The Tree Where Man Was Born

by Peter Matthiessen

  The assumption of knowing the African’s mind has been very often heard in the usual phraseology: “I have lived for many years amongst the Africans and I know them very well.” Yet this is far from the actual fact, for there is a great difference between “living” among a people and “knowing” them. While a European can learn something of the externals of African life, its system of kinship and classification, its peculiar arts and picturesque ceremonial, he may still have not yet reached the heart of the problem. . . . With his preconceived ideas, mingled with prejudices, he fails to achieve a more sympathetic and imaginative knowledge, a more human and inward appreciation of the living people, the pupils he teaches, the people he meets on the roads and watches in the gardens. In a word he fails to understand the African with his instinctive tendencies (no doubt very like his own), but trained from his earliest days to habitual ideas, inhibitions and forms of self-expression which have been handed down from one generation to another and which are foreign, if not absurd, to the European in Africa.10

  Jomo Kenyatta’s Facing Mt. Kenya, written in the 1930s, is essential to an understanding of the conflicts that were to give rise to the Mau-Mau Rebellion, 1952-1956; though never a terrorist himself, Kenyatta spent seven years in a detention camp as an early advocate of land reform and a symbol of Kikuyu resistance. A great source of Kikuyu bitterness was the conviction that the tribe had been tricked out of its land, for every foot of Kikuyu land was owned by individual tribesmen, not only the pieces for which token sums were paid but also the fallow land that was appropriated by the government, then dispensed to the colonials on the grounds that African farming techniques would be the ruin of it. Much high-minded legislation for the benefit of whites was bulled through by Hugh Cholmondeley, Lord Delamere, whose memorial was an order of the British Crown, in 1939, that no African or Asian was permitted to own land in what had already become known as the White Highlands. Four-fifths of this best land in Kenya was now the province of perhaps four thousand whites; a million Kikuyu were to make do with the one-fifth set aside as the Kikuyu Reserves. The tribe’s exposure to missions and clinics had led to a fatal population increase, and their growing poverty and frustration were all the more onerous for the education that numerous Kikuyu had struggled to obtain. Those who had fought in the British Army in Burma, then returned to inferior status in their own land, had an additional cause for bitterness, and many of these soldiers joined the Land Freedom Army movement, which was armed mostly with the cane-cutting machete called the panga. A half century of resentment was set aflame by the winds of pan-Africanism sweeping the continent, and the rebellion fell into the hands not of men like Kenyatta but of fanatic malcontents such as Dedan Kimathi, who made the name Mau-Mau, as the colonials called the movement, a symbol of the alleged barbarism, bestialities, and black magic that gave its oathing ceremonies such evil repute. But in the opinion of most Africans, Kimathi has been much maligned and the Mau-Mau atrocities exaggerated to excuse the savagery of the repression, and veterans of the Kenya Regiment acknowledge that atrocities were committed by both sides.

  Until recent years, most Africans clung to the hope of a fair accommodation with the white man, and Mau-Mau received only limited support from other tribes. The last of the guerrillas, led by the strange Kimathi, retreated into the high Aberdares, and at the end they wore animal skins, like the vanished Gumba who had fled there from the Kikuyu centuries before. In the dense forests of bamboo, on the moorlands of black trees and tussock from which torrents plunge into the stagnant clouds in the ravines, one can envision the human figures in their scraps of reeking hide, the remnant aborigines and the Kikuyu outlaws, hunched at their covert fires. At Gura Falls, red gladioli shiver in the mountain wind, and far below, in the greening mist, three bushbuck, kin of those whose meat and skins sustained life in the fugitives, stand listening to the rush of rains off Kingankop.

  In Nairobi, in 1961, Mau-Mau was still fresh in people’s minds, and in the streets and pubs, a colonial tone of voice prevailed. Yet Independence was already underway in Kenya, and change everywhere seemed imminent, even in South Africa, where the student who had come south with me from Khartoum had gone to warn his parents to flee that medieval region before the inevitable uprising. The Mau-Mau Rebellion, though defeated, had led within a very few years to victory, and Jomo Kenyatta, released from prison a few months after my arrival, was to become Kenya’s first president. The Old Man or Mzee, as he is known to black and white alike, decreed that the past must be put aside in the interests of Kenya’s future, and even appointed the police officer who had led the hunt for Kimathi as his private bodyguard. Those whites who would not work with blacks left quickly, and others left, too, who despaired of their prospects and security. “I reckon I’ll go south,” one man told me. “Rhodesia, or South Africa.” He shook his head. “I was raised in the White Highlands, you know. We never thought we’d lose it. Never.”

  A number of remarkable civil servants stayed on in Kenya (and Uganda and Tanzania) to help the new country get a start, although a main purpose of their jobs was the training of Africans to replace them. For their part, most black Kenyans shared their president’s good-humored attitude; there is still a “Lord Delamere Room” at the Hotel Norfolk, and few of the visitors walking Kimathi Street in front of the New Stanley know or care that it was named in memory of the desperate Mau-Mau leader who was hung.

  With the collapse of colonial governments, the destruction of wildlife by rampaging Africans had been widely predicted, and a glimpse of the last great companies of wild animals on earth was the main object of my trip to Africa in 1961. Since then (though their future remains uncertain) the East African parks and game reserves have actually increased in size and numbers. Even the Congo’s great Albert Park (now Kivu National Park), for which the worst had been foreseen, escaped serious damage. The one park destroyed by political unrest is the beautiful small park at Nimule, where civil rebellions, already begun when I passed through, have broken down all order. Blaming the revolt of the Nilotic tribesmen on mission efforts to discourage Moslem influence and resurrect the bitter memories of the slave trade, the Sudanese government has expelled the missionaries, and it is feared that the repression of the wild peoples has neared the stage of systematic genocide. A large shipment of ivory and white rhino horn that turned up in Mombasa a few years ago was apparently intended to buy arms for the desperate tribesmen, and almost certainly it came from Nimule. John Owen, a District Commissioner in that region of the former Anglo-Egyptian Sudan who later became director of the Tanzania National Parks, flew over Nimule in a light plane in 1969. “A careful search,” he told me, “produced nothing but one buffalo.” Very likely the vanishing white rhino is gone forever from the Sudan.

  Mr. Owen had invited me to return that year to Africa, and I came by way of Entebbe, in Uganda, flying out of the raining reaches of Lake Victoria into western Kenya. A clearing sky laid bare the high plateaus that extend southward the entire length of eastern Africa; the plane’s shadow crossed the Nandi hills, the Mau Range, and Maasai Land. Soon the circles of beehive huts, like scars on the crusty skin of the Rift Valley, drew together in the tin-roofed Kikuyu accumulations that surround Nairobi.

  In 1961, Nairobi was still a frontier town where travelers to wilder parts were served and outfitted. Gazelle and zebra crossed the road at Embakasi Airport, and the Aathi Plain and the Ngong Hills, bringing Maasai Land to the very edges of the city, made it credible that the first six people to be buried in Nairobi’s cemetery had been killed by lions.11 The National Museum was still called the Coryndon, the British Director of the National Parks wore a monocle, and the Norfolk and New Stanley were the only presentable hotels. Eight years later, hotels of international pretensions soared out of the polyglot byways of Nairobi, Delamere Avenue had become Kenyatta Avenue, and processional boulevards with names like Uhuru (Independence) and Harambee (All Together—!) carried visitors too rapidly from one end of this small city to the other. But beneath an
enlarged and shining surface, Nairobi was the same hot curry of bazaars and colonial architecture, curio shops, mosques, noise, and reeking slums, where crippled beggars were the envy of the swarms of unemployed. Once I had acquired the sunburn and old Land Rover that permitted me to be taken for a settler, I was beset by young Kenyans in the street who were anxious to find work of any kind.

  Unemployment, not to speak of street theft and corruption, permits diehard colonials to point at the inefficiency of the Kikuyu, who are too able and ambitious to be borne: “They all have degrees, these bloody Kyukes, but they can’t do a bloody thing.” But it would be more fair to say, “. . . but there isn’t a bloody thing for them to do,” for the new nation has few places for all these aspirant accountants, pharmacists, lawyers, and white collar workers, and few people trained in the skilled labor—carpentry, mechanics, and the like—that was formerly done by Asians. Even more so than the whites, the Asians were resented: the common man feels he was exploited by the shopkeepers, while the educated speak of an Asian practice of sending their money out of the country. Those who have lost their jobs seek desperately to emigrate almost anywhere, but they are quiet, and their plight, wherever possible, has been ignored. In an Asian shop on Hardinge Street (now Kimathi Street), African help has replaced the sallow children who were so cheap and efficient, and a pair of strong safari shorts, tailored for pennies in a few hours in 1961, cannot be copied in inferior material at three times the price in less than fifteen days.

  Whites are needed but not wanted—hence the undercurrent of rudeness beneath the precarious civilities. A black man abusing his authority, less in malice than in lack of confidence, is a daily trial for those not shepherded past such hazards by the tour companies (though one is startled just as often by a magical courtesy and gentleness). I remember one day in the Highlands, when the car had broken down. An African who yelled, “What’s wrong!” from the back of a passing truck was showing off his English, not expressing concern, and perhaps he was jeering—the red-faced settler beside me was quick to assume so. “Mind your bloody business!” this man fumed, under his breath. For the new African, such confrontation is a way of forcing the white to look at him at last, to perceive him as a man, an individual, on equal terms and face to face. Or so I assume, without much confidence; the episode occurred in 1970, when after several stays in Africa, having read much and heard more, I knew less than ever about the essential nature of the African.

  The discovery of Bantu philosophy must trouble those of us who are concerned with the education of Africans. . . . We have thought we were educating children, “big children,” and this seemed an easy task. But now, suddenly, we see that we are dealing with a humanity that is adult, conscious of its own wisdom, penetrated by its own universalist philosophy. And we feel the ground slipping from beneath our feet . . .12

  The first night of my return was spent at the New Stanley, since the old-fashioned Norfolk was full. After dark there was a light failure for two hours, most of which I passed contented in a huge white colonial tub, watching weird flickers of faraway torches in the bathroom airshaft and listening to the cries of the staff below, the sound of breakage and feet pounding. In front of the hotel, next day, African guests from the new nations were mingling with travelers of all tongues; tourists of limited income are now common in Nairobi, and the old dark green safari wagons make way for zebra-striped tour buses in herds. Inside at the Long Bar, the settlers in town from the White Highlands, from Nyeri and Eldoret and Rumuruti, exchanged gossip, news, and exasperation with the African that before Independence would certainly have been expressed in the hearing of the barman. The Long Bar is a last redoubt of the old-style wardens and white hunters—now called “professional hunters”—and the talk turned inevitably to the great days when the native knew his place. But others present understood that Independence had to come. As one such man remarked to me after a game warden had decried the “bloody Kyukes,” “the end of the game,” and all the rest, “Those old boys oughtn’t to take on like that—after all, they had the best of it.”

  Much has been written of the colorful decades when the Kenya Colony could be spoken of as “white man’s country,” and there seems no point in adding to it here. I wasn’t there, and anyway, the patterns of colonialism do not differ very much from one place to another. For me, the least fascinating aspect of East Africa is the period of technocracy and politics that began under white rule, which lasted little more than half a century among the millenniums that man has been in Africa. Jomo Kenyatta, born Kamau wa Ngengi, whose lifetime easily spans the entire colonial period, never laid eyes on a white at all, so it is said, until after the turn of the century, when he was already ten. And one of Livingstone’s bearers was still living in the 1930s, when Karen Blixen, in her splendid Out of Africa, began the lament for the end of the great days. In 1970 I chanced to meet the Kikuyu hero of that book, her servant “Kamante.” Kamande Gatora is a contained person with the watchfulness of the near-blind; he had taken the Mau-Mau oath, and been imprisoned, in the years after his mistress had gone home to Denmark, despite “the kind deeds I was receiving from her untold and the old life we stayed with her, like black and white keys of a piano how they are played and produce melodious verses.”13 It was idle to address him, and I stood silent, for my words could not be understood, and my face was but a blur in his blind eyes, though the eyes were cold and clear.

  It is not easy to get to know the Natives. They were quick of hearing and evanescent; if you frightened them, they could withdraw into a world of their own, in a second, like the wild animals which at an abrupt movement from you are gone—simply not there. . . . When we really did break into the Natives’ existence, they behaved like ants, when you poke a stick into their ant-hill; they wiped out the damage with unwearied energy, swiftly and silently—as if obliterating an unseemly action. . . .14

  In a letter dictated a few years ago, Kamande gave a “description of my mind concerning the old life and the new. Simply I can see just like the same. We were enjoying what we had, and until now we are enjoying what we have, so I don’t see any different. And the times were not so old for the history begins in our lifetimes. When Baroness leave for England the Mr. Matthew Wellington leave in Mombasa. Mr. Wellington help carried Dead Bwana Livingstone to the sea, so the history is now.”15

  A half century after he had come to work for the “everlasting dear Baroness,” as a sickly boy responsible for her dogs, Kamande stood there in the Langata dusk in the last light from the Ngong Hills and the Maasai Plain. In this old African’s remote unsqueamish gaze one saw that reasons were beside the point, that such events as Mau-Mau and the passage of his mistress had causes not apprehended by the stranger, who must fail in a logical comprehension of the African, yet may hope to intuit his more mysterious, more universal sense of existence. Life begins before a soul is born and commences once again with the act of dying, and as in the Afro-Asian symbol of the snake of eternity swallowing its tail, all is in flux, all comes full circle, with no beginning and no end.

  III

  NORTHWEST FRONTIER

  Somewhere the Sky touches the Earth, and the name of that place is the End.

  —A KAMBA SAYING1

  Of all roads in East Africa, the road north from Nairobi toward Mt. Kenya will hold most associations for the traveler with any acquaintance with the brief history of the region. One soon comes to Thika and the Blue Post Hotel, a relic of the days not long after the turn of the century when the first planters of coffee and flax and pyrethrum were clearing Kikuyu Land, and continues to Nyeri, named in 1903 by Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, the hero of the Nandi wars, who witnessed a procession of some seven hundred elephants through its village street. Crossing the equator at Nanyuki, the high road begins a slow descent over the ranching country west of Mt. Kenya—Kere-Nyaga, named for Nyaga or Ngai, which is the Maasai word for God used also by the Kamba and Kikuyu—a formidable mountain, dark and looming, jagged and malign, rising to snow f
ields that the Africans avoided, for the bright whiteness was a kingdom of Ngai.

  Before World War I, when Elspeth Huxley was a child on a Thika farm, a few Dorobo still wandered in these highlands:

  A brown furry figure stepped forth into a shaft of sunlight, which awoke in his fur pelt a rich, rufous glow, and twinkled on his copper ornaments.

  He was a small man: not a dwarf exactly, or a pygmy, but one who stood about half-way between a pygmy and an ordinary human. His limbs were light in colour and he wore a cloak of bushbuck skin, a little leather cap, and ear-rings, and carried a long bow and a quiver of arrows. He stood stock-still and looked at me just as the dikdik had done, and I wondered whether he, too, would vanish if I moved. . . . I knew him for a Dorobo, one of that race of hunters living in the forest on game they trapped or shot with poisoned arrows. They did not cultivate, they existed on meat and roots and wild honey, and were the relics of an old, old people who had once had sole possession of all these lands—the true aborigines. Then had come others like the Kikuyu and Masai, and the Dorobo had taken refuge in the forests. Now they lived in peace, or at least neutrality, with the herdsmen and cultivators, and sometimes bartered skins and honey for beads, and for spears and knives made by native smiths. They knew all the ways of the forest animals, even of the bongo, the shyest and most beautiful, and their greatest delight was to feast for three days upon a raw elephant.2