by M G Vassanji
“I don’t always eat this much, but in company I tend to indulge. Africa teaches you how little food you really need, and how much we in civilized England tend to overeat.”
They sat up late into the evening. Maynard did most of the talking, mostly about Africa. He loved it and he hated it, above all he feared it for what it could do to him. “This is a savage country, and it could turn you into a savage. It is so easy to be overcome by its savagery, to lose one’s veneer of Western civilization. This is what I have learned, what I dread most. So in a way I look forward to leaving it. But I have nowhere to go. India, perhaps. Egypt …”
He respected the African, yet would call him nigger. He loved animals. He had killed scores of both. He believed in Empire, but had no patience with settling the country with whites. “I,” said the soldier, “respect the African — as a redoubtable enemy or as a friend. I would kill him with as little compunction as he would me. But the settler, and the low class of official we have in East Africa — excuse me, Corbin, but there are not enough of you here — despises the black and would use me to kill him.”
They sat in silence for a long time. The courtyard below was quiet now. The moon had risen and passed the window and was somewhere above the house. From outside came the sound of frogs and night insects, with the richness of a symphony, it seemed, when he paid attention to it, and from the kitchen came the occasional clatter of utensils. One more time Corbin glanced around the room, preparing mentally to leave. There was one question he had about this man, based on what he had heard at the parties and picnics. But it was not his place to ask.
As if sensing this unease, Maynard began explanations.
“Imagine,” he said, “the centre of the village where they hold the baraza. Cleared hard ground. A white man — an Englishman — pegged to the ground. Lying on his back, mouth wedged open. Savage men and women come and urinate in his mouth. Men standing and laughing, women crouching, all drunk on pombé. The man drowns in nigger urine. He is disembowelled, used as a latrine.… Imagine the insects feeding on him … the stench … the scavengers … hyenas who would not leave a scrap of meat on a bone, vultures, crows. It had to be avenged, Corbin. For the white man, for authority, for order — they are the same thing here.
“We went in at dawn. Spies had given us the layout. No man or woman to be spared, I ordered. We set fire to the huts, waited outside for the niggers to emerge. I myself bayoneted them, men and women they came running out.… No mercy, I said …
“You’d be surprised at the ease with which a bayonet enters a human chest.… How cheap human life is really …
“You disapprove — obviously. Tell me, what would you do? I myself am not sure I did the right thing — I am haunted at times — but I believed then I was doing the right thing. To show strength, fury. This is a savage country, it makes a savage out of you. What would you do?”
“I’m not sure I can say … not being a military man. I do think the Colonial Office holds vastly different views of the natives.”
“Yes. I wonder which will prevail. Yours, obviously, when I’ve cleaned up and subdued the land for you to administer.”
But they departed on cordial terms. “I disapprove of his actions, not of the man,” Corbin went back and wrote. In fact he was strangely drawn to the soldier, and joined him several times for drinks, until his posting came.
17 March, 1913
“Send the poor devil in,” I heard the Provincial Commissioner say, and the secretary looked rather apologetically at me. “Poor devil” because I had been posted to a place called Kikono near the border with German East. It is a substation that has been sporadically manned depending on the availability of junior staff. There are a few mission stations in the area that lies to the east and next to the foothills of Kilimanjaro. The town is populated by a community of Indians and some Swahilis from the Coast. Henley, the PC, is something of a student of African tribes, hence his sympathy for me. He had just returned from a field safari in Giriyama. I must say I was not a little disappointed. In Africa one does not expect to be saddled with overseeing Indians. These, I am told, already have a conflict under way with local missionaries. Nevertheless I was eager to get away. And so, after yet another dinner party and dancing at the Grand Hotel (grand in name only, as everyone here hastily explains — but the Club is no good for such events, as it is out of bounds to women after 7 P.M.) and a picnic lunch the following morning with a charming couple called the Unsworths, I set off on the Uganda Railway for Voi.
I had resolved to catch up on duty, to write letters to Mother and Robert, but as soon as I sat down with paper and pen I realized how futile it was to attempt that mundane chore, to conjure up England out of a night in Africa. The darkest, blackest night that simply shut out the world of European Mombasa. From where I sat contemplating my epistolary failure, the window of the Uganda Railway coach sent back an eerie reflection of myself. I pressed my face to the pane and watched the darkness fly past … shadows in the moonlight swiftly rushing by, shadows that could be trees or some species of wildlife.… It was impossible to surrender to sleep with the knowledge that finally I was entering the interior of Africa … the huge and dark continent that had defied the rest of the world for millennia, now opening up to European civilization, to a great Empire of which I was a minor but privileged functionary. “Life and soul,” Mr. Churchill had said. My body had blistered in the heat and swelled to the bites of insects, and as I lay on the most uncomfortable bunk the Uganda Railway possessed, my soul was stirring.
19 March
Thirty porters were engaged for me at Voi, from where I set off this morning after spending two nights at the Dak bungalow. There has been much singing and merriment. The porters are of the Wataita tribe and speak a little Swahili. They wear a strip of cloth around their waist. Their front teeth are sharpened to a point, and some carry objects such as tin boxes or small animal horns in the slits in their ears. With me is Thomas, who was the first person to welcome me in Africa and has doggedly stayed with me, willing to serve me for anything I can pay him. He has told me an interesting story of how a woman from his people was once Queen of Mombasa for a very short period during Portuguese times. Thus the vanquished clutch at straws of glory.… He has a rather irritating habit of equating his status with mine, and never tires of pointing out the shortcomings of the poor Wataita. He doesn’t realize that they all have fun at his expense.
Part of our way is thick, thorny bramble, which we have to cut through. I am utterly in the hands of the porters and guides. What do they think of me? I feel strange and nervous, helpless with the smattering of Swahili I picked up in Mombasa. Sometimes I am the subject of their song, but whether they ply me with compliment or abuse I cannot say. Baboons chatter in the trees above us, rhino spoor has been pointed out to me, I have seen a snake cross my path. At one time we were followed by lion grunts, and even now in the dark night perhaps I hear them growl. I am reminded of the lion head at the Mombasa Club and the red-fezzed Captain Maynard sitting under it. I cannot help thinking that if the blacks in my caravan decide to butcher me and my Indian, it would be Maynard or someone like him who would be sent to avenge us.
2
Kikono, “The Little Hand,” lay some thirty miles from the border with German East Africa, a convenient stop on the east-west trail from Voi to Moshi that connected the two colonies. The mighty snow-capped Kilimanjaro attended by fluffs of cloud loomed in the near distance: a presence at once enigmatic, benign, and mystical; a symbol of the eternal. But the heart of this town in the thorny desert country was the little mbuyu — baobab — tree, a short thick deformity struggling out from the side of a hill, from which twisted, mangled branches grappled uselessly against the sky. In somewhat light-hearted fashion, and in keeping with legends surrounding mbuyu trees, this one was sometimes called “the little hand of the devil”; but at night, and especially at sudden encounter, it would appear quite ghostly, not to say satanic, and was avoided. During the day it was a s
hady meeting place. Facing it in two rows perpendicular to each other were the shops and houses and two mosques of the small town.
Early one afternoon the townsfolk began to prepare to welcome the new Assistant District Commissioner. The rest time had passed unnoticed. At last, amidst much anticipation and after a few false alarms, a boy was seen to go up to the little mbuyu tree, from under whose branches he began to beat on his drum, at which signal the shopkeepers stepped out from their shops to join the gathered crowd. The men in the police band, twelve-strong, set themselves up under the tree, and the drummer boy sat with them. The Indians stood in a row, somewhat solemn-looking in white drill suits and red or black fezzes, or in dhoties and turbans. Next to them formed a shorter line of Swahilis, in kanzus and embroidered caps, some in waistcoats. There was a third, large group of vendors, servants, and occasional labourers, and, with them, tribesmen and women from the neighbouring area. Thus they stood waiting, occasionally looking up, turning or craning their necks towards the road that entered town and would bring the new representative of the King.
What manner of town was Kikono, an Indian haven improbably placed miles away from the railway at the western edge of Taita country? It was said, with some truth, that open one Indian duka, or shop, in the middle of nowhere and soon you’d have a row of dukas, in the same way as a potato or yam proliferates. The first duka appears when a wind-riding seed falls on the ground and decides to make its home there. So the first duka appeared, so the town grew.
A young English naturalist and sportsman had one day taken off from the ancient port of Lamu on the Indian Ocean, where he had been a guest of the British Consul. He had borrowed a large sum of money from his unofficial banker, an Indian shopkeeper of the Shamsi sect called Jamal Dewji. The shopkeeper sent one of his sons along with the explorer-naturalist, ostensibly to assist him and even cook for him, but actually to keep an eye on him. “In his country he may be king,” he bragged in mosque, “but here I trust nobody.” “Stick to the hat-wearer’s heels and don’t come back without him or the money,” he told his son. Indeed, it was known that the Englishman, who had done much prying around town, had slipped into his bag an antique China bowl from an old tomb, and the news of his departure was received with some relief. He first went off to Zanzibar, from whence he sailed to Bagamoyo and marched with a caravan to Moshi and Taveta and finally to the station of the Mission of Christ in Africa, in the Taita country. At the mission he stayed two weeks, spending his time hunting and exploring. During this time Jamal Dewji’s boy, Abdul, fell in love with one of the converts, a Swahili girl called Hannah, and convinced the explorer to release to him some of his father’s money so he could set himself up in the area. The eminence was only too happy to rid himself of the watchdog at a discount. The boy and girl married, the girl reconverted to Islam and reverted to her original name, Khanoum.
Abdul Jamal Dewji, known thenceforth as Jamali, started his shop some miles down from the Mission at the little mbuyu tree which was long known as a resting place for caravans. The Shamsi community to which he belonged was well-organized, and news of this single-family settlement spread to Mombasa and beyond. There is a railway to the north and a railway to the south — how can a town fail to grow between them? the young man’s father boasted in Lamu. All that is needed is a line to join the two and pass through the village for it to become a town, a city. A few months later two men arrived from India, and later their families. Grocers, dispensers, sellers of cloth, jewellery, and hardware: a line of dukas sprang up. Where there are two Shamsis, as the adage says, let one be the headman, father and priest — the mukhi — and let the other form the congregation. That is, let them without further ado start a mosque.
The mukhi of the Shamsis here was currently Jamali himself. Like mukhis everywhere, he was paid not financially but with honour and respect, and promises of rewards in the hereafter. He was a shopkeeper, tall and lanky for his kind, with a face a little short of humble and the doggedness of a hyena when he had to help a community member. His Swahili wife spoke Cutchi to add to her mission English and had borne him three children.
Thus setting themselves up, loyal British subjects — and vociferously so — with visions of growth and prosperity for the town, they had applied to the government for official township status. While it made up its mind, the government responded by sending an Assistant District Commissioner of the Mombasa Province when it could spare one. The current ADC was Fred Axworthy, now on a march out of town to welcome and initiate his successor, Alfred Corbin. Word had reached town earlier in the day that ten of his thirty porters had deserted the new ADC the night before. Four of the ten were apprehended on the road outside Kikono, and now languished in the lockup.
Apparently heralding the arrival, a bevy of little boys in kanzus, loin cloths, or nothing at all, came running down the road, followed by a man rolling on his heels. They all joined the more irregular sections of the waiting crowd. The Indians formed a straighter line, the Swahilis stirred. All eyes were on the road now. There was a sudden silence, then everybody clapped hands as the two Europeans in white suits and sun-hats came striding into town at the head of a trail of porters. The police band broke into “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” and the Englishmen stopped to hear it out.
And this was what appeared to the new ADC as he approached the town: fleeting glimpses caught between bush and tree and anthill — a figure draped in white, dashing from left to right, cutting across his path in the distance. It could have been a man in kanzu but for the black hair flying, the lithe movement, the nimble step … then a red head-cover over the hair to complete the female figure. So amazed was he by the sight that he had stopped to watch. She disappeared behind an incline, where he was told lay the settlement …
25 March
… a mound really, of red earth, covered sparsely with the predominant vegetation of the area, namely thorn. Soon after that apparition disappeared, into one side of it, as it were, there emerged from the other side and directly in front of us a party lead by a white man in sun helmet.
“Dr. Livingstone, I presume, what? I dare say you must be the new ADC, the replacement I’ve been begging for on my knees, for months. Axworthy’s the name.”
Red-faced and stocky, perspiring freely, he was jovial, if anything. I introduced myself.
“We’ve caught some of your porters who absconded, so we’ve been expecting you rather. I dare say you’ll have to prescribe some strokes of the kiboko as deterrent. I don’t believe in the whip myself, too damn humiliating, but it’s what works best.”
I don’t remember what else he said, but it was a lot. I glanced briefly behind to see poor Thomas trudging along, bringing up the rear.
The entire town came into view almost instantly. To our left ran a row of shops and houses, meeting another row at a right angle at its far end. We were at the head of the only street and the town square, its centrepiece a baobab, or mbuyu, tree that led to the administrative centre and the ADC’s house.
This was Kikono, its inhabitants gathered under the mbuyu tree waiting patiently to greet me. As we approached, the police band struck up a tune. I was introduced to the local dignitaries, Indian and Swahili, the chiefs and dignitaries of nearby villages, and the local police force. After a supper of chicken stew and fried plantain, served by a young African girl who was rather scantily dressed, followed by pudding, brandy, and tobacco which I contributed, we retired.
The following day a rather unpleasant task awaited me. Those porters who had deserted on the way from Voi and had been caught were lined up to receive their dues. One fellow was brought in that morning with fervent protestations of having lost his way, so his case had to be heard. It was decided against him. Each received 10 strokes of the whip. “6 is too little, 20 too much,” said Axworthy.
It seems to me there has to be a better way of making the native willing to carry burden for a wage, some attractive inducement at journey’s end perhaps …
It’s been 5 days sin
ce I arrived, and Axworthy left this morning. The girl who cooked and waited at table for him has also disappeared, having joined the departing entourage, so Thomas swears. I am now lord under this mbuyu tree.
26 March
… My powers are modest.… In criminal cases I can inflict only one month’s imprisonment and a fine of Rs 50, whilst in civil cases my jurisdiction amounts to fines of up to Rs 250.… Bothered by boils, saw dispenser.
Ask for —
½ doz whisky
6 tablespoons
biscuits, any kind
… already Mombasa seems far away — and Europe?
He administered with a quiet, forceful diligence, a monastic rigour, in the unquestioned belief that what he did in his small way was part of a bigger enterprise in which he had some stake. His method — for he was a methodical man and thought carefully about what he did — was to understand the motives behind his people’s reluctance, recalcitrance, or hostility, and to make them understand his own position. He was there to administer in the name of his king and nation, to bring the land into the twentieth century in as painless a way as possible, in the belief that the British Empire with its experience of ruling other lands and with its humane system was the best nurturing ground for an emerging nation, for backward Africans and Orientals to enter the society of civilized peoples.
Governor’s Memoranda for PCs and DCs (1910)
(Native Policy, pages 5–6)
… The Fundamental principle and the only humane policy to be followed in dealing with peoples who have not reached a high stage of civilisation is to develop them on their own lines and in accordance with their own ideas and customs, purified in so far as is necessary. Whilst retaining all the good in their government, which makes for manliness, self-respect, and honest dealing, only that which is repugnant to higher ideals of morality and justice should be rejected; and the introduction of so-called civilisation, when it has a denationalising and demoralising tendency should be avoided. It is not from the present generation that we may look for much; the succeeding generations are in the hands of the Provincial Commissioners with their district staffs.… It must certainly be their endeavour to lift the natives to a higher plane of civilisation; but this can only be achieved by gradual methods and by observing existing conditions.