What we did see, however, surprised us. On the banks of the insignificant and then dried-up Isiolo river was a military encampment accommodating about four hundred Eritreans. They were deserters from the Italian army, which was engaged upon its conquest of Abyssinia, and had sought asylum in Kenya. No one knew what to do with them, so there they were, fed and clothed and looked after by the colonial government. A much larger influx of uninvited guests was to follow. Italian victories released over the Kenya-Abyssinian border a great wave of refugees. Some were demoralised soldiers, some peasants made homeless by the tides of war, and some were the Emperor’s Amharic-speaking high officials, together with their wives and children, servants and slaves. Dysentery soon broke out, and the refugees brought smallpox with them; they had no food, no means of shelter, no medicines, nothing but pathetic bundles of possessions carried on backs or heads. Down they came from the mountains and across the border, heading for the great waterless deserts of north-western Kenya. At the north end of Lake Rudolf they had to cross the Omo river which was in flood. The local tribesmen, who detested the Abyssinians with good reason, denied them canoes, and many perished in the flood as they struggled across.
We have all got used to refugees by now; Africa is said to have at least five million of them, and year by year their number grows. These were harbingers. No organised relief agencies existed then, no United Nations, Save the Children, Oxfam, Christian Aid, no teams of rescue workers, airlifts, all the paraphernalia that has since been assembled to cope, however inadequately, with such crises. It was left to half a dozen DCs and junior officers, stationed at three or four scattered outposts, with what help they could summon from Nairobi, to guide these refugees across more than three hundred miles of desert without roads or means of transport, food or shelter. Much of the burden fell on Gerald Reece at Marsabit. The RAF flew in food, medicos and smallpox vaccine, and lorries were brought up to convey the sick, the very old and the infants to Isiolo. Here all the survivors eventually assembled, nearly six thousand of them, including about one thousand children. No one knew how many people had perished on the way, but a general estimate was two thousand.
At Isiolo, a camp was improvised at record speed – by the time it was finished it was said to be the third largest township in Kenya. It had two churches, a hospital and several clinics, a handicraft centre, an irrigated vegetable garden and a court-house, over which Amharic nobles presided, as dignified as acacia branches, thatch and an inscription ‘Magna est Veritas’ over the porch could make it. The young colonial officials who brought all this into being were particularly proud of the school. The most persistent troublemaker among the refugees had his sting removed by equipping him with a teacher’s mortarboard and gown and conferring upon him the title of Dr Smart Aleck. The school was dubbed Narkover. Before long, each child was receiving a daily drink of milk as well as meat, bread and vegetables, and their health took on a spectacular improvement. In due course Kenya’s Governor, Air Vice-Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, paid a formal visit to the camp. He ended his inspection with the usual question: any complaints? Everyone at Isiolo had the same complaint, against an unrelenting, vicious wind that whirled dust around in choking eddies, shrivelled the skin and howled like a thousand lost dogs. The senior notable asked whether the camp could be moved to a more sheltered spot, giving as his unexpected reason: ‘The wind aggravates my syphilis.’
The district officer who organised the camp from scratch was a young man just turned thirty, Robert Armitage. He handed over to Richard Turnbull, who was twenty-eight. Gerald Reece I have already mentioned. All three rose in time to become colonial Governors, with appropriate knighthoods. Gerald Reece went on to govern British Somaliland; Robert Armitage to preside over the affairs of Cyprus and then of Nyasaland; and Richard Turnbull to become the first and last Governor-General of Tanganyika, and finally High Commissioner for the Aden Protectorate. The third of this trio has suggested as a suitable comment on the NFD of those times a phrase applied by Horace to North Africa: Leonum arida nutrix – a dry-nurse of lions.
When you see a name on a map, you naturally expect something to be there, at least a duka or two, maybe a market and possibly a ‘hoteli’, a sort of café selling a few basic necessities, Coca-Cola and perhaps portions of dubious-looking stew. This did not seem to be the case at Wamba. There was nothing to be seen except a river that had degenerated into a series of muddy pools, which Samburu cattle shared with elephants on an informal rota system. Generally the elephants waited until the Samburu cattle had finished, but during our first evening, while we were camped nearby, three elephants had got in first, and we saw a Samburu toto driving them off with a stick. They went meekly, and waited about in the bush until the cattle had drunk their fill.
Wamba was a beautiful camp. We had climbed above the parching heat and winds of Isiolo to an altitude of about 4,000 feet, high enough to engender that early morning crispness and purity that lends reality to the fancy of a singing heart. The air of the highlands has often been compared to champagne, but I do not think this apt, for while both are invigorating, champagne prickles, whereas the highland air is smooth and sweet. Weaver-birds chattered, anvil birds (a boubou shrike) sounded their bell-like duet, and multi-coloured starlings, so bold and iridescent, hopped about the camp. The fragrance of acacia blossom, clustered in tight little yellow balls, floated on the air as lightly as thistle-down.
Above our camp, the Mathews range rose almost to 8,000 feet, thickly forested and then only half explored. Here and there families of Dorobo,4 dwelt in their igloo-like shelters, moving on frequently to make new ones, living by drop-spear traps for elephants, snares for small mammals and by hunting antelopes with bows and poisoned arrows. Their numbers were dwindling, and Sharpie had established a settlement at the foot of the range where several hundred of them were being taught to dig, hoe, plant seeds, harvest crops and turn into farmers, with a Kikuyu agricultural instructor in charge.
Our arrival coincided with a full moon, and moons in Africa seem to get fuller than they do elsewhere. Everything becomes black and white; deep black for rocks and trees and shadows, and all else not chalk-white but a subtle kind of silver, full of mystery. We ate our dinner in the open beside a crackling, pungent-scented camp fire, after a dish of ‘first toasties’ more imaginative than the roasted peanuts we generally had at home. (‘Second toasties’ were savouries, more favoured as a rule than puddings.) Sharpie’s cook was a Swahili who had been with him for years, and he also had a personal servant – one might say valet – and an odd-job man, plus a driver-mechanic and his mate. The valet had the soft good looks, light-coloured skin and dark, disdainful eyes with a hint in them of wickedness of the young Arab. Some such attractive ganymede was nearly always to be found in Sharpie’s entourage.
For some reason, or for no reason, I have never been afraid of elephants. This is not courage, which consists of overcoming fear, but stupidity. Elephants are large, powerful and wild, and have been so harried and tormented by man almost since mankind began that if every elephant charged every human on sight and trampled him to death the score would not be evened. It is fear that stops them from doing this, and fear can lead to desperate frenzy as well as to precipitate flight. Besides, a great many elephants go about with festering wounds, or with memories of man-inflicted pain and terror, and you can never tell whether that creature dozing so peaceably in the shade, and such tempting camera-fodder, bears the scars of bullet-wounds or spearheads. So it is foolish not to be afraid of elephants. But, if I had harboured such fears, the elephants of Wamba would have dispelled them.
After the meal, I strolled down to the pool below our camp to enjoy the stillness and the silvery light on leaves and grasses and on the sandy verge of the pool. A dark-blue sky was bursting with stars. All was quiet, save for now and again a bark from some distant animal, the hoot of an owl, and once an outburst of frog-croak that started up like an orchestra, swelled to a crescendo and suddenly stopped, as if at the touch o
f a switch. Turning to wander back to camp, I looked up to see three elephants standing about fifteen yards away, moonlight illuminating their white tusks, the wrinkles on their foreheads and even a gleam in their eyes. They were altogether tranquil and relaxed, their big ears slowly moving, trunks hanging slackly down. Two or three strides and they could have stretched out a trunk and hurled me out of their path, but I sensed their peaceful intention and felt no inclination to turn and fly.
‘The elephant’s a gentleman,’ Kipling wrote; there is indeed a gentleness about them; they will step aside when a little plover in their path raises her wings to warn them off her nest. There is a legend among both the Kikuyu and the Chagga people of Mount Kilimanjaro that elephants formerly were men and women who, like Adam and Eve, gave offence to God, not in their case by disobedience but by vanity and extravagance. To make themselves look beautiful, they washed in milk. For this, God expelled them from their Eden, inflicting on them milk-white tusks as a perpetual reminder of their folly. Sometimes, it was said, when out of sight, a young elephant would change back into a human. Retreating a few steps, I stood under a tree and watched them, and they watched me. After about fifteen minutes they half-turned and moved down to the water’s edge with the dignity of a high priest bearing votive offerings to a shrine.
We set out next morning to climb a part of the mountain, intending to camp under the crest. This meant enlisting people to carry loads. The Samburu were too proud to carry anything heavier than a spear, so some of the Dorobo were recruited. They, too, had seldom carried anything heavier than a chunk of raw meat, and took it all as a great joke. They were not over-burdened; one man carried a hurricane lamp, another a tin basin, another Nellie’s sponge-bag, and so on. A whole army streamed off up the mountain along winding game tracks, escorted by several police askaris and a squad of tribal policemen in smart red and blue blankets, armed with rifles. The theory was that we were sure to encounter a rhino at almost every step. There were plenty of rhinos about, but as our cavalcade made a noise like a tank corps going into action, this was unlikely, and did not occur.
The Dorobo were light-hearted porters and, when we reached the forest, they vanished among the vegetation to re-emerge wreathed in smiles and smeared with honey. Here and there treeless patches with charred stumps told the tale of destruction by fire – deliberate fire started by the Samburu in order to clear a way for their cattle. They were doing great damage, Sharpie said, so he had ‘closed’ the mountain, and we could see saplings growing up in scorched places, and vegetation beginning to come back. His action had not been taken just because he loved trees, or wanted to annoy the Samburu. Forests are the mother of streams. They nourish and protect the springs, and if they are destroyed the springs dry up, rivers cease to flow, people and their cattle have to move elsewhere and another bit of Africa is turned into desert. This is going on all the time.
We camped that night in a natural forest glade, and all around us Cape chestnuts were smothered in a froth of pale pink blossom smelling rather like jasmine. (They are not chestnuts and had not come from the Cape, being indigenous – Calodendrum capense.) Early next morning we scrambled up a rocky shoulder to reach the crest and marvel at the view. It is the immensity of these views that defies description; they seem to have no end. On one hand a lava plain broken by abrupt and jagged mountains stretched away to Lake Rudolf and all Turkanaland and the Sudan beyond; on the other lay another plain dotted with queer little nobbly hills reaching to the sharp and distant lip of the Laikipia plateau. All was flooded with golden effulgence as the sun took possession of the plains.
This was to be plant-hunting day. Sharpie and Rose set out in one direction, Nellie and I in another, escorted by a tall and handsome Samburu tribal policeman with a charming smile who carried a rifle in one hand and a trowel in the other. As the hunt proceeded he laid aside his rifle and dug enthusiastically at any root coveted by Nellie.
Rose was one of those people, like Raymond Hook, Philip Perceval, Denys Finch Hatton and other self-taught naturalists, whose chosen element was the wild places of Africa and who accumulated, bit by bit, an understanding of their plants and creatures. But she was dogged by ill fortune. Birth under an unlucky star seemed the only way to account for the undeserved misfortunes that fell upon her. Dreadful things happened to her prize cows, things that happened to no other people’s cattle – unlikely accidents, rare diseases, deformed calves, deliberate sabotage. Once she ran over a favourite dachshund while backing her car. The man she hoped to marry died, after several years of suffering, from wounds inflicted in the war. She trusted her staff, but they frequently betrayed her; others had the same experience, but she seemed to have it more often than most.
On the surface she was gentle, mild and lenitive; underneath, tough. So much was made plain by the story of her daughter’s birth. The baby was premature. Rose was alone in a rudimentary shack with no telephone or nearby European neighbours; this was in the days when African employees lived apart in their huts, and none of their women had as yet ventured into European houses or become acclimatised to European ways. She despatched a runner to Naivasha, about twenty miles away, but the term runner was an expression of hope, not of reality; and no one came. The baby arrived, a tiny four-pounder. Rose was uncertain what to do next, and afraid of harming the infant, so it remained attached to the umbilical cord. ‘Luckily it suckled madly,’ she said. She herself opened a half-bottle of champagne. ‘What else could I do?’ she remarked. Nearly eighteen hours elapsed before help arrived and the cord was severed. When at last a doctor came, he had to operate, but had brought no anaesthetics. Rose, and the baby, survived.
She was a survivor, despite the blows of fate. She also survived an attack by thieves that left her tied up on the floor, battered and unconscious with broken bones, and permanently semi-crippled – a disaster still to come at the time of our plant-hunt, when she scrambled about the mountains with agility. All this she bore with humour and without despair, continuing her embroideries of flowers and birds in the finest of stitches on the purest of silk woven in China. They are works of art, and a shoal of brilliant tropical fishes, hanging on a wall of my cottage beneath a flight of ducks, never ceases to delight.
Back in camp with our plant loot, Nellie thanked our escort, to be rewarded with a smile more charming than ever, and remarked to Sharpie on his intelligence and courtesy. ‘A good fellow,’ Sharpie agreed. ‘One of the most reliable of our tribal policemen.’ He added that our escort had been one of the accused in the Powys murder case.
This case was still having repercussions. Our safari was not just a pleasure jaunt. Its purpose was for Sharpie to hold a baraza in which he was to tick off the Samburu yet again for refusing to give up spear-blooding, and to hand over the murderers to the police. Wherever a DC went, he held a baraza. He took up his position on a camp chair behind a small table, people sat around on their haunches, and an interpreter stood behind the DC’s chair. Normally the DC spoke in Swahili, which the interpreter rendered into the local dialect. Anyone could give his views, but generally the local headman was the spokesman, having first consulted with his council of elders – a procedure that might be described as democracy without frills.
The Samburu thrust the hafts of their spears into the ground and gathered round to listen to Sharpie’s address. Despite the posting to the district of a ‘levy force’, and despite heavy fines in livestock, the tally of spear-blooding murders had reached forty-six. Sharpie pointed out that if things went on as they were going, the Samburu would soon have no livestock left at all. They listened impassively; they were not warriors but elders who had to pay the fines. But they still did not reveal the identity of the murderers.
Next day we struck camp and followed what Sharpie called a new road. The road was an idea, not an accomplishment. A guide walked ahead to find a passage between boulders, fallen trees and ant-bear holes, and after a few miles we halted altogether while a path was hacked through the bush. We came at length to a g
rove of tall acacias beside a stream trickling down a broad bed of pure white sand, and full of tiny fish. A succulent dish of whitebait, we thought, for supper. We trawled with mosquito nets and caught a bucketful, but they were a disappointment – too bitter. So brilliant was the moonlight that we had no lamp upon the table and sat in the open on the white sand with the sound of gurgling water and croaking frogs in our ears, and a little owl sang to us all through supper.
To reach our last camp we wound our way to the top of the Leroghi plateau through some of the worst soil erosion I have ever seen. This plateau, and its steep escarpment, had been unoccupied until a few years before, when Samburu cattle, sheep and goats had started to come in from the north. They had multiplied so quickly that the area was carrying, so said the experts, two or three times as many beasts as it could support without serious damage to the pastures. Who was to blame for this? Not really the Samburu, but the vets. Periodic outbreaks of rinderpest and pleuro-pneumonia had previously held livestock numbers down to a level that the land could support. Now the vets with their vaccines had virtually abolished these checks. The beasts had multiplied, and the pastures had been eaten out and trampled and the soil washed away by storms. An old story. Vets and doctors between them have created the terrifying dilemmas of today’s Africa. If ever good intentions paved a way to hell, this is the exemplar.
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