The Tree Where Man Was Born (7 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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