Along the newly surfaced road beyond Nyahururu there are small farms, villages of wooden huts, patches of forest, where it is now rare to see any wild animal.
The tarmac ends abruptly. We pass through densely settled areas: ploughed fields dotted with huts, roofs of corrugated iron, small herds of goats and scrawny cattle guarded by vulpine dogs, bare stretches of land with stumps of half-burnt trees, which once was Colobus. From the side of the road Kikuyu children wave to us, and we wave back. Some of them come to the ranch with their teachers once or twice a year, in the lorry I send out for them, to see the wildlife which no longer has a place in the cultivated fields where they now live.
A little man seems to materialize by the side of the dusty track in front of us, and raises his hand in greeting, almost shyly. Intent on the road, eager as ever to arrive, I slow down slightly, but I do not stop. There is something familiar about his figure … Wanjiru and Sveva turn their heads towards him, and cry in unison with the same surprise, ‘It’s Luka!’
I slam on the brakes and the car stops in a cloud of red dust, through which he runs towards us, small lithe body bent forward obliquely to beat the pressure of the air and gain speed: his characteristic way of running effortlessly which I would recognize anywhere. Too many times we had run together after or from another running beast, and I had tried to copy his natural suppleness, the angle of his gait. In pearly dawns in coral fiery sunsets. He stops in front of my open window.
‘Luka.’
‘Memsaab. Kainda. Wanjiru. Kumbe, wewe badu najua mimi!’ (‘You still recognize me!’).
He has aged. Some teeth are missing. He is much thinner, the skin tight on his cheekbones. The red eyes glitter with a hint of the old spirit. He tells us he has a shop, a shamba at Lariak, he is fine … he misses the bush. ‘Habari wa faru?’ (‘How are the rhino?’). Nostalgia veins his voice. He will come to the house one day to see us. Soon. Next month, perhaps. We say goodbye. In the mirror, his diminutive figure becomes smaller, the hand raised, unmoving. Sveva waves until the dust settles on the memory of his shadow.
At the end of the murram track we reach the gate. From massive posts hangs a sign carved out of old cedar: OL ARI NYIRO RANCH. LAIKIPIA RANCHING CO. Underneath, newer: ‘The Gallmann Memorial Foundation.’ The gate opens, the askari smiles his welcome. Like all visitors, I sign the visitors’ book. My first question is always, ‘Habari wa nuua?’ (‘Any news of rain?’). The gate closes behind us, and we have arrived in Africa.
Rolling hills. Pale green leleshwa. Vivid red soil. Guinea-fowl in large flocks. To the south, at the feet of Ol Ari Nyiro’s side of the Enghelesha hill, spreads the untouched forest where colobus, leopard and buffalo, rare birds and butterflies, still find refuge. Next to it the grass leys where herds of fat Boran cattle graze, and the fields planted with maize and oats, sorghum and wheat and beans.
The game with Sveva is to be the first to spot a four-legged wild animal. It does not take long. A herd of impala. Running warthogs. A male zebra, massive, twitching tail over the round fat rump, surveys us from the middle of the track, snorts through black lips and trots after his females.
‘Elephant!’ cries Sveva. Feeding quietly off the thorn trees, a group of females and young ones hardly notice us. Trunks lift up tentatively to catch our scent, ears flap, stomachs rumble. A flock of pelicans fish the Nyukundu Dam. On the east side, a large herd of Dorper sheep, white bodies and black heads, drink, tended by their herders. Next to them, gentle waterbuck look on untroubled, handsome and harmless like hairy cartoon does. Buffalo drink at the Big Dam, deep in water to their knees. Black heads lift, wet muzzles dribble, oblong ears listen.
The road climbs up to Kuti through clearings and luggas, and round the corner of the airstrip, my garden appears, ablaze with flowers, the euphorbia grown to a colonnade, resonant with bird voices. The twin thorn trees are now visible from a distance, and I salute them. Simon comes to the car smiling, and we shake hands. ‘Ejok.’ ‘Ejoknui.’ The dogs jump around, howling their pleasure.
Every return home to Laikipia seems the same, yet something is always different. Small things. Perhaps there are new puppies to meet, or orchids have bloomed for the first time; elephant have defied the electric fence and uprooted another pepper tree or broken the water pipe; the leopard has come to steal the dogs’ meat; a rabid jackal has had to be shot at the gate; a cobra has chosen to nest in the fish-pond. Someone has been taken sick with malaria, and has had to be sent to hospital; wild bees have swarmed again above the ceiling in Emanuele’s room.
Unusual and memorable events, like one special evening not long after the ivory-burning.
My dogs were ready for the evening walk, when Simon’s silent shape materialized at my door. His impassive face seemed to have lost some of its normal composure.
‘Memsaab’, he whispered gravely, ‘Warani wa tayeri ya Pokot alikuja kusalamia wewe. Ni saidi ya mia. Unajaza kiwanja.’ (‘The young circumcised Pokot warriors have come to greet you. They are over a hundred. They fill the entire airstrip.’) He seemed awestruck. ‘Ni kitu kubwa sana.’ (‘It is a very big thing.’)
I went out on the lawn with the dogs. The golden light of the late afternoon silhouetted the black of the hills; the ridge of Mugongo wa Ngurue looked like the profile of a whale about to plunge down into the mystery of the Mukutan Gorge. Orange tinged the clouds as if an invisible fire burnt below the rim of the horizon.
The dogs tensed, straightening their ears and pointing towards the west. Black noses quivered, sensing a strangeness in the wind. Alarm ruffled the longer hair on their backs, as in a pack of hyenas alert to the hunt.
With a cadence of numberless cattle, of pounding buffalo hooves, an army of marching bare feet stamping in rhythm approached slowly from the plain. From it lifted a weird moaning sound, low and vibrating, powerful and eerie, coming closer: the circumcision song of the young Pokot warriors.
I took Sveva’s hand, her blue eyes widened by curiosity. The dogs surrounded us. I turned to Simon. ‘Tell them they are welcome. We shall wait for them.’
It was a long way from Italy, from the tame surroundings of my childhood: blackboards inscribed with Greek, classrooms shaded in greys, ancient paintings, bells calling from churches, history hovering in the fogs of autumn.
An unending procession of identical brown shapes moved like wooden spirits between the acacias and the euphorbias of the drive. Their faces were covered by long plaited hair falling forward to the waist. From breast to knee they were wrapped in skins, made soft and clinging by grease and red ochre. Their features hidden and their bodies concealed, they appeared sexless and remote, like ghosts or angels. They shook their hair from side to side, dramatically, like moving masks, revealing nothing.
It was as if the earth had come alive, taking the shape of humans. Each held a new ceremonial bow, and arrows burnt with intricate patterns of rusty brown and ivory white. They sang their haunting song, and they were well over a hundred. They approached spiralling in a single row, endlessly circling round and round, advancing indirectly in sign of friendship. In front walked the old chiefs. I recognized a few of them, ostrich feathers stuck in their skull-caps, black shukas fastened to their shrunken hips, sandals of uncured hide tied to their gnarled feet. They carried spears, the blades covered and lowered as in peace.
Before we knew it, the warriors stopped around us in an almost perfect circle. Sveva and I waited in the middle, on the manicured lawn carved out of the wilderness, among the flowers, our large dogs surrounding us. Our fair skin and hair stood out, and I realized that she and I were the only females present at this ceremony. Our European origin, my position as guardian of this land, gave us, I supposed, the status of men.
Yet there had been a time, only few years ago, when these same Pokot had come to kill our rhino.
The chiefs advanced to shake our hands. ‘Sopai’ (‘I greet you’), the oldest chief said. ‘Epah.’ (‘And I greet you’), I answered.
Langeta – the son of Chept
osai Selale, the old medicine-woman of the herbs – came close to interpret for me.
‘Kuki, we come in peace, to greet you and wish you prosperity. Our war with the Turkana rebels is over and this is a time of rejoicing for the Pokot, because it is the end of our first circumcision ceremony in twenty-three years. Every manyatta has sent some of their young warriors to you, and none of them shall forget this day, and what it means.
‘We have walked across your boundary to state our friendship and our co-operation. You, Musungu, have been fair to us, and we shall be loyal to you and we come to thank you. We want you to know that we consider you as one of us. You have helped us, and we shall help you. We shall not disturb the animals for which you care. What we are saying now cannot be undone and shall not be forgotten, for this is a sacred ceremony for the Pokot, and God is watching.
‘These young men were circumcised and are now healed. Tomorrow, and forever after, they shall dress as men, but today they will sing and dance for you. If you have any wish, speak.’
What more could I wish for? They had come to greet me in my home in the heart of Africa. I had become a figure in their life, as they had in mine. These wild Pokot warriors stood among my flower-beds, under the trees I had planted and seen growing, to honour me, a girl of Veneto, whose name they knew, accepting me as one of them. My childhood visions were realized beyond hope.
At the edge of the garden two yellow fever trees stood, reminders of the price I had paid in loss and sorrow to gain the privilege of protecting this land. They evoked in my mind Paolo’s and Emanuele’s faces. If the God of Pokot was watching, so were they. Love could not die: my awareness, responsibility and sense of belonging had grown out of my love for them.
As if in a well-rehearsed choreography, eight of the man-shapes advanced and closed around us in a tight circle. They smelt of smoke and sweat and animal fat. They put a gourd on the ground in the middle.
I looked at Simon, who stood watch at the limit of the circle waiting for my signal, and now came forward and gave me my pouch. Instinctively I knew what should be done. I bent and put a symbolic offering in the gourd.
In unison the eight young warriors spat on us in a drizzle a ceremonial blessing, and at that moment from more than a hundred throats the moaning began again. As the hair shook over their covered faces, I could make out the sound of three words I recognized: ‘Therra gnow-gnow, Mama Kuki’ (‘Thank you, Mama Kuki’).
‘Therra gnow-gnow,’ I answered humbly.
As one man, they shook their heads, the hair fell backwards, and for a fleeting moment I could see their exposed features.
I knew instantly that this was the highest honour. I went around the circle with Sveva, thanking each of them. I shook every hand, one by one, in the triple Pokot handshake I had learnt in Paolo’s days. Faceless once more, the young men sang ‘Therra gnow-gnow’ over and over again, hypnotically in refrain, so that it became a natural sound like the voice of an animal of the earth or a bird of the wind, lingering long as an echo well after they had gone.
After the last Pokot had left, Sveva and I walked to our trees at the end of the garden. The fire of wild olive burned below these, as it did every night. Like the ivory fire a few nights before, it was reflected from her golden hair and skin, while her eyes seemed to reflect the experiences of her unusual childhood.
The limpid sky of the equator, fringed by the leaves of our thorn trees, was studded with millions of bright stars unknown. ‘Some of those stars,’ I remembered Emanuele saying to me one night when we had camped out at the Nagirir Dam, ‘died millions of years ago. Yet we now see their light.’
I told Sveva, and we looked up together, feeling fragile yet strong, part of the universe, in the comforting perception of eternity. What she will be one day will come from the experiences of her childhood. There was hope. A time long gone I had been a little girl who dreamed of Africa.
Hand-in-hand we walked back to the house. It had been an extraordinary day and I wanted to think about it, and to record it in my diary.
The box of ebony inlaid with brass where I keep my pens has a false bottom. There I have kept Paolo’s letters. I took them out. It was years since I had read them.
On the top of a page of brittle airmail paper, he had written: ‘Kuki’. Below, he had traced the contour of his hand. A singularly slim hand.
At the bottom, he had written: ‘I love you. P.’
Now I put my hand over the outline of his, wishing I could still feel its warmth.
There were little notes. One, scribbled on the side of a label said: ‘I WANT your baby.’
On a folded page tom from a school book, that Paolo never had the time to give me, and strangely I did not remember having seen before, I now read with the choking awareness of after:
… you empty your heart in POETRY. As a last thing I ask you to write poetry, and one day to let us read it. You have the gift of seeing, feeling and communicating. I have wasted the time I was given without pausing long enough to see and to feel, but you have not. Perhaps you have paid much for what you have achieved. Perhaps it is the simplest thing of all, but because it takes a lifetime to learn, it is the only important gift you can give us. To all of us who have loved you, and love you. Only in this way will the whole belong again to us who loved you; good and bad, joy and ecstasy, melancholy and pain, people and places, e come era il tempo … the only true quality of real love is immortality … I shall always see you, darling shadow, on the lawn in Laikipia, with the dogs, writing your poetry. And in your poems I shall find again, with persistent devotion and unending joy, the dazzling country of your butterfly soul to which I have given my heart. Be happy. Your P.
P.S. If you do not do it for me, do it for Ema.
I stared at that letter for a long time. The silence in my bedroom was broken only by the crackling fire. From a black-and-white photograph on the mantelpiece, Paolo in the rubber dinghy at the Big Dam, Emanuele in front of him riding bareback deep in water, waved to me a last goodbye. Still tied to the central beam of my four-poster bed was the severed nylon thread from which the ostrich egg had once hung, protecting a mystery. From the side of my chair, like another ostrich egg, hung Emanuele’s white motorbike helmet, which had protected his head. In the next room Sveva slept with her dreams.
I pondered on the past, on all the omens. I had no choice. The only true quality of real love is immortality.’
Surrounded by my memories that night, I took my pen and I began to write.
Laikipia, July 1989
1. Ol Ari Nyiro: Paolo and Gordon at ‘Paulo’s Rocks’
2. Emanuele had a feeling for all reptiles. With a giant tortoise on Bird Island, Seychelles
3. Emanuele and Cinders
4. The lion hunt: Emanuele and three marauding lions
5. Paolo
6. Emanuele with an agama and a minute house snake
7. Emanuele and Kike
8. Waving goodbye: Emanuele, Paolo and Gordon at the Big Dam
9. Paolo, Emanuele and Luka after a Tharaka dance
10. The first snake: Emanuele and Kaa
11. Paolo’s funeral
12. Mirimuk, Luka and the security at Paolo’s funeral
13. The baby: Kuki, Sveva and Emanuele
14. Emanuele and Sveva
15. The last Easter: Emanuele, Sveva and green grass snakes
16. Sveva and the house staff at Kuti
17. Emanuele with a puff adder in the snake pit at Kuti
18. Emanuele, Mirimuk and security people at Maji ya Nyoka
19. Dudu, Emanuele and Saba dancing on the roof
20. The Longest Night
21. Luka at Emanuele’s funeral
22. Friends at Emanuele’s funeral: Saba, Simon Evans and Mapengo
23. Mapengo
24. The snakes go
25. The last snake
26. Alone with Gordon (far right)
27. Iain, Kuki and Sveva at the graves
28. Pokot dancers at Emanue
le’s rodeo
29. Kuki and her dogs
30. Sveva: the ivory fire
31. Kuki, Sveva and Rastus in the garden at Kuti
Postscript: Resurrection
… But if we listen to the child who lives in our soul, our eyes will grow bright. If we do not lose contact with that child we will not lose contact with life.
Paulo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept
On the top of the hill of Mugongo ya Ngurue (The Hog’s Back’), my sister the tree, the old wise acacia under whose shade so many times I had stood pondering on the strange twists of my destiny withered and died during the devastating drought of the year 2000. She died standing, dark grey and massive, twisted by generations of suns and rains, but on the parched broken branches, encrusted with the shrivelled, calcified leaves of a last, improbable blooming, on the old dead matriarch’s skin, colonies of ants still busied themselves in scattered columns, and life went on.
In the course of time Ol Ari Nyiro has changed, for the better. It began with I Dreamed of Africa.
When my first book was launched in Kenya in 1991, Amubahi Shah, the patriarch of a wonderful family of Kenyan Indians who own the largest chain of bookshops here and who were immensely supporting to me at that time, told me with an affectionate twinkle in his kind eyes: ‘For as long as your place is a cattle ranch, and cattle are sold to slaughter houses, it will never flourish. Remember this.’
I did not forget.
I had never really liked the idea of so much time, energy and resources going into keeping alive, against all odds, those meek creatures for three exhausting years, in our ragged and precipitous terrain covered in thick bush, where everything seemed determined to attack them. We had to protect the calves from leopard, hyena, cheetah and a full range of diseases, and later defend them from lion, wild dogs and cattle rustlers’ periodic forays on full-moon nights; we vaccinated them against weird, deadly viruses, dipped them weekly in costly poisons to prevent parasite infections brought by buffalo, and having failed to fatten them off the thin, silvery savannah grass of the hills, we had to plough massive fields to plant nutritious grass leys at Enghelesha, only to put them one day on a lorry and sell them, cheaply, to Nairobi butchers. It seemed a pointless struggle.
I Dreamed of Africa Page 30