Out of Africa: And Shadows on the Grass (47 page)

We registered ourselves with the wild animals, sadly admitting the inadequacy of our return to the community—and to our mortgages—but realizing that we could not possibly, not even in order to obtain the highest approval of our surroundings, give up that direct contact with God which we shared with the hippo and the flamingo. Nine thousand feet up we felt safe, and we laughed at the ambition of the new arrivals, of the Missions, the business people and the Government itself, to make the continent of Africa respectable. A time came when we began to feel uneasy about the matter. The Protestant Missions gave much time, energy and money to make the Natives put on trousers—in which they looked like giraffes in harness. The French Fathers were in better understanding with the children of the land, but they did not have—as they ought to have had—Saint Francis of Assisi at
their Mission station; they were themselves but frail souls, and at home had been loaded with heavy, mixed cultural cargo, which they dared not throw off. The businessmen, under the motto of “Teach the Native to Want,” encouraged the African to evaluate himself by his possessions and to keep up respectably with his neighbours. The Government, turning the great wild plains into game Reserves, seemed to succeed in making the lions themselves take on the look of kindly patersfamilias—times might come when our old feline friends would have their regular meals served them from Game Department canteens. It was doubtful whether sans them the graminivora would preserve their innocence of the period before the Fall, whether then the kongoni would still keep their lonely watcher silhouetted on top of a hill, the eland their silky skin swaying in the dewlap as they trotted along, and their moist eyes, the impala their flying leap. Must there then, even in Africa, be no live creature standing in direct contact with God?

Ay, but there will be, I consoled myself, as long as I have got Farah with me. For Farah, although gravely posing as a highly respectable major-domo, Malvolio himself, was a wild animal, and nothing in the world would ever stand between him and God. Unfailingly loyal, he was still at heart a wild animal, a cheetah noiselessly following me about at a distance of five feet, or a falcon holding on to my finger with strong talons and turning his head right and left. The qualities with which he served me were cheetah or falcon qualities.

When Farah first took service in my house, or first took my house into possession—for from that day he spoke of “our house,” “our horses,” “our guests”—it was no common contract which was set up, but a covenant established between him and me
ad majorem domus gloriam
, to the ever greater glory of the house. My well-being was not his concern, and was hardly of real importance to him, but for my good name
and prestige he did, I believe, hold himself responsible before God.

Farah was a highly picturesque figure in my house as he stepped forth on its threshold. In his relations with my Native servants he was unwaveringly fair and impartial, and he had a deeper knowledge of them and their course of thought than I could well account for, for I hardly ever saw him converse with them. Farah spoke English correctly, and French as well, for he had in his young days been cabin-boy on a French man-of-war, but he had a few expressions of his own which I ought to have set him right about, but which instead in our talks together I took to using myself. He said “exactly” for “except”: “All the cows have come home exactly the grey cow,” and I still at times find myself making use of the word in the same way.

Farah had the typical Somali voice, recognizable among all voices of the world, low, guttural, with a two-fold ring to it, for it was friendly but lent itself excellently well to a particular contempt or scorn. At times Farah like most Somali annoyed me by having so little
Gemütlichkeit
in his mental make-up. I accounted for it by the tribes’ abstinence from wine or spirits through a thousand years, and reflected that the sight of an old uncle dead drunk would have been a wholesome remedy against the desert dryness of the Somali mind.

He once told me that he did not like the Jews because they “ate antruss,” and for a while I wondered which would be the food that shocked him in the Jews, since the pork forbidden to Mohammedans is forbidden to the children of Israel as well. In the end, however, I gathered from him that what roused his indignation was the Jewish practice of charging interest on money lent, a proceeding forbidden to and despised by the Mohammedans. He said of an ambitious English friend of the house: “He never get Sir,” meaning that
he would never obtain the honour of being knighted. At the time when the locusts came upon us the Natives roasted and ate them; I had a mind to try them myself, but still somehow doubtful asked Farah what they tasted like. “I know not, Memsahib,” he answered. “I eat not such small birds.” He had a partiality for the demonstrative adjective: “This Arab horse dealer offers you this horse at this price,” and rarely spoke about his fellow-men but in the same way: “this Kamante,” “this Prince of Wales.” Thomas Mann in his book
Joseph in Egypt
tells us that the ancient Egyptians had the same usage, and that Joseph taught himself to speak according to their taste: “As we came to this fortress this good old man said to this officer.” It may be a particular African inclination.

Farah strictly saw to it that our Native servants groomed the horses and polished the silver of the house till they shone. He drove my old Ford car as if it had been a Rothschild’s Rolls-Royce. And he expected from me a corresponding loyalty to the paragraphs of our covenant. As a consequence of this attitude he was a highly expensive functionary in the house, not only because his salary was disproportionately larger than that of my other servants, but because he did without mercy demand my house to be run in grand style.

Farah was my cashier, he had charge of all money I took home from the bank and of my keys. He never drew up any accounts for me and would hardly have been able to do so, nor would it ever have occurred to me to demand it from him. I never doubted but that he did to the best of his ability spend my money in the interest of my house. Only there always remained to me a strong exciting element of suspense as to his views of the interests of the house.

I once asked him: “Farah, can you give me five rupees?” And he asked me in return: “What do you want them for, Memsahib?” “I want to buy a new pair of slacks,” I said. Farah shook his head. “We cannot afford that this month,
Memsahib,” he said. He told me: “I pray to God that your old riding-boots may last till your new ones arrive out from London.” Farah had good knowledge of riding-boots and felt it to be below my dignity to walk about in boots made by the Indians of Nairobi.

To make up for it he was liberal in other matters. He decreed: “We must have champagne for dinner tonight, Memsahib.” My English friends, who in between their long safaris stayed in my house, kept it in wine at a very high standard, but it happened when they were away for a long time that I ran short of wine. “We have got so little champagne left, Farah,” I said. “We must have champagne,” Farah said again. “Have your forgotten, Memsahib, that there is a Memsahib coming for dinner?” My guests as a rule were men.

When Prince Wilhelm of Sweden was coming for tea to the farm, in his honour I wanted to make a kind of Swedish cake called
Klejner
, for which you need a little bit, what the cookery-books call a pinch, of cardamom. As Farah was going to Nairobi I added the cardamom to his shopping list. “I do not know,” I said, “whether the white grocers will have it. But if you cannot get it with them you must go to the Indians.” The great Indian tradesman, Suleiman Virjee and Allidina Visram, were personal friends of Farah’s and owned more than half of the native trade-quarter, which was called the Bazaar.

Farah came back late in the evening and reported: “This precious spice, Memsahib, which other Europeans do not know, but which we must have, was very difficult to get. First I went to these white grocers, but they had not got it. Then I went to Suleiman Virjee, and he had it. And then I bought for five hundred rupees.” A rupee was two shillings. “You are crazy, Farah,” I said. “I meant you to buy for ten cents.” “You did not tell me so,” said Farah. “No, I did not
tell you so,” I said. “I thought you had human intelligence. But in any case I have no use for five hundred rupees’ worth of cardamom, and you will have to give it back to Sulieman Virjee, where you got it.” I at once realized that it would be impossible to make Farah carry out my order. It was not the inconvenience that he feared, for no kind of inconvenience means anything to a Somali. But he would not allow Suleiman Virjee to believe that a house like ours could do with less than five hundred rupees’ worth of cardamom.

He thought the matter over and said: “No. No, that would not be good, Memsahib. But I will tell you what we will do. I shall take over this lot.” So we left it at that, and the Somali are such furious tradespeople that Farah at once got the hitherto unknown article introduced on the farm, so that soon every self-esteeming Kikuyu went about chewing cardamom and dashingly spitting out the capsules. I tried it myself and it was not bad. I feel that Farah will have made a handsome profit on the transaction.

Farah’s knowledge of Native mentality came in useful to me.

Once, at the end of a month, when I had been paying out their wages to my people on the farm, in going through my accounts I found that a hundred-rupee note was missing and must have been stolen. I passed on the sad news to Farah, and he at once very calmly declared that he would get me my money back. “But how?” I asked him. “There have been more than a thousand people up here, and we have no idea at all as to who may be the thief.” “Nay, but I will get you your money back,” said Farah.

He walked away, and towards evening returned carrying with him a human skull. This may sound highly dramatic, but was in itself nothing out of the normal. For centuries the Natives had not buried their dead but had laid them out on the plain where jackals and vultures would take care of them.
One might at any time, riding or walking there, in the long grass knock against an amber-coloured thigh-bone or a honey-brown skull.

Farah rammed down a pole outside my door and nailed the skull to the top of it. I stood by and watched him with enthusiasm. “What is the good of that, Farah?” I asked him. “The thief will already be far away. And must I now have that skull of yours set up just outside my door?” Farah did not answer, he took a step back to survey his work and laughed. But next morning, by the foot of the pole a stone was lying, and underneath it a hundred-rupee note. By what dark, crooked paths it had got there I was not told, and now shall never know.

Farah, as already told, was a strict Mohammedan, burning in the spirit.

In speaking about Mohammedans and Mohammedanism, I am well aware that I got to know in Africa only a primitive, unsophisticated Mohammedanism. Of Mohammedan philosophy or theology I know nothing; from my own experience I can but tell how Islam manifests itself in the course of thought and conduct of the unlearned Orthodox. All the same I feel that you cannot live for a long time among Mohammedans without your own view of life being in some way influenced by theirs.

I have been told that the word “Islam” in itself means submission: the Creed may be defined as the religion which ordains acceptance. And the Prophet does not accept with reluctance or with regret but with rapture. There is in his preaching, as I know it from his unlearned disciples, a tremendous erotic element.

“Sweet scents, incense and perfumes are dear to my heart,” says the Prophet. “But the glory of women is dearer. The glory of women is dear to my heart. But the glory of prayer is dearer.”

In contrast to many modern Christian ideologies, Islam does not occupy itself with justifying the ways of God to man; its Yes is universal and unconditional. For the lover does not measure the worth of his mistress by a moral or social rod. But the mistress, by absorbing into her own being the dark and dangerous phenomena of life, mysteriously transluminates and sanctifies them, and imbues them with sweetness. An old Danish love poem has it: “There is witchcraft on your lips, an abyss within your gaze.” What the wooer desires is freedom to adore, what he craves and thirsts for is the assurance of being loved back. Kadidja’s caravaneer, with his eyes on the new moon, in the words of a later author, even though in a somewhat altered sense, is “God’s own mad lover-dying on a kiss.”

I sometimes wondered whether the tribes of the desert had become what they were by having been in the hand of the Prophet for twelve hundred years, or whether his Creed has taken such deep roots in them because from the very beginning they were of one blood with him. I imagined that just as the erotic aloofness of the founder of Christianity has left his disciples in a kind of void, or of chronic uneasiness and remorse, within this province of life, so has the formidable, indomitable potency of the Prophet pervaded his followers and made mighty latent forces in them fetch headway. Eroticism runs through the entire existence of the great wanderers. Horses and camels are desirable and exquisite possessions in a man’s life, and well worth that he should risk it for their sake. But they cannot compete or compare with women. To the hearts of the ascetic, hardened, ruthless tribes it is the number and the quality of the wives which decides a man’s success and happiness in life, and his own worth.

When, on the farm, I was called upon to give judgment in matters between my Mohammedan people, I looked up rules and regulations in the manual of Mohammedan law,
Minhaj et Talibin
. It is a thick and heavy, highly imposing book to have carried about with you, a surprising work as well to a North European mind in its taboos and recommendations, enlightening as to the Mohammedan view of life, infinitely detailed in its regulations on legal purity, prayer, fasting and distribution of alms and particularly upon woman and her position in the community of the Orthodox. “The law,” the classic states, “forbids a man to clothe himself in silk. But a woman may wear clothes of silk and should do so whenever this be in all decency possible to her.” The Somali whom I knew did, however, wear silk, but Farah explained to me that they would do so only when outside their own country and in the service of other people—and surely my old valued friend Ali bin Salim of Mombasa, or the old Indian high priest who came to see me on the farm, wore but the finest and most delicate wools. The book also lays down as law that a husband shall supply his wife not only with the necessary nourishment, lodgings and clothes, but that he shall also give her such and such luxuries, within his means, which are truly worthy of her and will make her truly value her husband. “In the case, however,” it adds, “of a woman of remarkable beauty, jurists may find themselves entirely in accordance and will have to weigh the matter between them.” The very grave and somewhat pedantic book thus registers woman’s beauty as an indisputable, juridical asset in existence.