Indeed, the memory of her first marriage was punctuated not so much by births and miscarriages as by fragments of her art – a sailor suit she had made for Hassan to wear when some Governor or other was arriving at the port, a shimmering loose gown for carrying a baby that had slipped away when she was barely showing, a white-sprigged bed cover she had quilted for the wedding of a Goan teacher’s daughter.
In Sophia’s memory the strike seemed to be the beginning of the end. It was a good thing – Ali said so, and therefore she must believe it. Although they continued to live in the old town way, in which Muslims considered themselves a cut above the inland people, Christians or pagans, kaffirs all, except for a few who had seen the light and were beginning to follow civilised ways, Ali was one of those who resented the Arab feeling of superiority. This feeling had grown since the Arabs, despite all their talk in the Coast Arab Association, had kept the votes for a Legco member to themselves. So Swahilis had begun to talk about unity with inland Africans, and once one started to think about them as brothers it was impossible not to see that they were suffering. Their wages were extremely low for a place where you could not even partially apply the theory that food was coming free from the home place; a house, however overcrowded, was hard to get and sure to cost more than the small allowance paid to those who did not get a room in government quarters; worse than that, the casual labourers might not get more than a few days’ work a month. Disorders and riots had occurred before. Now, Ali said, it was time to show what organisation and solidarity could do.
It alerted government and employers to labour problems. It was not able to do much else. Only the Conservancy Department had given proper notice of their intention to strike. The Municipality therefore recognised a dispute and came up promptly with a very small offer. The night soil workers accepted it but the sweepers did not, so that although there was not a sanitary emergency, the rubbish piled up. Casual workers at the port were the first to come out but the ‘permanent boys’ had too much to lose: however when the strike spread to the African Marine Company police stopped all work in the port for fear that strikers would carry out their threat to invade the dock area. Pickets did their best to bring building to a halt and also to call out domestic servants, but some domestic employers and hotels were accommodating their staff or driving them home.
Permanent labourers on the railway did not actually strike – they presented their demands and were promised investigation. This greatly weakened workers’ co-operation, but even so about six thousand people were off work at the same time. The Texas Oil Company paid off their daily workers and brought staff from Nairobi. The Mombasa Electric Light and Power Company signed off strikers and engaged new staff locally. Dairy workers settled their dispute within a day. So unity was sabotaged and people drifted back to work. Only the very poorest got much out of the interim award, and the planned further investigations were postponed in the excitement of war breaking out.
To Fatuma it just seemed messy, outside forces spilling over in the untidy order of island life. Rubbish piled up in the streets and round the fish market, goods lay undelivered, some of them rotting, gangs of unemployed wandered about, no greater hazard to life and property than usual but irritating, the extra police making a great show of breaking them up while, as a result, new groups formed up like a wave behind them. It gave her a funny feeling, but she tried to believe Ali that it would make for improvement in the long run.
Then, almost before one was back in routine, war. Knowing as usual, Ali said the awards, the restraint on police action, had been to keep the people loyal in case they were needed to fight. There was no very promising alternative to be loyal to, from what one heard of the Italians in Ethiopia, but even so in 1940 the government managed to lock up some political activists on a charge of being in touch with the enemy, and to ban three political groups.
It was not what older people thought of as a war, with soldiers nipping across the boundary to shoot one another beside the railway while you stood back and waved flags. This war meant work – the port full of ships, carrying troops, carrying food, carrying mail, which sometimes failed to arrive and was always wanted in a hurry. Everyone was busy. Everyone was tired. There were long queues for goods in the authorised shops, high prices in the others. Routes, and so manifests, might have to be changed at the last minute, documents delayed to reduce the risk of careless talk. One morning a load slipped and crashed down from overhead. Ali was crumpled, reduced, died on the way to hospital. He was buried, as is customary, at sundown. Overnight, order was reversed, and all Fatuma’s faiths disintegrated.
Eleven years they were together, good years, until the disaster that in her mind marched always with the troubles of the Second World War, when you had to pretend to be an Arab to qualify for a rice ration and your menfolk were too busy in the port to come home to their beds. But all that was behind her now. . . .
The cement floor was chill and damp to the touch. Draughts reigned under a cloudy sky. One had to speak to these faded old ladies in simplistic terms, dull and devoid of ornament. Admittedly, she did not know their treasured languages, but they prided themselves on knowing hers, and drained it of cadence and colour as they spoke.
Sophia smoothed the new dress lovingly. Once she would have scorned to wear anything that had been on another woman’s body. But this was neutral. It held no perfume of other days, no fragment of shell or fish scales, no healthy smell of babies bathed at sundown, of hard soap or new cloth redolent of dress, of coconut oil and peppers, cloves or rough sticks of cinnamon that were good to chew. No kohl, no hennaed patterns on the skin, no moist, milky breasts, no mystery here behind neat curtained windows where clerks and technicians and their lumpy wives lived in bland discomfort as the whites had taught them. Selecting the gayest of her wrappers as an invocation to warmth, she cocooned herself under the blanket in the hope of dreaming herself away.
‘No, good, Soph-i-a,’ said Matron sharply. ‘You will complain to me again that you can’t sleep at night because of somebody coughing or somebody snoring, and you use up all your sleep in the daytime.’
But Sophia hugged herself more tightly and kept her eyes closed.
CHAPTER THREE
She was so determined to sleep that she even missed the soldier marching by again. Perhaps he had moved house (whatever passed for house) or had chosen the Refuge particularly as his audience.
‘Lef’ ri’ lef’ ri’,’ today he was really drilling in style, causing the traffic to slow down as he followed one side of the road, stopping and starting to his own orders.
‘Might as well have a band,’ commented Nekesa. ‘I remember before I went to Uganda there were often military bands in Nairobi, European ones, I mean, in those days. Livelier than we get now, with always the same DA-DA da-da-da DA-DA. Everyone used to turn out to watch.’
‘Better they had been thinking about their freedom,’ growled Mama Chungu.
‘You can think and still watch.’
‘Nobody wanted to be watched in the forest,’ put in Wairimu. ‘Quiet you had to be, deadly quiet, or else you were a dead man.’
‘Can’t we leave it alone?’ asked Priscilla. ‘The Emergency finished twenty years and more ago. We are free now. Let us not keep chewing over it.’
‘Some of us had losses,’ insisted Mama Chungu. ‘You may not like to be made to remember it, but it’s true. We cannot get away from it.’
Indeed we cannot get away from it, thought Priscilla. But we can try to keep it in the past instead of living haunted with the images of blood and iron.
She looked curiously at Mama Chungu, who had spoken so little of herself since she had been picked up from the pavement and brought to the Refuge that some of them thought she had no memory at all. No one knew where she had come from. But memories, of course, need not speak in loud voices. They may gibber at a tantalising distance like a bat in the rafters, or swoop upon you like a moth, soundless but soiling you with a residue of filmy substance. They are the mo
re terrifying if they wake you up, unaware of where you are, or weave about from real places to the fantasy of story-books or the falsity of postmarked letters. Perhaps, after all, Mama Chungu was resuming shape, particularising herself, and the birth-pain of which she used to babble was not that of the mother but of the newborn child.
‘Rubbish,’ Rahel used to say when Priscilla tried to steer away from Emergency talk. ‘I’ve had to do with fighting all my life. What’s the use of pretending our menfolk can do without it? But I admit it was a tough time for you in the fifties. My Vitalis was a young private then, and it turned him up some of the things he saw. Young men don’t talk all that freely to their mothers, but he told me some things that seemed to haunt him, feeling he was taking it out of his own people. (Not that anyone spoke of freedom fighters then. Not where we lived, anyway. We were taught to feel superior to them and with their jobs and houses falling our way it wasn’t too hard.) But I used to tell him it’s not up to a soldier to choose his side. Other people have to do that, and sometimes they get the chop for it. A military man takes his orders the same as a bus driver. No good saying “I’d fancy a run to Nakuru today instead of Mombasa.” Once you do that, every rut in the road will be your fault. Stick to your orders, I said to him. It lets you out of taking responsibility.’
‘And look where that got us,’ Wairimu would retort. ‘Sharing a house with twenty-eight other old busybodies who praise peace and talk war, without a man in sight except the Reverend coming to tell us to mind our women’s business.’
Wairimu was by far the oldest, so she felt she had a right to slander old age if anyone did. She looked on Rahel, ten years younger, as her lieutenant, but one already failing in health. Sophia actually came between them in age but she was set apart, not by her colour, not by lack of experience (for they all respected her conversion and her tribulations), but by something less definable. It was not only her lack of the countrywomen’s skills, for Priscilla might also have seemed town-born if you did not know better, and Nekesa could hardly tell a potato from a groundnut till it was dug up and put on the market. There was some other timeless quality about Sophia that kept her out of the age-ranking order, friendly enough to all but not near neighbour to any.
‘Isn’t this a bit extreme?’ the donors’ representative had said when the Vicar brought her to see the Matron and go through the record books. She was a sandy sort of person, all pale and dappled, standing for some kind of corporate European personality.
‘I mean you have to be able to observe a lot of heartbreak to get the funds administered properly. It is a bit like the love of God: you take it in full of feeling and then have to learn to live with it inside the bounds of society. But we have been trained to think that it is only white people who can be completely ignored by their relations. These old bodies seem to have survived disaster after disaster.’
‘Of course the cases are extreme,’ said the Vicar gently. ‘Ours is not a very wealthy country. We don’t give out our resources to help the middling poor unless they have had other kinds of distress. Most of us have been middling poor at one time or another in our lives.’
‘Yes, yes, I see. Everywhere there are disasters. But one is dwarfed by disasters without any savings or security to relieve them. Care is one thing. The rebuilding of utterly shattered lives is another. Of course people were doing this with displaced persons in Europe at the end of the war, or after partition in India, but where society has not broken down. . . .’
‘Do our old ladies look shattered to you?’
‘No indeed, that is the wonder. Except the one who keeps nattering about her baby. Of course the one in bed has had a stroke by the look of her – I didn’t see that entered in the record. But still she has a kind of serenity about her, even after all those troubles.’
‘In England, you see,’ the Matron took it upon herself to expound to the Vicar, ‘people will take their old folks to a home, even if they have to pay quite heavily for it. They are more easily defeated by the care than by the expense. We are not like that, though there are a few who abandon their relations. And usually those who are willing to pay can employ someone to do the work at home.’ She had now turned her attention to Mrs Reinhold. ‘Wages are not so high, and in the countryside a helper might not even demand a wage, just expenses paid now and again. So those we get here are really problem cases.’
‘Now, now, Matron,’ the Vicar interrupted. ‘They are people with problems. They are not themselves problems. That is what Mrs Reinhold is saying.’
‘Of course I did not mean to imply. . . .’
‘And we know that the Lord is able to deal with every problem,’ went on the Vicar firmly, ‘and He sends people like you, Mrs Reinhold, to assist.’
‘Yes, I agree,’ said the social worker cautiously. ‘I happen to agree, though I’d be a bit careful about saying so when a number of very good and devoted people think they have sent me themselves. And on their behalf I should like to say how much we appreciate the care you are giving here. But surely not every one of these residents is an out-and-out Christian? And yet they have a resilience, a self-confidence that is hard to find among institutional cases – if you will allow the word for once, Vicar – and not to be taken for granted among people who have been buffeted so much in ordinary life. I mean, even a shared disaster – an earthquake wiping out a town, for instance – gives people an urge to support one another and put a brave face on it. Much of my work is concerned with that kind of situation. It is all these individual tragedies that reduce me to a jelly.’
‘You seem to be holding up very well for a jelly, Mrs Reinhold,’ answered the Vicar gallantly. ‘But I think perhaps you have a different time-scale for disasters than ours. Don’t forget we had the first man – a sort of raw material for Adam – in Kenya. William the Conqueror and Genghis Khan and Hitler, all these people are mere episodes for us. We have lived, traditionally, a very eventful life as regards plagues, famines, migrations, raiding parties. I don’t think any of these ladies grew up in the expectation – I don’t say not in the hope – of a calm course of life in which your husband was always nice to you, your children mostly stayed alive, you were surprised if there was nothing palatable to eat and were sure that your daughters-in-law would look after you in old age. We had the picture of that kind of life, but it wasn’t one to take for granted. If it had been, perhaps people would have resisted the changes the colonialists brought more strongly. I think perhaps it was not that they were too surprised to protest but that they were not surprised enough to believe that the new order was going to last. And the Emergency was not a single catastrophe but a repetition on a large scale of the kind of situation people had already encountered on their own. So it is not unimaginable to these women to be situated as they are. Perhaps it would be unimaginable to people who are young now in this country – we must hope so.’
‘They are tough all the same.’
‘To be eighty years old in Africa is to be tough. Particularly for a woman, because she has learned from childhood to look after others rather than to be looked after.’
‘In Europe and America,’ chipped in the Matron, ‘women live longer than men because they are exposed to less hardship. But in our pastoral areas, men live longer, because the women’s work is so much harder.’
‘Even Rahel,’ the Vicar went on, ‘– Rahel is the one who may have had a stroke – has a story you could hardly bear to hear. The record book only gives the bare bones of it. And yet she is not from the Emergency area and indeed Luo women have a relatively high status in their community. Would you like her to tell you about it?’
Once roused, tidied, introduced, Rahel was more than willing to go over it all again, and a schoolgirl was summoned from a neighbouring house to interpret from Luo into English. Friends gathered round to support even though they might not understand. Mrs Reinhold sat obligingly with a notebook, conscious that an example was being set up for her.
‘Vitalis was getting on for eighteen wh
en his father died, and mad keen to follow in his footsteps. So he joined up. It was probably the best thing he could do. I took it for granted, really. It was the only kind of work I knew much about, and he was not all that good at school to look for an office job. Margaret – they had all been baptised by then – was nearly sixteen, and soon afterwards she married a man from Seme and they moved to Tanganyika. Florence studied up to standard four and she stayed with me. After the town kind of life we lived in quarters I didn’t much like the idea of being inherited by some old man in Uyoma. My co-wife had a grown-up son by then, so she was able to stay with him in our own dala. So we arranged that she would prepare the fish that end and I would collect them off the bus in Kisumu and sell them in the market. When Florence was a little older she got a job as a ward-maid in the hospital and was able to help me pay the rent of the little room we had. I wasn’t really a very keen churchgoer then – in any case you lose a lot if you’re not in the market on Sundays – but my church friends were pleased that I had refused to be passed on to another man, and so they tried to teach me more and I got some comfort out of it.
‘But then our troubles started. I don’t mean to say that our husband’s death was not a trouble, but that was in the course of nature. He had put a lot of his Post Office money into a boat for his eldest son, Omondi, and that’s where a lot of our fish came from. But Omondi, the first child of my co-wife, was perhaps not meant to be a fisherman. He was a bit clumsy. He was not properly a saved man but he did not go in for the full boat-rituals either.’
There was a pause here, because the schoolgirl came from an inland area and had no idea of the mysteries of the lakeshore and the fishing cults. With a long explanation and a few Swahili words thrown in, she managed to convey the idea.
The Present Moment Page 5