Out In The Midday Sun

by Elspeth Huxley

  ‘Yesterday I went out to dinner,’ I wrote in a letter. ‘Mealies, sweet potatoes and nettle spinach stewed up together in a black pot with salt and something hot, probably chillis, and ladled out in calabashes. Also fat green bananas roasted in the ashes – excellent.’ It was an alfresco meal. At this time of year, during the hot weather, families emerged from their huts to eat their supper round a fire built outside the compound. By tradition, any traveller passing by would be invited to join in. I ate my share with pleasure while the conversation of my hosts, mellifluous and lively, flowed around me under the stars.

  Memories of smells and sounds can still evoke that camp, whose purpose has long since vanished. There was a bird called in Kikuyu ‘thrower of firewood’ – heaven knows why – whose monotonous but haunting notes were the first sound I heard when tea came with the dawn, and the sun’s precursory beams gilded the trunks of wattle trees on the horizon. Then came the tinkling of goat bells as the sun’s strengthening beams fell upon a clump of cassia bushes in full flower, an egg-yolk yellow like the yellowest gorse. A flock of green-winged parrots passed over from the forest to search for breakfast. Human voices called across the valley. An aromatic smell came from a spiky little bush that hugged the ground. Doves dropped their melodious notes like water poured from a bottle. At evening it was the turn of guinea-fowl to call from the shambas as they prepared to take off like overloaded aircraft for their roost in tree tops. And, by the river, as darkness crept up the shadowed valleys, came the rustle of banana leaves beside a whispering river, that most evocative of sounds. So peaceful it all seemed, yet in only fifteen years’ time death and terror would be staining these hills.

  As a parting present I bought Murigo a large ram. These rams stored fat in their tails, and were fattened on sweet potato tops in the huts until their tails hung to the ground. A fat tail weighed several pounds and was a special delicacy; the whole ram became a feast. We parted with many expressions of goodwill. Murigo was a patriarch, a stallion, a feudal baron on a small scale and an old rogue, but his homestead had an air of contentment as well as prosperity. He saw that all his children went to school. Several of his sons had a secondary education, and one or two, I think, went on to Makerere University. Probably they became politicians.

  I left Murigo’s camp with a mass of notes and impressions, and the problem of how to turn all this clay, as it were, into a pot. In order to get the background as accurate as possible, an elementary knowledge of social anthropology seemed desirable. Not that I was hoping to trespass on to the territory of anthropologists, but I did hope that, in trying to reconstruct tribal life before it started to crumble, I might avoid some of the more obvious pitfalls. So I enrolled, that autumn, in a seminar held by Professor Malinowski at the London School of Economics. I was doing things, of course, the wrong way round – ground-work should precede field-work. But better late than never.

  Professor Malinowski was revered as a pioneer who had more or less founded the modern school of social anthropology based on field-work among primitive tribes, rather than on measurements of skulls and bones and studies of racial characteristics. He himself had published a study of the people of the Trobriand Islands in the Pacific called The Sexual Life of Savages. This created a sensation by reason of its detailed and explicit descriptions of sexual behaviour. People were not, as yet, used to such unvarnished treatments of sex as are now to be seen, perhaps too often, on every television screen. He had drawn the conclusion that the Trobriand Islanders were ignorant of the father’s part in procreation. This proved hard to credit, and the book aroused a lot of controversy. I remember that I put my copy into brown-paper covers in order to avoid shocking visitors to the flat in London that was then our base.5

  ‘Started at the LSE’, I recorded in my diary. ‘Sat next to Johnston Kenyatta.’ This was a shock. Kenyatta – he became Jomo later – was a bogey-man to Kenya’s Europeans, an agitator, a revolutionary, a Red, fully equipped with horns and a tail. Now I was not only meeting this wicked man but sitting next to him. Naturally I was intrigued, and also alarmed – not by his evil influence, but by the contempt with which he might well treat my attempts to understand his people. How sinister, if sinister at all, was Johnston Kenyatta? He was courteous, urbane, self-possessed, self confident, and quite different from any Kikuyu I had hitherto met. His most memorable features were his eyes. They had a gleam in them difficult to describe: hard yet subtle, and with a hint – or was this imagination? of the satanic. He dressed flashily, in loud check trousers and a belted jacket, carried a walking-stick with an amber-coloured stone in its top, and wore the ring set with a semi-precious stone, perhaps a cornelian, that was to become, like his fly-whisk, a part of his insignia. In later years, when speaking in public, he would sometimes avoid direct confrontation with the Government by using unprovocative words, which he would contradict by twisting this ring on his finger. His audience always got the point, and roared with laughter.

  Kenyatta was a favourite of Malinowski’s, who gave him frequent opportunities to express his views. This he did with ease and virtuosity, never at a loss for the correct word. He had mastered the anthropological jargon perfectly. He was forty years of age or thereabouts, and had been living in England for five or six years as representative of the Kikuyu Central Association, the mouthpiece of the political aspirations of the tribe, which were to get back the land they had lost, and eventually to rid the country of white rule altogether and gain possession of the ‘white highlands’.

  Kenyatta had very quickly realised that it was in London, not in Nairobi, that the groundwork for achieving these aims must be laid. In Parliament he had powerful allies in the shape of Arthur Creech-Jones, who was to become Secretary of State for the Colonies when the Labour Party came to power in 1945, in most of the MPS on the left of that Party, and in the Fabian Colonial Bureau. Another ally was the Pan-African Congress, with headquarters in Manchester, activated by George Padmore, a West Indian with whom Kenyatta was closely in touch.

  The theme of Malinowski’s seminar was kinship in primitive societies. I found myself struggling in a sea of technical terms and theories which seemed a far cry from Murigo’s camp. Each student was required to concentrate on a particular society or tribe and to map out its kinship structure. My choice was, of course, the Kikuyu, and it was disconcerting, to say the least, to find among my class-mates not only a member of that tribe, but its political leader, especially as he was engaged upon the same task as I was, writing a book about his people. His was to be an anthropological study, Facing Mount Kenya, and mine a documentary novel, Red Strangers. The effrontery of my attempt was so plain that I nearly abandoned it altogether, especially as each student had to read a paper embodying his or her conclusions. This was indeed a terrifying occasion. I had read everything available, and made a complicated chart criss-crossed with arrows pointing in all directions from ‘Ego’ in the middle, indicating a spider’s web of kinship links between, I think, over two hundred persons. When I glanced nervously once or twice at Kenyatta I thought he was listening with a sardonic smile, but when it came to the discussion he let me off lightly with some mild remarks more in the nature of expositions than of criticism. He had chosen one of the Pacific tribes for his own study.

  Sometimes I repaired for luncheon, with other students, to a Chinese restaurant in the Strand. Even at a table for four, Kenyatta gave an impression of holding court. The big, dark stone in his ring seemed to reflect the gleam in his eye, not exactly malevolent but not cosy either. The word is overworked, but magnetism is the only one I can think of to describe the sense one felt in his presence. His voice was deep, resonant and compelling. He seemed happy to be treading the conventional path of the revolutionary, consorting with fellow schemers, living in cheap digs, addressing meetings held in cold and dreary halls, corresponding with revolutionary groups abroad, and looked at askance by authority. No one could have predicted in their wildest dreams that twenty-six years later he would be president of the in
dependent Republic of Kenya.

  The last occasion when I met Jomo Kenyatta was after he had won his triumph, and become ‘First Minister’ during a short interim period before complete independence. A party had been laid on for him in London to which I was invited. I arrived rather late, and saw him holding court surrounded by admirers at the other end of the crowded room, dressed in the regalia he had by then adopted: round beaded cap, fly-whisk made of wildebeest tail, and the famous ring. Through a gap in the crowd he saw me, waved his whisk and came charging forward to greet me as an old friend with that African warmth and exuberance that melts the iciest British reserve. It was well over twenty years since we had foregathered at the London School of Economics and our Chinese restaurant, and now the student agitator had become a national hero. Naturally I was touched by his generous recognition.

  This was the honeyed side of Kenyatta. There was another side, that of a demagogue who could stir his countrymen to do things, or to leave them undone, which were harmful to their own interests. Soon after the Second World War the colonial government set itself to tackle, belatedly as many thought, a condition that was destroying the country’s very basis and threatening its future – the bleeding to death of the land. Rivers were running red with the topsoil of the highlands, and the stain spread fifty miles out to sea. No one could honestly say, certainly not an intelligent man like Kenyatta, that to staunch this blood-flow was not vital to the interests of the African people. Kenyatta did say so. He said that measures to control soil erosion were colonialist tricks designed to steal the land, and succeeded in setting the Kikuyu, though not those of most other tribes, against them.

  The terracing of hills and slopes is essential to the control of soil erosion in tropical lands. An agency was set up and equipped with the necessary machinery to carry out this terracing, free of charge to Africans. Kenyatta had meanwhile returned to his native land after fifteen years abroad, having been trapped during the war in England, where he worked in a market garden in Sussex, by then married to an Englishwoman. Back in his own country he organised and united the various nationalist groups, and held meetings to which his fellow-tribesmen were drawn by his charisma, and impassioned by his words. He developed a clever kind of double-talk by which he said one thing and meant another, much to the frustration of the Special Branch, who were unable to nail seditious statements on him. At these meetings he incited the peasant farmers to turn against the conservation measures they had previously supported, and terracing and other measures came to an end. So the fertility of their shambas went on being washed out to sea. It was hard for the British officers, who were doing their level best to get conservation measures carried out, to forgive Kenyatta for deliberately sabotaging them. But I suppose that to win the nationalist battle you must be absolutely ruthless and concede no compromise, no special cases, even if in so doing you harm your own people’s interests and employ what your opponents think are dirty tricks.

  Then there was Mau Mau. No one doubted that Kenyatta was the real leader of the movement, and used it skilfully to further nationalist ends. He was the puppet-master. It spread underground like a mycelium until it forced the Government to declare a state of emergency in October 1952.

  Kenyatta, with a number of others, was immediately arrested, and so could not be held responsible for the increasing obscenity of the oaths which its adherents were obliged to take, and which they forced on others; nor for the increasingly brutal murders committed by Mau Mau gangs and for the mutilation of innumerable farm animals. Kenyatta had started something he was unable to control, because he was in prison. He was unsuccessful in another respect: Mau Mau never spread to other regions and, although the Kikuyu were, and are, Kenya’s largest tribe, they were only one of about forty. (The exact number is hard to define, because of sub-tribal divisions.) After being sentenced to seven years for managing a proscribed society, he was jailed at Lokitaung in a remote corner of the north-west, near the junction of Kenya, Ethiopia and Sudan.

  The very austerity of prison conditions may have saved his life. Before his arrest, he had been drinking heavily. In prison he was dried out and kept that way. Stories were spread that his jailers were giving him a bottle of brandy a day in the hope of finishing him off. This propaganda, as is so often the case, stood truth on its head.

  The prison at Lokitaung came under the supervision of the DC at Lodwar, and the DC at Lodwar was an unusual man. His name was L. E. Whitehouse (known as Wauce), and he had started his African career as a pharmacist in Nairobi. There he had conceived a great interest in the Maasai, and learned their language, which few Europeans spoke in the early 1920s. Then he hired twenty rickshaw-boys in Nairobi as porters and spent a fortnight in the Maasai reserve. More or less by accident he drifted into teaching, and was employed to start a school for Maasai boys on the slopes of Mt Kilimanjaro. To get there, pupils, teachers and Mr Whitehouse walked sixty miles from the nearest station to a spot marked with pegs, and built the school themselves from scratch.

  It was then the custom for each Maasai pupil to bring four or five cows with him to provide the needed milk, and a female relative to milk them. So Whitehouse found himself managing a dairy herd as well as a school; also doctoring the Maasai, which included treating warriors for terrible wounds inflicted by lions. In the Second World War he was absorbed into the administration and, when it ended, posted to Lodwar. Here he spent twelve years among the Turkana at his own request, which was granted because he had never encumbered himself with a wife.

  Sometime during his imprisonment, and the two-year period of detention that followed, Kenyatta underwent a change almost Pauline in its nature. His devious manipulation of subversive groups, his demagogic fervour, his involvement in the darker side of tribalism, all this seemed to melt away and be replaced by tolerance and generosity of spirit. Or perhaps these qualities had been there all the time beneath a mask of nationalist resolution. Lokitaung was a chrysalis in which the demagogue pupated into a statesman.

  How much of a part did Whitehouse play in this transformation? As the DC, he was the head jailer, and he could not, and did not, favour any individual prisoner. But he visited the prison regularly, decided how much latitude to allow in the provision of books, newspapers and correspondence, dealt with complaints, and saw that the prisoners were fairly treated. Special accommodation had been built for the six Mau Mau convicts, who were kept apart from other prisoners and guarded by a corporal warder. When Whitehouse visited the prison it was Kenyatta, not the corporal warder, who showed him round. Inevitably, they got to know each other fairly well.

  Whitehouse did no more than his duty but, despite the wall that separated the two men, Kenyatta evidently grew to like and trust his head jailer. The prisoners were not required to work, but had to carry their water for about a mile from the nearest well. They saved every drop they could and made a little shamba where they planted maize, millet and tomatoes. When Whitehouse departed after his inspections, Kenyatta would present him with a small paper bag, saying: ‘You haven’t any tomatoes at Lodwar, have you? Have a few to take back with you.’ So Whitehouse did.

  He retired as DC before Kenyatta was transferred to Lodwar, where the only restriction on his movements was to report to Whitehouse’s successor once a day. He and Whitehouse met once or twice in the bazaar, and chatted to each other in Maasai. Later they met again on official occasions, when the President greeted his former head jailer with every sign of warmth and affection. Asked, many years later still, for his verdict, Whitehouse said: ‘I had a very soft spot for Jomo Kenyatta – I still have. I think in many ways he was a great man. I doubt if Kenya will ever see as great a man again.’6 At eighty-plus, Whitehouse was still serving as senior resident magistrate, appointed by the African government to dispense justice to the Turkana whom he knew so well.

  Kenyatta’s period in prison gave him time for reflection away from the turmoil of politics. He could read, rest on his oars and think. Instead of being warped by prison, he seemed to
find a new stability. At a press conference just before his final release he said, half jokingly, ‘We have been in a university. We learned more about politics there than we learnt outside.’

  After Kenyatta became ‘First Minister’ as a prelude to his presidency, he made two important speeches – more than two, of course, but these were crucial. Most European farmers were frightened, depressed, and could see no hope for the future. For four years many of them had lived under siege, locked in at night with their revolvers for fear of gangs bursting in to hack them to pieces; the personal friends of some had died in this gruesome fashion, and many more had seen their cattle hamstrung or poisoned. The price of land had slumped to next to nothing, and a million acres had already been compulsorily bought to be split up into African shambas. Now the arch-enemy whom they believed to be responsible for all this was to become the ruler of their country.

  A meeting of white farmers was called at Nakuru and the arch-enemy invited to address them. By a coincidence of history the son of that Lord Delamere who had virtually started off white settlement was in the chair. It was a glum and hostile audience. This is part of what Kenyatta had to stay.

  I am a politician, but I am a farmer like you … I think the soil joins us all and therefore we have a kind of mutual understanding. If you want to understand each other, then the best thing is to talk together … I believe that the most disturbing point among us is suspicion, fear. These are created by not knowing what the other side is thinking. If we must live together, if we must work together, we must talk together, exchange views. This is my belief. And one thing which I want to make clear is this. It is, that we must also learn to forgive one another. There is no perfect society anywhere. Whether we are white, brown or black, we are not angels. We are human beings, and as such are bound to make mistakes. But there is a great gift that we can exercise, that is to forgive one another. If you have done harm to me, it is for me to forgive you. If I have done harm to you, it is for you to forgive me. All of us, white, brown and black, can work together to make this country great … Let us join together and join hands and work together for the benefit of Kenya. This is what I beg you to believe, that this is the policy of your government.