Dance of the Jakaranda

by Peter Kimani

“How dare you say that. Don’t you feel our pain?” Abdia said with clear indignation.

  “Yes, yes, my dear,” Fatima hissed. “But what can I do?”

  “If you do anything,” Karim said, sobering up, “please find somebody who can stop this. If not Babu, then who?”

  “Stop what? There is nothing to stop!”

  “I wish we came earlier,” Karim said. “We know Babu would have come to our rescue.”

  “But how do you know?” Fatima asked, puzzled by his insistence that Babu could have somehow salvaged Rajan’s betrothal to Leila. “That wayward boy—”

  “Pardon me, memsahib, has Babu become a boy now that’s he is unwell?” Karim posed.

  Fatima reeled from the revelation. She now understood with great relief that the Karims were there to seek Babu’s help in stopping their possible deportation, not to harangue them for failing to safeguard their daughter’s betrothal to Rajan. Fatima moved calmly toward Karim. “You are right, you are right,” she said, backtracking from her blunder. “Maybe Babu would have been able to help.”

  Later that night, long after the Karims had left, Fatima lay awake and wondered what had prompted them to think Babu could have stopped their deportation. There are way too many things I don’t understand about this man. She shrugged and turned on her side to sleep, as Babu’s breathing rose and fell in a seesaw rhythm. They had spent years of their married life in separate spaces on the bed, the dividing line being Fatima’s child, before Babu ultimately moved to a different room. He had seldom returned home before midnight, and when he did, he tiptoed into his room without a word. Where does he disappear to for such long periods? Fatima had often wondered, and a savage thought would creep in. The bugger, she’d say to herself with a pang of envy, is seeing another woman. But she could not figure out how sleeping around extended political leverage that the Karims believed Babu enjoyed.

  * * *

  A gang of Kiama kia Rukungu adherents descended on the Jakaranda a day after Big Man’s memorable appearance on television. They were about a hundred men, most of them young, some middle-aged. Feathers jutted out of their heads, faces dripped with white chalk, and all wore sisal kilts decorated with bright colors. Their leader carried a torch whose flame threw grotesque shadows on the assembly. Initially, the customers at the Jakaranda mistook them for the new resident band since Rajan’s group had stopped playing. Momentarily, revelers joined in the jig that was punctuated by the rhythmic chime of karing’a ring’a and deep drumming. But everybody scrambled back to their seats when the man holding the torch announced they were there to see the owner of the Jakaranda. They wanted to personally deliver the message they had been giving to other white farmers in the land: Mzungu aende ulaya, Mwafrika apate uhuru. The white man must return to Europe for the black man to gain his freedom.

  Many took it as a joke even as they pointed to the distant part of the farm where McDonald still lived, all alone—in yet another cycle of solitude—and returned to their drinks. “Better be warned, the old dog keeps a gun,” someone said over the throbbing sounds of the drums. “If ever there was mkoloni, then that’s him.” The party drifted away, the chime of karing’a ring’a accompanying them.

  McDonald, almost ninety-two, was still in perfect health, running most of his affairs with minimal assistance. His day servant had come and gone and he had been lounging on the upstairs balcony of his one-story wooden house smoking a pipe. He heard the dancers approach his farm and felt a mixture of curiosity and anger. He had heard stories about white farmers being humiliated by the gang at their own farms, so he was not surprised that he would be targeted. What surprised him was how calm he felt. But he was also angry that anyone dared trespass upon his land. To keep his anger at bay, he puffed on his pipe, standing in the shadow of the floodlight that illuminated the band of men beneath him. He noticed that in addition to the white chalk and spikes of feathers jutting out of the men’s heads, some wore animal masks that reminded him of England during Halloween. One man wore a pig snout; another wore rhino horns. McDonald thought the movements of some of the dancers was eerily familiar—he could have sworn he had seen them perform in the past. Or it could be that some had been his workers.

  The throb of the drums continued in earnest, with some of the dancers throwing lewd gestures in his direction, others indicating that he should descend from his balcony so they could stomp on him. McDonald did not mind the threats at all. He was relaxed enough to let his mind wander off to another time, another place.

  The cacophonous drumming faded in McDonald’s mind and gave way to the rhythmic rattling of that misty morning when the train made its maiden trip from Port Elizabeth to Mombasa, and the bewitching beauty of Nakuru that stunned and startled him, and compelled him to return when his coveted knighthood was substituted with a title deed to a piece of land.

  As a soldier, McDonald had felt somewhat cheated that the land he claimed as his own had been won without the firing of a single shot. There could be no glory in that. What he found even more frustrating, however, was Sally’s rejection of him and the land on which he built a house in her honor.

  McDonald had watched townships grow out of the steps of train stations. All townships followed a similar trajectory: Indian traders would build temporary stores selling refreshments. This encouraged other traders to hawk their wares near those stores. Before long, a market had ringed the place. Indian traders ventured into African villages to bring back sacks of sukuma wiki, potatoes for bhajia, dhania, and brinjals that they sold mainly to white settlers.Soon, there were different market days in different townships, each specializing in distinct merchandise. Livestock was procured from Kajiado every Monday; tanned hides were bought to Athi River every Tuesday; grains could be found in Kiambu every Wednesday, bales of cotton were sold in Port Elizabeth every Friday.

  The presence of traders from different parts of the colony led to the emergence of modest boarding facilities, and with these came other support services: transporters ferrying goods and people; petty traders selling yards of cloth and mukima toothbrushes; torches and sandals made from old tires. Different eateries emerged too, catering to the growing cadre of workers, all of whom remained organized along racial lines.

  Leading this brigade were the white settlers who, clinging to vestiges of white privilege, transformed many farmhouses into golf clubs, whose membership they offered only to their own. So every town that evolved from the train stations boasted one such club where whites socialized and whispered their fears of what the future held for them. Soon, many established reciprocal agreements so that a member of one golf club could patronize facilities in other parts of the colony at no extra cost. And in this way, the dream of making Kenya a white man’s country, even with a sea of resistance, would survive another day.

  The one group that defied this racial stratification were the twilight girls, most of them African, who migrated from one township to another like birds, scavenging for rich pickings. They could smell from afar which crop was about to flower and descend on the farmers awash with cash and relieve them of their hard-earned money with the blink of an eye. Actually, some would later confess, these city girls could steal with their eyelashes—all they needed to do was look at you and your money was gone.

  Occasionally, there was melodrama when men caught up with women who had stolen from them in other towns. An Indian transporter based in Port Elizabeth encountered a woman while she was entertaining another man in another town and claimed she had “eaten” his truck. The Indian did not want his money back, but he asked an unusual question of the man who was being entertained: he wanted to know if the man had heard an engine roaring when he was inside the woman.

  The new man, naturally, wanted to protect his woman’s honor and was about to swing into action, but stopped short, puzzled by this business of trucks roaring inside his woman. He thought the Indian meant breaking wind, but he couldn’t have been that uncouth. So he waited for some explanation, which the man supplied without any
prompting.

  Before meeting the woman, the Indian said, he operated a profitable enterprise ferrying goods from point A to point B. After meeting the woman, she confused him with mapenzi moto moto. The man conceded he hardly enjoyed mapenzi moto moto at home, only his wife’s constant nagging. So at the twilight woman’s prompting, he had left home and settled at a local lodging with her. In the meantime, he left his assistant—or turn-boy, as he called him—to run the business. Because of the turn-boy’s inexperience on the road, mainly due to poor driving skills, the truck kept breaking down. The Indian said he was a competent mechanic and had been servicing his own vehicle for years. But since he was too busy servicing the memsahib in bed, he told the turn-boy which part of the vehicle he thought needed fixing and gave him money for the parts. But the turn-boy did not buy quality parts, having seen this as a chance to keep a little money for himself. The truck soon began falling apart again and was in need of further fixing.

  Before long, there was hardly any money available for proper servicing of the vehicle, the entire savings having been spent facilitating mapenzi moto moto, so the breakdowns persisted. The man said he only left the twilight woman’s bed when he was told the truck had been grounded. Even then, the woman persuaded him that it was better to sell it rather than keep pouring good money into it, or incurring parking costs as he awaited its repair. So he left the bed to sell off the truck and returned quickly to enjoy the proceeds with the woman.

  “Now, do you understand when I ask if you hear engine roars when you are inside her? This woman ate my truck!” the man exclaimed, and left before the new man could even respond.

  * * *

  After McDonald’s efforts to tame the African wilds failed, and his pipe dream to produce enough milk for all to drink and even bathe in collapsed, he became the laughingstock of the white highlands. After the farmhouse had been turned into a whites-only private club, other settlers, between tots of brandies and slender glasses of wine, would mock McDonald’s naïveté. How could a man leave his own land to tame another’s? Did it not make more sense, and require much less energy, to simply conform and flow with nature? the white settlers asked themselves. While many admitted they had fled England to escape its horrible weather, they had no hang-ups about their motherland. They were happy to experiment with life and do what they wouldn’t dare back in England. Like sleeping with another man’s wife, or swapping wives with other men, or keeping a dozen servants. Yes, slavery had been abolished in Europe, but not in her dominions. And the master could fornicate with the servants and produce yellow babies without raising an eyebrow because the sun would tan them to acceptable social hues. As long as they bore white skin in the black land, the English would always have something to eat. And drink.

  This was the lot that in later years came to be known as the Happy Valley Set. Their debauchery entered the annals of history because that’s all they ever produced. Well, there were the bastards too, though they weren’t very many, given the amount of copulation that the group managed in those heady days of the empire. McDonald was scandalized when he learned some of the sordid things that had been conducted on his premises—that the space could be debased so deeply by his compatriots shocked him into silence. But the salacious-minded Happy Valley Set did not just live their lives; they also poked noses in other people’s business. Of McDonald’s indifference to women, they whispered that it was not entirely innocent. The man had tried dairy farming not just for milk; he must have enjoyed touching cows’ udders, they whispered. Bestiality, after all, was as old as mankind.

  McDonald ignored the gossip and threw himself into farming. He would grow wheat and feed the nation; he would introduce the colony to a culture of baking cakes and bread and pastries. The crop did remarkably well until 1939, when the war in Europe frustrated his importation of pesticides that could have saved the harvest from virulent weevils. That was McDonald’s turning point. He’d had enough with trying to domesticate the land and its people. He simply walked away, leaving farm equipment and the diseased crops still standing.

  That’s when McDonald turned his efforts to conservation. He would let the land be. He built a sanctuary away from human habitation to observe the wild animals. He learned their habits and noted their habitats. Soon, all important guests to the colony would look to him for guided tours to experience nature at its best. The only thing McDonald had to keep away from wild animals was the local poacher who sought them for food. As the chairman of the all-white Farmers’ Association, he had no trouble pushing through legislation that banned poaching.

  McDonald’s farm, whose acreage was expanded during the 1923 land adjudication to include the lake and the hot water spring, was certified as his with a shiny red seal; the embossed letters announced that Her Majesty had granted him a hundred-year lease for the thousand-acre piece of land. The revision of the land map meant that McDonald now encroached on Babu’s initial settlement by the lake. The long-term lease meant his control of the land would outlive him. Over the years, McDonald had agonized about the land and what would become of it once he was gone. He had neither an heir nor spouse to survive him—Sally’s exit from his life having sealed a certain void in his heart that never needed filling. Where others felt a void that needed constant replenishing, McDonald didn’t—his loss of love had firmly bolted the door to his heart. He would be fine, he had vowed to himself, all by himself. A man alone.

  In rare moments of reflection, McDonald thought about how many families had been displaced to accommodate him. He used his leverage in 1923 to formulate a policy that was given the lofty title of the Devonshire White Paper that would prevent Indians from owning land in the colony, under the pretext that African land ownership would be given priority. In the meantime, white farmers occupied all arable lands, which they insisted they were holding in trust for the Africans. Once they were ready to receive the land, it would be granted unto them.

  McDonald had heard his African servants talk of their anticipated lurch into adulthood when they would be bequeathed by their fathers a portion of the earth to build their own houses, after which they would marry. Yet, for all the land under his custody, McDonald would never take another wife. Failure to take a wife meant a man would die childless, a fate that his servants dreaded, because upon death, childless men would have ash smeared on their buttocks signifying they had produced nothing more than a mound of impotent soot.

  For the most part, however, McDonald felt good about himself and his circumstances. He had left home at seventeen with nothing more than the clothes on his back and with little prospects in life. An apprenticeship as a locksmith, to inherit his father’s business, was all that awaited him in England. But he had envisioned a different life for himself. He had chosen the army, and after twenty-three years of service to his country, he had started a new life in the colony as a pioneer farmer. And he had thrived, even in his solitude. Other lone men arrived on his doorstep and sought permission to camp on his farm. Trout fishing was possible in the lake, and steam-bathing in the hot water spring healed diseased or broken skin. This was the seed that grew into a thriving enterprise combining tourism and sports. Wealthier tourists arrived on hunting expeditions. They lived in tented camps where they could shoot kudu for dinner, trail impala for lunch, and fell rhinos for trophies to take home. It was the only resort of its kind in the entire colony, where man and wildlife lived in such close contact.

  Had he returned to England, McDonald suspected, he would have ended up in drab council housing, spending unbearably cold days staring at a blank wall and feeling pity for himself—a grumpy old man haunted by his unfaithful wife. He may have been unable to control one scrawny woman, but in the colony he had thousands of men under his command. Here he was the master of his universe. It was, for all intents and purposes, a proper universe, with natural and manmade features: a cool lake and a hot spring, and animals and servants to lord over. His landholding qualified him as a baron in the colony. Only men of title controlled such lands in
England, and most of it had been handed down through the generations. He had inherited nothing from his father other than his receding hairline and a short temper.

  The high point of McDonald’s life in the colony was when the colonial government notified him they had chosen his lodge to host an important couple from London. The year was 1952 and the colony was in the grip of an armed insurrection that was pushing for the expulsion of whites from the land, what historians agree was the precursor to Kiama kia Rukungu. McDonald, with his military background, had been instrumental in organizing a neighborhood watch, which buoyed his other credential as the chairman of the Farmers’ Association. He had risen to meaningful societal recognition even without the knighthood that he so coveted. So it was a cruel twist of fate that the important couple destined for his lodge turned out to be a young royal by the name of Princess Elizabeth, only twenty-five at the time, and her young husband.

  McDonald personally escorted the couple around, ducking into the woods when he sensed they were about to kiss, but intervening when they wandered too close to dangerous animals. McDonald navigated that space with ease, availing himself when needed, lurking in the shadows when he was in the way. He was proud to be of use to his country, even prouder that he had stayed on and harnessed the African wilds to accommodate his royal guests.

  As the couple’s visit neared the end—they were to leave in two nights—the princess invited McDonald to sit with them for dinner. “What can I do for you?” she asked gently. “You have been an exceptional host.”

  McDonald said he was glad to be of service, particularly to the royal family.

  “Sleep on it,” the princess prodded. “Think about it.”

  McDonald did not sleep that night. He was thinking how, nearly fifty years earlier, he had unsuccessfully lobbied for a title from the queen. And here was her daughter, sleeping under his roof, pestering him to state his wish. McDonald tossed and turned in bed that night, wondering whether to make the belated confession about how his quest for knighthood had kept him going. The lass would almost certainly let her family know there was an Englishman who deserved recognition for his contribution to the empire.