The rains have come to Laikipia, and it is an awakening. No seed is ever lost, no root sterile, in Africa. Dormant life sprouts again. Grass seems to grow greener overnight. New buds and fresh shoots appear on apparently dead old wood and dry grey branches. Between rocks, on barren tracks, extraordinary lilies bloom, pink and fleshy, and the light balls of fire of the aemantus, like bright red pompons, beckon in the breeze. Gigantic mushrooms break the hard crust of the termite hills. Termites swarm in their nuptial flight, quivering in millions, like golden snow. With this bounty, animals seem to go wild with the pleasure of partaking in this gigantic banquet. Weil fed, with lustrous coats, the antelope and buffalo contentedly chew their cud. Fat elephant and healthy giraffe reach up to feed on the tender new leaves of the upper branches of the acacia, white or yellow with powdery round flowers. The weaverbirds are busy building their nests with the new blades of grass. The air is balmy with the heady perfume of jasmine and mimosa, and the carissa bushes are frothy with clusters of white flowers. The surprise and wonder of the abundance of luxuriant vegetation is renewed every rainy season.
For years I had noticed that our people in Ol Ari Nyiro went out to gather a variety of plants, berries and fruit, wild spinach and twisted roots, which they brought home to cook. Most were delicious, with a tangy unpolluted flavour. People used strange seeds and pods, and the bark of trees, for medicine. In most of their homeland and in native villages these plants are now disappearing, owing to ploughing and the planting of foreign crops, weedkillers, and over-grazing.
I became very interested in the traditional use of herbal remedies, and felt that to record this precious and vanishing knowledge, to discover and use these plants, would be a useful study for the Foundation. I found out that the recognized expert in herbal medicine in our area was a very old Pokot woman, the mother of Langeta, a man we employed to check on the Pokot boundary. I decided to go and find her, to see if she was prepared to share her knowledge and co-operate in a project on ethnobotany, the traditional tribal use of indigenous plants.
I found her sitting outside her hut, children and goats playing around, and in her old eyes an unreachable wisdom. When she saw me she stood up, surrounded by small children, covered with flies, in the red dust and litter and dung of the little yard. Many brass rings, discoloured by age, dangled from the elongated lobes and sides of her ears. Rows of brown bead necklaces encircled her neck. Her skull was shaven along the sides in the traditional way, leaving a crown of long curly hair in tight ringlets like a mane on the top of her head.
I had met her before. She had come with the group of young Nditus and warriors clad in black, walking miles in the hot sun of noon. The dust which their marching feet sent up could be seen in the distance, and their safari song heard high above the treetops. The strong smell of wood-ash, curdled milk, smoke and sweat had been as dense in the still air as the odour of the herds of buffalo, and as recognizable. Like all the rest of them she had danced in the sun of noon, and in the windy night by the light of the fires. She had danced as if time did not matter.
Her name, I now discovered, was Cheptosai Selale.
A small, wizened old woman of the tribe of Pokot, she is the only remaining recognized shaman left in our area. When she dies – and many seasons have added wrinkles to her skin and sapience to her old greenish eyes – all her knowledge will die with her. I went determined, with patience and gentleness, to enlist her help in finding and recording the precious plants whose secrets she had mastered.
I brought her a gift of sugar and tea, soap and salt. I could not find tobacco, but on meeting her I guessed she would seek in her herbs and roots any such remedy for herself.
I remembered Paolo and the special relationship he had had with the wazee of Pokot, and the powerful medicine they had shared with him. I told her I respected and recognized her knowledge, and that I felt it was too valuable to lose. For all the time of our meeting she stood there, small and proud, listening to her son interpreting. She could speak little Swahili and mostly answered in Pokot, and her eyes never left mine; I read in them something powerful and unique. I understood that, before it is too late, we must have the humbleness and the wisdom to ask such people to teach us. We must shed this self-imposed blindness, which veils our perceptions – our peripheral life at the surface – and go down to our core, the source of all things, which we all share.
It was the strangest thing to feel this communication with her, a fund of buried common knowledge, a deep recognition, as of two beings who had shared the same vision and perhaps the same wisdom, almost as if I too had been a medicine woman in another life, and as if she knew this well.
Not once did she blink, yet she was not staring. Without her eyes ever leaving mine, at the end she just nodded. I offered my hand and she took it in hers without shaking it. Her hand was dry and hot, like a stone in the sun.
For the first time betraying any emotion, her face broke into a toothless grin, and I just smiled back: nothing more was needed, and I knew she would help.
I drove back in an elated mood. Suddenly the sky of Africa was more than ever my sky, more than ever I felt rooted in the old dust of the red murrain tracks … in the smell of sage from the tall leleshwa mixed with jasmine and elephant dung and hot dust and fire, which is Laikipia’s smell.
A few months after this meeting, our project on ethnobotany began and progressed with great success, in partnership with the Herbarium, and with the invaluable help of Cheptosai Selale.
If in the beginning I had dealt more with men, I now gradually discovered the women of Ol Ari Nyiro. In Africa rural women seldom get a chance to come out of their shells. In their native villages they till the fields and tend the small herds of domestic animals. On a ranch where the men are employed and there is no land for them to plant, they are confined with the children, dependent on their husbands, and with nothing more than the mere chores of survival to stimulate their lives. They rise with the sun and sleep with the moon. They gather wood which they carry in enormous tidy bundles on their bent, supple backs, to build a fire inside their dark huts which become saturated with dense eye-stinging smoke. The huts are safe and hot like dens, but the temperature drops outside, giving children dangerous chills: chest congestion and pneumonia are among the most common diseases. In the old days in the villages the women would still make utensils and ornaments out of the natural materials gathered in the forests, skins of animals, wood and roots and wild coloured seeds, oddly shaped gourds, and with the trade-beads peddlers used to barter for game trophies and goatskins.
Now the traders do not come any more, and at the weekly market in the village they sell no beads, but garish nylon garments, plastic basins and tin mugs for tea. The skill of making cleverly decorated utensils out of any material available is disappearing fast.
I noticed the amount of empty time the women spent looking into the distance, sitting with children around their huts, waiting for the time to cook their maize meal and vegetables. I discovered that they were keen to do something to occupy their days, and I provided them with beads and cottons, wool and skins, leaving them free to show me what they could produce. I was surprised by the quality and skill, the ingenuity, the meticulous care and the imagination they brought to this task. Blankets and lace, wall-hangings and belts, necklaces and earrings, delicate and exotic, appeared as by magic from their worn, clever hands. With care and patience, a small thriving Art and Craft Centre gradually began in Ol Ari Nyiro, and it was a true satisfaction for me to see the pride and enthusiasm the women put into their work; the proceeds gave them money of their own, and helped them to make their lives better and more fulfilled. There seemed to be no end to what one could find in the cornucopia of Africa.
The Gallmann Memorial Foundation was now firmly established and we needed a logo. It had to be the emblem of the memorial and it had to be evocative of Africa. I felt the two acacias, one small and one bigger, growing on Emanuele’s and Paolo’s graves were ideal. Our friends and I knew thei
r meaning, and to strangers they symbolized the quintessential African tree. I asked Davina Dobie, the artist and friend who had painted the flight of seagulls in Sveva’s nursery, to portray the trees for the logo. She spent a week in Laikipia, and did a sensitive job of love and artistry.
A larger and a smaller tree growing close together, their branches touching.
39
Robin
Biondo era, e bello, e di gentile aspetto … *
Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia
One evening soon after my return from Europe a car stopped in my Nairobi drive. From the door I watched a pair of legs in jeans run down the steps. Slim young legs, safari boots, a spring to the walk, and for an instant, crazily, I thought of Ema. A blue shirt, dark skin, straight fair hair almost bleached to silver, merry blue eyes under bushy blond eyebrows, an elfish smile of full sensuous lips turned up at the corners, brightening a good-looking boyish face: and there was Robin, whom I had not seen in years.
Now he came in from the dark of a night which looked so much like any other, to my lit lounge with the candles and the fire, and sat smiling on my white sofa, legs stretched out on the carpet, as if he had always belonged. He listened intently to my story, and time passed as I told once again of my pain and my sorrow and of the new-found sense of purpose and re-birth. He then spoke easily about his own life, and it was a pleasure for me just to sit there listening, letting my cares slide off like running water.
Robin had been born in Kenya of an English father and a Norwegian mother. His father had been a Wing Commander. His mother came from colourful ancestors who had left the luminescent north of Europe to live in Cuba, Mozambique and finally Kenya, where they became prominent coffee-planters. She herself was born on a ship in Madeira Harbour. She had met the dashing Wing Commander during the war, and he had once smuggled her – and a grand piano – to Cyprus from Nairobi for a party. They were married soon after, and have been devoted to each other ever since.
From his mother Robin inherited an uncommon love and understanding of animals. She – like Robin – was always surrounded by a bizarre assortment of pets; turtles and dogs, cockerels and cats, bushbabies and ducks, and talking parrots.
There was a lightness about Robin. As a new-born baby he had been very sick with blood poisoning, and the doctors at Gertrude’s Garden Pediatric Clinic advised the parents just to go home and let him die. He unexpectedly survived, and for years he remained thin and pale and faintly ghost-like, to bloom, in his later teens, into an unusually attractive young man. An engineer by training, versatile with anything to do with water, machinery and engines, when I met him Robin was working on films, mainly in the art, construction, or special effects departments.
There are people who walk in gloom, and others who walk in sunshine. Robin was one of the these. There ‘was a positive aura about him, a cheerful, pleasant disposition, as if he could cope with whatever happened and could tackle any problem with a light heart.
After that first evening, he came back the next day, and the day after. To my surprise, he admitted that for years he had regarded me as his ideal woman; but I was married to a man he liked and respected. He himself was going through a short and unlucky marriage, and he was nine years younger. He told me that my eulogy to Emanuele had affected him deeply and had made him feel he wanted to meet me again.
Since Emanuele’s death I had nursed the desire to go away one day to a beautiful unknown place with a beautiful person, gentle of soul and understanding – man or woman, it did not matter – and in the new and pure landscape relax and let all memories come and go as they would. I felt Robin would be the ideal person for this, and I confided in him, getting an immediate, positive response. He brought me to a place where I had never been, close to Lake Magadi, and it was a times of perfect magic and mutual discovery. The weather changed many times in only a few hours, from rain to sun to wind to clouds. We watched sacred ibis fish with fluid movements, their reflection in the water of the salt lake as vivid as their real image. We drove back bewitched, holding hands like teenagers. Our relationship was no longer platonic and soon after, as he had moved from Malindi to his parents’ house in Muthaiga because of his work, I invited Robin to come and live with me.
Apart from my husbands, I had never lived with a man. We shared days and nights. We laughed. Again the house echoed with a man’s voice. Men’s clothes hung in the wardrobe and his car was parked in our drive. Robin helped me to exorcize some of the shadows which had been haunting me, and which I had not dared to face. Since Paolo’s death I had wanted to visit the place of the accident, where he had died. Yet up to now I had been incapable of driving again on that road, heavy with traffic and, for me, pregnant with memories of my own. I asked Robin to go with me.
I gathered some gardenias, and one morning he drove me down the Mombasa road. The place was called Hunter’s Lodge, after a famous professional hunter, and was now a hotel. We often used to stop for refreshment at the Lodge on our way from the coast, and I knew it well.
He parked the car at the side of the road, and I got out. I looked up and around, trying to guess what Paolo had seen last: a row of gum trees, the sign of the petrol station, the mutating clouds of Africa. I searched the tarmac for marks of brakes on the smooth grey surface, but the weather had obliterated them long ago. Where was the exact spot? Would the people working there remember? No point. The attendants at the petrol station would certainly be new ones. It did not matter.
I found a place where the grass seemed to grow greener, and some wildflowers bloomed naturally on their own. I closed my ears to the noise of the passing traffic, and my eyes to the curious glances of passers-by. From the speakers in Robin’s car the music of Boccherini floated out, loud and evocative. I arranged my gardenias on the grass. Silence descended on my soul in peaceful layers, while Robin stood by me, quietly supportive, respecting my healing tears of remembrance.
Sveva was three at the time. She missed Emanuele and the crowd of his young friends of whom she had been the mascot, and Robin’s presence and attention filled her unexpressed yearning. At the ranch, he rode out carrying her in front of him on his motorbike, with me on the back. The air smelt of resin, buffalo and things growing, and elephants often crossed the road a few metres ahead, shaking their heads at us and getting on tranquilly with their elephantine life. Laikipia stretched around us in its intact beauty and I felt young and carefree. Sveva laughed, shaking her blonde hair in the wind. Robin was what we both needed at that time in our lives. The dogs ran after us, fighting playfully, barking at every dik-dik, chasing hares in clouds of red dust.
One night Gordon followed my car, and we did not notice he was missing until next day. When we found him he was stuck in the mud in Ngobithu’s Dam, unable to move. He had been there all night. His warm, loving eyes looked at me in acceptance of his fate, with an expression of desperate devotion which haunted me for weeks. Robin drove him straight to the vet in Nairobi, but his kidneys and his battered brave heart could not stand the strain. As soon as the car disappeared along my drive through the avenue of candelabra and I turned to go back inside, with a lump in my throat I noticed that Emanuele’s dog, Angus, who since his death had gone to live with Mapengo and followed him everywhere, had materialized again on my verandah. He sat across the passage in Gordon’s place; he had taken over the leadership of our pack of Alsatians. I knew from this that Gordon would not survive.
When Robin passed me the news on the Laikipia Security network that night, I cried for my old friend and for another severed link with the past. Robin brought him back to Laikipia, taking a day off filming, and we buried him close to the graves in the shade of the bush where he used to watch over me when I sat in remembrance. On his grave I planted little yellow flowers.
There was a serenity, a positive attitude about Robin, and it became my cure. To the delight of my friends, who adopted him immediately, in his love I bloomed. In his company I felt freer and happier than I had been in months. In the cha
os of my psychological life, he was a steadying and positive factor, and he helped me to come to terms with my solitude. I slipped into a period of sunlit happiness, and of intense physical well-being which lasted for a long time. Our relationship was to continue for years, and eventually, when our paths gently moved apart, it evolved into a deep friendship made of love, memories and total mutual trust, which is precious to me and which I shall for ever treasure.
Through Robin I had my first inside contact with the strange world of make-believe of cinema. Seeing people playing the game of films and reproducing reality helped me to come to terms with the real part I had been given to play in life. It was a weird world, where nothing was what it appeared to be. In its novelty, fantasy and absurdity I found distraction and solace for my true pains. I often visited Robin on location with Sveva.
During the filming of Out of Africa I joined him on the coast. A yellow Gypsy Moth biplane had been especially flown from England for the film, a shiny jewel of a flying-machine, unexpectedly sturdy, which could land and take off practically anywhere. In this case it had to land on the beach, and once they let me fly in it. It was like flying in a romantic time-machine. As light as the moth whose name it bore, the yellow biplane took off from the thin strip of deserted beach left clear by the receding tide, guarded by scraggy dunes and fringed with palm trees, which had been fenced off so that seaweeds could still draw their characteristic natural patterns on the shore and the mob of tourist feet would not interrupt the smoothness of the sand.
Robin, carrying Sveva on his shoulders, a blonde four years old in a white caftan, waved up to me, smiling. We circled high over a choppy sea rippled by the monsoon, the plane surged agile in the stormy sky into the wind which blew in my hair through the open cockpit; I wanted to scream with pleasure. In a moment one overtook the boundaries of time and space, and I passed from the silence and natural rhythms of the sea as it used to be, to the upturned faces of strangers, buoys and outboard engines, and from the past to the present, in a few seconds. When we landed again to the sudden quiet and stillness of the beach left only to the mercy of nature, the impact was almost physical. I emerged from the plane with the dizziness of one who has travelled seventy years in a few minutes. The inadequacy of our conception of time hit me once again, positively, ripping through the limiting certainty that we know everything and that time and space must conform to our rules. I clearly saw that time, as we perceive it, is man-made, tied precariously to this dimension, and so is the boundary of death. ‘As sure as the sand, it is written, we shall be together again,’ Emanuele had written in his diary one 19 March, Paolo’s death anniversary. It was true, and it was a wonderful feeling.
I Dreamed of Africa Page 26