Out In The Midday Sun Read online

  The temptation to indulge in lotus-eating is always strong on Mombasa island and all along this coast, which used to be known by the mellifluous name of Azania: white beaches, coral reefs, warmth and somnolence, singing cicadas and brilliant-plumaged birds inhabiting aromatic bush, the rustle of palm-fronds, melodious Swahili words falling softly on the ear. But the impulse had to be resisted; the up-country train left at half-past four. There was time, however, for a visit to the Old Town on the other side of the island, and the old harbour with its immemorial dhows. The time was right for such a visit for the harbour was crowded with dhows from Oman and Dubai, from Jeddah and the coast of Malabar, coming in on the north-east monsoon, the kaskazi, as they had been doing for centuries, almost unchanged. And Dr Burkitt was the ideal companion, for he had a house on the mainland and knew Mombasa well. I never visited his house but was told that, like everything else about Dr Burkitt, it was unusual. The walls of both ground floor and upper storey were built only half-way up, leaving a four-foot gap between wall and roof, and wire netting was substituted for glass; agreeable when zephyr-like breezes whispered in from the sea, less so when torrential rain and force-nine gales soaked and flooded everything and everyone inside.

  We proceeded, as everyone did, to the big, hot customs shed where dhow captains spread their intricately patterned carpets for sale. Many are the homes of retired East Africans enriched by the glowing colours of a rug bought for a few pounds in that sweltering shed.

  Then there were Zanzibar chests, thickly studded with brass nails and also much-sought-after when the dhows came in. Few of them actually came from Zanzibar; most were made in the Gulf ports or in India with the European market in mind. But now and again you could find one that had been used for its proper purpose, to stow the clothing and possessions of the sailors. My father had managed to find one such and had bought it for me as a wedding present. It was a Lamu chest, smaller and simpler than the Zanzibar ones and more roughly carpentered. Sometimes I wish that it could tell of its experiences, of the creaking dhows in which it had traversed the Indian ocean, of the ports at which its crew had whiled away the furnace days, drinking endless cups of sweet thick coffee poured from those tall, thin, swan-necked pitchers of the Arab world, while waiting for the monsoon to blow their vessel back to Lamu.

  In the old harbour the dhows lay almost hull to hull, their sails furled, their waists populated by sailors in round white caps and brightly printed kekois, cooking on charcoal braziers, chewing betel nut or mira’a, sleeping, gossiping, stowing or unloading cargo. I would not have cared to be one of their women who, when they travel, were packed into a sort of cage made of coconut matting, windowless and airless, swathed in black robes with only slits for eyes, horribly seasick and never allowed to emerge for fresh air and exercise.

  The mottled walls of Fort Jesus slope almost to the sea’s brink, leaving just enough room for a narrow beach on which men were at work mending the big lateen sails, now made of canvas, formerly of coir matting. There are many kinds of dhow and they have fascinating names: Booms, Sambuks, Ghanjabs, Kotias, Badans, Zarooks, M’tepes, each built in a different sea-port and to a different design. Their cargoes are innocent now – salt fish, dates, henna, copper wire, mangrove poles, cooking pots, ghee – but less than a century ago, could one have stood on the ramparts of Fort Jesus, one would have seen slaves whipped on board, to be packed in layers, one atop the other so there would have been no room to move. How many perished! And these were the survivors of those who had trudged, yoked and fettered, from the far interior. This was an Arab trade, and it was put an end to by the Royal Navy.

  Every guide book to Mombasa tells the story of Fort Jesus, built by the Portuguese at the end of the sixteenth century, Kenya’s most solid (though by no means oldest) monument to its past. It is a gruesome story of sieges, captures, recaptures, massacres and murders that punctuated three centuries of struggle between Arab and Portuguese for possession of Mombasa and the coast of Azania. One episode in particular, I have often thought, could be made into a powerful drama for stage and screen. It is a tale of revenge.

  Yusuf, the Hamlet of the piece, was the son and heir of Hasan, the sheikh of Malindi, who was loyal to the Portuguese overlords. When Yusuf was a boy of seven the Portuguese Captain of Port Jesus, an over-bearing and belligerent man, quarrelled with Malindi’s ruler and bribed African tribesmen from the mainland with two thousand pieces of cloth to murder Hasan. He then sent Hasan’s severed head to Goa, the seat of Portuguese government, followed by the boy Yusuf, to be brought up as a Christian by Augustinian monks, indoctrinated with Portuguese culture, and groomed to become the sheikh of Mombasa. Translated into Dom Geronimo Chingulia, he was married to a Portuguese girl of good family and, as a grown man, sent back to Mombasa to take over his heritage.

  The plan went awry. Back in Africa, the pull of Islam began to loosen the hold of Christianity, and his Arab blood to draw Yusuf back to his own people. It was said that he paid secret midnight visits to his father’s grave and prayed there in the Muslim fashion, and that a Portuguese spy shadowed him and reported his behaviour to the Captain.

  On 15 August 1631 the Feast of the Assumption was due to be celebrated in the chapel of the Fort. Thither Yusuf made his way with a band of followers. As the Captain greeted him, he stabbed the man to death and then, in the chapel, similarly despatched the Captain’s wife and daughter together with the officiating priest. A holocaust followed. All the garrison in the Fort were massacred, followed by nearly all the Portuguese in the town. The women were offered a chance of life – of a sort, in Muslim harems – if they abjured their faith. They refused, and were hurled into a boat and drowned in the harbour.

  Predictably, Yusuf did not enjoy a prosperous reign and die in his bed. After beating off an attempt to recapture the Fort by a fleet from Goa, he laid Mombasa waste and sailed away to the Red Sea. When the Portuguese re-occupied the island two years later they found it almost deserted. Yusuf was killed by pirates. History does not relate what happened to his unfortunate wife.

  Thus ended a bungled Portuguese attempt to create a ‘good native’ imbued with the culture of the colonial power, loyal to its authority and trained to govern in its name. After several dreadful sieges and massacres, Portuguese rule in Mombasa ceased on 26 November 1729, when Fort Jesus was abandoned and the few half-starved survivors struggled down to Mozambique in two dhows.2

  So, after an interlude of three centuries, the Arabs were back to hoist their plain red flag over Fort Jesus. It was flying there in 1933, for Mombasa, together with all this East African coastline, still belonged, in theory, to the Sultan of Zanzibar, the ruler of this residual Arab empire. The British leased a ten-mile-wide strip for an annual rent that had started at £17,000 but had gradually risen, in the face of stiff opposition by the tenant, over the years. This was a British Protectorate, not a colony. Perhaps the distinction was a hair-splitting one, but Arab law continued to be practised and the Muslim faith and various Arab customs to be observed. This was one of those untidy form of modus vivendi that look hypocritical but work pretty well. The Sultan’s representative in Mombasa, the chief Liwali Sir Ali bin Salim, was much respected by Europeans, generous in charitable causes and even welcomed in the Mombasa club which, following the general pattern of the day, admitted only European members with an occasional exception, like Sir Ali and the Aga Khan.

  The true bringers of peace to this Isle of War were no conquering heroes or bold adventurers but a middle-aged, middle-class consul in Zanzibar, who persuaded the Sultan to accept a Protectorate, and a Glaswegian ship-owner, founder of the British India Steam Navigation Company, whose statue, bespattered by bird droppings and looking as if an umbrella should have been included, stands in the commercial centre of the town. It was Sir William Mackinnon who, after years of patient prodding, persuaded a most reluctant government to grant, in 1888, a royal charter to his Imperial British East Africa Company: a charter but no cash, which was subscribed (£250,000) by
a number of hopeful philanthropists wishing to open up trade in the interior.3 Their hopes were not fulfilled; the British Government stepped in to bale out the company; soon after came engineers and surveyors to build the Uganda Railway and, incidentally, to found the club near the foot of the grim fort, with a fine view over the harbour. (And delicious fresh sea-food and an agreeable swimming pool.)

  The missionaries were here before the consuls and the engineers: amazing men and women (they brought their wives, and nearly always buried their children) who faced terrible privations and imminent death in a hostile Muslim land whose ruling class they offended deeply by taking in and caring for freed and escaped slaves.

  In due course an Anglican cathedral, substantial if not exactly beautiful, arose on Mombasa Island not far from fort and club, also a Roman Catholic one not much farther away. It was still a common practice for a young man making his career in Kenya to seek his bride during his long leave, get engaged, go ahead to build or otherwise acquire a dwelling, and then to send for his fiancée. He would be at the quayside to meet her, and very often she would go direct from ship to cathedral, pausing en route at the home of some unknown but hospitable lady to change into bridal attire. How bleak it must have been for a young girl to plight her troth to a man she might not have seen for a year or more, so far from her family, given in marriage by a total stranger. Did these girls feel elated, or afraid? A bit of both, I daresay.4

  My parents had hoped to meet me at Mombasa but they were over four hundred miles away up-country and could not afford the fare. The Depression had its strangle-hold on Kenya as on everywhere else, and the farmers’ plight was almost desperate. A whole bag of maize fetched only as much as would buy one gallon of petrol, if that, and some farmers hitched oxen to their cars to be towed in to their local town for essential shopping, all on credit, and for interviews with their bank managers, all in vain. To make matters worse the most devastating locust invasion in living memory had struck eastern Africa at the end of the 1920s. Swarms blackened the sky, descended on crops and pastures and left behind barren stalks and earth stripped of all vegetation; branches of trees broke beneath their weight and they had even halted trains by smothering the track so that the wheels lost their grip. They left behind a generation of hoppers which advanced in droves greedy to devour anything the swarms had spared and to invade new territories, where they turned into adult locusts and started the whole process over again. In 1931, nearly half the maize crop grown on European farms was destroyed. By the time of my arrival the worst was over, but the threat was still very much alive and would continue for some years.

  What had been the Uganda Railway when I first knew it had become the Kenya and Uganda Railways and Harbours and was very much smartened up. Powerful Garrett engines had replaced the old ones that had run on eucalyptus logs, spat sparks which started grass fires and paused for long drinks at almost every station. The old trains had no corridors, so you were isolated in your compartment except when you got out at stations to stretch your legs, and to have dinner at Voi and breakfast at Makindu. You ate in grubby, unadorned dak bungalows lit by safari lanterns; the food was pretty dreadful and the drinks tepid, but you could make new acquaintances or greet old ones and, at Voi, you might very likely hear lions grunting in the bush around. When you got back to your compartment your bedding would have been spread on the hard seats and you would batten down for the night.

  Each compartment had its small washroom, equipped with a built-in bottle-opener which Julian Huxley, in a book about his African travels,5 adduced as proof of what terrible topers Kenya settlers were. This was thought to be unfair, because you could get no drinking water on the train and so carried bottles of mineral water and needed an opener when you came to brush your teeth. But now there was a corridor, a dining car and five-course meals. There were still three classes: first for senior civil servants (who travelled free), the richer Europeans and a sprinkling of wealthy Indians; second for all the other Europeans and Indians; third for Africans, who crowded into trucks equipped with benches, taking their food and a great many small children and babies. There was nothing official about this grading system; if any African had been rich enough he could have travelled first class if he wanted to; at the time, none was, or did. I travelled second and paid, I noted in my diary, sixty shillings – quite a lot in those days. Third class, I think, cost eight shillings.

  Dust was the bane of the journey, a fine red dust that drifted into the compartments no matter how hard you tried to exclude it; and in the heat of the Taru desert to keep the windows tightly shut would have been to consign yourself to an oven. The dust got into everything, your nose, your eyes, your clothing, and when passengers arrived at Nairobi their faces were brick-red and hair and clothes stiff with the red powder.

  But when you set the dust and dirt against the sight that greeted you when you looked out at dawn, they weighed as little as a pin against a pyramid. It was one of the great sights of the world. Even without the animals it would have been spectacular, with the thin pure light of sunrise, the colour of a fine Moselle, flooding over this enormous savannah and picking out every tree, every fold in the surface of the plain; far beyond, the white dome of Kilimanjaro seemed to hover in the western sky. But it was the animals that brought life and wonder to the scene. Thousands, tens of thousands of them could be seen from the carriage window, from pygmy mongooses peering out of their burrows to – if you were lucky – mighty elephants in family parties, from dappled, mild-eyed giraffes like tall-masted ships of the veld to graceful little shiny ‘tommies’ or zebras shimmering in the sunlight: lumbering kongonis, heavy-dewlapped elands, a rhino perhaps, standing fore-square with horn uplifted, silver-backed jackals trotting home to their dens after a night’s foraging.

  The animals could not, I suppose, be said to be living at peace with one another, because predators were constantly hunting their prey, but only when they were hungry; species did not do battle against species, or herds vie with each other for power and glory; no animal oppressed or tortured another; they shared the pastures, the bush, the shade and foliage of trees, the salt-licks and the drinking places without dispute or rancour. They did not, as Walt Whitman put it, whine about their condition, weep for their sins, or agonise over their duty to God:

  … not one is demented with the mania of owning things,

  Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,

  Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

  Even man, the arch-killer, fitted into this harmonious-seeming state of affairs. To the left of the railway line, as far as the eye could see and farther, lay the Maasai reserve; and the Maasai, by and large, left the animals alone. They killed lions to protect their livestock, and young boys might hunt birds with bows and arrows, but otherwise they did not molest the wild creatures. Being nomadic, they had no crops and gardens to protect. Wild animals could come and go as they wished on their seasonal migrations. One of the early pioneers in Kenya, a tough weather-beaten Scot who made a living by trading in cattle, and had penetrated with a few porters far into the then little-known Maasai reserve, told me that when he pitched his camp, somewhere down beyond the Mara river, the hartebeests and Thomson’s gazelles, the wildebeests and jackals, would come right up to the tent to sniff unfamiliar odours out of curiosity and quite without fear. He said that he had felt some embarrassment, if not reluctance, to raise his rifle against the unsuspecting beasts. ‘You didn’t shoot them, surely?’ I said. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘The porters had to eat.’

  At the time of which I write, these great animal herds had not yet been seriously depleted in the game reserves, although outside them they were already being harried and in places ‘shot out’, not by sportsmen, whose bags were strictly limited by licence, but by farmers, black and white. National parks were not to come into existence until 1948, but early in the Colony’s history shooting had been prohibited in game reserves. Poaching was still on an insignificant
scale. So the animals, for the time being, had little to worry about provided they did not stray out of the protected areas. While they were extraordinarily quick to learn where they were safe from shooting, the deep urges of migration sometimes betrayed them. These inbuilt compulsions to trek away in search of fresh feeding and breeding grounds overrode the lessons of experience, and exposed them to fatal dangers when they crossed the unfenced boundaries of the game reserves.

  In the eight years that had elapsed since I looked out of the window of the train at this variety of creatures grazing and browsing and frisking their tails, a great change had taken place in my own attitude, and that of many others, towards them. In my childhood, I had enjoyed stalking and shooting the creatures of the veld and bush. I had owned and cherished a rifle; learned from my African companions the elements of tracking; collected and cured the heads, taken measurements of horns, read with enjoyment books by professional hunters, and shared the prevailing belief that shooting wild animals was an exciting test of skill sometimes spiced with danger, to be enjoyed by all who loved the countryside and hoped to learn its lore by trudging on foot through bush and forest with every sense alert.

  Even before I left Kenya at the age of eighteen, the fact that the end of a successful hunt was the destruction of a beautiful animal had begun to nibble at the roots of my enjoyment. The pleasures of the hunt were undeniable: those early mornings when shafts of sunlight gilded tree-trunks and sparkled on dew-beaded grasses and on a mantle of silver cobwebs; the bell-like call of birds; the monkey-shaken treetops, the air’s purity, the thrilling glimpse of an animal frozen into immobility before bounding silently away. But that these sensual pleasures should lead to pain and death on a bright morning had begun to seem a sacrilege. Not only that, it had begun to seem unnecessary. Animal photography was nothing new, but before the development of telephoto lenses it was crude, and the best photographs were taken at night, by flashlight, which was difficult, expensive to arrange and attended by more failures than successes.