, the total of spear-blooding murders by Samburu warriors had risen to thirty-two.
It was not until the end of that year that several Dorobo living near Il Pinguan told the police that they had encountered on the plain, at the relevant time, a party of Samburu warriors carrying Powys’ head and testicles and boasting of their feat. After the Dorobo had picked them out in an identification parade, seven Samburu warriors were charged with murder. Two turned King’s evidence, and in November 1934 the remaining five were brought to trial before a High Court judge in Nakuru.
According to press reports, the trial developed into something of a shambles.7 The laibon, retrieved from the Coast, gave evidence with ‘dark flashing eyes’ and ‘two mysterious trinkets’ fastened to his belt. Four young girls, lovers of the accused, admitted amid bursts of giggles that they had joined in a dance, customarily held to celebrate a spear-blooding, when the ‘song of the vultures’ had been sung. The two Samburu who had turned King’s evidence, together with the headman and two elders, swore to the guilt of the accused, as did three of the Dorobo who had met them on the veld carrying their trophies. The accused themsel
ves displayed rings of the kind traditionally worn by warriors who had speared their victim, and, fortified by the presence of the laibon, were truculent and confident of acquittal.
The prosecution was left in the hands of the most junior and inexperienced of the law officers of the Crown who, in the opinion of many, made a hash of it. All the proceedings had to be translated from the Samburu tongue into Swahili and thence into English, and back again by the same tortuous route. Witnesses grew muddled, contradictory and incoherent. Under the colonial legal system juries were not called in cases in which Africans were accused; instead, two, or sometimes three, assessors drawn from elders of the tribe concerned sat with the presiding British judge. The niceties of English law made little sense to most of such elderly men. At the end of the Powys trial one of the assessors thought the men not guilty, the other two said that they were too confused to make up their minds. The acting judge, a newcomer to the Bench, shared their doubts, and concluded that ‘the evidence has fallen just short of that degree of certainty which would warrant a conviction’. So the warriors went free.
I have outlined this case in some detail because it throws into relief two important factors that, time and again, bedevilled relations between rulers and ruled in the colonial period. One was the undercover influence of laibons and witch-doctors, so much more powerful and dangerous to tribesmen than the remote and often nonsensical capers of British law. The other was a fundamental difference between the European and the tribal African concept of justice. In Europe, we believe that the individual, if of sound mind, is responsible for his actions and that, if he breaks the law, he must be punished. Under tribal law the community and not the individual was held responsible for the misdemeanours of any of its members: and recompense to the victim’s family, not punishment of the offender, was the usual aim.
Out In The Midday Sun Page 18