Out of Africa (39 page)

“Kwaheri, Kinanjui,” I said,—Good-bye.

His burning fingers moved a little against my palm. Already before I had got to the door of the hut, when I turned and looked back, the dimness and smoke of the room had swallowed up the big outstretched figure of my Kikuyu Chief. As I came out again from the hut it was very cold. The moon was now low down at the horizon, it must have been past midnight. Just then in the manyatta one of Kinanjui’s cocks crew twice.

Kinanjui died that same night, in the Mission hospital. Two of his sons came over to my house next afternoon to tell me. They did at the same time ask me to the funeral, which was to take place on the following day, near his village, at Dagoretti.

The Kikuyus, when left to themselves, do not bury their dead, but leave them above ground for the Hyenas and vulture to deal with. The custom had always appealed to me, I thought that it would be a pleasant thing to be laid out to the sun and the stars, and to be so promptly, neatly and openly picked and cleansed; to be made one with Nature and become a common component of a landscape. At the time when we had the Spanish flu on the farm, I heard the Hyenas round the shambas all night, and often, after those days, I would find a brown smooth skull in the long grass of the forest, like a nut dropped down under a tree, or on the plain. But the practice does not go with the conditions of civilized life. The government had taken much trouble to make the Kikuyu change their ways, and to teach them
to lay their dead in the ground, but they still did not like the idea at all.

Kinanjui, they now told me, was to be buried, and I thought that the Kikuyu would have agreed to make an exception from their habit because the dead had been a Chief. Perhaps they would like to make a great Native show and gathering, of the occasion. I drove over to Dagoretti, on the following afternoon, expecting to find all the old minor Chiefs of the country, and to see a big Kikuyu festivity.

But Kinanjui’s funeral was altogether a European and clerical affair. There were a few Government Representatives present, the District Commissioner and two Officials from Nairobi. But the day and the place belonged to the Clergy; and the plain, in the afternoon sun, was black with them. Both the French Mission and the Missions of the Church of England and Scotland, were richly represented. If they wished to impress the Kikuyu with the feeling that here they had laid their hand on the dead Chief, and that he now belonged to them, they succeeded. They were so obviously in power that one felt it to be out of the question for Kinanjui to get away from them. This is an old trick of the Church’s. Here I saw for the first time, in any number to speak of, the Mission-boys, the converted Natives, half sacerdotally attired, whatever office they might be filling, fat young Kikuyus with spectacles and folded hands, who looked like ungenial Eunuchs. Probably Kinanjui’s two Christian sons were there, laying down their religious disagreements for the day, but I did not know them. Some of the old Chiefs were attending the funeral, Keoy was there, and I talked with him for some time of Kinanjui. But they kept themselves much in the background of the show.

Kinanjui’s grave had been dug under a couple of tall Eucalyptus trees on the plain, and a rope was extended
round it. I had come early and therefore stood close to the grave, by the rope, from where I could watch the assemblage grow and settle, like flies, round it.

They brought Kinanjui from the Mission on a lorry, and lifted him down near the grave. I do not think that I have ever in my life been more taken aback and appalled than I was then, at the sight of him. He had been a big man, and I remembered him as I had seen him when he came walking over to the farm amongst his senators, even as he had looked lying on his bed, two nights ago. But the coffin in which they now brought him was a nearly square box, surely no more than five feet long. I did not take it to be a coffin when I first set eyes on it; it must be, I thought, some box of appliances for the funeral. But it was Kinanjui’s coffin. I have never known why it was chosen, perhaps it was a thing that they had had at the Scotch Mission. But how had they got Kinanjui down there and how was he now lying in it? They placed the coffin on the ground, close to where I stood.

The coffin had a large silver plate on it with an inscription, which told, I was afterwards informed, that it had been given by the Mission to the Chief Kinanjui, and with a scriptural text on it.

There was a long funeral service. One after another, the Missionaries stood forth and spoke, and I suppose that they got in much profession and admonition. But I did not hear any of it, I was holding on to the rope round Kinanjui’s grave. Some of the Christian Natives followed them up, and brayed out over the green plain.

In the end Kinanjui was lowered into the ground of his own country, and covered with it.

I had taken my house-boys with me to Dagoretti so that they should see the funeral, and they were staying to talk
with their friends and relations there, and coming back on foot, so that Farah and I drove home by ourselves. Farah was as silent as the grave we had left. It had been hard to Farah to swallow the fact that I would not take Kinanjui back to my house with me, for two days he had been like a lost soul, and in the clutch of great doubts and depressions.

Now as we drove up before the door he said: “Never mind, Memsahib.”

Denys Finch-Hatton had come in from one of his Safaris, and he had stayed for a little while on the farm, but, when I began to break up my house and to pack, and he could stay there no longer, he went away and lived in Hugh Martin’s house in Nairobi. From there he drove out to the farm every day and dined with me, sitting,—towards the end, when I was selling my furniture,—on one packing-case and dining from another. We sat there late into the night.

A few times, Denys and I spoke as if I was really going to leave the country. He himself looked upon Africa as his home, and he understood me very well and grieved with me then, even if he laughed at my distress at parting with my people.

“Do you feel,” he said, “that you cannot live without Sirunga?”

“Yes,” I said.

But most of the time when we were together, we talked and acted as if the future did not exist; it had never been his way to worry about it, for it was as if he knew that he could draw upon forces unknown to us if he wanted to. He fell in naturally with my scheme of leaving things to themselves,
and other people to think and say what they liked. When he was there, it seemed to be a normal thing, and in accordance with our own taste, that we should sit upon packing-cases within an empty house. He quoted a poem to me:

During those weeks, we used to go up for short flights out over the Ngong Hills or down over the Game Reserve. One morning, Denys came out to the farm to fetch me quite early, just as the sun was up, and then we saw a lion on the plain South of the Hills.

He talked of packing up his books, that had been in my house for many years, but he never got any further with the job.

“You keep them,” he said, “now I have no place to put them.”

He could not make up his mind at all where to go when my house should be closed. Once, upon the persistent advice of a friend, he went so far as to drive in to Nairobi, and to take a look at the bungalows to be let there, but he came back so repelled with what he had seen that he did not even like to talk about it, and at dinner, when he began to give me a description of the houses and the furniture, he stopped himself and sat silent over it, with a dislike and sadness in his face that was unusual to him. He had been in contact with a kind of existence the idea of which was unbearable to him.

It was, however, a completely objective and impersonal
disapprobation, he had forgotten that he himself had meant to be a party to this existence, and when I spoke of it, he interrupted me. “Oh, as to me,” he said, “I shall be perfectly-happy in a tent in the Masai Reserve, or I shall take a house in the Somali village.”

But on this occasion he, for once, spoke of my future in Europe. I might be happier there than on the farm, he thought, and well out of the sort of civilization that we were going to get in Africa. “You know,” he went on, “this Continent of Africa has a terrible strong sense of sarcasm.”

Denys owned a piece of land down at the coast, thirty miles North of Mombasa on the Creek of Takaunga. Here were the ruins of an old Arab settlement, with a very modest minaret and a well,—a weathered growth of grey stone on the salted soil, and in the midst of it a few old Mango trees. He had built a small house on his land and I had stayed there. The scenery was of a divine, clean, barren Marine greatness, with the blue Indian Ocean before you, the deep creek of Takaunga to the South, and the long steep unbroken coast-line of pale grey and yellow coral-rock as far as the eye reached.

When the tide was out, you could walk miles away Seawards from the house, as on a tremendous, somewhat unevenly paved Piazza, picking up strange long peaked shells and starfish. The Swaheli fishermen came wandering along here, in a loin-cloth and red or blue turbans, like Sindbad the Sailor come to life, to offer for sale multi-coloured spiked fish, some of which were very good to eat. The coast below the house had a row of scooped-out deep caves and grottoes, where you sat in shade and watched the distant glittering blue water. When the tide came in, it filled up the caves to the level of the ground on which the house
was built, and in the porous coral-rock the Sea sang and sighed in the strangest way, as if the ground below your feet were alive; the long waves came running up Takaunga Creek like a storming army.

It was full moon while I was down at Takaunga, and the beauty of the radiant, still nights was so perfect that the heart bent under it. You slept with the doors open to the silver Sea; the playing warm breeze in a low whisper swept in a little loose sand, on to the stone floor. One night a row of Arab dhows came along, close to the coast, running noiselessly before the monsoon, a file of brown shadow-sails under the moon.

Denys sometimes talked of making Takaunga his home in Africa, and of starting his Safaris from there. When I began to talk of having to leave the farm, he offered me his house down there, as he had had mine in the highlands. But white people cannot live for a long time at the coast unless they are able to have many comforts, and Takaunga was too low and too hot for me.

In the month of May of the year when I left Africa, Denys went down to Takaunga for a week. He was planning to build a larger house and to plant Mango trees on his land. He went away in his aeroplane and was intending to make his way home round by Voi, to see if there were any Elephants there for his Safaris. The Natives had been talking much of a herd of Elephants which had come on to the land round Voi from the West, and in particular of one big bull, twice the size of any other Elephant, that was wandering in the bush there, all by himself.

Denys, who held himself to be an exceptionally rational person, was subject to a special kind of moods and forebodings, and under their influence at times he became silent for days or for a week, though he did not know of it himself
and was surprised when I asked him what was the matter with him. The last days before he started on this journey to the coast, he was in this manner absent-minded, as if sunk in contemplation, but when I spoke of it he laughed at me.

I asked him to let me come with him, for I thought what a lovely thing it would be to see the Sea. First he said yes, and then he changed his mind and said no. He could not take me; the journey round Voi, he told me, was going to be very rough, he might have to land, and to sleep, in the bush, so that it would be necessary for him to take a Native boy with him. I reminded him that he had said that he had taken out the aeroplane to fly me over Africa. Yes, he said, so he had; and if there were Elephants at Voi, he would fly me down there to have a look at them, when he knew the landing-places and camping-grounds. This is the only time that I have asked Denys to take me with him on his aeroplane that he would not do it.

He went off on Friday the eighth: “Look out for me on Thursday,” he said when he went, “I shall be back in time to have luncheon with you.”

When he had started in his car for the aerodrome in Nairobi, and had turned down the drive, he came back to look for a volume of poems that he had given to me, and that he now wanted with him on his journey. He stood with one foot on the running-board of the car, and a finger in the book, reading out to me a poem that we had been discussing.

“Here are your grey geese,” he said:

Then he drove away for good, waving his arm to me.

While Denys was down in Mombasa, in landing he broke a propeller. He wired back to Nairobi to get the spare parts that he wanted, and the East Africa Airway Company sent a boy to Mombasa with them. When the aeroplane was fixed, and Denys was again going up in it, he told the Airway’s boy to come up with him. But the boy would not come. This boy was used to flying, and had been up with many people, and with Denys himself, before now, and Denys was a fine pilot and had a great name with the Natives in this capacity as in all others. But this time the boy would not go up with him.

A long time after, when he met Farah in Nairobi and they were talking things over, he said to Farah: “Not for a hundred rupees would I, then, have gone up with Bwana Bedâr.” The shadow of destiny, which Denys himself had felt the last days at Ngong, was seen more strongly now, by the Native.

So Denys took Kamau with him to Voi, his own boy. Poor Kamau was terrified of flying. He had told me, at the farm, that when he got up and away from the ground, he fixed his eyes at his feet and kept them there till he got down to the earth again, so frightened did he feel if ever he cast a glance over the side of the aeroplane, and saw the landscape from its great height.