Red Strangers

by Elspeth Huxley

  All the same, the magic of making words visible fascinated him, and one day when he was taking flowers to the house—for Sasi, like Kichui, indulged in some secret ceremonial connected with flowers—he asked whether he could learn the magic too. Sasi said yes, but it would take him a long time—two seasons, perhaps three or four.

  “It is not a magic at all,” he added. “It is a piece of work, like making an ear-ring or a bead belt. It must be taught slowly; no person can learn in a month.”

  “A bee does not start with the honey-comb,” Matu agreed. “All things must be learnt by degrees. But if this thing requires skill, why do you teach children, who are not wise like elders and have no knowledge of magic and ceremonial and the law?”

  “Because children are quick to learn new ways,” Sasi replied, “and God loves them.”

  “But a great many children die,” Matu objected, “and then the teaching is wasted, like seed thrown into a stream.”

  4

  THE other stranger, Sasi’s brother, appeared to be a sort of mundu-mugu, but Matu could not believe that his methods were sound. Sickness, as was well-known, came from a thahu which only purification could remove, or from the malignant activities of spirits of the dead. Until the basic cause was known, the spirit responsible could not be appeased or driven out. Sasi’s mundu-mugu gave his patients medicines to swallow or to rub on their wounds, but he made no attempt to find the true cause of their illnesses. He did not even make use of lime or of the stomach contents of goats, without which there could be little control over supernatural forces. A mundu-mugu who used such superficial methods was like a cultivator who cut the stems of weeds with a harvesting knife, leaving the roots to sprout again.

  Matu decided to test the mundu-mugu’s powers for himself. He complained of pains in the stomach and in his legs and arms. The doctor did not consult the beans to discover the cause; all he did was to give Matu a white powder dissolved in water, which turned out to be a purgative. Matu could not find that it had any other effect. He went to Sasi and asked:

  “Is this medicine of your brother’s able to free a man from the attacks of spirits ?”

  “Spirits are not the cause of sickness,” Sasi said.

  Matu smiled at Sasi’s ignorance, and, to humour him, asked: “What, then, is the cause of sickness?”

  “Sickness comes when the body is unable to do its work, perhaps because it is tired or has been given the wrong food, and sometimes because of very small animals which get into the blood.”

  “It is troubled by spirits, not small animals,” Matu informed him. “Among our people there are men who can drive away these spirits with magic. Can your mundu-mugu drive away these small animals you talk of?”

  “Sometimes he can, but not always. A man can only be cured of his illness if God wishes him to live.”

  “God likes men, and always wishes them to live, unless he is angry at something and sends a pestilence. It is only spirits whose intentions are evil. Has your mundu-mugu a magic to make barren women conceive?”

  “No; it is God who decides whether a woman shall conceive.”

  “How could God wish a woman to be barren?” Matu protested “Only her enemies, or her husband’s enemies, or malicious spirits, would bring such an evil thing upon her. Can this mundu-mugu, then, cure impotence in men?”

  “Sometimes, if God wishes it.”

  “I have a sister, Ambui, who has been cursed, and her legs have swollen up until they are the shape of an elephant’s. Can he remove the curse and make her legs thin as they were before?”

  “That is impossible; there is an evil in her blood which no one can drive out.”

  “Can he restore life to the body of a man who has been poisoned?” Matu persisted. “Or, if a man’s finger is cut off, can he cause another one to grow ?”

  “Such things can only be done by God.”

  “Then I do not think that your mundu-mugu will be very much use to us,” Matu said. “Many people go to a mundu-mugu to get protection against poison, or because their wives are barren, or because their legs swell up. A wise mundu-mugu is able to deal with such things.”

  Nevertheless Matu observed that the mundu-mugu knew of a neat way to sew up cuts with a bent iron needle, and had a black medicine that stung like hornets and that seemed to heal wounds better than cowdung. The children said that he had given them a strong powder to drive out worms, and had a medicine to soothe the pain of burns. But apart from these things Matu could not see that the mundu-mugu, as a fellow practitioner, had anything to teach.

  5

  MATU went one morning to the ceremony of offering prayers to God, and was deeply puzzled as to its purpose. The rains had been fair, there had been no raids or pestilence and Sasi appeared to ask nothing of God that was worthy of his attention. Uncircumcised children joined without understanding in song, no sacrifice or tribute was offered, and Sasi mumbled his prayers into the earth instead of lifting his face to speak to God. The whole ceremony was so irreverently conducted that God would certainly pay no attention.

  A sight that he witnessed a few days later confirmed his opinion that Sasi was quite unfit to intercede with God. Sasi’s wife was being sent away in a wagon because she had been ill, and before she left Sasi put his arms around her and embraced her openly, in front of the ox-drivers and many others. Matu turned his head away for fear some further indecency should assault his eyes. It was worse than a breach of good manners; it was obscene. To put a man with so little sense of decency in charge of religious ceremonies would be an insult to God.

  When he went to receive rupees for his month’s work, he asked Sasi to explain a statement that Kamau had made, but which he could not possibly believe.

  “I have heard,” he said, “that your God, who lives in the sky, does not wish a man to have more than one wife. Surely this cannot be so?”

  “It is indeed so,” Sasi replied. “To have many wives is a very great sin.”

  “But this cannot be true!” Matu again persisted. “Only poor men have one wife, and God does not like poor men.”

  “Nevertheless God forbids more than one wife,” Sasi said. “A man and a woman should be together always, and when they are dead their spirits become as one.”

  “But why is this?” Matu asked.

  “It is the law of God.”

  “And in your country, does everyone obey such a law?”

  “Yes, everyone. There is no man with two wives.”

  “That is the most remarkable thing that I have ever heard,” Matu exclaimed. “What, then, does a man do when he is rich? And if he cannot marry many wives, what is the object of wealth? Does not God, then, wish his people to increase?”

  “Yes, if they keep the law.”

  “Then he must wish them to have many wives, who will bear children to increase their clans,” Matu said. “One woman cannot bear many children; but the clan of a man with ten wives increases greatly. This God of the strangers is not like ours. No doubt it is best for every people to have their own God.”

  “There is only one God,” Sasi said. “I have come to teach this to the Kikuyu, who live in an ignorance as dark as night. If you work here for two years, I will explain to you all these things.”

  “I cannot do that,” Matu said. “I have a wife, and goats, and a shamba; but I will bring you more eggs.”

  Matu went home deep in thought and more confused than ever before. But a solution of the greatest of all the mysteries concerning the strangers, the mystery of why they had left their own homes, began to appear. They had rebelled, perhaps, against the cruel and senseless law forbidding a man to take more than one wife; they had come to a place where God desired them to have as many wives as they could afford.

  6

  ABOUT the time that Matu’s first child was weaned, Muthengi sent for him and ordered him to take a number of young men to a place in the Masai’s country called Nanyuki. They were to carry loads for the strangers, but Matu was to be an overseer; he would
not have to carry anything himself. He offered to pay a young bull to escape the task, but Muthengi refused, and so he was obliged to set off for Nanyuki with food and blankets and a charm for protection against lions, a group of thirty youths under his command.

  At Nanyuki the camp of the stranger, whose name was Kiberenge, was like a white rock in the midst of a brown swirling pool of Masai cattle. The air quivered with bleats and lowings, like the string of an archer’s bow when the arrow is shot. Above the camp hung a grey mist of dust and over the cattle a wavering cloud of flies. The great bush-speckled plain Laikipia was sun-sodden and weary of waiting for rain, but in the afternoon the thick, coloured clouds of hot weather were still massed heavily over a knife-edged horizon.

  A deep silence fell on Matu and his men as they approached the camp. They could not walk at ease among so many Masai, any more than a man could stare unflinching at the noonday sun. Unconsciously their muscles tautened as if to grip the spear and their feet itched for flight. They passed close to a group of warriors who were driving a herd of cattle into the enclosures for the night. The sun was in their red wild faces and on the blades of their spears, and it seemed as if they shone with blood. The two groups passed in silence, but the air between was brittle as a dead twig

  From Kiberenge’s servants Matu learnt that the Masai were about to leave Laikipia with their cattle and their goats and all their possessions.

  “The grasses of Laikipia are kept low by the cows of the Masai,” Matu said. “How is it that the warriors have agreed to go?”

  “It is the orders of the Serkali,” his informant answered; “that is, the ruler whom the strangers obey.”

  They started from Nanyuki early in the morning, when the sky was white behind Kerinyagga and the sides of the mountain the iridescent purple of a grain of maize. First went the mobs of Masai cattle, lowing protests to the morning and leaving a darkened track in the spear-white dew. Masai warriors swooped like lean darting birds on their flanks, pigtails and short cloaks flying in a steady wind. Behind them came sheep in brown bleating waves and then the women, driving donkeys half-submerged in hides, cooking-pots, water-gourds, blankets and other gear. Small children trotted by their side with fly-sealed eyes, and the sullen elders, carrying light spears, brought up the Masai rear. Then marched a short column of soldiers, their red caps burning like scarlet flowers on the grey-white plain, and after them a long file of Kikuyu porters, two hundred in number. Some carried bits of Kiberenge’s many possessions —his tent, his soft bed, many sharp-edged boxes of peculiar foods that were found inside metal vessels, and various bundles of extremely awkward shapes—and others bore many sacks of maize, ground very fine for the soldiers to eat. At the end walked the stranger’s servants and behind them, at the rear, Kiberenge himself, on a brown horse.

  Matu walked among the porters to see that they did not lag behind or throw away their loads. He swung from his hands two objects containing fat and small captive flames to light Kiberenge’s tent at night. He was impressed with them because of the piece of plaited cord which burnt perpetually without being consumed; as soon as possible he intended to buy one for himself.

  7

  THEY marched for five days across the plain, camping each night by a small thorn-margined river, and for three more over the cold tufted shoulder of the high mountain Sattima and past a lonely reed-fringed lake called O1 Bolossat. The Masai slept by their cattle around their own fires, aloof from the Kikuyu and the soldiers. Their hearts burnt with anger like a blazing tree, but they would not allow the flames to break through their flesh. They were leaving forever the pastures that their cattle had found sweet, the plain that they, the Purko, had taken away from the extinguished Laikipia section of their own tribe.

  On the afternoon of the eighth day they came suddenly to the edge of a great valley, the like of which Matu had never imagined. It was so deep that cattle beneath would appear smaller than woodlice crawling over stones at a man’s feet. It was so wide that no one could see whether any rivers flowed down the blue hazy escarpment that formed the far wall; and the forest that clothed that distant mountain-side was like the fur of an animal’s pelt. Below, in the valley, lay a big lake, blue as a wild delphinium, enfolded by a rib of dark trees. Although Matu stared for a long time at the valley’s grey-green floor dancing beneath him under a haze of heat, he could see no shambas at all. Everywhere there was only grass, grey before the coming of the rains, flecked like a brindled cow with trees and belts of bush.

  “Can all this belong to the Masai?” he asked in amazement. “Can this, also, be their cattle’s pasture ?”

  “The Masai once called it theirs,” one of Kiberenge’s servants answered. “But their manyattas lay far to the south, near the lake they call Naivasha. These pastures in front of us are bad, and when cattle are grazed here they grow thin and die. Now the strangers have built a road of iron in this valley. They have brought along it their own cattle and sheep, and driven the Masai away. Their sheep are white all over and very fat, with wool as thick as thatch on a well-roofed hut.”

  The descent into the valley was long and steep. They dropped down through bamboos and forest trees, leaving the cold thin air of the heights for the valley’s warmth. That night they camped at the hill’s foot and next day they came to the shores of a big lake.

  Here Matu saw the iron road, like two endless snakes twisting along the white-floored valley. They camped by its side, and after dark a huge black fire-breathing beast went by, making a great noise. Matu was disappointed, for he had been told that it breathed out long shafts of fire and this one did no such thing. But he saw many sights that were strange and new : huge flocks of long-legged red birds standing in the lake; big-nostrilled cows that lived under water; great quantities of food being taken from the iron wagons; an instrument that was held between the lips and made a shrill noise like a bird. Above all he was impressed with the long strands of wire, so long that the end was not in sight, stretched between poles by the side of the road.

  Some of this wire ran overhead and some at the height of a man’s waist; this, he was told, was for keeping cows in one place. Such prodigality was almost beyond belief. A short length of wire, enough to encircle a woman’s arm five or six times, was worth a goat. The wire along the road must represent the value of a number of goats too great to be encompassed in one man’s mind. For the first time he began to realise dimly the incalculable wealth of the strangers. This was borne in on him again when he went to an Indian shop to buy a new blanket. He had seen several of the wagons that moved by themselves advancing before a column of white dust along the road. He decided that he would buy one, for he was tired of walking about at the orders of the servants of the Serkali. The Indian laughed and said it was impossible, so much did these wagons cost.

  “I am working for the Serkali,” Matu persisted. “Kiberenge will certainly give me a large number of rupees when my task is over. The sum might, perhaps, be sufficient.”

  The Indian laughed again. “Do you think that you, a Kikuyu porter, could buy one of these things, which are called motor-cars?” he asked. “Even among the strangers it is only the richest who can do so.”

  “How many rupees, then, do they cost?”

  “I do not know,” the Indian answered, “but at least a thousand goats.”

  Matu was astounded, but he believed the Indian—he had seen at least a thousand goats’ worth of wire already—and went sadly away.

  8

  AT the camp by the lakeside, called Nakuru, Masai sheep died in large numbers. In a few days the column moved on to the valley’s far edge, where the steep wall which enclosed it began to rise. This wall, like the one they had descended, was thick with forest, but the trees were different from any that Matu knew.

  They entered this forest the next morning. There was no track. A few short, squirrel-eyed hunters clad in grey monkey-pelts came down to guide them along faint winding elephant paths. The Masai warriors were told to stack their spears and help t
he porters to cut a track along the hunters’ path wide enough for cattle to tread. The porters followed, crawling like a column of ants through tough, interlacing undergrowth, under rough-barked junipers whose branches were festooned with light green Spanish moss as if a thousand feathery waterfalls had been arrested as they fell.

  The Masai murmured savagely among themselves when they were told to cut the path. Before they had led the way two hundred paces they threw down their knives, turned, and stalked back in a body to where Kiberenge was sitting on his horse.

  They would not drive their cattle any further, they said. In the forest the cattle would certainly die; already many beasts were sickening from cold.

  “We wish to return to Laikipia,” they continued. “That is our country; in the blood of our cattle we have eaten the grass of the plain. Turn your feet, then, and lead us back.”

  Kiberenge argued with them for a long time. Matu watched their faces and was afraid. He did not understand the Masai tongue, but their words were like the bite of spears. At last Kiberenge shouted an order and the waiting soldiers sprang into life. They took their rifles in their hands, spread out in a crescent behind the cattle and drove them into the forest without waiting to see what the owners were going to do.

  The Masai gathered together angrily, like swarming bees. But there were elders with them, and women driving donkeys, and vast flocks of ailing sheep; they were like hawks trapped with birdlime on their feet.

  Soon the Masai cluster broke and a tall warrior led his fellows along the path in the cattle’s wake. Once he stopped and thrust his spear deep into the ground as if he was transfixing an enemy’s heart. He passed close to Matu, who looked with terror at his face. His chin was tilted upwards but his eyes did not see the treetops. His look was prouder than a lion’s, blacker than an eagle’s. Only when all the warriors had driven their sheep into the forest did Matu feel safe. Now at last the plundering Masai, he thought, would leave him and his clan in peace. Now the pastures of Laikipia, and all the world that lay beyond, would be open to his own people. It was sweet to see the humiliation of the Masai and the downfall of their pride, to know with certainty that they would not return. The strangers were clearly the allies of the Kikuyu, for they had driven away the ancient foe.