Tefuga

by Peter Dickinson

  “And what’s more,” I said, “I don’t believe you care a brass farthing about the poor native. It’s just your way of getting at men because you haven’t got one of your own!”

  All this at the absolute top of my voice, like our natives in the compound, tho’ I was standing with my nose only a few inches from hers. The men positively must have heard, but I didn’t care. She tried to interrupt, but I wouldn’t stop. When I’d said my say I stalked back to the dining-room, leaving her to come along or not as she pleased. It was too funny—or it would have been if it hadn’t been us in it—the men sitting there pretending they hadn’t heard anything and me and Miss Cadbury—she must have a hide like a rhinoceros—absolutely despising each other and nobody daring to talk about anything except fishing. And I’d arranged with Ted that after the sweet course I’d take her out for a bit and leave the men alone to smoke their cigars! Well, that was off, for one thing.

  But actually me winning the fight made me feel so well and uppity that I didn’t really start thinking about what she’d said for quite a long time. I suppose I thought she was so awful she couldn’t be right about anything. But when Ted had taken them all off to catch the last ferry (Bevis has organized a sort of White Man’s camp across the river) and I was sitting alone I began to understand and realized that actually that might be it. I did know you got sick like that—I just hadn’t put two and two together. Not as stupid as it sounds, ’cos you’re sick half the time in Africa anyway. So feeling very scared I snuck off to look at my thingy. They did tell me it was important and I used to, always, when we started but I must have got out of the habit. Of course I’ve sort of looked, but not properly. It’s horrible, horrible Africa that’s done it. Everything here rots. Everything goes wrong. Just two tiny splits, but they must of been enough. Isn’t it strange how you live in a sort of dream world where you feel safe and nothing’s going to go wrong, and then the worst thing of all happens right inside you! I don’t know what to think. I don’t know how to feel. I know there are ways of not having babies after you’ve started, but I don’t know how to find out. Or who to ask. It’s only last night I realized, but I seem to have been swooping up and down for days! Even had moments when I felt rather excited, just knowing I can. And then right down again, like knowing I’ve started a disease which isn’t ever going to get well—I mean, even after it’s born somebody’s got to take care of it—and now there’s this wriggler inside me swelling and swelling, a little more every day, till I burst. Ted’s guinea worm. Ugh! I know it’s different, but that doesn’t help, just knowing.

  Ted got back last night in absolutely tearing spirits about me giving Miss Cadbury such a wigging. I’d been in bed for an hour and was longing for him. Terribly down and frightened. I hadn’t the heart to tell him, and now I think I’ll put it off a bit longer. I don’t feel guilty not telling him—in fact sometimes, in my downs, I feel almost as tho’ it wasn’t his baby at all. It’s Africa did this to me, so really it’s Africa’s baby.

  Pull yourself together, Bets! Mustn’t start thinking like that. Anyway, I’ll jolly well have to tell him before someone else does! Miss Cadbury knows, for a start, and she’ll tell everyone. Luckily we won’t be seeing them before Tefuga, and anyway men don’t talk about this sort of thing. Tefuga’ll be the end of the story, all that old rubbish cleared away. Time for a new start. It’ll be lots easier for the poor man then.

  Fifteen

  Jackland came sweating through the bush. There had been several minor delays where the tyre-tracks had disappeared on hard ground and he had needed to cast about, but there had also been places where the headlights had failed last night to show him a possible way through and he had now been able to take a short cut. By all outward signs, then, he was roughly on schedule, but there was an inward miscalculation of which he only gradually became aware, not his estimate of distances, but of his own ability to cover them, and of the effect that two or three years may have on the physical endurance of a man in later middle age. Jackland was by no means soft. Though he smoked too much and drank quite a bit at times, he also enjoyed using his body to the point of self-punishment, and assumed that he would be able to cope better than most with journalistic treks to hard places. It had so happened that his last few assignments had not involved that kind of test, so he had had no warning of the mild but definite slippage that had taken place. What should have been a five-hour tramp was going to take him six, the last three under the full heat of Africa.

  At first and for some time he assumed he was making the progress he expected; the sameness of the bush landscape gave him no clues. It was the condition of his own body as the heat increased that slowly made it clear to him that it was not the miles that had stretched but his pace that had shortened. He had imagined he had an hour to spare. Now it was doubtful whether he would reach the camp by noon.

  Various options presented themselves. He could give up the attempt to be on time, slow down, rest in patches of shade; he could stop completely and sit out the noon heat—perhaps Burn would send out a rescue mission, following the tyre-tracks; or he could increase his speed and try to make the rendezvous. The risk in the last course was that he might so exhaust himself that he would collapse, possibly having wandered in the last delirium away from the tracks. In that case he would nearly certainly die. Jackland had always been a cautious campaigner—had twice in the past saved his own life and those of his companions by this trait—but this time he chose the risk. He revised his calculations and deliberately forced another two inches on to his stride.

  He very nearly made it. Coming over a slight undulation he saw ahead the same phenomenon his mother had recorded—above the grey mass of the thorn-belt a line of darker vegetation, genuinely green, running into the distance to left and right. He held his watch at arm’s length and peered through sweat at the blurred digits, then drove his legs into a shambling lope. Sweat streamed all down him, mixing with dust and encrusting into the folds and seams of his face. When his head tried to loll he jerked it upright, a furious-looking gesture, implying perhaps that he himself could not understand his dangerous obstinacy, and whether it was a mere sense of honour or something else—though he had told her flatly that he had never in his life loved anyone—that made it matter that he should keep his promise to Miss Tressider.

  He was well into the old track through the thorn-belt when a loud rattle arose, penetrating the rasp of his breath and the thudding of his blood. He halted, gasping, and tried again to make out the time on his watch, but his eyes refused now to focus. The slamming rotor rose, out of sight behind the trees. Quickly the noise dwindled southward, leaving only the faint ticks and whirrings of the unnoticed creatures that made their small livings among the thorns.

  Jackland shook his head. There was no shade under the noon sun so he sat down where he was, too exhausted, and perhaps dispirited, to brush away the insects that at once buzzed round him. He did not move till the noise of a large truck’s engine reached him from the direction of the river. He found a niche in the bank of thorns at the trackside and stood in it to let the thing pass. The truck braked just beyond him. Three or four soldiers climbed down and a sergeant squeezed round from the front. The sergeant asked him where he’d been and whether he had seen the Sarkin. Jackland shook his head. The sergeant cuffed him, tentatively, as if experimenting with the sensation of treating a white man in this fashion, but then with more vigour and enjoyment. Jackland continued to shake his head. Perhaps he was genuinely refusing to answer, or perhaps he had driven himself so far that he now did not understand what was happening to him. When he collapsed the soldiers picked him up and lifted him into the back of the truck, which then drove on.

  Sixteen

  Sat Dec 11

  I am going to write this as tho’ nothing was different, nothing had changed. It’s the only way I can think of. Perhaps it’s a providence I started keeping this stupid diary in the first place, as tho’ I’d known at the start I
’d need it for this in the end. Then I’ll give it to Elongo (not Sixpence—he was never part of things) and tell him to take it out into the bush and find a termites’ nest and bury it inside, and the termites will chew it up and it will be gone. A sort of juju, I suppose, making Africa take it all back, so’s I can go home and pretend none of it happened. Not to me, anyway. To someone else with my name, far away in a hot country where I’ve never been. It might work.

  Oh, I’m so glad I’ve got an excuse! To go, I mean. I’m not interested in the baby—perhaps that will come. (Or perhaps it will be born with MADE IN AFRICA written invisibly somewhere on it, so’s only I can see.) But I’ve got to have it now, so I don’t have to come back, ever. I haven’t told Ted yet. It doesn’t seem fair, while he’s got all this terrible mess to deal with. I know what he’ll say, tho’. He’ll want to put in for a job in one of the other colonies, where you’re allowed babies, so we can go and live there. No. That won’t do. I don’t want Africa at all. Or India. Or anywhere except England. But first I must try and work my juju.

  Well, after the jollifications and parades the nobs went back to Kaduna and left Ted and Bevis to tidy up. At least they’d seen enough of the problem to understand there’s got to be a proper Resident and two D.O.s, or just censusing and assessing is going to take five years. Loads of work for Ted anyway. But first off, before any of that we had to get everything hunky-dory between the Kitawa and the new little Emir before he went away to school, which meant having a ceremony at Tefuga, with us there, part of it, so the Kitawa could really see we were both sides’ friends and everyone was going to be nice to everyone from now on. Then, at the last minute, a D.O. called McCrum went mad and shot himself on the other side of Soko which meant Bevis had to dash off. So it was just Ted and me.

  The tsetse season is over so we rode out, without any horrid Hausa either. They’d got to come separately so the Kitawa could see we weren’t part of the same old gang—a bit of seeing is far better with natives than any amount of telling. So the trip out was lovely, like a tour with no work. We paid calls at the villages, of course, to pick up fresh bearers, and they almost fought for the honour of carrying our stuff. Lots of them were going our way anyway, you see, to be at the ceremony, so it was a good thing for them if they got paid for going. And such smiles! Still very shy of me, tho’. I was full of electricity still, and they might get a shock, you see. Sad, I thought. I kept thinking of that time when Atafa Guni held my hand at the burnt village, and how I felt the easy friendship flowing between us, until she asked me to kill Kama Boi. It would have been nice if I could have gone back to that with one of them, somehow. There was something else I kept wondering about. Those scrawny old electors we’d talked to out in the bush, Ted and me, why weren’t any of them women? Elongo’d told me you get women elders in the villages quite often, so there ought to have been. Probably it was because the Hausa didn’t like it, and the electors were really there to choose a Hausa. But I kept remembering how really everything I’d done I’d brought off ’cos of the women, and ’cos of being a woman myself, and now they were being left out. It didn’t seem fair.

  Anyway, we had a jolly ride out, camped once, and got to Tefuga next day, late in the morning. It was rather exciting ’cos the nearer we got the more people we saw, and by the time we were almost there the bush was absolutely streaming with them, all coming to the ceremony, whole families together—whole villages, happy but not nearly as noisy as Africans sometimes are. They’re a secret people, the Kitawa. Very.

  We set up camp in the old place and Ted went off to have a palaver with the new Emir (with his advisers, really, but we had to pretend). He didn’t need me. I didn’t mind ’cos I truly wanted to go off on my own and find Femora Feng and talk to her. It would have been so awful if the only time we’d met had been with her crouching in the river bed, grey with fright, and me pretending to paint Tefuga Hill so I couldn’t even look at her properly. There was plenty of time. Nothing was due to happen till after the worst heat was over, then some Kiti dancing, then the ceremony on the hill at sunset.

  I wandered about the village looking for someone to ask. It wasn’t as easy as I’d thought. Lots of them didn’t belong, just going through on their way. Such masses, too, floods, streaming towards the hill. All across the river bed, like ants. It was funny how they managed not to come near me. They sort of flowed apart, leaving a space round me, my white island. In the end I saw a girl going into a hut and I waited outside and trapped her and asked her to take me to Femora Feng. She looked v. dubious. She’d got a little pot of something in her hand. I could’ve ordered her to do what I said but I didn’t want to start off on that foot so I just asked, as tho’ I’d been a Bakiti too. She told me to wait and ran off. After about ten minutes she came back and beckoned and I followed her out, sort of sideways through the bush, quite a long way, till we came to a place which I thought was one of their gardens ’cos there were mats all round only bigger and newer than sometimes. The girl pulled a mat aside, just enough to make a slit, but she covered her eyes with her hand before she poked her head through. Then she stepped away and someone the other side opened the mat a bit further to let me in. I said thank you to the girl but she had her head turned right away.

  Inside was full of women. I don’t know how many, more than a hundred, but too crowded to count and—this is difficult to explain—sort of not separate from each other. You see, they’d gone there to get painted up for the dancing, all those lovely, naked, graceful bodies covered in great streaks, white and ochre and a super rich raw siena which I wished I’d had in my box and little round circles of almost ultramarine—all over their bodies, like bright lizards. Dazzling and confusing, so till you looked hard you couldn’t be sure whose bits belonged to who. But marvellous too. I don’t think I’ve ever seen people looking so beautiful, so dressed to kill, tho’ I saw Queen Mary and her court at Bournemouth on a special visit before the war, all with osprey feathers and yards of lace and dripping with jet and pearls. They weren’t as grand. In fact they were vulgar, compared.

  The woman who’d let me in passed two empty pots to the girl outside (paint-pots—I should’ve known) before she shut the mat and faced me. She was painted already, her face a complete mask, but she had the right wide clear open gaze. I thought for a mo it might be Atafa Guni till she spoke.

  “Femora Feng speaks,” she said. “A strong spirit in Betty Jackland.”

  And she wasn’t afraid of me at all. She was triumphant.

  I wished her a strong spirit back and wondered what to say. This wasn’t what I’d really wanted. I mean, rather like expecting to have a long easy chat with the vicar’s wife on the morning of the church fête when she’s trying to get everything organized. Then, worse still, I realized that all the others had stopped doing anything and were listening.

  “You are all very beautiful,” I managed to say.

  “It is for the ancestors,” she said.

  “How do you make this blue?” I asked.

  I’d reached out my hand to touch one of the light spots on her upper arm, but she pushed it away, polite but firm.

  “It is not spoken of,” she said.

  I’d got it all wrong. Everything much too still, like being in church. And them all listening, as tho’ they were just one person, one woman.

  “Why do you come to Tefuga again?” she said.

  “I come because my husband comes. He must watch the ceremony so that everyone can see that all is right between the Kitawa and the new Emir.”

  That wasn’t what they wanted. I could feel their disappointment.

  “But I also come to talk with you, Femora Feng,” I said. Better. Much better.

  “What do you say to me?”

  Oh dear. What I meant was I’d come to chat about ordinary things, children and husbands, and dear Elongo, of course, and how much I admired him. That wasn’t what she meant. She was expecting a message. They all
were. A message from the magical white termite which had bitten the great black horse in the neck and made it fall down and die. Best I could think of was to try and remember bits of the speech Ted had written for little Azikoflo and turn them into Kiti. They were nice and simple, ’cos of A. being only a child. Even so there were lots of ideas the Kitawa just don’t have words for.

  “Today a time ends,” I said. “A new time begins. The old stubble is dug out and thrown away and the ground made clean for new seed. Good rain …” (Ted had made Azikofio talk about the rain of justice and honesty, which you can do in Hausa but you can’t in Kiti.) “Good rain will water that seed so that all the people may have food.”

  Then I got stuck. I managed not to um and er, but this wasn’t my sort of thing at all. Femora Feng waited for a bit, in case I wanted to say more.

  “Kama Boi has crossed the river,” she said. “We saw him go.”

  “Were you there?”

  I wished I’d known.

  “We saw him go. We saw him cross the river. But the spirit that was in him, where is that? Where is the spirit which the ancestors gave him? Can that too cross the river? Tell us, Betty Jackland.”

  Suddenly I understood something which had been sort of puzzling me without me really thinking about it. When the Kitawa wish you a strong spirit they aren’t just saying hello. They’re actually doing something, giving you something. You see, the word doesn’t mean what we mean, quite. With us your spirit is what makes you you. It’s your soul, and when you die it’ll still be you and you’ll go to heaven, etc. But with the Kitawa what’s you is only a sort of pot and then some spirit’s poured into it which comes from the ancestors and when people wish you a strong spirit they’re telling the ancestors to put a bit more in, and then when you die it goes back and joins up with all the rest till next time. That’s why they sometimes talk as tho’ there was only one big Kiti creature which they’re all part of. I don’t imagine they think like this all the time, any more than we really think all the time that somehow we’re going to go on living after our funeral. But suddenly I saw—at least I thought I saw—why KB had such a strong juju. It was ’cos he’d come to Tefuga and stood on the tombs of the ancestors and had a huge spirit poured into his pot, ’cos of the sacrifice. It makes a sort of mad sense, doesn’t it? Killing someone else, giving that spirit to the ancestors, as a sort of present, so they’d give a huge present back?