The Flame Trees of Thika Read Free Page A

who were nothing of the sort appointed themselves as members of this race, with its Arab affinities. He also claimed to be a Muslim, though it was hard to say in what this consisted. We never saw him at hisprayers and doubted if he knew the direction of Mecca. His only strict observance was his refusal to eat meat unless the throat of the animal providing it had been cut. So when Robin shot a buck, a knife would materialize in Juma’s hand, he would gird his long white
kanzu
round his waist (he wore nothing underneath) and sprint like a flash to the stricken antelope. He was a great meat-lover.
    He was also a magician. With three stones, a few sticks, and one old, black cooking-pot he would produce a four-course meal a great deal better than anything to be had in most restaurants or hotels. He had the secret, known only to Africans, of serving food hot and promptly, and yet not dry and burnt, at any hour of the day or night. Cooks were men of substance and authority, respected and well-paid. Juma made the most of his superior position. In fact he was a bully – large, strong, and black-skinned.
    ‘We are coming now to the country of the cannibals,’ he said facetiously, and quite untruthfully. ‘These Kikuyu, they scavenge like hyenas, they will dig up corpses and eat them. Sometimes their women give birth to snakes and lizards. They have never heard of Allah. They eat the intestines of goats and circumcise their women. They –’
    ‘Silence, Juma.’ Tilly commanded. She was hot, tired, dusty, and in no mood for anatomical gossip, and her understanding of the Swahili tongue was still shaky. Although she had studied it with her usual energy and grasp on the voyage out, her phrase-book, acquired from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, had not always suggested sentences most helpful to intending settlers. ‘The idle slaves are scratching themselves’…‘Six drunken Europeans have killed the cook’…turning these over in her mind, on top of the ox-cart in the sun, she doubted if their recital, even in the best Swahili, would impress Juma favourably.
    After his remarks I stared at the passing Kikuyu with a new interest. They looked harmless, but that was evidently a pose. We passed a woman carrying a baby in a sling on her back, as well as a load. I could see the infant’s shiny head, like a polished skittle ball, bobbing about between the mother’s bent shoulders, and looked hopefully for the glimpse of a snake or lizard. But no doubt the mothers would leave these at home.
    ‘These oxen,’ Juma grumbled, ‘they are as old as great-grandmothers, their legs are like broken sticks, this driver is the son of a hyena and lacks the brains of a frog. When the new moon has come we shall still be travelling in this worthless cart.’
    ‘No more words,’ Tilly said snappily. Juma had a patronizing air that she resented, and she doubted if he was showing enough respect. Those were the days when to lack respect was a more serious crime than to neglect a child, bewitch a man, or steal a cow, and was generally punishable by beating. Indeed respect was the only protection available to Europeans who lived singly, or in scattered families, among thousands of Africans accustomed to constant warfare and armed with spears and poisoned arrows, but had themselves no barricades, and went about unarmed. This respect preserved them like an invisible coat of mail, or a form of magic, and seldom failed; but it had to be very carefully guarded. The least rent or puncture might, if not immediately checked and repaired, split the whole garment asunder and expose its wearer in all his human vulnerability. Kept intact, it was a thousand times stronger than all the guns and locks and metal in the world; challenged, it could be brushed aside like a spider’s web. So Tilly was a little sensitive about respect, and Juma was silenced.
    We came at last to a stone bridge over the Chania river, newly built, and considered to be a great