Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness (8 page)

AT LAST CHERITO LURCHED ONTO the veranda with a tray of tea and a bottle of my grandmother’s homemade wine.

“Thank you,” my grandmother said.

Cherito staggered back into the kitchen. My grandmother’s hand hovered over the tray. “Tea, Mr. Prinsloo?” she offered. “Or something a little stronger?”

Flip blinked.

My grandmother poured them both a glass of wine. “It burns a little at first,” she warned, “but it’s not bad once you get used to it.” She took a sip of her wine. “Here’s to us.” She raised her glass. “There’re none like us, and if there were, they’re all dead.”

Flip took a sip.

“What do you think?” my grandmother asked.

Flip’s lips were stuck to his teeth, so he did not answer.

“Not bad, eh?” My grandmother poured herself another glass. “Mud in your eye,” she said. The second glass tasted better than the first, and working off the theory that the third would therefore be better than the second, my grandmother gave herself another helping. “To absent friends!” she cried. Which was how, when Flip finally got around to the reason for his visit, he found my grandmother in a pleasantly receptive mood.

“I’ve been watching your daughter riding,” Flip said suddenly.

My grandmother narrowed her eyes at him. “Have you?”

“I like her style,” he said. “Lots of blood.”

“Well,” my grandmother said, “I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.”

There was a long pause. Flip cleared his throat. “Dingaan’s Day is coming up,” he said.

Each year on December 16 Afrikaners everywhere celebrated Dingaan’s Day. The most significant date in their calendar, it memorialized a battle in 1838 when a Voortrekker column defeated Dingaan’s Zulu warriors on the banks of a river in modern-day KwaZulu-Natal. In Zulu they call that battle iMpi yaseNcome, the Battle of Ncome River. In Afrikaans they say it was Slag van Bloedrivier, the Battle of Blood River. But whatever you call it, the outcome was the same. On that day—with everything you can imagine going against them—four hundred seventy Voortrekkers roundly defeated tens of thousands of Zulu warriors. By nightfall, the Ncome River ran red with the blood of three thousand slain Zulus. No Afrikaners were killed in the battle and only three were wounded. This proved, the Afrikaners said, that their tribe had a divine right to exist on South African land.

My grandmother sighed and looked with some regret at her empty wineglass. “So it is,” she said. “How time flies.”

Flip cleared his throat again. “I want to beat my cousin Pieter at the Dingaan Day races,” he said.

My grandmother sat up. If there was one thing calculated to catch her interest, even through the fog of her homemade fig wine and lots of violent history, it was horse racing. “Is that so?”

“Yes,” Flip said.

“Do you have a good horse?” My grandmother gave a little hiccup and wagged her finger at Flip. “That’s the thing to win a race,” she said. “A good horse.”

“I’ve got a very good horse,” Flip said. “But I need someone who will ride it. My sons.... Agh no, man.” Flip put his head in his enormous hands. “They’re no good.” He looked at my grandmother, his eyes desperate. “I want your daughter.”

My grandmother gave another hiccup.

“I’ll pay her,” Flip offered.

My grandmother looked horrified and flapped a hand at Flip. “No, no, no. Don’t be silly.” She hiccuped again. “You must have her for nothing. Free to good friends. Go ahead. Take her.”

SO THE NEXT AFTERNOON, Flip Prinsloo came to the house and picked up Mum and drove her to his farm. “He had a bottle of South African brandy under his seat,” Mum says, “and he’d take slurps out of it as we drove along. He offered me some, but I wasn’t about to drink from a bottle that some scrubby old Afrikaner had been gulping out of.” To make up for this, Flip bought my mother an enormous slab of chocolate when he stopped at the Venus Bar to replenish his brandy supply. “Which gave me spots,” Mum warns. “So that was an important lesson. If someone offers you either brandy or chocolate, you should always take the brandy.”

At the farm, Mum was left alone in a dimly lit sitting room while lunch was prepared. “All the furniture pressed against the skirting boards and a host of immensely chilling ancestors glared down from the walls,” Mum says. Lunch was an awkward affair: “A very severe wife, a couple of hulking sons and one crushed-looking daughter-in-law.” Except for the occasional outburst in Afrikaans, the family ate in silence. “I didn’t understand what they said, but it certainly sounded as if they were plotting to kill me,” she says.

Boiled mutton—“Grisly,” Mum says—was followed by stewed coffee and fried sweetbreads, and then Flip reached for his sweat-stained hat and pushed himself away from the table. “Time to race,” he said. The sons wiped their lips and stood up. They, too, reached for their veldskoen hats. “Kom,” Flip told Mum.

The farm was on the edge of the plateau, and even though the Prinsloos had been cultivating it for fifty years, the buildings looked inadequate and hasty in the face of all the earth and sky they were trying to command. The place had a haunted feel, as if it were in mourning for its old self. From a roughhewn livestock shed a syce emerged, leading three horses: two ordinary-looking geldings and a bay mare plunging at the end of her lead rope.

“Dit is jou perd,” Flip told Mum. “Violet.”

Mum was speechless.

“I’ll never forget the first time I saw her,” she says. “I don’t think she ever had two feet on the ground at any one time. She wasn’t tall but she had these long elegant legs, and a powerful chest. I could see, just looking at her, that she could run like the wind.”

“Well,” Flip said. “Op jou merka. First one to the end of the maize field wins.”

Without warning and certainly without waiting for my mother, the Prinsloo sons leaped onto the two geldings and took off along the edge of a maize field. “Those Afrikaners didn’t know how to train horses,” Mum says. “They just put very savage bits in their mouths and rode like mad.” Mum was still hopping about, trying to get her leg over the saddle, when Violet took off after the other horses.

“I don’t know how I stayed on,” Mum says. “But I did. I somehow managed to scramble up into the saddle with the mare at full gallop, grab the reins and hang on while she flew up the maize field. And I beat the sons, both of whom had tumbled down antbear holes long before the finish line.”

That December, Mum won the Dingaan’s Day race on Violet, outpacing Flip Prinsloo’s cousin Pieter by lengths. Flip was drunk with victory. He bought Mum slabs and slabs of chocolate at the Venus Bar and he offered to marry her off to his sons. “One was about thirteen and the other was already married,” Mum says. “But Flip said that didn’t matter. He said I could have either, or both—whichever I wanted.”

“I don’t want your sons,” Mum told Flip. She didn’t want the chocolate either. She wanted Violet.

Flip shook his head. “No, not the horse,” he said.

“If I can’t have her, I won’t ride her,” Mum said.

Flip fingered his hat. “Is that so?”

“Yes,” Mum said.

In the end, Mum and Flip struck a deal. She could borrow the horse all year for show jumping and hacking—anything she wanted—as long as she would ride for him every year on Dingaan’s Day.

“Done,” Mum said, shaking one of Flip Prinsloo’s enormous hands.

Flip fetched the brandy bottle from under his seat and took a long swallow. “Op Violet,” he said, offering Mum a sip.

Mum put the bottle to her lips. “To Violet,” she agreed.

So for the first time in her life, Mum won everything she entered: show jumping, racing, bending poles. “That mare had one speed: flat out. No one could stop her. I couldn’t stop her. But I could just about steer her and as long as I could stay on, we won, we won, we won. We won everything.”

Nicola Huntingford and the Mau Mau

Donnie on the farm. Kenya, circa 1960.

O
nce a week my grandfather took Auntie Glug and Mum to one of the two movie theaters in Eldoret: either the Roxy or the Lyric. From one week to the next, Mum wallowed in the agreeable agony of having to choose between Rowan Tree fruit gums or Wilkinson’s dolly mixture. “By the time we arrived at the cinema, I’d be half dead with indecision because they were all such beautiful sweets,” she says. Then, having painstakingly selected the treats, Mum, Auntie Glug and my grandfather were shown to their seats by ushers who were dressed up like organ-grinders’ monkeys in funny little uniforms with fezzes perched on the side of their heads.

The lights went down and, through the backlit mauve-gray gauze of cigarette smoke, the show began. First, a Pathé News reel, a jingoistic British production that always included something cheerful for the far-flung subjects. “The royal family doing something horsey or a factory in Manchester belching lots of patriotic smoke into a gloomy English sky,” Mum says. After the news, there was a pause while the adults refreshed their cocktails and the Indians who ran the movie theater sweated over the ancient, dust-rusted projection machines.

“Finally, after much ado, the main event,” Mum says. “Usually a war movie with lots of wicked Nazis coming to a sticky end and heroic British soldiers prevailing against overwhelming evil. The sound system was awful, so we struggled if they showed a Western because we couldn’t understand their accents.” Mum gives me a reproachful look as if I were personally responsible for the shortcomings of John Wayne’s elocution. Then she continues in a more conciliatory tone. “Although their plots were very simple, of course, so it didn’t matter too much—a bunch of cowboys wiping out bunches and bunches of Indians.” Mum sniffs. “Very hard on their horses, we always thought.”

She and I are having this conversation while driving north from Cape Town to Clanwilliam in the Western Cape, having rendezvoused for a holiday in South Africa. I have come from Wyoming and Mum and Dad have flown from Zambia to meet me. It is the end of the cold rainy season, and the air outside is humming in anticipation of the ferocious heat of summer, which is gathering strength, moment by moment. Each day begins with a memory of chill, but by noon baking waves are rocking the ground. Mum looks out the window, but I can tell she isn’t seeing the citrus farms, neatly laid out like strung jewels on pale sandy soil along the Olifants River, nor is she seeing the ash-purple fynbos that smothers the flanks of the mountains here. In her head, Mum is back in Eldoret, in a stuffy, smoke-filled cinema and it is the early 1950s.

“And of course they never forgot the national anthem,” Mum says dreamily, putting her hand over her heart. “Every show they played ‘God Save the King’—or ‘God Save the Queen,’ whoever it was—and you had to leap to your feet respectfully, God save our gracious Queen, long live our noble Queen. God Save the Queen!” Mum is singing softly, “La la la la! Send her victorious, happy and glorious, Tra la la la la la laaa la la! God save the Queen.”

She resumes her speaking voice and says with pride, “Did you know that Princess Elizabeth was actually in Kenya when her father died?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Did you?” Mum’s voice expresses doubt that I could really know such a wonderfully imperialistic fact. “Yes, well, she and Phil were staying at the Tree-tops Lodge in the Aberdares in February 1952.” Mum’s eyes go moist. “And they say Elizabeth went up to her room as a princess and came down as a queen, like in a fairy story. We all thought it was very significant, very appropriate that she ascended to the throne
in
Kenya.”

Mum pronounces the name of the country with a long, colonial-era
e
—Keen-ya (/ki nja/), as if Britain still stains more than a quarter of the globe pink with its dominion. I, however, pronounce it with a short, postcolonial
e
—Kenya (k nja). It irritates my mother when I say “Kenya” and she corrects me, “Keen-ya,” she says. But her insistence on the anachronistic pronunciation of the country only adds to my impression that she is speaking of a make-believe place forever trapped in the celluloid of another time, as if she were a third-person participant in a movie starring herself, a perfect horse and flawless equatorial light. The violence and the injustices that came with colonialism seem—in my mother’s version of events—to have happened in some other unwatched movie, to some other unwatched people.

Which in a way, they were.

SOMETIME IN THE LATE 1940S the General Council of the banned Kikuyu Central Association began a campaign of civil disobedience. They were protesting the British takeover of Kenyan land and the colonial labor laws that forced black Kenyans into a feudal system structured to benefit the eighty thousand white settlers. “No,” Mum says impatiently. “No, no, no, you’ve got it all wrong. Eldoret was not taken over from anyone. There hadn’t been anyone living on it before the white man came. It was too bleak and windy for the natives. The Nandi lived in the warm forests around the plateau. Plus, they weren’t farmers. They were cattle people and they were very independent, very savage, very serious warriors.” Mum pauses. “So we all got on rather well together.” Then she gives voice to a common settler sentiment. “It was not the Nandi who were the problem, it was the Kikuyu who were so difficult.”

Known to themselves as Muingi (the Movement), Muigwithania (the Understanding) or Muma wa Uiguano (the Oath of Unity), the rebellion became known outside Kikuyu circles as the Mau Mau. Possibly the name was an acronym of the Kiswahili phrase “Mzungu Aende Ulya. Mwafrika Apate Uhuru”—“Let the White Man Go Back. Let the African Go Free.” Or perhaps it was a mispronunciation of “Uma, Uma”—“Get out, Get out.”

Members of the Mau Mau bound themselves together through traditional Kikuyu oath rituals that were rumored to involve animal sacrifice, the ingestion of human and animal blood, cannibalism and bestiality. They used traditional Kikuyu weapons—spears, short swords, rhino hide whips, and broad-bladed machetes—and frequently tortured their victims, disemboweled them and hacked them beyond recognition. In early 1952 the bodies of several Kikuyu policemen loyal to the British were discovered mutilated and bound with wire, floating in rivers near Nairobi. Not long after, settler famers near Mount Kenya found their cattle disemboweled in the fields, the tendons in their legs severed.

“No,” Mum says, “we didn’t enjoy the Kikuyu. They were very scary and up to all sorts of horrible, funny business. That made us all very anxious even on the plateau. We sent the servants home before dark, locked the house at night and put chicken wire up over the windows. My father went everywhere with his service revolver and my mother kept a Beretta pistol under her pillow.”

Still, nothing happened to the Huntingfords or to any of their friends. Life went on in all its gauzy, cinematic glory. Then one day in mid October 1952, a note arrived at the Huntingfords’ door carried by one of Babs Owens’s syces. The syce was breathless with fright. A Kikuyu insurgent had appeared on the racecourse. “I can’t think why Babs had to fetch my father for help,” Mum says. “You’d have thought, being Babs, she could have walloped the bloke herself, or bitten his ear off or something, but she didn’t. She sent this note to my father and he was a gentleman, so he grabbed his revolver and off he went, across the road.”

My grandfather kept his back to the ruins and made his way cautiously behind the track. In the unfiltered equatorial light, the crumbling buildings from the Italian prisoner-of-war camp set up spooky blue shadows. “The old jail, all abandoned and gloomy,” Mum says. Suddenly my grandfather saw the alleged Kikuyu dart briefly into the open then sink into the dimness of one of the dissolving buildings. “My father edged his way up to the building and fired a warning shot into the building. He didn’t intend to shoot the chap, obviously, but the bullet ricocheted off the walls and hit him—didn’t kill him. Just a wound. But now it was a police matter and my father was carted off to appear in court.”

Mum shakes her head. “A few days later and it would have been fine for my father to shoot a Kikuyu because the British had declared a state of emergency by then. But on that afternoon it wasn’t okay.” A trial was held and my grandfather was sentenced to one day in jail. There was an outcry from the community. “My father was the starter at the races that afternoon,” Mum explains. “He couldn’t possibly spend the day in jail. He was the only one who knew how to do the starter flags.”

After the state of emergency was declared, British soldiers poured into the country and white settlers joined their ranks. By the end of November 1952, eight thousand Kikuyu had been arrested. Far from subduing the tension, attacks against British settlers escalated. Until January 1953, Mau Mau attacks against settlers were isolated and only men were targeted. But on the twenty-fourth of that month, the hacked and tortured bodies of a young British settler family were discovered on their farm—Roger Rucks (aged thirty-seven), his pregnant wife, Esmee (aged thirty-two), and their son, Michael, (aged six). Their Kikuyu cook (tellingly, his name and age were not given in any of the reports) had also been beaten and chopped to death.

Settlers fired their Kikuyu servants, and arrests of suspected Kikuyu insurgents as well as of innocent Kikuyu bystanders intensified. By the end of 1954, British soldiers were holding as many as seventy-seven thousand Kikuyu men, women and children in cramped, unhygienic concentration camps. They forced detainees to work, and if they refused, the prisoners were beaten, sometimes to death. One prisoner, John Maina Kahihu, describes the atmosphere in these camps vividly: “We refused to do this work. We were fighting for our freedom. We were not slaves.... There were two hundred guards. One hundred seventy stood around us with machine guns. Thirty guards were inside the trench with us. The white man in charge blew his whistle and the guards started beating us. They beat us from 8 am to 11.30. They were beating us like dogs. I was covered by other bodies—just my arms and legs were exposed. I was very lucky to survive. But the others were still being beaten. There was no escape for them.”
¹

Jittery settlers made plans to leave Kenya, hastily selling their farms and setting sail for Australia or Britain. Forever after they would bore to death anyone who would listen about the perfect equatorial light of East Africa. “When-wes” they were called, as in, “When we were in Kenya. . . .” But everyone understood that the old colonial Kenya was over. No matter how many British soldiers were sent to the colony, no matter how many Kikuyu were shot or arrested, the minority’s complacent picnic on the backs of a deeply angry majority was over.

At about this time, Flip Prinsloo returned to the Huntingfords’ door and asked to see my grandmother. Once again, my grandmother sat out on the veranda with Flip and poured them both a glass of homemade wine. “Here’s to us,” she said, raising her glass.

“Ja,” Flip agreed. He turned his glass in his hand for some moments before taking a drink. “Well,” he said after the sting of the wine had subsided enough to let him speak. “You’ve lost this war.”

“Yes, we already know that,” my grandmother said.

They finished their drinks in near silence and then Flip got to his feet. “We’re going back to South Africa,” he said.

“So I heard,” my grandmother said. She lifted the bottle. “Won’t you stay and have the other half?”

“Nee dankie.” Flip jammed his veldskoen hat back on his head. Then he took a deep breath. “If your daughter wants the horse, I’ll take a hundred pounds for it.” He stood his ground for a moment as if expecting the money to materialize on the spot.

“I see,” my grandmother said.

Flip nodded and in the intervening moments the fragile peace that my grandmother and he had made between the British and the Boers reverted to mutual suspicion. “Good-bye, Mrs. Huntingford,” Flip said.

“God speed to you, Mr. Prinsloo,” my grandmother replied.

My grandmother watched Flip Prinsloo’s retreating back and poured herself a fortifying glass of wine. A hundred pounds was far beyond the Huntingford budget. An advertisement went up on the sports club notice board and another appeared on the notice board at the race grounds. “FOR SALE: Violet.” And then it listed all her achievements: “Winner of this, that and the next thing,” Mum says. “Everyone knew Violet; she hardly needed to be advertised.”

Mum sulked and wouldn’t talk to anyone for weeks. “Luckily no one would buy her,” Mum says. “She was so difficult. Anyway, lots of people were leaving and everyone was trying to get rid of their animals. No one wanted to take on more responsibility.” In the end, Flip Prinsloo couldn’t sell Violet and he had to give Mum the mare for nothing. She smiles. “So that was one good thing that came out of the Mau Mau.”

Although most of their friends had packed up, my grandparents didn’t immediately consider leaving Kenya. “Certainly Australia was out of the question,” Mum says. “And I don’t suppose my parents felt they had any reason to be in Britain. Dad felt Kenyan. It was his home.” So instead of leaving, the Huntingfords bought half a farm on a long, low basin about five miles north of the racetrack. Catherine Angleton, the rich one-legged English widow with whom my grandmother had boarded during the war, bought the other half on the condition that her son Martin could come out to Kenya and live on it.