Read Online The Flame Trees of Thika by Elspeth Huxley - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Elspeth Huxley
Ads: Link
of leather sandals. He brought a chit from Randall which said: ‘You will find this boy reliable and clever, so long as you keep him off the drink. He is half a Masai, so despises the Kikuyu, but the other half is Kikuyu so he understands them. If you give him grazing for his cattle, he will think you a king.’
I became friends with Sammy. To the Kikuyu he was stern and often arrogant, but to us he was always polite and dignified. The Kikuyu, as a rule, were not much interested in their surroundings. Although they had a name for all the shrubs and trees and birds, they walked about their country without appearing to possess it – or perhaps I mean, without leaving any mark. To us, that was remarkable: they had not aspired to re-create or change or tame the country and to bring it under their control. A terraced Italian landscape or an English farming county is a very different matter from the stretch of boggy forest first provided as the raw material; it is the joint creation of nature andman. The natives of Africa had accepted what God, or nature, had given them without apparently wishing to improve upon it in any significant way. If water flowed down a valley they fetched what they wanted in a large hollow gourd; they did not push it into pipes or flumes, or harass it with pumps. Consequently when they left a piece of land and abandoned their huts (as eventually they always did, since they practised shifting cultivation), the bush and vegetation grew up again and obliterated every trace of them, just as the sea at each high tide wipes out footprints and children’s sandcastles, and leaves the beach once more smooth and glistening.
Sammy took more note of things. He showed me nests of the small golden weavers that built in swamps; neatly-woven purses, lined with seed-heads, depending from bent-topped reeds and giving them a look of pipes with long, thin, curved stems; he followed the yellow-throated francolin whose clutch of speckled eggs, laid under a grass-tuft, was as hidden as the weavers’ nests were plain.
Also he introduced about half a dozen of his little native cattle to graze on our land.
‘This is a bad place for cows,’ he said, ‘so I shall bring only a few, enough to keep me from hunger.’
‘Where are the rest?’
‘My father herds them for me with his own.’
It was his father who was the Masai. ‘My father’s cattle are as many as the gazelle on the plain. When he moves them, it is like droves of zebra who seek water in the dry season. My father’s cattle are fat as lice. These Kikuyu cattle, they are thin as grasshoppers.’
Unlike the Kikuyu, he always made the most of his wealth and importance. If you asked a Kikuyu how many goats he had, he would shake his head and answer: ‘How should I own any goats? I am a poor man.’ The Kikuyu looked in others for the cunning they possessed themselves. If you believed a man to be well-off in goats and cattle, it was ten to one you were thinking of taxes, or levies of some kind. The poor, thought the Kikuyu, were like lizards who could take refuge under stones and exist even if they lost their tails. To the Masai, this attitude was contemptible. A man’s glory resided in his herds and flocks, and ifhe had no glory, what sort of man was he? As for risking the loss of them, any Masai felt himself able to defend his own against all comers, even against the Government. They would do as no man told them, only as their own sense of fitness prescribed.
Sammy did not at first bring a wife with him, but a boy, some kind of relation: a red, greased boy who had exactly the look of a buck that pauses for an instant to await some infinitesimal movement or sound that will send him flying like a spear from the hand. This boy prepared his master’s food and acted the part of page to a medieval knight, and Sammy stalked about like a squire, creating around himself an aura of feudal authority.
One day he showed me how he bled his cattle. A Kikuyu seized the
I became friends with Sammy. To the Kikuyu he was stern and often arrogant, but to us he was always polite and dignified. The Kikuyu, as a rule, were not much interested in their surroundings. Although they had a name for all the shrubs and trees and birds, they walked about their country without appearing to possess it – or perhaps I mean, without leaving any mark. To us, that was remarkable: they had not aspired to re-create or change or tame the country and to bring it under their control. A terraced Italian landscape or an English farming county is a very different matter from the stretch of boggy forest first provided as the raw material; it is the joint creation of nature andman. The natives of Africa had accepted what God, or nature, had given them without apparently wishing to improve upon it in any significant way. If water flowed down a valley they fetched what they wanted in a large hollow gourd; they did not push it into pipes or flumes, or harass it with pumps. Consequently when they left a piece of land and abandoned their huts (as eventually they always did, since they practised shifting cultivation), the bush and vegetation grew up again and obliterated every trace of them, just as the sea at each high tide wipes out footprints and children’s sandcastles, and leaves the beach once more smooth and glistening.
Sammy took more note of things. He showed me nests of the small golden weavers that built in swamps; neatly-woven purses, lined with seed-heads, depending from bent-topped reeds and giving them a look of pipes with long, thin, curved stems; he followed the yellow-throated francolin whose clutch of speckled eggs, laid under a grass-tuft, was as hidden as the weavers’ nests were plain.
Also he introduced about half a dozen of his little native cattle to graze on our land.
‘This is a bad place for cows,’ he said, ‘so I shall bring only a few, enough to keep me from hunger.’
‘Where are the rest?’
‘My father herds them for me with his own.’
It was his father who was the Masai. ‘My father’s cattle are as many as the gazelle on the plain. When he moves them, it is like droves of zebra who seek water in the dry season. My father’s cattle are fat as lice. These Kikuyu cattle, they are thin as grasshoppers.’
Unlike the Kikuyu, he always made the most of his wealth and importance. If you asked a Kikuyu how many goats he had, he would shake his head and answer: ‘How should I own any goats? I am a poor man.’ The Kikuyu looked in others for the cunning they possessed themselves. If you believed a man to be well-off in goats and cattle, it was ten to one you were thinking of taxes, or levies of some kind. The poor, thought the Kikuyu, were like lizards who could take refuge under stones and exist even if they lost their tails. To the Masai, this attitude was contemptible. A man’s glory resided in his herds and flocks, and ifhe had no glory, what sort of man was he? As for risking the loss of them, any Masai felt himself able to defend his own against all comers, even against the Government. They would do as no man told them, only as their own sense of fitness prescribed.
Sammy did not at first bring a wife with him, but a boy, some kind of relation: a red, greased boy who had exactly the look of a buck that pauses for an instant to await some infinitesimal movement or sound that will send him flying like a spear from the hand. This boy prepared his master’s food and acted the part of page to a medieval knight, and Sammy stalked about like a squire, creating around himself an aura of feudal authority.
One day he showed me how he bled his cattle. A Kikuyu seized the
Similar Books
