The Flame Trees of Thika (20 page)

A small and skinny bullock was marked for the feast and tethered near the house to be fattened on maize and sweet-potato tops, and Robin announced that if any other beast
were to be injured, everyone would be fined two rupees and the carcass sold to Indians at Thika. The ox-teams remained intact.

No special ceremony seemed to be involved in Sammy’s marriage, merely the making, transport, and consumption of large quantities of beer. The liquor, made from sugar-cane, fermented in large gourds which sat like squat, plump-bellied elders round the fire in the middle of a hut bubbling quietly away, with driblets of froth, like the old man’s saliva, trickling down their narrow necks.

Once the beer was ready, various women attached to Sammy’s household stoppered the big pots with leaves, strapped them on their backs, and set off for the homestead of the bride’s father, who was one of Kupanya’s fellow-elders and friends.

About this time, Njombo reappeared from a further visit to the reserve. The sparkle had gone out of him, he was listless and almost sulky, in spite of the stone stables, now completed, and two new ponies, a handsome bay called Lucifer (a name he did not quite live up to, in spite of Arab blood) and Dorcas, a chestnut mare. Whenever Sammy appeared near the stables, Njombo looked the other way or walked off, his face blank and stony. The gay little cap he had worn, made from a sheep’s stomach, had been abandoned; his ears lacked ornament, his blanket was of the plainest, he had given up laughing and joking with his friends. When I asked Sammy what was wrong he replied with contempt: ‘Njombo is a fool. If a man cuts down a banana tree in his shamba, can he see bananas in his cooking-pot?’ This did not seem to clear up the matter.

I cannot remember how I discovered the truth, that Sammy was marrying Njombo’s intended wife. Poor Njombo could not pay the bride-price, everything he owned or could borrow had to go towards the blood-fine owing to the family of the Palmers’ murdered headman. So Sammy had stepped smartly into the breach, and carried off the girl.

No one disputed the justice of this, not even Njombo, but he had, for a Kikuyu, an undisciplined spirit and he could not help resenting his fate.

‘Perhaps it would have been better to have gone to prison,’ I suggested.

‘How could I go to prison ? If I had done so, who would have paid the debt?’

Meanwhile the mission-boy produced for Hereward, whose name was Kamau, had gone to Fort Hall and been arrested, and would soon be tried for something he knew nothing about.

‘That is unfair,’ I suggested.

But Njombo was unsympathetic.
‘Huyu,’
he said – that man, that creature – ‘he is like a bustard who stalks about in the long grass and looks with envy at the ostrich. His father owes a debt to Kupanya, so he must help to pay it.’

It was about this time that the District Commissioner came from Fort Hall to make inquiries about the murder. He wore a khaki uniform with shining buttons and a large topee with a badge in front, and was attended by a retinue that impressed us with its smartness and size. When he went on a walking safari, he was preceded by thirty or forty porters carrying loads, but this time he rode up on a mule without his camping outfit, and stayed the night. At first he was rather stiff and distant in his manner. He was an official, and it was incorrect to be too friendly with riff-raff on the farms. Tilly had laid out a small steeplechase course, and after tea he was made to join in a race with several of the neighbours. These steeplechases led as a rule to several falls and much hilarity, and by the end of this one the District Commissioner, Mr Spicer, was laughing and joking like everyone else. He apologized for not having come before, but said he had about a quarter of a million Kikuyu to deal with and only one assistant who was down with fever, and he himself had been collecting hut-tax; and in any case chief Kupanya had sent in a prisoner.

Next morning he held an inquiry. He sat on a camp-chair under a tree while everyone squatted round him. One after the other, witnesses recalled the fight which had led to the death of the Palmers’ headman. The accused youth, they said, had seized a
rungu
(one of the heavy-headed clubs that warriors carried) and bashed the headman in self-defence.

‘If it was in self-defence,’ Mr Spicer asked, ‘why did the accused receive no injuries?’

The headman, they said, had gone for him with a knife, and Kamau’s agility had saved him from injury.

‘Who is paying blood-money to the dead man’s family?’

This question provoked such a mesh of explanations involving relationships and goats, that Mr Spicer was soon wrapped round in argument like Gulliver pinioned by Lilliputians, quite unable to break out. He selected three or four witnesses, instructed them to report at Fort Hall in so many days’ time, and came in to breakfast.

‘I hope that boy will not get a very long sentence,’ Lettice said. ‘He looked so under-sized to be a murderer, and not at all fierce.’

‘Mission-boys,’ Hereward exclaimed with distaste. ‘The ruin of perfectly good natives. Just what you’d expect.’

‘I always suspect mission-boys,’ Mr Spicer agreed. ‘Not of the crime, but of being picked out to be accused of it; no one likes them very much. But if all the witnesses agree on oath, and the accused man says he’s guilty, then it’s difficult not to convict. However, in this case there’s the plea of self-defence….’

‘Let us hope it succeeds,’ Lettice remarked. ‘Even so, it’s sad to think of him languishing in prison.’

‘They very seldom languish,’ Mr Spicer said. ‘I have to count the prisoners quite often, and there are nearly always too many. The first time I did this, I found the prison population almost twice as large as it should have been. Food was short in the reserve and the warders had found places for a great many of their relatives, who treated the jail more or less as a club, and gave part of their rations to their wives. It is a very easy jail to escape from, but all our trouble lies the other way, in keeping people out.’

‘All the same,’ Lettice persisted, as he prepared to mount his mule. ‘I hope you won’t be too hard on that poor little creature.’

Mr Spicer put on his topee, and seemed at once to change from an ordinary person into someone altogether more grave, resplendent, and aloof. Even his expression altered, and his tone of voice. He adjusted his topee with its glittering badge, said distinctly: ‘I think you may trust in British Justice,’ and rode off.

‘That hat has a kind of magic in it, like Samson’s curls,’ Lettice reflected. ‘His self-assurance roosts in it, and can be taken on and off.’

‘Well, it is the uniform,’ Hereward said with understanding.

For a month or two we heard no more of the case, and then
one day Kamau the mission-boy reappeared, looking much fatter, and pleased with himself, and wearing a new shirt.

‘I am not guilty,’ he said, using the English words, though stiffly, as if they were a bad fit.

‘Well, it is no affair of mine,’ Robin replied. The foundations of our stone house were being laid slowly, with the aid of Hereward’s Indian
fundi
, and his mind was full of the complications of building. Kamau said he would like to work for us, and that he was a clerk, who could look after stores and tickets. Robin doubted this, but signed him on for a very small wage in this capacity. Sammy shook his head afterwards, and said that nothing but harm would come of it.

‘Why did the
D.C.
return him?’ Sammy demanded rather crossly. ‘He said that he had killed the headman. And all the witnesses agreed.’

‘Perhaps the
D.C.
thought that they were all lying,’ Robin suggested. ‘As indeed they probably were.’

‘It is not a good thing,’ Sammy said firmly, without explaining why. He had, of course, become an ally of Kupanya’s, which was a great help to us, as we never went short of labour. I sometimes saw his young wife, Kupanya’s daughter, about her tasks near Sammy’s homestead, or on his shamba, which occupied the choicest part of our farm. She was called Wanjui, and was jaunty and attractive, with supple limbs as soft as new-moulded clay, and was scarcely more than fifteen years old. Now that she was married her head was shaven and she wore a beaded leather apron and a great many coils of wire, for Sammy was a rich man and could afford to keep her well. She went with his second wife (the senior was in Masailand) to hoe the shamba, or plant maize, or harvest millet, according to the season. So far as we could see she was gay and happy and, if she regretted Njombo, she showed no sign. Njombo was a younger and more dashing sort of man, but not nearly so rich.

Some months later, after the rains, Sammy reported to Tilly in a gloomy manner that Wanjui was sick, and asked her to provide medicine. After Tilly had visited Wanjui in the cavern of her hut, she sent for Maggy Nimmo. Mrs Nimmo always came under protest, saying that she was a nurse no longer, and had no equipment, and was always expected to do doctor’s work, but as
a rule she did come, jogging over on a mule in a very long divided skirt.

‘It’s the usual story,’ she said to Tilly when she had looked at Wanjui. ‘A miss, and all sorts of dirty messes applied to make matters worse. How these women live at all is beyond me, mutilated as they are for a start. What can one do for the girl in that filthy dark hut with every sort of infection ? There’s only one chance, to get her into hospital.’

By now a branch line had reached Thika, and a train ran each way three times a week. This made us all feel very civilized. The train was not well equipped for sick people, and the five miles to Thika in an ox-cart or mule-buggy were still an obstacle, especially in the rains, when the two streams we had to cross engulfed their home-made bridges and turned into impassable torrents. Still, for eight or nine months of the year a sick person, if not too sick, could be got to Nairobi in six or seven hours with luck, provided that he fell ill on a Monday, Wednesday, or Friday.

Tilly fixed up some blankets in the mule-buggy to make a bed. When everything was ready, Sammy appeared in the doorway looking sheepish and said that Wanjui had refused to go.

‘Then she must be taken,’ Tilly said.

Sammy shook his head. ‘Some relatives have come…there are two old women…they have their own medicines….’

Tilly was furious, but it was no good. Sammy himself would have sent her, but in this emergency the word of a husband carried little weight. The matter had been taken over by Kupanya’s family. Mrs Nimmo reported that two old crones were in possession of the hut and that a witch-doctor with a gourd full of spells was squatting outside, and a goat tethered near him ready for sacrifice.

‘That girl will die,’ she said, ‘if she doesn’t have proper treatment. If I had my way I’d take her in by force.’

This was impossible. Sammy now supported the old women, and Wanjui remained in her hut. They had managed things in this way for centuries, and in any case the journey would very likely have finished her off. Kamau came up and said that he wished to pray for Wanjui, but this could only be done in his hut, so he wanted leave for the rest of the day. Robin replied that he
could pray just as well in the office, but Kamau said that God would not listen to him there, and they had a theological argument.

My own interest was centred on the goat marked down for sacrifice. It was all so unfair on the innocent goat that I resolved to see if I could rescue the animal. This had to be a single-handed, secret business, for I knew that Tilly would forbid the exploit as firmly as the Kikuyu would resist it. In fact I was not supposed to know what was going on at all, but as I was doing my lessons in the sitting-room where most of the discussion took place, the gist of the matter did not escape me.

After lunch, instead of resting on my bed as I was supposed to, I slipped out to Sammy’s compound, where I expected everything to be in a state of drama and activity. But it seemed to sleep as usual in the sun; a few small children played around in the dust, a woman sat in the shade of a hut making a basket out of creeper-twine, there was no sign of Sammy or the old crones. And where was the doomed goat? A little corkscrew path took off from the compound and vanished into a plantation of tall maize. I followed this through a green, rustling forest, and came to an uncultivated patch round a tree. In the shade of the tree several men were squatting, doing something that I could not see on the ground. I watched for some time without daring to move, lest they should be angry, lest I had stumbled on some secret rite. But there did not seem to be anything secret about it and the men did not look round, so I walked up to see what was going on.

I was too late to save the goat. Its inside had been silt open, some of its organs lay on the ground and it had been partially flayed – all sights to which I was well used, and did not find remarkable. The point was that the goat was still alive. A man held its jaws to stop it bleating, but for a moment I saw its eyes, and the feeble twitchings of its raw and broken legs. I then turned and ran all the way back. Tilly found me on the lawn scratching Twinkle’s back, a treatment of which she was very fond. She started to scold me for neglecting my rest, but noticed something wrong, and inquired whether I had been out without a hat, an error that was thought by everyone to result in instant death.

‘Nothing must ever happen to Twinkle,’ I said.

‘That would be a dull life,’ Tilly pointed out. ‘She’s getting big enough to look for a husband.’

‘Then we must get one for her.’

‘One duiker is quite enough,’ Tilly said firmly. She had been obliged to have all the flower-beds surrounded by wire netting, but Twinkle leapt over these and the beds had now become more like prisons than features of a garden, with barbed wire entanglements all over the place. Now and then Twinkle would butt people in the backside and then walk off unconcerned, as if contemptuous of the fuss they made. Tilly lived in the hope that the call of the wild would operate, but I was convinced that Twinkle was too fond of me to leave us for the bush.

‘Sooner or later’, Tilly added, ‘Twinkle really will have to go.’

‘No, no, whatever happens, nothing must hurt Twinkle.’