Unbowed: A Memoir (Vintage)

by Maathai, Wangari

  My father was very good with languages and could communicate quite fluently in Kipsigis, Luhyia, Luo, and Kiswahili, which he picked up around the area. But most of us on the farm rarely met people from other communities, spoke their languages, or participated in their cultural practices. Except for the skin color we shared we were as “foreign” to one another as the British setters were to us. I grew up knowing that I was a Kikuyu and that the other communities were different from us. I would, though, overhear the adults around me expressing their views about some of our differences. If, for example, one of the women was very well dressed, they would ask her with a smile, “Where are you going, smartly dressed like a Luo?” Other people were known to expect things for free. These ethnic biases, many of which were planted early in one's childhood, became amplified and were embraced by national political rhetoric. They are still used today to divide Kenyans from one another.

  During my years on the farm, I never thought about the fact that Mr. Neylan and his family were white while everyone else was black, and I never heard my parents or other adults talking about it; for them, skin color was not an issue. But we did recognize the differences in our lifestyles and privileges, which were taken as given. In my child's world, though, there was a time when I thought life was at a standstill: Those of us who were children would always be children, and those of us who were old would stay that way. “That's the way they are,” I said to myself. It took me a long time to realize that people grow old and die and that even I was getting bigger and taller.

  I never spoke to Mr. Neylan, his wife, or his children, but I did observe them. Mrs. Neylan always wore a large hat, probably to protect herself from the strong, hot sun. She also wore light, flowery cotton dresses that came to just below her knees. People called her nyaklneke, which means “a large person,” perhaps because she was pleasantly round and walked briskly. We had nicknames for all the settlers and, in fact, I never learned her real name. When I saw Mrs. Neylan it was usually in the evenings when I would come to collect our family's allotment of wheat flour and skimmed milk (the settlers kept the butter). There she was, basket in hand, moving purposefully from one coop to the other collecting eggs from her chickens. I loved watching her. If she were alive today and we met, she would probably say with a chuckle, “Well, look at you! Who is nyaklneke now?”

  Mr. Neylan and nyaklneke had children, including a daughter about fifteen years older than I. The people on the farm fondly referred to her as kairĩtu, or “the sweet young girl.” Occasionally, my father would work around the Neylans’ homestead. One time I went to see him there and found myself very close to kairitu's room. Through an open door I saw a compartment full of clothes. More than twenty dresses must have been inside—the closet was completely stuffed. I can still see the colors: blue, white, and red. “How can anybody have so many dresses?” I asked myself. It was as many dresses as I had seen in my whole life. At that time, I think I had two dresses, maybe three.

  Over the years, my father and Mr. Neylan grew to be close friends—as good friends as a master and his employee can be. My father valued that friendship, perhaps even more than Mr. Neylan did. One time, when he got older, my father took Mr. Neylan a he-goat. Traditionally, when an old man takes a he-goat to another old man it is a sign of great friendship and respect. The man receiving the goat is supposed to slaughter and eat the goat, and return the front leg to the man who gave it to him. I don't know whether Mr. Neylan knew what to do with the goat or whether he returned the leg, but giving the animal to him meant a lot to my father.

  Among the British were some wonderful people, like the Neylans. The power between my father and Mr. Neylan was never equal, of course. We remained squatters on Mr. Neylan's land until Kenya's independence. But when independence came and a wave of British settlers sold their land to local people, Mr. Neylan decided to give my father twenty-five acres of the farm as a gift. My father then joined a cooperative and with the other members bought what remained of Mr. Neylan's farm. When my father died in 1978, his remains were buried on that farm, not far from where our homestead had stood and where I had eaten managu berries as I tended our sheep and goats. My eldest brother and some members of my extended family now live on that land. Occasionally I would accompany my mother or other members of my family to Nakuru town, about ten miles away, where the women would sell vegetables in the markets. In those days, there was no public transport, so we walked. We would leave early in the morning, long before the sun rose over the ridges of the valley, and arrive in Nakuru at dawn. The area around Nakuru is largely grassland, with occasional trees, especially acacia. Up on the ridges, there were natural forests but also plantations of exotic species, such as pine and eucalyptus. I remember thorn trees along the riverbanks and I used to collect firewood from the fallen branches. I always wondered how those trees got to be set along the river—why they were only there and nowhere else. I did not realize then that most of the other trees had been cut to make way for farms.

  For me, a rural child, going to town was very adventurous. In Nakuru, I would see cars, lots of people, and clothing and other goods for sale. We would have a cup of tea at my father's relative's hotel and eat mandazi, fried dough sweetened with sugar. All this was fascinating to me then so I did not mind the walk. In fact, I practically ran.

  In those days, the upper part of Nakuru town was still enclosed by forests and was extremely clean. It was an affluent town, surrounded by wealthy settlers. Approaching Nakuru from the east, you always knew you were close because you would see jacaranda trees, which, when they bloom, have beautiful, bright blue-purple flowers. Jacarandas are among the many foreign species of trees and plants the British must have brought to Kenya. As you walked toward the town, on the right was a ridge and, beyond it, the lake. Because Mr. Neylan's farm was out of town, I saw the lake only from a distance. To me it looked shiny white, from the saltwater, with a flush of pink, which I learned much later was due to the millions of flamingoes that make it their home. The lake is now a national park, where you can see rhinos, lions, hippos, and, of course, the flamingoes.

  Like many towns in colonial Kenya, Nakuru at that time was segregated, with separate areas for Europeans, Indians, and Africans. The European section was on the slopes of a ridge overlooking the lowlands. The houses had a very particular style: red brick with red, blue, or white walls and sloping roofs, surrounded by jacarandas and bougainvillea, which the British seemed to love, since you always saw them in their homesteads.

  The Indians occupied the middle ground on the hill and their houses had a distinctive architecture of mostly flat roofs, elaborately decorated walls, and small gardens. About thirty-five thousand Indians were brought by the British to Kenya in the 1890s as low-wage laborers to build the Kenya-Uganda railroad. Many Indians died completing the railroad, but those who survived were encouraged by the British to stay in Kenya and Uganda. Many did and set up shops along the railroad line and sold goods, such as blankets and cotton products, along with salt and other foodstuffs. These goods were being imported for the first time.

  The Indian immigrants also brought with them their traditional foods and cuisine and successfully introduced them to the local populations. Salt, fat, sugar, and oil, virtually unknown in local food preparation, tasted good and were heavily promoted. Today, many new diseases associated with nutrition find their roots in this sudden change in people's diets, which for many communities, including Kikuyus, had been largely maize, millet, roots, beans, sugarcane, and green vegetables.

  In Nakuru, as in other cities at that time, Africans lived in the most crowded part. There were many people and the homes, built from stone, mud, or brick, were small and crowded together. Even as a child, I could see the difference. Of course, I did not think any of this was deliberate: It was just the way it was and we belonged in that part of town. Today, Nakuru is Kenya's fourth-largest city— busy, bustling, noisy, and full of houses and people. If you go to Nakuru now, it is very different. The jacarandas are stil
l there, but the city is not nearly as beautiful. While there are still a large number of Indians and Europeans, there is not much separation between them and Africans. Today, money talks. If you have it, you can live anywhere.

  Every family has a secret, and ours is no exception. In my family, there was a missing member, someone I did not find out about until I was well into adulthood. During the First World War, Africans in the colonies were conscripted to fight or serve as porters. In Kenya, if parents had an able-bodied son old enough to go to war, they were supposed to encourage him to join military training and then fight with the British army in East Africa (most of the battles were against the Germans and Italians and fought in Somalia and Tanganyika). If he would not go on his own, the parents were expected to surrender him to the authorities.

  My grandparents had such a son, Thumbi. My grandmother did not want her son, who was no more than twenty at the time, to join the war. She was in despair. So she advised him to hide in the dense vegetation near a high waterfall in the Tucha River near Ihithe, and brought him food from her farm every day. However, the British had developed a system to deal with parents who were reluctant to give up their sons to the war effort. They would confiscate all of their livestock. For people at that time, especially men, livestock was everything, as important as land. The authorities confronted my grandfather and threatened to take all his cattle and goats. The pressure worked. He told them where his son was hiding and they went and seized him.

  “Ah, he'll come back,” my grandfather said to his wife and anyone else who would listen once his son had gone to war. “He'll never come back,” my grandmother replied, crying. And he never did. He became one of the more than one hundred thousand Kikuyus who died on the battlefield or from starvation or influenza during the First World War. When the war ended in 1918, my grandparents waited for their son to return from Tanganyika. But he didn't and they received no news about him. Then one day a man who lived nearby and who had also gone to the war said to my grandparents, “Make beer and I will come and tell you what happened to your son.”

  So my grandfather made beer. That was typical: to make beer and have guests come and drink and talk. That afternoon, the man came. Perhaps the beer gave him the courage to tell my grandfather what he knew about his son's fate. “I saw him get shot. He fell, and he didn't get up,” he said sadly. My grandmother cried for her son for the rest of her life, and she always blamed my grandfather for the loss. “I told you he wouldn't come back,” she would say.

  My mother told me this story because I asked her why my uncles and aunt were naming their children after my father. In Kikuyu culture, traditionally the first son is named for his paternal grandfather, so I always thought my father was my grandparents’ eldest son. Later, I learned that my father was named after my grandmother's father, so there must have been another son. In explaining this, my mother told me that my grandmother had been so distraught by what happened to her son that she decided that none of her grandchildren would be named for him, lest she be reminded of that loss. The name of that young man—my eldest uncle—was lost with him, wiped from the face of the earth.

  My grandparents and other families like them who lost sons in the First World War never received any official word about what had happened to their children, or any compensation. This is still an open wound. I want to say to the British government, “My uncle went to war and never came back, and nobody ever bothered to come and tell my grandparents what had happened to their son.”

  2

  Cultivation

  Late in 1947, my father sat me down, which, given our relationship, was unusual. “You are going to Nyeri so you can help your mother take care of your younger sister,” he said. I imagine I just nodded. As long as I was going with my mother, it was all right by me. If I had been told I was to be separated from her, I would probably have thrown a tantrum.

  My two older brothers were already in Nyeri attending school, living with my uncle Kamunya, whose children were also in school. It was decided, presumably by my father in discussion with my mother, that we would return to Nyeri so my mother could relieve my uncle and his family of the care-taking duties for my brothers. My mother, my youngest sister, Wachatha (then about two), and I made the journey together. My other sister, Muringi, had injured her leg chopping wood, so she stayed behind and joined us later.

  My father had sent my brothers to school in Nyeri because, even in the late 1940s, it was rare to have schools on settlers’ farms. Not even the missionaries tried to establish schools on private land. Also, educating African children was not a priority for the settlers. Indeed, when Mr. Neylan heard of what my father was doing, he is said to have asked him who would pick his pyrethrum. “Don't worry,” my father replied, “there are still many children in my homestead.” As it turned out, because of the conflict following the outbreak of the Mau Mau resistance movement and the state of emergency that followed, none of my other siblings managed to follow us to Nyeri to attend school.

  To get from Nakuru to Nyeri in those days, you first had to travel north and then east in a sixty-mile journey that today lasts only three hours but at that time took all day. This would be the longest conscious journey of my young life. Our adventure began the previous day, when we spent the night at our relative's hotel in Nakuru town—more a place to have tea than to sleep. This was an extraordinary experience in itself, to sleep in town. It was very warm, so much so that we did not even want to cover ourselves. I hardly slept because the surroundings were so unfamiliar: There were lights, cars passing, people talking and working in the kitchen throughout the night.

  Early in the morning, we boarded the bus and started our long journey to Nyeri. Until then, I had thought that the whole world was contained between the ridges that ran along the edge of the Rift Valley and Lake Nakuru. So you can imagine my shock when we climbed the ridge through Ndunduri and I discovered that on the other side of the ridge lay another world. I was completely overwhelmed by this discovery and hardly remember what happened between Ndunduri and Nyahururu (in English, Thomson's Falls). When we passed Nyahururu my mother told me that its name meant “place of falling water” and that it was called after a waterfall nearby.

  The packed bus rattled along past the waterfall and, as it did, I glimpsed the fast-flowing waters that disappeared into the steep fall and heard them rolling down the cliff. We were soon traveling across the open grasslands and interminable scrub on the eastern edge of the Rift Valley. Looking out through the bus's open window and enjoying the cool breeze on my face, I watched the great herds of cattle grazing on ranchland owned by the white settlers. Zebras, giraffes, antelopes, and the occasional buffalo were dotted throughout the plain. Together our little family and our fellow travelers— farmers, businessmen, and visitors returning home—jostled and bumped and hoped that our luggage would not fall off the roof and be lost in the huge cloud of dust that spread out in a plume behind us.

  At one point in the trip we drove past acre upon acre of blackened tree stumps. These were mĩĩtarakwa (tropical cedars), which had been destroyed by what my mother said had been a forest fire. When we reached Ngobit, there was a police checkpoint where we were stopped and asked to exit the vehicle. The uniformed officers looked very serious, well-dressed, and disciplined. Much later, I understood that they were ensuring the bus had a valid road license and that vendors weren't transporting diseased livestock.

  It was around dusk as we approached Nyeri, dipping into the valleys and climbing up the rough roads around the hills. Everywhere I looked I could see woodlots, and between them farms and rows of crops. Far in the distance, seeming to hover above the horizon, were the imposing outlines of the snow-capped peak of Mount Kenya to the north and the Aberdare Range to the west. Both were covered by thick forests that to my eyes seemed like blue-black blankets.

  We arrived in the bus depot in the center of Nyeri. Most of the passengers disembarked here, but we stayed on until the last stop, Huho-inĩĩ, where the bus owner had his
homestead. Since it was too late for us to continue the journey, we slept there as the bus owner's guests. Everything was new and unusual and it took me a long time to fall asleep as I stared into the darkness, thinking about what I had seen that day and the final leg of the journey that lay ahead. It was so quiet I could almost hear my own breathing.

  The following morning we woke up early and ate porridge. Typical of the hospitality in those days, we didn't have to pay for the bed or the breakfast. Our feet took us the final three miles to Ihithe, my mother carrying much of our luggage, Wachatha wrapped around her chest, and me walking in front. Near the top of Gatumbĩĩro, which is seven thousand feet above sea level, I saw my home—a series of valleys, bright green and luxuriant, punctuated with yams, bananas, sugarcane, and arrowroots. Even though I had eaten these foods, I had never seen them growing in the soil.

  On the horizon was the thick, deep green of the Aberdare forest, stretching as far as the eye could see in the early morning sun. I drank in the beauty, overwhelmed. The contrast between Nakuru and Ihithe could not have been greater. Nakuru means “dusty place” in Maasai, while Ihithe was a landscape full of different shades of green, all springing from soil the color of deep terra-cotta—smooth and dark and richly fertile, but mostly hidden behind the mass of wet, fresh vegetation.

  Finally, my mother led us down a narrow path overhung with plants into the homestead of her father, my grandfather, Kibicho Ngetha. He received us warmly—giving her his hand and saying, “Wakla maitü” (“How are you, my mother?”). She replied, “Wakla awa” (“I'm fine, my father”) and he laid his hand on my sister's and my foreheads and blessed us. To me, he seemed very old. He wore a blanket around his shoulders and was richly adorned in a necklace, with long pierced ears and colorful earrings. This was the first time he had seen my mother since her own mother had died. We sat down and were treated to a welcome drink—delicious millet porridge in a calabash, a large one for my mother and my little sister and a small one for me.