Red Strangers

by Elspeth Huxley

  A small group of circumcised men attended this class, but the great majority were boys, some of them only five or six years old. Karanja could not help resenting the indignity of being put amongst them. Sometimes they were taught by a female, an elderly European woman with grey hair. “If a woman can be a Christian,” he thought, “it cannot be very difficult; no doubt I shall soon become one too.” But it was much harder than he had hoped, and he was told that it would take at least two years.

  5

  HE still wore the charms that Matu had made to protect him from lions, rhinos and evil magic. One day, when he was bathing in a cold river that flowed past the mission on its way from the forest to the great valley that lay below, a Kikuyu dressed in a European suit came up and saw the charms lying with his clothes on the bank.

  “How can you bring such things as these to the mission ?” he asked Karanja in a stern voice. “Do you not know that they are very evil and come from the devil, who is the enemy of God?”

  Karanja dried his lean, shining limbs slowly in the sun, and laughed.

  “They do not come from the devil,” he replied. “They come from my father, who is a mundu-mugu of great fame.”

  “You are an ignorant man,” the newcomer said. “Do you not know that a mundu-mugu is the servant of the devil himself? No doubt your father has often sacrificed goats to cure people of diseases ?”

  “Certainly he has,” Karanja said. “He is said to have great powers, although of course I myself, being an educated man, do not believe such things.”

  “Yet you wear these evil charms. Do you not know that those sacrifices of your father were made to the devil and not to God?”

  “That cannot be true,” Karanja said, “for often the sacrifices have been accepted and the sickness dispelled.”

  “Those offerings are to the devil, not to God, just the same. And those charms that hang around your neck are the devil’s also. If you are wise you will throw them in the water before they cause you harm.”

  Karanja looked idly at the charms lying on his shirt: a small goat’s horn, a lion’s tooth and a mununga spike full of medicine. It was true that he seldom thought of them now, but without them he would feel less safe in the precarious situations into which he was led. Then a thought struck him, and he asked :

  “If it is true, as you say, that these charms are not liked by God, can they perhaps bring sickness to one who wears them ?”

  “Assuredly,” his informant said. He spoke earnestly, and as one in authority. From a red mark sewn on to his shirt Karanja recognised him as a dresser from the hospital, and therefore one who knew all about disease. “He who worships the devil is sure to fall sick, sooner or later.”

  “I am sick,” Karanja said, “but I thought it came from having slept with a woman in Nairobi who had a thahu. If what you say is true it might perhaps be that God is angry because of these charms.”

  “What sort of a sickness have you got ?” the dresser asked. When Karanja told him he said : “That disease can be cast out in the hospital, because the European doctor, who is blessed by God, has a medicine which he pours into your arm through a needle of iron.”

  “How can I obtain this medicine?” Karanja asked.

  “There is only one way. You must cast these evil charms into the water at once and never think of them again. Tonight you must pray for a long time to God, asking forgiveness. Come to-morrow to the hospital; and if God has heard you, the doctor will be able to cast out your disease.”

  Karanja thought for a little, fingering his charms. He did not want to let them go. Still, if he was to become a Christian, clearly it had to be done; and in any case he could get more from his father later on.

  He got to his feet without another word, picked up the charms and hurled them into the shallow stream. The shining waters opened a white mouth to receive them, closed up, and rippled on.

  “Now I am without protection,” Karanja said, “save that which the God of the Christians can give. To-morrow I will come to the hospital to see what he can do.”

  6

  KARANJA made friends with the dresser and persuaded him to restore the shape of his ears. For some time Karanja had realised that long, hanging lobes looked ridiculous with European dress. Such ears, stretched to hold heavy iron ornaments or blocks of wood, were worn only by old men and by stupid youths from far uncivilised districts, who knew nothing of European ways and dressed uncouthly in blankets.

  He paid a fee of one shilling and the dresser operated on him with a razor-blade on a table made of sticks behind a group of huts. The severed ends of the lobes were sewn together neatly, and the wounds painted with a medicine that stung. It was painful, but the result was well worth while. When the lobes had healed no one could have told that they had ever been pierced and distended, and Karanja no longer felt self-conscious about them in the presence of well-dressed men.

  One day the chief missionary asked to see Karanja’s kipandi. When he replied that it was lost he was told to get another from the D.C. Karioki was given the same orders. Karioki asserted that the danger of being caught by the police could no longer exist; and indeed the D.C. gave them new kipandis without objection. Again they had to make marks on paper with their fingers; and Karanja was not at ease.

  “These smudges are signs by which we can be recognised, as my father can tell one goat from another by the markings on its chest,” he said. “I hope that Pig’s Meat is not looking for us still.”

  “One day I shall return to kill Pig’s Meat,” Karioki boasted. “But I am too busy now. There is a girl in the school here who admires me very much; I am thinking of marrying her.”

  Some days later Karanja was called from his class to find two policemen standing on the grass outside. He looked around quickly, but saw that it was too late to run. His arms fell limply to his side and despair filled his heart. Now he would be taken away and never see again his bicycle or his father.

  One of the policeman shackled his wrists together with iron fetters and the other did the same to Karioki. They were taken by train to Nairobi and left in a big building surrounded by a high wall on the outskirts of the town. Inside were many people, and policemen armed with rifles; and there they stayed for several days. Twice a day they were given food on plates, but it was full of lumps and very badly cooked and Karanja hardly dared to touch it at all.

  At last they were brought before a European in the place where cases were heard. Here they learnt that evil fortune had mastered them entirely. First they were charged with running away from Pig’s Meat, which they had expected; and then with stealing money from the Indian and hitting him over the head.

  Karanja glanced around him in despair when this charge was read. The eyes of the police were like stars, he thought; they saw everything, and no one knew where they were looking. The Indian himself was in court to point to Karioki as his servant; and the man who had sold them the bicycles; and many others.

  The European refused to judge them then. They were returned to prison to be judged later, by another man. The European pointed to an Indian in the court and said :

  “This man is your friend. You must tell him everything and he will speak for you to the big judge when your case is tried in a month’s time.”

  The month was slow to pass. Once the Indian came, and Karanja told him the whole story; but he seemed to take little interest and did not listen carefully.

  “How could the police know that I took the money?” Karioki asked. “I was not seen.”

  “You left the marks of your fingers on the safe, and they were the same as the marks on your kipandi,” the Indian said. “It was very foolish. Next time when you steal remember to cover your hands, or to wipe everything that you touch.”

  Karanja fell into a mood of deep dejection and could scarcely eat. He was convinced, now, that the dresser at Kijabe had deceived him. Evil fortune had clawed him like a leopard, and all because he had thrown the protection of his father’s charms into the river.
r />   7

  KARANJA did not understand the trial at all. He stood with Karioki in a wooden pen. Above them was an old man in a red woman’s dress with long white hair curled like that of the Swahili prostitutes he had seen in Nairobi. The Indian lawyer also appeared to have grown curly white hair. For some reason all those concerned with the trial seemed to be wearing the dress of European women, as boys imitated girl’s clothing when they were circumcised. It seemed to Karanja a most undignified thing for elders in a court of law to do.

  There was a great deal of talk. The Indian told Karanja that he must explain the whole story. He tried to do so, although he was frequently interrupted by the interpreter and forbidden to say things which he had already said; and he did not know who was his accuser. Everyone seemed in a hurry, and there was only one judge. At the end of several muddled hours of talk the interpreter said that he must go to prison for six months and that Karioki must go for two years.

  “That is not just,” Karanja exclaimed. “I did not steal anything. I ran away from Pig’s Meat, but he was a bad man who beat Karioki, and I do not want to go back.”

  “All this is nothing to do with the man you call Pig’s Meat,” the interpreter said. “It is because you did not go to the police when you heard that Karioki had stolen from the Indian. Instead you bought a bicycle with stolen money.”

  “Why should I have told the police?” Karanja said, much surprised. “Is not Karioki of my own age-grade ?”

  “That has nothing to do with it,” the interpreter replied. “You should have gone to the police just the same.”

  Karanja was taken back to the comfortless house behind the high wall in a state of deep dejection. He felt that his life was already ended, that he would never see his father and mother again.

  The prison stood on the edge of the Masai plain, shadeless save for a few scaly gum-trees. It was a place without purpose; but at first it was not as bad as he had expected. There was plenty of food, even though it was badly cooked, and his bed and blankets were cleaner than those he had been given at the fat woman’s hotel in Nairobi. And he no longer had to do the cooking in a charcoal brazier, or pay for his food. But he was very upset when his clothes were taken away and replaced by a blanket, the costume of ignorant men who only understood how to cultivate a shamba.

  8

  WORK in the prison was not hard. Sometimes the prisoners sat in a shed and sewed thick cloth into sacks and sometimes they dug and cultivated in a shamba. For several months they were taken out of Nairobi every day in a truck to work on mending a road. In Nairobi Karanja had become weak from lack of food and from sickness, but now he grew strong again, and a doctor pricked his arm with a needle to cure his disease.

  In spite of these advantages, however, he was unhappy. At first he mourned the loss of his bicycle, and then he was haunted by a desire to see his father and his family. As time crawled on he grew restless and moody, tormented by futile desire. It seemed as if a spring welled within him which could find no outlet, or as if he had been a tree loaded with ripe fruit that stood in a desert where none ventured, so that the fruits rotted and fell uselessly to the ground. Some of his companions, driven by feelings which they did not understand, turned to each other in order to blunt the edge of desire. Karanja was revolted and deeply disturbed; he had never imagined that such unnatural behaviour could occur.

  Time moved like a cloud, without form or boundary, until one morning a warder gave him back his clothes. This surprised him, for he had thought them taken away for good. Then he was taken out of the locked gate alone and told that he was free. The grass of a new season’s growth was green on the plain around him, and he thought: now my mother’s crops will be knee-high, and perhaps after all I shall see my father again.

  “Which is the road to Njoro?” he asked.

  “Njoro is a long way off,” the warder said. “You will need money to get there. You had better stay in Nairobi first. Now, I have a sister who can give you shelter in her house.…”

  “No,” Karanja replied, “I am going to Njoro.”

  The road was long and the journey hot and tiring, but on the eighth day he climbed the hill above the broad valley and reached the long-grassed, wooded country that he knew as home. News of his arrival was shouted along the road ahead and before he reached the homestead he saw his father, bent-backed and thin-legged but laughing like a young man, hurrying through the glades with a bag of medicines over his shoulder to greet his son.

  CHAPTER IV

  Capitalists

  I

  ON his father’s shamba Karanja found order and peace, and escape from the turbulence of the outer world. The freedom to come and go, to eat and sleep as he pleased was sweeter than cane juice; once again events came clothed in reason and propriety, no longer naked in their unpredictability, like sudden flames. He decided that to seek the causes that lay behind them, to search for the end of any road, were foolish pursuits. How could he discover the sources of the river of events, that lay so far away amid such brutal rocks ?

  Matu, to whom he spoke something of these thoughts, said:

  “There is an old saying: a visitor is like a stream. At night he comes, at sunrise he departs; none knows the place of his origin or of his destination. A stream cannot rest, it hurries along; only when it spreads out into a swamp can it nourish the roots of plants with its waters. Do not, therefore, wander like a visitor, or you will become thin and without substance like a stream. It is better to remain in one place, remembering the saying: he who stays under a tree knows what ants use it. Therefore you should seek a wife, and I will pay goats to her father, and then you will be content.”

  “I am ready to do so,” Karanja answered, “but still my thoughts trouble me and I wish that I had been to school.”

  “Thoughts are like fireflies,” Matu said. “They shine brightly but are gone before you can catch them in your hand. Those who chase them cannot see the ground before their feet and fall into pits dug for wild beasts.”

  Karanja asked news of Marafu’s shamba, and of all that had happened during his absence.

  “Marafu is stopping us from cutting down trees for firewood,” Matu replied, “and I do not consider that he pays us sufficient shillings for our work. But he is no longer quite so noisy, and his voice has become softer, more like an elder’s. Strangely enough, it was the woman who taught him good behaviour. Sometimes she, too, grows angry; however, she is a woman, and most women are foolish at times. But she has many medicines to cure diseases and nowadays all the women take their sick children to her. They say that she has stronger magic than I have, but I do not think that so young a woman with only one child, and that a baby, can know much about magic or curing disease.”

  “Marafu has a child?” Karanja enquired.

  “A son. The mother suckled it for three months only, and now she gives it milk from cows. Whoever heard of babies being given warriors’ food? There is something else that has come to Marafu’s: a big thing that runs swiftly across the shamba and pulls the plough. A man sits on its back and it obeys his hand. It makes a great noise, but does the work of a hundred women in a day.”

  Karanja immediately resolved to become the keeper of the noisy object. He could ride a bicycle, and this could not be harder to control. The man who sat on its back agreed to teach him its ways for five shillings. Later, when this man left to attend to his own shamba, Karanja asked Marafu if he could be employed to drive it and the European agreed. For a year he worked as the tractor’s driver, whenever there was work to do. It shook beneath him like a warrior getting ready for battle, but once it had agreed to go it was obedient. He felt like the chief of an army, like his uncle Muthengi whom the warriors had followed into battle long ago.

  2

  WHEN the season of dances came Karanja exchanged his shorts for a length of white calico, put a white cock’s feather in his hair, and went every night to some gathering of young men and women along the Mau. The rhythm of the dance had not been killed by
the alien shoes that had encased his feet. He became famous for his prowess, and for the spicy character of his songs. People came from distant farms to hear in his verses the stirring stories of his adventures : of how he had been to Mombasa and sailed in big boats; of how the Governor had offered to buy his bicycle, which flew faster than a European car, for sixty cows; of his friend Benson Makuna who had been to England and ate food without touching it with his hands; of the large number of women who had implored him to become their lover because of a charm given to him by his friend a court interpreter in Nairobi, who owned three motor-cars.

  It took a year to select a bride. He watched the girls carefully in the shambas, weeding and digging, as well as at the dance. Few resisted his entreaties when he walked back with them after a dance to the doors of their mothers’ huts and told them of his desire to enter. But it was hard, after all his experience, to treat them as virgins, and the question of his marriage was settled for him when a girl conceived and named him as her lover. Her father brought a case before the council and Matu paid the ten-goat fine. She seemed a hard-working, cheerful girl, and Karanja was quite willing to make her his bride. Her name was Ngima. She had not married before because she suffered from bleeding of the nose, an affliction which, the young men said, was certain to make her barren. When Karanja proved the falsity of this assumption he laughed at them as ignorant, superstitious fools. He himself, an educated man, did not believe such old-fashioned things.

  The bride-price, he found, was higher than ever before. Matu had to pay eighty goats, one cow, four fat rams, a barrel of honey and a heavy blanket worth a year’s tax. He complained a great deal at the price, but Karanja knew that he could well afford it. His eldest daughter Wamboi had just been married to a Masai herdsman who worked for a European on a nearby farm. This Masai had seen her at the market and although he had never spoken to her, he had sent messages to Matu offering large payments in cows. Wamboi had at first refused, but the Masai had raised his offer to a point where Matu could no longer resist. Although Wamboi cried bitterly and protested, she had to go. After a month she returned to her mother, following the custom, and said that she was happy enough. The Masai was rich and kind and there was little cooking to do, since he lived on blood mixed with curdled milk, and meat roasted on a grid.