It is a unique moment, that first meeting of a mother and her new-born baby, the first glance at the mysterious creature that for months has been carried and nursed in the secret of the womb, and now has become a different, forever independent human being, with features inherited from generations of ancestors.
I held out my hands. Perfect head, tanned skin, dark golden fuzz of hair, and, extraordinary for a new-born baby, open, direct, intense and knowing blue eyes.
‘A sign, just give me a sign.’
Slowly, almost deliberately, while the deep-blue eyes never left mine, the index finger of the left hand curled up tightly, and she grabbed my hand with the other fingers. Weakness, relief, joy at the pit of my stomach.
‘Welcome back,’ I whispered, before I finally slept.
I had felt sure the baby had to be a replica of Paolo, and, therefore, a boy. Paolo knew better than I. I called her Sveva, the name Paolo had chosen, with Paolo as a middle name. The Svevi were a noble tribe which had invaded Italy from the north in the early tenth century, and had settled in Sicily. Their blond hair and blue eyes can still be found today in some Sicilians, normally very dark. It was a rare, beautiful name which suited her looks perfectly.
Within a day, my room at the hospital became a conservatory overflowing with all sorts of flowers and plants, which filled every vase and shelf and spread into the corridor. A procession of people came to visit. Friends brought champagne, and letters and telegrams kept arriving from everywhere. I had engaged a nurse for the baby. She was a Kikuyu woman by the name of Wanjiru, intelligent, pleasant and well educated, responsible, large and with a sense of humour, who already had six children of her own. She came to the hospital with Emanuele, marched into my room and went straight to the crib. She took the baby in her arms and lifted her high, cooing delightedly: ‘A musijana!’ (‘A little girl!’). ‘Mutoto yangu!’ (‘My own child!’). Sveva smiled a toothless bright grin. ‘Makena!’ (‘The happy one!’) Wanjiru exclaimed in Kikuyu. I could see from the first moment that the relationship between those two would be one of great affection. It became in fact a deep mutual love and Wanjiru will forever be another mother to Sveva.
When after a few days I returned to the house at Gigiri, I found it full of flowers. Oria had brought a basket of special heart-shaped biscuits, baked by her old cook Kimuyu. In an elegant pot stood a young yellow fever tree, with a note addressed to Miss Sveva Gallmann and the words: ‘Welcome home, Sveva. This tree, which your father loved so much, will bring you luck and happiness.’
Paolo’s favourite bird had been the seagull, which reminded him of the sea. Entering Sveva’s nursery I found that while I was in hospital one of the pale blue walls had been painted with a delightful flight of seagulls and drifting clouds. It was the gift of Davina Dobie, an artist and a close friend of ours. She had left a note: ‘… love you and baby Paolo, always, even from far away’.
A few days after Sveva’s birth, we flew up to Ol Ari Nyiro. It was a very strange feeling, to go back to Laikipia with Paolo’s baby in my arms. The dogs ran down to meet the car as usual. They sniffed her tiny feet, shyly, tentatively nuzzling them.
My room was waiting, with the egg. I climbed on the bed and touched it, holding it in my hand and shaking it gently to let the message inside know I was there. I moved Sveva’s tiny hand, already with tapering fingers, to the shell, smooth as cream. In the night, by the light of my candle and fire, I watched the egg yet again, as if it were some mysterious face with a concealed secret to tell, and the egg stared back at me like an enigma. The point of the game was perhaps to keep guessing, trying to see the reasons and the symbol behind the egg. I was not ready yet. I could not yet break the egg.
As a sign of celebration, sheep were slaughtered and roasted, and I cancelled all the outstanding debts of my staff. Our people came to greet Sveva and wish her well, as is the custom. They looked at her, touched her pink fingers, giggled at the colours of her eyes and hair – just like her father – and brought her gifts of eggs, a cockerel, a bead charm.
In time, they gave her names. Kainda was her Tharaka name, which Luka gave her, and which means ‘the hunter’s daughter’. Kaweria was her Meru name, given by Garisha, which means ‘the loving one’. The one which stuck was her Kikuyu name, Makena, The happy one’, chosen by Wanjiru, for her sunny character. Mirimuk came and looked at her gravely and closely for long moments. ‘Paulo has returned. His seed was not lost. He is this girl now, and we are happy, as he will look after this shamba again.’ He put his hand on her head, and spat on her a drizzly spray of saliva in the traditional Turkana blessing. ‘Jambo Paulo,’ he said in his husky voice. ‘Asante wa kurudi’ (Thank you for coming back’).
I had grown to feel a deep affection for Mirimuk, his acute eyes, his good-natured reserved moods, his endurance on a diet of posho and milk, his independent pride mixed with respect and eagerness. He cared for Sveva, Emanuele and me, and this was apparent. We returned this care. His chosen name for Sveva touched a deep chord in me.
25
The Drought
In the Highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be, because here I belong …
Karen Blixen, Out of Africa
We had buried Paolo on 22 March.
March had ended in gusts of wind, and the extraordinary galloping clouds of Africa, which forever move and change in fantastic patterns, were not yet visible in the pure blue sky. We started looking up for signs of rain; but the nights brought only ceaseless wind which bent the fragile new pepper trees I had planted, and the young yellow fever tree on Paolo’s grave had to be staked with a bamboo post to prevent it from breaking. Dust devils arose in the hot plains in swirls of sticks and thorns, and a fine film of dust dulled the crotons and the evergreens.
The Pokot burned their pastures, and in the night chains of fires garlanded the hills like ceremonial lights: but the rains seemed to have receded. A few times the sky became grey and heavy, and we looked hopefully to the east from where the rains used to come to Laikipia, but we could only hear the noise of the howling winds playing new notes through the hollows and branches of the tallest trees. The pastures grew drier and poorer by the day; the cattle started losing condition. Now ribs could be seen sticking out below the patterned skins. The humps hung flabby. The waterholes dried out and the level of the dams reached the lowest ever.
One night I was woken up by furious snarling noises, dogs barking and growling. Someone was also knocking frantically at my door. ‘Chui!’ the askari was shouting urgently, ‘chui nakula mbwa!’ (‘The leopard is eating the dogs!’). The commotion was extraordinary, and seemed to be coming from the lawn outside the sitting-room.
The generator is switched off at night, and it is not the easiest thing, for one shortsighted like me, to light the paraffin lamp, find and load the gun in darkness, get a torch and creep out, barefoot in the dewy cold grass, towards an invisible prowling beast. Nothing I had learnt in Italy had prepared me for this.
The leopard, attracted certainly by the dogs’ scent, had discovered he had to reckon with seven of them. He had repaired up one of the young yellow fever trees, where he hung tenaciously, snarling and lashing out with his paws like any cat. In the flash of my torch, his yellow eyes and bare fangs looked wild and breathtaking. Sensing me, the dogs redoubled their brave efforts. The barking grew louder, and one of them tried to jump up the tree. The leopard caught him swiftly with its claws, and in the screaming which followed, I fired in the air and my torch fell. The leopard took advantage of the darkness to jump away – which was what I wanted – and my dogs took off in hot pursuit, their fierce barking, mixed with plaintive whines, silencing the shy creatures of the night. There was no major casualty which mercurocrome and antiseptic powder could not cure that time, but several other leopard attacks, on one or the other of the dogs, became a fairly normal occurrence. Many times Colin Francombe had to come up to Kuti with his specialized surgeon’s kit to attend to serious wounds.
In mid June, Colin left with his family for England for his overseas biennial leave of two months. For the first time since we had come to Africa, I was alone.
Soon, the cattle started dying. At first it was two or three a day, and John Mangicho, the assistant manager, with the headmen Ngobitu and Tunkuri could cope with this. But when different symptoms that they were not familiar with began to appear, and the number of deaths grew to ten or more animals a day, I sent for Jasper Evans. He was the neighbour Colin had suggested I should contact in case of emergency, and he came immediately. Jasper was one of those people you cannot imagine ever losing their temper. He was phlegmatic and balanced, and just seeing him standing on my verandah, a warm pink vodka in one hand and his khaki hat in the other, discussing the problem with absolute calm, reassured me. He gave logical instructions which made sense, and suggested certain cures. His last remark when leaving was typical of his fatalistic attitude: ‘You have six thousand head of cattle. Do not worry about losing a hundred.’
I did worry, however. I still knew practically nothing at all about cattle, but I could see that, in their debilitated state, they were prone to any disease they would otherwise have been resistant to. In this case it was east coast fever, a tick-borne infection brought by buffalo, for which there was still no cure. Over four hundred head died before Colin came back, and this taught me a lesson I shall never forget. I decided to start planting again, and to grow fodder which could become silage to keep ready for an emergency such as this. The grass leys at Enghelesha needed to be rejuvenated, and I felt we should grow the maize that we had otherwise to buy to feed our labour force. Part of the maize and the green stalks could be used for silage. Never again should a drought find us unprepared.
In the meantime, reports of poaching began to disturb me more and more often. A certain amount of ‘healthy’ poaching is unavoidable in a property teeming with wildlife and surrounded by a settlement where nothing wild has been left. The Pokot on our north-east boundary were extremely poor. They knew Ol Ari Nyiro from time immemorial, as it had once been their territory where they had run cattle and goats. Occasionally they speared an eland for meat, and I could never find it in my heart to condemn this. However, small-scale poaching had never been a problem until the very late seventies, when a new factor changed the entire scene. Gangs of Somali infiltrated the Pokot, and provided a market for ivory and rhino horn. The price they offered for a horn represented over a year’s income, and was a temptation the Pokot people could not resist.
We had at that time sixteen people employed in our private Security on the ranch. Their task was to patrol the place on foot and make sure no trespassing went undiscovered. They were responsible for the safety both of domestic stock and wildlife. Thanks to them we had a zero record of cattle rustling, quite an achievement for a territory so close to the land of the Samburus, whose young warriors stole cattle on full-moon nights as an accepted tradition. Our Security were armed mostly with bows and arrows. The majority of them belonged to the Tharaka, a tribe of hunters living on the rim of the Meru National Park, and they knew all the secrets of poaching and hunting, having once been poachers themselves. They were small and muscular, built to track unending hours and to hide quickly. They were resilient and courageous, and Luka was their chief. In the Security there were Turkana, taller, long-limbed, wilder, tireless walkers: Mirimuk was their leader. There were also a few Somali, cunning and more sophisticated, and immensely brave, led by Hussein Omar. Only these three men had guns. It was soon apparent that sixteen people armed with bows and arrows were no longer enough to patrol the entire ranch efficiently, as well as fighting an organized and well-armed poaching offensive.
There were many new things I had to learn to cope with, apart from my personal solitude. The first of these was to adopt the right attitude to the land I was suddenly responsible for, as on this would depend its future.
Many of my old friends from Italy were horrified at the thought of me alone in the heart of Africa, with only a very young son and a small baby for company, no telephone, no proper roads, surrounded by thousands of acres of bush where it was not just the wildlife that was dangerous, but also people determined to kill whoever came between them and their quarry. Many came or wrote begging me to reconsider my decisions, to sell the place for a profit and go back ‘home’. The idea of leaving, however, never once crossed my mind. Not in the darkest moments of loneliness when the tasks ahead seemed beyond my own power, and the things which I had to face on my own too complicated and alien. Even if Paolo was no longer there, the reasons for our choice still were.
My first symbolic decision had been the one to bury Paolo in Laikipia, rather than send him back to Italy as had been expected. I knew that burying him in the land he had loved and chosen was not only following his instructions, which in itself would have been reason enough. It was an essential statement confirming my position and my choice: Laikipia, Ol Ari Nyiro, were ‘home’.
In Africa, great importance is attached to laying to rest the dead in their own land. The homestead is where your ancestors have been buried and where you one day will be. I felt that if one cannot choose the place of one’s birth, one should at least choose the place where, once dead, the body will rest. For this very reason I had planted the acacia, the African tree par excellence, and the one Paolo loved most. The roots would one day reach and feed on his body, which would grow out of the grave again and become part of the landscape he had loved so well. Because of this I had decided to resist the pressure to go to Europe to give birth to Paolo’s baby. In the space of a few months, Paolo would have died, he would have been buried and he would have again been born in Africa.
I had chosen to stay in this country. Emanuele was showing every sign of being well able one day to run the ranch in the enlightened way that Paolo would have wished. His passion for natural sciences was obviously not a passing fancy. After his university studies he would have come back with all the new ideas and tools to develop the place on the lines Paolo and I had believed in: keeping a careful balance between the development of the natural resources and the protection of the environment. I felt strongly about the guardianship of the land. Going away would mean renouncing this responsibility and declaring defeat. I could not let Paolo down. I should hold on a few years for Emanuele, and I was lucky to have in Colin a competent and loyal supporter whom I respected and trusted. The first step, however, was the policy I wanted to adopt, and I was conscious that this was ultimately up to me. In the surrounding ranches in the Laikipia, rhino were being poached rapidly, and soon none would be left, apart from those in the few fenced and protected sanctuaries belonging to a handful of dedicated people. Most landowners felt that the responsibility for the survival of the wildlife was no longer theirs. Since the ban on hunting in 1977, wildlife belonged to the government. Ranchers were allowed to control whatever they felt was dangerous to them or their property, but the protection of wildlife on private land was no longer strictly their concern. It was also an extremely expensive operation, which guaranteed no return.
I had found Ol Ari Nyiro teeming with wildlife. I wanted to protect it, even if theoretically this was not my task and nobody expected me to do it. I wanted to protect it because of Paolo, because of Emanuele and because of my own self-respect; because all around us I could see what would happen if I let go. Across the hill of Enghelesha, Colobus farm was being chopped up into small shambas where wildlife had no place. The forest of cedars and podo, the old black acacias, had been cut and made into charcoal. No more magic refuge for the Colobus monkeys and the rare birds was left along the bare slope of the hills once thick with wildflowers and liana. Maize was planted everywhere. Tin roofs dotted the ploughed fields where buffalo and antelope had been abundant.
If I went, the same would happen here: where would the animals go? The forest of Enghelesha was the only large piece of indigenous forest remaining in that part of Laikipia. The variety of flora was exceptional on the ranch because of its vari
ed terrain. I could not bear the thought that all this would inevitably be destroyed by settlement, never to return. The idea of selling that beauty for money not only appeared to me ugly and pointlessly greedy. It would be an act of cowardice which would show that the privilege of being there was wasted on me. More than anything, I wanted to prove that I deserved my guardianship.
Sitting on the top of the hill at Mugongo ya Ngurue, looking down at Baringo through the intact cliffs of the Mukutan Gorge, I touched the rough trunk of the old twisted acacia growing there at the edge of the world, as a sentinel to the silent, vast, majestic scenario. That landscape had been there long before our advent. It would still be there after I left. Not only had I no right to spoil it, but I had to be actively involved in protecting it. Special privileges come at a price: and this was my inheritance.
With my daughter’s birth my life had changed again completely. The gap of over fourteen years between her and Emanuele was a large one to bridge, and all this had happened at a time when, as a result of Paolo’s death, so many new demands on my time and energy had arisen which I could neither avoid nor postpone. All the many tasks of a housewife and a mother were still there, and in addition there was the baby to nurse and to look after. She was of course my priority, and as I did not want to leave her alone, I got myself one of those kangaroo-like baby carriers and took her with me wherever I went, as all African mothers do. I also decided to breastfeed her for as long as the pediatrician suggested. He advised two years, and, having overcome the initial shock, I set about it without a second thought; thinking about it now, this was one of the most sensible decisions I ever took. Also, I had employed Wanjiru to take care of all the practical details of caring for a baby. She became part of our family immediately and for good. She eventually learned Italian, and travelled with us, while Sveva adored her as a second mother.
I Dreamed of Africa Page 14