Out In The Midday Sun

by Elspeth Huxley

  The Tumutumu Mission was like a bit of nineteenth-century Scotland transplanted to this smiling but, alas, sinful land. In charge was a young, bony, energetic Scot called Duncan who imposed a strict, fair and healthy regime; cold baths, physical jerks and no nonsense were part of the regime. He and his small European staff spoke fluent Kikuyu, their medical services were good, and they ran efficiently a chain of dispensaries and primary schools throughout the reserve. Mr Duncan spoke of Nairobi with all the fervour of an Old Testament prophet denouncing Sodom and Gomorrah, and a mediaeval hell of fire and brimstone awaited unrepentant sinners. When he felt the need for rest and relaxation he climbed Mt Kenya, and returned refreshed.

  There was also a Roman Catholic Mission at Nyeri whose Fathers had quite a different approach, and it must have been confusing for the heathen to find the white man’s paths to salvation branching out in so many different directions. In Uganda, matters had reached a pitch where Protestants and Catholics had gone to war, and where several years of fighting had resulted in the creation of a number of martyrs. In the South Nyeri district relations were not so strained, although a pursing of lips might be seen at Tumutumu on mention of Father Cagnolo’s neighbouring Mission.

  Already there were signs that the Kikuyu were no longer prepared to accept without question the teachings of the various Missions. The two main stumbling blocks were polygamy and female circumcision. They pointed out, rightly I believe, that Christ Himself had nowhere laid down a rule of one man, one wife. Polygamy was their custom, and they did not see why a man with several wives could not claim to be a Christian. Most of the Missions stood firm and expelled from their flock every erring polygamist. As a result, breakaway Churches had begun to appear.

  From Murigo’s camp I wrote: ‘The missionaries are very worked up about a heretic church that has started among the Kikuyu, nominally Christian but supporting polygamy and female circumcision. An “Arch-Bishop” has arrived from South Africa to ordain a “priesthood” of its own. They say it is very anti-Mission and anti-white generally. The Kikuyu do have a confusing time. The Local Native Council school at Nyeri, non-sectarian, teaches biology, science etc., while five miles away the Italian Catholic Mission adopts an attitude well illustrated by a remark in a book on the Kikuyu published by them which I have just been reading, to the effect that “after the failure of the Darwinian farce and the discrediting of the monkey-makers of Germany, the so-called science of biology …”’.

  I had expected to be greeted by suspicion and even hostility by the Kikuyu. What were we after? What lay behind all these questions? Most Kikuyu people assumed that, if a white person settled anywhere amongst them, he or she was scheming to get their land. Land to them was the be-all and end-all of everything, and injuries that some of those living near Nairobi had suffered when white farmers had settled on land that had formerly been used by their families were already festering. No one living near Murigo’s had been affected in this way, but they would have heard enough about the matter to be on the qui vive. They were, indeed, suspicious to begin with, but this soon wore off and, when I turned up at a homestead or gathering, chaperoned by a charming man called Gacheche whom Murigo had detailed to escort me, I was greeted with courtesy, friendliness and feminine giggles. Small children sometimes ran away, but I do not remember one overt rebuff.

  To this day I do not know just how the people’s suspicions were allayed. I think Karanja had a lot to do with it. He had been with Jos and Nellie since boyhood and, when asked, as I am sure he was, ‘are they after our land?’ he would have reassured them; Jos and Nellie were too old and had enough already, my bwana was elsewhere, and by that time I think that the sanctity of the reserves was generally recognised. After the report of the Morris Carter Land Commission in 1933, land had in fact been added to the Kikuyu reserve and none had been taken away.2

  And then, probably the elders came down on our side. If, at this time, you had asked the older members of the Cavalry Club in London to tell you about the battle of Omdurman, the eyes of a dozen elderly gentlemen would have brightened, they would have stirred in their arm-chairs and tales of dashing exploits involving cavalry charges and flashing swords would have been poured into your ears. It was the same with the Kikuyu elders. Had they fought the Maasai, had they defended their fathers’ cattle, had they even gone forth to raid themselves? Indeed they had. Not for a long time, in fact probably not ever, had anyone really wanted to hear about it all. To the young, old men everywhere are bores. Now the war-horn sounded again in withered ears, painted shields flashed in the sun and ostrich-feather anklets shook as wrinkled elders turned their memories back to a brave, warlike youth. Several of the old men even pulled spears from the thatch of their huts where these had been put by, retrieved their long buffalo-hide shields, and paraded for me outside our banda to demonstrate their battle array. And some of them were not as old as all that. The last Maasai raids had taken place at the turn of the century, or perhaps later still.

  It was always fights against the Maasai that were recalled. No mention was ever made of fights against the KAR. I had always assumed, as had many others, that the introduction of British rule into Kikuyuland had been a wholly peaceful process, and it was not until the publication in 1957 of Richard Meinertzhagen’s diaries that most people realised how much force had been employed. The Kikuyu in those days were not a peaceful people. Their warriors had attacked and wiped out several trading parties, including one carrying the Royal Mail which was set upon near Thika in 1902, leaving fourteen people dead or severely wounded. A farmer bent on buying sheep had been murdered in an appalling fashion, anticipating the worst atrocities of Mau Mau. To travel without an armed guard was asking for trouble. The KAR had been called in to enforce penalties – the confiscation of livestock – for these murders and attacks, with the young Meinertzhagen in charge. His detachment, which included Maasai levies, captured large quantities of livestock and, when he met with resistance, he burnt villages, razed crops and slaughtered warriors with ruthless efficiency.

  The Kikuyu answered back: at Nyeri, in December 1902, they attempted to rush Meinertzhagen’s camp and, with their spears and arrows, killed and wounded thirty-two of his men; his guns killed thirty-eight of them. ‘I must own,’ he wrote, ‘that I never expected the Wakikuyu to fight like this.’ Early in 1904 an expedition against a section of the tribe called the Irryeni captured 782 cattle and 2150 sheep and goats, and killed a number of ‘the enemy’.3 These were no minor skirmishes, and they had taken place not much above thirty years before Murigo’s elders demonstrated to me how they had fought the Maasai. The Kikuyu then were very localised; people who lived on one ridge had litle to do with those living on another; and none of the Meinertzhagen’s expeditions had passed through what was to become Murigo’s location. Nevertheless it was strange that not a word was said about it all. Ignorance, tact, or just forgetfulness? Perhaps it was because they were recalling only their own personal experiences; they themselves had fought the Maasai but not the KAR, and what others had done was not their business.

  Their stories needed to be taken with a sizeable grain of salt. According to them, Kikuyu warriors were every bit as fierce and bold as those of the Maasai, whom they often defeated, while sometimes they themselves carried off Maasai cattle. In actual fact they had been no match for the much more highly trained and organised Maasai battalions, and were a threat only in the forest where they used bows and arrows rather than spears. The Maasai had the upper hand, but the Kikuyu had the forests in which to retreat.

  When the people living near Murigo’s had got used to my wandering about with Robert and Gacheche asking questions, I told Gacheche of my wish to see a witch-doctor at work. This was a sensitive subject, since witch-doctors had spiritual powers, and spirits must be treated with great respect. Also it was known that white people disapproved of witchcraft, and did not believe in the powers of its practitioners. There was a Witchcraft Ordinance which forbade the more malignant aspects of the prac
tice.

  We started with a little harmless fortune-telling, conducted by a witch-doctor who unstoppered a long, thin gourd and scattered the beans it contained on to an ox-hide. From the way they fell he told my fortune, needless to say a propitious one, and refused to accept a fee. The witch-doctor, like his gourds, was tall and thin and had a much more bony face, with a sharper profile, than the average Kikuyu. Maasai blood again. Gacheche told me that this witch-doctor belonged to a section of the Kikuyu, a sub-tribe really, who dwelt somewhat apart on the forest’s edge, and were known for their supernatural powers. They were called the Ndia.

  This was only a preliminary. I wanted to see, and photograph if possible, a more important ceremony, even though I knew it would involve the evisceration of a goat. This was the removal of a thahu. Everywhere there lurked, as by now I realised, just beneath a peaceful surface, an extraordinary number of ancestral spirits who were extraordinarily prone to take offence. The least little thing offended them – omitting to pour a libation of beer before a feast, forgetting to throw a pebble on a heap, as you passed it, near some sacred spot, inadvertent damage to a fig tree’s branches, gazing directly at your mother-in-law instead of turning your head. The spirits were a spiteful lot and, when offended, took their revenge. This might take many forms, the list was endless: your cow might abort, your child break a leg, porcupines might destroy a patch of maize, or, worst of all, your wife might miscarry. Nothing in life was fortuitous. Everything had a cause, and the cause lay either in offence given to a spirit, or in the machinations of an enemy who had laid a spell. In either case, you were afflicted by a thahu, and your only recourse lay in a visit to a witch-doctor who would remove it, or counter-act the spell.

  One morning Gacheche, grinning as usual – he wore a little cap at a jaunty angle made from the lining of a sheep’s stomach and fringed with beads – appeared at our camp to say that the witch-doctor who had told my fortune was about to cast out a thahu from a client, and was willing to let me see and photograph the process, for a fee of one goat. So we retraced our footsteps to the witch-doctor’s abode. Nellie decided not to come. She did not want to witness the cruelty to the goat – nor, indeed, did I – and preferred to pursue her current project of making a collection of plants used in the brewing of local dyes.

  The ceremony did, indeed, involve sickening cruelty. All four of the goat’s legs were broken, and its stomach was slit open to extract the undigested contents, which were believed to have magical properties. It was essential that the goat should remain alive while all this was done to it, and even then it was not put out of its misery. Horrible as all this was, the cruelty was not deliberate, nor did the witch-doctor and his client derive any sadistic pleasure from it. The object was not to inflict pain on the animal, but to protect the human. Millions of animals suffer in the research laboratories of western nations for the same reason. Pain was endemic in African life, and no ways existed of avoiding it. Pain just had to be endured, and endured it was, with a stoicism that constantly amazed Europeans. Even babies terribly burned by falling into fires were astonishingly apathetic, and recovered from injuries that would have killed any European child.

  The contents of the wretched goat’s stomach were mixed on a banana leaf with several nameless and unpleasant-looking substances. Then the witch-doctor dipped a goat’s horn into the concoction, thrust it into the client’s mouth, recited various incantations, marked the man’s body all over with chalk mixed with other powders, and eventually assured him that the thahu, like the devils of the Old Testament, had been expelled. I was thankful when it was over – for this goat, but not for many more to come that would be sacrificed, as legions had been in the past, in this distressing way.

  Our visit to Murigo’s coincided with the time when circumcision ceremonies were held, accompanied by much dancing and singing, and at night we heard the throb of drums and the sound of chanting and stamping. There was no reticence about boys’ circumcision, but I was careful to avoid the subject of the operation on girls. Ever since the murder of the elderly American missionary in 1929, everyone had walked warily around the subject of this rite. The Missions had been persuaded, though reluctantly, to damp down their campaign against it, and the Government had continued to sit, uneasily, on the fence. Given time, they argued, education would make the custom obsolete.

  I was therefore surprised when Robert informed me that I had been invited to attend the circumcision of young girls from Murigo’s location. The only stipulation was that I should leave my camera behind. It was perhaps absurd to feel flattered when invited to witness a clitorodectomy, but I was. It was a gesture of confidence. Evidently Nellie and I were not considered any longer, if at first we had been, to be government or Mission spies. Nellie politely declined the invitation. Robert conducted me to the place where the ceremony was to be held and then retreated; men were banned.

  Long before dawn, in the chill of the night, the girls had been taken to the nearest river and had stood for several hours in its cold water to numb their nerves. By the time they had assembled at the appointed place the sun was up, and the numbness must have worn off, but perhaps a psychological effect remained. Scores of married women, heads shaved bare as billiard balls – a sign of matrimonial status – surrounded the arena, waving banana fronds. The girls were lined up in a rough semi-circle, each sitting on an ox-hide with legs outstretched and with two sponsors whose function was to hold her in position and give moral support. One held her by the shoulders and one sat facing her, grasping her legs.

  The operator was an elderly and wizened woman with a little greying hair on her head – hair might again be grown, if it would, when child-bearing was over – clad in the traditional women’s garments, a goatskin apron edged with beads and a short cloak of the same material. She was in a sense a professional, being called upon to perform the operation from some distance around. I think her fee was a goat. Her instrument was a rusty razor-blade that looked almost as old as she.

  Jomo Kenyatta defended female circumcision, together with all the other customs of his people, and wrote that the operation was performed with the skill of a Harley Street surgeon.4 Perhaps so, but this toothless old lady with her withered paps and ancient razor-blade was a far cry from the masked consultant in his theatre at a London hospital. But I believe that, despite the absence of anything whatever in the nature of antiseptics and sterilization, both infections and serious after-effects were rare.

  Not to flinch or cry out during the operation was an absolute imperative. Any girl who did so would be disgraced, and would never live down her shame. The sponsors who gripped her tightly no doubt controlled the flinching, and the silence that fell as the operator moved from one girl to the next was unbroken even by a whimper. The old woman worked swiftly. There were, and are, two forms of the operation: removal of the clitoris only, and removal of the labia on each side as well, a much more drastic and painful mutilation. So far as I could see, and I did not keep my eyes fixed throughout on the performance, on this occasion clitorodectomy only was performed. When it was over the sponsors staunched the flow of blood with handfuls of leaves, helped the girls to their feet and led them off to huts built for them near their parents’ homesteads, where they would spend about a month recovering and enjoying their new status as adults ready for marriage. Most of them were already affianced. As soon as it was all over, a great outburst of lu-lu-lu-lu-lu-ing occurred amongst the spectators, branches were waved about and there was stamping and laughter and rejoicing. The family, the clan and the tribe itself had been strengthened and enriched by the accession of new members; and no initiate had disgraced herself and her family by crying out.

  Several theories have been advanced to explain the origin and obstinate persistence of this custom, widespread throughout Africa and parts of Asia, which seems so barbaric to most European minds. Is it a form of male despotism designed to keep women subservient to their husbands? And, by denying them sexual pleasure, to discourage adultery? If so, i
t did not seem to work very well, and those who have experienced the operation, and are prepared to talk about it, have said that sexual pleasure can still be had despite the absence of a clitoris – other areas take over and develop sensitivity. It is an ordeal, and as such toughens the initiates and teaches them to endure pain with stoicism. Certain it is that circumcision makes childbirth more difficult and dangerous, and it is odd that any human society should cling so stubbornly to a practice that damages a process so vital to its survival. The question of compassion for the girls seems nowhere to enter in.

  Everyone enjoys markets, and Karatina’s was a splendid one. The coming of the branch line from Thika which linked it with Nairobi had caused it to grow like a bean-sprout, and mouth-watering produce went off every day – citrus fruit, strawberries, asparagus, fresh vegetables, potatoes, pawpaws, eggs and chickens, all sorts of things. Women squatted all day beside their piles of beans, their maize-cobs, stalks of sugar-cane, twists of tobacco, bunches of herbs, and bargained with passion for a few cents. Goats bleated, cattle lowed, sheep baa’d, cocks crowed, women haggled, men strolled about greeting their friends. It was noisy, busy, cheerful, smelly and well conducted without apparent direction from above. Prices were reckoned in cents – one hundred cents, of course, went to one shilling. Here are some examples taken from my notebook of prices that I paid, with their translation into modern British currency in brackets.

  Everyone living in the reserve had his, or rather her, own shamba, so these were the prices obtained for their surplus produce. Wages paid to Africans were very low, and often quoted in the House of Commons and by such bodies as the Fabian Colonial Bureau as examples of slave labour and exploitation. It is always misleading to say what people receive without also saying what their wages will buy. A shilling went a long way in Karatina’s market.