We went down to the oxen’s boma, and sat on the fence, counting the oxen as they came in. Without words I pointed them out to Ingrid: “These oxen,” and without words she responded: “Yes, these oxen,” and recorded them in her book. We went round to the stables to feed the horses with sugar, and when they had finished it, I stretched out my sticky and be-slabbered palms, presenting them to Ingrid and crying, “These horses.” Ingrid sighed back laboriously, “Yes, these horses,” and noted them down. In my garden by the river she could not reconcile herself to the idea that I must leave the plants that I had brought from Europe; she wrung her hands over the mint, sage and lavender, and talked of them again later on, as if she were pondering on some scheme by which I might arrange to take them with me.
We spent the afternoons in contemplation of my small herd of Native cows which grazed on the lawn. I went through their age, characteristics, and yielding of milk, and Ingrid groaned and shrieked over the figures as if she had been bodily hurt. She scrutinized them carefully one by one, not with any view to trade, for my cows were going to my house-boys, but so as to value and weigh up my loss. She clung to the soft sweet-smelling calves; she had herself after long struggles got a few cows with calves on her farm, and against all reason, and against her own will, her deep furious glances blamed me for deserting my calves.
A man who was walking beside a bereaved friend and who was all the time in his own mind repeating the words: “Thank God it is not me,” would, I believe, feel badly about it, and would try to suppress the feeling. It is a different thing in two women who are friends, and of whom the one is manifesting her deep sympathy in the distress of the other. There it goes without saying that the more fortunate friend will all the while in her heart repeat the same thing: “Thank God it is not me.” It causes no bad feeling between the two, but on the contrary brings them closer together, and gives to the ceremony a personal element. Men, I think, cannot easily or harmoniously envy or triumph over one another. But it goes without saying that the bride triumphs over the bridesmaids, and that the lying-in-visitors envy the mother of the child; and none of the parties feel the worse on that account. A woman who had lost a child might show its clothes to a friend, aware that the friend was repeating in her heart: “Thank God it is not me,”—and it would be to both of them a natural and befitting thing. It was so with Ingrid and me. As we walked over the farm, I knew that she was thinking of her own farm, praising her luck that it was still hers, and holding on to it with all her might, and we got on very well on that. In spite of our old khaki coats and trousers, we were in reality a pair of mythical women, shrouded respectively in white and black, a unity, the Genii of the farmer’s life in Africa.
After a few days Ingrid said good-bye to me, and went up by the railway to Njoro.
I could no longer ride out, and my walks without the dogs had become very silent and sedate, but I still had my car, and I was glad to have her, for in these months I had much to do.
The fate of my squatters weighed on my mind. As the people who had bought the farm were planning to take up the coffee-trees, and to have the land cut up and sold as building-plots, they had no use for the squatters, and as soon as the deal was through, they had given them all six months’ notice to get off the farm. This to the squatters was an unforeseen and bewildering determination, for they had lived in the illusion that the land was theirs. Many of them had been born on the farm, and others had come there as small children with their fathers.
The squatters knew that in order to stay on the land they had got to work for me one hundred and eighty days out of each year, for which they were paid twelve shillings for every thirty days; these accounts were kept at the office of the farm. They also knew that they must pay the hut-tax to the Government, of twelve shillings to a hut, a heavy burden on a man, who with very little else in the world would own two or three grass-huts,—according to the number of his wives, for a Kikuyu husband must give each of his wives her own hut. My squatters had, from time to time, been threatened to be turned off the farm for an offence, so that they must in some way have felt that their position was not entirely unassailable. The hut-tax they much disliked, and when I collected it on the farm for the Government, they gave me a great deal to do, and much talk to listen to. But they had still looked upon these things as common vicissitudes of life, and had never given up the hope of somehow getting round them. They had not imagined that there might be, to them all, an underlying universal principle, which would at its own hour manifest itself in a fatal, crushing manner. For some time they chose to regard the decision of the new owners of the farm as a bugbear, which they could courageously ignore.
In some respects, although not in all, the white men fill in the mind of the Natives the place that is, in the mind of the white men, filled by the idea of God. I once had a contract drawn up with an Indian timber-merchant, it contained the words: an act of God. I was not familiar with the expression, and the lawyer who was drawing up the contract tried to explain it to me.
“No, no Madam,” he said, “You have not quite caught the meaning of the term. What is completely unforeseeable, and not consonant with rule or reason, that is an act of God.”
In the end, the certainty of their notice to quit brought the squatters in dark groups to my house. They felt the denunciation as a consequence of my departure from the farm,—my own bad luck was growing, and was spreading over them as well. They did not blame me for it, for that was talked out between us; they asked me where they were to go.
I found it, in more than one way, difficult to answer them. The Natives cannot, according to the law, themselves buy any land, and there was not another farm that I knew of, big enough to take them on as squatters. I told them that I had myself been told when I had made inquiries in the matter, that they must go into the Kikuyu Reserve and find land there. On that they again gravely asked me if they should find enough unoccupied land in the Reserve to bring all their cattle with them? And, they went on, would they be sure all to find land in the same place, so that the people from the farm should remain together, for they did not want to be separated?
I was surprised that they should be so determined to stay together, for on the farm they had found it difficult to keep peace, and had never had much good to say of one another. Still, here they all came, the big swaggering cattle-owners like Kathegu, Kaninu, and Mauge, hand in hand, so to say, with the humble unportioned workers of the soil like Waweru and Chotha, who did not own so much as one goat; and they were all filled with the same spirit, and as intent upon keeping one another as on keeping their cows. I felt that they were not only asking me for a place to live on, but that they were demanding their existence of me.
It is more than their land that you take away from the people, whose Native land you take. It is their past as well, their roots and their identity. If you take away the things that they have been used to see, and will be expecting to see, you may, in a way, as well take their eyes. This applies in a higher degree to the primitive people than to the civilized, and animals again will wander back a long way, and go through danger and sufferings, to recover their lost identity, in the surroundings that they know.
The Masai when they were moved from their old country, North of the railway line, to the present Masai Reserve, took with them the names of their hills, plains and rivers; and gave them to the hills, plains and rivers in the new country. It is a bewildering thing to the traveller. The Masai were carrying their cut roots with them as a medicine, and were trying, in exile, to keep their past by a formula.