Red Strangers
RED STRANGERS
ELSPETH HUXLEY was born in 1907 and spent most of her childhood in Kenya. She was partially educated at the European School in Nairobi, and then at Reading University, where she took a diploma in agriculture, and at Cornell University, USA. In 1929 she joined the Empire Marketing Board as a press officer. She married Gervas Huxley in 1931 and travelled widely with him in America, Africa and elsewhere. She was on the BBC General Advisory Council from 1952 to 1959, when she joined the Monckton Advisory Commission on Central Africa. Among her diverse writings are novels, detective stories, biographies, volumes of autobiography and travel books. Her publications include The Flame Trees of Thika (1959), The Mottled Lizard (1962), Out in the Midday Sun (1985), an anthology entitled Nine Faces of Kenya (1990) and Peter Scott: Painter and Naturalist (1993). She died in January 1997. In its obituary, The Times wrote that ‘She was not only a talented writer but an outstanding personality.’
RICHARD DAWKINS was born in Nairobi in 1941. Educated at Oxford University, he was formerly an Assistant Professor of Zoology at the University of California at Berkeley, a Lecturer in Zoology at Oxford University and a Fellow of New College. In 1995 he became the first Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. Among his bestselling books are The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype, The Blind Watchmaker, River Out of Eden, Climbing Mount Improbable and Unweaving the Rainbow. Many of his books are published in Penguin. He has received many prizes and honours, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
ELSPETH HUXLEY
Red Strangers
with an Introduction by RICHARD DAWKINS
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published by Chatto 1939
Published in Penguin Books 1999
Published in Penguin Classics 2006
Copyright 1939 by Elspeth Huxley
Introduction copyright © the Financial Times Ltd, 2006
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author of the introduction has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-119125-6
Contents
Introduction by Richard Dawkins
Foreword
BOOK I: MUTHENGI
Chapter I The Visit
Chapter II The Debt
Chapter III The Purification
Chapter IV The Forest Shamba
Chapter V The Hunters
Chapter VI The Dancers
Chapter VII The Circumcision
Chapter VIII The Notched Spear
Chapter IX The Raiders
Chapter X The Bride
Chapter XI The Red Strangers
BOOK II: MATU
Chapter I Tribute
Chapter II Justice
Chapter III Contact
Chapter IV Road of Snakes
Chapter V Men of God
Chapter VI Emigrants
Chapter VII War
BOOK III: KARANJA
Chapter I Marafu
Chapter II Pig’s Meat
Chapter III Benson Makuna
Chapter IV Capitalists
Chapter V Forbidden Dances
Chapter VI The Goats Go
Chapter VII Return to Tetu
Chapter VIII Christians
Introduction by Richard Dawkins
Elspeth Huxley died last year at the age of ninety. Best known for her vivid African memoirs, she was also a considerable novelist who, in Red Strangers, achieved a scale that could fairly be called epic. It is the saga of a Kikuyu family spanning four generations, beginning before the coming to Kenya of the British (‘red’ strangers because sunburned), and ending with the birth of a new baby girl, christened Aeroplane by her father (‘His wife, he thought, would never be able to pronounce such a difficult word; but educated people would know, and understand’). Its 400 pages are gripping, moving, historically and anthropologically illuminating, humanistically mind-opening … and, lamentably, out of print.
I had an unrealized youthful ambition to write a science fiction novel. It would follow an expedition to say, Mars, but seen through the eyes (or whatever passed for eyes) of the native inhabitants. I wanted to manoeuvre my readers into an acceptance of Martian ways so comprehensive that they would see the invading humans as strange and foreign aliens. It is Elspeth Huxley’s extraordinary achievement in the first half of Red Strangers to immerse her readers so thoroughly in Kikuyu ways and thought that, when the British finally appear on the scene, everything about them seems to us alien, occasionally downright ridiculous, though usually to be viewed with indulgent tolerance. It is the same indulgent amusement, indeed, as I remember we bestowed upon Africans during my own colonial childhood.
Huxley, in effect, skilfully transforms her readers into Kikuyu, opening our eyes to see Europeans, and their customs, as we have never seen them before. We become used to an economy pegged to the goat standard, so when coins (first rupees and then shillings) are introduced, we marvel at the absurdity of a currency that does not automatically accrue with each breeding season. We come to accept a world in which every event has a supernatural magical interpretation, and feel personally swindled when the statement, ‘The rupees that I pay you can later be changed into goats’, turns out to be literally untrue.
When Kichui (all white men are referred to by their Kikuyu nicknames) gives orders that his fields should be manured, we realize that he is mad. Why else would a man try to lay a curse upon his own cattle? ‘Matu could not believe his ears. To bury the dung of a cow was to bring death upon it, just as death, or at any rate severe sickness, would come to a man whose excreta were covered with earth … He refused emphatically to obey the order.’ And, such is Huxley’s skill that even I, despising as I do the fashionable nostrums of ‘cultural relativism’, find myself endorsing Matu’s good sense.
We are led to marvel at the absurdity of European justice, which seems to care which of two brothers committed a murder: ‘… what does it matter? Are not Muthengi and I brothers? Whichever it was that held the sword, our father Waseru and other members of our clan must still pay the blood-price.’ Unaccountably there is no blood-price, and Matu, having cheerfully confessed to Muthengi’s crime, goes to prison, where he leads ‘a strange, comfortless life whose purpose he could not divine’. Eventually he is released. He has served his time but, since he did
n’t realize he was doing time, the event is of no significance. On returning to his own village, far from being disgraced, he has gained prestige from his sojourn with the mysterious strangers, who obviously regard him highly enough to invite him to live in their own place.
The novel takes us through episodes that we recognize as if from a great distance; through the First World War and the ravages of the subsequent Spanish ’flu, through smallpox epidemics and worldwide economic recession; and we never once are told in European terms that this is what is going on. We see all through Kikuyu eyes. The Germans are just another white tribe, and when the war ends we find ourselves wondering where are the plundered cattle that the victors ought to be driving home. What else, after all, is warfare for?
Ever since borrowing Red Strangers from the library, I have been on a ceaseless quest to acquire a copy of my own. It has been my routine first question on every visit to Hay-on-Wye. Finally, I tracked down two old American copies simultaneously on the Internet. After so many years of restless searching, I could not resist buying both. So now, if any reputable publisher sincerely wants to look at Red Strangers with a view to bringing out a new edition. I will gladly make available one of my hard-won copies.* Nothing will part me from the other one.
TO MY MOTHER
Who first suggested this book, and helped to bring it into being.
Foreword
ALTHOUGH this is a novel, most of the incidents related are true. Part I has as its background the local history of a small area of East Africa, a section of what is now the South Nyeri district of the Kikuyu reserve, located on the southern slopes of Mt. Kenya at an elevation of about 7,500 ft. All the characters, without exception, are imaginary, but many of their adventures occurred to real people who related them to me; and such events as smallpox outbreaks, famine and so on, are matters of historical record. The ceremonies and customs described are based in some cases on observation and in some on accounts given by elders, supplemented by such written sources as “With A Prehistoric People” by Routledge, and notes kindly lent by Dr. L. S. B. Leakey, whose authoritative work on the Kikuyu tribe is shortly to appear.
This book makes no claim whatever to scientific exactitude. I am not an anthropologist and have not been able to adopt the methods of long study and thorough checking and rechecking essential to that social science. The picture of tribal life is very far from being complete, and in a few cases I have erred intentionally for the sake of clarity. (For example, the eldest son is always named after his grandfather, and it would obviously muddle the reader if two characters were called by the same name. A son is in certain ways a sort of reincarnation of his grandfather, and for this reason is sometimes addressed as “father” by his own father—a habit very confusing to non-Africans. I have also applied the word “clan” to the extended family, where its correct use is to denote what I have called the “tribal group.”)
The story of the coming of the white man is related as it was told to me by a number of people who were grown-up at the time. The first European they can remember who came into this particular district was John Boyes (“Kianjahé”); the date of his visit was 1898. The submission of the elders to an agent of the British Government took place at Nyeri (then known as Tetu) on December 21st, 1902. While these landmarks are genuine, other events believed by the characters in this book to be equally historical are not necessarily true. For instance, by tradition the tribe originated in their present area, but in fact students believe that they reached it from elsewhere only within the last 150 years.
Finally, to forestall a possible, although absurd, misconception, I should like to disclaim any intention of speaking for the Kikuyu people or of putting forward their point of view. I have tried to describe the coming of the European to a part of Africa previously untouched by white influence as it appeared to one family of one tribe living in one small district in one part of Africa. But I am well aware that no person of one race and culture can truly interpret events from the angle of individuals belonging to a totally different race and culture. The old Kikuyu men, that rapidly dwindling number who remember life as it was lived before British rule, cannot present their point of view to us because they cannot express it in terms which we can understand. The young educated man—educated in our purely literary sense of the word—uses the thought-tracks of the European ; he is scarcely more able than his European teacher to interpret the feelings and outlook of the generation to whom the processes of European thought were always alien. It was the consideration that within a few years none will survive of those who remember the way of life that existed before the white man came, that led me to make the experiment of this book.
BOOK I: MUTHENGI
1890–1902
CHAPTER I
The Visit
1
MUTHENGI was fourteen years old when he first saw a column of shining-skinned young Kikuyu warriors swinging along the forest’s edge towards the plains, like a ripple of wind across a field of ripening grain, on the way to war. Afterwards he could not remember the names of the warriors, nor the boasting words they had shouted to his father as they loped past, nor even the designs painted boldly in black and red on their long shields; but from that moment he became a warrior; his spirit marched with theirs, and dreams of battle filled his waking mind. While others of his age were preoccupied with their skill in games, with the herding of goats, or with bird-scaring among the millet, he would practise hurling sticks against the trunk of a banana tree; and in his imagination bronze-limbed Masai warriors surged in full retreat over the millet-fields, and captured Masai cattle flowed in a brown flood over the pastures of his clan.
Even his father caught a little of the excitement at the time. The family, all five of them—the two parents, Muthengi and his young brother Matu, and a baby sister slung in a goatskin on the mother’s back—had just emerged from the cool shade of the forest to the edge of a sloping pasture that gleamed like a parrot’s wing in the bright sunlight. They paused a moment to accustom their eyes to the white morning glare, after the soft forest shadows; and suddenly, away to the left, the blade of a spear stabbed the air with a shaft of deflected sunlight.
Waseru, the father, turned his head, and then Muthengi saw them, the warriors : lithe as the leopard, swift as the reedbuck, tireless as the elephant, moving in a silent column within the shadow of the forest’s edge. Their glossy black ostrich-feather head-dresses nodded and swayed with each long easy stride, and naked spear-points twinkled from the shadows as if the stars had been plucked from heaven to hang in the boughs of trees. The iron rattles, shaped like cowrie shells, that each man wore strapped below the right knee were stuffed with leaves to kill the sound.
This was no game, no warriors’ display; it was a raid, the warriors’ business. The lust for cattle and for glory was in every man’s heart.
The movement of their feet disturbed Waseru’s blood. He, too, belonged to the class of warriors on whose strength the safety of his people rested. A Kikuyu proverb came into his mind as his eyes followed them: “a young man is a piece of God.”
They came on swiftly, and Waseru stepped back among the trees to let them pass. They seemed taller than men, in their nodding head-dresses. Each carried a spear in his right hand, and a long buffalo-hide shield hung from his left arm. A sword in a vermilion scabbard was strapped to his side, and a smooth-headed wooden club tucked into his belt. The right side of each warrior was newly greased with fat and brick-red ochre, and the left side, free from paint, shone like a dark polished chestnut. Many of them recognised Waseru, and raised their spears and greeted him by name as they passed.
“Is all well?” he called to one, a cousin, who saluted him. “Do you go to raid cattle on the plains?”
“Wa-Masai have captured Kikuyu cattle by the salt-lick and driven them across the river,” the warrior shouted. “We go to get them back.”
“Tonight we sleep by the salt-licks at Iruri,” another added. The column did not pause. “On the secon
d day we fall upon the manyattas* on the plain.”
A third man completed the tale as the column moved on. “We shall bring back our cattle, for our spies have told us that Masai warriors have gone across the plain to raid the Purko.”
Waseru raised his own spear in a final salute. “Go,” he called after the retreating column, “and tread upon termites!”
2
MUTHENGI’S body was rigid as a tree. Wide-eyed, he watched the warriors as if they had been a procession of spirits. His father’s shout broke the spell. He darted out of the little group and ran after the young men, tripping over tree-roots and brandishing a stick, a wild rushing torrent of excitement at his throat. He hopped after the tail of the column like an ostrich chicken, every sense submerged in a tide of conviction that he was one with the young warriors, marching towards the plains for loot and glory. Then a hand gripped his shoulder, and pride and exaltation vanished like a dream at dawn.
“Come back, you senseless partridge!” his father exclaimed angrily. Then, remembering that no man must abuse his son, he dropped his hand, and continued in a calmer voice: “Do you know no better than to speak thus to the warriors—you, an uncircumcised boy!—and to run behind those who set out on a journey? Must you disgrace your parents before the young men?”
Muthengi made no reply. He followed his father back to the path, his head held low. Shame was in his heart, but the rhythm of strong swinging bodies pounded behind his eyes. “One day,” he vowed, “I will be the greatest warrior of them all.”
Dappled sunlight spotted his mother’s brown goatskin cloak as though it had been a leopard’s back. Matu, his young brother, stood by her side, silent and afraid.
“Ee, father, warriors will throw spears at you, thinking you are a dikdik, if you run after them!” Wanjeri told her son. Her voice was high and shrill. The shaved shiny head of the baby on her back bobbed up and down as she laughed.