Out of Africa (43 page)

I was surprised that they should be so determined to stay
together, for on the farm they had found it difficult to keep peace, and had never had much good to say of one another. Still, here they all came, the big swaggering cattle-owners like Kathegu, Kaninu, and Mauge, hand in hand, so to say, with the humble unportioned workers of the soil like Waweru and Chotha, who did not own so much as one goat; and they were all filled with the same spirit, and as intent upon keeping one another as on keeping their cows. I felt that they were not only asking me for a place to live on, but that they were demanding their existence of me.

It is more than their land that you take away from the people, whose Native land you take. It is their past as well, their roots and their identity. If you take away the things that they have been used to see, and will be expecting to see, you may, in a way, as well take their eyes. This applies in a higher degree to the primitive people than to the civilized, and animals again will wander back a long way, and go through danger and sufferings, to recover their lost identity, in the surroundings that they know.

The Masai when they were moved from their old country, North of the railway line, to the present Masai Reserve, took with them the names of their hills, plains and rivers; and gave them to the hills, plains and rivers in the new country. It is a bewildering thing to the traveller. The Masai were carrying their cut roots with them as a medicine, and were trying, in exile, to keep their past by a formula.

Now, my squatters were clinging to one another from the same instinct of self-preservation. If they were to go away from their land, they must have people round them who had known it, and so could testify to their identity. Then they could still, for some years, talk of the geography and the history of the farm, and what one had forgotten the
other would remember. As it was, they were feeling the shame of extinction falling on them.

“Go Msabu,” they said to me, “go for us to the Selikali, and obtain from them that we may take all our cattle with us to the new place, and that we shall all remain together where we are going.”

With this began for me a long pilgrimage, or beggar’s journey, which took up my last months in Africa.

On the Kikuyu’s errand I first went to the District Commissioners of Nairobi and Kiambu, then to the Native Department and the Land Office, and in the end to the Governor, Sir Joseph Byrne, whom I had not met till then, for he was only just out from England. In the end I forgot what I went for. I was washed in and out as by the tide. Sometimes I had to stay for a whole day in Nairobi, or to go in two or three times in a day. There were always a number of squatters stationed by my house, when I came back, but they never asked me for my news, they kept watch there in order to communicate to me, by some Native magic, stamina on the course.

The Government Officials were patient and obliging people. The difficulties in the matter were not of their making: it was really a problem to find, in the Kikuyu Reserve, an unoccupied stretch of land big enough to take in the full number of the people and their cattle.

Most of the Officials had been in the country for a long time, and knew the Natives well. They would only vaguely suggest the resource of making the Kikuyu sell out some of their stock. For they knew that under no circumstances would they do so, and by bringing their herds on to a place that was too small for them, they would cause, in years to come, endless trouble with their neighbours in the Reserve,
for other District Commissioners up there to go into, and settle.

But when we came to the second request of the squatters, that they should remain together, the people in authority said that there was no real need for that.

“Oh reason not the need,” I thought, “our basest beggars are in the poorest things superfluous”,—and so on. All my life I have held that you can class people according to how they may be imagined behaving to King Lear. You could not reason with King Lear, any more than with an old Kikuyu, and from the first he demanded too much of everybody; but he was a king. It is true that the African Native has not handed over his country to the white man in a magnificent gesture, so that the case is in some ways different from that of the old king and his daughters; the white men took over the country as a Protectorate. But I bore in mind that not very long ago, at a time that could still be remembered, the Natives of the country had held their land undisputed, and had never heard of the white men and their laws. Within the general insecurity of their existence the land to them was still steadfast. Some of them were carried off by the slave-traders and were sold at slave-markets, but some of them always remained. Those who were taken away, in their exile and thraldom all over the Eastern world, would long back to the highlands, for that was their own land. The old dark clear-eyed Native of Africa, and the old dark clear-eyed Elephant,—they are alike; you see them standing on the ground, weighty with such impressions of the world around them as have been slowly gathered and heaped up in their dim minds; they are themselves features of the land. Either one of the two might find himself quite perplexed by the sight of the great changes that are going on all round him, and might ask you where he was, and you would have
to answer him in the words of Kent: “In your own kingdom, Sir.”

In the end, just as I was beginning to feel that I must drive in to Nairobi and back, and talk on in Government Offices all my life, I was suddenly informed that my application had been granted. The Government had agreed to give out a piece of the Dagoretti Forest Reserve to the squatters of my farm. Here they could form a settlement of their own, not far from their old place, and after the disappearance of the farm they could still preserve their faces and their names, as a community.

The news of this decision was received on the farm with deep silent emotion. It was impossible to tell from the faces of the Kikuyu whether they had all the time had faith in this issue of the case, or whether they had despaired of it. As soon as it was settled, they immediately entered on a course of multifarious complicated requests and propositions that I refused to deal with. They still stayed on by my house, watching me in a novel way. Natives have such feeling for, and faith in, fortune, that now, after our one success, they may have begun to trust that all was going to be well, and that I was to stay on the farm.

As for me myself, the settlement of the squatters’ fate was a great appeasement to me. I have not often felt so contented.

Then, after two or three days, the feeling came upon me that my work in the country had been brought to an end, and that now I might go. The coffee harvest on the farm was finished, and the mill standing still, the house was empty, the squatters had got their land. The rains were over, and the new grass was already long on the plains and in the hills.

The plan which I had formed in the beginning, to give in
in all minor matters, so as to keep what was of vital importance to me, had turned out to be a failure. I had consented to give away my possessions one by one, as a kind of ransom for my own life, but by the time that I had nothing left, I myself was the lightest thing of all, for fate to get rid of.

There was a full moon in those days, it shone into the bare room and laid the pattern of the windows on the floor. I thought that the moon might be looking in and wondering how long I meant to stay on, in a place from which everything else had gone. “Oh no,” said the moon, “time means very little to me.”

I would have liked to have stayed on until I could have seen the squatters installed in their new place. But the surveying of the land took time, and it was uncertain when they would be able to move on to it.

At that time, it came to pass that the old men of the neighbourhood resolved to hold an Ngoma for me.

These Ngomas of the Ancients had been great functions in the past, but now they were rarely danced, and during all my time in Africa I have never seen one of them. I should have liked to have done so, for the Kikuyu themselves thought highly of them. It was considered an honour to the farm that the old men’s dance was to be performed there, my people talked of it a long time before it was to take place.

Even Farah, who generally looked down on the Native Ngomas, was this time impressed by the resolution of the old men. “These people are very old, Memsahib,” he said, “very very old.”

It was curious to hear the young Kikuyu lions speak with reverence and awe of the coming performance of the old dancers.

There was one thing about these Ngomas of which I did not know,—namely that they had been prohibited by the Government. The reason for the prohibition I do not know. The Kikuyu must have been aware of the interdiction, but they chose to overlook it, either they reasoned that in these
great troubled times, things might be done that in ordinary times could not be done, or else they really forgot about it in the midst of the strong emotions set going by the dance. They did not even have it in them to keep silent about the Ngoma.

The old dancers when they arrived were a rare, sublime sight. There were about a hundred of them, and they all arrived at the same time, and must have collected somewhere at a distance from the house. The old Native men are chilly people, and generally wrap and muffle themselves up well in furs and blankets, but here they were naked, as if solemnly stating the formidable truth. Their finery and warpaint were discreetly put on, but a few of them wore, on their old bald skulls, the big head-dresses of black eagle’s feathers that you see on the heads of the young dancers. They did not need any ornaments either, they were impressive in themselves. They did not, like the old beauties of the European ball-room, strive to obtain a youthful appearance, the whole point and weight of the dance, to them themselves, and to the onlookers, lay in the old age of the performers. They had a queer sort of markings on them, the like of which I had never seen, chalked stripes running along their crooked limbs as if they were, in their stark truthfulness, emphasizing the stiff and brittle bones underneath the skin. Their movements, as they advanced in a slow prelusive march were so strange that I wondered what sort of dance I was now to be shown.

As I stood and looked at them a fancy came back to me that had taken hold of me before: It was not I who was going away, I did not have it in my power to leave Africa, but it was the country that was slowly and gravely withdrawing from me, like the sea in ebb-tide. The procession that was passing here,—it was in reality my strong pulpy
young dancers of yesterday and the day before yesterday, who were withering before my eyes, who were passing away for ever. They were going in their own style, gently, in a dance, the people were with me, and I with the people, well content.

The old men did not speak, not even to one another, they were saving their strength for the coming efforts.

Just as the dancers had ranged themselves for the dance, an Askari from Nairobi arrived at the house with a letter for me, that the Ngoma must not take place.

I did not understand it, for it was to me a quite unlooked-for thing, and I had to read the paper through twice or three times. The Askari who had brought it, was himself so impressed with the importance of the show he had upset, that he did not open his mouth to the old people or to my house-boys, nor strut or swagger in the usual manner of Askaris, who are pleased to show off their plenitude of power to other Natives.

During all my life in Africa I have not lived through another moment of such bitterness. I had not before known my heart to heave up in such a storm against the things happening to me. It did not even occur to me to speak; the nothingness of speech by now was manifest to me.

The old Kikuyu themselves stood like a herd of old sheep, all their eyes under the wrinkled lids fixed upon my face. They could not, in a second, give up the thing on which their hearts had been set, some of them made little convulsive movements with their legs; they had come to dance and dance they must. In the end I told them that our Ngoma was off.

The piece of news, I knew, would in their minds take on a different aspect, but what I could not tell. Perhaps they realized at once how completely the Ngoma was off, for the
reason that there was no longer anybody to dance to, since I no longer existed. Perhaps they thought that it had, in reality, already been held, a matchless Ngoma, of such force that it made naught of everything else, and that, when it was over, everything was over.

A small Native dog on the lawn profited by the stillness to yap out loudly, and the echo ran through my mind:

Kamante, who had been put in charge of the tobacco that was to have been dealt out to the Ancients after the dance, in his habitual silent resourcefulness here thought the moment convenient for bringing it, and stepped forward with a big calabash filled with snuff. Farah waved him back, but Kamante was a Kikuyu, in understanding with the old dancers, and he had his way. The snuff was a reality. We now distributed it amongst the old men. After a little while they all walked away.

The people of the farm who grieved most at my departure were I think the old women. The old Kikuyu women have had a hard life, and have themselves become flint-hard under it, like old mules which will bite you if they can come to it. They were more difficult for any disease to kill off than their men, as I learned in my practice as a doctor, and they were wilder than the men, and, even more thoroughly than they, devoid of the faculty of admiration. They had borne a number of children and had seen many of them die; they were afraid of nothing. They carried loads of firewood,—with a rein round their foreheads to steady them,—of three hundred pounds, tottering below them, but unsubdued; they
worked in the hard ground of their shambas, standing on their heads from the early morning till late in the evening. “From thence she seeketh the prey, and her eyes behold afar off. Her heart is as firm as a stone, yea as hard as a piece of the nether millstone. She mocketh at fear. What time she lifteth up herself on high, she scorneth the horse and his rider. Will she make many supplications unto thee? will she speak soft words unto thee?” And they had a stock of energy in them still; they radiated vitality. The old women took a keen interest in everything that was going on on the farm, and would walk ten miles to look at an Ngoma of the young people; a joke, or a cup of tembu, would make their wrinkled toothless faces dissolve in laughter. This strength, and love of life in them, to me seemed not only highly respectable, but glorious and bewitching.