The Flame Trees of Thika (5 page)

‘Tell them they can have whatever it is they like to eat,’ Robin suggested,’ and that if they come to work I will give them all a rupee to start off with.’

‘They are too stupid to understand rupees,’ Juma said with even greater scorn than before.

‘For heaven’s sake think of
something
, Juma!’

The invisible spectators kept just beyond the firelight, as a
buck will edge its way out of rifle range. They knew no language but their own, and of this Juma was ignorant. He had, however, attached to himself at some point a child, known simply as the
toto
, a fetcher and carrier. The
toto
was now summoned and appeared, large-headed, skinny-limbed, velvet-eyed, and rather pathetic. He stood by Juma, looking as if he expected to be cooked and eaten, and addressed a few quavering sentences to the unseen crowd. At least, one felt it to be a crowd, but it may have been only two or three young men.

The
toto
’s voice brought forth one of them almost into the open. He was young and oiled and red, with twists of ochred hair dangling all over his head and down to his eyes, like a Yorkshire terrier. He carried a spear and wore a short cloak of leather, and a belt with a throwing-club tucked into it, and the usual red scabbard. His speech was soft, liquid, musical, almost whining, like water over rocks, with underneath a plaintiveness, a nervous tremor.

‘He asks, what is this light,’ said Juma in his mixture of English and Swahili. ‘He says, is it a bit that has fallen from a star.’

‘Show it to him,’ Robin instructed.

But the young man retreated as Juma advanced with the lantern in his hand. The darkness gave way before Juma and he moved in a golden glow. The light slid down a limb, caught the flash of a spear-head, flickered across a startled eye, and then all trace of the young man and his companions evaporated. Juma called. No answer. The huge and silent night closed in like an infinite sea over all traces of our visitors.

Robin swore with disappointment.

‘No matter,’ Juma said. He used a kind of basic child’s Swahili for our benefit. ‘They will come back tomorrow, and the next night. And then by day.’

On the following night, the young men were bolder and edged more closely into the circle of light. They were like bronze statues endowed with life and moved tautly, as if on springs, ready to bound forward or back. One felt that just as they vanished into the void like antelopes when alarmed, they might spring forward when angered and thrust with spears: they were triggered men.

The
toto
spoke to them for longer this time and the lantern itself was taken from its pole and displayed at close quarters. They touched it boldly, and one burnt his hand against the glass.

Although we were astonished at their ignorance even of lamps, devices known to the Romans and indeed to others long before that, the sight of a tongue of flame imprisoned in a bubble, independent and mobile, must have appeared altogether miraculous to those confronted with it for the first time. It was these very inventions that to us appeared so obvious and simple, like lamps and matches and wheels, and putting water into pipes, that struck these people with the force of wonder and amazement. Later, when Europeans displayed the inventions in which they themselves took so much pride, like aeroplanes and radios, they were often disappointed at the Africans’ attitude of indifferent acceptance. But if you had lived for many centuries without control over the elements, quite at their mercy, it would be the realization that fire and water, your daily companions, could be mastered, that would come as a revelation to you, not the ingenuity of some more refined device for enabling you to do something you had never thought of doing, like travelling through the air.

Robin had a bright idea. ‘Tell them’, he instructed Juma, ‘that to every man who comes to work for me for one month, I will give a lamp like this.’

Juma, the
toto
, and the Kikuyu conversed in their curious mixture of tongues for some time.

‘They say’, Juma reported in his tone of contempt for the aborigines,’ that this lamp contains a spirit which obeys Europeans. They do not believe it would stay inside and serve them.’

‘Tell them not to be such idiots,’ Robin said briskly. ‘Explain about paraffin.’

‘Is there a word for paraffin?’ Tilly inquired.

‘It is called fat,’ Juma replied.

His exposition caused a stir among the young men. They uttered startled exclamations and drew back a little, poised for flight. Juma almost shook the
toto
in his vehemence, and the
toto
wound up his speech to a higher pitch. He was a very slender, fragile link between two worlds, and seemed at times about to snap like a piece of thread.

‘I have told them,’ Juma reported with disgust. ‘They think it is human fat, and we are cannibals.’

‘I could cheerfully become one,’ Robin said, ‘if this goes on. Tell them it is fat that comes out of the ground.’

‘They will not believe it,’ said Juma.

‘It seems unlikely, if you look at it that way,’ Tilly agreed, ‘that there should be wells of fat in the ground.’

‘We shall be here all night’, Robin protested, ‘if Juma is going to put them through a course in economic geography. Tell them that they can take this lamp away and examine it. But explain that it will die when its food is finished and if they bring it back tomorrow, they shall have some more.’

No one could be found brave enough to grasp the lantern. The young men backed away, and Juma left it, with the flame turned low, in the grass at a short distance from our tents. It stayed there till everyone had gone to sleep, but in the morning it had gone.

‘Those savages will come back,’ Juma prophesied.

They did come back, two days later, and in the hours of daylight, and they brought with them several older men who did not wear a lot of little pigtails but merely black curls, and bright bead ornaments in their ears, and snuff-horns hanging by thin chains from their necks, and a good many amulets and coils of copper wire. One or two wore red blankets and the others cloaks of monkey skin, beautifully sewn together and edged with beads.

These men carried no weapons, but one had a polished staff in his hand. He was thickset for a Kikuyu, though among a less slender race he would not have seemed so; his skin was light, his eyes keen, his voice quiet, and he was clearly accustomed to authority. This man was called chief Kupanya. It was only much later that we discovered he was wrongly labelled because the Kikuyu did not have chiefs in their hierarchy. They had elders of various grades, and he was a spokesman for his particular set of elders. But the policy of the Government was to appoint local chiefs where they did not exist already, and his polished staff indicated that he had been selected as ruler of the district closest to our land.

The chief and his companions sat down under a tree near our camp, and took snuff.

‘I suppose I ought to give them something,’ Robin remarked. ‘I wonder what?’

‘They would like beer,’ Juma informed him. ‘And a fat sheep.’

‘We haven’t any beer or fat sheep.’

Yet to leave them under the tree without any refreshment did not seem a propitious start.

‘We’ve got some soda-water siphons,’ Tilly suggested. In those days no camp, house, or safari was complete without these useful devices, and a box of sparklets to recharge them.

Juma fetched all our tin mugs and handed them to the Kikuyu, who examined them with interest. For themselves they used calabashes, made from the gourds we saw growing everywhere, often clambering up the roofs of huts. Robin produced a siphon and squirted the frothing water into one of the mugs. This created a sensation; here was water obviously possessed of a most ebullient and irrepressible spirit, who might well be displaying anger. Or perhaps they thought a spirit lived inside the bottle and was blowing out a kind of steam. At any rate it said much for their courage that they did not run away. As elders, they had their dignity to preserve. Juma drank some of the soda-water as a demonstration, but this was too much even for chief Kupanya. They held the mugs gingerly, and after a while poured the soda-water respectfully into the ground.

‘I want some strong young men to clear the bush,’ Robin explained. ‘I will pay them in rupees.’ Kupanya spoke a little Swahili, so Juma was able to act as interpreter.

Robin had thought it would be easy to explain his needs, but it was not. Kupanya asked a great many questions. Why had Robin come, where was the shamba to be, what was he going to grow in it, who was to plant the crop and harvest it? Was he a relation of the Italians at the Mission? (This made Robin smile; he had an ear-to-ear grin, and when amused he beamed like a sun.) Or was he a relation of the District Commissioner? Had he a shamba in his own country? Had he seen King George? Had he any of the powerful European medicines against coughs and against worms?

‘We shall go on for ever at this rate,’ Robin said impatiently. ‘He doesn’t seem to realize that this is my land and I’m offering his young men a chance to work.’ The whole thing was as
mysterious to Kupanya, as his attitude was baffling and dense to Robin, and no doubt the chief would have considered two or three days’ conversation under the tree well spent, had it led to clarification. But in Robin’s opinion this meeting was not intended as a leisurely exchange of views, it was a simple matter that could be dealt with in a quarter of an hour.

‘You might get on quicker’, Tilly suggested, ‘if you offered the chief baksheesh of some kind.’

So Kupanya was told he would receive a goat for every ten young men who came to work and stayed a month. There would be no payment for those who left in less than thirty days. After that, negotiations did seem to proceed more swiftly. When the elders left, they took the tin mugs, which they clearly looked on as a present. Robin did not like to stop them, so after that we had nothing to drink out of but half a dozen very precious Irish cut-glass tumblers, salvaged from what was always referred to as the Crash, until Robin rode down to Thika and borrowed some more mugs from the Blue Posts.

T
HE
young men arrived about a week later. Robin remarked ruefully that he appeared to have summoned up a sort of Zulu
impi
rather than a labour force. They were painted as for war, or perhaps a dance, with chalk and red ochre and feathers tucked into their freshly decorated hair, and they arrived in a column stamping and chanting and waving spears. At the first sight of them Tilly and Robin were somewhat alarmed, but it soon became apparent that this was all in fun, so to speak, and to show that they were ready for anything. With them were some of the elders and, at a safe distance, a party of shy and giggling young women heavily greased and ochred and covered with beads.

When they had calmed down and communication had been established, each man who wished to work was given a small square of cardboard ruled into thirty squares and called his ticket. One square was crossed off for each day on which he
worked. When he completed the ticket, which might take him several months, he was paid. When it came to accepting tickets, only a small proportion of the
impi
proved to be stayers; the rest had come to see what was going to happen, and to join in the fun.

The young men’s first task was to build themselves sleeping quarters, which they did in an amazingly short time merely by felling trees, driving branches into the ground, and tying together bundles of long, dry grass to make walls. But they would not thatch the huts themselves, as this was against their custom.

Everything except the thatch was prepared on the first day. On the second, the house was assembled. The young men had erected the walls and the skeleton of the roof by midday. Then a file of young ladies arrived, each one bearing on her back a bundle of reeds cut from a river-bed and previously dried in the sun. These maidens, clad in short leather aprons, clambered up to the skeleton roof and tied the thatch in place with twine made from forest creepers. It was very well organized and, in two days, the huts were done. The Kikuyu had a strict rule that every building must be completed between sunrise and sunset; if a hut were to be left unroofed overnight, evil spirits would move in and nothing, apparently, could be done to dislodge them. This was a most fortunate belief, from a European point of view.

After they had completed their own houses, Robin put them on to building one for us. It was to have a single living-room flanked by two bedrooms, all in a straight row like a stable – not, perhaps, inspired architecturally, but this was to be a temporary arrangement, until a proper stone residence went up. He struck some pegs in the ground to indicate the corners and cut a little trench between, to make the shape quite clear.

A young man called Njombo had emerged as the spokesman of the labourers, who were always called boys. How this name for grown men first originated I do not know, but everyone used it. Njombo, with several friends, looked incredulously at the trench and the pegs.

‘We cannot build a house like that,’ he said.

‘Why not?’

Njombo shook his head. He knew very little Swahili. ‘Not good,’ was all he could say.

‘It is good for me,’ Robin retorted, ‘and I am to live in it.’

Njombo and the others engaged in a long conversation in Kikuyu that sounded full of outraged alarm.

‘It will fall down,’ he said finally to Robin.

‘Not if you build it properly.’

‘Why do you not have a house like that?’ he asked, pointing to one of the round Kikuyu huts built by the young men.

‘Because I am not a Kikuyu, I am a European,’ Robin explained with what he thought was patience. ‘Europeans have houses like this, with straight lines and corners. So do not argue any more.’

Njombo clearly thought Robin’s insistence not merely peculiar, but sinister. Goodness knows how many evil spirits would not find shelter in a house with comers. He had been as far as Thika and had therefore seen the Indians’ houses, which were rectangular, so the whole idea, although strange, was not unheard-of, but he had never been asked to take part in the actual building of such a monstrosity.