Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness (7 page)

And Kenya’s security was increasingly suspicious of Mum. “Hujambo, askari!” she told the security guard. “Pole sana. Those horrible, vicious terrorists. ” She smiled magnificently and stuck her head out of the window and addressed the guard loudly. “The tourists will be back. You mustn’t give up hope.” The guard frowned nervously at Mum and asked the taxi driver to open the boot. “That’s right,” Mum said, encouragingly, “you must carry on. You must have courage.” And then she broke into a long string of Swahili that she spoke deliberately and in incantations, as if wrapping a spell around Swahili speakers from which the rest of us were to be excluded.

Released from the uneasy security guard, we swept up to the hotel. The taxi driver jumped out and opened Mum’s door. She paused a moment—as if her foot touching the earth might break the spell—before stepping out onto the gravel. She breathed in the salty, humid air and her arms went out in front of her. For one astonishing moment I thought she was going to embrace the taxi driver. Instead, she offered him her hands and he took them, helping her to her feet. They bantered back and forth in Swahili, a tongue in which Mum must be a standup comedienne because they had to prop each other up through gales of laughter.

At the reception, Mum sniffed and wiped her eyes when the traditional dancers came out to greet us. “Oh bravo,” she said. “Well done!” When the dance was over she clapped enthusiastically and shouted, “Mzuri sana! Encore! Encore!” Her mood was infectious. The traditional dancers, surprised by such unbridled enthusiasm, began their dance again. “I’ll take another one of those delicious sticky drinks,” Mum said, swooping down on the woman holding the tray.

Dad filled in the guest registration card without his usual griping (“Good God, what are you trying to do, kill every last tree with all this bloody paperwork?”). Instead, in the space requesting “Please list all allergies,” he caused hilarity by writing “WOMEN AND ALCOHOL.” Then when he greeted the Old Girls who were collecting against the reception desk he was so effusively warm and courtly that several of them retreated into the potted plants, their hats and money belts askew.

“Let’s have a party!” Dad said, handing Auntie Glug a sticky drink. She propped herself up against an arrangement of wooden curios and looked as if she were beginning to have second thoughts about the reunion.

Meanwhile, Mum clapped along to the dancers, and cocked her hips this way and that. “Asante sana!” my mother cried. “And what beautiful voices, what lovely smiles you all have!” The traditional dancers trooped out into the sunshine with my mother cheering them on. In fact, she seemed in danger of joining them more or less permanently. “All right,” Dad said, sensing how things might easily unravel, “that’s enough for now, Tub.” Then, in his enthusiasm to demonstrate that nearly forty years of marriage had done nothing to diminish his chivalry, he accidentally hit my mother in the head opening the door for her from the reception room into the garden. Mum reeled into the cannas clutching her eye.

Auntie Glug stared into her sticky drink. “I wonder how these go with Prozac?” she asked.

ASIDE FROM OUR SMALL PARTY gathered for the Highlands School reunion and a group of American geologists who had been exploring for oil in Uganda, no one was staying at the hotel. Nor were any of the other hotels up and down the beach much occupied. A few rent boys combed the beach for old European women, but found only a couple of takers: an Italian matron of leathery complexion and a broken French woman in her early seventies with bad knees. Without the customary crowd of guests into which to fade, the old women seemed doubly desperate, and the rent boys looked doubly ill used. “Why on earth can’t they go to bed with a good book like everyone else?” Mum asked, eyes lowered over a glass of cold Tusker.

Even beyond the main tourist strip everything still felt ghosted and shocked from the attack against the Paradise Hotel. Our Swahili guide, Mr. Faraji, gave us a tour of Fort Jesus and the spice market and he walked us through the old Arab quarters, but it was as if a disease had washed over the place, taking with it the usual, pushy, vibrant clatter of an ancient port city. “Oh dear,” Mum said, “how sad and quiet.”

“Very quiet and sad,” Mr. Faraji agreed.

So Mum and Mr. Faraji embarked on a two-person mission to revive Mombasa. Nothing could dim their excitement, their curiosity, or their determination to be deeply impressed by everything. Mum bought spices and kikois, baskets and carvings, beads and postcards while Mr. Faraji haggled with hawkers to secure her the best price. Mum admired every angle of the city, ran her fingers along the woodwork on the doors, joked with the shopkeepers and bought food from everyone who offered it to her even though Mr. Faraji begged her not to eat anything from street vendors.

“Why ever not?” Mum said, licking her fingers.

I reassured Mr. Faraji that Mum is an extreme omnivore. She has eaten snails peeled off the farm’s driveway and wild frogs’ legs from the bush surrounding the Tree of Forgetfulness. Once she even ate a prawn cocktail in hyperlandlocked, socialist-era Zambia, and if that didn’t kill her, I argued, a little dysentery-laced street food in Mombasa wasn’t going to do the trick.

While we walked through the Old Arab quarter, Mr. Faraji tried to give us each a sprig of fragrant wild marigold to hold to our noses. Mum shook her head. “Oh no,” she said. “I’d be very offended if someone walked past my house sniffing herbs.” She stepped over a broken, bubbling pipe. “And I’m sure my drains smell at least as bad as this.”

One afternoon, Mr. Faraji took us out to a beach near the harbor. This was the site of the children’s holiday camp where the Huntingfords had stayed for three weeks every year. We all piled out of the taxi. There was no sign of the holiday resort now, but there was a hot little shack on the edge of a littered beach to which we all repaired. There was a smell of sewage and rotting fish. An unfinished concrete building sprouted rusting rebar. “Now,” Mum said, half closing her eyes, “this was where we spent our glorious holidays.”

By some miracle, Mr. Faraji managed to procure some cold beers for all of us, so we sat in the tin shack while Mum repainted the dreary beach as it had been in her glorious childhood. Another round of cold beer arrived on the heels of the last and the sun began its slow descent over the land so that the sea became a tranquil sheet of gold. As Mum remembered it, the holiday camp at Mombasa was almost unmitigated bliss—watching the huge ships pull into the harbor, diving for shells, exploring empty beaches, swimming in the shark fence (which may explain why Mum always swims with her head well above water, as if scanning the horizon for fins). The only drawback to these holidays seemed to have been the ablution block. “It was very off-putting. There was one large building for men and one large building for women, and in the women’s bathroom, there were eight holes all lined up next to one another without any divisions over one huge pit.” Mum shook her head at the memory. “
Very
hard to relax.”

OUR DAYS TOOK ON A predictable rhythm resolving into a pleasant routine. In the morning, we were awakened by the rhythmic scraping of the gardener’s broom against the sandy walkways and the shouting mynah birds. Afternoons brought camels strolling up the beach and heat-stunned siestas under the umbrellas around the pool. In the evenings, stars appeared slowly over the Indian Ocean, the Guiana chestnut slapped against the windows in the breeze, and a dense peace settled against the hotel. The heavy air was thick with frangipani, tropical lilies and gardenia. “Everything’s changed everywhere,” Mum said. “But some things here feel very familiar. Wonderful people, gorgeous gardens, exciting markets, delicious spices and so much more ancient feeling than anywhere else I’ve been in Africa, such
culture
, such diversity. Oh, I shall always be a child of Kenya, always.”

After supper, Mum, Dad, Auntie Glug and Uncle Sandy created a dance floor in the hotel restaurant. By ten or eleven most evenings, we seemed to be the only people awake on the whole beach and we trailed our small party out onto the sand. Then, dancing together in the moonlight, Mum and Dad appeared as they must have in their twenties: beautiful, optimistic and aware of being the most exciting couple anyone had ever met.

The barman put on Doris Day and Mum moved into Dad’s arms. “Gonna take a sentimental journey,” Mum and Doris sang together. “Gonna set my heart at ease.” Then my parents danced close to the bar and I could smell her perfume, his pipe tobacco. “Gonna make a sentimental journey, to renew old memories.” Mum sank back against Dad’s shoulder briefly before spinning back out into the shadows. Even in the near dark I could see a crescent of tears brimming in Mum’s eyes. “Got my bag, got my reservations,” she sang along. “Spent each dime I could afford.... Gotta take that sentimental journey, sentimental journey home.”

I turned back to the bar and sighed. “Go on, Niece-Weevil,” Auntie Glug said, pushing a sticky drink toward me. “One of these can’t hurt.”

Nicola Huntingford, the Afrikaner and the Perfect Horse

Circa 1957

Mum and Violet. Kenya, circa 1958.

S
ometimes memory does a trick of packaging events together so that they are conveniently conflated and easier to retrieve. In this way, Mum remembers nothing of the circus that came through Eldoret in the mid-1950s except that Nane left with it. “I suppose my mother must have thought that he had knocked me out one too many times,” she says, “so off he went to feed the lions.” Mum gives a little gulp. “And I don’t know if this is the way I imagined it, or if this really happened, but I have a picture in my head of Nane bouncing off down the road behind bars, peering back at me, with big pleading eyes.”

“Oh, that’s awful,” I say.

Mum thinks about this for a moment. “Yes, it was,” she says. Then she looks uncomfortable and I can tell she does not want to seem like an ungrateful Christopher-bloody-Robin type. So she clears her throat and revises the story, assuming a stiff upper lip for the task. “Well,” she says, “I’m sure my parents didn’t tell me he was going to feed the lions at the time. I am sure they told me that Nane had run away to join the circus. Trapeze artists, dancing bears, happy days.”

My grandparents asked knowledgeable friends to source a really good replacement for Nane. In their minds, they pictured a Thoroughbred, something largehearted and bold that could match my Mum’s courage and skill in the show-jumping arena. Golden Duckling, the horse the friends selected, was very well bred by King Midas out of Cold Duck. “She was a great big Thoroughbred,” Mum says, “pretty head, nice neck, she was perfectly put together until you got to her legs.” Mum pauses from dramatic effect. “They were sawed off.”

I look suitably horrified.

“I know,” Mum says. “We all stood in the stable yard in Nairobi staring at this apparition, but we were too polite to tell the friends who were supposed to be experts that they had selected a dud. Sawed-off legs
and
curved hocks”—Mum turns her elbows out in an impression of a horse with bad conformation—“which meant she’d just fall down in the middle of whatever you were doing. Oh,” she adds, “and she had an absolutely murderous disposition.”

Nevertheless Mum—brought up by her parents not to complain almost no matter what—gamely paid forty pounds of her own money for the horse (more than half a century later she remembers with undiminished resentment the exact amount), and the thing was hauled home in the back of a truck. “Well, Duckling wasn’t ideal,” Mum admits. “In fact she was pretty awful, but she was what I had.” So Mum entered show-jumping competitions as before, and as before she contributed significantly to everyone’s entertainment. “I usually left the arena unconscious, strapped to a stretcher, dripping blood,” she says with a happy smile.

For a year or two the homicidal, sawed-off Thoroughbred bashed Mum senseless week after week and Mum gamely hauled herself back onto the creature for more punishment. And then—beginning in the year Mum turned thirteen—an almost biblical series of events brought her Violet, a horse of such shining perfection that none of the scores of other horses she has owned since have ever quite rivaled that one, flawless animal.

“In 1957, there were terrific floods in Eldoret,” Mum says. “Water roared down the passageway, the choo was submerged, the cows and horses stood around up to their knees in mud, the roads washed away, the mud bricks on all the buildings got soggy, the walls sagged, the roof leaked, the laundry never dried, frogs moved into the house.” This went on for weeks and by the time the sun did come out again, the community was very rundown and measles broke out. “It started in the villages, then the old ladies next door got sick, then half the kids in my school got sick plus all the nuns. Then the Polish refugees keeled over and finally my father caught it,” Mum says.

My grandfather had to lie in a darkened room for a couple of months. “Doctor Reynolds told him not to read, but of course he did and ruined his eyesight forever.” And my grandmother was run ragged taking care of sick people. She took meat and milk to the Nandi villages; she ferried soup and bread up to the old ladies. She visited the sick boarding-school children and took clean linens to the nuns. She fed the Polish refugees—“Eldoret was smothered in them for some reason,” Mum says, “and they all insisted they were princesses and counts. Very unlikely, I would have said”—and finally she came back to bathe my grandfather’s rash in calamine lotion and give him his supper.

One morning, into this overwrought and distracted atmosphere, Flip Prinsloo arrived at the Huntingford’s door, the brim of his sweat-stained felt hat clutched in his fists, and asked to see Mrs. Huntingford. My grandmother ordered tea from the drunken Cherito and sat out on the veranda with Flip. It says something about my grandmother—and about Flip, for that matter—that the two of them waited for the tea tray to arrive in perfectly companionable silence. It also says something about the depth of Flip’s desperation that he had come to a British woman for help. “You see,” Mum explains, “in Eldoret, there was a big group of very British settlers, like our family. And then there was a quite big group of very Afrikaner settlers, like Flip. And of course the two groups did not mix at all.” Mum narrows her eyes. “The Boer War,” she says darkly. “Never, ever forget the Boer War, Bobo. They certainly haven’t.”

THE DUTCH ARRIVED in South Africa at the Cape of Good Hope, on the southwestern tip of Africa, in 1652. To begin with, they saw themselves not as settlers but as temporary workers, there to grow vegetables for the Dutch East India Company’s ships sailing between Holland and Indonesia. But by the early 1700s, independent trekboers—nomadic farmers—had broken away from the Dutch East India Company and were pushing into the wild, pepper-scented land to the north, displacing the native Khoikhoi. Over time, these trekboers began to call themselves Afrikaners (Africans) to mark their sense of a new identity as distinct and separate from the Dutch. And they developed a distinct language—Afrikaans—basic Dutch salted with whatever other languages were floating around the Cape at that time.

In 1795, the British, looking to protect their sea routes and alarmed by the empire-building intentions of other European countries, sent an expedition to the Cape and easily forced the Dutch to surrender, but they hadn’t counted on—or recognized—the increasingly cohesive and nationalistic sensibilities of the Afrikaners. By the mid 1830s, British rule had so disgusted the Afrikaners (the 1834 emancipation of slaves was the final straw) that about twelve thousand of them responded by emigrating far into the interior—the Great Trek, it was called afterward—and setting up two of their own independent Afrikaner-run republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal.

War is Africa’s perpetual ripe fruit. There is so much injustice to resolve, such desire for revenge in the blood of the people, such crippling corruption of power, such unseemly scramble for the natural resources. The wind of power shifts and there go the fruit again, tumbling toward the ground, each war more inventively terrible than the last. In 1880, the British confiscated a Boer’s wagon because he had not paid his taxes. Needing nothing but the smallest of excuses, the Boers retaliated by declaring war against the British. Within a year, the British had been defeated. The Afrikaners would later call this their First War of Independence. The British would call it the First Anglo-Boer War.

But the subsequent gold rush of 1886 attracted even more British to the Boer republics. Never forgetting their resentment, the Afrikaners refused to let the British vote. Even by the 1890s, when there were more British than Afrikaners in the republics, the Afrikaners denied the British the vote. This provoked the Second Anglo-Boer War, or what the Afrikaners called the Second War of Freedom, in October 1899. This time the British took no chances. Four hundred fifty thousand soldiers came to South Africa from Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada to fight fewer than sixty thousand Boers. This time the war was longer and even more excessively nasty and brutish than the last.

Although the Afrikaners had no official army, they had been on the continent for two centuries and they had the land in their blood (to say nothing of their blood in the land). They needed no barracks or uniforms, and no generals to give them orders. They had sturdy horses, strong men and tenacious women. Their children were crack shots, raised to be tough and self-sufficient. On the other hand, the British troops wore impractical red jackets that shone out of the blond high veldt like stoplights. They didn’t understand the language of this wide, sad land, nor did they love it. The only way they could win the war was backhandedly—by starving and diseasing the Afrikaners out of existence. So between 1901 and 1902, the British scorched more than thirty thousand farms and placed almost all the Afrikaner women and children in the world’s first concentration camps. As many as twenty-nine thousand Boers died from the appalling conditions in those camps; so did twenty thousand blacks who had been caught working on Boer farms. By the time a peace treaty was signed at the town of Vereeniging on May 21, 1902, the British army had killed nearly one quarter of all the Boers in existence.

Flip Prinsloo had come to Kenya as a baby with his parents and forty-seven other Afrikaner families from the Transvaal. The families were mostly bywoners (poor tenant farmers who had no hope of purchasing land of their own) or hensoppers (those who had surrendered to the British during the Boer War and who now found the shame of that surrender unbearable). Both the bywoners and the hensoppers wanted a large piece of free, unoccupied African land on which to settle. The last thing they wanted—having done little else in living memory—was to have to fight or die for that land. “But there it was and they were welcome to it,” Mum says. “No one else had settled there—too windy and far-flung for the tastes of most people.”

The Uasin Gishu plateau on which the town of Eldoret now sits had been occupied in precolonial times first by the Sirikwa, then by the Masai and finally by the Nandi. In other words, the British considered it “unoccupied,” a perceived emptiness that irked them. Consequently, they offered it to the Zionists as a temporary refuge for Russian Jews until a homeland in Israel could be established. But the Zionists rejected the offer, some of them weeping openly at the 1903 sixth Zionist Congress and quoting from Psalm 137, “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.”

So in semidesperation the British offered the land to British-abhorring Afrikaners from the Transvaal, and in 1908 more than two hundred Boers arrived by ship in Mombasa, Kenya. They took trains as far as Nakuru, where they purchased native oxen, which they trained to pull wagons all through the long rainy season of March, April and May. At the end of May, they began to climb from the Rift Valley, up the escarpment to their new homeland. It took them two months to cover one hundred miles, the wagons churning through mud up to the tops of their wheels and the forest dense and impassable in places. The trekkers cut bamboo to make causeways across swamps. The drivers stayed near the oxen, urging them step by slithering step.

In a wetland at the top of the escarpment a wagon loaded with sugar sank up to its axles and all the sugar melted. While the trekkers struggled for days to free the wagon, a two-year-old girl died of pneumonia. The young men planted poles and created a rudimentary sacred site for the funeral, and the Afrikaners grieved in the way of stoical people, tight lipped and moist eyed. They buried the girl in a place which they called Suiker Vlei—Sugar Vlei—and the next day they freed the wagon and continued the journey to the Sosiani River.

“There was at that time,” Mum says, “a hunter called Cecil Hoey who lived on the other side of what would become Eldoret. He saw what he thought was a long stream of smoke snaking its way up the escarpment onto the highlands. And then he realized he was seeing the pale canvas of covered wagons winding up to the plateau. It was the trekkers arriving.” Mum says, “Cecil took one look at that lot and predicted the end of the wildlife. He was right because when those Afrikaners first got there they had nothing to live off except what they could kill, and they finished off all the animals in no time.”

The Afrikaners made harrows from branches and thorns bound with leather thongs made from zebra skin, they made soap from eland fat and they made shoes from the hides of giraffes. They ate what they could snare or shoot and they lived in grass-thatched houses made from their own mud bricks, baked in the high-altitude sun. “A lot of them were very basic,” Mum says. “They weren’t educated and they didn’t read anything except the Bible. But they were tough and resourceful and they could live off nothing, those people.” And then she sniffs and I can tell that it wounds her to make this next admission. “Well, that was
most
of them. But some of them were quite posh. One Afrikaner family was
so
posh that the Queen Mother stayed with them when she came to Kenya in 1959.” Mum pauses to let me absorb this startling knowledge. “Imagine that,” she says. “There’s no way our shoddy little house would have been fit for royalty, but there they were—those posh Afrikaners—entertaining the Queen Mother!”