The prestige of the Christian religion in Africa was weakened by the intolerance that the one Christian church showed towards the other.
On Christmas nights while I was in Africa I used to drive over to the French Mission to hear the Midnight Mass. It was generally hot at this time of the year; as you drove through the wattle plantation, you heard the chiming of the Mission bell a long way in the clear warm air. A crowd of happy, lively people were at the place round the church when you arrived, the French and Italian shopkeepers of Nairobi with their families had come out, the nuns from the convent school were present, and the Native congregation swarmed in gay clothes. The big fine church was lighted with many hundred candles and with great transparencies which the Fathers had themselves made.
When Christmas came, in the first year after Kamante had come into my house, I told him that I was going to take him with me to the Mass, as a fellow Christian, and described to him the beautiful things that he was going to see there, in the manner of the Fathers themselves. Kamante listened to it all, moved in his soul, and put on the best clothes he had. But when the car was at the door, he came back in great agitation of mind and said that he could not possibly come with me. He did not want to give me his reasons, and flinched from my questions; in the end it came out. No, he could not go, he had by now realized that it was to the French Mission that I meant to take him, and he had been so strongly warned against that Mission when he had been in Hospital. I explained to him that this was all a misunderstanding, and that he must come now. But at that he began to turn to stone before my eyes, he died, he turned up his eyes so that only the white showed in them and sweated in the face.
“No, no, Msabu,” he whispered, “I am not coming with you. There inside that big church, I know it well, there is a Msabu who is mbaia sana,”—terribly bad.
When I heard this I became very sad, but I thought that now I would indeed have to take him with me so that the Virgin herself could enlighten him. The Fathers had a life-size pasteboard statue of the Virgin in their Church, all blue and white, and the Natives are generally impressed by statues, while it is difficult to them to conceive the idea of a picture. So I promised Kamante my protection and took him with me, and when he walked into the Church, very close at my heels, he forgot all his scruples. It happened to be the finest Christmas Mass that they had ever had at the Mission. There was in the Church a very big Nativity,—a grotto with the Holy Family, just out from Paris, which was illuminated by radiant stars in a blue sky, and it had round it a hundred toy animals, wooden cows and pure white cotton-wool lambs, without any petty consideration as to their size, that must have raised ecstasy in the hearts of the Kikuyus.
After Kamante had become a Christian he was no longer afraid to touch a dead body.
Earlier in his life he had been afraid of it, and when a man, who had been carried on a stretcher up to the terrace by my house, died there, he would no more than the others lend a hand to carry him back; he did not recede, like the other people, on to the lawn, but he stood immovable upon the pavement, a little dark monument. Why the Kikuyu, who personally have so little fear of death, should be so terrified to touch a corpse, while the white people, who are afraid to die, handle the dead easily, I do not know. Here once more you feel their reality to be different from our realities. But all farmers know that here is a domain on which you cannot control the Native, and that you will save yourself trouble if you give up the idea at once, for he will really rather die than change his ways.
Now the terror had disappeared out of Kamante’s heart; he scorned it in his kinsmen. He did even show off a little here, as if to boast of the power of his God. It happened that I had opportunities to test his faith, and that Kamante and I came to carry three dead people between us, in the course of our life on the farm. One was a young Kikuyu girl who was run over by an ox cart outside my house. The second was a young Kikuyu who was killed while he was felling trees in the forest. The third was an old white man who came to live on the farm, played a part in the life of it, and died there.
He was a countryman of mine, an old blind Dane by the name of Knudsen. One day when I was in Nairobi he fumbled his way up to my car, presented himself, and asked me to give him a house on my land, as he had no place in the world to stay in. I had at that time been reducing my staff of white people on the plantation, and had an empty bungalow that I could lend him, and he came out and lived on the farm for six months.
He was a singular figure to have on a highland farm: so much a creature of the Sea that it was as if we had had an old clipped albatross with us. He was all broken by the hardships of life, and by disease and drink, bent and crooked, with the curious colouring of redhaired people gone white, as if he had in reality strewn ashes upon his head, or as if he was marked by his own element and had been salted. But there was an unquenchable flame in him which no ashes could cover. He came of Danish fisherman stock and had been a sailor, and later one of the very early pioneers of Africa,—whatever wind it was that blew him there.
Old Knudsen had tried a great many things in his life, preferably such as have to do with water or fish or birds, and had done well on none of them. At one time, he told me, he had owned a very fine fishing concern on Lake Victoria, with many miles of the best fishing nets in the world, and with a motorboat. But during the war he had lost it all. In his recounting of this tragedy of his, there was a dark moment of fatal misunderstanding, or of the treason of a friend. I do not know which, for the tale was never quite the same at the various times when it was told to me, and it brought Old Knudsen into a terrible state of mind when he came to this point of his recital. There was, all the same, some real fact in the story, for in compensation of his losses, the Government, while he was staying with me, paid him a sort of pension of a shilling a day.
All this he told me on the occasions when he came up on a visit to my house. He often took refuge in me, for he was uncomfortable in his own bungalow. The small Native boys, whom I gave him as servants, ran away from him again and again, because he frightened them by rushing at them blindly, head foremost, and fumbling with his stick. But when he was in high spirits he would sit on my verandah over a cup of coffee and sing Danish patriotic songs to me, all by himself, with great energy. It was a pleasure to both him and me to speak Danish, so we exchanged many remarks over insignificant happenings on the farm, just for the joy of talking. But I did not always have patience with him, for when he had once arrived it was difficult to make him stop talking and go away; in our daily intercourse he had, as was to be expected, much of the Ancient Mariner, or of the Old Man of the Sea.
He had been a great artist at the making of fishing nets,—the best fishing nets in the world, he told me,—and here, in the bungalow of the farm, he made kibokos,—the Native whips which are cut out of Hippo hide. He would buy a Hippo hide from the Natives or the farmers up at Lake Naivasha, and if he was lucky he could make fifty kibokos out of one hide. I have still a riding-whip which he gave me; it is a very fine whip. This work spread a terrible stench round his house, like the stench round the nest of some old carrion-bird. Later on, when I made a pond on the farm, he was nearly always to be found by the pond, in deep thought, with his reflection vertically under him, like a Sea-bird in a Zoo.