by Peter Tonkin
A new breed of white skin arrived; men and a few women who were not content to stay on the coast but wished to explore and map and describe what they found. They followed the River Mau up to the great falls and beyond. Sometimes they found a N’Kuru spear, sometimes a Kyoga arrow. And, like the traders, they continued to come. As did the missionaries who set up their churches first and then their schools. They taught about a white-skinned god who loved the world so much that he allowed himself to be nailed to a tree to save it. The N’Kuru, exposed to this first, were far too proud to be influenced by a man who preferred to die rather than to kill. They liked the idea of nailing people to trees, however, and did it to several missionaries. But still they came. The Kyoga reacted differently to religion. Perhaps the missionaries were less arrogant with them, for they had seen what the N’Kuru had done to several of their martyred number and it was common knowledge that the hag-ridden devil worshippers in their jungles atop the mighty ridge were twenty times as deadly. In fact the Kyoga were intelligent and interested. The school did well, though the church never really took hold. And for once the natives seemed resistant to the diseases of civilisation while the missionaries contracted ailments without number which were usually fatal.
The relationship between the N’Kuru and the Kyoga remained the same as it had been before the pale-skinned Arabs and the white-skinned Europeans began to interfere but then, as the twentieth century began to loom, it worsened. And the reason was rubber.
In spite of the persistence of the English slave traders over the years, Mau never fell into the British sphere of influence. Instead it became an outcrop of those territories owned absolutely by the Emperor Leopold. He offered great tracts of the verdant country to his hangers-on at court, but none had the wish or the will to be farmers, even by proxy. One or two settlers arrived in long wagons pulled by oxen modelled on the successful design favoured by the Dutch further south. The N’Kuru wisely slaughtered them and blamed it on the Kyoga. And then, as it had been in the forests around the Congo, rubber was discovered in the jungle atop the escarpment where the Kyoga continued to live. Leopold’s men were quick to understand the contempt with which the N’Kuru viewed their smaller, darker neighbours, and so the rubber growers gave the tall ex-farmers guns, whips and, most importantly, heavy, sharp pangas, and they made them overseers.
This was the darkest hour in all the history of the Kyoga. Their jungle villages were overrun and their people placed in a new and savage bondage. Quotas were dictated in far Brussels by businessmen with no knowledge or understanding of how impossible it would be to fulfil them. Made arrogant by distance and ignorance, they demanded that their local representatives force their workers to greater efforts. The local men, deaf to the protests of the last, sickly missionaries, began to threaten the N’Kuru: if the local tribes were not up to the job, they would import outsiders who were -they had no end of experienced overseers on the black banks of the Congo. The N’Kuru and the Kyoga could work side by side in the jungle. Such threats spurred the N’Kuru to frenzies of cruelty - cruelty imported, like slavery, by the pale skins. For every man, woman and child of the Kyoga nation, a quota was set. At the end of each quota period, the white latex each had collected was weighed and measured. The first failure to meet the quota cost a finger. The second cost a hand. The third a foot. The fourth an eye. The fifth - and there were blessedly few - a testicle or a breast. The missionaries tried to help by searing closed the wounds and bringing the sufferers back to working fitness as quickly as they could. By the time a couple of million men were being slaughtered on the fields of Flanders, a similar number were being disfigured and destroyed in the anonymous western African jungles to supply the white-skin armies with the ton upon ton of rubber they needed to keep the killing going: men and women and children; arms and legs and eyes.
In that strange combination of exhaustion and euphoria which followed the end of the Great War, the voices of the missionary societies were at last listened to and it was decided that more humane ways could be found to gather rubber, and the N’Kuru were ordered to stop disfiguring their charges. But because they had tried to help, and so had seemed to condone, the missionaries had lost the good will of the Kyoga. Their churches were burned and the last few of them slaughtered. But the Kyoga had learned about white-skin education - the most important lesson of all although it availed them little in the face of their N’Kuru overseers.
Only after the likes of Joseph Conrad and Roger Casement had been up the river to the Leopold Falls and then up into the jungle beyond did the European world begin to learn of the atrocities their representatives had caused, and the injunction was rigidly enforced. In any case, the rubber market was easing and there were other areas which could supply it. So the jungle was left to the crippled Kyogas and attention was turned once more to the N’Kuru’s plains. Farmers arrived, fresh-faced and hopeful, ready to colonise the vast pasture lands. This time they arrived in large numbers, in motorised caravans armed to the teeth with the kind of weapons which can only be perfected in a war. The N’Kuru watched their farmland being split among white skins and their grazing land surrender to the plough. They watched fences chop the bush into ugly, pointless squares, and they saw the elephant chopped down like trees because they too failed to understand the fences. The bottom fell out of the ivory market because of the massive over-supply. The lordly, arrogant herdsmen became mere farm hands employed to cultivate land which had been theirs for all time. Men who had never deigned to bow their heads were forced to bend their backs or starve. Princes were paid pennies for their pride.
Mawanga, however, prospered. As the farms began to flourish, so their produce had to be shipped. The port, deep beyond measuring but sheltered by those welcoming harbour horns, was filled with an increasing bustle of shipping as tobacco, meat and grain went out and a range of new fertilisers and supplies came in. White hunters arrived, expecting to clear the plains of game for the farmers but instead they rediscovered the escarpment. Jungle safaris were arranged and tourists arrived expecting to be able to shoot antelope, elephant, wildebeest and lion on the plains one day and mountain gorillas up the escarpment on the next. The N’Kuru, understandably uncertain of these developments, were soon characterised as sullen and lazy. The Kyoga, discovered anew in the jungle, were immediately recognised as excellent bushmen, mighty hunters and natural askaris. A few intrepid film directors arrived from Hollywood. The yodelling cries of Tarzan echoed from the high edge of the escarpment. Some Hollywood stars arrived. Conrad Hilton thought he’d better put up a hotel. With a keen eye for a good location, the Hilton Organisation raised their tall hotel on the northern inland outskirts of the town, where the lower coastal slopes of the tectonic cliff overlooked the city and the harbour from a safe, exclusive distance. Where the air was cooler and sweeter. It was a suburb which soon attracted many others who could afford to leave the hot, malodorous bustle of the busy port. Mawanga grew and grew.
And then, just as the political sky to the north began to darken once again, somebody discovered copper, cobalt and uranium upcountry. Heavy industry arrived and engineering plant passed through Mawanga and up the Mau to the Leopold Falls. A powerful funicular railway was built to move equipment, ore and metal up and down the tectonic cliff. The mines were all on Kyoga land. The Kyoga were recognised as hard workers, bright and trustworthy. They took responsibility. In return they were given education. With that they earned money and, most precious of all, power. The N’Kuru were treated as sullen children and their resentment simmered towards boiling point.
The Second World War, when it came, touched the country of Mau hardly at all. It was physically removed from large theatres of conflict and all that was noticed was that the demands for supplies were more strident and the European managers fewer. The Kyoga took over. They were the educated class, the businessmen with the proud history as hunters. The N’Kuru continued to grub in the red dirt of their land, ordered to grow unsuitable crops by inefficient farmers required to me
et more and more impossible targets. At least they didn’t lop off hands and feet this time. The Kyoga watched and waited.
The resentment of the N’Kuru nation overflowed soon after the end of the war. A new wave of settlers, sent out as soon as they were demobbed, settled into areas hitherto considered unfarmable and began to fight the land in their efforts to produce coffee, cocoa, groundnuts and cotton. The N’Kuru’s patience ran out. In camps and what was left of the old villages, young men began to band together in the night carving again the old war clubs and arming them with lions’ claws.
When the farmers and their families began to be found clawed to death by lions in their beds, it took very little time for the local government to realise what was going on. Neither the white skins with their hearts in Europe nor the Kyoga government ministers could control the uprising. They called to Europe for help and Europe sent troops in. Within six months of the first death, there was a dirty little bush war going on. No obvious leader emerged from the ranks of the N’Kuru Lion fighters, and the reason for this soon became obvious. The liberation army was receiving advice on the best way to organise themselves - in little cadres, each member of which knew only his immediate associates. It was a format which the intelligence officers with the European troops recognised all too well. Communist advisers had arrived in the ranks of the N’Kuru secret army.
The men in Brussels shook their heads. It was nearly 1960. The English Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had observed that a wind of change was blowing over Africa. A gust of that wind arrived in Mau. The point of colonisation was to make money. As soon as the army of occupation required to control the communist-inspired insurgents began to cost more than the country was earning for its imperial overlords, it was granted independence. Power was simply handed to the Kyoga politicians who had been running their own puppet parliament since the end of the war. The white-skin Governor shook the small-boned, black-skinned hand of the new Premier and Mau was on its own. The European civil servants left. Many of the farmers on the plains, who had been hanging on only because of the protection afforded by the European army, left with them. Up in the highlands, the mines remained viable and to begin with it looked as if there were enough foreign businesses interested in supporting the economy - enough European banks willing to offer loans - to enable Mau to stand on its own feet. But the guerrilla war went on. The army and the police force conscripted from the Kyoga youth, trained and paid through foreign loans, swung into brutal action. They had no trouble with the communist-style organisation of the N’Kuru Lions; they assumed all N’Kuru were communist terrorists and took it from there. They had no trouble with white-skin sensitivities in questioning suspects; they remembered how their grandparents had been forced to collect rubber and applied the same techniques. A brief and bloody war swept over the farmlands. When it was over, the leaders of the Lions were in hiding in Angola and neighbouring Congo Libre. Their power was destroyed. But so was half the country’s economic base. The army was victorious. But it was incredibly expensive and had no further reason to exist. It soon became obvious that Mau was not such a good investment as had been thought in the white-skin market places. Companies began to pull out. The copper mines closed. Banks began to ask that loans be repaid. The Maui franc crashed on the international money market. Inflation hit one thousand per cent. The economy collapsed.
From under the wreckage rose a giant whose simple mission was to save his people. All of his people. In the days when Mwanga had been a man, not a city, an N’Kuru girl had been kidnapped by a Kyoga man - one of thousands. Their mingled blood ran through the generations and down the centuries to flow in the veins of Dr Julius Karanga. Educated first at a mission school in the bush and then with a scholarship at the Sorbonne in Paris, he had been subject by chance to the French method of colonisation and had been not only well educated but also fully trained in the practicalities of government. He understood the systems which had to be put in place. He knew that Mau needed not armies and secret police but law, justice. And that meant courts. Schools. Hospitals. A social structure. He had the vision to see that his country could only afford these things if she produced the goods to pay for them. And she would only produce the goods if she was united and well governed. He saw that the first step was to bring the people together, his people together, and allow them to choose a government they trusted.
Invited home from his work as a political commentator in Paris, he accepted the post of President only on condition that it was a temporary appointment, to be confirmed or cancelled by due process of democracy. He made it his first mission to explain democracy to a people who had known only supposedly benign dictatorship. He toured the country, talking to the elders in the villages and townships. He described how his vision of democratic government would work. He began to ask for men to come forward and present themselves as being worthy of government office. Kyoga men came and then, at last, N’Kuru men. This was the early sixties. Women, largely uneducated, still worked on the land. He took the men, fired them with his vision and began to try and organise elections. As his year of office ran out, he held his precious elections. They were violent but ultimately successful in their immediate aim. A government was formed and he was recognised as its head.
Companies began to return with the new stability. Banks. The World Bank. As if to add a divine blessing to the process, diamonds were discovered in the Kyoga lands, then, right up near the border to the north, reserves of coal and oil. Slowly, painstakingly, over one decade and then another, this great leader began to unify and restore his country. The high jungle was carefully cleared to allow access to the mineral wealth of the outback. But it was not wilfully destroyed and the habitats of the gorillas and the jungle leopards were preserved. The farms on the plains were organised into communes, for the French-educated leader was not too proud to see that some of what the communists had instilled into the N’Kuru freedom fighters was wise and practical. The communes held their land on condition that they, too, would protect the dwindling populations of antelope, wildebeest, rhino and elephant; on condition that they were careful with the pesticides and chemical fertilisers they used on the land, that they chose their crops with care and did not over-farm the soil. The grasslands had been over-farmed, however, and badly so. The farmers found their work painfully difficult and became increasingly grudging about protecting species they saw only as vermin which put their livelihoods at risk. A trade grew up in ivory and rhino-horn poaching as some N’Kuru came close to starving. Rumours began to circulate that the N’Kuru Lions were getting ready to return.
Julius Karanga’s reaction to this was typical. He set in motion his greatest project so far: the great Mau dam and irrigation project. He gathered all the power and prestige he had and poured it unstintingly into the project which would make the N’Kuru farmlands bloom again. By early 1985 it was ready to go. The elder statesman was invited by the dam-building consortium to lay the first stone - the dam was destined to bear his name - and he accepted. On 16 July, he stood high on the southern bank of the river and declaimed to the world, ‘I lay the first stone of the Dr Julius Karanga Dam here before you today in the land of my N’Kuru ancestors. In the fullness of time I shall stand on the land of my Kyoga ancestors and lay the last stone so that we can bring back life and prosperity to all of our country! I tell you, my people, the future has never looked so bright.’
These were the last words he was ever to speak, for the bomb wrapped round the body of a young N’Kuru freedom fighter standing nearby exploded at that moment and twenty people nearest to her, including the Premier and many of his closest colleagues, died at once. The N’Kuru Lions were back.
In the political turmoil which followed the outrage, twenty years of Karanga’s work fell apart overnight. The new government, Kyoga men, began an undeclared war on the N’Kuru. The Lions reacted in kind. Terrorism came to Mawanga with a vengeance. The great plains became no-go for anyone associated with the powers that be - the army, the police, the commune o
rganisers. The crops died. The land dried. The red soil began to blow away. Five carefully planted terrorist bombs closed the coal mines and set the oilwell on fire. Only the diamond mine remained in production, for security there had always been tight.
The people began to starve. Desperate, the government begged aid from its neighbours. The Congo Libran government which had sheltered the Lions sent cattle to supplement the N’Kuru herds but the cattle were infected with rinderpest and the plague wiped out all the herds. Shipments of food began to turn up desultorily: meat from Europe which had already been refused by Russia because it was contaminated; grain from the United States which had been sprayed with illegal chemicals; free milk powder for the children, which did not contain the nutriments they actually required to develop properly. The usual. But there were other demands on the aid agencies much more urgent than Mau’s seemed to be. For twenty years, the country had stood as a symbol of everything positive in African independence. It was difficult for the rest of the world to come to terms with the speed and the scale of the disaster overtaking the once prosperous state. And, just as divine power had chosen to give to those who had by adding oil and diamonds to the security brought by Julius Karanga, so the same power chose to take even from those who had not, and the great drought came. The grassland became a bowl of red dust. The black soil of the escarpment became cracked and dry as the jungle withered. The mighty River Mau dried to a stinking trickle which oozed a full half-mile away from the place where Karanga had died, where the first stone of his dam had been laid. All that kept the harbour of Mawanga open was the depth of its tectonic floor; the river itself could hardly make it to the sea.