Here lay before you a hundred miles’ gallop over grass and open undulating land; there was not a fence nor a ditch, and no road. There was no human habitation except the Masai villages, and those were deserted half the year, when the great wanderers took themselves and their herds off to other pastures. There were low thorn trees regularly spread over the plain, and long deep valleys with dry riverbeds of big flat stones, where you had to find a deer-path here and there to take you across. After a little while you became aware of how still it was out here. Now, looking back on my life in Africa, I feel that it might altogether be described as the existence of a person who had come from a rushed and noisy world, into a still country.
A little before the rains, the Masai burn off the old dry grass, and while the plains are thus lying black and waste they are unpleasant to travel on: you will get the black charred dust, which the hoofs of your horse raise, all over you and into your eyes, and the burnt grass-stalks are sharp as glass; your dogs get their feet cut on them. But when the rains come, and the young green grass is fresh on the plains, you feel as if riding upon springs, and the horse gets a little mad with the pleasantness. The various kinds of gazelles come to the green places to graze, and there look like toy animals stood upon a billiard table. You may ride into a herd of Eland; the mighty peaceful beasts will let you get close to them before they start trotting off, their long horns streaming backwards over their raised necks, the large loose flaps of breastskin, that make them look square, swaying as they jog. They seem to have come out of an old Egyptian epitaph, but there they have been ploughing the fields, which gives them a familiar and domesticated air. The Giraffe keep farther away in the Reserve.
At times, in the first month of the rains, a sort of wild white fragrant Pink flowers so richly all over the Reserve that at a distance the plains look patched with snow.
I turned to the animal world from the world of men; my heart was heavy with the tragedy of the night. The old men sitting at my house made me uneasy; in old times people must have had that feeling when they thought it likely that a witch of the neighbourhood had fixed her mind upon them, or was at the very moment carrying a wax-child under her clothes, to be baptized with their own name.
My relations with the Natives in the legal affairs of the farm were altogether of a queer nature. Since, before anything, I wanted peace on the land, I could not keep out of them, for a dispute between the Squatters, which has not been solemnly settled, was like those sores that you get in Africa, and which they there call veldt-sores: they heal on the surface if you let them, and go on festering and running underneath until you dig them up to the bottom and have them cleaned all through. The Natives themselves were aware of this, and if they really wanted a matter settled they would ask me to give judgment.
As I knew nothing of their laws the figure that I cut at these great courts of justice would often be that of a Prima donna who does not remember a word of her part and has to be prompted through it by the rest of the cast. This task my old men took upon themselves with tact and patience. It would also at times be the figure of an affronted Prima donna who is shocked by her role and, refusing to go on with it, walks off the stage. When this happened, my audience took it as a hard blow from the hand of destiny, an act of God outside their understanding; they looked on it in silence and spat.
The ideas of justice of Europe and Africa are not the same and those of the one world are unbearable to the other. To the African there is but one way of counterbalancing the catastrophes of existence, it shall be done by replacement; he does not look for the motive of an action. Whether you lie in wait for your enemy and cut his throat in the dark; or you fell a tree, and a thoughtless stranger passes by and is killed: so far as punishment goes, to the Native mind, it is the same thing. A loss has been brought upon the community and must be made up for, somewhere, by somebody. The Native will not give time or thought to the weighing up of guilt or desert: either he fears that this may lead him too far, or he reasons that such things are no concern of his. But he will devote himself, in endless speculations, to the method by which crime or disaster shall be weighed up in sheep and goats,—time does not count to him; he leads you solemnly into a sacred maze of sophistry. In those days this went against my ideas of justice.
All Africans are the same in these rites. The Somali have a very different mentality from the Kikuyu and a deep contempt for them, but they will sit down in identical manner to weigh up murder, rape, or fraud against their stock at home in Somaliland,—dearly beloved she-camels, and horses, the names and pedigree of which are written in their hearts.
Once the news came to Nairobi of how Farah’s little brother, who was ten years old, in a place called Buramur, had taken up a stone and thrown it at a boy of a different tribe, knocking out two of his teeth. Over this matter representatives of the two tribes met at the farm to sit upon the floor of Farah’s house and talk, night after night. Old lean men came, who had been to Mekka and wore a green turban, arrogant young Somalis who, when they were not attending to really serious matters, were gunbearers to the great European travellers and hunters, and dark-eyed, round-faced boys, who were shyly representing their family and who did not say a word, but were devoutly listening and learning. Farah told me that the matter was considered so grave because the boy’s looks had been ruined, he might find it difficult, when his time came, to get married, and would have to come down in his pretentions as to birth or beauty in his bride. In the end the penance was fixed at fifty camels, which means half waregilt, full waregilt being one hundred camels. Fifty camels were then bought, far away in Somaliland, to be, ten years hence, laid on to the price of a Somali maiden, and to turn her eyes off the two missing teeth of her bridegroom; perhaps the foundation of a tragedy was laid. Farah himself considered that he had got off lightly.
The Natives of the farm never realized my views on their legal systems, and they came to me first of all for their indemnification when any ill-luck befell them.
Once, in the coffee-picking season, a young Kikuyu girl named Wamboi was run over by a bullock cart outside my house and killed. The carts were taking coffee from the field to the mill, and I had forbidden anybody to go riding on them. Otherwise I should have had at every trip a party of gay coffee-picking girls and children taking a slow joyride,—for anybody can walk quicker than a bullock,—all across the farm, and it would be too heavy on my bullocks. The young drivers, however, did not have it in them to send away the dreamy-eyed girls who kept running alongside their carts and begging for this great pleasure; all they could do was to tell them to jump off where the road came into sight of my house. But Wamboi fell as she jumped and the wheel of the cart went over her small dark head and broke the skull; a little blood trailed in the cart-track.
I sent for her old father and mother, who came in from the picking-field and wailed over her. I knew that this would also mean a heavy loss to them, for the girl had been of marriage-age, and would have brought them in her price of sheep and goats and a heifer or two. This they had been looking forward to since her birth. I was considering how much I ought to help them, when they forestalled me by turning upon me, with great energy, their claim for a full indemnification.
No, I said, I would not pay. I had told the girls of the farm that I would not have them riding on the carts, all people were aware of that. The old people nodded, there was nothing here with which they did not agree, but they stuck to their claim immovably. Their argument was that somebody must pay. They could get no contradiction to the principle into their heads, no more than they could have got the theory of relativity in there. And it was not greed or spite which, when I broke off the discussion and went back, made them follow at my heels; it was, as if I had been indeed magnetic, a law of Nature.