The Ghosts of Happy Valley

by Juliet Barnes

  The old woman, Wanjiru, told us that she’d picked pyrethrum for Alice and helped with her tree nurseries. ‘She was a very good woman,’ she said firmly, repeating this to nods from the others. Her husband, Kariuki, now totally blind, had looked after Alice’s cows. Alice had been very good to her staff, the old couple insisted: she protected them and gave them medicines when they were sick. They called her wacheke, which Solomon explained is Kikuyu for ‘thin’; in their eyes at least, Alice was underweight, and a thin woman, to a traditional Kikuyu man, is a useless woman.

  ‘The area still keeps Harris’s nickname,’ Solomon added fondly. ‘The people around there call it Wacheke!’

  I’d imagined we might get a few less complimentary stories, but all the wazee kept agreeing that Alice had been a very ‘good’ woman – perhaps the Kiswahili words mzuri sana, meaning ‘very good’, were also becoming lost in translation.

  There were ears to our walls. The volume of voices rose as the curious crowd swelled outside. The one window and door had been firmly shut, so presumably they were waiting for us to emerge so they could get a better look at us, or more probably me. Blonde white women were a rarity up here.

  ‘These young people have no respect!’ admonished the only mzee who spoke English. ‘Happy Valley has become Problem Valley.’ He spoke about the pressure on land in this now poor area, and how some families still have ten children. Without hope of a sound education or job prospects, many youngsters escape from their unhappy situation by using alcohol, marijuana and even heroin. He told us with a sigh: ‘Our young people copy foreign styles. They become Rastafarians, go to the disco and dance to reggae.’

  Solomon launched suddenly into a speech about the forests being destroyed and rivers drying up. ‘Yes,’ agreed the English-speaking mzee, ‘even the forest guards are cutting the trees and selling the wood, because you see their salaries are too low to survive on.’

  ‘But they would still do the same if their salaries were very high,’ said Solomon sadly, ‘because the problem is just greed and corruption everywhere.’

  A few wazee hadn’t spoken yet. ‘That one knows no other place than here,’ said Solomon, indicating one old man who was staring absent mindedly into his tin mug. Actually, Kabiru seemed oblivious of anything, including our presence.

  Karihe, who had no teeth at all, suddenly told us that he blamed the population increase today on the young, unmarried girls. ‘They have children too young and they are refusing to listen to their parents!’

  ‘You remember Harris?’ Solomon prompted: ‘Wacheke?’

  After a vacant stare at me, as if somehow trying to make the connection, Karihe nodded. ‘Wacheke! Eeeeh! She had a car, but she transported her pyrethrum in carts.’ He shook his head, then took up a new thread. ‘Wacheke! She had pet gazelles, three ostrich and even a lion. She had a lot of cows.’ There was a pregnant pause before he suddenly looked at me, almost accusingly. ‘She shot herself at five in the evening and her staff called the manager of the neighbouring farm. She was buried by Murango, Gatitu and another man. Eeeeh! They were each given a cow as a reward. They were sad when she died because they were very devoted to Wacheke.’ Having made this contribution, Karihe relapsed into unbroken silence.

  I asked about drinking and drugs and wild parties. But the elders shook their heads. No, Wacheke didn’t smoke or drink.

  ‘She closed her door and was completely isolated from other people,’ said one.

  ‘She had no husband, but she had lots of white friends,’ added another.

  ‘She didn’t shoot animals,’ explained a third.

  ‘She was very good to everybody . . .’

  The swelling crowd outside occasionally became too noisy. Solomon would then stride out and order them to keep away and keep quiet. It was briefly effective. A shaft of light fell across our table as the young girl who seemed to be in charge of kitchen affairs came in through the back door. I could see a skein of blue sky above a small square of golden wheat. A pair of wet trainers were drying on a post in front of a pit-latrine, absorbing the smell of woodsmoke that issued from the kitchen. The kitchen was a simple affair: there was a fire, flanked by several large stones with a blackened sufuria (aluminium pan) balanced on top. This arrangement was sheltered from the elements by sheets of tin on three sides, and a low tin roof. The girl who worked in the kitchen had to stoop to go in and stir the sufuria. Our refreshments seemed to be taking their time, but the door had been left open, which offered hope.

  Occasionally someone would slip through the back door, trying to appear inconspicuous, but Solomon would have none of it: they would be thrown out immediately. We appeared to have exclusive rights to the hotel. One man was admitted; he turned out to be Solomon’s eldest brother, Njuguna, who looked well into his sixties.

  ‘Wacheke died in 1940,’ said Kariuki. ‘After her death another white man who we called Ngororo came to live there, then John Ring from India, then a man called Sterling.’ A 1954 survey map, published by the British War Office and shown to me by veteran land surveyor John Vaughn, shows Alice’s home on the river – a church beside it – with the name not of ‘Ring’ but ‘Laing’. Joan Heath, who lived below Clouds in the fifties, remembered ‘John Lang’ living there. ‘Ring’, again, was a slip of the Kikuyu tongue.

  Kariuki thrust a large pinch of snuff into a nostril that looked almost raw already. He sniffed dramatically and said, ‘In those days we were paid thirty shillings a month for our work. Women were paid twenty.’

  ‘Some of us were paid fifteen shillings,’ grunted Ngugi. ‘It was still tough after the Mau Mau, but thanks to Kenyatta we were each given seven acres of land. Some people were given more.’

  Having divided up that land for their many children and grandchildren, most of them are now on less than a quarter of an acre. Land, so precious to their people, is in increasingly short supply.

  The third round of tea arrived, accompanied at last by the chapattis, and I produced the tin of jam Solomon had suggested I buy back in Captain’s only shop. In spite of its startlingly scarlet appearance and synthetic, slightly perfumed smell, it was met with hearty approval and the elders fell silent as they tucked in to the feast. Solomon demolished his jammy chapatti, while relating to the gathering how as a child he had found caves in this area full of bones and human skulls.

  The elders nodded: they knew those Mau Mau caves.

  ‘There was also an old cedar tree – the tree of Kimathi,’ Solomon added, ‘and people carved their names there – including Kimathi!’

  ‘Happy Valley was the best land so it was given to us Kikuyu as a reward for our fighting,’ Njuguna added. ‘The government also gave us building materials, fertiliser, seeds, gum-boots, pangas [machetes], coats, cows and money. You had to repay these loans in thirty years to get your title deed, so now most people here have no title deeds!’

  The old men were tired. A few of them began to wander outside and away. Karihe had nodded off and Kabiru had somehow found his way to the door and headed off in an indeterminate direction. ‘Somebody will take him home,’ said Solomon.

  He was right and I felt foolish for being concerned. Everyone knew everyone else and Kabiru would be gently steered home by a passer-by. There were no institutions for the elderly up here, just extended families who still upheld old traditions of revering their elderly members, looking after them until they passed away. Traditionally, when elderly Kikuyu were close to death, they were left outside the hut to die and for the hyenas to dispose of. Nowadays they are buried – usually on their land.

  We’d been hours inside the hotel, eating and drinking mountains of delicious chapattis and extremely sweet tea stewed with milk, but the entire bill came to less than 200 shillings (about £1.50).

  As the tea party drew itself to a natural end, I watched the old men hobble away and wondered whether they had courteously told us good things about Alice de Janzé because they thought that was what we wanted to hear. Or had she simply been very discreet
in front of the servants, as one was in those days? Nobody in that era had African friends, let alone entertained Africans in their houses – apart from the 3rd Baron Delamere, who invited the Maasai into his home to talk cattle. It was a habit not always palatable to his fellow white settlers, who would object, when dropping by, to find half-naked warriors squatting companionably in his living room. The settlers further muttered behind Delamere’s back because he tolerated their frequent thefts of his stock and ‘overpaid’ them.

  That night we were to stay with Solomon’s cousin Jane, who lived in a small and basic but comfortable stone house that seemed the height of luxury beside its many mud-walled neighbours. Jane lives next door to Solomon’s old family home, built on the plot allocated to Solomon’s mother in the early 1960s: all once part of Alice’s 600 acres.

  Jane’s husband was away – delivering vegetables to town in his lorry (judging by the state of the roads that could take days) – but Jane hardly ever seemed alone, as numerous visitors and relations all seemed to be staying too. Dozens of children sat around the fire in the separate wooden hut that served as a kitchen. Tea was brewing and a tiny ginger kitten peeped at me from under a stool. I was on my way to the outdoor pit-latrine, watched by rows of bright, black eyes, my every gesture offering great amusement. When I said ‘jambo’ in greeting, the kids dissolved into giggles, failing to smother their laughter behind their hands. When I emerged from the small, wooden building that reminded me of Grandpa Potts’ flying hut in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a very thin, quiet girl of about thirteen brought me a bucket of hot water to wash in. She averted her eyes when I spoke to her, did not reply and certainly did not giggle before she slipped away with nervous deference. Often, in very poor Kenyan families, a girl will be sent off to relations to work in exchange for food and basic lodgings. It’s an arrangement open to all forms of abuse.

  Later that afternoon, Solomon and I walked over a saddle that Solomon called ‘the flyover’, down a path between steep cultivated fields. We looked below us, across fields of beans, potatoes and maize, at Alice’s former home. ‘We are at the place where Harris found the lion cubs,’ said Solomon. ‘I remember this area with so much forest and so many animals!’ he added sadly.

  Numerous passers-by stopped to greet us and shake hands. All were puzzled to see a white woman in the area, so Solomon was enjoying spinning out the explanations. I was in my own world, looking east across a sweeping, spectacular view that had changed so dramatically in forty years. But soon the screen of smoke from the burning Aberdares blurred much of the detail.

  Walking back and climbing higher on another dirt track, we were heading to the smallholding owned by Solomon’s brother, Njuguna. ‘I was born here, right on this shamba, in 1959,’ Solomon said, extending his hand towards the field of beans. We walked up a path, trying to ignore another fiery backdrop of fiercely burning forest on Kipipiri. Solomon briefly pointed out the site where his hut had been burnt to the ground, then turned his attention to the larger fires that silently erased our view of the mountains. As we joined a buzzing cloud of flies and more relatives of Solomon’s in Njuguna’s simple mud house with its earth floor and wallpaper of old newspapers, I marvelled at Solomon’s evident and astounding capacity for leaving the past behind.

  At Solomon’s cousin Jane’s that evening we were generously fed with irio and mutton stew. Afterwards the two young boys who seemed to live there too, although they weren’t Jane’s sons, struggled with their homework by the dim light of a solar bulb. The night was cold and, after the local drunk had visited to watch a football game on the solar-powered TV, I was happy to roll up in a blanket in my allocated bedroom. I was concerned that I was taking somebody else’s room and felt certain the family had only butchered a sheep for our benefit, but in rural Kenya – or certainly Happy Valley – unconditional hospitality is the norm. Back in the twenties I’m sure Idina’s and Alice’s hospitality knew no bounds, but then they could well afford it.

  It was a noisy night, thanks to the heart-shaped clock outside my bedroom door: it welcomed each hour with a shattering wail, every note rising in anguish, followed by chimes reminiscent of a cat being skewered. It chimed ten at one in the morning – and so it continued through the night until it yowled at me fourteen times. I gave up on sleep and sat up in bed.

  The window pane glowed and flickered orange – I could see the jagged lines of forest fires as they danced along the length of the Aberdares, some turning back on themselves, forming angry red rings, flaring furiously against the dark mountainous bulk. I imagined the many creatures fleeing in terror from those flames.

  At six in the morning the jubilant clock exploded into a sound that was a combination of a shriek, a howl and a wail – fifteen times. Solomon hadn’t slept much either, he told me as we cradled steaming tin mugs of tea in the crystal dawn, sniffing the smoke from the burning mountains.

  ‘I had many conversations all through the night and I could not rest because I was then thinking about them,’ he explained.

  ‘Conversations?’ I asked, imagining he’d sat up putting the world to rights with his relatives.

  ‘Dreams,’ he said gloomily, ‘with dead people. But I was not asleep!’

  I moved stiffly into the morning sun, too weary to hear his dreams. I changed the subject to forest fires and we both turned to face the eastern sky with its innocently slim spirals of smoke, signalling doom when the later morning winds began to brew around these mountains.

  II

  Monkey Business and Murder

  9

  Into the Heart of the Valley

  In his autobiography, Solomon nostalgically recalls the thick forest all around the simple, one-roomed hut where he grew up, just above Alice’s old home. It was here that Solomon developed his love of colobus monkeys: ‘I was fascinated to watch them and I used to think of them as another tribe of people living in the forest. I tried to listen to what they were saying to one another.’

  Solomon’s interest in animals, birds, insects and plants convinced his peers he was mad. His mother, certain he was possessed by a bad spirit, sent her youngest son away to live with relations, miles from home. First he lived with a senile grandmother, and then a cruel aunt who used her hut floor as a toilet at night and made Solomon clean up after her, with his hands.

  Solomon, the nonconformist, refused to accept this as his lot. Hungry and thin, but not cowed, he escaped, stowing away on a Rift Valley-bound matatu. When he was discovered, with no money to pay his fare, he was thrown out in the Rift Valley farming town of Nakuru – closer to home, but still too far to walk. The young Solomon begged for a while and when the white memsahibs doing their weekly shopping didn’t spare him a few shillings and the Indian shop owners had no scraps to throw to him either, he stole food from kiosks. Survival was risky: he was low in the pecking order of street children, who were regularly rounded up by the police and driven away, some of them never to be seen again. One day Solomon was caught, thrown roughly into the back of a police van, then locked up in a stinking cell with so many other boys and adult men that there was standing room only. For his ‘crimes’ he was thoroughly beaten before being thrown back amongst the criminals.

  Small, skinny, wily and lucky, Solomon managed to escape and run like the wind to the nearest main road, which happened to be the one heading towards Gilgil. A matatu stopped and a fellow traveller, who felt sorry for the strange, wild-eyed little boy, paid his fare to Gilgil, then gave him enough money for the next leg of his journey from Gilgil to Wanjohi. Thus Solomon made it back home, the final miles completed on foot. He writes proudly that the return of Happy Valley’s ‘lost boy’ was even announced on the local radio. Luckily his mother seemed relieved to see him too.

  Solomon’s local fame spurred him on to follow his dreams: at his primary school his tree-planting activities grew into an environmental club. By the time he had finished his primary education Solomon had earned the respect of a kind teacher, who decided he was worth sponsoring
. There’s no such thing as a free secondary education in Kenya, so Solomon was one of the lucky few able to head off to boarding school, where he worked hard in hope of a bright future. But after finishing school, like so many other young Kenyans, then and today, he had little hope of affording any further education or even finding employment. Thus Solomon began his voluntary youth conservation groups and tree nursery projects, slowly building up a following of other unemployed young people.

  For Solomon, our trips provided opportunities to check on his tree nurseries all around Happy Valley, as well as to find out how many more colobus monkeys had been trapped, killed or chased away. He said it gave him extra credibility to be seen in a vehicle, albeit rather an old and dirty one. I, meanwhile, was becoming ever more aware of the area’s conservation issues, alongside the history of the settlers who had once fleetingly occupied this troubled area.

  On one of our very early Happy Valley safaris, we’d stopped beside a sprawling muddle of roadside kiosks, their signboards always innovative: from the London Hotel to the Cheerful Shop. While Solomon went to find one of his colobus-friendly assistants, I watched a chicken wander nonchalantly into a bar. It was kicked out of the way by an emerging drunk – though not too drunk to spot me and cross the road, where he collapsed on the bonnet of my Land Rover and broadcast his financial problems and the woes of having seven children to anyone who wanted to listen.