Book Two. A Shooting Accident on the Farm

Chapter 1. The Shooting Accident

On the evening of the nineteenth of December, I walked out of my house before going to bed, to see if there was any rain coming. Many farmers in the highlands were, I believe, doing the same thing at that hour. Sometimes, in a lucky year, we would get a few heavy showers just round Christmas, and it was a great thing for the young coffee, which has set on the trees after the flowering in the short rains of October. This night there was no sign of rain. The sky was serene and silently triumphant, resplendent with stars.

The Stellar Heaven of the Equator is richer than that of the North, and you see it more because you are out more at night. In Northern Europe, winter nights are too cold to allow one much pleasure in the contemplation of the stars, and in summer one hardly distinguishes them within the clear night sky, that is as pale as a dog-violet.

The tropical night has the companionability of a Roman Catholic Cathedral compared to the Protestant Churches of the North, which let you in on business only. Here in the great room everybody comes and goes, this is the place where things are going on. To Arabia and Africa, where the sun of the midday kills you, night is the time for travelling and enterprise. The stars have been named here, they have been guides to human beings for many centuries, drawing them in long lines across the desert-sands and the Sea, one towards the East, and another to the West, or the North and South. Cars run well at night, and it is pleasant to motor under the stars, you get into the habit of fixing visits to friends up-country by the time of the next full moon. You start Safaris by the new moon, to have the benefit of the whole row of moonlight nights. It is then strange, when back on a visit to Europe, to find your friends of the towns living out of touch with the moves of the moon and almost in ignorance of them. The young moon was the sign of action to Khadija’s camel man, whose Caravan was to start off when she appeared in the sky. With his face towards her he was one of the “Philosophers who spin out of moonlight systems of the Universe.” He must have looked at her much, that he made her his sign in which to conquer.

I had got a name amongst the Natives, because a number of times I had happened to be, on the farm, the first to see the new moon, like a thin silver bow in the sunset; particularly because, two or three years running, I had been the first to catch sight of the new moon of the month of Ramadan, the Mohammedan’s holy Month.

The farmer slowly turns his eyes all round the Horizon. First to the East, for from the East, if it comes, comes the rain, and there stands clear Spica in the Virgin. Then South, to greet the Southern Cross, doorkeeper of the great world, faithful to travellers and beloved by them, and higher up, under the luminous streak of the Milky Way, Alpha and Beta in the Centaur. To the South West sparkles Sirius, great in heaven, and the thoughtful Canopus, and to the West above the faint outline of the Ngong Hills, now nearly unbroken, the radiant diamond ornament, Rigel, Betelgeuze and Bellatrix. He turns to the North last, for to the North we go back in the end, and there he runs upon the Great Bear himself, only he is now calmly standing on his head on account of the heavenly perspective, and that has all the air of a bearish joke, that cheers the heart of the Nordic emigrant. People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue. They also know that the real glory of dreams lies in their atmosphere of unlimited freedom. It is not the freedom of the dictator, who enforces his own will on the world, but the freedom of the artist, who has no will, who is free of will. The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream, but in this: that there things happen without any interference from his side, and altogether outside his control. Great landscapes create themselves, long splendid views, rich and delicate colours, roads, houses, which he has never seen or heard of. Strangers appear and are friends or enemies, although the person who dreams has never done anything about them. The ideas of flight and pursuit are recurrent in dreams and are equally enrapturing. Excellent witty things are said by everybody. It is true that if remembered in the daytime they will fade and lose their sense, because they belong to a different plane, but as soon as the one eams lies down at night, the current is again closed and he remembers their excellency. All the time the feeling of immense freedom is surrounding him and running through him like air and light, an unearthly bliss. He is a privileged person, the one who has got nothing to do, but for whose enrichment and pleasure all things are brought together; the Kings of Tarshish shall bring gifts. He takes part in a great battle or ball, and wonders the while that he should be, in the midst of those events, so far privileged as to be lying down. It is when one begins to lose the consciousness of freedom, and when the idea of necessity enters the world at all, when there is any hurry or strain anywhere, a letter to be written or a train to catch, when you have got to work, to make the horses of the dream gallop, or to make the rifles go off, that the dream is declining, and turning into the nightmare, which belongs to the poorest and most vulgar class of dreams.

The thing which in the waking world comes nearest to a dream is night in a big town, where nobody knows one, or the African night. There too is infinite freedom: it is there that things are going on, destinies are made round you, there is activity to all sides, and it is none of your concern.

Here now, as soon as the sun was down the air was full of bats, cruising as noiselessly as cars upon asphalt, the nighthawk swept past too: the bird that sits on the road and in the eyes of which the lights of your car gleam red a moment before he flutters up vertically in front of your wheels. The little spring-hares were out on the roads, moving in their own way, sitting down suddenly and jumping along to a rhythm, like miniature Kangaroos. The Cicada sing an endless song in the long grass, smells run along the earth and falling stars run over the sky, like tears over a cheek. You are the privileged person to whom everything is taken. The Kings of Tarshish shall bring gifts.

A few miles out, in the Masai Reserve, the Zebra are now changing their pasture, the flocks wander over the grey plain like lighter stripes upon it, the Buffalo are out grazing on the long slopes of the Hills. My young men of the farm would come by, two or three together, walking one after the other like narrow dark shadows on the lawn, they were afoot and aiming straight at their own object, they were not working for me, and it was none of my concern. They themselves accentuated the position by just slackening their pace as they caught sight of my burning cigarette-end outside the house, and saluting without stopping.

Jambo Msabu.”

Jambo Morani ”—young warriors,—“where are you going?”

“We are going to Kathegu’s manyatta. Kathegu has a big Ngoma on tonight. Good-bye Msabu.”

If they walk together in bigger parties they will bring their own drum to the dance, and you hear it a long way away, like the throbbing of a small pulse in the finger of the night. And suddenly, to the ear that has not been listening for it, comes what is not so much a sound as a deep vibration of the air, the distant short roar of the lion. He is afoot, he is hunting, things are going on, out there where he is. It is not repeated, but it has widened the horizon; the long dungas and the waterhole are brought to you.


As I was standing before my house a shot fell, not far off. One shot. Then again the stillness of the night closed on all sides. After a while, as if they had been pausing to listen and were now taking it up once more, I heard the Cicada chiming their monotonous little song in the grass.

There is something strangely determinate and fatal about a single shot in the night. It is as if someone had cried a message to you in one word, and would not repeat it. I stood for some time wondering what it had meant. Nobody could aim at anything at this hour, and, to scare away something, a person would fire two shots or more.

It might have been my old Indian carpenter Pooran Singh down at the mill, firing at a couple of Hyena that had slunk into the millyard and were eating the straps of oxhide hung up there, with stones as weights to them, to be made into reins for our waggons. Pooran Singh was no hero, but he might have put the door of his hut ajar for the sake of his reins and blown off his old shotgun. Still he would have let off both barrels, and would probably have loaded and shot again, once he had tasted the sweetness of heroism. But one shot,—and then silence?

I waited for some time for the second shot; nothing came, and as I looked again at the sky there was no rain coming either. So I went to bed, taking a book with me, and leaving the lamp to burn. In Africa, when you pick up a book worth reading, out of the deadly consignments which good ships are being made to carry out all the way from Europe, you read it as an author would like his book to be read, praying to God that he may have it in him to go on as beautifully as he has begun. Your mind runs, transported, upon a fresh deep green track.

Two minutes later a motorcycle rounded the drive at a terrific speed and stopped in front of the house, and someone knocked hard upon the long window of my sitting-room. I put on a skirt and a coat and a pair of shoes, took the lamp and went out. Outside was my mill-manager, wild-eyed and sweating in the lamplight. His name was Belknap, he was an American and an exceptionally capable, inspired mechanic, but of an uneven mind. With him things were either nearing the Millennium, or dark without a glimpse of hope. When he first came into my employ he had upset me by his varying views of life, and of prospects and conditions of the farm, as if he had had me up in an enormous mental swing; later I had got used to them. These ups and downs were no more than a kind of emotional daily gymnastics to a lively temperament, much in need of exercise, and to which too little was happening; it is a common phenomenon with energetic young white men in Africa, particularly with those who have spent their early life in towns. But here he came out of the hands of a tragedy, and was as yet undecided as to whether he should satiate his hungry soul by making the most of it, or

escape from its grimness by making as little of it as possible, and in this dilemma he looked like a very young boy running for his life to announce a catastrophe; he stuttered as he spoke. In the end he made very little of it, for it held no part in it for him to play, and fate had let him down once more.

By this time, Farah had come from his house, and listened to his narrative with me.

Belknap told me how peacefully and pleasantly the tragedy had started. His Cook had had a day off, and in his absence a party had been given in the kitchen by the seven years old kitchen Toto, Kabero, a son of my old Squatter and nearest neighbour on the farm, the old fox Kaninu. As, late in the evening, the company became very gay, Kabero had brought in his master’s gun and, to his wild friends of the plains and shambas, had acted the part of a white man. Belknap was a keen poultry farmer, he made capons and poulardes and bought up pure-bred chicken at the Nairobi sales, and he kept a shotgun on his verandah to frighten away hawks and cerval-cats. When later we talked the case over, Belknap held that the gun had not been loaded, but that the children had looked up the cartridges and loaded it themselves, but here I think that his memory failed him, they could hardly have done it if they had wanted to, and it was more likely that the gun had for once been left loaded on the verandah. However it got there, the cartridge was in the barrel when Kabero, in the greatness of youth and popularity, aimed straight in amongst his guests and pulled the trigger. The shot had boomed through the house. Three of the children had been slightly wounded, and had fled from the kitchen in terror. Two were there now, badly hurt or dead. Belknap finished his tale by a long anathema of the continent of Africa and of the things that happen there.

While he talked, my houseboys had come out, very silent; they went in again, and brought out a hurricane-lamp. We got out dressing and disinfectant. It would be a waste of time to try to start the car, and we ran as quick as we could through the forest down to Belknap’s house. The swinging hurricane-lamp threw our shadows from the one side of the narrow road to the other. As we ran on, we were met by a succession of short raw cracked shrieks,—death squeals of a child.

The kitchen door was flung back, as if Death, after having rushed in, had rushed out again, and left the place in dire devastation, a chicken-house that the badger has been in. There was a kitchen lamp burning on the table and smoking sky-high, and in the small room the smell of gunpowder still hung. The gun was on the table beside the lamp. There was blood all over the kitchen, I slipped in it on the floor. Hurricane-lamps are difficult to direct on to any particular spot, but they give a very striking illumination of a whole room or situation; I remember the things I have seen by the light of a hurricane-lamp better than others.

I knew the children who had been shot, from the plains of the farm, where they had herded their fathers’ sheep. Wamai, Jogona’s son, a lively little boy who had for some time been a pupil at the school, was lying on the floor between the door and the table. He was not dead, but not far from death, and unconscious even, though he groaned a little. We lifted him aside, to be able to move. The child that shrieked was Wanyangerri, who had been the youngest of the party in the kitchen. He was sitting up, leaning forwards, towards the lamp; the blood spouted, like water from a pump, from his face,—if one could still say that, for he must have stood straight in front of the barrel when it was fired and it had taken his lower jaw clean off. He held his arms out from his sides and moved them up and down like pump-spears, as the wings of a chicken go, after it has had its head cut off.

When you are brought suddenly within the presence of such disaster, there seems to be but one advice, it is the remedy of the shooting-field and the farmyard: that you should kill quickly and at any cost. And yet you know that you cannot kill, and your brain turns with fear. I put my hands to the child’s head and pressed it in my despair, and, as if I had really killed him, he at the same moment stopped screaming, and sat erect with his arms hanging down, as if he was made of wood. So now I know what it feels like to heal by imposition of hands.

It is a difficult thing to bandage a patient whose face is half shot off, in your endeavour to stop the bleeding you may choke him. I had to lift the little boy on to Farah’s knee, and made Farah hold his head in position for me, for if it fell forward I could not get the dressing fastened, and if it fell back the blood ran down and filled his throat. In the end, while he sat so still, I got the bandages placed.

We lifted Wamai on to the table and held the lamp up to look at him. He had received the full charge of the gun into his throat and chest, he did not bleed much, only a thin trail of blood ran down from the corner of his mouth. It was surprising to see this Native child, who had been as full of life as a fawn, so quiet now. While we looked at him his own face changed and took on an expression of deep surprise. I sent Farah to the house to fetch the car, for we had no time to waste in bringing the children into hospital.

While we waited I inquired after Kabero, the boy who had fired the gun and shed all this blood. Belknap then told me a queer story about him. A couple of days earlier Kabero had bought an old pair of shorts from his master, and was to pay him with a rupee from his wages. When the shot fell, and Belknap ran out to the kitchen, Kabero was standing in the middle of the room with the smoking gun in his hand. He stared at Belknap for a second, and then dived into the pocket of the very shorts that he had so newly bought and had put on for the party, drew up a rupee and laid it on the table with his left hand, while with his right he threw the gun also on the table. And in that final settlement with the world he was gone; he actually, although we did not know of it at the moment, in this great gesture, disappeared from the face of the earth. It was an unusual behaviour in a Native, for they generally manage to keep a debt, and in particular a debt to a white man, within the outskirts of their mind. Perhaps the moment to Kabero had looked so much like the day of judgment, that he felt he had got to play up to it; perhaps he was trying, in the hour of need, to secure a friend. Or the shock, the boom, and the death of his friends round him, had knocked in the whole of the boy’s small sphere of ideas, so that bits of the periphery had been flung into the very centre of his consciousness.

At that time I had an old Overland car. I shall never write anything against her, for she served me well through many years. But it was rare that she could be induced to run on more than two cylinders. Her lights were out of order too, so that I used to drive in to dances at the Muthaiga Club with a hurricane-lamp swaddled in a red silk handkerchief, for a back light. She had to be pushed into starting, and upon this night it took a long time.

Visitors to my house had been complaining of the state of my road, and during the death-drive of that night I realized that they had been right. I first let Farah drive, but I thought that he was deliberately going into all the deep holes and waggon-tracks of the road, and I took the steering-wheel myself. For this I had to get off by the pond to wash my hands in the dark water. The distance to Nairobi seemed infinitely long, I thought that I might have driven home to Denmark in the time that it took us.

The Native Hospital of Nairobi lies on the hill just before you drive down into the cup of the town. It was dark now, and seemed peaceful. We had much trouble to wake it up; in the end we got hold of an old Goan doctor or doctor’s assistant, who appeared in a queer sort of negligee. He was a big fat man of a very placid manner, and had a strange way of making the same gesture first with one hand and then with the other. As I helped to lift Wamai out of the car I thought that he stirred and stretched himself a little, but when we brought him into the brightly lighted room in the hospital, he was dead. The old Goan kept waving his hand at him, saying: “He is dead.” And then again at Wanyangerri, saying: “He is alive.” I never saw this old man again, for I never came back to the hospital at night, which was probably his hour there. At the time, I thought his manner very annoying, but afterwards I felt as if Fate itself in a number of big white cloaks, the one on the top of the other, had met us at the threshold of the house, dealing out Life and Death impartially.

Wanyangerri woke up from his trance when we took him into the Hospital, and at once got into a terrible panic; he would not be left but clung to me and to anybody near him and cried and wept in the greatest anguish. The old Goan in the end calmed him by some injection, looked at me over his spectacles and said: “He is alive.” I left the children there, the dead and the live, upon two stretchers, for their different fates.

Belknap, who had come in with us on his motor-bicycle, mostly so as to help us to push the car into starting, should she stop on the road, now thought that we ought to report the accident to the Police. So we drove down into town to the River Road Police Station, and thereby ran straight into the night-life of Nairobi. There was no white Police Officer present when we came, and while they sent for him we waited outside in the car. The street had an avenue of tall Eucalyptus trees, the tree of all pioneer-towns of the highlands; at night their very long narrow leaves give out a queer pleasant smell, and look strange in the light of the street-lamps. A big buxom young Swaheli woman was carried into the Police Station by a group of Native Policemen, she resisted with all her might, scratched their faces, and screamed like a pig. A party of brawlers were brought in, still eager, upon the steps of the Station, to go for one another; and a thief, I believe, who had just been caught, came down the street with a whole tail of night-revellers after him, who were taking his part, or the part of the Police, and were loudly debating the case. In the end a young Police Officer arrived, straight, I believe, from a gay party. He was a disappointment to Belknap, for he began to take down his report with the keenest interest and at a terrific speed, but then fell into deep thoughts, dragged his pencil slowly over the page and finally gave up writing and put his pencil back into his pocket. I was cold in the night air. At last we could drive home.

While I was still in bed the next morning, I felt, by the concentrated stillness outside the house, that there were many people about it. I knew who they were: the old men of the farm, squatting upon the stones, munching, sniffing their tobacco, spitting, and whispering. I also knew what they wanted: they had come to inform me that they wished to set a Kyama on the case of the shot of last night, and of the death of the children.

A Kyama is an assembly of the Elders of a farm, which is authorized by the Government to settle the local differences amongst the Squatters. The members of the Kyama gather round a crime, or an accident, and will sit over it for many weeks, battening upon mutton, talk, and disaster. I knew that now the old men would want to talk the whole matter over with me, and also that they would, if they could, in the end make me come into their court to give the final judgment in the case. I did not want to take up an endless discussion of the tragedy of the night, at this moment, and sent for my horse to get out and away from them.

As I came out from the house I found, as I expected, the whole circle of the Ancients to the left of it, near the boys’ huts. For the sake of their own dignity as an assembly they pretended not to see me, until they realized that I was going away. They then stumbled on to their old legs in great haste, and began to flap their arms at me. I waved my hand to them in return, and rode off.

Chapter 2. Riding in the Reserve

I rode into the Masai Reserve. I had to cross the river to get there; riding on, I got into the Game Reserve in a quarter of an hour. It had taken me some time, while I had lived on the farm, to find a place where I could get over the river on horseback: the descent was stony, and the slope up the other side very steep, but “once in,—how the delighted spirit pants for joy.”

Here lay before you a hundred miles’ gallop over grass and open undulating land; there was not a fence nor a ditch, and no road. There was no human habitation except the Masai villages, and those were deserted half the year, when the great wanderers took themselves and their herds off to other pastures. There were low thorn trees regularly spread over the plain, and long deep valleys with dry riverbeds of big flat stones, where you had to find a deer-path here and there to take you across. After a little while you became aware of how still it was out here. Now, looking back on my life in Africa, I feel that it might altogether be described as the existence of a person who had come from a rushed and noisy world, into a still country.

A little before the rains, the Masai burn off the old dry grass, and while the plains are thus lying black and waste they are unpleasant to travel on: you will get the black charred dust, which the hoofs of your horse raise, all over you and into your eyes, and the burnt grass-stalks are sharp as glass; your dogs get their feet cut on them. But when the rains come, and the young green grass is fresh on the plains, you feel as if riding upon springs, and the horse gets a little mad with the pleasantness. The various kinds of gazelles come to the green places to graze, and there look like toy animals stood upon a billiard table. You may ride into a herd of Eland; the mighty peaceful beasts will let you get close to them before they start trotting off, their long horns streaming backwards over their raised necks, the large loose flaps of breastskin, that make them look square, swaying as they jog. They seem to have come out of an old Egyptian epitaph, but there they have been ploughing the fields, which gives them a familiar and domesticated air. The Giraffe keep farther away in the Reserve.

At times, in the first month of the rains, a sort of wild white fragrant Pink flowers so richly all over the Reserve that at a distance the plains look patched with snow.

I turned to the animal world from the world of men; my heart was heavy with the tragedy of the night. The old men sitting at my house made me uneasy; in old times people must have had that feeling when they thought it likely that a witch of the neighbourhood had fixed her mind upon them, or was at the very moment carrying a wax-child under her clothes, to be baptized with their own name.

My relations with the Natives in the legal affairs of the farm were altogether of a queer nature. Since, before anything, I wanted peace on the land, I could not keep out of them, for a dispute between the Squatters, which has not been solemnly settled, was like those sores that you get in Africa, and which they there call veldt-sores: they heal on the surface if you let them, and go on festering and running underneath until you dig them up to the bottom and have them cleaned all through. The Natives themselves were aware of this, and if they really wanted a matter settled they would ask me to give judgment.

As I knew nothing of their laws the figure that I cut at these great courts of justice would often be that of a Prima donna who does not remember a word of her part and has to be prompted through it by the rest of the cast. This task my old men took upon themselves with tact and patience. It would also at times be the figure of an affronted Prima donna who is shocked by her role and, refusing to go on with it, walks off the stage. When this happened, my audience took it as a hard blow from the hand of destiny, an act of God outside their understanding; they looked on it in silence and spat.

The ideas of justice of Europe and Africa are not the same and those of the one world are unbearable to the other. To the African there is but one way of counterbalancing the catastrophes of existence, it shall be done by replacement; he does not look for the motive of an action. Whether you lie in wait for your enemy and cut his throat in the dark; or you fell a tree, and a thoughtless stranger passes by and is killed: so far as punishment goes, to the Native mind, it is the same thing. A loss has been brought upon the community and must be made up for, somewhere, by somebody. The Native will not give time or thought to the weighing up of guilt or desert: either he fears that this may lead him too far, or he reasons that such things are no concern of his. But he will devote himself, in endless speculations, to the method by which crime or disaster shall be weighed up in sheep and goats,—time does not count to him; he leads you solemnly into a sacred maze of sophistry. In those days this went against my ideas of justice.

All Africans are the same in these rites. The Somali have a very different mentality from the Kikuyu and a deep contempt for them, but they will sit down in identical manner to weigh up murder, rape, or fraud against their stock at home in Somaliland,—dearly beloved she-camels, and horses, the names and pedigree of which are written in their hearts.

Once the news came to Nairobi of how Farah’s little brother, who was ten years old, in a place called Buramur, had taken up a stone and thrown it at a boy of a different tribe, knocking out two of his teeth. Over this matter representatives of the two tribes met at the farm to sit upon the floor of Farah’s house and talk, night after night. Old lean men came, who had been to Mekka and wore a green turban, arrogant young Somalis who, when they were not attending to really serious matters, were gunbearers to the great European travellers and hunters, and dark-eyed, round-faced boys, who were shyly representing their family and who did not say a word, but were devoutly listening and learning. Farah told me that the matter was considered so grave because the boy’s looks had been ruined, he might find it difficult, when his time came, to get married, and would have to come down in his pretentions as to birth or beauty in his bride. In the end the penance was fixed at fifty camels, which means half waregilt, full waregilt being one hundred camels. Fifty camels were then bought, far away in Somaliland, to be, ten years hence, laid on to the price of a Somali maiden, and to turn her eyes off the two missing teeth of her bridegroom; perhaps the foundation of a tragedy was laid. Farah himself considered that he had got off lightly.

The Natives of the farm never realized my views on their legal systems, and they came to me first of all for their indemnification when any ill-luck befell them.

Once, in the coffee-picking season, a young Kikuyu girl named Wamboi was run over by a bullock cart outside my house and killed. The carts were taking coffee from the field to the mill, and I had forbidden anybody to go riding on them. Otherwise I should have had at every trip a party of gay coffee-picking girls and children taking a slow joyride,—for anybody can walk quicker than a bullock,—all across the farm, and it would be too heavy on my bullocks. The young drivers, however, did not have it in them to send away the dreamy-eyed girls who kept running alongside their carts and begging for this great pleasure; all they could do was to tell them to jump off where the road came into sight of my house. But Wamboi fell as she jumped and the wheel of the cart went over her small dark head and broke the skull; a little blood trailed in the cart-track.

I sent for her old father and mother, who came in from the picking-field and wailed over her. I knew that this would also mean a heavy loss to them, for the girl had been of marriage-age, and would have brought them in her price of sheep and goats and a heifer or two. This they had been looking forward to since her birth. I was considering how much I ought to help them, when they forestalled me by turning upon me, with great energy, their claim for a full indemnification.

No, I said, I would not pay. I had told the girls of the farm that I would not have them riding on the carts, all people were aware of that. The old people nodded, there was nothing here with which they did not agree, but they stuck to their claim immovably. Their argument was that somebody must pay. They could get no contradiction to the principle into their heads, no more than they could have got the theory of relativity in there. And it was not greed or spite which, when I broke off the discussion and went back, made them follow at my heels; it was, as if I had been indeed magnetic, a law of Nature.

They sat down and waited outside my house. They were poor people, small and underfed; they looked like a pair of little badgers on my lawn. They sat there till the sun was down and I could hardly distinguish them against the grass. They were sunk in deep grief; their bereavement and their economic loss melted into one overwhelming distress. Farah was away for the day; in his absence, at the time when the lamps were lighted in my house, I sent them out money to buy a sheep to eat. It was a bad move, they took it as the first sign of exhaustion in a besieged city and sat down for the night. I do not know if they would have had it in them to go away, if it had not been that, late in the evening, they conceived the idea of running in the young cart-driver for their damage. The idea lifted them off the grass and away, suddenly, without a word, and took them early next morning to Dagoretti, where our Assistant District Commissioner lived.

It brought upon the farm a long murder-case and many swaggering young Native Policemen. But all that the A.D.C. offered to do for them was to have the driver hanged for murder, and even that he gave up when he had got the evidence in the case, and the Ancients would not hold a Kyama upon the matter after both he and I had turned it away. So in the end the old people had to sit down under a law of relativity of which they did not understand a word, as other people have had to do.

At times I grew tired of my Ancients of the Kyama and told them what I thought of them.—“You old men,” I said, “are fining the young men in order that it shall be impossible to them to collect any money for themselves. The young men cannot move for you, and then you buy up all the girls yourselves.” The old men listened attentively, the small black eyes in their dry and wrinkled faces glittered, their thin lips moved gently as if they were repeating my words: they were pleased to hear, for once, an excellent principle put into speech.

With all our diversities of views, my position as a judge to the Kikuyu held a profusion of potentialities, and was dear to me. I was young then, and had meditated upon the ideas of justice and injustice, but mostly from the angle of the person who is being judged; in a judge’s seat I had not been. I took great trouble to judge rightly, and for peace on the farm. At times, when the problems became difficult, I had to retire and take time to think them over, covering my head with a mental cloak so that nobody should come and talk to me about them. This was always an effective move with the people of the farm, and I heard them, a long time afterwards, talk with respect of the case that had been so deep that no one could look through it in less than a week. One can always impress a Native by wasting more time over a matter than he does himself, only it is a difficult thing to accomplish.

But that the Natives should want me for a judge, and that they should consider my verdict of value to them, of this the explanation is found in their mythological or theological mentality. The Europeans have lost the faculty for building up myths or dogma, and for what we want of these we are dependent upon the supplies of our past. But the mind of the African moves naturally and easily upon such deep and shadowy paths. This gift of theirs comes out strongly in their relations with white people.

You find it already in the names which they deal out to the Europeans with whom they come in contact, after a very short acquaintance. You have got to know these names if you are to send a runner with letters to a friend, or find the way in a car to his house, for the Native world knows him by no other name. I have had an unsociable neighbour, who would never entertain a guest in his house, who was named Sahane Modja,—One Cover. My Swedish friend Eric Otter was Resase Modja,—One Cartridge,—which meant that he did not need more than one single cartridge to kill, and which was a fine name to be known by. There was a keen automobilist of my acquaintance, who was called “Half man—half car.” When Natives name white men after animals,—the Fish, the Giraffe, the Fat Bull,—their minds run upon the lines of the old fables, and these white men, I believe, in their dark consciousness figure as both men and beasts.

And there is magic in words: a person who has for many years been known to all his surroundings by the name of an animal in the end comes to feel familiar with and related to the animal, he recognises himself in it. When he is back in Europe it is strange to him to feel that no one ever connects him with it.

Once, in the London Zoo, I saw again an old retired Government Official, whom in Africa I had known as Bwâna Tembu,—Mr. Elephant. He was standing, all by himself, before the Elephant-house, sunk in deep contemplation of the Elephants. Perhaps he would go there often. His Native servants would have thought it in the order of things that he should be there, but probably no one in all London, except I who was there only for a few days, would have quite understood him.

The Native mind works in strange ways, and is related to the mind of bygone people, who naturally imagined that Odin, so as to see through the whole world, gave away one of his eyes; and who figured the God of love as a child, ignorant of love. It is likely that the Kikuyu of the farm saw my greatness as a judge in the fact that I knew nothing whatever of the laws according to which I judged.

Because of their gift for myths, the Natives can also do things to you against which you cannot guard yourself and from which you cannot escape. They can turn you into a symbol. I was well aware of the process, and for my own use I had a word for it,—in my mind I called it that they were brass-serpenting me. Europeans who have lived for a long time with Natives, will understand what I mean, even if the word is not quite correctly used according to the Bible. I believe that in spite of all our activities in the land, of the scientific and mechanical progress there, and of Pax Britannica itself, this is the only practical use that the Natives have ever had out of us.

They could not make use of all white men for the purpose, and not of one man and another equally. They gave us, within their world, precedence of rank according to our utility to them as brass-serpents. Many of my friends,—Denys Finch-Hatton, both Galbraith and Berkeley Cole, Sir Northrup MacMillan,—ranked highly with the Natives in this capacity.

Lord Delamere was a brass-serpent of the first magnitude. I remember that I once travelled in the highlands at the time when the great pest of hoppers came on to the land. The grasshoppers had been there the year before, now their small black offspring appeared, to eat what they had left, and to leave not a leaf of grass where they had passed. To the Natives this was a terrible blow, after what they had gone through it was too much for them to bear. Their hearts broke, they panted, or howled like dying dogs, they ran their heads against a wall in the air before them. I then happened to tell them how I had driven through Delamere’s farm and had seen the hoppers on it, all over the place, in his paddocks and on his grazing land, and I added that Delamere had been in great rage and despair about them. At that same moment the listeners became quiet and almost at ease. They asked me what Delamere had said of his misfortune, and again asked me to repeat it, and then they said no more.

I did not, as a brass-serpent, carry the weight of Lord Delamere, still there were occasions when I came in useful to the Natives.

During the war, when the fate of the Carrier Corps lay upon the whole Native world, the squatters of the farm used to come and sit round my house. They did not speak, not even amongst themselves, they turned their eyes upon me and made me their brass-serpent. I could not very well chase them away, seeing that they did no harm, and besides, if I had done so they would have gone and sat down in some other place. It was a singularly hard thing to bear. I was helped through with it by the fact that my brother’s regiment was at that time sent on to the foremost trenches at Vimy Ridge: I could turn my eyes upon him and make him my brass-serpent.

The Kikuyu made me a chief-mourner, or woman of sorrows, when a great distress befell us on the farm. It was what would happen now over the shooting-accident. Because I grieved for the children, the people of the farm found it in them to lay the matter aside, and let it rest there for the time being. In regard to our misfortunes they looked upon me as the congregation looks upon the priest who empties the cup alone, but on their behalf.

There is this about witchcraft, that when it has once been practised on you, you will never completely rid yourself of it. I thought it a painful, a very painful process to be hung upon the pole, I wished that I could have escaped it. Still, many years after, there will be occasions when you find yourself thinking: “Am I to be treated in such a way?—I, who have been a brass-serpent!”

As I was riding back to the farm, on crossing the river and actually in the water, I met a party of Kaninu’s sons, three young men and a boy. They carried spears and came along quickly. When I stopped them and asked for news of their brother Kabero they stood, the water half way to their knees, with still set faces and downcast eyes; they spoke lowly. Kabero, they said, had not come back, and nothing had been heard of him since he had run away last night. They were now certain that he was dead. He would either have killed himself in his despair—since the idea of suicide comes very natural to all Natives, and even to Native children,—or he had been lost in the bush and the wild animals had eaten him. His brothers had been round looking for him in all directions, they were now on their way out into the Reserve to try to find him there.

When I came up the river-bank on my own land, I turned and looked out over the plain; my land was higher up than the land of the Reserve. There was no sign of life anywhere on the plain, except that a long way out the Zebra were grazing and galloping about. As the party of searchers emerged from the bush on the other side of the river, they went on quickly, walking one by one; their small group looked like a short caterpillar rapidly winding its way along on the grass. At times the sun glinted on their weapons. They seemed fairly confident of their direction, but what would it be? In their search for the lost child, their only guide would be the vultures that are always hanging in the sky above a dead body on the plain, and will give you the exact spot of a lion-kill.

But this would be only a very small body, not much of a feast for the gluttons of the air, there would not be many of them to spot it, nor would they be staying on for a very long time.

All this was sad to think of. I rode home.

Chapter 3. Wamai

I went to the Kyama followed by Farah. I always had Farah with me in my dealings with the Kikuyu, for while he showed but little sense where his own quarrels were concerned, and like all Somalis would lose his head altogether wherever his tribal feelings and feuds came in, about other people’s differences he had wisdom and discretion. He was, besides, my interpreter, for he spoke Swaheli very well.

I knew before I arrived at the assembly that the chief object of the proceeding would now be to shear Kaninu as close as possible. He would see his sheep driven away to all sides, some to indemnify the families of the dead and wounded children, some to maintain the Kyama. From the beginning this went against me. For Kaninu, I thought, had lost his son just as the other fathers, and the fate of his child seemed to me the most tragic of the lot. Wamai was dead and out of it, and Wanyangerri was in Hospital, where people were looking after him, but Kabero had been abandoned by all, and nobody knew where his bones lay.

Now Kaninu lent himself exceptionally well to his role of the ox, fattened for a feast. He was one of my biggest squatters; on my squatter-list he is down for thirty-five head of cattle, five wives and sixty goats. His village was close to my wood, I therefore saw much of his children and his goats, and continually had to run in his women for cutting down my big trees. The Kikuyu know nothing of luxury, the richest amongst them live as the poor, and if I went into Kaninu’s hut I would find nothing there in the way of furniture except perhaps a small wooden stool to sit on. But there were a number of huts at Kaninu’s village, and a lively swarming of old women, young people and children round them. And a long row of cattle, about milking time at sunset, advanced towards the village across the plains, with their blue shadows walking gently on the grass beside them. All this gave to the old lean man in the leather mantle, with the net of fine wrinkles in his dark shrewd face all filled up with dirt, the orthodox halo of a Nabob of the farm.

I and Kaninu had had many heated arguments, I had indeed been threatening to turn him off the farm, all over a particular traffic of his. Kaninu was on good terms with the neighbouring Masai tribe, and had married four or five of his daughters off to them. The Kikuyu themselves told me how in the old times the Masai had thought it beneath them to intermarry with Kikuyu. But in our days the strange dying nation, to delay its final disappearance has had to come down in its pride, the Masai women have no children and the prolific young Kikuyu girls are in demand with the tribe. All Kaninu’s offspring were good-looking people, and he had brought back a number of sleek romping young heifers across the border of the Reserve in exchange for his young daughters. More than one old Kikuyu pater familias in this period became rich in the same way. The big Chief of the Kikuyu, Kinanjui, had sent, I was told, more than twenty of his daughters to the Masai, and had got over a hundred head of cattle back from them.

But a year ago, the Masai Reserve had been put into quarantine for foot-and-mouth disease, and no stock could be taken out of it. Here was a grave dilemma in the existence of Kaninu. For the Masai are wanderers, and change their abode according to season, rain and grazing, and those cows in their herds which lawfully belonged to Kaninu were dragged all over the land and would at times be a hundred miles away, where nobody knew what was happening to them. The Masai are unscrupulous cattle-dealers with anyone, and more so with the Kikuyu whom they despise. They are fine warriors and are said to be great lovers. In their hands the hearts of Kaninu’s daughters were turning like the hearts of the Sabine women of old, and he could no longer rely on them. Therefore the resourceful old Kikuyu took to having his cattle shifted at night, when the District Commissioner and the Veterinary Department were supposed to be asleep, over the water to my farm. This was real villainous behaviour on his part, for the Quarantine regulations are amongst those which the Natives understand, they think highly of them. Had these cows been found on my land, the farm itself would have been put into quarantine. I therefore set out watchmen down by the river to catch Kaninu’s retainers, and on moonlight nights there had been many great dramatic ambuscades, and swift flights along the silver stream, and the heifers, upon which the whole concern turned, stampeded and ran away in all directions.

Jogona, the father of the child Wamai, who had been killed, was, on the other hand, a poor man. He had but one old wife, and all he owned in the world were three goats. He was not likely to make more, for he was a very simple person. I knew Jogona well. A year before the accident, and the sitting of the Kyama, a terrible murder had taken place on the farm. Two Indians who were leasing a mill from me a little way higher up the river, and were grinding mealie to the Kikuyu, had been killed in the night, their goods had been stolen, and the murderers were never found. The murder scared off all the Indian traders and storekeepers of the district, as if they had been blown away by a storm; I had had to arm Pooran Singh down at my own mill with an old shotgun to make him stay on, and even at that it had taken much persuasion. I myself had thought, the first nights after the murder, that I heard footsteps round the house, so for a week I had kept a night watchman there, and this man was Jogona. He was very gentle, and would have been of no use against murderers, but he was a friendly old man and pleasant to talk with. He had the manners of a gay child, his broad face wore an inspired and keen expression, whenever he looked at me he laughed. He now seemed very pleased to see me at the Kyama.

But the Koran itself, which I was studying in those days says: “Thou shalt not bend the justice of the law for the benefit of the Poor.”

Besides myself, at least one member of the assembly was aware that its purpose was now the flaying of Kaninu: this was Kaninu himself. The other old men sat around, infinitely attentive, and with all their wits collected for the proceedings. Kaninu, on the ground, had drawn his big cloak of goatskin over his head, from time to time he gave out under it a whine or whimper, like that of a dog which is exhausted by howling and is just keeping its misery alive.

The old men wanted to begin with the case of the wounded child Wanyangerri, because it gave them endless opportunity for palaver. What was the indemnification to be if Wanyangerri were dead? If he were disfigured? If he had lost the faculty of speech? Farah, on my behalf, told them that I would not discuss this matter until I had been in Nairobi and had seen the doctor of the hospital. They swallowed their disappointment and got their arguments on the next case ready.

It was up to the Kyama, I told them through Farah, to get this case settled quickly, and they should not sit over it for the rest of their lives. It was clear that it was not a murder-case, but a bad accident.

The Kyama honoured my speech with their attention, but as soon as it was finished they opposed it.

“Msabu, we know nothing,” they said. “But here we see that you do not know enough either, and we understand only a little of what you say to us. It was Kaninu’s son who fired the shot. Otherwise how would he be the only one not hurt by it? If you want to hear more about it Mauge here will tell you. His son was there and had one of his ears shot off.”

Mauge was one of the wealthiest squatters, a sort of rival of the farm to Kaninu. He was a very stately man to look at, and his words had weight, although he spoke very slowly and from time to time had to stop and think. “Msabu,” he said. “My son told me: the boys all held the gun the one after the other and pointed it at Kabero. But he would not explain to them how to shoot with it, no he would not explain it at all. In the end he took the gun back, and at the same moment it shot, it wounded all the children and killed Wamai, Jogona’s son. This is exactly how it happened.”

“I knew all that already,” I said, “and it is what is called bad luck, and an accident. I might have fired the shot from my house, or you, Mauge, from yours.”

This created a great stir in the Kyama. They all looked at Mauge, who became very uneasy. Then they talked for some time amongst themselves, very lowly, as in a whisper. At last they took up the discussion again. “Msabu,” they said, “this time we do not understand one word of what you are saying. We can only believe that you are thinking of a rifle, since you yourself shoot so well with a rifle, but not so well with a shotgun. If it had been a rifle you would have been quite right. But nobody could shoot with a shotgun from your house, or from Mauge’s house, down to the house of Bwana Menanya, and kill people within the house.”

After a short pause I said: “Everybody now knows that it was Kaninu’s son who fired the gun. Kaninu will pay Jogona a number of sheep to make up for the loss. But everybody also knows that Kaninu’s son was not a bad child and did not mean to kill Wamai, and that Kaninu will not pay as many sheep as if that had been the case.”

Here an old man by the name of Awaru spoke. He was in closer contact with civilization than the others, for he had been seven years in jail.

“Msabu,” he said, “you say that Kaninu’s son was not bad and that therefore Kaninu will not pay out very many sheep. But if his son had wanted to kill Wamai and had thus been a very bad child, would that have been a good thing to Kaninu? Would he have been so pleased about that, that he would have paid many more sheep?”

“Awaru,” I said, “you know that Kaninu has lost his son. You go to the school yourself, so you know that this boy was clever at school. If he was as good in all other ways, it is a very bad thing to Kaninu to lose him.”

There was a long pause, not a sound in the ring. At the end of it Kaninu, as if suddenly reminded of a forgotten pain or duty, gave out a long wail.

“Memsahib,” said Farah, “let these Kikuyu now name the figure that they have in their hearts.” He spoke in Swaheli to me, so that the assembly should understand him, and succeeded in making them ill at ease, for a figure is a concrete thing, which no Native likes to give out. Farah let his eyes run all round the circle and in a haughty way suggested: “One hundred.” A hundred sheep was a fantastic number, which nobody would seriously have thought of. A silence fell upon the Kyama. The old men felt themselves at the mercy of Somali mockery, and chose to lie low under it. A very old man whispered “Fifty” but the figure seemed to carry no weight but to be blown aloft in the current of air of Farah’s joke.

After a moment Farah himself briskly said “Forty” in the manner of the experienced cattle-trader, at home with figures and stock. The word set astir the latent ideas of the meeting; they began to talk very lively amongst themselves. They would now need time, and would meditate and cackle much, but all the same a basis for negotiations had been laid. When we were at home again Farah said to me confidently: “I think that these old men will take forty sheep from Kaninu.”

Kaninu at the Kyama had one more ordeal to go through. For old broad-bellied Kathegu, another big squatter of the farm, father and grandfather to an enormous household, here rose and proposed to go through the sheep and goats which Kaninu was to hand over, indicating them individually one by one. This was all contrary to the custom of any Kyama, Jogona could never have invented the scheme, and I could only believe it to be founded upon an agreement between Kathegu and Jogona, for the benefit of Kathegu. I waited a little to see what would come of it.

Kaninu, to begin with, seemed to give himself up to his martyrdom, he ducked his head and puled, as if, for each animal named, a tooth was being drawn out of him. But when at last Kathegu, himself hesitating, designated a big yellow goat without horns, Kaninu’s heart broke and his strength gave out. He came forward, out of his cloak, in one mighty gesture. For one moment he roared like a bull at me, a bellow for help, an awful de profundis, until he saw, in a quick glance, that I was on his side, and that he was not to lose the yellow goat. He then sat down without another sound; only after a while he gave Kathegu a very deep sarcastic glance.

After about a week of sitting and supernumerary sittings of the Kyama, the indemnification was finally fixed at forty sheep, to be paid by Kaninu to Jogona, but no individual sheep were to be indicated in the transfer.

A fortnight later Farah, in the evening while I was dining, gave me fresh news of the case.

Three old Kikuyu from Nyeri, he told me, had arrived at the farm the day before. They had heard of the case in their huts up at Nyeri, and had walked from there to appear on the stage and to plead that Wamai was not the son of Jogona but was their late brother’s son, and that therefore the compensation for his death should lawfully fall to them.

I smiled at the impudence, and remarked to Farah that this was just like the Kikuyu of Nyeri. No, said Farah thoughtfully, he believed that they were right. Jogona had indeed come from Nyeri to the farm six years ago, and from what Farah had gathered, Wamai was not Jogona’s son, “and never had been,” Farah said. It was, he went on, a great stroke of luck to Jogona that he had, two days before, been handed over twenty-five of his forty sheep. Otherwise Kaninu would have let them wander off to Nyeri so as to save himself the pain, Farah said, of meeting them on the farm now that they were no longer his. But Jogona would have to look out still, for the Nyeri Kikuyu were not easy to shake off. They had taken up their abode on the farm and were threatening to bring the case before the D.C.

In this way I was prepared for the appearance, a few days later, before my house, of the Nyeri people, who belonged to a low class of Kikuyu, and had all the look of three dirty and shaggy old Hyenas that had slunk one hundred and fifty miles upon Wamai’s blood-track. With them came Jogona, in a state of great agitation and distress. The difference in the attitude of the parties probably arose from the fact that the Nyeri Kikuyu had nothing to lose, while Jogona had twenty-five sheep. The three strangers sat on the stones with no more manifestation of life than three ticks upon a sheep. I had no sympathy with their cause, for, whatever the circumstances were, they had taken no interest in the dead child while he had lived, and I was now sorry for Jogona, who had behaved well at the Kyama, and had, I believed, grieved over Wamai. Jogona, when I questioned him, trembled and sighed so that it was impossible to understand him, and we got no further on this occasion.

But two days later Jogona came back early in the morning, when I was at my typewriter, and asked me to write down for him the account of his relations to the dead child and its family. He wanted to take the report before the D.C. at Dagoretti. Jogona’s very simple manner was impressive because he felt so strongly about things, and was entirely without self-consciousness. It was evident that he was looking upon his present resolution as upon a great enterprise, which was not without danger; he went to it with awe.

I wrote his statement down for him. It took a long time, for it was a long report of events more than six years old, and in themselves extremely complicated. Jogona, as he was going through it, continually had to break off his tale to think things over or to go back in it and reconstruct it. He was, most of the time, holding his head with both hands, at moments gravely slapping the crown of it as if to shake out the facts. Once he went and leaned his face against the wall, as the Kikuyu women do when they are giving birth to their children.

I took a duplicate of the report. I have still got it.

It was extremely difficult to follow, it gave a lot of complicated circumstances and irrelevant details. It was not surprising to me that Jogona had found it difficult to recollect, it was more surprising that he should be able to recollect the facts at all. It began:

“At the time when Waweru Wamai, of Nyeri, was about to die,—na-taka kufa, wished to die, they have it in Swaheli,—he had two wives. The one wife had three daughters, after Waweru’s death she married another man. The other wife, Waweru had not yet paid for altogether, he still owed her father two goats for her. This wife had overstrained herself when she lifted a load of firewood and had had a miscarriage and nobody knew if she would bear any more children...”

It went on in this way, and dragged the reader into a thick maze of Kikuyu conditions and relations:

“This wife had one small child by the name of Wamai. At that same time he was sick, and the people believed that he had got small-pox. Waweru was very fond of his wife and of her child, and when he was dying he was very much worried because he did not know what would become of her when he himself should be dead. He therefore sent for his friend Jogona Kanyagga, who lived not far away. Jogona Kanyagga owed Waweru, at this time, three shillings for a pair of shoes. Waweru now suggested to him that they should make an agreement....”

The agreement came to this that Jogona should take over his dying friend’s wife and child, and pay to her father the two goats that were still due to him from the sum of her purchase price. From now the report became a list of expenses, which Jogona had brought upon himself through the adoption of the child Wamai. He had, he stated, purchased an extraordinarily good medicine for Wamai just after he had taken him over, when he was sick. At some time he had bought rice from the Indian duca for him, as he did not thrive on maize. Upon one occasion he had had to pay five Rupees to a white farmer of the neighbourhood, who said that Wamai had chased one of his turkeys into a pond. This last amount of hard cash, which he had probably had difficulty in raising, had stamped itself upon the mind of Jogona; he came back to it more than once. From Jogona’s manner it appeared that he had, by this time, forgotten that the child whom he had now lost had not been his own. He was shaken by the arrival and the claim of the three Nyeri people, in many ways. Very simple people seem to have a talent for adopting children, and feeling towards them as if they were their own; the facile hearts of the European peasants do the same without effort.

When Jogona had at last come to the end of his tale, and I had got it all down, I told him that I was now going to read it to him. He turned away from me while I was reading, as if to avoid all distractions.

But as I read out his own name, “And he sent for Jogona Kanyagga, who was his friend and who lived not far away,” he swiftly turned his face to me, and gave me a great fierce flaming glance, so exuberant with laughter that it changed the old man into a boy, into the very symbol of youth. Again as I had finished the document and was reading out his name, where it figured as a verification below his thumbmark, the vital direct glance was repeated, this time deepened and calmed, with a new dignity.

Such a glance did Adam give the Lord when He formed him out of the dust, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul. I had created him and shown him himself: Jogona Kanyagga of life everlasting. When I handed him the paper, he took it reverently and greedily, folded it up in a corner of his cloak and kept his hand upon it. He could not afford to lose it, for his soul was in it, and it was the proof of his existence. Here was something which Jogona Kanyagga had performed, and which would preserve his name for ever: the flesh was made word and dwelt among us full of grace and truth.

The world of the written word was opened to the Native of Africa at the time when I lived out there. I had then, if I wanted to, an opportunity of catching the past by its tail and of living through a bit of our own history: the period when the large plain population of Europe had in the same way had the letter revealed to them. In Denmark it happened a good hundred years ago, and from what I had been told by people who were very old when I was a child, I believe that the reaction in both cases has been nearly exactly the same. Human beings can but rarely have shown such a humble and ecstatic devotion to the principle of Art for Art’s sake.

These communications from one young Native to another were still generally composed by professional letter writers, for, although some of the old people were carried away by the spirit of the age, and a few very old Kikuyu attended my school and patiently toiled through the ABC, most of the elder generation withheld themselves distrustfully from the phenomenon. Only a few of the Natives could read, and my houseboys, and the squatters and labourers of the farm, therefore brought their letters to me to have them read out. As I opened and studied one letter after another, I wondered at the insignificance of the contents. It was the common mistake of a prejudiced civilized person. You might as well have set to herborize the little olive branch that Noah’s dove brought home. Whatever it looked like, it carried more weight than all the ark with the animals in it; it contained a new green world.

The Natives’ letters were all very much alike, they kept close to a sanctioned and sacred formula, and ran more or less as follows: “My dear friend Kamau Morefu. I will now take the pen in my hand”—in an unliteral sense, for it was the professional scribe who was writing, “to write you a letter, for I have for a long time wished to write a letter to you. I am very well and it is my hope that you are, by the grace of God, very well. My mother is very well. My wife is not very well, but I still have the hope that your wife will be, by the mercy of God, well.”—here would follow a long list of names, with a short report attached to each of them, mostly insignificant, although at times very fantastic. Then the letter was closed. “Now my friend Kamau, I will finish this letter, for I have got too little time to write to you. Your friend Ndwetti Lori.”

To transfer similar messages between young studious Europeans a hundred years ago, Postillions vaulted into the saddle, horses galloped, Post-horns were blown, and paper with ligulate gilt edges was manufactured. The letters were welcomed, cherished, and preserved, I have seen a few of them myself.

Before I learned to speak Swaheli, my relation to this Native world of letters had a curious feature to it: I could read out what they wrote without understanding a word of it. The Swaheli tongue has had no written language until the white people took upon themselves to make up one; with care it was spelled out as it is pronounced, and it has got no antiquated orthography to entrap a reader. I would then sit and read out their writings orthodoxly, word for word, with the receivers of the letters in breathless suspense all around me, and could follow the effect of my reading without in the least knowing what it was all about. Sometimes they would burst into tears at my words, or wring their hands, at other times they cried out with delight; the most common reaction to the lection was laughter, and they were continually doubled up by convulsions of laughter while I read.

When later on I got so far as to understand what I was reading, I learned that the effect of a piece of news was many times magnified when it was imparted in writing. The messages that would have been received with doubt and scorn if they had been given by word of mouth,—for all Natives are great Sceptics,—were now taken as gospel truth. Natives are, in the same way, extremely quick of hearing towards any confounding of a word in speech; such a mistake gives them a great malicious pleasure, and they will never forget it, and may name a white-man for his lifetime after a slip of his tongue; but if a mistake was made in writing, which was often the case, as the Scribes were ignorant people, they would insist on construing it into some sense, they might wonder over it and discuss it, but they would believe the most absurd things rather than find fault with the written word.

In one of the letters that I read out to a boy on the farm, the writer, amongst other news, gave the laconic message: “I have cooked a baboon.” I explained that he must have meant that he had caught a baboon, since also in Swaheli the two words are somewhat alike. But the receiver of the letter would by no means consent to it.

“No, Msabu, no,” he said. “What has he written in my letter? what is written down?”

“He has written,” I said, “that he has cooked a baboon, but how would he cook a baboon? And if he had really done so he would write more to tell you of why and how he did it.”

The young Kikuyu grew very ill at ease at such criticism of the scriptural word, he asked to have his letter back, folded it up carefully and walked away with it.

As to Jogona’s statement which I took down, it proved very useful to him, for when the D.C. had read it, he dismissed the appeal of the Nyeri people, who walked scowling back to their own village, without having got anything off the farm.

The document now became Jogona’s great treasure. I saw it again more than once. Jogona made a little leather bag for it, embroidered with beads, and hung it on a strap round his neck. From time to time, mostly on Sunday mornings, he would suddenly appear in my door, lift the bag off and take out the paper to have it read to him. Once when I had been ill, and was for the first time again out riding, he caught sight of me at a distance, ran after me a long way, and stood by my horse all out of breath, to hand me his document. At each reading his face took on the same impress of deep religious triumph, and after the reading he solicitously smoothed out his paper, folded it up and put it back in the bag. The importance of the account was not lessened but augmented with time, as if to Jogona the greatest wonder about it was that it did not change. The past, that had been so difficult to bring to memory, and that had probably seemed to be changing every time it was thought of, had here been caught, conquered and pinned down before his eyes. It had become History; with it there was now no variableness neither shadow of turning.

Chapter 4. Wanyangerri

When I was next in Nairobi, I went to see Wanyangerri in the Native Hospital.

As I had so many squatter families on my land, I was hardly ever without a patient in there, I was an habituée de la maison, and on friendly terms with the matron and the orderlies. I have never seen a person who put on paint and powder so thick as the Matron, within her white coiffe her broad face looked like the face of those Russian wooden dolls which will unscrew, and have then got another doll inside them, and another inside that, and which are sold under the name of Katinka. She was a kind and capable matron, as you would expect it from Katinka. On Thursdays they moved all beds out of the wards to an open square between them, while they cleaned and aired the houses. This was a pleasant day in hospital. There was a great fine view from the court, with the dry Athi plains in the foreground, and far away the blue mountain of Donyo Sabouk and the long Mua Hills. It was a curious thing to see my old Kikuyu women in beds with white sheets to them, like seeing an old worn-out mule, or other patient beast of burden, there; they themselves laughed to me at the situation, but sourly, as an old mule might do, for Natives are afraid of hospitals.

The first time that I saw Wanyangerri in hospital, he was so shaken and overcome that I thought the best thing for him would be to die. He was frightened of everything, weeping all the time that I was with him, and begging to be taken back to the farm; he shook and trembled in his bandages.

It was a week till I came in again. I found him then calm and collected, he received me with dignity. He was however very pleased to see me, and the orderly told me that he had been waiting impatiently for my arrival. For he could today tell me, with much assertiveness, and spitting out the words through a tube in his mouth, that he had been killed the day before, and was going to be killed again in a few days’ time.

The doctor who treated Wanyangerri had been to the war in France, and had patched up many people’s faces, he took trouble about him and made a success of the work. He put in a metal band for a jawbone and screwed it on to the bones left in the face, and he plucked up the bits of torn flesh and stitched them together to make a sort of chin for him. He even, Wanyangerri told me, had a bit of skin taken from the shoulder to fill up his patchwork. When at the end of the treatment the bandages came off, the face of the child was much changed, and looked queer, like the head of a lizard, because it had got no chin. But he was able to eat in a normal way and to speak, although after the accident he always lisped a little. All this took many months. When I came to see Wanyangerri he asked me for sugar, so I used to bring a few spoonfuls in a bit of paper.

The Natives, if they are not paralyzed and benumbed by their terror of the unknown, growl and grumble much in hospital, and invent schemes for getting away. Death is one of these; they do not fear it. The Europeans who have built and equipped the hospitals, and who are working in them, and have with much trouble got the patients dragged there, complain with bitterness that the Natives know nothing of gratitude, and that it is the same what you do to them.

To white people there is something vexatious and mortifying in this state of mind in the Natives. It is indeed the same what you do to them; you can do but little, and what you do disappears, and will never be heard of again; they do not thank you, and they bear you no malice, and even should you want to, you cannot do anything about it. It is an alarming quality; it seems to annul your existence as an individual human being, and to inflict upon you a role not of your own choosing, as if you were a phenomenon in Nature, as if you were the weather.

The immigrant Somalis in this respect differ from the Natives of the country. Your behaviour to them affects them strongly, in fact, you can hardly move without affecting the fierce burning prigs of the desert in one way or the other, and, very often, not without deeply hurting them. They have a keen sense of gratitude and will also bear malice for ever. A benefit, like an offence or a slight, is written in stone in their hearts. They are severe Mohammedans and, like all Mohammedans, have a moral code according to which they will judge you. With the Somalis you can make or destroy your prestige within an hour.

The Masai here hold a position peculiar to themselves amongst the Native tribes. They remember, they can thank you, and they will bear you a grudge. They all bear us all a grudge, which will be wiped out only when the tribe is wiped out itself.

But the unprejudiced Kikuyu, Wakambas, or Kavirondos, know of no code. They have it that most people are capable of most things, and you cannot shock them if you want to. It is, it can be said, a poor or perverted Kikuyu, to whom it makes any difference what you do to him. Left to their own nature, and to the tradition of their nation, they will look upon our activities as upon those of nature. They judge you not, but they are keen observers. The sum of their observations is what you pass for with them, your good or bad name.

The very poor people of Europe, in this way, are like the Kikuyus. They judge you not, but sum you up. If they like or esteem you at all, it is in the manner in which people love God; not for what you do to them, not at all for what you do to them, but for what you are.

One day in my wanderings through the hospital I saw three new patients there, a very black man with a thick heavy head, and two boys, who were all three bandaged at the throat. One of the orderlies in the ward was a hunchback and a narrator, who took a pleasure in explaining to me the most intriguing cases in his house. As he saw me stopping before the beds of the newcomers he came up and told me their story.

They were Nubians in the band of the King’s African Rifles, the black soldiers of Kenya. The boys were drummers, and the man a horn-player. The horn-player had had serious controversies in his life, and had lost his head over them as it will happen to Natives. First he had fired his rifle right and left over the barracks, and when the magazine was empty he had shut himself up with the two boys, in his hut of corrugated iron there, and had tried to cut their throats and his own. The orderly was sorry that I had not seen them when they had been brought in last week, for then they had all been covered in blood, and I would have believed them to be dead. Now they were out of danger, and the murderer had got his senses back.

As the story-teller went through his tale, the three persons in the bed upon whom it turned, were following it with deep attention. They interrupted him to correct the details of his tale, the boys, who had great difficulty in speaking, turning to the man in the bed between them to make him confirm their statement, confident that he would assist them to let me have the story as effectively as possible.

“Did you not foam at the mouth, did you not shriek?” they asked him. “Did you not say that you would cut us up in bits as big as a grasshopper?”

The manslayer said “Yes, yes,” with a mournful mien.

At times I would be kept in Nairobi for half a day, waiting for a business-meeting, or for the European mail when the train from the coast was late. On such occasions when I did not know what to do, I used to drive up to the Native Hospital and take a couple of the convalescents there out for a short joy-ride. At the time when Wanyangerri was in hospital, the Governor, Sir Edward Northey, kept a couple of young lions, which he was sending on to the London Zoo, caged up in the Government House grounds. They were a great attraction to the people in hospital; they all asked to be taken to see them. I had promised the patients of the K.A.R. band to take them up there when they were well enough for it, but none of them would come until they could all go together. The horn-player was the slowest to recover, one of the boys was even discharged from hospital before he was well enough to go with me. The boy came back to hospital every day to inquire about him, so as to be sure to have his drive. I found him outside there one afternoon, and he told me that the bugler still had a very terrible headache, but that this was only to be expected since his head had been so filled with devils.

In the end they came, all three, and stood before the cage sunk in contemplation. One of the young lions, angry at being stared at for such a long time, suddenly got up, stretched himself and gave a short roar, so that the onlookers got a shock, and the smallest boy took cover behind the bugler. As we were driving back he said to him: “That lion was as villainous as you were.”


During all this time Wanyangerri’s case was lying dormant out on the farm. His people sometimes came and asked me how he was getting on, but, with the exception of his little brother, they seemed scared of going in to see him. Kaninu also came round to my house late in the evening, like an old badger out reconnoitring, to sound me about the child. Farah and I, between ourselves, at times weighed up his sufferings, and computed them in sheep.

Farah also, a couple of months after the accident, informed me of a new feature of the case.

On these occasions he would come in while I was dining, stand erect by the end of the table and take upon himself to enlighten my ignorance. Farah spoke both English and French well, but stuck to certain mistakes peculiar to him. He would say “exactly” in the place of “except”,—“all the cows have come home, exactly the grey cow”,—and instead of correcting him I took to using the same expressions when I talked to him. His face and countenance were assured and dignified, but he would often start in a vague manner: “Memsahib,” he said, “the Kabero.” This was the programme then. I waited for what was to follow.

After a pause Farah took up the subject again. “You think, Memsahib,” he said, “that Kabero is dead and has been eaten by the hyenas. He is not dead. He is with the Masai.”

In two minds I asked him how he knew of this. “Oh, I know,” he said, “Kaninu has got too many girls married to Masai. When Kabero could not think of anybody who would help him exactly the Masai, he ran out to his sister’s husband. It is true that he had a bad time, he sat all night in a tree and the Hyenas stood around it underneath. Now he is living with the Masai. There is a rich old Masai, who has got many hundred cows, who has no children himself and wants to get Kabero. Kaninu knows of all this very well, and has been out to talk it over with the Masai many times. But he is afraid to tell you, he believes that if the white people know of it, Kabero will be hanged in Nairobi.”

Farah always spoke of the Kikuyu in an arrogant way. “The Masai wives,” he said, “bear no children. They are pleased enough to get Kikuyu children. They steal too many. Still, this Kabero,” he went on, “he will come back to the farm when he grows up, for he will not want to live like the Masai, always going from one place to the other. The Kikuyu are too lazy for that.”

From the farm, the tragic fate of the disappearing Masai tribe on the other side of the river could be followed from year to year. They were fighters who had been stopped fighting, a dying lion with his claws clipped, a castrated nation. Their spears had been taken from them, their big dashing shields even, and in the Game Reserve the lions followed their herds of cattle. Once, on the farm, I had three young bulls transmuted into peaceful bullocks for my ploughs and waggons, and afterwards shut up in the factory yard. There in the night the Hyenas smelled the blood and came up and killed them. This, I thought, was the fate of the Masai.

“Kaninu’s wife,” said Farah, “is sorry to lose her son for so many years.”

I did not send for Kaninu, for I did not know whether to believe what Farah had told me or not, but when he next came to my house I went out to talk with him. “Kaninu,” I asked him, “is Kabero alive? Is he with the Masai?” You will never find a Native unprepared for any action of yours, and Kaninu immediately burst into weeping over his lost child. I listened to him and looked at him for a little while. “Kaninu,” I said again, “bring Kabero here. He will not be hanged. His mother shall keep him with her on the farm.” Kaninu had not stopped his laments to listen, but he must have caught my unfortunate word of hanging; his wails were drawn into a deeper note, he dived into descriptions of the promise that Kabero had given, and of his own preference for him above all his other children.

Kaninu had a lot of children and grandchildren who, as his village was so near to my house, were always about it. Amongst them was a very small grandson of his, the son of one of those daughters of Kaninu who had married into the Masai Reserve, but who had come back from it and had brought her child with her. This child’s name was Sirunga. The mixture of blood in him had come out in the quaintest vitality, such a wild profusion of inventiveness and whims that he was like nothing quite human: a small flame, a night-bird, a diminutive genie of the farm. But he had epilepsy, and, because of that, the other children were afraid of him, chasing him away from their games and naming him Sheitani,—the devil,—so that I had adopted him into my household. As he was ill he could do no work, but he filled with me exceedingly well the office of a fool or jester and followed me about everywhere like a small fidgety black shadow. Kaninu knew of my affection for the child, and till now had smiled at it in a grandfatherly way; now he seized it, turned it at me and worked it for all it was worth. He declared with great strength that he would rather have Sirunga ten times eaten by leopards than he would lose Kabero, indeed now that Kabero was lost let Sirunga go as well, it would make no difference,—for Kabero, Kabero had been the apple of his eye and his heart’s blood.

If Kabero were indeed dead, this was David grieving over his son Absalom, a tragedy to be left to itself. But if he were alive and hidden with the Masai it was more than tragic, it was a fight or flight, a struggle for the life of a child.

I have seen, on the plains, the gazelles play this game when I have unknowingly come upon the spot where they were hiding their newborn fawn. They would dance to you, step up before you, jump, caper or pretend to be lame and unable to run,—all to distract your attention from their young. And suddenly, actually under the hoofs of your horse, you saw the fawn, immovable, the small head stretched out flat on the grass, lying low for his life while his mother dances for it. A bird will do the same tricks to protect her young ones, flap and flutter and even cleverly act the role of the wounded bird, which trails her broken wing on the ground.

Here was Kaninu performing to me. Was there so much warmth and so many gambols left in the old Kikuyu when he thought his son’s life at stake? His bones creaked in the dance, he was even changing sex in it, and had taken on the appearance of an old woman, a hen, a lioness,—the game was so plainly a feminine activity. It was a grotesque performance, but at the same time highly respectable, like the cock ostrich taking turns with the hen in sitting on her eggs. No woman’s heart could have remained unmoved by the manoeuvre.

“Kaninu,” I said to him, “when Kabero wants to return to the farm he can do so and no harm shall come to him. But you must bring him up here to me yourself at that time.” Kaninu became dead silent, he bowed his head and walked away sadly as if he had now lost his last friend in the world.


I may as well tell here that Kaninu remembered, and did as he had been told. Five years afterwards, when I had almost forgotten the whole affair, he one day through Farah applied for an interview. I found him standing outside the house, on one leg, very dignified, but at the bottom of his heart uneasy. He addressed me in an amiable way. “Kabero is back,” he said. By that time I had learned the art of the pause, I did not say a word. The old Kikuyu felt the weight of my silence, he changed feet, and his eyelids quivered. “My son Kabero has come back to the farm,” he repeated. I asked: “He is back from Masai?” Immediately, by the fact that he had made me speak, Kaninu took it that our reconciliation was effected; he did not smile yet, but all the cunning little wrinkles in his face were adjusted for a smile. “Yes, Msabu, yes, he is back from the Masai,” he said, “he has come back to work for you.” The Government in the intermediate time had introduced the Kipanda, the registration of each individual Native, in the country, so that we would now have to call a Police Officer out from Nairobi to make a lawful inhabitant of the farm out of Kabero. Kaninu and I appointed the day.

Upon that day, Kaninu and his son arrived a long time before the Police Officer. Kaninu presented Kabero to me in a jovial manner, but at heart he was a little frightened of his recovered son. He had reason to be so, for the Masai Reserve had had from the farm a small lamb, and now gave us back a young leopard. Kabero must have had Masai blood in him, the habits and discipline of Masai life could not in themselves have worked the metamorphosis. Here he stood, a Masai from head to foot.

A Masai warrior is a fine sight. Those young men have, to the utmost extent, that particular form of intelligence which we call chic;—daring, and wildly fantastical as they seem, they are still unswervingly true to their own nature, and to an immanent ideal. Their style is not an assumed manner, nor an imitation of a foreign perfection; it has grown from the inside, and is an expression of the race and its history, and their weapons and finery are as much part of their being as are a stag’s antlers.

Kabero had adopted the Masai fashion in hair-dressing, he wore his hair long and braided with string into a thick pigtail and a leather strap round the brow. He had acquired the Masai carriage of the head, with the chin stretched forward, as if he were presenting you his sullen arrogant face upon a tray. He had also the general rigid, passive, and insolent bearing of the Moran, that makes of him an object for contemplation, such as a statue is, a figure which is to be seen, but which itself does not see.

The young Masai Morani live upon milk and blood; it is perhaps this diet that gives them their wonderful smoothness and silkiness of skin. Their faces, with the high cheek-bones and boldly swung jaw-bones, are sleek, without a line or groove in them, swollen; the dim unseeing eyes lie therein like two dark stones tightly fitted into a mosaic; altogether the young Morani have a likeness to mosaics. The muscles of their necks swell in a particular sinister fashion, like the neck of the angry cobra, the male leopard or the fighting bull, and the thickness is so plainly an indication of virility that it stands for a declaration of war to all the world with the exception of the woman. The great contrast, or harmony, between these swollen smooth faces, full necks and broad rounded shoulders, and the surprising narrowness of their waist and hips, the leanness and spareness of the thigh and knee and the long, straight, sinewy leg give them the look of creatures trained through hard discipline to the height of rapaciousness, greed, and gluttony.

The Masai walk stiffly, placing one slim foot straight in front of the other, but their movements of arm, wrist and hand are very supple. When a young Masai shoots with a bow and arrow, and lets go the bow-string, you seem to hear the sinews of his long wrist singing in the air with the arrow.

The Police Officer from Nairobi was a young man lately out from England and full of zeal. He spoke Swaheli very well, so that I and Kaninu did not understand what he said, and he became absorbed in interest in the old case of the shooting accident, and put Kaninu to a cross-examination under which the Kikuyu turned into wood. When he had finished it, he told me that he thought Kaninu had been monstrously treated, and that the whole case ought to be taken up in Nairobi. “That will mean years of your life and mine,” I said. He asked me to be allowed to remark that this was no consideration to be taken, where the execution of justice was concerned. Kaninu looked to me, for a moment he believed that he was being trapped. In the end it was found that the case was too old to be taken up, and nothing more was done about it, except that Kabero was regularly registered on the farm.


But all these things were to happen only a long time later. For five years Kabero was dead to the farm, wandering with the Masai, and Kaninu had much to go through still. Before the case had done with him, forces came into play which seized him and ground him very small.

Of those I cannot tell much. First because they were in themselves of a hidden nature, and secondly, because at the time things were happening to me myself, that took my thoughts off Kaninu and his fate, and left, in my mind, the general affairs of the farm in the background like that distant mountain of Kilimanjaro, which sometimes I could see from my land, and sometimes not. The Natives would take such periods of distraction of mine meekly, as if I had been in reality lifted from their existence into another plane, afterwards they referred to them as to times when I had been away. “That big tree fell down,” they said. “My child died, while you were with the white people.”

When Wanyangerri was well enough to leave Hospital, I fetched him back to the farm, and from that time only saw him at intervals, at an Ngoma or on the plains.

A few days after his return his father, Wainaina, and his grandmother presented themselves at my house. Wainaina was a small rotund man, a rare thing in a Kikuyu, for they are nearly all of them lean people. He grew a spare thin beard, and another peculiarity of his was that he could not look you straight in the face. He made the impression of a mental troglodyte, who wants to be left to himself. With him came his mother, a very old Kikuyu woman.

Native women shave their heads, and it is a curious thing how quickly you yourself will come to feel that these little round neat skulls, which look like some kind of dusky nuts, are the sign of true womanliness, and that a crop of hair on the head of a woman is as unladylike as a beard. Wainaina’s old mother had left the little tufts of white hair on her shrivelled scalp to grow, and thereby, as much as an unshaven man, she conveyed the impression of dissoluteness or shamelessness. She leant on her stick and left it to Wainaina to speak, but her silence was striking sparks the while; she seemed to be all loaded with a graceless vitality, of which she had passed none on to her son. The two were in reality Uraka and Laskaro, but of that I did not know till later.

They had come shuffling up to my house on a peaceful errand. Wanyangerri, his father told me, could chew no maize, they were poor people and short of flour and they had got no milking cow. Would I not, till Wanyangerri’s case was settled, allow him a little milk from my cows? Otherwise they did not see how they were to keep the child alive until the time when his indemnification should come in. Farah was away in Nairobi on one of his private Somali lawsuits, and in his absence I consented to let Wanyangerri have a bottle of milk a day from my herd of Native cows, and instructed my houseboys, who seemed strangely unwilling or uncomfortable about the arrangement, to let him fetch it from us every morning.

A fortnight passed, or three weeks, then one evening Kaninu came to the house. He suddenly stood in the room where I was reading by the fire after dinner. As the Natives generally prefer a discussion to take place outside the house, the manner in which he shut the door behind him, prepared me for surprising communications. But the first surprise was that Kaninu was dumb. The subtle and honeyed tongue was as dead as if it had been cut out of him, and the room, with Kaninu in it, remained silent. The big old Kikuyu was looking very ill, he hung upon his stick, there seemed to be no body inside his cloak, his eyes were dim like the eyes of a corpse, and he kept on wetting his dry lips with his tongue.

When at last he began to speak it was only to state, slowly and dismally, that he thought things were bad. A little later he added in a vague manner, as if it were altogether a matter to be ignored, that he had now paid over ten sheep to Wainaina. And now Wainaina, he went on, wanted a cow and calf from him as well, and he was going to give them to him. Why had he done that, I asked him, when no judgment had yet been given? Kaninu did not answer, he did not even look at me. He was, this evening, a traveller or pilgrim who had no continuing city. He had come in, as it were on his way, to report to me, and now he was off again. I could not but think that he was ill, after a pause I said that I would take him into hospital the next day. At that he gave me a short, painful glance: the old mocker was being bitterly mocked. But before he went away he did a curious thing, he lifted up a hand to his face as if he were wiping off a tear. It would be a strange thing, like the flowering of the pilgrim’s staff, should Kaninu have tears in him to shed, and stranger still that he should put them to no use. I wondered what had been happening on the farm while I had had my thoughts off it. When Kaninu had gone I sent for Farah and asked him.

Farah at times was loth to speak about Native affairs, as if they were beneath him to dwell upon and me to hear of. In the end he consented to tell me, all the time looking past me out of the window, at the stars. At the bottom of Kaninu’s loss of heart was Wainaina’s mother, who was a witch and had cast a spell upon him.

“But, Farah,” I said, “Kaninu, surely, is much too old and wise to believe in a spell.”

“No,” said Farah slowly. “No, Memsahib. For this old Kikuyu wife can really do these things, I think.”

The old woman had told Kaninu that his cows would live to see that it would have been better to them had Kaninu at the beginning given them to Wainaina. Now Kaninu’s cows were going blind, one after another. And under the ordeal Kaninu’s heart was slowly breaking, like the bones and tissue of those people who, in old times, were put to the torture of ever increased weights laid on to them.

Farah spoke of Kikuyu witchcraft in a dry, concerned manner, as of foot-and-mouth disease on the farm, which we ourselves would not catch, but by which we might lose our cattle.

I sat late in the evening thinking of the witchery on the farm. At first it looked ugly, as if it had come up from an old grave to flatten its nose upon my window-panes. I heard the Hyena wailing some way off, down by the river, and remembered that the Kikuyu had their werewolves, old women who at night take on the shape of Hyenas. Perhaps Wainaina’s mother was trotting along the river now, baring her teeth in the night-air. And I had by now become used to the idea of witchcraft, it seemed a reasonable thing, so many things are about, at night, in Africa.

“This old woman is mean,” I thought in Swaheli, “she uses her arts in making Kaninu’s cows blind, and she leaves it to me to keep her grandchild alive, on a bottle of milk a day, from my own cows.”

I thought: “This accident and the things which have come from it, are getting into the blood of the farm, and it is my fault. I must call in fresh forces, or the farm will run into a bad dream, a nightmare. I know what I will do. I will send for Kinanjui.”

Chapter 5. A Kikuyu Chief

The big Chief Kinanjui lived about nine miles North-East of the farm, in the Kikuyu Reserve near the French Mission, and ruled over more than a hundred thousand Kikuyus. He was a crafty old man, with a fine manner, and much real greatness to him, although he had not been born to be a Chief, but had been made so, many years ago, by the English, when they could no longer get on with the legitimate ruler of the Kikuyus of the district. Kinanjui was a friend of mine, and had been helpful to me on many occasions. His manyatta, to which I had ridden over a few times, was as dirty and as full of flies as those of the other Kikuyus. But it was much bigger than any other I had seen, for in his position of a Chief Kinanjui had given himself over fully to the joys of marriage. The village was alive with wives of his of all ages, from skinny toothless old hags on crutches to slim, moon-faced, gazelle-eyed wenches, their arms and long legs wound up in shining copper wire.

His children were everywhere, in clusters, like the flies. The young men, his sons, erect, with decorated heads, went to and fro, and caused much trouble. Kinanjui had told me once that he had at the moment fifty-five sons who were Morani.

Sometimes the old Chief would come walking over to my farm, in a gorgeous fur-cloak, accompanied by two or three white-haired senators and a few of his warrior-sons, on a friendly visit, or to take a rest from governmental affairs. He would then pass the afternoon in one of the Verandah chairs that had been carried out on the lawn for him, smoking the cigars that I sent him out, with his councillors and his guard squatting on the grass round him. My houseboys and squatters, when they had news of his arrival, came and grouped themselves there, and entertained him with the happenings on the farm, the whole company forming a sort of political Club under the tall trees. Kinanjui in these meetings had a manner of his own: when he thought that the discussions were dragging out too long, he leant back in his chair, and, while still keeping the fire in his cigar alive, he closed his eyes and drew his breath deeply and slowly, in a low regular snore, a sort of official, pro forma sleep, which he may have cultivated for use in his own Council of State. I sometimes had a chair moved out for a talk with him, and on these occasions Kinanjui sent away everybody, to point out that now the world was going to be governed in earnest. He was not, at the time I knew him, the man that he had been, life had taken much out of him. But when he talked freely and openly, for my private ear, he showed much originality of mind, and a rich, daring, imaginative spirit; he had thought the matter of life over and held his own strong views upon it.

A few years earlier a thing had happened which had strengthened the friendship between me and Kinanjui.

He came to my house one day when I was lunching with a friend who was on his way up country; I had no time to give the Kikuyu Chief till my friend had gone. Kinanjui would expect to be offered a drink while he was waiting, and after his long walk in the sun, but I did not have enough of one thing to make up a glassful, so my guest and I filled a tumbler with all the different sorts of strong liquor that I had in the house. I thought that the stronger I made it, the longer it would keep Kinanjui occupied, and I took it out to him myself. But Kinanjui, after having with a little gentle smile just wetted his lips, gave me as deep a glance as I have ever had from a man, laid his head back and emptied the glass to the last drop.

Half an hour later, when my friend had just driven off, my houseboys came in and said: “Kinanjui is dead.” I felt, in one moment, the tragedy and the scandal rise up before me like great grave shadows. I went out to see him.

He was lying on the ground in the shade of the kitchen, with no expression whatever in his face, with blue lips and fingers, dead-cold. It was like having shot an Elephant: by an act of yours a mighty and majestic creature, which has walked the earth, and held his own opinions of everything, is walking it no more. He looked degraded as well, for the Kikuyu had poured water over him, and had taken off him his big cloak of monkey-skin. Naked he was like an animal when you have cut from it the trophy, for the sake of which you have killed it.

I meant to send Farah for a doctor, but we could not get the car started, and Kinanjui’s people kept on begging us to wait a little before we did anything.

An hour later, as I was going out again, with a heavy heart, to talk with them, my boys came in to me once more and said: “Kinanjui has gone home.” It seemed that he had suddenly got up, draped his cloak about him, and his retainers round him, and had walked off, the nine miles to his village, without a word.

After this time, I believe, Kinanjui felt that I had run a risk, even braved a danger,—for you are not allowed to give Natives alcohol,—to make him happy. He had been to the farm since, and had smoked a cigar with us, but he had not mentioned a drink. I would have given it to him had he asked for it, but I knew that he would not ask any more.


I now sent a runner to Kinanjui’s village and explained to him the whole affair of the shooting. I asked him to come over to the farm to finish it. I suggested that we should give Wainaina the cow and calf of which Kaninu had talked, and then let the whole matter finish at that. I was looking forward to Kinanjui’s arrival, for he had the quality, which everyone values in a friend, of being effective.

By this letter of mine, the case, that had for some time been becalmed, fetched wind and ended up dramatically.

One afternoon, as I was riding back to my house, I just caught sight of a car that came along at a terrible speed, rounding the drive upon two wheels. It was a scarlet car with a lot of nickel on it. I knew it, it belonged to the American Consul of Nairobi, and I wondered what urgent business it was which brought the Consul to my house at such a pace. But as I was getting off my horse at the back of the house, Farah came out to tell me that the Chief Kinanjui had arrived. He had come in his own car, which he had the day before bought from the American Consul, and he did not want to get out of it till I had seen him in it.

I found Kinanjui sitting up straight in the car, immovable as an idol. He had on a large cloak of blue monkey-skins, and on his head a skull-cap, of the kind which the Kikuyu make out of sheep’s stomachs. He was always an impressive figure, tall and broad, with no fat on him anywhere; his face too was proud, long and bony, with a slanting forehead like that of a Red Indian. He had a broad nose, so expressive that it looked like the central point of the man, as if the whole stately figure was there only to carry the broad nose about. Like the trunk of an Elephant, it was both boldly inquisitive and extremely sensitive and prudent, intensely on the offensive, and on the defensive as well. And an Elephant, finally, like Kinanjui, would have a head of the very greatest nobility if he did not look so clever.

Kinanjui now did not open his mouth or wince while I paid him my compliments on the car, he stared straight in front of him in order that I should see his face in profile like a head struck upon a medal. As I walked round to the front of the car, he turned his head so as to keep his regal profile towards me, perhaps he really had in his mind the King’s head on the Rupee. One of his young sons was driver to him, and the car was boiling hard. When the ceremony was over, I invited Kinanjui to come out of the car. He collected his big cloak round him in a majestic gesture and descended, and in that one movement he stepped back two thousand years, into Kikuyu justice.

On the Western wall of my house there was a stone seat and in front of it a table made out of a mill-stone. This stone had a tragic history: it was the upper mill-stone of the mill of the two murdered Indians. After the murder nobody dared to take over the mill, it was empty and silent for a long time, and I had the stone brought up to my house to form a table top, to remind me of Denmark. The Indian millers had told me that their mill-stone had come over the Sea from Bombay, as the stones of Africa are not hard enough for the work of grinding. On the top side a pattern was carved, and it had a few large brown spots on it, which my houseboys held to be the blood of the Indians, that would never come off. The mill-stone table in a way constituted the centre of the farm, for I used to sit behind it in all my dealings with the Natives. From the stone seat behind the mill-stone, I and Denys Finch-Hatton had one New Year seen the new moon and the planets of Venus and Jupiter all close together, in a group on the sky; it was such a radiant sight that you could hardly believe it to be real, and I have never seen it again.

I took my seat there now, with Kinanjui on the bench on my left. Farah took up his stand on my right hand, and therefrom kept a watchful eye on the Kikuyus, who had been gathering round the house, and who kept coming in as the news of Kinanjui’s arrival spread on the farm.


Farah’s attitude to the Natives of the country was a picturesque thing. No more than the attire and countenance of the Masai warriors, had it been made yesterday, or the day before; it was the product of many centuries. The forces which had built it up had constructed great buildings in stone as well, but they had crumbled into dust a long time ago.

When you first come to the country, landing at Mombasa, you will see, amongst the old light-grey Baobab-trees,—which look not like any earthly kind of vegetation but like porous fossilizations, gigantic belemnites,—grey stone ruins of houses, minarets and wells. The same sort of ruins are to be found all the way up the coast, at Takaunga, Kalifi and Lamu. They are the remnants of the towns of the ancient Arab traders in ivory and slaves.

The dhows of the traders knew all the African fairways, and trod the blue paths to the central marketplace of Zanzibar. They were familiar with it at the time when Aladdin sent to the Sultan four hundred black slaves loaded with jewels, and when the Sultana feasted with her Negro lover while her husband was hunting, and was put to death for it.

Probably, as these great merchants grew rich, they brought their harems with them to Mombasa and Kalifi, and themselves remained in their villas, by the long white breakers of the Ocean, and the flowering flaming trees, while they sent their expeditions up into the highlands.

For from the wild hard country there, the scorched dry plains, and unknown waterless stretches, from the land of the broad thorn-trees along the rivers, and the diminutive, strong-smelling wild flowers of the black soil, came their wealth. Here, upon the roof of Africa, wandered the heavy, wise, majestic bearer of the ivory. He was deep in his own thoughts and wanted to be left to himself. But he was followed, and shot with poisoned arrows by the little dark Wanderobos, and with long, muzzle-loaded, silver-inlaid guns by the Arabs; he was trapped and thrown into pits all for the sake of his long smooth lightbrown tusks, that they sat and waited for it at Zanzibar.

Here, also, little bits of forest-soil were cleared, burned, and planted with sweet potatoes and maize, by a peace-loving shy nation, which was not much good at fighting, or at inventing anything, but wished to be left to themselves, and which, with the ivory, was in great demand on the market.

The greater and lesser birds of prey gathered up here:

“Tous les tristes oiseaux mangeurs de chair humaine...

S’assemblent. Et les uns laissant un crâne chauve,

Les autres aux gibets essuyant leur bec fauve

D’autres, d’un mat rompu quittant les noirs agrès?”

The cold sensual Arabs came, contemptuous of death, with their minds, out of business times, on astronomy, algebra, and their harems. With them came their young illegitimate half-brothers the Somali,—impetuous, quarrelsome, abstinent and greedy, who made up for their lack of birth by being zealous Mohammedans, and more faithful to the commandments of the prophet than the children got in wedlock. The Swaheli went along with them, slaves themselves and slave-hearted, cruel, obscene, thievish, full of good sense and jests, running to fat with age.

Up country they were met by the Native bird of prey of the highlands. The Masai came, silent, like tall narrow black shadows, with spears and heavy shields, distrustful of strangers, red-handed, to sell their brothers.

The different birds must have sat together up here and talked. Farah told me that in the old time, before the Somali brought their own women down from Somaliland, their young men could marry with the daughters of the Masai only, out of all the tribes of the country. This must have been in many ways a strange alliance. For the Somali are a religious people, and the Masai have no religion whatever, nor the slightest interest in anything above this earth. The Somali are clean, and take much trouble over their ablutions and hygiene, while the Masai are a dirty nation. The Somali, too, attach the greatest importance to the virginity of their brides, but the young Masai girls take their morals very lightly. Farah gave me the explanation at once. The Masai, he said, had never been slaves. They cannot be made slaves, they cannot even be put into prison. They die in prison if they are brought there, within three months, so the English law of the country holds with no penalty of imprisonment for the Masai, they are punished by fines. This stark inability to keep alive under the yoke has given the Masai, alone amongst all the Native tribes, rank with the immigrant aristocracy.

All the birds of prey lived with their burning eyes upon the gentle rodents of the land. The Somali here had their own position. Somalis are not good at being all on their own, they are very excitable, and, wherever they go, if they are left to themselves they will waste much time and blood over their tribal moral system. But they are fine seconds in command, and perhaps the Arab capitalists have often given them charge of daring undertakings and difficult transports while they stayed in Mombasa themselves. Therefore their relation to the Natives was nearly exactly that of the sheepdog to the sheep. They watched them untiringly, their sharp teeth bared. Would they die before the coast was reached? Would they escape? The Somali have a keen sense of money and values, they will have given up food and sleep for the sake of their charges, and must have come back from the expeditions worn to skin and bone.

The habit is in their blood still. When we had the Spanish Flu on the farm, Farah was very ill with it himself, but he followed me about, all shivering with fever, to bring medicine to the Squatters and to force it into them. He had been told that paraffin was very good against the disease, and therefore he bought paraffin for the farm. His little brother Abdullai, who was with us then, was very bad with flu, and Farah was much worried about him. Still, that was only the inclination of the heart, a frivolous matter. Duty, bread and reputation lay with the farm-labour, and the dying sheepdog stuck to his job. Farah also had much insight in what was going on in Native circles, although I do not know from where he had his knowledge, for with the exception of the biggest amongst them, he kept no company with the Kikuyu.

The sheep themselves, the patient nations, with no teeth or claws to them, no power and no earthly protector, got through their destiny, as they get through it now, on their immense gift for resignation. They did not die under the Yoke, like the Masai, or storm against fate, as the Somali do when they believe themselves injured, cheated or slighted. They were friends with God in foreign countries, and in chains. They also kept up a peculiar self-feeling in their relations to those who persecuted them. They were aware that the profit and prestige of their tormentors lay with them themselves: they were the central figures in the chase and the commerce, they were the goods. Upon the long track of blood and tears, the sheep, deep in their dark dumb hearts had made for themselves a bobtailed philosophy, and thought not highly of the shepherds or the dogs. “You have no rest either day or night,” they said, “you run with your hot tongues out, panting, you are kept awake at night so that your dry eyes smart in the daytime, all on our account. You are here on our account. You exist for our sake, not we for your sake.” The Kikuyu of the farm at times had a flippant manner towards Farah, as a lamb may skip in the face of the sheepdog just to make him get up and run.

Farah and Kinanjui met here, the sheepdog and the old ram. Farah stood up erect in his red and blue turban, black embroidered Arab waistcoat and Arab silk robe, thoughtful, as decorous a figure as you would find anywhere in the world. Kinanjui was spreading himself on the stone seat, naked but for the mantle of monkey furs on his shoulders, an old Native, a clod of the soil of the African highlands. They treated each other with respect, although, when they had no direct dealings, in accordance with some ceremonial they pretended not to see one another.

It was easy to imagine the two, a hundred years earlier, or more, holding a converse over a consignment of slaves, undesirable members of the tribe, of whom Kinanjui was ridding himself. Farah would be keeping, all the time, at the back of his mind the idea of swooping upon the old chief himself, a fat morsel, so as to have him included in his parcel. Kinanjui would follow, without fault, every one of Farah’s thoughts, and, through the whole sitting, he would be carrying the weight of the situation, the weight, too, of his own scared and heavy heart. For he was the central figure, he was the goods.

The big meeting which was to settle the case of the shooting accident began in a peaceful spirit. The people of the farm were all pleased to see Kinanjui. The oldest squatters got up and came to exchange a few remarks with him, then walked back and took their seats on the grass. A couple of old women from the periphery of the assembly shrieked a greeting to me: “Jambo Jerie!” Jerie is a Kikuyu name, the old women of the farm addressed me by it, and the very small children made use of it as well, but the young people, or the old men never called me Jerie. Kaninu was present at the meeting, in the midst of his large family, like a scarecrow somehow called to life, with burning, attentive eyes. Wainaina and his mother came along and sat a little away from the others.

I told the people, slowly and in an effective manner, that the matter between Kaninu and Wainaina had been settled and the settlement put down on paper, Kinanjui had come over to certify it. Kaninu was to give Wainaina a cow with a heifer calf at foot, and by that the affair should be ended, since nobody could stand it any longer.

Kaninu and Wainaina had been informed of the decision beforehand, and Kaninu was instructed to have the cow and calf ready. The activities of Wainaina were of an underground nature, in the daylight he was like a mole above the ground, and looked as soft as a mole does there.

When I had read up the agreement I told Kaninu to bring along the cow. Kaninu got up and waved both arms up and down many times to two of his young sons, who were holding the cow behind the boys’ huts. The ring opened while the cow and calf were slowly led into the middle of it.

At the same moment the atmosphere of the meeting changed, as when a thunderstorm comes up in the horizon, and quickly rises to Zenith.

There is nothing in the world which to the Kikuyu holds the interest and importance of a cow with a heifer calf at foot. Bloodshed, witchcraft, sexual love or the wonders of the white men’s world, all evaporate and disappear near the great flaming furnace of their passion for live stock, which smells of the stone-age, like a fire you strike with a flint.

Wainaina’s mother broke into a long wail and shook a dry arm and finger at the cow. Wainaina joined her, all stuttering and breaking in his speech, as if someone else were speaking through him, he raised his voice to heaven. He would not accept the cow, she was the oldest in Kaninu’s herd, and the calf that she had now got with her, that surely was the last which she would ever bear.

The clan of Kaninu cried out and cut him short in a furious staccato inventory of the qualities of the cow, behind which you felt a great bitterness, and contempt of death.

The people of the farm did not have it in them to remain silent where a cow and calf were being discussed. Everyone present gave out his opinion. The old men seized one another by the arm and shook out their last asthmatic breath in praise or condemnation of the cow. The shrill voices of their old women fell in and followed them up, as in a canon. The young men spat out short deadly remarks at one another in deep voices. In two or three minutes the open place by my house was boiling over like a witch’s caldron.

I looked towards Farah and he looked back at me, but like a man in a dream. I saw that he was a sword half way out of the scabbard, which in a moment would be flashing right and left in the strife. For the Somali are themselves stock-owners and cattle traders. Kaninu threw me a glance like a drowning man, who is finally carried away by the current. I took a look at the cow. She was a grey cow with deeply curved horns, and was standing patiently in the very centre of the cyclone that she had raised. When all fingers were being pointed at her she began to lick her calf. I thought that she did have, somehow, the look of an old cow.

At last I turned my eyes back to Kinanjui. I do not know whether he had been looking at the cow at all. While I looked at him he did not even wince. He sat immovable, like some bulk without either intelligence or sympathies just set down by my house. He turned his side to the screaming crowd, and I realized how much the profile is the true face of a king. It is a Native faculty thus to transform yourself, in a single movement, into lifeless matter. I do not think that Kinanjui could have spoken or moved without fanning the flames of passion, as it was he kept sitting on them to quell them. Not everybody could have done it.

Little by little the fury died down, the people stopped shrieking and began to talk in an everyday manner, in the end they became silent one by one. Wainaina’s mother, when she thought that nobody watched her, crawled a few steps on her stick to have a closer look at the cow. Farah turned and came back to civilization, with a little, wry smile.

When everything was quiet we made the parties in the case come round to the mill-stone table, dip their thumb in cart-grease, and press their thumb-mark down upon the document of the agreement. Wainaina did it very reluctantly, whimpering a little when he set his thumb to the paper, as if it was burning him. The agreement ran as follows:

The following agreement has been made at Ngong today, the 26th of September, between Wainaina wa Bemu and Kaninu wa Muture. The Chief Kinanjui is present here and sees it all.

The agreement states that Kaninu shall pay to Wainaina a cow with a heifer calf. This cow and heifer calf shall be given to Wainaina’s son Wanyangerri, who was, on the 19th of December last year, shot by a shotgun which was fired by mistake by Kaninu’s son Kabero. The cow and calf shall be the property of Wanyangerri.

With the payment of this cow and her heifer calf the Shaurie shall be finally settled. Nobody, after this, must speak of it or mention it at all.


Ngong, September, 26th.

Wainaina’s mark.

Kaninu’s mark.

I was here and heard the document read.

The mark of the Chief Kinanjui.

The cow and heifer calf were handed over to Wainaina in my presence.

Baroness Blixen.

Загрузка...