I was not at this meeting, held in mid-1963, but those who were told me that tension and hostility almost tangibly eased, and that Kenyatta’s next few sentences drew laughter.
Many of you, I think, are just as good Kenyans as myself. I think some of you may be older than myself a little bit. I am 73 myself and I have my age-group among you. Therefore you are just as good Kenyans as myself. I think some of you may be worried – what will happen if Kenyatta comes to be the head of the government? He has been in prison, maybe he has given trouble. What is he going to do? Let me set you at rest. That Kenyatta has no intention whatever to look backwards. Not at all. I want you to believe what I am saying now, that we are not going to look backwards. We are going to forgive the past and look forward to the future. Because if we start thinking about the past, what time shall we have to build the future?7
The M’zee, as he had become, sat down to an enthusiastic clapping of white hands. His words did much to persuade some, at least, of those white farmers who had contemplated leaving to stay on and give the future a chance.
This message of ‘forgive and forget’ was not addresssed to Europeans only. Kenyatta’s own people were deeply divided. Those who had taken an active part in Mau Mau were in a minority; many had joined a Home Guard recruited by the administration, and the chiefs, as well as the numerous Christians, had stayed loyal to the Government. Civil war had left its inevitable bitterness, and many feared that a night of the long knives would follow for those Kikuyu who had fought the freedom-fighters. Kenyatta knew that, unless he could overcome these festering enmities, he could have little hope of leading his nation to a peaceful future. In a speech he made a few months later he told his people that ignorance, sickness and poverty – not, by implication, Europeans – were Kenya’s true enemies, and that only hard work and unity could overcome them. Only the burial of hatchets and the dismantling of tribal barriers could create a contented country. We must work together, strive together, join together – harambee! That cry so familiar to drivers stuck in the mud became the rallying call of the nation.
The night of the long knives – or the sharpened pangas – never happened. Wild-eyed ‘generals’ with matted hair emerged from the forests, and ‘rehabilitated’ oath-administrators with ‘Jomo beards’ from the detention camps, to mingle with ‘loyalist’ home guards and stalwart Christians and all turn back together into ordinary citizens. Harambee worked. How much, so quickly, was really forgotten none but a Kikuyu could say, but forgiveness was apparent, thanks to the wisdom of Jomo Kenyatta, the M’zee.
CHAPTER 14
Lamu to London
All the Europeans resident on Lamu island when I went there with Nellie were bachelors. They numbered six. One of them, our host, was Henri Bournier, a middle-aged Swiss of gentle manners, who lived at Shela, a crumbling village about two miles beyond Lamu town. The waters of the bay lapped at the steps of his terrace; we arrived by boat and paddled on foot the last bit of the way. As in all Arab houses, archways replaced doors to allow the circulation of air, Persian rugs and porcelain vases served for adornment, and white-washed walls with little furniture achieved simplicity.
Behind the village of Shela were sand-dunes overlying bleached bones sometimes exposed when gales swept the island during monsoons. They were the result of a battle fought in 1813 between the people of Lamu and an invading force commanded by the Arab governor of Mombasa, Ahmad ibn Said al-Mazrui, a member of a family renowned even in the blood-stained history of the Coast for violence and brutality. Ahmad had installed one of his lieutenants as governor of the neighbouring island of Pate, and intended to do the same in Lamu. ‘Lamu always bowed to the storm and made peace with the victor of the day,’ wrote the historian Justus Strandes,1 but on this occasion the worm turned. Anything was better, the citizens of Lamu evidently thought, than submission to the Mazruis. On the beaches of Shela they won an overwhelming victory.
Lamu seemed like some ancient vessel becalmed in the seas of history, its sails furled, unrocked by tempests, even the barnacles on its keel fast asleep. All sorts and breeds of men had fused to make its Swahili-speaking citizens – Arabs, Bajuns from the many islands of the archipelago, Bantu-speaking tribesmen from the mainland, Gallas and Somalis, Persians (called here Shirazi), Indians, many others who, as in all sea-ports, had come and gone and left their seed. Writing of the island in 1910, C. H. Stigand observed that ‘civilised vices’ were rife, not to mention uncivilised ones like opium-smoking and, despite the Muslim faith, drunkenness.2
According to a document called The Chronicle of Lamu the town was founded, together with a number of others, by Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan (AD 685–705) who crossed the ocean with a company of Syrian settlers in the last decade of the seventh century. Thereafter for eight hundred years it remained an outpost of Islam in this land of Zinj, Zinj meaning black. That is, if The Chronicle of Lamu is correct, but it is not an ancient document, being a collection of oral traditions assembled early in the twentieth century. The archaeologist Neville Chittock, who has excavated in the nearby islands of Manda and Pate, has suggested that the thirteenth century is a more likely date for the founding of the town of Lamu.3
Over the centuries the island prospered modestly, sending its dhows across the Indian Ocean laden with ivory, mangrove poles, ambergris, gums, tortoise-shells, rhino horns and slaves, and welcoming them back with such items as daggers, glass and porcelain vessels, dyed cloth, wheat and ghee. A great Chinese fleet sailed down the coast of Zinj in 1417, following the arrival in Peking of a giraffe from Malindi which was thought to be the incarnation of a mythical creature emblematic of Perfect Virtue, Perfect Government and Perfect Harmony, and which aroused the curiosity of the Chinese court.4 Malindi followed up this gift with another of a ‘celestial horse’ and a ‘celestial stag’, probably a zebra and an oryx. Quantities of Ming and Persian porcelain have been found in various islands of the archipelago.
Then, in 1497, came Vasco da Gama, presaging an end to such scant tranquillity as these settlements had enjoyed. For the next four centuries Arabs and Portuguese contended for mastery, and the story is one of battles at sea, sieges on land, treachery, intrigue, massacre, razings of cities, executions, burnings and flight, punctuated by threats and disasters from other quarters. The worst of these was the descent on the settlements of a tribe of cannibals called the Zimba. They came from the south, according to a Dominican missionary who saw it happen, ‘killing and eating every living thing, men, women, children, dogs, cats, snakes, lizards, sparing nothing.’ They worked their way up the coast leaving a trail of sacked cities and human bones. If they really ate all their victims they must have gorged themselves on protein to an unimaginable extent – at Kilwa alone, in 1587, they were said by Father Joso dos Santos to have killed about 3,000 of the city’s estimated 4,000 inhabitants. Mombasa suffered as badly. The Zimba chief announced his army’s intention to ‘kill and eat every living thing in the Island.’ They very nearly did.5
The Zimba met their Waterloo at Malindi. The garrison of thirty Portuguese soldiers plus some local auxiliaries prepared to die fighting, but by a stroke of great good fortune another warlike tribe, though not cannibals, attacked the Zimba in the rear as they besieged the town and wiped out all but one hundred of them – an event which the historian Sir John Gray compared with the repulse of Attila and his Huns at Châlons in 451. So Lamu escaped the holocaust.
Above Henri Bournier’s house at Shela, between it and the big Jumaa mosque (there were twenty-eight mosques on the island), rose the ruins of an old Arab mansion which, in its decay, evoked the splendour and sophistication of a prosperous and confident society now altogether gone. The flat façade was scored into squares and rectangles as in a geometrical drawing, punched by slits and arches to form windows, and stamped with abstract designs. No crude or impoverished culture had given rise to this architecture, which combined simplicity with elaboration, stark design with graceful decoration. The building spoke of riches and a certain pomp. In
its decay, coconut palms were sprouting from the ruined courtyard’s rubble. On Manda island, just across a creek from Lamu, I saw a taller, more imposing mansion buried in the bush and sufficiently intact to invite entry. The whole inner face of the massive stone walls was pitted with innumerable niches, like a giant dovecote. In each niche, in the mansion’s heyday, would have stood a porcelain plate, or bowl, or jug, Persian or Chinese, beautifully glazed and painted.
How the great hall must have glowed with colour as sunlight slanted through the slits and arches, or by lamplight with wicks floating in oil! Gowns, jewels, furniture were no less splendid. It was the loss of their commercial supremacy to the Portuguese that reduced most of these Arab nabobs to poverty, and their mansions to neglect and ultimate ruin. Even so, some of the sheikhs kept up their style. A priest who visited Malindi in 1606 wrote that the king ‘sat in a skilfully wrought chair of mother-of-pearl and we in chairs of scarlet velvet embroidered with fine gold thread’. When they left, the king ‘ordered bugles and trumpets, curved and of ivory, to be sounded, and the mountains and valleys repeated with their echo his pleasure and the affection with which he bid us godspeed’.6 One of these curved and carved ivory trumpets survives in the DC’s office at Lamu, known as the great horn of Siwa.
The DC was another of Lamu’s bachelors. Daddy Cornell – I never heard his other name – was more or less a fixture, and knew his district, which included the archipelago and part of the mainland, inside out. He dwelt in an old Arab house and, when on the island, was sprucely clad in a white suit with collar and tie. He was reserved in manner, perhaps shy, a misogynist by reputation and a disgruntled man. His grievance went back to the Powys murder case when he had been DC in charge of the Samburu. The young men were defiant of authority, following their triumph celebrated in ‘the song of the vultures.’ Half a dozen of these youths, coming before him to answer for some minor offence, displayed an insolence which provoked him into awarding them, on the spot, ten strokes of the cane. The legal code allowed this punishment, but only after a proper trial and confirmation of sentence. Cornell knew that the Samburu were in an explosive frame of mind, and that if they got away with defying administrative officers as well as murdering Europeans, there might be serious trouble. Public opinion had not, at the time, turned against corporal punishment, still practised in almost every British school. But he had sinned. He was reprimanded by the Governor and posted to another district, and knew that his prospects of promotion had been snuffed out for good.
Lamu was a backwater, but a pleasant one. The streets were almost narrow enough for one man to shake hands with another across them from top-storey windows; therefore they were dark, shady and relatively cool. No cars were allowed, but nothing wider than a wheelbarrow could have got along them anyway. They were perfectly clean, and this, it seemed, was due to Daddy Cornell. He was more of a martinet than a lotus-eater.
Another of the bachelors was Coconut Charlie. His real name was Charles Whitton, and he had arrived in the Protectorate in 1912 to manage rubber and coconut plantations on the mainland. Long tufts of hair came out of his ears. He possessed a dignified mien, a white moustache and white hair, and was assembling a collection of artefacts to become the nucleus of a museum. There was a lot of pottery and Chinese porcelain, at that time quite easy to find, and he showed us also Lamu chests, ivory-inlaid chairs and silver-inlaid locks. Eighteen years had passed, he told us, since he had set foot off the island, and here he expected to remain until he died.
His other hobby was to work out how to get from one railway station to another in Britain. There used to be a fat volume called Bradshaw’s which gave the times of arrival and departure of every train to and from every station in the United Kingdom. Coconut Charlie spent hours, a Bradshaw at his elbow, planning imaginary railway journeys which, wherever possible, avoided London.
Then there was Percy Petley, who kept the one and only hotel. It was not much of an hotel, and if you wanted to wash, I was told (I never stayed there), an elderly gentleman poured a bucket of water over your head. There is still a Petley’s hotel, greatly enlarged and, I feel sure, with better plumbing and without the rats said to haunt the original one. Lamu rats were reputed to be particularly large and aggressive, to come up the sewers at high tide and to defy the cats, which lacked spunk and were, so it was said, sometimes eaten by the rats.
Sharpie had a house on Lamu island, but it was empty when we were there and, when he retired, he decided to live at Ndaragwa, near Thomson’s Falls, the better to exercise his gardening skills. He went into the business of designing gardens and advising on what to put in them, sometimes in collaboration with Peter Greensmith, the horticultural genius responsible for the avenues of bougainvillea, jacaranda and other shrubs and flowering trees that are the glory of Nairobi.
When I last saw Sharpie he had grown overweight, he puffed and panted, and his eyesight was failing. He was living alone save for a couple of servants who did not actually neglect him, but furnished no companionship either. His garden had run to seed, except for a bit of lawn and a bed or two within sight of his veranda, and everything out of range was a tangle of weeds.
I had the impression that he was a disappointed man, believing himself to have been misprized. I do not remember his actually saying so; my impression may have been wrong. But it was true that a good many of his colleagues in Kenya’s colonial service with his experience had been rewarded with nice fat governorships and ‘K’s’; I do not think he had even been made a Provincial Commissioner. Perhaps he had not really deserved it. But he had created lovely gardens, and made many friends. He died at Thomson’s Falls (Nyahururu) in 1966, aged seventy-seven.
The focus of Lamu town was a square beneath a pock-marked white fort and shaded by a giant African almond tree. The fort, like Mombasa’s, was in use as a jail. Piles of sacks lay about, coconuts I think, perhaps simsim, waiting to be loaded into dhows. Under the almond tree little booths offered for sale small sticky cakes and heavily sweetened tea – sweetness was all. The turn of coffee came in the evening, when vendors carried round their swan-necked brass pots kept hot on braziers, and a delicious aroma was wafted on the air. By day men stood about endlessly chatting, clad in kekois or in white kanzus, sometimes with embroidered waistcoats, all spotlessly clean. Scarcely a woman in sight. But on the beach we watched a bevy looking like black beetles in their all-embracing bui-buis climbing awkwardly into a row-boat to take them to the mainland, and then to catch a bus for Mombasa. Richer Arabs and Swahilis often sent their wives there to have their babies. The bus jolted along dreadful roads all through the night, crossing the Tana at Garsen when the river was not in flood. If the driver saw an antelope en route he would stop, get out and shoot it, running at full tilt to cut its throat before it expired. Then he would tie the carcase to the back of the bus and sell the meat in Mombasa.
Most women never did anything so adventurous as go to Mombasa, and I thought their existence must be terribly dull. But, despite purdah, the bui-bui and jealous husbands, intrigues and amours did, I was assured, occur. Visits to female relatives were in order and, while women’s lib was unheard of, women’s solidarity was strong. A bold young wife on such a visit might slip away from the women’s quarters and, concealed in the folds of her bui-bui, keep an assignation; should the husband unexpectedly appear, her relatives would cover up for her until she could be summoned back. Or so I was told; the chances of an outsider breaching the walls of Muslim reticence on such topics were virtually nil.
One day we watched a dhow being put together under a palm-thatched shelter on the beach. Roughly hewn planks were fastened by nails, most of which looked bent and rusty. A few years ago, no nails would have been used. Lamu had been famous for its own special kind of dhow, the m’tepe, whose planks were stitched together by cords made from copra. The masts were mangrove poles, and sails were made of matting woven by women, so everything needed to build a dhow was home-grown. The last of the Lamu m’tepes was built in 1933. Now every
dhow has an engine, their numbers have dwindled and most of their voyages are confined to the coastal trade. It is the end of a long and brave tradition.
I have never since been back to Lamu, which has endured some harrowing experiences. In Mau Mau times some of the most unrepentant of the forest gangsters were incarcerated there. Then the tourist industry arrived, at first a trickle, then a flood. The hippies came, expelled from Nepal, bringing their drugs, their ragged clothes, their dirty beards and habits which, however harmless to any but themselves, deeply offended Muslim susceptibilities. One can easily imagine how people in whom modesty was so ingrained would react to the sight of semi-naked women, indeed quite naked ones, on the beach. Some of the hippies stole, and some begged. Esmond Bradley Martin has recorded how, while strolling along the beach, he came upon a naked German girl copulating with a Bajun man who had elephantiasis (then still fairly common, and erroneously believed to come from eating limes).
The hippy tide washed over Lamu, as other tides have done. The tourist tide has not receded, but the Kenyan authorities have wisely refused to allow developers to build hideous high-rise hotels along the waterfront, which they have done elsewhere. The red flag of Oman has been replaced by the green, black and red one of the Republic of Kenya. Coconut Charlie, Percy Petley, Henri Bournier, all are gone where such changes can no longer concern them. Daddy Cornell came to a sad end. He retired to a small farm near Witu on the mainland. Word came to him that a gang of armed raiders was intending to attack Witu during the night. Unarmed, he went out to warn the villagers. The raiders intercepted him, and shot him dead.
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