Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness
Page 9
“Yes,” I say.
“Did you?” Mum’s voice expresses doubt that I could really know such a wonderfully imperialistic fact. “Yes, well, she and Phil were staying at the Tree-tops Lodge in the Aberdares in February 1952.” Mum’s eyes go moist. “And they say Elizabeth went up to her room as a princess and came down as a queen, like in a fairy story. We all thought it was very significant, very appropriate that she ascended to the throne in Kenya.”
Mum pronounces the name of the country with a long, colonial-era e—Keen-ya (/ki nja/), as if Britain still stains more than a quarter of the globe pink with its dominion. I, however, pronounce it with a short, postcolonial e—Kenya (k nja). It irritates my mother when I say “Kenya” and she corrects me, “Keen-ya,” she says. But her insistence on the anachronistic pronunciation of the country only adds to my impression that she is speaking of a make-believe place forever trapped in the celluloid of another time, as if she were a third-person participant in a movie starring herself, a perfect horse and flawless equatorial light. The violence and the injustices that came with colonialism seem—in my mother’s version of events—to have happened in some other unwatched movie, to some other unwatched people.
Which in a way, they were.
SOMETIME IN THE LATE 1940S the General Council of the banned Kikuyu Central Association began a campaign of civil disobedience. They were protesting the British takeover of Kenyan land and the colonial labor laws that forced black Kenyans into a feudal system structured to benefit the eighty thousand white settlers. “No,” Mum says impatiently. “No, no, no, you’ve got it all wrong. Eldoret was not taken over from anyone. There hadn’t been anyone living on it before the white man came. It was too bleak and windy for the natives. The Nandi lived in the warm forests around the plateau. Plus, they weren’t farmers. They were cattle people and they were very independent, very savage, very serious warriors.” Mum pauses. “So we all got on rather well together.” Then she gives voice to a common settler sentiment. “It was not the Nandi who were the problem, it was the Kikuyu who were so difficult.”
Known to themselves as Muingi (the Movement), Muigwithania (the Understanding) or Muma wa Uiguano (the Oath of Unity), the rebellion became known outside Kikuyu circles as the Mau Mau. Possibly the name was an acronym of the Kiswahili phrase “Mzungu Aende Ulya. Mwafrika Apate Uhuru”—“Let the White Man Go Back. Let the African Go Free.” Or perhaps it was a mispronunciation of “Uma, Uma”—“Get out, Get out.”
Members of the Mau Mau bound themselves together through traditional Kikuyu oath rituals that were rumored to involve animal sacrifice, the ingestion of human and animal blood, cannibalism and bestiality. They used traditional Kikuyu weapons—spears, short swords, rhino hide whips, and broad-bladed machetes—and frequently tortured their victims, disemboweled them and hacked them beyond recognition. In early 1952 the bodies of several Kikuyu policemen loyal to the British were discovered mutilated and bound with wire, floating in rivers near Nairobi. Not long after, settler famers near Mount Kenya found their cattle disemboweled in the fields, the tendons in their legs severed.
“No,” Mum says, “we didn’t enjoy the Kikuyu. They were very scary and up to all sorts of horrible, funny business. That made us all very anxious even on the plateau. We sent the servants home before dark, locked the house at night and put chicken wire up over the windows. My father went everywhere with his service revolver and my mother kept a Beretta pistol under her pillow.”
Still, nothing happened to the Huntingfords or to any of their friends. Life went on in all its gauzy, cinematic glory. Then one day in mid October 1952, a note arrived at the Huntingfords’ door carried by one of Babs Owens’s syces. The syce was breathless with fright. A Kikuyu insurgent had appeared on the racecourse. “I can’t think why Babs had to fetch my father for help,” Mum says. “You’d have thought, being Babs, she could have walloped the bloke herself, or bitten his ear off or something, but she didn’t. She sent this note to my father and he was a gentleman, so he grabbed his revolver and off he went, across the road.”
My grandfather kept his back to the ruins and made his way cautiously behind the track. In the unfiltered equatorial light, the crumbling buildings from the Italian prisoner-of-war camp set up spooky blue shadows. “The old jail, all abandoned and gloomy,” Mum says. Suddenly my grandfather saw the alleged Kikuyu dart briefly into the open then sink into the dimness of one of the dissolving buildings. “My father edged his way up to the building and fired a warning shot into the building. He didn’t intend to shoot the chap, obviously, but the bullet ricocheted off the walls and hit him—didn’t kill him. Just a wound. But now it was a police matter and my father was carted off to appear in court.”
Mum shakes her head. “A few days later and it would have been fine for my father to shoot a Kikuyu because the British had declared a state of emergency by then. But on that afternoon it wasn’t okay.” A trial was held and my grandfather was sentenced to one day in jail. There was an outcry from the community. “My father was the starter at the races that afternoon,” Mum explains. “He couldn’t possibly spend the day in jail. He was the only one who knew how to do the starter flags.”
After the state of emergency was declared, British soldiers poured into the country and white settlers joined their ranks. By the end of November 1952, eight thousand Kikuyu had been arrested. Far from subduing the tension, attacks against British settlers escalated. Until January 1953, Mau Mau attacks against settlers were isolated and only men were targeted. But on the twenty-fourth of that month, the hacked and tortured bodies of a young British settler family were discovered on their farm—Roger Rucks (aged thirty-seven), his pregnant wife, Esmee (aged thirty-two), and their son, Michael, (aged six). Their Kikuyu cook (tellingly, his name and age were not given in any of the reports) had also been beaten and chopped to death.
Settlers fired their Kikuyu servants, and arrests of suspected Kikuyu insurgents as well as of innocent Kikuyu bystanders intensified. By the end of 1954, British soldiers were holding as many as seventy-seven thousand Kikuyu men, women and children in cramped, unhygienic concentration camps. They forced detainees to work, and if they refused, the prisoners were beaten, sometimes to death. One prisoner, John Maina Kahihu, describes the atmosphere in these camps vividly: “We refused to do this work. We were fighting for our freedom. We were not slaves.... There were two hundred guards. One hundred seventy stood around us with machine guns. Thirty guards were inside the trench with us. The white man in charge blew his whistle and the guards started beating us. They beat us from 8 am to 11.30. They were beating us like dogs. I was covered by other bodies—just my arms and legs were exposed. I was very lucky to survive. But the others were still being beaten. There was no escape for them.”1
Jittery settlers made plans to leave Kenya, hastily selling their farms and setting sail for Australia or Britain. Forever after they would bore to death anyone who would listen about the perfect equatorial light of East Africa. “When-wes” they were called, as in, “When we were in Kenya. . . .” But everyone understood that the old colonial Kenya was over. No matter how many British soldiers were sent to the colony, no matter how many Kikuyu were shot or arrested, the minority’s complacent picnic on the backs of a deeply angry majority was over.
At about this time, Flip Prinsloo returned to the Huntingfords’ door and asked to see my grandmother. Once again, my grandmother sat out on the veranda with Flip and poured them both a glass of homemade wine. “Here’s to us,” she said, raising her glass.
“Ja,” Flip agreed. He turned his glass in his hand for some moments before taking a drink. “Well,” he said after the sting of the wine had subsided enough to let him speak. “You’ve lost this war.”
“Yes, we already know that,” my grandmother said.
They finished their drinks in near silence and then Flip got to his feet. “We’re going back to South Africa,” he said.
“So I heard,” my grandmother said. She lifted the bott
le. “Won’t you stay and have the other half?”
“Nee dankie.” Flip jammed his veldskoen hat back on his head. Then he took a deep breath. “If your daughter wants the horse, I’ll take a hundred pounds for it.” He stood his ground for a moment as if expecting the money to materialize on the spot.
“I see,” my grandmother said.
Flip nodded and in the intervening moments the fragile peace that my grandmother and he had made between the British and the Boers reverted to mutual suspicion. “Good-bye, Mrs. Huntingford,” Flip said.
“God speed to you, Mr. Prinsloo,” my grandmother replied.
My grandmother watched Flip Prinsloo’s retreating back and poured herself a fortifying glass of wine. A hundred pounds was far beyond the Huntingford budget. An advertisement went up on the sports club notice board and another appeared on the notice board at the race grounds. “FOR SALE: Violet.” And then it listed all her achievements: “Winner of this, that and the next thing,” Mum says. “Everyone knew Violet; she hardly needed to be advertised.”
Mum sulked and wouldn’t talk to anyone for weeks. “Luckily no one would buy her,” Mum says. “She was so difficult. Anyway, lots of people were leaving and everyone was trying to get rid of their animals. No one wanted to take on more responsibility.” In the end, Flip Prinsloo couldn’t sell Violet and he had to give Mum the mare for nothing. She smiles. “So that was one good thing that came out of the Mau Mau.”
Although most of their friends had packed up, my grandparents didn’t immediately consider leaving Kenya. “Certainly Australia was out of the question,” Mum says. “And I don’t suppose my parents felt they had any reason to be in Britain. Dad felt Kenyan. It was his home.” So instead of leaving, the Huntingfords bought half a farm on a long, low basin about five miles north of the racetrack. Catherine Angleton, the rich one-legged English widow with whom my grandmother had boarded during the war, bought the other half on the condition that her son Martin could come out to Kenya and live on it.
“Auntie Glug told me Martin was smelly and had a prehensile forehead,” I say.
“Did she?” Mum says, frowning.
“Yes,” I say.
“I suppose you’re going to go putting that into an Awful Book,” Mum says.
“Well?” I persist.
“Oh, I suppose,” Mum admits reluctantly. “Yes, there was a bit of a problem so none of the girls wanted to go out with him and that led to much more serious problems.”
“Like what?” I ask.
Mum gives me a look. “Just more serious problems,” she says darkly.
MUM WAS NEARLY SIXTEEN BY the time the Mau Mau uprising had been quelled in January 1960. Fewer than a hundred Europeans had been killed. Official British sources estimated that British troops and Mau Mau rebels had killed more than eleven thousand black Kenyans, but in a 2007 article in African Affairs, the demographer John Blacker estimated the total number of black Kenyan deaths at fifty thousand, half of whom were children under ten. The insurgency had been quashed, but news of atrocities British soldiers and white settlers had committed made headlines in Britain and the British lost their stomach for the colony. “Independence was inevitable,” Mum says.
In preparation for self-rule in Kenya, African leaders pressed for the resettlement of those Kikuyu who had been incarcerated in the labor and concentration camps during the Mau Mau. In July 1960, government officials arrived on the Huntingfords’ farm and begged my grandparents to take in a Kikuyu family. My grandfather looked out at his little farm, with its freshly planted windbreaks and carefully contoured lands. “I don’t see why not,” he said.
Duly, the Njoge family set up their homestead upwind of Martin Angleton’s little thatched shack. Martin traveled downwind to welcome them to the farm. “And the next thing you know people started teasing my father at the club, asking him if he had put up the banns.” Mum blinks at me, as if the astonishment of this moment has not yet worn off. “It turned out that Martin had gone and got himself engaged to Mary Njoge.” Mum narrows her eyes. “Well, the wedding went off without a hitch. Everyone brought a fish slice or whatever it was. And that was that—the new Kenya.” Mum pauses, “So you can say what you like, but we were all very progressive.” She has to search for the other word. “Yes,” she says at last, “egalitarian.”
IN 1961, THE YEAR SHE turned seventeen, it was decided something should be done with Mum. “My parents wanted me to learn how to be useful and that wasn’t going to happen as long as I stayed in Kenya.” They sent her to Mrs. Hoster’s College for Young Ladies in London and put her up in a women’s hostel in Queensgate. “I’ll never forget—as soon as you opened the door, there was this awful stench of overcooked cabbage,” Mum says. “Then I suppose they got extractor fans and blew it all up into the ozone and now it doesn’t smell so bad, but back then the whole of England reeked of boiled cabbage.”
Mrs. Hoster’s College for Young Ladies was a very reputable establishment opposite the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, “run by a bunch of scary, tweedy lesbians. Although some very noble people went there.” She shuts her eyes and counts them off on two fingers. “Prince Philip’s assistant went there, passionate about being posh. And the Dalai Lama’s sister—she went there too, passionate about the cause.”
Every morning, students at Mrs. Hoster’s College for Young Ladies were stationed behind Remington typewriters. “About two tons of steel, and they would put on records of military music and we were supposed to type in time to the Coldstream Band. Clickety-clack, clickety-clack.” Then Mum gives a rendition of herself typing. “On the other hand—pause, ping—pause, ping—pause, ping. That was my corner.” And in the afternoon shorthand practice. “Well, I could never read back what I had written—it just looked like a madwoman’s scrawl to me.”
Mum sighs. “It took me longer to complete the course than everyone else because I was not passionate about being a secretary. And I had chronic sinus problems.” She hesitates and then corrects herself. “Actually, not really. It was London in the sixties. There was so much going on. I didn’t have sinus problems at all, I had hangovers.”
“You were a hippie?” I ask.
“Hippie?” repeats Mum coldly. “Don’t be ridiculous, Bobo. No, these were the years of the Cold War; lots of lovely intrigue and hanky-panky—the Profumo affair, Mandy Rice-Davies, Christine Keeler. We all confidently expected that we were going to get blown to pieces by the Russians at any moment; it was terribly exciting.” Mum shakes her head, “And I wasn’t going to die learning bloody shorthand, that’s for sure.”
Catherine Angleton offered to hold a ball so that my mother could come out. “Not out of the closet,” Mum says, as if this is what I am about to suggest. “I was supposed to creep out from behind the typewriter to be formally presented to society. But I didn’t want to be a debutante. I didn’t see the point. Anyway, the sort of Englishmen who went to those balls would have sneered at me because I was a colonial.” She sighs. “They’d all have been terribly snobbish and listened like hawks for a slip in my accent; if I made the slightest mistake with my pronunciation, they would have pounced.”
YEARS LATER, MUM TRIED TO drill proper accents into Vanessa and me. Hours and hours of BBC radio were streamed into our ears in the hope that Received Pronunciation would rub off on us. And she did what she could to bring our voices down an octave or two—our high-pitched Rhodesian accents made us sound like adenoidal chipmunks. Auntie Glug thought we sounded sweet; Mum thought we sounded appalling.
My current accent is, according to Mum, appalling too—a hybrid Southern-African-English-American patois, barely recognizable as the language of Elizabeth II. My sister isn’t much better. She came home from the time she spent in London in her late teens and early twenties with what Mum calls “a dreadful cockney twang” to complement her colonial clip. “I can never tell if Vanessa is deliberately trying to wind me up,” Mum says, “or if she just does these things because she doesn’t care.”
In addition to being bombarded by Received Pronunciation, Vanessa and I were instructed in a bewildering list of prohibitions regarding speech and vocabulary. It was vulgar to talk about money, which suited us because we seldom had any worth mentioning. (Money was also supposed to be frivolously frittered—when Mum finally came into a small inheritance upon her mother’s death in 1993, she spent it on books, horses, Royal Ascot hats and a protracted visit to London’s West End, where she saw every show playing.) It was also vulgar to talk about one’s health. “No one really wants to know how you are,” Mum said, “so just tell everyone you’re marvelous.” We had to say napkin instead of serviette, loo instead of toilet, veranda instead of stoep, sofa instead of settee, and what? instead of pardon? We were told it was rude to ask if someone wanted “another drink.” You always asked if they wanted “a drink” or “the other half.”
At school, however, the matrons gave us milk of magnesia for our bowels even when we told them we were “marvelous.” The teachers thought what? and loo were uncouth. They corrected Vanessa and me, and told us to say pardon? and lavatory. Meanwhile, half the students at our school thought being posh meant excessive primness and drinking their tea with a raised pinkie. The other half didn’t care at all about manners and cultivated a deliberate unposhness. I did my best to fit in.
“Well, it’s up to you,” Mum said. “But don’t blame me if you’re invited to tea with the Queen, and don’t have a clue how to behave.”
BY DECEMBER 1963, it was decided that all that could be done for Mum at Mrs. Hoster’s College for Young Ladies had been done. “After two whole years, I still couldn’t type and I couldn’t do shorthand.” Her eyes flame. “They tried to tame me and they failed.” A week later, Mum left London and landed in perfect, equatorially lit Nairobi. “I had my hair dyed blond and cut shoulder length, very sophisticated,” she says. “Those were the days when you dressed to the nines to fly and I wanted to look my best for Kenya.” She wore navy blue winklepickers and a pale blue linen suit. “Off the rack but it gave the impression of being very posh—short enough to be intriguing but not so short as to upset the horses.” Mum smiles. “And oh, I’ll never forget the first breath of Kenyan air when I stepped off that plane—so fresh, so fragrant. And the light was so perfect, such unpolluted clarity.” She gives me a look. “Lots of people have tried to write about it, you know, but hardly anyone can capture it. You had to be there. You had to see it for yourself.”