Red Strangers

by Elspeth Huxley

  Throughout the land, Ngarariga continued, hunger and plague walked like angry lions, and on every ridge half the homesteads were closed with shrubs and stank of death. Never before had such a double disaster fallen. Three sacrifices had been made by the elders, but God’s ears were stuffed with cloud. It was thought that he was angry because the young men had allowed themselves to be taken away to perish in the Europeans’ war.

  Waseru’s wealth, which had not been great, was divided into two. One part was shared equally between his adult sons, Muthengi and Matu; the other part was given to Ngarariga to hold in trust for Waseru’s uncircumcised children by his surviving wife. Muthengi’s inheritance would be as a drop of water in a pool; his homestead was like the camp of the police at Tetu, so many huts were there, and out of his great wealth he had hired an Indian to bring food in a wagon from Nairobi so that his wives and children had escaped famine. Nevertheless, an equal division of his father’s property was the law. The land that Wanjeri had cultivated was shared equally between her two sons. Matu knew that in practice his brother would secure it all; still, half was legally his, and one day his sons might be able to claim it. He resolved to establish his right in the presence of witnesses. He therefore took Muthengi and three senior elders of the clan to the spot and planted itoka lilies, the acknowledged boundary marks of his people, in the corners of his claim. Then a fat ram was slain and eaten by the elders and the two brothers to bind the settlement, and Matu blessed them with its stomach contents mixed with blood.

  8

  A FEW days later, the first batch of young men returned from the war. Eight came from Tetu, walking in silence along the path with bundles of clothes and cooking-pots strapped to their backs. Their faces were gaunt and their skin tightly stretched over ribs and shoulder-blades. They looked about them with dazed, deep eyes whose glances seemed to brush indifferently over the surface of all they saw, as a mundu-mugu will brush the curse from a man with the cow’s-tail stopper of his medicine gourd.

  Girls and women rushed to meet the approaching party, trilling loudly with delight. Slowly the men seemed to awake out of a dream. They recognised their relatives and asked for news, but their voices were strange, like the flat note of a hollow tree struck by a club where before they had been like clear goat-bells on the mountain. Those who had left as youths returned as old men, walking slowly. Three wore beards, showing that they had been sick, and their hair was unshaven.

  Ngarariga seized his staff and hurried down to see them, hope opening like a flower in his heart. He met them in the path and gazed eagerly into their faces; one at least of his sons must be there; surely Reri could not have failed to return. He recognised several of his kinsmen, but not the faces that he sought.

  “Where are my sons ?” he said. “Why have they not come?”

  The men looked sideways at him, but no one answered. They made as if to move on. Ngarariga stood in their way, and because he was an elder they could not push him to one side.

  “Why do you not answer?” Ngarariga said. “My sons went with you from the pen at Karatina. Surely they would not have stayed behind! What has become of them, of my three sons?”

  “We do not know,” one of them answered.

  “Where have you come from?” Ngarariga insisted, “and what have you done, that you stayed so long away from your fathers’ homesteads?”

  “Do not ask us questions, old man,” another said. His voice was loud and rough. “Can you not see that we are tired after a long journey? Stand aside, and let us pass to find our fathers.”

  Ngarariga was astounded to hear a young man speak with such rudeness to an elder. But his distress was so great that he could not reprimand him. He stepped to one side and leant on his staff, his face stiff with pain, while the silent group filed past him. The women followed, subdued, no longer trilling. Now he was certain that his three sons, all that he had, were dead.

  In the houses of the eight who had returned the rejoicing was like matted grass over a swamp, for underneath lay a feeling of bottomless disquiet. The young men were strange and for that reason frightening; so quiet, so numb, as if they carried something dead within them and had left in a distant country their old knowledge of laughter and desire.

  Nduini was one of those who welcomed home a son. He slaughtered a goat and asked his kinsmen to a feast of celebration. Although no one lacked food that night, and many young women came to the household after the feast with ochre-smeared bodies, there was no dancing and no song. After he had eaten the young man rose, saying that he was tired and needed sleep.

  “Now that you have come back,” Nduini said, “and the strangers’ war is over, we wait to hear news of the country to which you went, and of all that became of you and the others who were captured at Karatina fifteen months ago.”

  The young man turned his head away as if he had seen something unclean, and said in a deep voice:

  “You must not ask me of such things, for I will not speak of them so long as I live.”

  The young man slept and rested for many days and sat in the shade by the homestead, doing no work. Sometimes girls who walked along the path stopped to talk to him, and when he saw one that he liked energy began, little by little, to return to his limbs. But Nduini was not satisfied. Something had happened to his son that he could not understand. He went to one of those who had returned with him; and said:

  “My son will not tell me anything of the places he has seen, or of what he did there; he is not well, and I think it is because of something that he saw while he was away. You are his friend, and of his age-grade; tell me what is troubling his mind.”

  The young man said: “Do not ask him about the things that he has seen; they are too terrible to be spoken of.”

  “There is much that is terrible in war,” Nduini replied. “It was very terrible when the Masai fell upon us, and the corpses of our warriors and the ashes of our homes lay about us like dead cattle in a year of plague. But he who goes to a mundu-mugu may be purified, and the evil vomited away.”

  “Do not ask me,” the young man said, “nor your son; for we who have returned have sworn an oath between us never to speak of what we have seen.”

  9

  MATU returned to his own shamba haunted and distressed by all that he had heard; he was more than ever glad that he had come to Njoro and thus escaped both the famine and Europeans’ war. The harvest had started, and he watched with satisfaction while Wanja’s granaries were filled. Afterwards he sacrificed a goat and placed a little of its stomach contents mixed with fat in the granaries, thanking God for a good harvest.

  One day he came back to his homestead in the grey of the evening, at the hour when the parrots flew back to the forest, to find a strange man seated by the thingira fire. He was tall and gaunt, and under a thin blanket his ribs protruded like the branches of fire-killed trees. A big beard covered his chin and his hair was long; the pus from sores oozed through a piece of cloth bound around his ankle. When Matu entered he looked up quickly and then away again, crouching on a stool over the fire.

  Matu greeted him politely and sat down opposite. He glanced at the stranger nervously, and then more closely, for something seemed familiar about his face.

  After a long silence the traveller looked up at him and said: “Do you not know me, then, my cousin?”

  Matu stared incredulously at the stranger, doubting his ears. The man was bearded like a cedar, his hair was matted and wild. Underneath was the shape of a head that matched another in his memory.

  “Reri, son of Ngarariga!” he exclaimed.

  “I come to ask food and shelter,” Reri said, “for I have been very sick.”

  Matu reflected that Reri owed him twenty-six goats and would perhaps seduce his youngest wife, who had not forgotten her lover; but there could be no question of turning away his uncle’s son.

  “Peace be with you,” he said. “My wives shall bring you food.”

  All through the evening his covert glances returned to R
eri’s face. He could not believe that a man could change so much. The well-preened youth who had danced till the moon was low, who could no more resist flirting with girls than the bee could keep away from the purple muthakwa blossom, was dead. Another had returned, deep-eyed and quiet, and sick in mind and body; one from whom the smooth-limbed girls would shrink nervously, or whom they would ridicule as a sort of ogre at the dances.

  Reri stayed in Matu’s thingira for three months, growing slowly fatter and resting a great deal. Sometimes a fever would shake him violently as though with cold, and then he would break into a great sweat. At such times he would lie in the darkness of the hut covered with blankets, and Matu’s young wife would take him water in a calabash.

  One day Matu said to him: “How can you fail to be sick when you are so severely troubled by spirits ? I will give you a goat if you will vomit out the thahu and let a mundu-mugu drive the evil away.”

  “The spirits that cause my sickness are not those which you can understand,” Reri answered. “They come from a long way off and trouble me with memories. What I have seen is too deep and too evil to be vomited out. But I will buy a goat, and you shall cleanse me if you wish.”

  Reri’s purification was long and thorough, and Wanja shaved his hair and beard. Matu was greatly relieved when his cousin was again recognisable as a young man. For the first time his own son Karanja was not afraid to sit in the same hut. Reri was pleased at this, and took the boy out next day to look for honey in the forest. Matu made him a charm to ensure good luck and another to bring success with women, and from the day of his purification he grew steadily stronger.

  One evening he said to Matu: “Now I shall go back to my father’s, since I am strong enough to walk over Nyandarua. When you come to visit me I shall give you a fat ram, for you have been generous and helped me when I was sick.”

  “That is good,” Matu said. “When you return, Ngarariga will ask you what has become of your two brothers who went with you to the war.”

  “Do not speak to me of that,” Reri said, “for I cannot answer.’

  10

  HE left the next day. Matu’s curiosity about the things thats had occurred during the war was great, but for many years no one who had come back would speak. He never learnt the whole truth; but years afterwards, when Reri had become an elder and in his mind the fire-blackened plain of the past was hidden under fresh grasses, Matu asked if the story might be told.

  Even then Reri was unwilling to speak. But Matu urged him and at last he told of how he had been captured with many others in the pen at Karatina, and then he said:

  “There were four soldiers to take us, armed with rifles, and they marched us together down the road. The road was dry and the dust strong in our throats, and as we marched the noise that our feet made was ru-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu on the road.

  “At Thika we were put into the train and taken to Nairobi, where we were given food and blankets, and then put into another train. Here we slept together in a wagon like cattle, on the hard floor; and the noise of the wheels was tee-chee-chee-chee-chee-chee-chee on the rails.

  “We stayed two days at Mombasa, and saw the sea. Wagons were moving about on it without reason, each one following its own purpose, like a bird. We did not know where we were being taken, or for what purpose.

  “After two days we were put into this wagon on the sea. We were locked into a small room with iron walls. Then the room began to move about beneath our feet: it was as if we had been in the belly of an animal. We were so frightened that we could not speak. Twice we were taken up out of the room, and that was worse, because we could see nothing but water in any direction and no land anywhere. When we died our spirits would be lost and hungry in the sea, forever unable to return to the land of our own clan. There was one who jumped out, meaning to swim back while there was yet time; but he was drowned.

  “But we saw land again at a place called Dar-es-Salaam, and came out of the ship, and were put into a train which went to Morogoro. Here we were told not to drink water from the wells, as the enemy had put poison into them. We were very thirsty and many did not believe that such big springs could be poisoned. They went to drink the water, and all who did so were seized with pains in the stomach and died. They were buried together in a big ditch, but we could not leave that place, and we stayed there carrying very heavy stones to build houses.

  “After two months we went by train to Dodoma, and there we were told to walk for ten days to Iringa. No Europeans went with us, and no soldiers, only guides; but we could not run away, for everywhere there was nothing but bush. We were given ten oxen at Dodoma and told to kill one every night, and that on the eleventh day we would reach Iringa. We marched for many days. The sun made our heads like pots of gruel boiling on the fire, and our feet went ru-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu through the bush. On the way many people got diarrhœa. Some could no longer walk, but lay down and were left behind, and the hyenas ate them. I had diarrhœa, but was able to walk, and soon we came to a camp of soldiers and I went with my brother and another man to see a European. Many people were dying under the same roof without being taken away; that building had a dreadful curse; there was death in it, and an evil smell. So I ran away and went to cut firewood; but when I inquired for my brother I was told that he had died.

  “We left that place and went on to a big river like a lake, where men took us across in boats. On the other side was a camp. Here a sickness fell upon me again and I was taken to another hospital; but people were dying all around me, and after two days I escaped in the night. Next day I went to work digging ditches, although my limbs were weak.

  “A month later we marched on again; we reached some mountains, and then a country as cold as our own. We stayed at a place called the camp of bullets. It was on the top of a hill. We carried bullets down to the bottom, where wounded men were taken, and we carried wounded men back to the top. Sometimes they died on the way, but we still had to carry them, and to defile ourselves with corpses; and at night we were too tired to cook food.

  “From the camp of bullets we were taken to a place where we had to dig graves and to bury those who had been killed. We had to lay our hands on corpses. There were two flags, a red one and a white. When the red flag was hoisted we were told to stop work and lie down. When the white flag was put up we had again to bury corpses.

  “There was a European in charge. He walked up and down with a stick in his mouth, and this stick was a form of magic, because bullets flew all around his head and over his shoulders, but he was never struck. Some of us were struck, and many more died from sickness. A man who was working close to me was struck in the wrist. He looked at his wrist and his blood gushed over me like a waterfall, and there was blood even in my eyes. He fell down to the ground and died at my feet, away from his own clan.

  “I was no longer afraid to touch corpses. I wished to die, and therefore no danger could come to me from thahu. I walked about seeking a bullet that would kill me, but I could not find one. I did not think that I should ever see my home again. Sometimes I dreamt of home, but we did not speak of our own country at all in the camp, because we tried to keep our minds empty of such thoughts that hurt us more than hunger or wounds.

  “One day an enemy was captured bringing a letter to the European officer. When the European read it he laughed loudly and said : ‘Do not kill the askari, for now there will be no more fighting, either on land or sea.’ A soldier told us that we would be taken home, but we did not believe it. We carried many heavy boxes of bullets to a place called the camp of lorries, and then we walked through the bush for ten days, carrying many sick on stretchers, until we reached the railway. My second brother was with me, and he fell sick, and on this journey he died.

  “We went to Dar-es-Salaam, and after a month I was put into a ship and told that I was to be taken to Mombasa. But this did not make me happy, for I did not want to live. I saw Mombasa and thought that I was dreaming; but when I reached Nairobi I understood that I had come home. At Nairobi I
was given seventy rupees and told that I would be taken to Tetu. I did not want to see my father then, for my sickness had returned and I feared that he would ask for my two brothers. I left my companions there and came by train to your homestead until I should die, or be rid of my sickness.

  “Those of us who returned agreed that we would never speak of the things that had occurred, because they are too evil to be mentioned; and even now I have not told you all of what I saw, for words do not exist to describe such things. Sometimes these things return to me in dreams, and then I wake and I cannot sleep again. Sometimes, when I see a European, they come back to me also, because it was the Europeans who captured me and the evils that swallowed me when they took me for the war were caused by them. But now I have a wife and children, and I do not often think of such things any more.”

  BOOK III: KARANJA

  1919–1937

  CHAPTER I

  Marafu

  1

  KARANJA was startled out of his doze in the shade of an acacia by the thump of hooves near his head. He jumped up, clutching his wooden spear, fearful for the safety of his father’s goats. He had grown to be a thin, light-skinned boy of an age when the ceremony of second birth had recently been celebrated in his mother’s hut, and he had been born into his clan. Shortly before, his eye-teeth had been taken out to make a gap through which gruel could be poured should evil spirits ever bind together his jaws.