by Peter Kimani
I’m curious to how you use your fork and knife these days. I recall you had trouble drawing butter from the jar and putting it on the side plate. You liked buttering your bread direct from the jar, which ticked me off without fail. I suspect you must be eating butter directly from the jar since, in your military wisdom, bread and butter eventually meet in the stomach.
Sally wanted to find out if he had gone native, McDonald thought happily; he would prove to her he had only grown more sophisticated. He would demonstrate to her that he was as good as any Englishman; in fact, he was as good as her father, whose country home in Derbyshire he replicated in the design of the Nakuru house. He worked his men like donkeys, most of them artisans he had diverted from the team detailed to maintain the new railway, and so worked at no cost to him. None of them knew their old boss had been retired.
The concrete blocks were sourced from other faraway colonies like the Congo and Nyasaland and hauled uphill by African handymen. The blocks were used as cornerstones that were a slightly different shade from the rest of the wall, and were placed at calculated intervals to evoke the pattern of a staircase. Once again, McDonald maintained the division of labor he applied on the railway construction. African laborers teamed up with an Indian artisan. A white architect named Johnson—whom the African workers called Ma-Johnny—provided general oversight.
Workers sang songs to urge others; they cracked jokes to deflect attention from their backbreaking toil. “Hey, man, a bird is going to perch on your head thinking it’s a tree!” one worker would tease another who was considered lazy.
“Maybe he will help build its nest,” another would join in.
During the rail construction, McDonald had discouraged joking among the workers because he believed those busy using their tongues were misdirecting their energies. But he had become more tolerant during the construction of the house—not that the workers necessarily knew this. To be on the safe side, the workers continued to fall silent at his approach.
When workers fell short of their projected goals, McDonald organized overnight shifts. That’s when the glowworms in the marshes were replaced by lightbulbs and locals who had never experienced electricity were drawn to the lights, just like the moths that buzzed around the bulbs, singeing their wings and doing their death dance before paving the way for more suicidal insects. The locals stood and marveled: Muthungu ni hatari, they said, admiring the discoveries the white man had brought to their village. In that spirit, few spoke about the builders who had been killed or maimed in their labors, or devoured by wild animals at night while working. And those who did speak of these casualties concluded with philosophical zest: an abattoir is never without blood.
The house was completed in ten months, sixty days ahead of the projected deadline. McDonald devoted the last months to supervising the gardens as well as the jacaranda trees that he ordered planted along the road that led from the train station to his house so that Sally would be garlanded by purple blooms when she set foot upon the land in 1902. The idea of the blooms came straight from the Bible, or McDonald’s vague recollections from Reverend Turnbull’s sermons about Jesus’s dramatic entry into Jerusalem garlanded by palm fronds from enthused followers.
He thought the jacaranda reflected Sally’s beauty, and the trees were in full bloom when a horde of servants in a horse-drawn chariot was dispatched to fetch Sally from the Nakuru train station, only a few miles away. Some of the trees had shed their leaves, turning the black earth into a purple carpet. McDonald stayed home to receive guests who had been invited for the banquet. A band had been invited all the way from Nairobi to perform, as was the chef and the kitchen staff. It was the same chef who had cooked for the first colonial governor in 1901, and would be detailed to cook for the Queen of England when she visited the colony years later. The freshest English pastries had been delivered on the weekly flight that brought in the mail from Nairobi. The smells wafting, the piped music floating on the air, combined with the modulated laughter from guests who had already arrived, provided a sense of joy for those assembled.
At the dining hall, a matron hired from Nairobi had drawn up a list to ensure the right sort of people sat together. Engineers from the railway department, for instance, would sit with hoteliers and civil servants and businesspeople. The idea was to mix all manner of professions to spice up conversations and put different perspectives to debate.
The lilting music from the cellos and wind instruments was exactly right for the light refreshments being passed around. Reverend Turnbull was seated between an anthropologist named Jessie Purdey on field research from the University of London and a retired district commissioner named Henry James. On the other side of the table was a youngish woman with a sunburned face and freckled nose. Her name was Rosemary Turner and she giggled when Reverend Turnbull introduced himself.
“How can a reverend have such a cocky name?” she drawled. She proceeded to spend the rest of the evening stepping on his shoes and pinching his thigh.
What followed remains a topic of heated debate to this day, without a discernible conclusion or concurrence. With the passage of time, previous rumors would acquire more sinister pegs so that Sally, the malkia, became a legend in her own right. But as local people like to say, where there is smoke, there is fire, and the smoke and smog that clouded Sally’s visit had one consistent thread: she made a brief appearance at the party incognito before exiting fast.
There were claims that she sneaked into the party disguised as a beggar to test McDonald’s kindness, and was promptly chased away by the guards. Yet others claimed that when she arrived on the coast, she had visited a medicine man who gave her special herbs and charms that allowed her to transform herself into a cat, to spy on McDonald’s house and his friends before making her quiet exit, never to be seen again. Another rumor that became firmly entrenched in the Nakuru lore was that Sally arrived without any disguise, took one look at the edifice built in her honor, sneered that it resembled a chicken coop, and spat on the ground to show her disgust before walking away, with McDonald in tow, pleading with her to return to him.
So, to lay the debate to rest, here’s the true version of the events of that day: Sally arrived on the train from Mombasa as scheduled and saw the African servants waiting to receive her. They were holding a placard carrying her name. On it was McDonald’s looped scrawling, identifiable from a mile away. Sally waved at the servants, who scrambled for her luggage and packed it in the carriage. As she hoisted a leg up to board the carriage, that aforementioned cheeky whirlwind did its thing and she was left with her skirt briefly covering her face, mildly embarrassed but otherwise in good cheer, even after the servants abandoned their mission. The horse trotted back home without the distinguished guest but bearing her luggage.
McDonald panicked when he saw the horse return with the two suitcases but without the servants or Sally. He responded with mathematical precision: adding all the facts together, he concluded that the servants and Sally were together, as memories of that morning in South Africa flooded back to him. He paused to think further; there were four servants involved. Even with Sally’s preponderance for bedding her servants, she certainly couldn’t manage all of them at once. There was a wave of relief as he realized it was implausible that they were all together. Yet, the horse’s presence with Sally’s luggage showed she had met his servants. So where were they?
As guests continued to stream in and greet old friends, McDonald quickly organized a search party that tracked down all the servants within the hour. Recalling the abduction of some British engineers four years earlier, McDonald was fearful this could develop into another crisis, so he had ordered the servants to be restrained from escaping, using any means necessary—a coded message for what military men called “appropriate force.” From the servants’ cuts, bruises, and bleeding noses, it was evident that those unleashed on them had applied McDonald’s instructions to the letter. Some inebriated guests joined in the flogging as the four men were delivered to Mc
Donald’s house, arms tied behind their backs and roped together so that if one fell, the others followed suit.
It was during this commotion that Sally stole into the compound, having spent the hour picking flowers while following the horse’s trail. She was actually tickled by the whole episode and thought no further about what may have prompted the servants’ flight. She instantly recognized the man who had been holding her placard. He had a wound under his left eye, and he looked pleadingly at her when she arrived. Sally thought of her naked truth, as she called her windy exposure. It was nature’s way of reminding her of her vulnerability, much the same way a hurricane sweeps onto the shores to return all the waste the humans have deposited in the sea for ages. Or a shoe that filters to the surface long after its owner is drowned. Sally thought she was being reminded of her own ordinariness, her near-nakedness reminding her of a birth into this new world, bearing nothing but her skin.
Sally did not speak a word nor venture beyond the porch; she simply turned around and went back the way she had come, a shudder in her chest, a quiver on the lip, as memories of her college days flooded in. She had enrolled at the University of London to study history and, out of curiosity, took a minor in African history. A huge chunk of the study was dedicated to the transatlantic slave trade. Sally had nightmares reading about the inhumane treatment the slaves were subjected to on those trips. But what broke her heart was encountering her great-grandfather in the list of merchants who transported African slaves through Bristol to the new lands. How could a man related to her have been party to such injustice?
Sally staged a solo protest against slavery by making amends to the next black man she encountered—a bearded student she had seen in the library a few times. He was from Ghana, shy, somewhat awkward. She invited him for a drink, gave her room number, and fled before he found his voice. He arrived as agreed and knocked timidly. Before the man could say Asantehene, Sally smothered him with kisses and undressed him, and it could have been misconstrued as rape had the young man not relaxed and grinned.
Sally’s one-woman protest did not end there; her tryst with the South African gardener was prompted by the same instinct: an unspoken guilt over past mistreatment of blacks through slavery and her patriarch’s complicity in it. After reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness days after its publication in 1899, her estrangement from white privilege was complete. How she rationalized that it was right or moral to enjoy the trappings of comfort acquired through slave labor—the backbone of her family wealth—nobody knows. It may well have been what prompts a soldier to lay down his life for country, even when the cause that takes him to the front line is fraudulent; or for those inclined toward the divine scriptures, it is the same principle that leads a righteous man to lay down his life for sinners. Sally’s salacious behavior made her neither profligate nor righteous—her actions may have been an affront to the laws of the land but one could hardly consider them divine. Yet, it was difficult to divorce the simple privilege that her past afforded her, which freed her from the rigors of earning a living to fornicate at will. That fact of her life had been secured decades earlier, so her communion with black males, whether students in London or gardeners in South Africa, could only be seen as returning a favor of sorts—thanking the black forebears who had made possible her comfortable future.
So when Sally caught a glimpse of McDonald’s brutalized servants, it brought back that resentment. She walked away in silence.
She may not have spoken a word, but many words were spoken about her, especially after the assembled guests were told by a deflated and defeated McDonald that the guest of honor was unlikely to grace the celebrations due to some unexpected developments. He had been unable to extract any information from the servants, beyond the wind mishap and their flight from the station. But guests who had had a little too much to drink shouted that McDonald was lying because some had reported sighting a mysterious guest arrive and depart almost immediately. And since no one in the colony had met her previously, they all remarked on her skin, which was whiter than anyone they’d seen, her springy and dignified gait, as well as her manner of clothing, which was heavier than the Nakuru weather required.
It was Sally’s letter from England a month later that finally broke McDonald’s heart, resulting in a depression during which he locked himself up and mourned his loss. By then, McDonald had confirmed that Sally had arrived on the coast as scheduled and departed soon after, but he had no way of verifying whether or not she had visited his house:
I am distraught to write this letter, the last to you from me. Your cruelty toward me and fellow men, which I have borne and witnessed over the years, is the ground on which I’m filing for divorce. Yours is the Heart of Darkness.
Sally
Had locals been privy to this missive, they would have concluded that Sally was a witch, able to cast a spell and unleash a spirit. For the house that McDonald built soon turned into a veritable heart of darkness, with the windows shuttered for years and signs warning women to keep off the premises posted all over the property. Only male servants were allowed in the compound. They, too, were ordered to wear black uniforms because their master was mourning, although he did not specify his loss. Some overzealous workers chose to wear sackcloth as a mark of their loyalty, and those who learned about the secret code on the posters also abstained from touching their wives in solidarity with their master.
And when the doors and the windows to the house were finally opened, the villagers were surprised to see cows rearing their big heads in the doorway. That’s when the edifice was converted into a farmhouse that later gave way to the segregated social establishment, which further gave way to the multicultural outfit named the Jakaranda, the letter k for Kenya replacing the c in the jacaranda that McDonald said sounded “colonial.”
Now, on the cusp of the new republic and a new dawn for its multicolored citizens, the Jakaranda was about to acquire a new identity, yet again.
4
History has strange ways of announcing itself to the present, whether conceived in comforting darkness or blinding light. It can manifest with the gentleness of a bean cracking out of its pod, making music in its fall. Even when such seed falls into fertile soil, it still wriggles from the tug of the earth, stretching a green hand for uplift. The seed of wonderment that germinated from the flicker of a kiss in that darkened night had, in a few months, grown by leaps and bounds. And so it came to pass that the ancient history that Babu had dodged for two generations suddenly arrived at his doorstep, unfurling with the slow, deliberate motions of a burning rope, embers crawling from knot to knot. What was perplexing was the precision of the revelations: like the biblical plague that reached every household that did not bear a lintel, the dregs from Babu’s past rose to the fore, sliding beneath his locked door to sweep him off his feet.
But that’s rushing the story, burying the inimitable drama that unfurled the night Mariam made her grand return to the Jakaranda and reordered the lives of those who she touched—not just with her already famously flavored tongue, but with words rolled off the selfsame organ. So let’s hold it right there and absorb the moment when, lured by the smell of sweet, spicy perfume, Rajan descended the dais and stretched a hand, like a leaf dying for light after months in darkness. He stretched a hand toward the woman he suspected was the kissing stranger, and on whom he seemed utterly dependent for survival.
The young lass sat unmoved. She obviously did not understand the dance etiquette at the Jakaranda, and Rajan’s slight frame silhouetted against the dancing lights struck a statuesque pose, hair pulled into a ponytail, his lower lip trembling with both anticipation and trepidation, a hand stretched out to receive the reluctant girl. All this was witnessed by the hundreds of pairs of eyes that seemed hypnotized by the act. A hesitant beat broke the enveloping silence as Rajan knelt at Mariam’s feet, words instantly forming on his lips:
Malaika, nakupenda malaika
nami nifanyeje
kijana mwenzio .
. .
The crowd roared appreciatively as the band started to play the slow love song they all knew by heart. Mariam flashed a coy smile and rose to her feet. The instantaneous clamor was enough to lift the roof off the Jakaranda, so that even Mariam could no longer resist the serenade. She made a few strides toward Rajan, who led the way toward the stage, doing a little dance because he could hardly contain his elation.
When she hesitated at the staircase leading to the dance floor, Rajan swept her off her feet, rocking her in his arms. She proved heavier than he had anticipated and Rajan staggered, nearly missing a step before regaining his balance. She swooned with pleasure, or perhaps fright, as he took the stairs before depositing her onstage. She steadied herself, her wide, circular silver earrings shining against the oscillating lights. Her mass of thick hair reached her waist. She smiled broadly, revealing twin dimples, straightening a crease on her long skirt as she did so.
If this was the kissing stranger he had encountered in the dark, Rajan thought, she certainly wasn’t afraid of the spotlight.
The love song faded and was replaced by a mugithi tune, bringing onto the stage the stories that Rajan had been told by his grandfather Babu about his experiences building the railway. The dance imitated the movement of the train and Rajan guided Mariam to join the trail of revelers doing their rounds through the dance floor, their feet spread wide apart to imitate the railway, every lap around the premises marking a completed journey.
The next tune was called the dance of the marebe. It involved thunderous drumming followed by the wail of the guitar and the blow of the sax. It was called the dance of the marebe because it told the true story of the Indian trader who encountered a lion in the Tsavo forest as he led his mule to the camp. The mule carried on its back pails of paraffin and when the lion struck, Babu had narrated to Rajan, its claws got stuck in the ropes holding the pails. The mule attempted to flee but was paralyzed by fear and the additional load on its back. The lion could not extricate himself from the hessian ropes. The pails of paraffin clanged together as the mule hee-hawed, trying to shake the beast burdening his back.