The senior wife carried a smouldering log to the thingira and lit a fire. Waseru squatted over the flames on a low stool and waited for his father, talking meanwhile with his young half-brother Ngarariga, a newly circumcised youth now in the warrior class. Ngarariga was angry because he had been forbidden by the council of warriors to take part in the raid. He had been ordered to stay behind to guard the herds; and now, if any loot were taken, he would get no share.
As Ngarariga and Waseru speculated on the outcome of the raid, the thought of wealth and cattle filled their minds entirely, as hot beer fills the belly at festivals. The leaping fire was warm and caressing on their eyelids. In his interest Waseru forgot his own poverty and the loneliness that sometimes assailed him in his forest hut, separated from his own kin. Now he felt as a raindrop that has reached the river might feel when it merged itself in the great body of the stream; or as a bird that finds its way back to the forest after it has been lost for many days among the shadeless mountains.
6
MAHENIA, Waseru’s father, was small and brittle. His face was networked with wrinkles as if a horde of ants had been scurrying over his skin, each one leaving a little furrow in its track. He had shrewd black eyes that darted swift glances about him like a forest rat. He was known as a quick-witted man who drove hard bargains in goats, and if luck had been with him he might have become rich. Fortune had been his match, but not his master. He was by no means a rich man, but he was comfortably placed and well respected in the council of elders. He himself, however, complained frequently of the misfortunes that had befallen his cattle, and of his worthless son’s insatiate demands for the loan of goats. The lobes of his ears were distended with wooden cylinders, set with beads, as broad across as a man’s palm. Small chain ornaments dangled from the upper cartilage of his ears, and necklaces of beads, shells and leather hung from his neck. He wore a cloak of chestnut goatskin, and his hair, as befitted an elder’s, was closely cropped.
He greeted Waseru in a high, uneven voice and sat down by the fire on the three-legged stool, its wood darkened by long use, that hung over his shoulder on a fine iron chain. He grunted and belched with comfort as he sat, and rubbed his eyes and temples. The beer had been good and warm and liberally poured.
“Waseru,” he said, “is all well with you? Have the milletrains come plentifully to the new land that you have cleared, and does your wife cultivate with proper industry?”
Waseru replied that the rains had come and that the millet had sprouted knee-high among the stumps of felled trees. But there were many pigs in the forest, he added, and they came at night to eat the young stalks. And the cold was so bitter that it entered into the marrow of his bones; sometimes his limbs became as stiff as branches.
They talked intermittently by the fireside, pausing a long time between sentences as each theme was touched upon, weighed, and turned over slowly in the mind, as a full-bellied dog will prod a morsel of food with his nose before deciding whether or not to eat it. They talked of many things, but Waseru did not mention the illness of his son, nor his consultation with the mundumugu; nor did Mahenia ask the reason for his visit.
Wanjeri, meanwhile, sat in her mother-in-law’s hut, gossiping and helping to stir the big black pot. How pleasant it was, she thought, to be again among the goats in the warm thick atmosphere of which she seemed herself to be a part; how pleasant to sense the familiar tang of goat sharp in her nostrils, to hear their scuffles and soft stampings in the darkness. Eyes gleamed in the firelight on all sides, as if God had poured a little of the night into a calabash and let it stand with a circlet of stars floating around the rim. In the forest there were no goats because Waseru was poor. The hut was cold and empty, and the night outside full of spirits, angered and hungry for fat.
When food was ready Mahenia’s senior wife carried steaming porridge in calabashes to the men. They ate in silence, savouring the rich flavour of the heavy paste. Wanjiku brought her husband a thin gruel made from ground millet left for a day to sour in a long gourd, and a platter of hot yams. There were also large bananas, roasted in the warm ashes until they were hard and grey. It was a good meal, the best that Waseru had tasted since he had left his father’s compound. He ate slowly, trying to conceal his hunger, but Mahenia was not deceived. The old man watched him covertly with darting eyes set deep in a cunning, leathery face. Now he had no need to ask the reason for the visit of his son.
CHAPTER II
The Debt
1
WASERU left his father’s homestead while the white strands of cobweb hanging on the bush were beaded with dew and early morning sunlight lay gently over new-washed grass.
From the green pastures below the forest’s border he could see the majestic peak of Kerinyagga, that was hidden from his own dwelling by regiments of trees. The sun came up over the eastern shoulder and brushed its white tooth clean of darkness, while its immense shadow still lay like deep water over the roofs of huts and the grey cultivation below. The mountain of the ostrich, it was sometimes called, because the pure whiteness of its crown and the stark blackness of the rocks below gave it the appearance of a cock-bird’s plumage. High and remote, the peak floated in the clean air above them, guarded from the impudent feet of men by many spirits. The Athi, those hunters who ate the flesh of game, had sometimes seen them, and reported them as small in stature, no higher than a man’s waist. At night they would sit on cold black rocks and wail into the mists, malignant and lonely.
Above, on the far white crest where no man could venture, was the seat of God. There he dwelt, sending rain or withholding it according to his pleasure, blessing sometimes with abundance, showing his anger sometimes in pestilence or drought. He sent his messengers in the bodies of animals to accept sacrifices that old men left for him beneath sacred fig-trees, those trees whose roots grew down from heaven instead of up from earth as was the case with all other trees. Sometimes, when he prepared to go on a journey, men could hear him cracking his joints with a noise of thunder; at such times they would not dare to look up into the sky, lest they should glimpse his majesty and perish.
Waseru’s father-in-law lived a full half-day’s journey distant. At first the path followed the course of a twisting stream, through shambas carpeted with the dark, heart-shaped leaves of sweet potatoes and green with the stiff stems of millet and sorghum. Birds twittered and flapped everywhere in the warm, sweet-smelling bush. The three insistent notes of the bird called ‘throwerof-firewood’ fell like raindrops out of the branches in a descending cadence: “Gai-ky-ngu; gai-ky-ngu; gai-ky-ngu.”
As the sun climbed up the sky, heavy full-bellied clouds in changing shades of white and grey and violet rose from behind the earth and hung above the horizon like fantastic fruits, swollen with ripeness, suspended from the formless tree of heaven. Later in the day they would move slowly along the horizon with the dignity and sureness of old men proceeding at their leisure to a beer-feast. Waseru had heard it said that they were God’s white oxen being driven by his wives over the deep pastures of the sky, but he himself felt doubtful whether oxen could be so transfigured.
As Waseru walked he reflected deeply on his troubles. Fortune seemed to have deserted him completely, he thought. Things had been good with him at first, after his circumcision. He had taken his place among the warriors, he had won renown at the dances, girls had looked on him with favour. When, after nine seasons, the time came for him to marry, his father had paid the bride-price without demur, even though the girl’s father, Ndolia, belonged to a clan which was often feared because there were said to be many poisoners among its members. But his father had paid goats, his mother had brewed beer, the senior elder of his clan had allotted him good land, and he had built himself a hut. Soon afterwards his wife had borne him a son, Muthengi, and then, after the first had been weaned, a second son, Matu. He had owned a small herd of goats which was gradually increasing, so that the purchase of a second wife was not beyond his dreams.
2
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p; THEN the first disaster had occurred. The land that Waseru had been given to cultivate on his marriage had been partially covered with forest. When weeds had begun to creep over his wife’s millet field, and harvests no longer filled her granary to the roof, he had decided to plant his next crops on fresh soil. So he had declared war on the trees. The smaller ones he had felled with an axe, the larger ones with fire. He had hollowed out a place near the foot of each tree and started inside it a blaze of banana leaves. A stain of black had spread gradually over the white flesh of the tree; each stately giant had tottered like a drunken elder, and crashed to the ground with a mighty roar that had shaken the very foundations of the earth. The trees had smouldered slowly into ashes, and the sun had streamed down into the uncovered earth to warm it for seed.
Everyone had known, up and down the ridge, that Waseru was felling trees near the forest’s border; and the boys had been told that goats must not be herded there. But one day a he-goat from across the river had strayed, and a boy had followed it into the forest’s fringe where Waseru had been at work among the trees. The causes of the disaster that had followed were not yet fully understood. It was clear, of course, that some enemy of the boy’s parents, or of his clan perhaps, must have laid upon him a powerful spell to guide his feet to the path of the falling tree. The last supports of the big makarimbui had cracked with a noise like bamboo poles bursting in a fire, and the trunk had smashed down on to the skull of the bewitched young goatherd. There Waseru had found him, later in the day. He had fetched his father, and they had stared fearfully at two black branches bearing no leaves that protruded from the foliage— two spindly, lifeless legs.
In the lawsuit that followed the victim’s father had accused an enemy of killing his son by sorcery. The council of elders had sat in judgment for a long time. Waseru, as a party to the litigation, had found himself obliged to pay no less than three fat rams to the elders in court fees. And the payment of blood-money, forty goats, had stripped him of the last of his flock, forcing him to borrow from his father. At a single stroke he had been deprived of wealth that had taken eight seasons to amass.
His troubles, even then, had not been over. A third child had been born, and Ndolia had demanded payment of the balance of the bride-price. Waseru had hoped to borrow from his father, but the Masai had carried out a daring raid about that time, and Mahenia had lost all his cattle. The old man, distressed and angered by the heavy loss, had refused to help any further, and accused his son of idleness and sloth. Waseru had been deeply wounded by his father’s attitude. When the millet crop had failed, and wild pigs had eaten his sweet potatoes, and on top of everything Ndolia had cursed him publicly as a worthless son-in-law unmindful of his duty, he had realised that the land he was cultivating and the huts in which he lived were charged with a very evil magic; and he had decided to move.
Waseru’s clan had the right to hunt game and to gather honey in all that part of the forest lying between the two streams that bounded their land. Where cultivation lay the strip was narrow, perhaps six times as far as a man could throw a spear; but higher up the rivers spread out like the spokes of a fan, and the clan’s territory stretched into the heart of the forest farther than man had ever penetrated.
Once, long ago, a race of wandering dwarfs who lived on the flesh of game had hunted there. They had slept in holes in the ground, like moles, and had worn long beards; their name, Agumba, meant “the people of the children’s eyes.” Some of their women had married into Kikuyu clans; but the men had retreated before Kikuyu axe and fire which had destroyed their shelter. The last of them, it was said, had changed into crimson-feathered plantain-eaters which could even now, on occasion, be heard talking the Agumba language in the dead of night. So the little hunters had vanished, and only elephants and deer, birds and monkeys, pigs and leopards, remained to stir the forest’s silence with their restless motion.
The forest was the enemy of the Kikuyu; it was cold and dark, and barred rich land to the women’s hoe. Only by labour and toil could trees be destroyed. Even then the forest lay in wait like an ambush of warriors, ready to surge forward if women were idle at their weeding. It was an enemy, but its only weapon was the slow persistence of growth, and that could not serve against the swift axe, the creeping fire, and the biting hoe. Steadily and inexorably the Kikuyu people were beating it back, foot by foot, and claiming the deep soil, rich with juices of vegetable decay, as their own. Although it was hard work to clear the forest the rewards were big; crops were heavy, and often there would be a surplus for exchange. And new land, Waseru reckoned, could scarcely be bewitched. So, fortified by a charm to protect the crops and a blessing from the senior elder of his clan, he had moved with his family from his father’s homestead to the forest, to start a new shamba of his own.
3
THE sun, filling the sky with an exuberance that drowned its own body, was high overhead when Waseru reached Ndolia’s homestead. The old man himself did not appear until the evening. Unlike most of his people he was fat and heavy, and his face wore a sulky, shifty look. He carried a staff of black polished mungirima wood and a fan of large leaves, badges of his rank as a member of the senior elders’ council. He wore ear ornaments of flat metal spirals and a thick cloak of monkey skin. He was a rich man, with five wives living and two dead; and as an outward sign of his importance he displayed a long metal concave ring on the middle finger of his pudgy right hand.
His was a big compound, containing ten or twelve round huts. It was one of a group of eight which together formed a village enclosed in a high prickly fence and surrounded by a belt of forest. When shadows softened with the sloping of the sun it became a centre of great activity. Flocks of goats converged upon it out of the bush from all sides, like grey guinea-fowl hurrying to their roosting-places, and the air was filled with a gay noise of tinkling bells. Women and young girls padded homebound along the paths, bent low under burdens of sweet potato tops or green bananas, often with babies tucked into leather slings on their backs. A knot of slim young men, their hair plaited with twine and feathers and thickened by a paste of ochre and fat, arrived at dusk from the cattle boma. They carried long gourds that had been rinsed with cows’ urine in order to thicken the new milk quickly into curds.
It was a warm night, and Waseru fed with Ndolia and several of his sons and nephews outside the thingira, under the stars. His father-in-law greeted him coldly, and spoke to him hardly at all. After the meal Ndolia, refreshed by frequent dips into his snuff-horn, listened to reports from his circumcised sons as to the disposition and health of the cattle. Waseru sat in silence, waiting for Ndolia’s signal; but none came. He went to bed in the thingira on a skin-covered bed reserved for guests. Late at night a noisy group of young men came in from a dance, cracking a few last jokes about their amorous experiences. Then silence spread over the village and the tumbled land of ridges, and Waseru slept.
He waited two days, sitting silently on his stool in the sun or going with the young men who herded cattle, before Ndolia was ready to speak. All this time he looked respectfully at his feet when his father-in-law passed him, and turned his face away when one of Ndolia’s wives approached. He was unhappy and apprehensive, for he felt dislike and contempt coming out of the minds of Ndolia’s sons and nephews like the stench from a rotting corpse. And he was afraid, for sometimes it seemed that he did indeed detect an evil smell in the village, such a smell as could only arise where sorcery was practised.
4
ON the third morning he was summoned to an interview under a big, thick-foliaged fig-tree whose wide branches shaded the gateway of the homestead. Ndolia was seated on his low stool. Around him squatted a little circle of men of his generation, the ruling generation of the land. Waseru recognised them all as Ndolia’s kinsfolk—his brothers, the sons of his father’s brothers, and other more distant members of his clan.
Ndolia reviewed at length the history of the dispute. He recited the bride-price that Mahenia had originally paid, descri
bing in detail the markings of each goat he had received, and recalling each brew of beer that Mahenia’s wives had made. He held in his hand a bundle of short sticks and threw one to the ground to represent each goat, and then, in a separate pile, each brew of beer. He spoke then with great fluency of the many goats that were owing, of the progeny that these goats would have added to his flocks had they been promptly paid; of broken promises, of the disgrace of poverty, and of the undutiful behaviour of sons-in-law. It was a long recital, punctuated by a chorus of approval from those of his kinsmen who remained awake, and by the snores of those who had fallen asleep. When at last it ended Ndolia claimed seventeen goats, two fat rams, and ten brews of beer.
Waseru could hardly resist crying out in protest at this. The claim was far beyond his capacity to pay, and it was rankly unjust. He kept his temper, however, cleared his throat, spat, and started in a low tone to state his defence. He, too, reviewed the history of the case, pausing now and then to emphasise a point by hurling a stick to the ground as if he were projecting the argument into the skulls of his audience. He admitted a debt of two fat rams and four goats, but denied all obligations to produce more beer. He offered, however, to pay one fat ram immediately for a feast at which the quarrel should be thrown away, to provide one brew of beer, and to pay four goats and one more ram after the millet harvest was in. His offer was indignantly rejected. The argument grew heated, voices were raised, and the air was electric with hostility. Not until the sun was sinking through a red pool of cloud beyond the Masai plains did the discussion end.
Red Strangers Page 3