Out of Africa: And Shadows on the Grass (56 page)

“I am,” he concludes in his letter, “carrying my official duties successfully, with dignity and popularity.”

There lives in Copenhagen a talented young journalist, Mr. Helge Christensen, who from boyhood has been keen on ornithology and many years ago got my mother’s permission to study bird life in the woods of Rungstedlund. Mr. Christensen in an international competition won a flying trip to Nairobi and came to Rungstedlund to ask me whether I wanted him to take out greetings to friends of mine in Kenya. I asked him, if possible, to look up Juma and Kamante. But Ali Hassan being away at the time, I felt that it might be a difficult task to pick out by their names only two Kikuyu among two millions. Mr. Christensen, though, held on to his promise and was successful.

Juma he tracked down by going out to the residential district of Karen, named after me, and making enquiries at its central club-house, formerly my own house. He was here told that an old man by the name of Juma from time to time would come up and ask permission to walk in the grounds, “to think there, of the time that had once been,” for an afternoon would walk on the paths beneath the tall trees and then again would disappear. A kitchen toto from the club believed that he knew from where the old man came, and
was taken into the car to point out the rough grass-track winding into the Masai Reserve—a long way, the traveller thought, for an old man to walk in order to meditate on the past. Juma’s manyatta here, below the blue hills of Ngong, surely is one of the loveliest spots in the world. It had, Mr. Christensen told me, grown into a big place and was swarming with young people and children, who thronged round the car. Juma himself was called forth from his hut, a patriarch, full of days, somewhat long in the teeth, a little vague about the present but brightening up as he got on to days gone by, and in the end explaining to his wives and his offspring that his Memsahib had sent out this good Bwana with gifts, thanksgivings for his excellent service in her house. Two eagles, Mr. Christensen told me, circling high above the heads of host and visitor, were pointed out as old friends of the Memsahib’s, eager to have news of her. Juma once had heard them cry “God bless her.” The scream of an eagle, as I myself heard it on a day when I was flying with Denys Finch-Hatton, is like anything but a blessing.

Kamante was found further away from Nairobi, in the midst of a maze of shambas with hemp, corn and sweet potatoes, and of grass-land. I was told that he received his visitor as if he had been expecting him this very afternoon, which may well have been the case, for Kamante was resourceful. Kamante had never shown any faith whatever in my intelligence, yet he now enlarged upon my wisdom and competence, pointing out to my countryman the wide area of land which, against all resistance and intrigue, I had forced the Government of Kenya to yield up to him. Like Abdullahi and Juma he took it that his guest had been sent out as a personal ambassador of mine to get his news and enquire into his wants. He was anxious to send back by him such news and information as I should be interested in, weighing his words and from time to time making a pause to collect his
thoughts. The operation on his eyes had been successful, inasmuch as he could now see his cows. He could not count them, he said, which was a sad thing, but when in the evening they had been brought back into their boma he could make them out dimly, like a multitude of sweet potatoes within a pot of furiously boiling water, thronging and rolling about and jumping upon one another, which was pleasant.

Mr. Christensen has published a small book,
Juma and Kamante
, on his visit to my two old servants. It contains two woodcut portraits of the title-characters; the one of Juma is very good.

Quite recently, and quite by chance, I have in another Danish paper come upon a later interview with Kamante, whom the journalist has succeeded in tracing and running to earth. Kamante is well, and would like to come to Denmark to take service with me once more, at the same time he fears that he is too old, and that it might be better to send me one of his sons. Somewhat uneasy at giving the information—as I am uneasy at passing it on here—Kamante tells the Danish journalist that he has been a year in prison for taking the Mau-Mau oath. I did not know of the circumstance; it has given me matter for thought. Has the deep, unconquerable sceptic here at last met with something in which it was possible to him to have faith? Has the eternal hermit, the “rogue” head of game, by his own choice totally isolated from the herd, here at last through a dark inhuman formula experienced some kind of human fellowship? In order to make up for the awkwardness of the situation, Kamante brings out from his pocket a letter from me to him and shows it to my countryman. “Look,” he says, “Msabu writes to me: ‘My good and faithful servant Kamante.’ ” As again he folds up the letter and sticks it into his pocket, he adds, “And so I am.”

I have had news of another former resident of the farm,
the blind Dane, Old Knudsen, who for some time lived in a small house on it, all salted and embittered through the experiences of a tragic life, but with great flaming inner visions to make up for his loss of sight, a grey and bent indomitable optimist.

Last March I had a letter from an American lady of the University of Maryland. A fortnight before, she had been dining with a Danish economist just back from a recent mission to East Africa; they had been talking about me and my book
Out of Africa
, and he had told her that at the Danish Consulate to Tanganyika he had been given information which he wanted to bring to my attention. When a few days later he had died in his hotel in Washington, Mrs. Stevenson passed on this information to me. “What he had learned from the Danish Consul,” she wrote, “and what I feel that he would want you to know, was that Old Knudsen’s scheme for extracting phosphate from the bottom of Lake Naivasha was
not
wild. Some discovery has been made which verifies his theory. I did not get the details, but I feel that you should know.”

Thus, with deep satisfaction, I now see before me Old Knudsen righted, for a while laying down his harp in order to grip old fishermen’s and mariners’ tools, laughing out in triumph over Old Knudsen’s enemies.

I hear, these days, with intervals of one month, or half a year, from my old servants in Africa.

So there they are, out from their coverts in the woods, in the rays of sunset, treading cautiously still, but looking round them more confidently than when they first came into sight, lifting and turning their heads. It is content to watch you so, friends and comrades, I wish you may wander and gaze there, so high up in the air, in the strange freedom of your hearts, for a long time still. You have kept me company
through many years; I shall not again frivolously doubt your actuality, I shall, from now, leave to you the rich world of reality. And you may hand me over to those dreams of mine which will take charge of me.

Juma has died. But I have recent news of Ali and Kamante.

Ali writes good English now. He has seen my photograph in the paper. “Really and truthfully it makes my heart very much pleased to see your photo. Really and truthfully it fills my heart with joy when I hear your name spoken. Or when I speak your name.”

As I admire his handwriting and grammar, I sometimes seem to see Berkeley’s little wry smile as in his mind he followed a line of wild duck on the glass-clear sky. And I wonder whether one more of them, fascinated by the decoys below, will here be slowing its flight to drop, in the end, like an arrow-head let off backwards by some heavenly archer, into the water of the pond, in order to become respectable.

But Kamante, all through a triple layer of idiom, in a many-times-folded note, manages to preserve his originality. His last letter, of a month ago, ends up:

“I certainly convinced when I pray for you to almighty God that this prayer he will be stow without fault. So I pray that God will be kind to you now and then.”

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

ISAK DINESEN is the pseudonym of Karen Blixen, born in Denmark in 1885. After her marriage in 1914 to Baron Bror Blixen, she and her husband lived in British East Africa, where they owned a coffee plantation. She was divorced from her husband in 1921 but continued to manage the plantation for another ten years, until the collapse of the coffee market forced her to sell the property and return to Denmark in 1931. There she began to write in English under the
nom de plume
Isak Dinesen. Her first book, and literary success, was
Seven Gothic Tales
. It was followed by
Out of Africa, The Angelic Avengers
(written under the pseudonym Pierre Andrézel),
Winter’s Tales, Last Tales, Anecdotes of Destiny, Shadows on the Grass
and
Ehrengard
. She died in 1962.