Out In The Midday Sun

by Elspeth Huxley

  Of course there were exceptions and grey areas. The principal exception was in matters of black magic and the activities of witches and wizards, enemies of society, as distinct from witch-doctors who were on the whole beneficial. Practitioners of black magic were like tumours in the body and had to be cut out. They were put to death, often in exceedingly unpleasant ways. Ordinary offenders were fined in cattle, sheep and goats. In cases of murder, manslaughter or serious injury, the object was to compensate the family of the killed or injured person for the loss or impairment of a contributor to the family’s welfare. The fine had to be paid not just by the offender, but by members of his extended family; and as a rule it was paid in instalments which might continue for years. It was a highly complicated system, because the livestock’s increase was taken into account; but argument, especially about livestock, was a keenly savoured pleasure, and possibly the procedure solved another of society’s problems the world over, how to provide interesting and useful occupations for the elderly. Trials were generally conducted by elders sitting beneath a shady tree with a plentiful supply of beer at hand.

  The African system of justice no doubt had its shortcomings, but it enabled the people to dispense with police forces, barristers and judges, prisons and the whole paraphernalia of the law as enforced in western nations. I have often thought that compensation rather than punishment is the better principle of the two. Could we adopt it, think what billions we should save, what miseries we should eliminate! It seems a topsy-turvy notion to keep society’s least useful members locked up, sometimes for the rest of their lives, at a cost per individual even greater than the sum that would provide a first-rate education for a boy or girl at the most expensive of our boarding schools, or (better still) that would add substantially to the old age pension.

  So why not fine offenders, distribute the cash to their victims or victim’s families, and let them go free? Alas, it would not work. Substantial fines can be paid only by people with property; few of our criminals are property-owners, whereas almost every African tribesman, through his family, used to be. And in our individualistic society we should be unwilling to contribute to a fine imposed upon, say, a brother’s wife’s step-son’s cousin-in-law, even though it might cost us less to do so than to pay the proportion of our tax spent on getting him convicted and held for years in prison.

  The extended family was a powerful influence on the side of good behaviour. Since every member – male member, to be precise – knew that he would probably have to contribute a goat or two, even a heifer in extreme cases, towards the penalty imposed on an offender, it was naturally in his interest to see that even his remotest cousin obeyed the law. We do not have extended families. Also, there is the matter of sanctions. Tribal sanctions were mainly supernatural; an offence was an affront to tribal spirits who would take their revenge against the whole group or family, not just against the individual offender. We, too, used to have our supernatural sanctions in the shape of hellfire and eternal damnation; we have abandoned them, and crime proliferates. Since no one has been able to think of a better alternative we must, no doubt, go on locking up our miscreants and employing people to try to catch them and enforce their punishment, with increasing lack of success. Meanwhile Africans have abandoned their own system in favour of that introduced by the colonialists, and sport the full panoply of bewigged judges, costly law-courts, uniformed policemen, highly paid barristers, and prisons, some of which sound even nastier than our own.

  The sequel to the Powys trial was predictable. The ‘song of the vultures’ was openly sung throughout Samburuland, and spear-blooding murders went from strength to strength. Kikuyu people, male or female, furnished most of the victims. The Government’s remedy was ‘closer administration’, i.e. more district officers and more policemen, combined with heavier collective fines in the shape of livestock. A new station was opened at Maralal in Samburu country, which was transferred from the Northern Frontier District, where colonial officials were few and far between, to the more settled Rift Valley Province administered from Nakuru. A policeman with a ‘levy force’ was stationed at Maralal to collect fines. PCs and DCs held barazas at which they lectured Samburu elders on the evil of their ways and delivered awful warnings, which the tribesmen ignored. Every Samburu knew the identity of the various murderers, but despite all the fines and lectures, the elders went on refusing to hand them over to the police.

  But ‘closer administration’ sewed the seeds of social change. A primary school and a dispensary appeared at Maralal; traders were encouraged, dukas opened, and gradually it became less safe to fall upon a solitary herdsman, or group of women carrying loads through the bush. There came a change of age-sets: the wicked warriors had their pigtails shaved, exchanged long-bladed spears for shorter-bladed, ceremonial ones, laid aside their ornaments and turned their minds to marriage. They were replaced by a new age-set of warriors whose spears cried out for blood, but by then the seeds of change were germinating; there were young Samburu who had seen the wonders of Nairobi, some even who had joined the police. Risks were greater, and the elders had had enough of paying fines. The murders did not stop, but they slowed down.

  The Samburu bore no grudge against those who had fined and lectured them. When, some years later, the time came for a DC who had won their respect to move on, the elders assembled to bid him farewell and give him a parting present. The present consisted of five good heifers. The DC found himself in an embarrassing position all too familiar to colonial civil servants. The rules forbade, and very strictly forbade, the acceptance of presents of any kind. Yet to give and to receive was a courtesy deeply embedded in African custom. To refuse a token of respect and friendliness – a chicken perhaps, some eggs, milk, tobacco – was considered to be a gross breach of good manners. The white man, in his brash and overriding way, was apparently too ignorant of polite behaviour to give or to receive gracefully.

  From the point of view of the Colonial Service, this ban on presents formed the very basis of the rule of incorruptibility. Allow a bottle of whisky or a pound of tea at Christmas, let alone five heifers, and the way lay open to a thousand-pound bribe. This rigid rule underpinned what may well have been the most incorrupt public service the world has yet known. No doubt there were occasional lapses over the years, but the only one I ever personally heard of – and this was not a bribe – concerned, I regret to say, an old friend of ours, a DC called H. B. Sharpe, who was a brilliant and dedicated gardener. After he had quitted one post to take up another, an elderly mowing machine was reported to be missing. Some years afterwards a colleague set eyes upon a machine of the same make and vintage in the garden of a house that Sharpie (as everyone called him) owned at Lamu. By that time he had retired, and the matter was not pursued. In any case, it was a common make of machine.

  As to the Samburu: the departing DC, Terence Gavaghan, was obliged to remind the elders of the rule, and to reject their gift of heifers. The elders were deeply offended. Gavaghan hit on what he thought was a solution. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said. ‘I’ll sell the heifers, and put the money towards a new dispensary in the district of which you’re in need.’ The faces of the elders did not brighten. They conferred. ‘We do not give you these heifers,’ their spokesman pronounced, ‘in order that we should remember you. We give them in order that you should remember us.’ Terence Gavaghan could think of no reply.

  CHAPTER 11

  Safari with Sharpie

  I have already mentioned Sharpie, Major H. B. Sharpe, and his horticultural skills. A common interest in gardening and plant-hunting brought him and Nellie together, and he became my parents’ good friend. From 1926 onwards he was stationed in the Northern Frontier District which, with the adjoining district of Turkana, occupied an area about half the size of Kenya and considerably larger than that of the United Kingdom. You couldn’t just go to the NFD to look round, it was a ‘closed district’, as I have explained. So the best way to travel in the North was to join forces with a distr
ict officer going on one of his periodic safaris. Such officers normally travelled with a small escort of Kenya police askaris, plus a few men of an irregular force drawn from local tribes and popularly known as dubas, or dingbats. You took your own transport and equipment, but travelled under the aegis of the DC.

  So when, early in 1937, Sharpie suggested that Nellie and I should go north with him on such a safari, combining a little plant-hunting on the side, we naturally jumped at the chance. He was a perfect travelling companion. Not plants only, but birds, beasts, the people and every aspect of this vast, hard-hearted, sun-baked country were familiar to him. He had entered the Colonial Service by a back door, having been trained as a botanist at Kew instead of at Oxbridge, and worked for the agricultural department as a plant inspector, a lowly form of life in the colonial hierarchy. In the First World War he rose to the rank of Major and afterwards joined the Brahmins in the administration. The Brahmins never altogether took to him, for various reasons. The man who set his stamp upon the North was Vincent Glenday, who had joined the Colony’s service in 1913, spent most of his time in that region and was its Officer-in-Charge from 1934 to 1938. That stamp was one of hard, tough, spartan living, a frontier life whose participants were expected to spurn creature comforts and to march all day on a handful of dates, and a draught of camels’ milk if they were lucky.

  Sharpie did not subscribe to what some of Glenday’s subordinates called the strength-through-misery philosophy. He belonged to the Epicurean, not the Stoic, school. His tastes were sybaritic, his conversation irreverent, sometimes witty and spiced with scandal, and he had no respect whatever for sacred cows. Officers stationed on the lower reaches of the Tana river sometimes safari’d in canoes. Sharpie would take a small kerosene refrigerator and an entourage of ten: two polers, two paddlers, an interpreter, a hospital dresser, a game scout, a corporal of police and two servants. A colleague encountered him proceeding downstream under an awning doing a crossword puzzle while the paddlers kept up a monotonous chant – Sanders of the River come to life.1

  Another cause of the oblique glances that the Brahmins of the administration cast in Sharpie’s direction was the fear that at any moment a major scandal would erupt around his head. Sharpie made no bones, or few bones anyway, about his homosexual tendencies. Bones on this matter were advisable then. The law had not changed since Oscar Wilde’s time, nor had social condemnation lifted. Such a scandal, it was felt, would embarrass the whole administration and tarnish the good name of the North, Men serving in the North were very jealous of its good name.

  The Brahmins might have been glad to get rid of Sharpie by posting him to the decadent south, but he was too good at his job to be discarded. He seldom talked about his past experiences, but I was told of one that earned him the respect of colleagues not easily impressed. The main concern of colonial administration in the North was, and had been since the start of British rule, to hold back, or at least delay, the unrelenting southward thrust of the Somali into the grazing grounds of the various Galla-speaking tribes. This movement had continued gradually but steadily ever since, about six hundred years ago, the legendary ancestor of the Somalis – a descendant, as they claimed, of the Prophet Mohamed – had first set foot in Africa somewhere on the shores of the Red Sea.

  People who know the Somali say that there are no better fighting men in Africa; tough as their sure-footed little ponies and unexcelled in hardihood, audacity, racial pride and courage. To these qualities they add a cunning and skill in intrigue which prompted Richard Turnbull, their historian and reluctant admirer, to describe them as ‘the crafty Ulysses of the Horn of Africa’.2 They achieved their southward advance as much by outwitting the peoples in their path as by military conquest. The key to the situation was always the wells. Get possession of the wells, and you got possession of the grazing grounds they opened up for the nomads’ cattle and camels.

  The duty of the British, as they saw it, was to prevent, as far as they could, a Somali take-over of the wells and grazing grounds of other peoples under their protection, notably the Boran, but they never had the resources to do so. The first to be confronted by this virtually impossible task was a young Greek, Philip Zaphiro, born in Constantinople, who had reached East Africa in the capacity of taxidermist and interpreter to Northrup McMillan, an American millionaire who led an expedition to southern Abyssinia in 1904. In 1907, Zaphiro was appointed ‘British Southern Abyssinia Frontier Inspector’ at a salary of £200 a year, plus £900 a year for expenses. A boundary line, of sorts, between Abyssinia and the East Africa Protectorate had been agreed in the same year between the Emperor Menelik II and the British Foreign Office. Zaphiro somehow or other had acquired an Admiral’s frock coat and red cummerbund in which he rode about the frontier, persuading the tribesmen to do as he told them. Apparently, quite often they did.

  But by this time the Somali had reached the grazing-grounds of the Boran around the wells of Wajir, and nothing but force, and a lot of force at that, could have made them draw back. All Zaphiro could do was to persuade the Boran to give up their wells peaceably in order to avoid their own extermination. This process was completed in 1932 when the last of the Boran retreated, leaving the Somali in undisputed possession of the wells. Meanwhile, Glenday had drawn a ‘Somali line’ from the Abyssinian frontier to the river Tana, westwards of which the Somalis were not to go, and the administration’s efforts were concentrated on trying to hold them back. But the line existed only on a map, and depended on persuasion to enforce its observance.3

  This is where Sharpie came in. As a junior district officer in the 1920s, he had been posted to Wajir, where he took over from a tall and handsome officer called John Llewellyn. Long Lew, as he was generally known, wore an eyeglass, travelled in some style – clean plates for each course, polished glasses, coffee cups – and had been encountered on the march, so I was told, wearing a hat and eyeglass and a pair of sandals, with nothing in between. The Somali shared with the Maasai a talent for capturing the hearts of their white rulers to such an extent that the rulers almost became the ruled. Long Lew steeped himself so deeply in Somali lore that he could even read their camel brands, a highly complex orthography by which every individual camel could be traced to its owner through his clan, sub-clan and family.

  The Somali were, and are, split into a number of clans, or tribes, nearly always at enmity and often at war with each other. One of the most powerful of these clans made Long Lew a blood brother and thereafter could twist him round their little fingers. He allowed them to move with all their livestock and hangers-on as far south as the Tana, where they had no right to be. Sharpie, taking a handful of ‘gobbos’, was sent to retrieve them. A great deal of nerve and diplomacy, and an extraordinary amount of bluff, were needed to accomplish this without bloodshed, and had blood been shed it would certainly have been Sharpie’s. He marched two hundred miles, rounded up about one thousand people and ten thousand head of cattle, marched them back, and reinstated them in their proper ranges. ‘A truly Herculean task’ was how Turnbull described this achievement. ‘It meant a good deal of hard trekking’ was Sharpie’s own comment.

  To get back to our safari: we rendezvous’d at Rumuruti, where Sharpie had created out of nothing one of those superb gardens which became his hallmark at every boma that he occupied. He was middle-aged by then, white-haired, rotund and rubicund, jovial but now and then a little testy. His garden was full of colour, of big shady indigenous trees, and of rivulets rippling about lawns kept green by sprinklers. I remember to this day the melodious fluting of golden orioles in thick-foliaged mununga trees, the glowing colour of scarlet cannas beside a stream adorned with maidenhair ferns and crossed by little rustic bridges, and Sharpie wrestling with a young elephant he had reared almost from birth and who shared his quarters. In his gardening activities it was, of course, a help to have the inmates of the local jail available to do the donkey-work. As a magistrate – DCs were ipso facto magistrates – he was in a position to see that the ja
il was not empty for long, although I do not for a moment suggest that he took this into consideration when delivering sentences; the supply of offenders was unlikely ever to run dry. The prisoners, for their part, did not look unhappy in the shade of the trees languidly swinging to and fro an implement designed for beheading grasses.

  Besides Nellie, myself and Karanja, Rose Cartwright made up the party. Jos was holding the fort at Njoro; this quite often seemed to be his fate, but his breathing already troubled him, he was not a plant-hunter and was happy hatching schemes for making fortunes, writing plays never to be performed, keeping an eye on the farm and gently exercising the dogs. Rose, like Sharpie, could seldom be faulted on the naming of a plant or bird. Beneath a quiet, rather self-effacing manner lay a dry wit, a keen appraising eye, a devotion to wild places and a talent as a raconteur. On a visit to a brother immediately after the First World War she had fallen in love with the country as well as with Algy Cartwright, whom she married; the first love affair lasted, the second did not. Now she had a herd of beautiful Guernsey cows which she dearly loved, as she did her dachshunds, the fire-finches and cordon bleus that hopped about her living room, and sorties into the Aberdare forest with a rifle, a groundsheet, a cooking pot and little else, in search of the elusive bongo, an exercise which seemed to me to plumb the depths of discomfort. There was nothing like that, I am glad to say, about our safari with Sharpie to Wamba and the Mathews range (now called Longeyo) beyond.

  Everyone entering the NFD had to go by Isiolo and sign a book proffered by a police askari, who then raised a pole balanced on two posts: such was the Gateway to the North. You approached it through a row of scruffy Indian dukas along a road deep in dust; past the barrier came police and other quarters built of local sunburnt bricks with tin roofs; then a few mud-and-wattle offices and finally bungalows for the handful of white officials, who I think consisted of the DC, a policeman, a doctor and a vet. A rather half-hearted attempt had been made to plant pepper trees and eucalyptus for shade. That was about all there was of Isiolo. The DC was Captain Rimmington, said to have trained a giraffe to be saddled and ridden, and an ostrich to draw a cart. We did not see either of these at Isiolo on our way through.