For the next month Matu laboured with axe and fire to destroy the trees. His two women followed after to break the clods with clubs and pangas. The rains had started, and they worked against time. Every afternoon black, angry rainclouds rolled over the mountain’s crest above and broke over the forested shoulders of the Mau. Each time Matu ran for shelter, but was drenched before he had gone ten paces; and Wanja moaned in despair at the rivulets which poured into the temporary hut.
Before nightfall the storm would pass over. Then long rays of sunshine would stream over the rain-drenched hillside, and on every leaf and grass-blade a drop of water would catch and hold the golden light. The fresh strong smells of rising sap and leaf-mould would surge out of the earth, and nimble-footed bushbuck would step delicately from the thickets to shake the moisture from their chestnut coats. Sometimes a steady rain would return during the night and at dawn the sky would be dyed the angry crimson of a flamingo’s wing. Then Matu and Wanja would stay indoors until the sun had climbed over a close-packed wall of cloud to dry a little the tall red-oat grass that stood among the trees high above a man’s head, and drenched him as if he had plunged into a river. But as a rule the sun sprang fully armed into a sky the colour of a bead. It seemed as if each day was born afresh, alert with wonder; there was no telling what might happen to it before nightfall ; darkness seemed a hundred seasons away.
After the rain the cultivated earth lay black and steaming in its fecundity, and sap-taut shoots grew rapidly towards the sky. Matu, seeing the soil’s great fertility, gave his son Karanja a small knife and said:
“My son, remember that the soil is the fat part of a ram, and a young cow is like a beehive. Look at the fat and the flesh of a ram: you will see that the flesh is white and the fat is black. So is good soil black, like a ram’s fat. Go now and cultivate it well with your mother, so that you may learn to become a man.”
6
WANJA planted among the stumps all the maize seed she had brought, two kinds of beans and some sweet potatoes. Here and there she put in sticks and planted by them seeds of the tree-pea njugu. The millet of three different kinds she left in the granary, for the time to plant it was not yet. Finally she put in a few black beans of the castor oil bush, so that she would not lack oil for smearing on her body to make her limbs shine in the sun.
But she soon learnt that the seasons of the Mau were different from those of her own country. Heavy rain came when everything should have been dry and the shamba had not been prepared for planting; and there appeared to be no millet rains at all. It was extremely confusing, and she complained loudly to her husband that the land must be cursed by the displeasure of God.
“Have you not seen that the goats of the men who live here are fat,” Matu answered, “and that their children are fat also because there is plenty to eat? Do not be foolish, but cultivate well, and God will send us good crops.”
To make sure of this, he bought a he-goat for two rupees—less than half the rate that prevailed at Tetu—and sprinkled the stomach contents mixed with two spirit-repelling powders around the boundaries of his new shamba, calling on God to bless him with heavy crops, many children and fertile goats. Then he awaited with confidence the harvest of his first crop.
7
MATU was distressed to find that the women did not share his enthusiasm for the new shamba and the pioneer life.
They complained continually of the heavy soil; of the tough-rooted weeds that must be planted at night by spirits, so quickly did they grow again; and of the river’s steep banks, so slippery after rain that water-carriers could scarcely clamber up. They grumbled also at the long distances between homesteads, and the lack of neighbours; at the wild animals; and above all at the vast concourse of spirits inhabiting the wild, malignant forest that pressed in upon them all, spirits that could be heard shrieking and moaning angrily among the trees. When a full moon rode high over the tapering beard-hung cedars, and stars swam like silver fishes in and out of their spike-leaved branches, Wanja could not sleep because of these raucous, hostile noises.
One day Wanja fell and dropped the baby by the river, and Matu realised that spirits had indeed tried to hurt his wife. He killed a goat at once and purified her, and decided to delay no longer the building of a proper homestead. He hewed the posts out of a big cedar whose base had been eaten by fire, while Wanja cooked food and brewed beer. All the neighbours were summoned to the site, blessed with gruel; and in a day a stout hut of cedar posts and mud was built.
The maize grew to an extraordinary height. The stems were thicker than Matu’s wrist. But the beans were half choked by quick-growing weeds and there was trouble with the treepeas and sweet potatoes. Although Matu tried to stay awake at night to drive away wild animals he could not prevent bushbuck from eating off the pea shoots, and wild pigs were as numerous in the forest as zebras on the plain. Night after night they ravaged the sweet potatoes. Every morning Wanja gazed at the results with despairing eyes and complained:
“Am I then to cultivate for the benefit of wild animals ? Am I now to be the wife of a forest pig ? What did you come here for, leaving the good land of your clan, to live like an Athi or a monkey among trees and beasts? I cannot endure it any longer. I shall run away to my father and tell him that you ill-treat me, and that I must return to my own clan.”
“Have you no patience, no sense ?” Matu retorted. “Do you expect the tree of wealth to bear fruit in a single season? It is always the clumsy dancer who complains that the ground is stony. Can you not see that the maize is tall and strong and the goats fat and healthy? Learn patience, and do as you are told.”
The attacks of wild pigs continued to devastate the sweet potatoes, and after two seasons Matu reluctantly admitted that he could not fight them off. He told Wanja not to plant them any more.
“Soon I shall return to Muthengi’s,” he told her, “and then I will fetch seeds of the foreign potatoes that I brought from Tetu. I do not think the pigs will find them, for they grow very deep in the ground and each plant produces a great many. And they are very good to eat.
“And how will I fatten he-goats or rams,” Wanja demanded, “if I have no sweet potato tops to give them?”
“I do not know,” Matu replied. “Perhaps there is no way. Then I shall be without fat rams to eat.”
Wanja laughed derisively. “All men are alike,” she said. “They want three things: to lie with girls, to drink beer and to eat fat meat. No doubt if you went without fat rams you would lie down and say you were too tired to get up.”
“Silence,” Matu said angrily. “You are as ill-mannered as a woman who hands food to her husband with her left hand. I shall beat you if you talk in this way.”
After that Matu had to pretend not to care about the lack of fattening rams in the pen in his wife’s hut, but it made him very sad to know that he could not again eat their juicy, succulent flesh.
8
WANJA was no less disappointed by the failure of the sugar-canes that had been planted by the river. The banks were abrupt and rocky, covered with thick prickly bush and creepers. There were no flat swampy stretches enclosed in bends of the stream, such as those used in Kikuyu for cane, and it had been hard to find a suitable place. They sprouted, but soon afterwards they withered and died. Wanja blamed the dryness of the land and the cold nights, for after sunset the air grew bitter and the skin of travellers tightened over their limbs. She tried again, but with the same result. How, Wanja demanded, lacking sugar-cane, could she make beer ?
Around the homestead Matu planted some banana suckers brought from Kikuyu by train, but they refused to establish themselves at all. At Wanja’s request Matu killed a goat and sprinkled the land with stomach contents, asking God to bless the bananas and imploring the spirits to leave them alone; but he knew from the first that a sacrifice would be useless, for the land was too cold.
“This place is cursed,” Wanja protested bitterly. “God does not like it, and we have little left to eat. Why do you not
return to your own clan, where wild animals and spirits can be kept from the seedlings and bananas and canes will grow?”
One night they heard the trampling of hoofs outside the compound, and lay terrified in the darkness of the hut.
“It is the spirits driving their cattle to water,” Wanja whispered in an agony of fright.
“It is the buffalo that live in the forest,” her husband replied, “and that is very nearly as bad.”
Matu was right. A herd of buffalo had marched through the shamba, trampling beans and tall maize plants into the mud. In the morning he gazed at the damage with saddened, patient eyes, mournful as an anvil-bird. Almost he felt that Wanja was right, and that God did not wish him to cultivate on the Mau.
“They have passed on,” he remarked hopefully. “They will not come again.”
Wanja said nothing, and he felt uneasy, knowing that silence could be a bandage hiding an ugly sore. She went about sullenly, as one who had reached the limit of endurance. They had no food, now, but a little maize bought at the Indian’s shop. When the rain started again, however, she planted millet among the remnants of the sweet potatoes and beans, and he decided that her threats had been the fruit of anger, not of intent. “He who goes on a journey,” he said to himself, “does not leave bananas to roast in the ashes.”
The buffaloes had razed the shambas of others besides himself. Men were afraid to go from one homestead to another along forest paths, and women refused to cut firewood, so frightened were they of the savage black herd. Many people came to Matu for medicines to protect them against meeting buffaloes on the path. Matu took some of the dung, mixed it with different powders, put it in the horns of goats and gave it to his clients to hang around their necks. As a result of this no one was hurt, in spite of the serious damage done to many shambas of ripening maize. Matu made another magic to protect the shambas and after a few discouraging incidents this proved successful, for it brought a young stranger with a rifle to the Mau. He killed several of the buffaloes, and the rest took fright and went away to hide in the bamboos.
9
WHEN the silk of the maize began to shrivel, much rain fell; and then the sun came, so that the plants were the tallest and the cobs the biggest Matu had ever seen. So heavy were the cobs that he wondered that the stems did not break, and in spite of the buffaloes’ depredations the crop was good.
“Now, you see,” he told Wanja, “this land is fat. Next season you will fill two granaries, and sell besides several sacks of grain at the Indian shop.”
“Then I hope you will get another wife,” Wanja said. “The weeds here are such that I work until sunset and still they outstrip me.”
“I shall go to my father’s at the time of the full moon,” Matu replied, “to fetch my goats; and then, perhaps, I shall see about another wife.”
In the dry season he walked back over Nyandarua to his father’s homestead and returned, a month later, driving his goats before him and carrying a long, roughly-woven basket full of chickens. He hoped that Wanja would learn to eat them, and cease her complaints about lack of food. He carried also a sack of small white potatoes, thickly pitted with eyes.
When he reached home he found Wanja more aggrieved than ever. Bushbuck had fattened on the beans. Spirits had thrown sticks at the roof of the hut and danced upon the thatch. Wild pigs, with no one to check them, had done as much damage as a herd of elephants. As for the millet, cold had stunted it in youth, a drought had come just when it needed moisture, and then rain had spoilt it at harvest. The seasons were completely mad, she said.
She planted millet a second time, but the creeping white-flowered weed kangei appeared in the shamba. Wanja went out with her panga when the sun leapt up over Nyandarua above the cloud-packed valley, and returned only when francolins were calling by the river in the evening, but still she could not keep it under control. Rain fell on and off, at scattered intervals, for six months, so that as soon as the shamba was clean another shower came and the weeds sprang up all over again. The weeds choked the millet, which could not grow more than knee-high. As soon as it ripened, the birds arrived. Every morning, soon after sunrise, big flocks of green parrots would rise out of the forest and descend upon the shamba. They returned only when the sun’s rays were severed by the black edge of the Mau, squawking as they flew. Pigeons came also, and blue starlings; long-tailed mouse-birds, flycatchers with white spectacles, and golden-breasted weavers flashing like flowers in the sun. They ate all that was left of the millet Wanja had planted with such care, and when the harvest came there was no grain to cut. The whole affair was so discouraging that Wanja did not plant millet any more.
Matu gave her the white potatoes and told her to grind maize instead of millet for gruel. He had noticed that Kagama’s wife did this, and flavoured the gruel with a sweet, brown, sticky substance bought from the Indian, and made from cane. Wanja took the potatoes, but said nothing; she had become as sullen as a rainy sky and her face was drained of laughter.
10
ONE day a new stranger arrived: a short man with black hair smooth like leather and the usual sharp features, abrupt jerky ways, harsh voice and incalculable thoughts of his kind. He summoned all the heads of families and told them to clear the land of bush and trees. He himself remained near at hand in a tent to direct the work.
The big trees were attacked with axes, their trunks fastened by chains to oxen, and dragged downhill to the railway station. Then the stumps were dug out with picks and burnt. Matu asked why the stumps must be removed and was told that the strangers, whom he had learnt to call Europeans, tilled the soil with big knives which were dragged through the soil by oxen, and that these would break against the stumps. It was said that a European down on the plain had dug up, by means of these knives, a shamba so vast that it would take a man all day to walk around it, and that he had planted a new crop like millet, but with only one ear on each stalk and with very big grains.
Matu worked for two months at the digging of stumps. On one day in every seven he was told not to come. Much to his disappointment, no knife drawn by oxen was brought, and when the European had built a small mud-and-timber house with an iron roof, and with big iron barrels to catch the rainwater, he paid each man eight rupees and went away for good.
By now, however, other Europeans had come. All along the Mau the sound of voices shouting at ox-teams and the crack of whips could be heard as land was cleared for shambas, and big square houses were built. Always these people called on others to work and did none themselves, but paid out many rupees. They gave orders in Swahili that were extremely hard to understand, the present, past and future being inextricably confused; but when their commands, however obscure, were not immediately grasped, they were apt to grow impatient and abusive, and to behave in a most ill-mannered way. But Matu was well content, for as long as he lived on land belonging to a European he could not be taken for the work of the hide strips. Besides, the land was limitless and the climate perfectly suited to goats, and his own flock grew fat, sleek and fertile.
Wanja gradually became accustomed to the insanity of the seasons. She never gave up complaining about the weeds, the cold and the coarse, monotonous food, but she admitted that her granary was readily filled. When the white potatoes flourished and a fence was built high enough to keep bushbuck out of the beans, she had enough to eat. Near her hut she made a little burrow in the ground which she fitted with a wooden door to keep out gennets and serval cats, and here she shut the chickens by night. In time she grew quite fond of eating eggs, or cockerels stewed with vegetables in a pot. At last her natural cheerfulness returned; and after Matu had negotiated a particularly profitable deal in goats, he bought her some wire ear-rings and a small sheep and gave her five goat-skins for a new dress, to show that he had forgiven her for her ill temper.
11
BY telling fortunes Matu learnt the stories of many of his neighbours’ lives. All had come by railway from places near Nairobi, from Dagoretti or Kiambu; but some ha
d been to distant lands and seen many strange sights before they reached the Mau.
Matu’s friend Kagama told such a story. His adventures had started one day when, as a young man, he had gone to the market carrying a spear. At that time Europeans were still rare; but one, belonging to the Serkali, was living at Dagoretti. Kagama laid his spear down with many others before he entered the market, as was the law. The European came, seized the spears, and asked to whom each one belonged. Kagama claimed his, and the European said :
“I see you are a young warrior, strong enough to be a soldier; you must come with me.”
Kagama was afraid to refuse. He went with the European to Nairobi, where he lived with many others in a hut, ate food cooked by men, and was taught how to behave like a soldier. After six months had elapsed he and his fellows were put into the train. They travelled for a day and a night, until they reached a place called Nandi. Here several of them who were guarding the railway were killed at night by spear-thrusts in the back. The European officer summoned the Nandi warriors to a house and told them to stack their spears and to go inside, where they would find much food. They did so; the soldiers closed the doors and surrounded the house, and next day the Nandi warriors were bound and sent in three iron wagons to Nairobi, where they worked for twelve months making roads.
Kagama stayed in the Nandi country for a long time, driving back the warriors who came at night to steal the iron ropes on which the train ran. After eight seasons he returned home, bought a wife, and settled down. But the elders did not like him because he had been so far away, learning none knew what evil and dangerous magic from Nandi sorcerers. Several attempts were made by enemies of his father’s clan to seize for cultivation the land he had inherited. Friends told him that threats had been made against him and a poisoner consulted; so when he heard from a cousin, who worked as cook, of a white man who was ready to give a shamba to anyone who came, he decided to move to a safer place. Others joined him, and a group of ten went by train to this European’s farm, which adjoined that on which Matu had settled. He saw that the land was good, and sent to Dagoretti for his wife; he had prospered, and now owned over a hundred goats and two wives, and was negotiating for a third.
Red Strangers Page 27