Out of Africa: And Shadows on the Grass (52 page)

At the time when the Natives of the Highlands were free to die as they liked, they would follow the ways of their fathers and mothers. When a Kikuyu fell ill, his people carried him out of his hut on his bedstead of sticks and hides, since a hut in which a person had died must not again
be
lived in but had to be burned down. Out here under the tall fringed trees his family sat round him and kept him company, squatter friends came up to give the news and gossip of the farm, at night small charcoal fires were made up on the ground round the bed. If the sick man got well he was carried back into the hut. If he died he was brought across the river out on the plain, and was left there to the quick and neat cleaning and polishing of jackals and vultures, and of the lions coming down from the hills.

I myself was in sympathy with the tradition of the Natives, and I instructed Farah—who showed himself deeply averse to the idea, for the Mohammedans wall up the graves of their dead and perform solemn rites by the side of them—if I died on the farm to let me travel in the track of my old squatters across the river. There were so many of the true qualities of the Highland country in the
Castrum doloris
out there under the big firmament, with its wild, free, gluttonous undertakers: silent drama, a kind of silent fun—at which after a day or two the main character himself would be smiling—and silent nobility. The silent, all-embracing genius of consent.

The Government prohibited and put an end to the funeral custom of old days, and the Natives gave it up unwillingly. The Government and the Missions then undertook to build
hospitals, and, seeing the reluctance of the people of the land to go into them, were surprised and indignant and blamed them for being ungrateful and superstitious, or for being cowards.

The Africans, though, feared pain or death less than we ourselves did, and life having taught them the uncertainty of all things, they were at any time ready to take a risk. An old man with a headache once asked me if I might not be able to cut off his head, take out the evil from it, and set it back in its right place, and if I had consented I think he would have let me make the experiment. It was other things in us which at times set their nerves on edge.

For they had had our civilization presented to them piecemeal, like incoherent parts of a mechanism which they had never seen functioning, and the functioning of which they could not on their own imagine. We had been transforming, to them, Rite into Routine. What by now most of all they feared from our hands was boredom, and on being taken into hospital they may well have felt that they were in good earnest being taken in to die from boredom.

They had deep roots to their nature as well, down in the soil and back in the past, the which, like all roots, demanded darkness. When, in his small confused Kikuyu-Masai mind, Sirunga had given me a small contorted key, the reference to a past—“long long long ago”—an African past of a thousand years, I took it into my course of thought. We white people, I reflected, were wrong when in our intercourse with the people of the ancient continent we forgot or ignored their past or did indeed decline to acknowledge that they had ever existed before their meeting us. We had deliberately deprived our picture of them of a dimension, thus allowing it to become distorted to our eyes and blurred in its Native harmony and dignity, and our error of vision had caused deep and sad misunderstandings between us and them. The view to me
later on was confirmed as I observed the fact that white people to whom the past was still a reality—in whose minds the past of their country, their name and blood or their home was naturally alive—would get on easier with the Africans and would come closer to them than others, to whom the world was created yesterday, or upon the day when they got their new car.

The dark people, then, as the clever doctor from Volaia approached, may well have gone through the kind of agony which one will imagine a tree to be suffering at the approach of a zealous forester intending to pull up her roots for inspection. Their hearts in an instinctive deadly nausea turned from the medical examinations of the hospitals, such as they did from the
kipanda
, the passport giving the name and data of its bearer, which some years later the Government made compulsory to each individual Native of the Highlands.

We Nations of Europe, I thought, who do not fear to floodlight our own inmost mechanisms, are here turning the blazing lights of our civilization into dark eyes, fitly set like the eyes of doves by the rivers of waters (Song of Solomon 5: 12), essentially different to ours. If for a long enough time we continue in this way to dazzle and blind the Africans, we may in the end bring upon them a longing for darkness, which will drive them into the gorges of their own, unknown mountains and their own, unknown minds.

We may, if we choose to, I thought further, look forward to the day when we shall have convinced them that it be a meritorious and happy undertaking to floodlight a whole continent. But for that they will have to get other eyes. The intelligent, efficient and base Swahili of the coast have got such eyes.

The outcome of these various circumstances was this: that I would from time to time find myself unemployed as a doctor, and my consulting room empty.

It would most often happen after I had been taking a patient into hospital. But it might be brought about suddenly, by reasons unknown to me and probably unknowable, like the sudden pause which may occur amongst labourers in the field. They would then, after a week, bring me up a patient or two with a high fever or a broken limb, too far gone for treatment. I would feel that I was being made a fool of, and lose patience with my people, I would speak to them without mercy:

“Why,” I asked them, “must you wait to come to me with your broken arms and legs until they are gangrenous, and the stench, as I am driving you to Nairobi, makes me myself sick?—or with a festering eye until the ball of it has shrunk and withered so that the cleverest doctor of Volaia will not be able to cure it? The old fat Msabu matron in the Nairobi hospital will be angry with me once more and will tell me that I do not mind whether my people on the farm live or die—and in the future she shall be right. You are more obstinate than your own goats and sheep, and I am tired of working for you, and from now on I shall bandage and dose your goats and sheep and leave you yourself to be one-legged and one-eyed, such as you choose to be.”

Upon this they would stand for some time without a word, and then, very sullenly, let me know that they would in the future bring me up their injuries in good time, if on my side I would promise not to take them into hospital.

During the last few months that I was still on the farm, at the time when very slowly it was being made clear to me that my fight of many years was lost, and that I should have to leave my life in Africa and go home to Europe, I had as a patient a small boy of six or seven named Wawerru, who had got bad burns on both legs. Burns are an ailment which you would often get to treat in the Kikuyu, for they built up
piles of charcoal in their huts and slept round them, and it happened that in the course of the night the coals slid down on top of the sleepers.

In the midst of a strangely non-real existence, unconnected with past or future, the moments that I spent in doctoring Wawerru were sweet to me, like a breeze on a parched plain. The French Fathers had presented me with a new kind of ointment for burns, just out from France. Wawerru was a slight, slant-eyed child, late-born in his family and spoilt, in so far as he believed that nobody would do him anything but good. He or his elder brothers who carried him up to the house had managed to grasp the idea of a treatment every third day, and his sores were yielding to my cure. Kamante as my amanuensis was aware of the happiness that the task gave me, his lynx eyes every third day would seek out the small group amongst the patients on the terrace, and one time, when they had missed a day, he gave himself the trouble to walk down to Wawerru’s manyatta and to admonish his family about their duties. Then suddenly Wawerru did not appear, he vanished out of my existence. I questioned another toto about him;
“Sejui”
—I know not—he answered. A few days later I rode down to the manyatta, my dogs running with me.

The manyatta lay at the foot of a long, green grass-slope. It contained a large number of huts, for Wawerru’s father had got several wives, with a hut to each of them and—in the way of most wealthy Kikuyu—a central hut of his own, into which he could retire from the world of femininity to meditate in peace, and there was also an irregular suburb of bigger and smaller granaries to the settlement.

As I rode down the slope, I saw Wawerru himself sitting on the grass, playing with a couple of other totos. One of his play-fellows caught sight of me and notified him, and he at once, without so much as a glance in my direction, set off
into the maze of the huts and disappeared to my eyes. His legs were still too weak to carry him, he scuttled along with wondrous quickness on all fours like a mouse. I quite suddenly was thrown into a state of flaming anger at the sight of such ingratitude. I set Rouge into a canter to catch up with him, and at the moment when, in the exact way of a mouse with its hole, he slipped into a hut, I jumped from the saddle and followed him. Rouge was a wise horse; if I left him, the reins loose round his neck, he would stand still and wait for me till I came back. I had my riding whip in my hand.

The hut to my eyes, as I came into it from the sunlight of the plain, was almost dark; there were a few dim figures in it, old men or women. Wawerru, when he realized that he had been run to earth, without a sound rolled over on his face. Then I saw that the long bandages, with which I had taken so much trouble, had been unwound, and that from heel to hip his legs were smeared with a thick coat of cow-dung. Now cow-dung is not actually a bad remedy for burns, since it coagulates quickly and will keep the air out. But at the moment the sight and smell of it to me were nauseating, as if deadly—in a kind of self-preservation I tightened my grip on my whip.

I had not, till now, in my mind associated my success or failure in curing Wawerru’s legs with my own fate, or with the fate of the farm. Standing here in the hut adjusting my eyes to the twilight of it, I saw the two as one, and the world round me grew infinitely cheerless, a place of no hope. I had ventured to believe that efforts of mine might defeat destiny. It was brought home to me now how deeply I had been mistaken; the balance-sheet was laid before me, and proved that whatever I took on was destined to end up in failure. Cow-dung was to be my harvest. I bethought myself of the old Jacobite song:

Now all is done that could he done
.

And all is done in vain
.

I spoke no word, I do not think that I gave out any sound at all. But the tears all at once welled out from behind my eyelids, and I could not stop them. In a few moments I felt my face bathed in tears. I kept standing like that for what seemed to me a long time, and the silence of the hut to me was deep. Then, as the situation had to end somehow, I turned and went out, and my tears still flowed abundantly, so that twice I missed the door. Outside the hut I found Rouge waiting; I got into the saddle and rode away slowly.

When I had ridden ten yards, I turned round to look for my dogs. I then saw that a number of people had come out from the huts and were gazing after me. Riding on another ten or twenty yards, I was struck by the thought that this in my squatters was an unusual behaviour. In general, unless they wanted something from me and would shout for it—as the totos, popping from the long grass, screeched out for sugar—or wanted just to send off a friendly greeting: “Jambo, Msabu!” they let me pass fairly unnoticed. I turned round again to have another look at them. This second time there were still more people standing on the grass, immovable, following me with their eyes. Indeed the whole population of the manyatta would have got on their legs to watch Rouge and me slowly disappearing across the plain. I thought: “They have never till now seen me cry. Maybe they have not believed that a white person ever did cry. I ought not to have done it.”

The dogs, having finished their investigation of the various scents of the manyatta and their chasing of its hens, were coming with me. We went home together.

Early next morning, before Juma had come in to draw the curtains of my windows, I sensed, by the intensity of the silence round me, that a crowd was gathered at a short distance.
I had had the same experience before and have written about it. The Africans have got this to them—they will make their presence known by other means than eyesight, hearing or smell, so that you do not tell yourself: “I see them,” “I hear them,” or “1 smell them,” but: “They are here.” Wild animals have got the same quality, but our domestic animals have lost it.

“They have come up here, then,” I reflected. “What are they bringing me?” I got up and went out.

There were indeed a great many people on the terrace. As I kept standing silent, looking at them, they, silent too, formed a circle round me; they obviously would not have let me go away had I wanted to. There were old men and women here, mothers with babies on their back, impudent Morani, coy Nditos—maidens—and lively, bright-eyed totos. Gazing from one face to another I realized what in our daily life together I never thought of: that they were dark, so much darker than I. Slowly they thronged closer to me.

Confronted with this kind of dumb, deadly determination in the African, a European in his mind will grope for words in which to formulate and fix it—in the same way as that in which, in the fairy-tale, the man pitting his strength against the troll must find out the name of his adversary and pin him down to a word, or be in a dark, trollish manner, lost. For a second my mind, running wildly, responded to the situation in a wild question: “Do they mean to kill me?” The moment after I struck on the right formula. My people of the farm had come up to tell me: “The time has come.” “It has, I see,” in my mind I assented. “But the time for what?”