Out of Africa Read online

  After a time I learned their manner from them, and gave up talking of the hard times or complaining about them, like a person in disgrace. But I was a European, and I had not lived long enough in the country to acquire the absolute passivity of the Native, as some Europeans will do, who live for many decennaries in Africa. I was young, and by instinct of self-preservation, I had to collect my energy on something, if I were not to be whirled away with the dust on the farm-roads, or the smoke on the plain. I began in the evenings to write stories, fairy-tales and romances, that would take my mind a long way off, to other countries and times.

  I had been telling some of the stories to a friend when he came to stay on the farm.

  When I got up and went outside, there was a cruel wind blowing, the sky was clear and set with millions of hard stars, everything was dry.

  At first I wrote in the evenings only, but later on I often sat down to write in the mornings as well, when I ought to have been out on the farm. It was difficult, out there, to decide whether we ought to plough the maize-field up again and plant it a second time, and whether we ought to strip the withering coffee berries off the trees to save the trees, or not. I put the decisions off from day to day.

  I used to sit and write in the dining-room, with papers spread all over the dinner table, for I had accounts and estimates of the farm to do, in between my stories, and little desolate notes from my farm manager to answer. My house-boys asked me what I was doing; when I told them I was trying to write a book, they looked upon it as a last attempt to save the farm through the hard times, and took an interest in it. Later they asked me how my book was proceeding. They would come in, and stand for a long time watching the progress of it, and in the panelled room their heads were so much the colour of the panels, that at night it looked as if they were white robes only, keeping me company with their backs to the wall.

  My dining-room looked West, and had three long windows that opened out to the paved terrace, the lawn and the forest. The land here sloped down to the river that formed the boundary between me and the Masai. You could not see the river itself from the house, but you could follow its winding course by the design of the dark-green big Acacias which grew along it. To the other side of it the wood-clad land rose again, and over the woods were the green plains that reached to the foot of the Ngong Hills.

  “And were my faith so strong that it could move mountains, that is the mountain that I would make come to me.”

  The wind blew from the East: the doors of my dining-room, to lee, were always open, and for this reason the West side of the house was popular with the Natives; they laid their way round it, to keep in touch with what was going on inside. From the same motive the little Native herdboys brought their goats round and made them graze on the lawn.

  These little boys, who wandered about on the farm in the company of their fathers’ herds of goats and sheep, looking up grazing for them, did in a way form a link between the life of my civilized house and the life of the wild. My house-boys distrusted them and did not like them to come into the rooms, but the children had a real love and enthusiasm for civilization; to them it held no dangers at all, for they could leave it again whenever they liked. The central symbol of it to them, was an old German cuckoo-clock that hung in the dining-room. A clock was entirely an object of luxury in the African Highlands. All the year round you could tell, from the position of the sun, what the time was, and as you had no dealings with railways, and could arrange your life on the farm according to your own wishes, it became a matter of no importance. But this was a very fine clock. In the midst of a cluster of pink roses, at every full hour, a cuckoo here flung up its little door and threw itself forward to announce the hour in a clear insolent voice. Its apparition was every time a fresh delight to the young people of the farm. From the position of the sun, they judged accurately when the moment for the midday call was due, and by a quarter to twelve I could see them approaching the house from all sides, at the tail of their goats, which they dared not leave behind. The heads of the children and of the goats swam through the bush and long grass of the forest like heads of frogs in a pond.

  They left their flocks on the lawn and came in noiselessly on their bare feet; the bigger ones were about ten years and the youngest two years. They behaved very well, and kept up a sort of self-made ceremonial for their visits, which came to this: that they could move about freely in the house so long as they did not touch anything, nor sit down, nor speak unless spoken to. As the cuckoo rushed out on them, a great movement of ecstasy and suppressed laughter ran through the group. It also sometimes happened that a very small herdboy, who did not feel any responsibility about the goats, would come back in the early morning all by himself, stand for a long time in front of the clock, now shut up and silent, and address it in Kikuyu in a slow sing-song declaration of love, then gravely walk out again. My houseboys laughed at the herdboys, and confided to me that the children were so ignorant that they believed the cuckoo to be alive.

  Now my houseboys came in themselves to watch the work of the typewriter. Kamante sometimes stood by the wall for an hour in the evening, his eyes ran to and fro like dark drops under the eyelashes, as if he meant to learn enough about the machine to take it to pieces and put it together again.

  One night as I looked up I met these profound attentive eyes and after a moment he spoke. “Msabu,” he said, “do you believe yourself that you can write a book?”

  I answered that I did not know.

  To figure to oneself a conversation with Kamante one must imagine a long, pregnant, as if deeply responsible, pause before each phrase. All Natives are masters in the art of the pause and thereby give perspective to a discussion.

  Kamante now made such a long pause, and then said, “I do not believe it.”

  I had nobody else to discuss my book with; I laid down my paper and asked him why not. I now found that he had been thinking the conversation over before, and prepared himself for it; he stood with the Odyssey itself behind his back, and here he laid it on the table.

  “Look, Msabu,” he said, “this is a good book. It hangs together from the one end to the other. Even if you hold it up and shake it strongly, it does not come to pieces. The man who has written it is very clever. But what you write,” he went on, both with scorn and with a sort of friendly compassion, “is some here and some there. When the people forget to close the door it blows about, even down on the floor and you are angry. It will not be a good book.”

  I explained to him that in Europe the people would be able to fix it all up together.

  “Will your book then be as heavy as this?” Kamante asked, weighing the Odyssey.

  When he saw that I hesitated he handed it to me in order that I might judge for myself.

  “No,” I said, “it will not, but there are other books in the library, as you know, that are lighter.”

  “And as hard?” he asked.

  I said it was expensive to make a book so hard.

  He stood for some time in silence and then expressed his greater hopes of my book, and perhaps also repentance of his doubts, by picking up the scattered pages from the floor and laying them on the table. Still he did not go away, but stood by the table and waited, and then asked me gravely: “Msabu, what is there in books?”

  As an illustration, I told him the story from the Odyssey of the hero and Polyphemus, and of how Odysseus had called himself Noman, had put out Polyphemus’ eye, and had escaped tied up under the belly of a ram.

  Kamante listened with interest and expressed as his opinion, that the ram must have been of the same race as the sheep of Mr. Long, of Elmentaita, which he had seen at the cattle-show in Nairobi. He came back to Polyphemus, and asked me if he had been black, like the Kikuyu. When I said no, he wanted to know if Odysseus had been of my own tribe or family.

  “How did he,” he asked, “say the word, Noman, in his own language? Say it.”

  “He said Outis,” I told him. “He called himself Outis, which in his l
anguage means Noman.”

  “Must you write about the same thing?” he asked me.

  “No,” I said, “people can write of anything they like. I might write of you.”

  Kamante who had opened up in the course of the talk, here suddenly closed again, he looked down himself and asked me in a low voice, what part of him I would write about.

  “I might write about the time when you were ill and were out with the sheep on the plain,” I said, “what did you think of then?”

  His eyes wandered over the room, up and down; in the end he said vaguely: “Sejui”—I know not.

  “Were you afraid?” I asked him.

  After a pause, “Yes,” he said firmly, “all the boys on the plain are afraid sometimes.”

  “Of what were you afraid?” I said.

  Kamante stood silent for a little while, his face became collected and deep, his eyes gazed inward. Then he looked at me with a little wry grimace:

  “Of Outis,” he said. “The boys on the plain are afraid of Outis.”

  A few days later, I heard Kamante explain to the other houseboys that in Europe the book which I was writing could be made to stick together, and that with terrible expense it could even be made as hard as the Odyssey, which was again displayed. He himself, however, did not believe that it could be made blue.

  Kamante had a talent of his own that became of use to him in my house. He could, I believe, cry when he wanted to.

  If ever I scolded him in earnest, he stood up straight before me and looked me in the face, with that watchful, deep sadness which the faces of the Natives take on in a single moment; then his eyes welled, and filled with heavy tears that slowly, one by one, rolled out and down over his cheeks. I knew them to be pure crocodile’s tears, and in other people they would not have affected me. But with Kamante it was a different thing. His flat wooden face, on these occasions, sank back into the world of darkness and infinite loneliness, in which he had dwelt for many years. Such heavy, dumb tears he might have wept as a little boy on the plain, with the sheep round him. They made me uneasy, and gave to the sins for which I scolded him a different aspect, a smaller look so that I did not want to go on talking about them. In a way it was a demoralizing thing. Still I believe that by strength of the true human understanding which existed between us, Kamante knew in his heart that I looked through his tears of contrition and did not take them for more than they were,—indeed that he himself looked upon them more as a ceremony due to the higher powers, than as any attempt to deceive.

  He often referred to himself as a Christian. I did not know what idea he attached to the name, and once or twice I tried to catechize him, but then he explained to me that he believed what I believed, and that, since I myself must know what I believed, there was no sense in me questioning him. I found that this was more than an evasion, it was in a way his positive programme, or confession of faith. He had given himself under the God of the white people. In His service he was prepared to carry out any order, but he would not take upon himself to give reasons for a working system which might prove to be as unreasonable as the working systems of the white people themselves.

  It sometimes happened that my behaviour clashed with the teachings of the Scotch Mission, where he had been converted; then he would ask me which was right.

  The lack of prejudice in the Natives is a striking thing, for you expect to find dark taboos in the primitive people. It is due, I believe, to their acquaintance with a variety of races and tribes, and to the lively human intercourse that was brought upon East Africa, first by the old traders of ivory and slaves, and in our days by the settlers and big-game hunters. Nearly every Native, down to the little herd-boys of the plains, has in his day stood face to face with a whole range of nations as different from one another, and to him, as a Sicilian to an Esquimo: Englishmen, Jews, Boers, Arabs, Somali Indians, Swaheli, Masai and Kavirondo. As far as receptivity of ideas goes, the Native is more of a man of the world than the suburban or provincial settler or missionary, who has grown up in a uniform community and with a set of stable ideas. Much of the misunderstanding between the white people and the Natives arises from this fact.

  It is an alarming experience to be, in your person, representing Christianity to the Natives.

  There was a young Kikuyu by the name of Kitau, who came in from the Kikuyu Reserve and took service with me. He was a meditative boy, an observant, attentive servant and I liked him well. After three months he one day asked me to give him a letter of recommendation to my old friend Sheik Ali bin Salim, the Lewali of the Coast, at Mombasa, for he had seen him in my house and now, he said, he wished to go and work for him. I did not want Kitau to leave just when he had learned the routine of the house, and I said to him that I would rather raise his pay. No, he said, he was not leaving to get any higher pay, but he could not stay. He told me that he had made up his mind, up in the Reserve, that he would become either a Christian or a Mohammedan, only he did not yet know which. For this reason he had come and worked for me, since I was a Christian, and he had stayed for three months in my house to see the testurde,—the ways and habits,—of the Christians. From me he would go for three months to Sheik Ali in Mombasa and study the testurde of the Mohammedans; then he would decide. I believe that even an Archbishop, when he had had these facts laid before him, would have said, or at least have thought, as I said: “Good God, Kitau, you might have told me that when you came here.”

  The Mohammedans will not eat meat of any animal that has not had its throat cut by a Mohammedan in the orthodox manner. This is often a difficulty on a Safari, where you carry few provisions with you, and are dependent for your servants’ food on the game you shoot. When you shoot a Kongoni and it falls, your Mohammedans rush at it, as upon wings, to be in time to cut the throat of it before it dies, and you yourself watch them in suspense, with burning eyes, for if they are seen standing over it with hanging arms and head, it means that the Kongoni has died before they got up to it, and you will have to stalk another Kongoni, or your gun-bearers will go starving.

  When in the beginning of the war I was going out with my ox-wagons, the night before I started I happened to meet the Mohammedan Shereef up at Kijabe; I asked him if he could not give my people dispensation from the law for as long as our Safari lasted.

  The Shereef was a young man, but wise, and he talked with Farah and Ismail and pronounced: “This lady is a disciple of Jesus Christ. When she fires off her rifle, she will say, or at least in her heart say: In the name of God, which will make her bullets equivalent to the knife of the orthodox Mohammedan. For the length of time of this journey, you can eat the meat of the animals that she shoots.”

  The prestige of the Christian religion in Africa was weakened by the intolerance that the one Christian church showed towards the other.

  On Christmas nights while I was in Africa I used to drive over to the French Mission to hear the Midnight Mass. It was generally hot at this time of the year; as you drove through the wattle plantation, you heard the chiming of the Mission bell a long way in the clear warm air. A crowd of happy, lively people were at the place round the church when you arrived, the French and Italian shopkeepers of Nairobi with their families had come out, the nuns from the convent school were present, and the Native congregation swarmed in gay clothes. The big fine church was lighted with many hundred candles and with great transparencies which the Fathers had themselves made.

  When Christmas came, in the first year after Kamante had come into my house, I told him that I was going to take him with me to the Mass, as a fellow Christian, and described to him the beautiful things that he was going to see there, in the manner of the Fathers themselves. Kamante listened to it all, moved in his soul, and put on the best clothes he had. But when the car was at the door, he came back in great agitation of mind and said that he could not possibly come with me. He did not want to give me his reasons, and flinched from my questions; in the end it came out. No, he could not go, he had by now realized that it was t
o the French Mission that I meant to take him, and he had been so strongly warned against that Mission when he had been in Hospital. I explained to him that this was all a misunderstanding, and that he must come now. But at that he began to turn to stone before my eyes, he died, he turned up his eyes so that only the white showed in them and sweated in the face.

  “No, no, Msabu,” he whispered, “I am not coming with you. There inside that big church, I know it well, there is a Msabu who is mbaia sana,”—terribly bad.

  When I heard this I became very sad, but I thought that now I would indeed have to take him with me so that the Virgin herself could enlighten him. The Fathers had a life-size pasteboard statue of the Virgin in their Church, all blue and white, and the Natives are generally impressed by statues, while it is difficult to them to conceive the idea of a picture. So I promised Kamante my protection and took him with me, and when he walked into the Church, very close at my heels, he forgot all his scruples. It happened to be the finest Christmas Mass that they had ever had at the Mission. There was in the Church a very big Nativity,—a grotto with the Holy Family, just out from Paris, which was illuminated by radiant stars in a blue sky, and it had round it a hundred toy animals, wooden cows and pure white cotton-wool lambs, without any petty consideration as to their size, that must have raised ecstasy in the hearts of the Kikuyus.

  After Kamante had become a Christian he was no longer afraid to touch a dead body.

  Earlier in his life he had been afraid of it, and when a man, who had been carried on a stretcher up to the terrace by my house, died there, he would no more than the others lend a hand to carry him back; he did not recede, like the other people, on to the lawn, but he stood immovable upon the pavement, a little dark monument. Why the Kikuyu, who personally have so little fear of death, should be so terrified to touch a corpse, while the white people, who are afraid to die, handle the dead easily, I do not know. Here once more you feel their reality to be different from our realities. But all farmers know that here is a domain on which you cannot control the Native, and that you will save yourself trouble if you give up the idea at once, for he will really rather die than change his ways.