Red Strangers

by Elspeth Huxley

  “Soon he will be speaking of circumcision,” Waseru remarked to his wife. He adjusted the round ball of black ostrich feathers which capped the tip of his spear, to show that he travelled in peace, and hitched his short cloak of dressed goatskin more securely on his right shoulder. Iron bangles on his forearm caught flecks of sunlight from the shadows, and fine iron chains hanging from the lobes of his ears jingled as he moved. Small goat-horns containing magic hung by more chains from his neck.

  “Circumcision!” his wife exclaimed. “And where will you find the fat he-goat to present to the elders, and the ox to slaughter for your son’s circumcision feast ? Are ownerless goats wandering like birds here in the forest, and oxen sleeping in the trees that you burn down?”

  “Silence, wife!” Waseru said. He struck the butt of his spear on the ground and strode into the sunlight, following a path across the rich green pasture towards a cluster of golden-roofed huts that clung to the hillside like ticks on the flank of a cow. Muthengi’s bare feet padded along the hard red path behind his bent-backed mother, but his spirit was with the smooth-limbed warriors gliding down to the beckoning, treacherous Laikipia plain.

  The path leading to the homestead of Waseru’s father wound along a steep green ridge that lay between two small rivers. A thick mat of short-cropped grass and clover clothed the crest of the ridge, and patches of bush and forest hid the full curves of the shoulders. The bush was thick and full of flowering shrubs. The glowing yellow of Cassia, pure as the note of a bell, mingled with the delicate mauve of muthakwa; down by the rivers the flame-coloured petals of a balsam seemed to reflect the brilliant wings of birds that came to sip the clear, quick-flowing water. Goats swarmed over the uncultivated land, sleek and shiny-skinned, nibbling at the aromatic leaves and juicy bark of young bushes. The tinkle of their iron bells was carried from hillside to hillside by a breeze that lightly stirred the bright-leaved banana-trees growing in the valleys. Millet, sprouting among the stumps of old forest trees, was knee high. The millet rains had fallen generously, the earth was moist and fertile, and the crop good. The air was light and clean in the nostrils, and the home of many birds. Waseru felt pleasure in his veins as he walked, for the sun was warm and satisfying after the cold shade of the forest where his new home lay.

  The morning shadows were still long over the grass when Waseru and his family reached his father’s homestead. A fence of closely-woven sticks surrounded a group of huts, and inside the grass was worn down to expose bare sunbaked earth. Although it was early the old man, Mahenia, had left already for a beer-drink; but his two wives had not yet gone out to their day’s work in the shamba.* The younger of the two was kneeling before a large flat stone and grinding millet for the evening meal. Ornaments of twisted and polished iron hanging from her distended earlobes jiggled like a gazelle’s scut as her body swayed rhythmically to and fro, and her silky skin, well greased with castor oil, shone like a polished gourd in the sunlight. She greeted Waseru and his family with welcoming shouts and laughter.

  “Ee, you come from afar,” she remarked to Wanjeri. “Men must find you irresistible, that your husband takes you where there is none but spirits to lie with you.”

  Wanjeri’s rather sulky face creased into a grin. She threw back her head and laughed until her ornaments jangled.

  “Are not spirits old men, too old for intercourse?” she retorted. “I tell you, it is lonely there. No strangers pass our gateway, and if the fire in my hut goes out, from whom can I take new fire?”

  Mahenia’s senior wife removed a screen of interlacing sticks from the door of her granary, a round hut made of sticks and perched on the top of four poles so that it resembled a beehive on stilts, and extracted from it a calabash of heavy green dough. The children stared at it silently, their eyes round as moons and black as buffaloes, with all the intensity of hunger in their gaze.

  The wife broke off handfuls of dough and gave food to each in turn, beginning with Waseru, and ending with the youngest child. Waseru spat the first mouthful, the spirit’s portion, to the ground, and ate the rest of his share standing a little apart; for it was not right to eat with women, even though a handful of dough hardly counted as a meal. The children gobbled greedily, licking the last traces off their fingers. It was a good rich paste of mashed bananas mixed with ground sorghum and two kinds of bean, and flavoured with leaves of the nettle nyani; and it was the most solid food the family had eaten for a month. Up in their forest home the granary was empty of everything save a small sack of millet, three bunches of bananas, and a few yams.

  3

  WHEN Waseru had eaten he strode with lighter feet along the narrow path, his short goatskin cloak and his sword in its red scabbard swinging as he walked. He was tall and shapely, his limbs smooth and long. His hairless skin was lighter than the average for his tribe, his cheekbones higher, and his nose less flat. A Masai grandmother, sold to a Kikuyu for two sacks of millet in the last great cattle plague, had left her stamp on his features. His hair was done in Masai style. It was divided into tufts, each one plaited with twine, thickly smeared with a mixture of sheep’s fat and red ochre, and tied at the end farthest from the head. The front tufts dangled over the forehead; the back ones were gathered into a queue and hung down to cover the nape of the neck.

  The hut of Irumu the mundu-mugu * lay beyond a banana plantation on the fertile slopes of the next ridge. Brilliant green fronds hung like the languid arms of dancers over the path, and in the shamba the tough tendrils of yam vines twisted themselves around low mukongogo trees. Irumu was at home, sunning himself outside his hut on a low three-legged wooden stool, and meditatively plucking a few stray hairs from his chin with a pair of tweezers.

  His repute as a mundu-mugu stood high. Not only could he divine the cause of a thahu * and remove it with such strict observance of ritual that there was no danger of its persistence, but he could foretell the fortunes of warriors who contemplated a raid, he could make medicine to bring success in war or love, and he could remove curses—all, that is, save the deadly curses laid by smiths, which only a smith could abrogate. He was a man of great influence. When the council of warriors decided to make war, it was always Irumu to whom they sent to read the portents; and if he forecast success, they had no fears of failure.

  Irumu was an elder of the ruling generation Maina and president of the senior council of elders, upon which only those with circumcised children might sit; but he still looked vigorous and full of nervous energy. He had a thin narrow face and a slightly hooked nose, and his eyes were several shades lighter than the usual sloe-black of his fellows. At times they could look as yellow as those of a leopard. His close-cropped woolly hair was dusted with white. He had long, flexible fingers and agile toes. He did not look like a Kikuyu at all; indeed, there were strange legends as to his origin. As a young man his father had migrated towards the east, to the country of the Ndia, and lived there for many years in order to escape from Masai raids. He had returned as an old man, with circumcised sons. Irumu had already become a mundu-mugu, versed in none knew what mysteries, for it was well known that Ndia was a land of magic; strange and dreadful practices of witchcraft and sorcery were prevalent in that savage country.

  Waseru thrust the haft of his spear into the ground outside Irumu’s homestead and entered, shouting as he did so that he came in peace. He greeted the mundu-mugu with great respect and sat down beside him, squatting on his heels. For half-an-hour they chatted leisurely of trivialities—news of wedding feasts, lawsuits, goat transactions, crops. Only then did Waseru broach the subject of his visit.

  He had come, he said, to ask professional advice. After harvest he was going to build a hut on his new land, and he wanted to know where to place it in order that his wife might be fertile and his crops abundant. And, more urgently, his second son Matu had fallen sick. The boy was growing thinner than a twig, and his stomach rejected food. Some malignant influence was at work. No doubt he would die, unless the cause could be revealed and the evil d
riven out.

  4

  IRUMU listened in silence, staring into the ground at his feet, his mobile lips curved in a half-smile. Even after the story was told he did not speak, but sat for so long without moving that Waseru thought he must have gone to sleep. Heat reflected from the red beaten floor of the compound pressed into their faces like a burning hand. Irumu liked to sit under the sky and feel the sunlight soaking through his skin and filling his veins with blood, as it fills the hard fruit of the tree with soft ripe juices.

  Finally he stirred, unstoppered a small bottle of polished black wood that dangled from his neck on the end of a fine chain, and took a deep pinch of snuff. He rose without a word and, bending double to get through the door, vanished into the darkness of his hut. When he reappeared he carried a long, polished gourd, neatly stoppered with a baby gourd that fitted into the neck upside down. He squatted on his stool, arranged his heavy oxhide cloak around him, and spread a goatskin on the ground. Then he opened his gourd and sought the answers to Waseru’s questions in the magic beans.

  He tipped a random number of shiny black beans, fruits of the mubagé bush, into his palm, and counted them on to the goatskin in piles of five. Then he pushed the groups of five together into heaps of twenty, counted the number of beans left over, and poured them all back into the gourd. He shook the gourd slowly back and forth, tipped out another handful of beans and repeated the process. This he did several times. On each occasion he counted carefully the odd number of beans left over when the piles of twenty were made, for in their numbers lay—for those who could read the signs—the secrets of Waseru’s future. At last Irumu spoke. He chanted in a low sing-song voice, striking the palm of one hand with the forefinger of the other to emphasize his points.

  “The rains of the beans will be sufficient, and the millet rains after them,” he said, “and your crops will be good. You will build a new house, but see to it that the door does not look towards the sunset; and if the gate of the compound faces running water your daughters will be barren. See that you bless the hut with beer, and do not cut the poles while the moon is dead.”

  “All that I shall do,” Waseru agreed. “And now tell me why my son refuses food and grows weak as a stem of millet when the ground is hard as rock from lack of rain.”

  Irumu’s chant went on, his long flexible fingers marking each point against a light brown palm. His amber-tinted eyes directed quick glances at Waseru’s face, and then back again to the beans that glistened on the goatskin.

  “Your son Muthengi will grow to be a great warrior,” he said. “When he is circumcised he will go with the young men to raid cattle, and he will win great renown. One day he will kill a Masai warrior who has a spear with a notch in the haft, and he will bring back the spear for the council of warriors to see. That shall be known as a sign, and Muthengi shall become a great leader in war.”

  Waseru became excited over this, and exclaimed that his father had once been a great warrior who had captured many cattle and become rich. Muthengi, his son, would also capture cattle, and have many wives, and so the clan would grow in wealth and power. Then he remembered about Matu’s sickness, and asked whether the boy would recover.

  Irumu took another deep pinch of snuff, returned the beans to the gourd, and counted them, again, on to the goatskin at his feet. As he did so he addressed them softly, asking the cause of Matu’s sickness. Two old men, passing Irumu’s compound on the way to a beer-drink, came in and squatted on their heels to watch. Irumu paid them no attention. At last he spoke solemnly, repeating each sentence in slightly different words to emphasize its gravity.

  “The fat that your son eats is turned into husks in his body,” he said. “It cannot nourish him, and his limbs waste. He is sick because there is a thahu in his body. If it is not cast out, he will surely die.”

  Waseru’s face remained impassive and he asked:

  “What is the cause of this thahu, then?”

  Irumu gathered up the beans, shook them, and set them out again in piles of five and then of twenty.

  “The child has an evil thahu,” he said. “The reason is here, but it is not yet clearly shown. It is a thahu that comes from a woman. Perhaps it came because milk from the breasts of a woman who is not his mother fell upon the child, and brought sickness into him.”

  “I do not know anything of this,” Waseru answered, “but it may be so.”

  “The thahu comes from the child’s mother,” Irumu repeated. “Perhaps because her head was shaved after her child was born by a woman who had been suckled by a child not her own. Or perhaps because she was feeding sweet potato tops to a he-goat, and the he-goat licked her garments, and she did not go to a mundu-mugu to be purified from the thahu of the goat.”

  “She did not tell me of these things,” Waseru said, “but they may indeed have been so.”

  Irumu gathered up the beans afresh, and asked again for the cause of the thahu to be revealed. “Perhaps the thahu comes to the child’s mother from her parents,” he went on. “Perhaps the woman’s father is not satisfied with the bride-price and there was a quarrel between you and him. If the woman’s father publicly cursed you because of this, a thahu would fall upon her child.”

  “It is true that the woman’s father, Ndolia, claims more goats from me because his daughter has given birth to three children,” Waseru remarked. “But before I left my father’s house to cultivate new land in the forest, a he-goat was killed and the quarrel was thrown away in its entrails, and there is no bad feeling between us any longer.”

  Irumu’s restless eyes flickered backwards and forwards from Waseru’s face to the beans. “Now I will tell you which of these causes has brought the thahu to your child,” he said. Again he gathered up the beans and shook them, and again he spread them out in black shining piles. He studied them for a long time before he spoke.

  “The reason for the thahu is here,” he said at last. “The woman’s father is not satisfied with the number of the goats and the gourds of beer you gave him for his daughter. He claims more goats because she has borne you three children, and he has cursed you publicly because you have not paid your debt. The quarrel between you did not finish when the he-goat was slain, and it has brought thahu to your child. You must make peace with Ndolia, and pay him goats for the removal of the curse. And a goat must be slain for the purification of the child, or your son’s body will wither like a plant whose roots are devoured by moles.”

  Waseru’s face remained impassive, but dismay gripped his throat and stomach. This was the diagnosis that his heart had dreaded. Ndolia was a rich man and he, Waseru, poor. He knew that Ndolia despised him as a worthless son-in-law, and, worst of all, as one who neglected his duty towards his wife’s father; yet he did not know how he could get goats to satisfy Ndolia’s greed. Unless he could do so, the child would surely die.

  “Truly, there is wisdom,” he remarked bitterly, “in the saying : ‘The rich man who eats with a stick does not know that the poor man who eats with his fingers is burnt’.”

  5

  SHADOWS from the tall, slender-trunked trees that stood in clumps among the scattered shambas lay in long black bars across the green of grass and bush and millet when Mahenia’s two wives returned to the homestead. The senior wife was bent almost double beneath a heavy load of sweet potato tops, strapped to her back with leather thongs. She was bringing them from the shamba to feed to a he-goat that was fattening in the darkness of a narrow pen inside her hut. A recently circumcised daughter plodded behind with a load of firewood on her back.

  Wanjiku, the younger wife, arrived a little later. She carried two big gourds, golden in the slanting sunlight, on her back. Inside them water rolled a little from side to side as she moved with bent knees, in a sort of shuffle. Behind trotted a small daughter, four or five years old, naked except for a triangular piece of dressed goatskin hanging down in front. A few days before she had cried because she had nothing to carry, while a girl but little older than herself had been giv
en a calabash of water by her mother. So Wanjiku had laughed, and handed the smallest gourd that she could find to her daughter. Now the little girl jogged happily up the hill steep from the river, the water in the half-filled vessel gurgling like a hungry stomach on her back.

  The hut of Mahenia’s senior wife was immediately opposite the entrance. To the left stood Wanjiku’s hut, and on the right was a thingira * where men sat to feed and gossip, and where circumcised boys slept. All the huts were built of solid posts cut from the forest, joined with mud and thatched with pale dried grass. The domes of their circular roofs were slightly blackened, and blue wood-smoke drifted gently up through the thatch like a mist rising from a swamp at sunrise. The eaves hung lower than a man’s shoulder and all who entered had to bend double to pass through the low narrow door. Surrounding the front of the hut, under the eaves, was a narrow veranda where the gourds were stored. Opposite the door of each wife’s hut stood a round granary filled with the harvests of her shamba.

  The air was full of the soft bleating of goats. They were nozzling eagerly at lumps of salt-impregnated earth kept in a trough made from the hollow trunk of a tree. The boys divided the goats into two lots and drove each contingent into the hut to which it belonged. Shuffling and jostling, the goats took their accustomed places in a warm, smoky pen screened off by hurdles of woven sticks. A fire burned in the centre of each hut, and around it were spaced four stout poles supporting the roof. They were encrusted with a thick layer of solidified smoke, and shone richly in the firelight like the black depths of a wise man’s eyes. Beds of boards and sticks, raised on poles off the hardbeaten earth floor and covered with skins, flanked the sides of the huts. The air was densely charged with many smells: from the close-packed goats and their urine, strong and sharp; from the essential oils of wood, clean and bitter; from the red ochre and fat smeared on shining human limbs, sweet and rancid. A subtle compound arose also from porridge steaming in the big cooking-pot, and from bananas roasting slowly in the ashes.