Out In The Midday Sun

by Elspeth Huxley

  The lorry retrieved the Lindstroms’ broken-down car and towed it into camp, where Fish took it to bits. After he had re-assembled it, quite a large part was left over. What its function was I did not know, and nor did Fish. After regarding it for a few moments with his head on one side he threw it into the bush, saying in his low-key Swedish voice: ‘I think the car will go better without it.’ The poor old vehicle did stagger back as far as Parikatabuk, consisting of two Indian dukas on the Kenyan border, where it finally collapsed. Within a week we caught the Uganda mail at Rongai station and next morning were on the first leg of our journey home.

  The Nile, wrote Herodotus, ‘enters Egypt from parts beyond’, and ‘parts beyond’ just about describes the confusion of lakes, watery cul-de-sacs and swamps whence issues one branch of that river. Elderly paddle-steamers, varied by crowded buses, took us across Lake Kyoga, on to Lake Albert, and to the foot of the Murchison Falls, where, from a few yards away, I photographed a crocodile lying on a sandspit with its jaws wide open. The reptile paid absolutely no attention. Some locking mechanism enables crocodiles to lie for hours with open jaws, which cools them down and allows access to a small plover who cleans their teeth by plucking bits and pieces from their great big molars. Crocodiles were everywhere, lying torpidly in the sun or imitating floating logs, but now are all but extinct in these Nile waters. In fact so rare have crocodiles become that they are being captive-bred in South Africa to save them from extinction.

  For two days the Samuel Baker took us down the youthful Nile at a leisurely pace, stopping for half a day to allow the crew to cut and load firewood for the ancient engines. We were still passing through Uganda. Four hundred miles of the east bank had been temporarily ‘closed’ by the Protectorate’s government, and the people moved away, as part of a campaign to eliminate sleeping sickness. It succeeded, and the people moved back – only to be slaughtered, some years later, in large numbers, and made into refugees, by the freebooting troops of Idi Amin.

  At Nimule we said goodbye to the Samuel Baker, and a small fleet of station wagons took us to Juba, and embarkation on another vessel. We were now in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Men with fanciful, elaborate hair-do’s strolled hand in hand beside the river, tall and proud and lean as leopards. One coiffure, a thick twist of hair threaded with cowrie shells, looked like an ornamental serpent coiled around the young man’s head. The lives of these Dinka people were centred on their cattle, adapted like them to survive the dryness, heat and harshness of their environment. Had the people but known it, they were enjoying a brief and, in retrospect, halcyon respite between two cruel oppressions: that of the slavers whose tentacles, stretching far into the interior, had been scotched by General Gordon and his successors, and that of the rule of Northerners, of Arab blood and Muslim faith like the slavers, who in the not so distant future were to let loose the dogs of war in the southern Sudan.

  Soon after leaving Bor, we came to the Sudd. Our vessel butted her way through a green jungle of papyrus which seemed to have no beginning and no end, her bow constantly stuck in mud and roots and reeds. Then members of the crew seized giant punt-poles and pushed her backwards to get her free. She tried another channel that looked clearer, only to meet more floating vegetation and to stick again. It was like some slow, random vegetal pavane, conducted in a moist, oppressive heat amid a smell of rotting reeds and turgid mud. Plops and gurgles disturbed the water – a crocodile, a fish, a hippo? Birds dipped and dived, mosquitoes rose in clouds as evening fell and pinged incessantly all night.

  The designers of our vessel, which had been built in Glasgow, had evidently been more concerned to keep her passengers warm than to cool them. The funnel, hot to the touch, rose through the middle of the little dining saloon from the engine room beneath it. The same thought must have occurred to those Glaswegians who had drawn up the menus, probably in mid-winter, since they relied heavily on steak-and-kidney pie and plum duff – all tinned, there was no refrigeration. We almost envied our Sudanese captain, who was observing Ramadan. Every evening a savoury-smelling rice stew in an iron pot was hauled up to the bridge from the deck below. But it is the prohibition against drinking between sunrise and sunset, more than against eating, that tests the willpower of the faithful during the month of Ramadan.

  From the air, the Sudd looks like a vast green lawn, level as a plate, threaded with little gunmetal-coloured channels. These offered scant help to navigators of light aircraft following the Nile down from Lake Victoria to Khartoum. They had to decide which was the Nile, and which one of the Sudd’s shifting waterways. It was the fashion then for owners of little Moths, Cessnas or whatever to fly to England and back for business or holidays. Losing the way was a hazard; pilots had to depend on maps and eyesight, in the absence of radio beacons. We thought, as we chugged along, of two friends of Nellie’s, Brigadier Arthur Lewin, who was about the same age as Jos, and his wife Phyl. On a flight back home to Njoro they chose a wrong channel through the Sudd, vainly sought the right one, and started to run out of petrol. There was nothing for it but a forced landing. Their two-seater plane buried its nose in the papyrus and gently overturned. They were unhurt, but stranded.

  For provisions all they had was a few sandwiches, a flask of water and another of whisky. All around was mud and water and papyrus. With nightfall came millions of mosquitoes which covered them as with a blanket, and feasted on their blood until their eyes were half buried in swollen flesh. All they could do was to sit there and pray to be spotted by aircraft sent out from Khartoum, but a tiny aeroplane three parts buried in the Sudd was a needle in a haystack indeed.

  Then came a haboub. These sudden, violent storms sweep without warning over the desert and were dreaded by pilots, who flew over and above and around them lest their aircraft be torn apart. An approaching haboub roars like a train and scatters before it vegetation, birds and anything else in its path. Suddenly the Lewins found themselves surrounded by birds of every kind: storks, egrets, geese, fish-eagles, and many others. Birds settled on their wrecked aeroplane, at their feet, almost on their heads. The meaning of the phrase ‘in the eye of the storm’ came home to them. They were in that very eye.

  I forget how many days and nights they stayed there, foodless and feverish. Once or twice aircraft flew over, specks in the sky. Then Phyl had an inspiration. She used the mirror in her powder compact as a reflector to beam a ray of sunlight back into the sky. When they saw an aeroplane drop down towards them and circle over, they knew the trick had worked.

  To locate a quarry in the Sudd and to effect a rescue were two different things. Next day a plane returned to drop food and medicines, which vanished into the mud. Meanwhile a barge had set forth from Malakal to edge its way towards them. The Lewins reached Khartoum at last more dead than alive. Phyl said that the one thing she would never forget was the company of birds, all fear of man forgotten, sharing their safety in the eye of the storm.

  We emerged into a stretch of relatively open water called Lake No, where our branch of the river, the Bahr el Jebel, was joined by the Bahr el Ghazal, the river of gazelles, which winds a tortuous western course to the hills of Darfur. This wild, remote region, little known even today, had been partially explored by the Welsh ivory-trader and prospector John Petherick. Then, in 1863, a Dutch girl called Alexandrine Tinné – only twenty-four years old, beautiful, accomplished and said to be the richest heiress in the Netherlands – set forth from Khartoum with her mother, an aunt, and a retinue which included five scientists. Hers was to be an exploration of the plants, trees, rocks, birds and butterflies of this unmapped region, not only of its geography.

  From Khartoum, her barges pushed their way as far as they could get up the Bahr el Ghazal. The party then proceeded on foot into the country of the Niam-Niam, meaning eaters of men, where disaster overtook them. Somewhere near what is now the Sudan-Zaire border, Alexandrine’s mother and one of the scientists died of fever, and another scientist was killed by a buffalo. The rest got back to Khartoum, where
her aunt also died.

  Alexandrine Tinné never went back to Holland. She lived for a while in Cairo, wearing Arab dress, consorting with Arab savants and travelling in Algeria and Tunisia. In 1869 she joined a caravan bound from Tripoli to Lake Chad across the Sahara. She took two Dutch sailors as her escort, and equipped the caravan with two large iron water tanks to be strapped on to camels. The desert Tuaregs had never seen tanks like that before and a rumour spread that they were filled with gold. The Tuaregs killed her two sailors and slashed her so severely that she bled to death on the sand. She was thirty years of age.8

  At Malakal, swarms of locusts darkened the sky. Men of the Nuer tribe, stork-like and handsome, were casting nets from canoes. They had smeared themselves all over with ash to keep mosquitoes at bay and so looked grey instead of bronze. Flocks of snow-white egrets circled round, alighted in the reeds, took off again into a crimson sunset. We passed Fashoda, consisting of a wharf, a few bedraggled huts, a tea-shop and a half-rotted notice board.

  After Kosti, a hot and dirty train took us to Khartoum, another train to Wadi Halfa and the end of the Sudan. From Luxor we drove northwards through clouds of sheep, children, water buffaloes, camels and dust. Women clad from head to foot in black, and carrying dustpans and brushes, darted from their hovels whenever a passing camel defecated to sweep up the droppings, precious fuel in this treeless land. We observed with interest an Egyptian method of making butter. Beside an unpaved road, where every passing vehicle or creature stirred a dust-cloud, was a goat-skin, fastened by its hollow legs to four posts, and hanging upside down. An old man, one-eyed and toothless, squatted beside the goat-skin and gently rocked it to and fro. Inside a little cream skimmed from the milk of water-buffaloes was thickening slowly into butter. That night, we stopped at a small hotel between Assuit and El Minya and, at breakfast, ignored the pale, watery-looking butter that was put before us.

  I have never cared for Cairo, and was thankful when we embarked at Alexandria on a Jugoslavian vessel crammed with three hundred members of the Hitler Jugend whose fares had been bartered for a quantity of Jugoslavian coal. We were the only other passengers on board, and formed a coalition with the captain, who sailed so close to the rocky Adriatic shore in order to wave to his wife that he almost scraped paint from his ship’s side. Soon we were in Venice. It was December, raining steadily and icy cold. The chill of the Doges’ palace might have been Dante’s inspiration for his vision of the inner circle of hell. But dinner on the Simplon-Orient Express restored our spirits, and in London friends were on hand to welcome us back. Over eight years were to pass before I set foot in Africa again.

  CHAPTER 15

  Fifty Years On

  People say that it is a mistake to go back, but I think this is so only if you expect things to be much the same or, if they have changed, to have changed for the worse.

  When I went back in December 1983 Nairobi was festooned with banners saluting Twenty Great Glorious Years, and adorned with photographs of the President, Daniel arap Moi, looking stern rather than jubilant. It was the twentieth anniversary of independence. Foreign delegations had arrived from all over the world, the Queen was shortly due. The flag of the Republic flew from standards erected along every street and highway, and arches with excited texts were everywhere. To mark the occasion, some 7,000 prisoners were released from jail. To judge from the many stories one heard of muggings and robberies with violence, there were quite enough criminals about already.

  One of the people I had hoped to see, and did see, was Major Esther Wambui Njombo. She arrived in time for tea in her civilian clothes, small and trim and neat, driven by a formidable lady twice her size in army uniform. Major Njombo had been born on my parents’ farm at Njoro and was the daughter of our headman Njombo, and a much younger wife. Njombo had died in 1952 when she was about three. Her education had begun at the farm school Nellie had started with less than a dozen pupils. I must have seen her when she was a child, but did not remember her, nor she me. She did, of course, remember Nellie. What did people think of her? I asked. ‘They did not mind her,’ the Major replied – a backhanded compliment, but I think she meant it kindly.

  She went on to a secondary school and then became a teacher. One day in 1973 she heard that women were being recruited for the army. This was a revolutionary measure introduced by M’zee Kenyatta, and only ten girls were initially accepted. Esther Wambui got in on the ground floor, and in less than ten years rose to her present rank. After a spell at Sandhurst, she was given command of the women’s section of the Kenyan army. When a detachment went to Britain to take part in the Royal Tournament at Earl’s Court, she was its commander. Now, at thirty-five, the army provides her with a house, a car and driver, generous pay, and a pension in a few years’ time.

  Did she ever go back to Njoro? ‘Oh, yes, I go back sometimes. I have a shamba there – not on your mother’s old farm but close to it, on Major Adams’.’ She has two other properties: four valuable acres at Langata, Nairobi’s fashionable suburb, and two hundred acres north of Mt Kenya where she grows wheat on contract. She has a son of ten. Wambui, her mother, shares her house in Nairobi. In three days’ time the big parade is to take place, and her soldiers will be there – drilled, I am sure, to perfection. Major Njombo has a look of her father, sharpish cheek-bones and prominent teeth, and might be called petite, with a gentle, high-pitched voice; not at all a formidable Major.

  It is almost as if a new species has appeared on earth, the young Kenyan woman who has put tribal ways behind her. Self-assured, well-mannered, elegantly clad and with a neat Afro hair-do, these independent young ladies cope competently with word-processors and computers, staff banks, manage shops, work as stylists in hair-dressing salons, as flower-arrangers, as secretaries and drivers. How much initiative and ability must have gone to waste for all those centuries, how much talent lain buried! I know that women had, and have, a respected place in tribal society, that their rights were no less well defined than their duties, and to think that they had been regarded as mere beasts of burden was a superficial view. Nevertheless their place in tribal society was subservient; child bearing and rearing their purpose, and the scope for any form of self-expression small. On any road leading from the capital, within a mile of the Kenyatta Centre, you can see, today, women looking older than their years, toiling along under their loads. The smoke-blackened hut, three cooking stones, the gathering of firewood are far from obsolete. That was Major Esther’s background. The image of a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis is compelling.

  There are two points of view. I called on Margaret Kenyatta in her office high up in the Kenyatta Conference Centre, Nairobi’s tallest and proudest building, all glass and glitter once off the ground but, at the bottom, dark and dim like a cathedral, full of sombre pillars that dwarf the flux of human figures surging to and fro and proceeding, as it seemed, through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea. Where were they all going, and what for? Perhaps to the enormous conference chamber, handsomely panelled, dimly lit, designed to hold a thousand delegates from all those international Boards, Organisations, Authorities and quangoes that converge upon Nairobi, bringing prestige, prosperity and that rich prize coveted by all emergent nations, foreign exchange.

  On the tenth floor (there are thirty-four, with a jaunty cap on top) Margaret Kenyatta presides over the world headquarters of the United Nations Environmental Programme, on which she is Kenya’s permanent representative. A shortish, plumpish, and alert person of late middle age, she reflects the jovial and outgoing side of her father’s character, rather than the more devious yet steely aspect called for by the politics of nationalism. She greeted me with a generous warmth. Born in 1926, she is the M’zee’s eldest daughter and only surviving child of his first wife Wambui, now in her eightieth year and living in contentment, Margaret said, with her daughter, on the outskirts of Nairobi – still active, still digging in her garden, cooking, bargaining in the market. Margaret has one son practising law in Nairo
bi, and two cherished grandsons.

  Between the ages of three and eighteen Margaret saw nothing of her father, who was in Britain. By the time he returned in 1947 she had left the Alliance High School, the country’s co-educational Eton, and had gained some secretarial training which she put at the disposal of her father during those fraught post-war years when he was consolidating freedom movements into the Kenya African National Union, attacking the colonial government, launching the Independent Schools which were the hotbed of Mau Mau, and generally directing the strategy of the nationalist movement.

  ‘I was never a freedom-fighter,’ she told me, ‘but always involved in the organisation of the movement.’ She was on hand to greet her father on his triumphant return to his home at Gatundu, in Kiambu, in August 1961, after nine years in the wilderness.

  We turned to another freedom that had been at least partially achieved, that of African women. She did not think much of it. ‘I had a very happy childhood,’ she said. ‘We were happier then than young people are now. I, too, carried heavy loads of firewood on my back; I too, had a leather thong pressing into my forehead. I was strong, I was proud of my strength to carry firewood and water and to hoe in my mother’s shamba. I enjoyed these tasks. I was making my contribution to the family, playing my part. It was a wonderful life we had then. We were all together. No one was alone or neglected, each person had his place, her place, in the extended family. There was so much love and affection. There was security.’

  Her maternal grandmother, Margaret said, had a lot of children, and they had children too, so she must have a great many cousins. ‘Now I don’t even know of their existence, who they are, what they do. The extended family is breaking down, has broken down already in the towns.’ Now there is the nuclear family living in flats and small houses with no room for cousins and aunts. ‘Now we have started in Nairobi a branch of Help the Aged. And we are having old people’s homes. It is sad, very sad.’