I Dreamed of Africa

by Kuki Gallmann

  I had always loved Lake Turkana. Its ancient emptiness fascinated me. A ceaseless hot dry wind blew from the endless silence of millennia. On the calm surface of the lake the sun set purple and indigo. We walked on the black volcanic sand which smelt of soda, where strange gigantic fishbones had been washed ashore from its mysterious depths. When we swam the water was warm, as if a continuous slow fire, burning underneath, made it simmer.

  A splash, very close, rippled the surface. ‘Just a crocodile,’ grinned Richard, undisturbed. ‘Don’t worry. They are well fed.’ Eyes protruding above the water level, these huge scaly reptiles spend their torpid uneventful lives as part of a larger scheme, fitting into the wise equilibrium of Nature.

  Sitting on the open verandah of Richard’s windswept cottage that night, sipping some excellent chilled wine, I felt cleansed and renewed by the majesty of the lake. The stark, undecorated simplicity of those rocks and bare shores was a contrast to the lush vegetation of Laikipia. It seemed as if we were at one with our ancestors, and I felt the wind of time blowing away my unresolved pains, blending them with the pains and sorrows of all the people who had trod the Earth, from their very beginning up here to this moment in my own history. The healing effect was what Richard felt it would be and I was grateful for his intuition.

  On my return Laikipia looked greener, richer and fuller than I had ever experienced it. Up there I had faced my deepest nature: alone but not lonely, without excuses behind which to hide, I had again felt that I could well and fearlessly be in my own company. Slowly my open wound was forming a scar.

  I started flying more often with Iain Douglas-Hamilton. Iain flew with total ease, very low, a glorious way of exploring the African bush. He may have taken risks, as some said, but I knew he could cope with competence and courage in any emergency. For me, flying with Iain was not just exciting, it was pure pleasure. Although his nonchalance about details was found alarming by some, I was totally confident in his ability to deal with any drama with nerves of steel and a cool head. He flew very low, scanning the contours of the terrain as if searching it with his eyes, so we could catch every detail of the animals we were trying to spot. You saw more from Iain’s plane than from any other.

  One weekend Iain was staying in Laikipia with a couple of friends and their children when on a cool morning, just after breakfast, our attention was attracted by some cries coming from the direction of the swimming-pool. There, behind the ‘baby enclosure’ I had built to prevent Sveva, who could not swim yet, from falling in, her small figure stood alone, calling ‘Mamma’. Even from the distance I could see there was something strange about her looks, and her voice was weird. She was drenched in water. Overturning the chair where I had been sitting, and without stopping to apologize, I reached her in a few fast, desperate strides, Iain following. She was dressed in heavy overalls, socks and Wellington boots, and a sweater. She was soaked to the bone, her boots full of water, her clothes and hair dripping. I took her in my arms, and she was so heavy that I staggered under her weight. Only then did she begin to cry. The story came through broken sobs while I undressed and dried her, and it left us all bewildered.

  She had been playing with the other little girl, who had accidentally pushed her into the water; terrified by what she had done, instead of calling us she had run away to hide. Sveva had sunk straight to the bottom, her tiny body weighed down by all her heavy clothes, incapable of floating and unable yet to swim. And then?

  ‘And then, Mamma, I opened my eyes under water and it was all blue and cold and I could see the white ladder, a bit far … I could not reach it … so I kicked my feet on the bottom and just managed to grasp it, and I climbed out … as Ema had taught me I should do if I ever fell in … like a frog. I am cold now, I am afraid … but there, I wasn’t …’

  We stayed speechless, looking down at her, a wet toddler of not yet three. I knew she could not swim at all … there was no explanation. I felt faint at the image of what would normally have happened … and had not. I started trembling with delayed shock. Iain seized my shoulders in his hands to steady me, shook me a little, looked deep into my eyes. ‘Kuki,’ he said slowly, trying to sound calm, ‘Kuki, your daughter is going to live for ever, can’t you see? She managed to swim out on her own – by God! – fully dressed from a deep pool at the age of two, before she has learnt even to float. I’ll be damned … there are truly things science cannot explain.’

  Sveva was unusually quiet all day long and so was I, unable to take in the implications of what could have happened. To distract us from this pensive mood, Iain flew us to Carletto’s for the morning, Sveva wrapped in a blanket in my arms. Absentmindedly, I watched the shadow of the plane moving fast through the dry shrubs, scaring away warthogs down their holes, pink-necked ostriches trotting off, and zebra running in the dust a few feet below us.

  In the early afternoon, the sun shining, I put Sveva into her swimming costume and went into our pool with her.

  ‘Show me how you did it. Let’s see if you can manage to do it again.’ But she could not. Although practically naked and light, in the warm midday water, with my reassuring presence, she sank down and I had to grab her by her hair, spluttering wildly … in the morning, she had not even swallowed any water, she had not coughed … Iain and I looked at each other unbelieving, and to this day neither of us can explain what really had happened, what force benign, unknown, had saved her life.

  Often, in the months and years to come, when at night she sometimes woke up because of a cough or a nightmare, by the time I reached her bedside I found her already quiet, soothed, and she told me that Emanuele had been there sitting with her, just as he used to do, and she was now consoled. When something uncanny happens, something beyond the parameters of what we call ‘normal’, when fantasy, memories and magic meet and disconcert us, we label it ‘unbelievable’ and dismiss it, since contemplating the unprovable makes us uneasy as if treading uncertain and insecure terrain. But such things do happen, and not to be able to explain how or why is only our limitation; our inability to understand is our problem, and does not affect their authenticity. The day Jack Block died and disappeared under water in a river in Chile, his boat, moored at the jetty of his farm in Naivasha, sank for no apparent reason. There is no question that Paolo knew he was going to die soon, and that when he died, before anyone told me, I instantly knew, and I grew pale, laid my cheeks upon my hands and cried in anguish.

  There is a tune Sveva later took to whistling – I cannot whistle for the life of me, and she can, like a nightingale – the very tune Paolo whistled all the time. And when I ask her who taught it to her she naturally answers, ‘Nobody. I just know it.’ There is her left index finger: perfectly normal, lovely and flexible. But when she is concentrating, she curls it up and it becomes like Paolo’s broken finger, the one he could not move after the first accident. We do not know how or why, but it remains a fact that she does.

  A few days after the swimming-pool episode I heard one morning on our internal radio network that a dead leopard had been reported by a herdsman on the Sambara hill, close to Enghelesha. I drove there, and, with the young assistant manager and a couple of trackers, we went to look for the carcass. It was a rule in Laikipia never to leave a dead animal without trying to find the reason for its death. We left the car and proceeded on foot. It was further than we had thought. In the June sky, slate-grey clouds had started to gather and it looked heavy with imminent rain. Finally we found the bloated, stinking leopard below a combretum tree on the side of a hill. It was a young male, badly mauled, scratched and with signs of bites: possibly a fight with a stronger competitor for the favours of the same female. The skin was already damaged and the fur peeling off in tufts of matted hair: no chance of skinning it, and we decided to leave it there.

  Just then, the first large warm drop of rain fell from the skies on my head, and thunder shook the earth. A cold wind began to blow in scattered gusts. Soon rain mixed with hail started falling, biting like icy needles into
my bare arms and legs. There was no escape. The car was about five miles away. It was the first heavy shower of the long rains of 1983. It ran through the dry steep paths like a river, carrying twigs, leaves and branches, small dead birds, a grass snake, lost dung beetles, and in places reached up in muddy swirls from our ankles to our knees and hips. We could not seek refuge below the sparse trees for fear of lightning. The sky seemed to have descended on the Highlands like a grey lid of water, squashing us, drenching us to the bone. I think I have never been colder in my life. Often, white lightning zigzagged across the sky, closer than I dared to think, and thunder exploded in magnified rumbles. Wading through churning torrents in the billowing wind, we walked back to the car, and it took hours.

  In those hours, through the blinding rain, deafened by thunder, scratched by thorns and branches, in the howling gale, a sort of catharsis took place in me, as if the storm had symbolically washed away the old clinging skin and the debris of the old searing pain.

  When, with chattering teeth and wet hair, we finally reached the car and the assistant manager’s house he lent me a pullover and one of his kikois. Towelling my hair and body dry in the bathroom with a rough towel, I looked at myself in the small rusty mirror, as I had not in weeks. Wet locks hung around my thin face. New grey showed through the blonde of my hair, and new deep lines marked the sides of my mouth. Yet my dark tanned skin was fresh and dewy. My grey-green eyes looked washed also, and bigger and clearer in my haggard face. My shoulderblades were showing, my hands with the short nails were slimmer, my arms thinner: I looked in an odd way much older and much younger.

  Wrapped in clothes too big for me, barefoot, I crouched in front of the fireplace where a roaring fire of mutamayo had been built by the house servant, who now brought me a tray of strong sweet tea and slices of thick brown bread, just baked, with homemade farm butter. I ate as if for the first time in my life, ravenously, savouring every mouthful, as I had not in weeks, while slowly the warmth of the fire penetrated my bones and a sense of physical wellbeing pervaded me; I felt pleasantly drowsy, and fit. I think that was the best meal I have ever had in my life.

  Outside, the storm had subsided, and night was falling fast. Someone came in with an unusual report: seventeen steers had been sheltering from the storm under a tree in the grass ley, lightning had struck the tree, and they had all been electrocuted. The young man went out to check, and I slowly drove the thirty kilometres to my house at Kuti, on the other side of the ranch. From the open car window came the song of life of a million frogs. The car kept sliding in the dark red mud, leaving new tracks, like a decoration on creamy chocolate fudge. Just before Kuti, green eyes shone in the car beams – a spotted body – and the live leopard, a dik-dik hanging from his mouth, was gone, swallowed by the night.

  The beauty and privilege of being here, now, made me euphoric. On bare feet I walked to Emanuele’s grave, and to his orange fire. My head on Paolo’s tree, as on his shoulder, I sighed deeply, and the night air smelt new and good.

  An idea was beginning to take shape in my mind, a positive, triumphant idea to turn their irreversible end into a new beginning. It matured slowly, and it became my purpose. If Emanuele and Paolo were no longer here, the place, the animals and I still were, and so were the reasons for my choice.

  Looking through Emanuele’s things one day, I had come across a book Paolo had given him on his last birthday: that tragic, gruesome and yet prophetic book of Peter Beard, The End of the Game. Paraphrasing the famous piece ‘Desiderata’, Paolo had written:

  Emanuele, you are a Son of the Universe. No more, no less than a tree or a star or a stone. You have the right to be here. With all its Ends and putting out of the Fires, it is still a beautiful world for the one who can see a new beginning every time the sun sets on our Mukutan. Be careful. Be happy. I love you. Paolo.

  There was a finality in these words, as in an epitaph, but I could now see in them a new meaning: like stones, like hills, like anything with shape in nature, we had the right to be here. Yet we did not have the right to pollute or to destroy the environment which surrounded us and which had an equal right to existence. In Emanuele’s open, dead eyes I had seen reflected the sky and the trees he could see no longer. He had passed and gone ahead, but Nature survived as before, and in it we had to live and go on and be gentle.

  This was the lesson in Emanuele’s death. The love of his life had been his death: but it should not be also his end. If he had physically gone, his spirit lingered, and the place and I were still there. Like Paolo, Emanuele had been an idealist. He would have gone to university in the following September to read Zoology and Range Management, and would have come back one day with all the new ideas. He would have implemented his acquired skills on the ranch, combining innovative techniques with traditional knowledge and the principles in which he believed: keeping the balance between the wild and the tame, learning the secrets of Nature and applying them to its protection and balanced development.

  I considered the future of Africa with its growing population of people, children of today in whose hands the destiny of Kenya will soon lie. Children brought up on the outskirts of the towns, where nothing wild had been left, their minds confused and polluted by alien religions, by poverty and lack of worthy goals. These children had never seen and been taught to appreciate the beauty of their country. The average urban African has never seen an elephant; how could these people make a policy which would enable them to protect the environment and at the same time ensure their survival? Was all the wilderness destined to disappear through lack of knowledge and planning? I certainly could not change everything, but I could not tolerate the thought of this happening to Ol Ari Nyiro.

  The only solution was education, offering the chance of experiencing at first hand the land and traditions of their forebears and proving that one can and should coexist with the wild, in harmony … that one can, and should, learn how to utilize Nature without spoiling it, in fact protecting it at the same time. In Ol Ari Nyiro, we already had it all. The wildlife, the indigenous flora and the people and the domestic animals and the crops. We not only had the springs and the Mukutan stream, but also the man-made reservoirs; the well-graded roads, and the narrow paths made by generations of buffalo and antelope going to the water. The place was an oasis where animals were welcome, and where they found refuge, food, their ideal habitat. But the place was an operating ranch, with domestic stock, plantations and people on it. We had already proved that it could happen. We should try harder, do it better, become a model of how to achieve this goal.

  The elephants walked here from the north along their ancient routes, which they had known and used since the beginning of elephants on Earth, but which were now increasingly interrupted by cultivated fields, mushrooming along their safari paths faster than they could possibly adapt to the change. Inevitably, they would not resist the temptation of ripe fields of maize, and they would forage on it as they would on the grasses and bushes which the maize had replaced. Although innocent, they would then be seen as destructive, branded as crop-raiders, shot on control: the rights of man would always win over the rights of the wild animals, unjust as this might be, unless a way could be found to combine the wild with the tame, and to plan a safe route for them to tread. Something needed to be done urgently to avoid the injustice of their gradual elimination.

  The descendants of those first rhinos Delamere had met at the beginning of the century were still here, in Ol Ari Nyiro. But how many did we have? What was known of them? Why had they chosen this area as a refuge? What were they eating?

  The people of the ranch still used the indigenous plants they gathered locally to cure a myriad of diseases: which plants? Which diseases? Why could we not find out more about them, learn these secrets from the old people who still remembered, and record them before it was too late? There was no end to what one could do to utilize the land as well as respect it. It was a matter of taking a step, several steps further, to get adequate help, and there was
no reason why I should not succeed. I became determined to do all I could to make of Ol Ari Nyiro a unique example of how this ideal could be achieved. The ranch and its animals, wild and domestic, and its plants, cultivated and indigenous, and its people, living in a changing Africa but still remembering – just – their traditional skills, would be established as a living monument to the memory of the men I had loved. If the country and its nature and people could benefit from their deaths, they would have served a purpose.

  There was the time when an aeroplane flew low over the house, and a friend emerged who had come especially from Italy to bring me a message. ‘Enough is enough. You do not belong to this place. What more do you want to lose? Your friends are worried. Come back to Italy.’

  I walked with him to the graves at the bottom of the garden: birds chirped on Paolo’s tree; in its shade Emanuele’s was already growing sturdily, as a young boy in the shelter and protection of his father’s love. Two red hibiscus had been laid on the graves by Sveva and by me, as happened every day. I stood there in the peaceful shade and looked at my friend. The life of town and business had not been kind to him. Deep wrinkles lined his face and he had the hurried look of people who have no time to stop and listen to their inner voice, and care for things wild and free.

  ‘I have buried them here because here is home,’ I said gently. ‘I have planted two African trees because one day their bodies will be transformed into them. I have decided to stay on and to make a success of it; otherwise all these lessons would be wasted on me. I am here to stay. You are kind, and I appreciate your concern, and I thank you. But I will not come back to live in Italy, I will not escape and give up. I am in Kenya to stay, but I must earn this privilege.’