Out In The Midday Sun

by Elspeth Huxley

  ‘My poor young man, my poor young man, you have ruined your career! If you had only left it to me I could have arranged your posting. We have our methods.’10 This was the head Goan clerk at Kisumu addressing the young district officer who, to his unconcealed fury, had been posted to this lakeside station among Bantu and Nilotic peoples when he wanted to be in the North serving under Glenday among the Galla and Somali. (These experienced Goan clerks were the lynch-pin of the administration, and fatherly to young officers – comparable to sergeant-majors in the British army. Their names echoed the great names of Portugal – Albuquerque, da Gama, Almeda, Dias, Pinto, da Costa.) Assisted by the influence of Glenday, he got back to the North, which had already hooked him.

  Turnbull made himself an expert on Somali customs and clans, and took pride in his mastery of their complex genealogies. Also he collected, identified and registered in three languages – Boran, Somali and Turkana – pretty well every tree and shrub that grew in the region. Like Glenday, he was a scientist by training, Turnbull in physics, Glenday in geology and forestry.

  After five years as Officer-in-Charge he left the NFD to enter the political world of Nairobi as Chief Secretary, where experience gained by dealing with Somali feuds and intrigues no doubt stood him in good stead in the snake-pit of Legislative Council. The view that the settler-politicians were a bunch of ill-mannered backwoodsmen out only for themselves, unscrupulous and pig-headed, was pretty general in the higher echelons of the colonial service. ‘Little, frightened, narrow, heathen men, with nothing to offer but words, tricks, schemes and spite’ was how Sir Philip Mitchell, Governor from 1944 to 1952, described them. Turnbull took a much kinder view. ‘Don’t delude yourself’, he advised, ‘that the settlers were either silly old Colonel Blimps or rough farmers; there were brilliant educated men amongst them who knew far more about parliamentary procedures and the niceties of government than many of us did. They were at us night and day, and it was an excellent thing. It meant that if I had a letter from a senior settler complaining of x, y, or z, my first reaction was not – here’s that wretched man once again; it was – is my conscience quite clear in this matter?’11 So the emphasis was on efficiency in government, although this was by no means always achieved. Africa’s secret weapons, Turnbull has observed, are inertia and apathy.

  ‘A brilliant speaker with a pungent wit’ is how one of the unofficial members of the Legislative Council, Sir Charles Markham, has described him. ‘His opponents in debate were decisively massacred, yet he was never rude. He gave the impression of a benevolent headmaster having to control firmly and kindly a rather undisciplined bunch of school kids, but had none of the aloofness and pomposity sometimes assumed by big frogs in small colonial ponds.’12 (When a colonial civil servant reached a certain level in the hierarchy, a KCMG was automatically bestowed; the letters were interpreted by the irreverent to stand for ‘kindly call me God’.)

  Dick Turnbull did not altogether renounce the austerities of the North, but these became a little softened by Nairobi’s sybaritic influence. He became, and has remained, a connoisseur of wine. Charles Markham has related an episode that occurred when Turnbull, as acting Governor during the absence of Sir Evelyn Baring, was presiding over a dinner party at Government House. ‘After the ladies had left the room, Turnbull suggested that we might as well broach another bottle of Château Margaux 1947. Having already consumed more than a generous quantity, I suggested that perhaps this was a little excessive, which produced the immediate response: “My dear fellow, if we don’t drink it, think of the ghastly chaps who might!” No further argument was needed to convince me that we were doing Sir Evelyn Baring a service.’ In his defence Dick Turnbull has pointed out that Sir Evelyn was not really being robbed, for his digestion had been so wrecked by dysentery that he could eat and drink little but rice pudding and soda water.

  From Nairobi, Dick Turnbull moved on in 1955 to Dar es Salaam to govern Tanganyika, where Julius Nyerere had emerged as the nationalist leader. A lucky opening gambit got him off to a good start. At their first meeting he said: ‘Good morning, Mr Nyerere, you and I have some difficult problems to solve in bringing this country to independence.’ Mr Nyerere smiled. If the two were not like kittens in a basket after that they were not like snarling dogs either. This personal liking between the chief of the outgoing colonialists and the incoming African ministers was matched in Kenya by the mutual respect and goodwill that grew up between Jomo Kenyatta and Malcolm MacDonald, Governor-General in the period immediately preceding independence.

  As Tanganyika’s Governor, Turnbull did not allow the languid airs of Dar es Salaam to erode his dedication to physical fitness. Before dawn broke, mounted on a vintage bicycle that was clumsy and heavy, he would pedal vigorously about the back streets of the capital and among the harbour’s sheds and railway sidings. Visiting MPS from Britain would be provided with bicycles and invited to come too. It was an invitation few had the temerity to refuse. ‘It was a useful way’, Dick Turnbull said, ‘to assess their moral fibre.’

  The bicycle went too when he retired at first to Henley, where he could be seen, often in icy winter weather, pedalling along the tow-path with a megaphone coaching the crews of colleges and clubs of which he had once been an active member. When he moved to wilder country further north he could be found, by then in his mid-seventies, following beagles in wind and rain over the Northumbrian hills. He was, and is, a perfectionist; I recall at Henley the greenest, smoothest and most disciplined of lawns, a closed district to any vagrant plantain or clover; and, in his hospitable Border home, glasses polished until they shone like crystal and every spoon and saucer precisely in its allotted place. Happily, his wife Beatrice is endowed with humour, good nature, simplicity and a sense of order to match her husband’s.

  A practical man, down-to-earth, a realist scornful of woolly thinking, rose-tinted outlooks and sentimental judgements – I liked a remark of his concerning ‘jam-puff courses such as sociology’ – and hardly a romantic, one would say. Yet when I asked him what it was about that other, harsher, crueller border that had so captured his allegiance he replied, pausing only to uncork a bottle of ambrosial German wine, ‘The romance’.

  Sipping the ambrosial wine from crystal-clear glasses, Dick told me the story of John Ethelstan Cheese. He had first met this strange, itinerant English priest in 1935 in one of the remoter parts of the NFD, trudging along a sandy track carrying a small Gladstone bag, a ground-sheet and nothing else. He wore a crumpled, threadbare suit that hinted at a clerical cut, and a pair of sandals. A trader’s lorry had dropped him at a duka where water could be had by digging for it, and the next source of water was fifty miles farther on. He had promised, he explained, to look up the sons of Mohamed Ahamed of the Habier Sulieman clan, and did not like to disappoint the family. In gentle tones he added: ‘I hope it will not embarrass you if I tell you that I put my faith in God and that God looks after me. It’s a funny business, but I’ve never queried it, and it has always worked.’

  So Dick left him in the desert, but sent out two tribal policemen to follow him at a discreet distance and to go to his aid should aid be needed. That same evening Padre Cheese, as he was known, came up with a Somali ‘village’ – a family group on the move, with all its possessions, in a never-ending search for camel-browse. The people were on their way to the Lorian swamp and should by then have reached it, but a freak storm had brought up some unexpected browse and so they had delayed their departure. The tribal policemen returned to camp, reporting that this was a very holy man and that it was the will of God that no harm should come to him.

  In all Padre Cheese’s time in the North he made two Christian converts. But he never despaired, nor did the nomads ever refuse him food and shelter. His grand design was to translate the Gospels into Somali, but as this tongue still lacked a written orthography he was obliged to settle for the use of Arabic characters. He translated the Gospel according to St Luke and the whole of Pilgrim’s Progress, retreating f
or the purpose to Lamu, where a hospitable Arab provided him with a room and writing materials.

  In appearance he was a pale, thin, ascetic-looking individual with a shy and diffident manner. He had entered Kenya in 1930 from Ethiopia, having been a missionary in Addis Ababa and in Palestine before that. A product of Rugby school and Cambridge University, he had been ordained in 1902, so must have been a man of over fifty when he took to the nomadic life, and nearly sixty when Dick Turnbull came upon him carrying his small Gladstone bag.

  Seventeen years later, Dick found him living in Lamu and looking older than his seventy-odd years. On Sundays he would preach to a handful, a very small handful, of Christians, consisting usually of the DC, one or two followers of the Salvation Army, and the DC’s staff of Goan clerks, who were Roman Catholics but came to the services to give the old man pleasure. Padre Cheese preached long and rather rambling sermons, and then adjourned to Sunday luncheon with the DC, probably his only square meal of the week. He died in 1959 on his way back to England and was buried at sea. ‘He had no aim in life but to serve God’ was the Somali verdict.

  CHAPTER 13

  Among the Kikuyu

  After I had finished writing Delamere’s biography, Nellie said: ‘You’ve done White Man’s Country. What about Black Man’s Country next?’ She had been intrigued by the enterprise of Njombo and a few companions who, without saying a word, had turned up at Njoro station to meet her there when she moved from Thika, and by the colonisation of the Njoro district by the Kikuyu. Enterprise always appealed to her, and so did a sense of humour; it was their possession of these two qualities that underlay her liking for the Kikuyu people. Also they were intelligent and good at growing things. So Nellie and the Kikuyu had a lot in common. Some Europeans thought them deceitful, crafty, much given to squabbling and to becoming barrack-room lawyers, and were reluctant to employ them, preferring men and women of more straightforward tribes. There was quite a sharp division among white farmers between the pro- and the anti-Kikuyu.

  The Black Man’s Country notion developed into a plan to trace through the lives of an imaginary Kikuyu family the coming of the white man into a world of custom and tradition that had remained virtually unchanged for centuries. It was to be in the shape of a novel. No doubt this was a foolhardy idea, since I doubt whether any member of one race and culture can get under the skin of people of a different race and culture. Still, it was worth a try.

  The first step was to reconstruct, insofar as one could, the daily life and customs of the people in the days when white men were unheard of. This was not quite as difficult as it sounds because the coming of the white man was so recent. I am writing of 1937. A British Protectorate had been established only forty-two years earlier, and the boma at Nyeri, in the heart of Kikuyuland, had not been opened until 1902. Although trading expeditions and explorers had passed along its margins, they had avoided most of Kikuyuland for fear of poisoned arrows, in whose deployment the young men were highly skilled. The people were still in the process of taking over the forested areas on the foothills of Mt Kenya and of the Aberdare mountains from the Dorobo, or taking them over from no one at all, and cutting down and burning trees to make way for shambas. Men and women still in their fifties and sixties could remember at first hand, not from hearsay, what tribal life was like before white men came along to disturb and then disrupt it.

  The Provincial Commissioner at Nyeri arranged for Nellie and me and Karanja, accompanied by several dachshunds, to occupy a government camp about six miles from a market called Karatina. These permanent camps were dotted about the reserve for the use of district officers going on their rounds. Junior officers still made these rounds on foot, the chiefs of each sub-district providing porters and supplying firewood and a few necessities like milk at each camp. Ours consisted of an open-sided mud-and-wattle banda and three rondavels, roofed with banana fronds. The walls were whitewashed and it was all perfectly clean. At an altitude of 6,500 feet the nights were chilly – too chilly until we bought a brazier and warmed ourselves at night by its glowing charcoal – but the mornings sparkled in the sunlight of the clear, fresh mountain air. With a sixty-inch rainfall which seldom failed, with a deep, rich forest soil and a plentitude of crystal-clear streams emerging from the forest, the whole place seemed to be bursting with fertility. Feathery dark green wattle trees were massed on the crests of the ridges; pastures on the slopes were rich with Kikuyu grass and white clover; maize, groundnuts, beans and sweet potatoes shared the shambas; banana fronds stooped over rippling streams; stands of sugar-cane prospered in the valleys. A sharp, aromatic scent from the bush sweetened the air.

  All the homesteads, each encircled by a timber palisade, had some shelter round them, banana trees or relics of the forest. Here and there a fig tree stood on its own. Fig trees were favoured by the spirits, so must not be lopped or felled. Peace and fecundity seemed to bathe those ridges in a golden effulgence. I have no doubt that beneath the surface all sorts of wickednesses went on, diseases proliferated, plots thickened, but they stayed beneath the surface and the crust was fair. Certainly there was no hunger or want, and no loneliness; in the fabric of kinship, every thread was woven in.

  The location we had come to was called Murigo’s after the local chief. Murigo called on us himself soon after we had settled in to bid us welcome, bringing presents of a chicken and small brown eggs. He was an impressive figure: tall, well built, dignified in gait and courteous in manner. Fortunately he was a great tea-drinker, which solved the problem of our return gifts. Over several mugs of the heavily sweetened beverage I explained my mission as best I could. I had brought with me Routledges’ book on the Kikuyu, published in 1910,1 and showed him its illustrations of tribal accoutrements which younger men no longer used or wore. Customs, I said, were disappearing too, and I hoped that his elders would tell me about them so that I could put their words into a book. Murigo saw the point immediately and promised to help, and proved to be as good as his word.

  Next day we returned his call and found him in a sizeable village. He had sixteen wives, each with her separate hut and granary, and one or two extra huts for guests and unmarried sons. Chiefs, as I have said, were appointed by the Government; their salaries were nominal but they had many opportunities to grow rich. Murigo had made the most of these. Every evening, flocks of sheep and goats driven by his smaller sons emerged from the bush, wives arrived with heavy loads of sweet potato tops to feed his cattle, and other wives and daughters came with gourds of water and bundles of firewood. Smoke rising from the thatch of the huts showed that fires were being stoked beneath big, soot-blackened pots to cook the evening meal. It was a busy scene, and orderly, each person going about her task in a leisurely way like easy-going bees in a hive.

  Each wife had her own shamba, which was seldom in one piece, but generally fragmented into several little non-adjoining plots. To European eyes, these appeared to have no boundaries, but every inch was known to the owners and elders. Although individual shambas were small, sometimes tiny, they added up to a sizeable area of land. Murigo’s children, also, added up to a sizeable family, fifty or sixty, I daresay. I did not ask him how many, and had I done so he would have given an evasive reply, for the Kikuyu, like those of many other tribes, thought it unlucky to enumerate people or cattle or goats; they knew each one as an individual, not by numbers, although in matters of bride-price and of blood-money they would argue for weeks, months and even years as to how many goats and cattle should be paid.

  The emblems of Murigo’s chieftainship were a heavy brass-topped staff and a wide-brimmed felt hat on which was pinned a brooch in the image of the heraldic prancing lion that was Kenya’s crest. Nearly every morning he drove down a red dirt track in a handsome Chevrolet chauffeured by one of his many sons to attend meetings of the Local Native Council or of the Native Tribunal, both of which sat in open-sided bandas beside the crowded market. Murigo presided, but had to heed the opinions of his councillors. These bodies had been set up by
the colonial government, but basically they formalised and expanded arrangements that had existed before. There was no question of introducing democracy among the Kikuyu and other Bantu tribes, as there was among peoples with such autocratic traditions as were common in West Africa. The Kikuyu had governed themselves very democratically in the past, but in small units and without a central authority.

  Most of Kikuyuland consists of ridges separated by the many rivers running down either from Mt Kenya or from the Aberdares. These ridges form natural units, and, in each unit, law and order and the allocation of land was in the hands of the elders of those families who dwelt on each ridge. All the colonial government had to do was to formalise the system, define the boundaries of each location, and establish Local Native Councils, buds of future district and county councils, and Native Tribunals, buds of future law-courts, and equip them with minor officials and sets of rules.

  After making our number with Murigo we went to the Church of Scotland Mission at Tumutumu, near Nyeri, to collect our interpreter. Both the Kikuyu and I got on all right in Kisettla, but when it came to tribal customs recounted by old men, the Kikuyu tongue was obviously needed. I regretted very much that I had not learnt it, but it is a difficult language, and there was no time to remedy the matter. The Kikuyu speak a soft, fluid, honeyed tongue, full of subtle inflections that change the meaning of the words. Robert, the interpreter, was a young teacher with a secondary school education, still a rare distinction. His English was careful rather than fluent, but improved as we went along. He had a pleasant personality and entered into the spirit of my quest; in fact, he knew little more about the history of his people than I did, and was surprised at some of the things he learnt.