Out of Africa: And Shadows on the Grass

by Isak Dinesen

  Farah was a Somali, which means that he was no Native of Kenya but an immigrant to the country from Somaliland further north. In my day there were a large number of Somali in Kenya. They were greatly superior to the Native population in intelligence and culture. They were of Arab blood and looked upon themselves as pure-blood Arabs, in some cases even as descendants of the Prophet. On the whole they thought very highly of themselves. They were all fanatical Mohammedans.

  The Natives of the land, the Kikuyu, Wakamba, Kawirondo and Masai, have got their own old mysterious and simple cultural traditions, which seem to lose themselves in the darkness of very ancient days. We ourselves have carried European light to the country quite lately, but we have had the means to spread and establish it quickly. In between, an oriental civilization, violent, cruel and very picturesque, gained a foothold in the Highlands through the slave and ivory trade.

  The finest ivory in the world comes from East Africa, and the old slave traffic, a long time before the discovery of America, was carried on along these coasts. From here slaves were freighted eastward to Arabia, Persia, India and China, also northward to the Levant; you will see little black Negro pages in old Venetian pictures. From here came the forty black slaves who, together with forty white, carried Aladdin’s jewels to the Sultan on their heads. Zanzibar was the great centre of the trade. The Sultan of Zanzibar, I was told when I was there in 1916, was still paid an appanage of £5,000 as compensation for his loss of income from the slave trade. I have seen, at Zanzibar, the market-place and the platform where slaves were put up for sale.

  The old commercial intercourse has left its traces in the language of the country. Each tribe of East Africa has got its own language, but all over the Highlands a primitive, un-grammatical lingua franca is spoken: Swahili, the tongue of the coastal tribes. Small children even, herding goats and sheep on the plains, would understand and answer as we asked our way, or questioned them about water or game, in Swahili. I spoke Swahili to my Native servants and labourers on the farm, but as the farm lay in the Kikuyu district, our particular local jargon contained many Kikuyu words and turns of phrases.

  The trade also brought the Somali to the country. Most likely Farah’s ancestors had been enterprising buyers-up, very likely also hunters and robbers in the Highlands, and possibly pirates on the Red Sea.

  The Somali are very handsome people, slim and erect as all East African tribes, with sombre, haughty eyes, straight legs and teeth like wolves. They are vain and have knowledge of fine clothes. When not dressed as Europeans—for many of them would wear discarded suits of their masters’ from the first London tailors and would look very well in them—they had on long robes of raw silk, with sleeveless black waistcoats elaborately embroidered in gold. They always wore the turbans of the orthodox Mohammedans in exquisite many-coloured cashmeres; those who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca might wear a green turban.

  The dark nations of Africa, strikingly precocious as young children, seemed to come to a standstill in their mental growth at different ages. The Kikuyu, Kawirondo and Wakamba, the people who worked for me on the farm, in early childhood were far ahead of the white children of the same age, but they stopped quite suddenly at a stage corresponding to that of a European child of nine. The Somali had got further and had all the mentality of boys of our own race at the age of thirteen to seventeen. In such young Europeans, too, the code of honour, the deadly devotion to the grand phrase and the grand gesture is the passion urging them on to heroic deeds and heroic self-sacrifice, and also at times sinking them into a dark melancholy and resentment unintelligible to grown-up people. The Somali woman seemed to have stolen a small march upon her male, and from the time when she can first walk until venerable high age presents the picture of the classic jeune fille of Europe: coquettish, wily, covetous beyond belief, and sweetly merciful at the core.

  I had read the old Nordic Sagas as a child, and now in my intercourse with the Somali I was struck by their likeness to the ancient Icelanders. I was therefore pleased to find Professor Ostrup, who is an authority on both nations, making use of a common term to characterize Arabs and Icelanders: he calls them “attitudinizers.” The same ravenous ambition to distinguish themselves before all others and at any cost to immortalize themselves through a word or gesture, lies deep in the hearts of the sons of the desert as it did in the hearts of the untamed, salt young seafarers of the Northern Seas.

  On the African plains the picture of Ejnar Tambeskälve, the unrivalled young archer, the friend of King Olav Tryggveson, who was with him in the naval battle of Svoldr in the year 1002, was brought back to me. As Ejnar’s bowstring burst with a loud boom and the King through the din of the battle cried out: “What burst there so loudly?” he screeched back: “The Kingdom of Norway off thy hand, King Olav!” The wild-eyed warrior boy, standing up straight in the stern of the ship, may have felt with satisfaction that now what was to be achieved had been achieved. And we who today read about him may agree with him, since by now few people will remember who won or lost the battle of Svoldr, or what were the consequences of it, while Ejnar Tambeskälve’s grand mot has been remembered through a thousand years.

  In my dealings with Farah and his tribe I felt that whatever else I might risk from their hand, I did not run the risk of being pitied—no more than I would do in my dealings with a young boy at home.

  Personally I have always had a predilection for boys, and have at times reflected that the strong sex reaches its highest point of lovableness at the age of twelve to seventeen—to get it back, in a second flowering, at the age of seventy to ninety. So were the Somali from the first day irresistible to me. With the later European settlers, however, they were not popular.

  I myself came out to the Protectorate of British East Africa before the First World War, where the Highlands were still in very truth the happy hunting grounds, and while the white pioneers lived in guileless harmony with the children of the land. Most of the immigrants had come to Africa, and had stayed on there, because they liked their African existence better than their existence at home, would rather ride a horse than go in a car and rather make up their own campfire than turn on the central heating. Like me they wished to lay their bones in African soil. They were almost all themselves country-bred and open-air people; many of them were younger sons of old English families, schooled early in life by elderly, dignified keepers and stablemen and were accustomed to proud servants. Themselves untamed, with fresh hearts, they were capable of forming a Hawkeye-Chingachgook fellowship with a dark, untamed nomad or hunter; they accepted and trusted the Somali, as the Somali accepted and trusted them.

  During the war, and the first years after it, no new settlers landed. But in the following years an energetic advertising of the Colony of Kenya as a country of unique economic possibilities was started in England, and “Closer Settlement” was made the catchword. It brought out a new class of settlers, people who had grown up and lived in one town or one community in England, and who were strangely provincial compared to the African Natives, who were at any time prepared for anything. Plots of land were also given out as rewards to British non-commissioned officers, most of whom were city people, who in the loneliness of the great landscapes felt that they had been promised more than they were given.

  To me it was a sad programme. From the point of view of emigration, I reflected, Kenya, with an altitude and a climate in which white people could not take on manual labour, and with a vast Native population, would never be an area of great moment. When I first came to the country there were about five thousand white people there; she might, I thought, possibly take in ten times as many. But then, I was told, Australia and New Zealand and Canada could at the same time, take in up to fifty or a hundred millions. And from the point of view of the country itself, the “true home of my heart,” a closer white settlement was a dubious benefit, and it was the quality, not the quantity of white settlers which we should have at heart. I laugh, and I suppose I ought to blush, when I call t
o mind that at this time I wrote to a very superior political personage in England and developed my views to him. I am indeed touched when I remember that he did really send an answer to my letter, in a courteous, if noncommittal note.

  To these later arrivals to the country the Somali, her earliest immigrants, seemed haughty and unmanageable and were, I believe, on the whole as intolerable as to me and my friends they were indispensable. So it came that our particular clan of early settlers—arrogantly looking upon ourselves as Mayflower people—might be characterized as those Europeans who kept Somali servants and to whom a house without a Somali would be like a house without a lamp. Here were Lord Delamere and Hassan, Berkeley Cole and Jama, Denys Finch-Hatton and Bilea, and I myself and Farah. We were the people who, wherever we went, were followed, at a distance of five feet, by those noble, vigilant and mysterious shadows.

  Berkeley Cole and I, in a private jargon of ours, distinguished between respectability and decency, and divided up our acquaintances, human and animal, in accordance with the doctrine. We put down domestic animals as respectable and wild animals as decent, and held that, while the existence and prestige of the first were decided by their relation to the community, the others stood in direct contact with God. Pigs and poultry, we agreed, were worthy of our respect, inasmuch as they loyally returned what was invested in them, and in their most intimate private life behaved as was expected of them. We watched them in their sties and yards, perse-veringly working at the return of investments made, pleasantly feeding, grunting and quacking. And leaving them there, to their own homely, cosy atmosphere, we turned our eyes to the unrespectable, destructive wild boar on his lonely wanderings, or to those unrespectable, shameless corn-thieves, the wild geese and duck, in their purposeful line of flight across the sky, and we felt their course to have been drawn up by the finger of God.

  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 hea
d. “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.