The small town of Sotik, half a mile off the main Kericho-Kisii road, overlooks hilly fertile farmland semi-encircled by gentle mountains. On the outskirts stands the Sotik Hotel, surrounded by piles of builders’ rubble and malodorous restaurant garbage. Its five jerry-built storeys seem excessive; rumour had it that a local politician’s son-in-law was the contractor. Wide black streaks on the concrete façade led my eye to defective guttering and the enormous square patio became an ankle-deep pond when it rained. However, the staff were amiable, though none spoke comprehensible English, and the wooden table and chair in my £3 room guaranteed a writer’s comfort. Unfortunately, privacy was limited by a broken window pane through which inquisitive hands could (and often did) pull aside the flimsy curtain. In my en suite bathroom the shower worked but the lavatory had long since become a health hazard.

I was about to shower when a policeman knocked on my door and brusquely ordered me to remain in Sotik ‘until further notice’. As I began to argue he added, ‘For your safety, madame’. He declined to expatiate but later on, reading a borrowed copy of the Daily Nation, I saw his point. Between Sotik and the Ugandan border nasty things were happening. ‘Tribal warfare’, explained the Nation. My two Luo drinking-companions in the bleak third-floor hotel bar – up a concrete spiral stairway reeking of urine – had another explanation. ‘It’s Moi stirring trouble,’ one muttered in my ear. ‘He’s trying to prove multi-party democracy won’t work in Kenya.’ Then two Kikuyus entered and the Luos fell silent.

Sotik is a Kipsigi centre and the Kalenjin-speaking, Nilo-Hamitic Kipsigis (President Moi’s small tribe) are on the Kikuyus’ side against the Luos. These last are not to be confused with the Western Bantu Luhyas, though I personally wouldn’t blame anyone for confusing tribes which to European ears sound identical. Much as it pains me to have to agree with the reprehensible Moi, it has to be said that none of Kenya’s forty tribes is known for its devotion to Western-style multi-party democracy. Nor is it realistic to expect them to appreciate a political system so remote from their own traditions.

For £1.20 the hotel restaurant provided ideal cyclist-fodder: a tender giant steak (it covered the dinner-plate) with three helpings of crisp chips and carefully cooked cabbage. I complimented the cheerful young chef when he left his cockroach-busy kitchen to observe my gustatory reactions. He beamed and explained, ‘Here we learned to cook the English way. My grandfather and father cooked always for the same family. They could serve you many complicated meals, now we have only simple foods.’

At the next table sat a bank clerk newly arrived in Sotik. He was doleful. ‘My home is in Kisumu, a real town. This place is only a trading centre. What will my wife say when she sees it? Where are my children to get good education? The older ones must stay with their grandparents.’ (At 34 he had six children and a seventh on the way.) ‘My wife must stay in Kisumu to have this baby, here she might die. And how can we bear such cold nights? We have always lived in Kisumu.’

Another grievance concerned his youngest brother; on applying for a bank job he had been told he must have an AIDS test. ‘These people say they cannot waste money training youngsters who may soon die. This insults my brother. He is a good Catholic boy, he lives like a Christian. Now he is looking for other work, he is too much afraid of the test. But he can find nothing else so secure and well-paid with nice promotion.’

I remained silent; it seemed not the occasion for drawing logical conclusions.

Sotik’s night-life happens in its hotel and the inhuman decibels of amplified reggae and punk rock blared until 4.15 a.m. After that I needed my fortifying breakfast (for 70 pence) of two giant chef-made beef sausages, two slabs of bacon, two fried eggs, a pyramid of bread thickly buttered and a large pot of strong hot tea. Foodwise, I could have been delayed in no better place.

It took me all of fifteen minutes to explore the town. Poorly stocked ex-Asian shops, solidly built but neglected, lined the dusty, pot-holed main (and only) street. In significant contrast were two pretentious new banks (Barclays and KCB) and two garish new petrol stations (Esso and Caltex). Coca-Cola was yet to come; elsewhere, many township shop-fronts had recently been painted cream with the Coca-Cola script writ large and high in crimson lettering visible from afar. This jollification of otherwise dismal trading centres is rewarded by a prodigious consumption of the liquid advertised, which costs exactly ten times as much as a more wholesome and equally refreshing cup of tea.

To the chagrin of President Moi – uncomfortably aware of donor scrutiny – Kenya now enjoys a more or less free press, though its freedom was hard-won and is always under threat. The literate public values this aspect of democracy and every morning I saw newspapers being attentively read on the streets, in tea-shops, around the marketplaces. Moreover, even in Sotik, reputedly a pro-Moi stronghold, those papers which try to be objective seemed the most popular. Kenyans are shrewd folk who know a propaganda sheet when they see it and prefer to acquire the facts – if possible – and do their own interpreting: which augurs well for the long-term political future of their country.

To state that most Africans are noisy is an allowable generalisation; whatever their mood – usually cheerful – they like to give tongue. Yet Sotik that day was strangely quiet. Although I sensed no hostility to the mzungu everyone was being uncommunicative, not only with me but with each other. Apart that is from Albert, who ran a cramped but busy general store and seemed something of an enigma. He was tall, well-built, grey-haired, exceptionally black and forcefully eloquent. He should, I felt, have been lecturing at some university rather than selling pints of kerosene, half-pounds of rice and quarter bars of soap behind a Sotik counter. I hinted as much, but he only slightly enlightened me.

‘You’re right, I’m not a local man. So I don’t have to get involved in all this present nonsense. And I’m not afraid to talk. It’s good for foreigners to know what’s going on, though not many give a damn about Kenya unless they want a holiday here – looking at animals! Who cares about Kenya’s endangered humans? Yet now we’re sliding to the edge of the abyss. You must avoid Sondu, a small town but dangerous now. At midday yesterday, when the market was crowded with Luo, the Kipsigi attacked, using pangas, spears, poisoned arrows. Eight Luo were killed, scores badly wounded. Forty of their huts were burned. Those Kipsigi were trucked in from elsewhere, they weren’t residents. In fact many were unemployed graduates, disguised in warrior garb. My son was there – he’s studying these developments – and he recognised nine of his classmates among the “warriors”. Trouble was expected in Sondu but the police kept off the scene, no doubt obeying orders. Take my advice and move fast to Uganda. Hundreds of Luo work on Sotik’s tea estates – maybe the next targets?’

In 1882, Joseph Thomson wrote to his Royal Geographical Society patrons requesting copies of Punch, The Illustrated London News, The Athenaeum and The Graphic: ‘A bundle of such, coming across my path in the Masai country, would indeed be a boon and a blessing.’ Following the same line of thought, I spent the hot noon hours on my bed engaged in The Pursuit of Love. Then a sadness shadowed my day; calling on Sotik’s Mill Hill missionaries, I heard that a young colleague of theirs and good friend of mine – first met in Cameroon – had recently died of malarial complications.

Back at the hotel, a compactly muscular young man was awaiting me in the bar. He wore a neat but shabby grey suit, its open jacket revealing a Harvard University T-shirt.

‘They told me you come from Ireland,’ he said. ‘My name is Moses and my teachers were Irish – Father Declan, Father Pat, Father Malachy. They were good teachers and now I love Ireland.’ He sat opposite me and added, ‘You will give me a beer.’

That demand grated; within moments I would have offered a beer. Repressing my annoyance, I ordered two Tuskers while Moses lamented his fate – in the same health-worker job since his marriage nine years ago, with no hope of advancement because he couldn’t afford bribes and knew no Big Men.

‘That’s a Big Man at Barclays in Kisumu,’ observed Joseph. ‘Every weekend he comes home to his cattle. Cattle are still important here, owning even a few makes us calm. His father got that house from an English farmer. Some families were lucky at Independence, the English going home gave them presents of buildings and land. They just had to promise to treat the dogs and cats and horses very well, and to talk to them!’ (This last concept vastly amused Joseph.) ‘The English are very religious about pet animals – is it the same in Ireland? My grandfather says they’re afraid animals will curse them if they’re not treated like humans – is that true? Anyway we did look after them, we felt so grateful for the land. Their children are still around, mixed in with our own animals.’

I glanced sideways at Joseph, whose neat oval face was bronze in the afterglow. At first I had suspected irony but he was being utterly sincere. Evidently no one had ever told him that in many cases the retreating settlers had originally acquired their land through robbery with violence. In 1906 a British army captain, Richard Meinertzhagen, was busy ‘pacifying’ this Sotik region and wrote in his journal:

26 Feb. A ring of posts is being established round the reserve and Nandi found outside it are to be shot at sight … Though the Government have achieved their purpose in punishing the Nandi and confining them to a reserve, I am not so sure that it has finally disposed of the Nandi question.

6 March. We have been most successful against those Nandi who broke out of the reserve … When it was just light enough to shoot we surprised a party in a hollow not more than forty yards from us. I at once ordered rapid fire and the whole party of thirteen were shot down … By this time Wilson had reached the vicinity and the enemy was completely surrounded. They lost thirty-two killed. I took my position on Chebarus Hill, whence I could overlook the operations … [which] … I hope will convince the Nandi of the futility of breaking out of their reserve … We effected a complete surprise, finding many of the enemy still in their huts. We killed nineteen Nandi and captured thirty-four. We also bagged 542 sheep and goats. We had two men wounded. When natives are surprised like this they have little heart for opposition, especially when they find themselves surrounded. Having taught these Nandi their lesson we came on to Nandi Fort in the evening.

When the 24-year-old Captain Meinertzhagen arrived in East Africa from Burma in 1902 the Protectorate Commissioner was Sir Charles Eliot, he who first designated the Kenyan Highlands as ideal ‘White man’s country’ where European interests should always be given priority. In 1904, Sir Donald Stewart succeeded Eliot and was reminded by the Foreign Office that Britain’s presence in Africa could be justified only by ‘a most careful insistence on the protection of native rights’. Unluckily for the ‘natives’, Meinertzhagen seems never to have heard of these emphatic written instructions. In those days London was a long way from Mombasa and many were the cracks through which inconvenient directives could fall.

No settler could have farmed without local labour, so a variety of unsavoury methods were used to force Africans to work for wages – a bizarre new concept which outraged their dignity and quickly wrecked their social structures. In 1913, Karen Blixen recorded:

I had 6,000 acres of land … About one thousand were squatters’ land, what they called their shambas. The squatters are Natives, who with their families hold a few acres on a white man’s farm, and in return have to work for him a certain number of days in the year. My squatters, I think, saw the relationship in a different light, for many of them were born on the farm, and their father before them, and they very likely regarded me as a sort of superior squatter on their estates.

Only a generation separated the ‘pacification’ of Kenya’s Highlands and Karen Blixen’s departure from her failed farm. Yet by 1931, as she poignantly illustrates, most Africans had accepted European domination and been drained of initiative:

The Natives of the farm looked to me for help and support and did not, in a single case, attempt to arrange their future for themselves. They tried their very best to make me stay on … A flock of sheep may be feeling the same towards the herd-boy, they will have infinitely better knowledge of the country and weather than he, and still will be walking after him into the abyss. The Kikuyu sat around my house and waited for my orders … You would have thought that their constant presence, when I knew I could not help them, and when their fate weighed heavily on my mind, would have been hard to bear. But it was not so. We felt, I believe, up to the very last, a strange comfort and relief in each other’s company. The understanding between us lay deeper than all reason.

As the first stars twinkled I said to Joseph, ‘I’m glad people here remember the settlers kindly. But I’m sad Europeans made so many Africans feel inferior.’

Joseph smiled wryly. ‘But we are inferior! Before, we had no civilisation, nothing but wars and superstitions. Why do you pretend? I’m not stupid, I don’t want to be told sweet lies to make me happy!’

‘You’ve just proved my point,’ I laughed, turning back into the bar.

Sotik’s electricity supply had failed yet again and two smoky oil-lamps were being lit. Moses had ordered himself another beer; indicating the bottle he said cheerfully, ‘On your account!’ Even in the dim light I noticed annoyance flickering across Joseph’s face. Pointedly he declined my offer of a beer, shook hands with both of us and was gone.

‘You must meet my children,’ said Moses then. ‘I have nine, the eldest aged eight.’

Promptly I fell into the trap. ‘So you have two wives?’

Moses gurgled with laughter and clapped his hands in the air above his head. ‘No! No! I am a good Christian, I have only one beautiful wife! You forgot about twins and she gave me two pairs! So for seven births we have nine children – good value!’ He sucked the last drop from his bottle and stood up. ‘Come, we will eat together, my home is near.’

Moses’s home was an hour’s walk away, in the bush, and only a few stars peered through the drifting clouds. The terrain was hilly; the rough narrow path was lined with thorn bushes; half-rotten tree trunks spanned a wide shallow stream. Without my pencil torch I would probably have twisted an ankle and possibly broken a leg. Moses led the way, needing no light. On particularly confusing stretches he turned gallantly to take my hand. We passed two compounds of round Luo huts where fires glowed under pots of posho (maize porridge), its appetising aroma mingling with the scent of blue-gum smoke.

Moses talked of his ambition to become an AIDS counsellor. ‘This is a big problem, brought to us by tourists and the British Army having exercises here. In the clinic I see how many are dying with doctors calling it something else – like pneumonia, malaria, TB, cancer, brain tumours. We need so many people to teach the wanachi about this dirty disease! But to counsel I need special training, in the West. You can please arrange for me to go to Ireland – OK?’

I forebore to argue with Moses about the mysterious origins of the AIDS virus; its present and future control are incomparably more important than its past. When I told him that there is nothing new to be learned about AIDS in the West he protested plaintively, ‘But I know you have special training for counsellors! An American nun said so in our church!’ He fell silent when I suggested that techniques developed for helping Whites might not help Blacks, given our radically different cultural backgrounds. I later discovered that he knew more about the medical aspects of the epidemic than most Western lay people and was free of those calamitous notions so common in Africa, such as anal intercourse being ‘safer’ than vaginal.

Kerosene is expensive in Kenya and the living-room, when we arrived, was illuminated by a flickering wick in a tiny tin of tallow. Moses lit a lamp before introducing me to his Kikuyu mother-in-law, a gracious old lady (she turned out to be two years my junior) who rose to greet me from her stool in a corner. A tightly tied headscarf showed her strong handsome features to best advantage and she had the exaggeratedly looped ears that some fashionable Kikuyu women of her generation indulged in by way of competing, jewellery-wise, with the Masai. You can display an enviable load of earrings if your lobe-hole is four or five inches in circumference.

Then Jenny entered, looking astonished – as well she might, I being the family’s first ever White guest. Despite all that child-bearing she remained remarkably beautiful, a slender, serene 28-year-old, considerably taller than her Luo husband. Neither she nor her mother spoke English but Moses proved a diligently non-sexist interpreter, keen for his womenfolk to have their say.

Then the children came crowding in, their eyes aglow with excitement. In sequence they shook hands while saying ‘My name is Ann’ – or Paul or Rebecca or Timothy or James or whatever. Even the toddler, Simon, managed to squeak ‘Si’ before noticing something comic about me and rolling on the floor in a fit of giggles. They were an enchanting quiverful, however ecologically excessive, and their faded and threadbare clothes, I noted uneasily, were considerably cleaner than my own. Eagerly the older ones questioned me about my tribal territory and looked anxiously sympathetic when I admitted to owning no cattle. For them, too, Moses was a patient translator; seen as father, husband and son-in-law, he seemed a much more congenial and relaxed person than the Luo government employee met in a Kipsigi town.

A giant thermos provided oddly stimulating herbal tea. Granny had collected the herbs in the forest, then dried and blended them; anyone could pick herbs, she stressed, but only an expert could blend them. After my third cup a selection of pious pictures, torn from mission magazines and pinned to the walls, began slowly to gyrate …

Granny felt an exile in Sotik. Only two years previously the family had moved from their village by Lake Victoria because the unschooled tea-pickers from the same area knew little Swahili and needed a Luo-speaking health-worker. Then Moses, assisted by Luo neighbours, had built the two-roomed hut in which we sat and the adjacent kitchen shack; Granny and the children shared a nearby beehive hut. Now Moses was gathering stones for ‘a big house’. Eight of his acres supported five cattle; the other four were cultivated by Granny, Jenny and the older children. All of which indicated a second source of income, pace that tale of woe in the bar.

The children queued to shake hands again and say ‘Good-night, Dervla’ – they had been practising that odd name – while Granny fetched the statutory basin and water-jug. As we adults dug into three communal dishes – stodgy maize dumpling, watery greens, hunks of tough beef – I noted guiltily that the meat was being reserved for Moses and me; we had bought it en route, from a wayside stall lined with sleeping bluebottles. I little thought that three months hence, in drought-stricken Zambia, I would look back on such meals longingly, as banquets.

Moses reproached me for having no camera. ‘I need pictures of my beautiful children!’ That grievance was easily remedied; we arranged to meet for a photographic session at the market at noon next day. After an expedition to the distant latrine – roofless and odourless, encircled by creeper-bound stakes – I slept soundly on the living-room couch, between freshly laundered sheets.

At this arid season Sotik market offered only low mounds of bananas, onions, greens, tomatoes, potatoes, chillies. No one could hope to make any significant profit from the day’s dealings, yet the women squatting beside their produce looked cheerful. ‘They are happy’, remarked Moses, ‘because on Sundays they needn’t work on their shambas. They can spend all day here, talking with friends.’ The briskest business was being done by second-hand clothes dealers whose prices, for well-worn American garments, were quite high. The same money spent on locally made garments would have procured something more durable and becoming but lacking the cachet of imported cast-offs. Again I noticed an uncharacteristic quietness. Normally market crowds are audible a mile away; here the bargaining and attendant badinage were subdued.

On that Sunday afternoon Sotik’s shops were shut and its street almost deserted. In a squalid hoteli I ordered four cups of tea, the teapot being there unknown. All the other customers – mostly men, a few with wives and children – were intently watching a hyper-violent film on a fuzzy blank-and-white television set. Then real violence impinged.

Truckloads of the General Service Unit, bristling with guns, raced recklessly up the pot-holed street. Hastily the hoteli door was closed and barred and the women hauled their toddlers away to the safety of a back room. As the men rushed to the wide window an agitated waiter sharply ordered them back to their seats. Moments later we saw scores of Luo men, of all ages, being pursued up the street by a heavily armed foot patrol carrying tear-gas canisters. I looked questioningly at my companions but everyone avoided my eye; within that group mutual mistrust was palpable.

When the door was unlocked twenty minutes later I strolled up the street, past gatherings of tensely silent men and women standing outside shop entrances staring in the direction of the man-hunt. Soon I was overtaken by another platoon in full battledress, half-running, their sweating faces ugly with hate. Waving rifles and staves, they shouted threateningly at everybody and one deliberately kicked me as he passed. Then they were out of sight, over the dip in the road where it descended to the Catholic mission. At the end of the main street two complacent-looking well-dressed urban types, wearing KANU badges in their lapels, stood conferring by the kerb. Both shrugged and turned away when I ventured to ask, ‘What’s happening?’ A moment later several shots came from the direction of the mission. There was an odd non-reaction; no one retreated into doorways, no one exchanged words. I stood still, acutely aware of being de trop, a resented witness. Then a young clergyman, hurrying around the corner, noticed me and stopped. ‘Leave this place,’ he said. ‘Come with me.’

On the way back to the hoteli my protector anxiously enquired, ‘Are you saved?’

To soothe him I said ‘Yes’, then asked, ‘What’s going on?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘God will protect us because we are saved.’ But his body language contradicted his words. When another yelling truckload jolted past, as he was lifting his tea-cup, half the contents spilled on to his lap and there was terror in his eyes. ‘I now go back to my family,’ he said. ‘You go back to your group. Tourists are very safe in Kenya, we like them very much, but you should not leave your group. I give you God’s blessing and also to your group.’

I thanked him for his caring and spared him the knowledge that I was ungrouped.

All afternoon I read and wrote in my room, while heavy rain flooded the hotel patio. The Sunday Times (‘The Voice of the People’), the Sunday Nation (‘The Newspaper that Serves the Nation’) and the Standard on Sunday all devoted many pages to the attack on the hunger-striking mothers and the significance in African tradition of women stripping naked. In a Standard article on ‘Female Stripping’ Mumbi Risa wrote:

Among some African communities, when a woman strips it is a sign of extreme anger – a choking anger. A sign that she is ready for anything including death. It is viewed with fear especially if the stripper is older than one, a mother or grandmother. Among the Kikuyu, when a son abuses his mother or grandmother the greatest threat she can issue to him is, ‘Do you want me to strip in front of you? Do you dare me do that?’ In the Luo community when a woman bares herself it is regarded as a terrible curse. It is the most fear-instilling thing a woman can do. In the Masai community, even if a man would be beating his wife and she bares herself, he stops and runs away. Every effort is made to cleanse him of the curse because they believe that if this is not done death will surely befall him. The choicest of goats is slaughtered to cleanse him of the curse.

After the attack, the mothers were given refuge in the crypt of the Anglican All Saints’ Cathedral, a courageous gesture on the part of the Church authorities. According to the Sunday Nation:

A Government minister, Mr Nabwera, said he supported the Government’s eviction of the hunger-strike mothers of political prisoners from Uhuru Park. He also supported the storming of the All Saints’ Cathedral compound by anti-riot police to disperse supporters of the hunger-strike mothers hiding there. Mr Nabwera said, ‘Let the police throw tear-gas at the churches which some Kikuyu have been using to spread evil. Stripping naked is the final madness which cannot be allowed even in the Luhya community. Do the Kikuyu think they are the only ones with women capable of giving birth to presidents?

The Sunday Nation also carried a full-page advertisement, inserted by a Mombasa women’s group, registering the strongest possible condemnation of ‘the abhorrent and ghastly behaviour of our menfolk’.

All the papers described a riot that had taken place on Nairobi’s Dandora estate on the previous Saturday afternoon when a KANU rally provoked anti-KANU mobs to go on the rampage. The Sunday Nation reporter, Willys Otieno, was himself badly beaten up, as a photograph proved. He wrote:

The GSU squad embarked on a patrol of the estate in which they hit everybody in sight. Police arrested a lorryful of suspects including a European who spoke with a markedly French accent. The barefooted European, dressed in blue jeans, white shirt and green jacket, pleaded for mercy as the police rained baton blows on his head. ‘I have done nothing! Why do you want to kill me? Don’t kill me please!’ he pleaded as the beating went on. At least six policemen were seriously injured during the fracas.

The Sunday Times printed a press statement signed by Professor Philip Mbithi, Permanent Secretary in the Office of the President, Secretary to the Cabinet and Head of the Public Service:

The Government is disappointed by the story carried yesterday in the Standard and expects the press to present news objectively and factually. At Uhuru Park the police had instructions only to ensure that chaos did not break out in the city and to oversee the pursuance of law and order. At no time were the striking mothers dispersed. The women were protected from the demonstrations and riots and were peacefully taken from the park to their homes. The Government wishes to reassure members of the public that during the demonstrations and riots which emanated from the political highjacking of the women’s hunger-strike, the police exercised exemplary restraint and discipline.

Five days after that exercise of restraint my upper back was still sore and multi-coloured. Yet I had been lucky. A Standard on Sunday photograph showed one of the hunger-strike leaders, Professor Wangari Maathai, leaving hospital wearing a neck-brace; necks are more vulnerable than shoulders. Professor Maathai went straight from her hospital bed to the crypt to rejoin her comrades.

The political prisoners were at last released a few days before my return to Nairobi in July. I rejoiced then with them and their mothers – still living in the crypt, though they had long since given up their hunger-strike. (Apart from the Irish, few protestors anywhere take hunger-strikes to their logical and lethal conclusion.) Having talked at length with several of these remarkable men, I could see why President Moi had been so keen to keep them off the political scene, by fair means or foul, for as long as possible.

That evening the hotel bar was almost empty. When Joseph appeared, and heard that I planned to continue next day, he asked uneasily, ‘You have permission?’

‘No, but since there’s trouble here I may as well push on.’

Joseph glanced around and, judging our two fellow-drinkers to be out of earshot, confided, ‘Today was a mistake! This morning two Kipsigi were speared and killed outside the hospital, in revenge for Sondu. Yesterday the Kipsigi attacked there again, killing with one arrow a 12-year-old girl and the 2-year-old brother on her back. They have a new kind of arrow, made from big flattened nails dipped in vegetable poison. But here, this morning, we had no crowd trouble, after the killings. Then someone sent a wrong message, about big gangs of Luo attacking Kipsigi all over Sotik. The GSU came quickly, all stirred up to punish the Luo – any Luo. That message was sent to spread the trouble, maybe to frighten Luo workers away from our tea plantations. But why? The local Kipsigi don’t want that sort of hard work with low pay. It’s all a plot to make anarchy.’

A week later, in Kampala, I bought a Kenyan newspaper and read that hundreds of Luo workers had fled in panic from Sotik’s tea plantations.

I left Sotik by starlight, my breath cloudy in the cold air. The map showed an unmotorable track, bypassing Sondu, and quite apart from tribal warfare such a route appealed. In Kenya the main threat to life comes not from the spears or poisoned arrows of inflamed warriors but from the average driver’s attitude to cyclists and pedestrians. Both are expendable, as is proved by the road-death statistics printed daily in the national newspapers. When matatus (mini-van taxis) or buses or trucks are intent on overtaking each other (which is all the time), the presence of wayside travellers is ignored. However narrow the road, overtaking is the name of the game, as though each driver were racing for a valuable prize. The matatu-drivers do indeed have an economic motive for their madness; the more miles they can cover in a day the more they earn. And then the bus- and truck-drivers’ macho distaste for being out-sped causes the whole stream of traffic to become homicidal. The drivers’ own death-rate, to say nothing of their passengers’, is not much less horrendous; that willingness to dice with death which spreads the AIDS virus also prevails on the road.

Most of that day’s eighty-eight miles were downhill, the first fifty or so through intensively cultivated rolling country – the many ascents short, the many descents long, the thronging natives friendly, the beauty memorable. Unsuccessfully I tried to imagine this region as it was when Meinertzhagen first arrived, eager to join in the ‘Sotik Expedition’ – organised because ‘the people of Sotik raided the Naivasha Masai and carried off a lot of their cattle. On being asked to return them they refused and sent insulting messages to the Government.’ Finding his martial arts superfluous on that occasion, Meinertzhagen sought consolation, as was his wont, in killing large numbers of animals, triumphantly listed – ‘oribi, bohor reedbuck, Jackson’s haartebeeste, waterbuck, topi, warthog’. How different the landscape must have looked when its lavish fertility was supporting an abundance of wildlife and comparatively few humans!

It is easier to imagine colonial Kenya a decade or two later, so vividly has that era been described in books that have become minor classics. There is a mystical quality about many Europeans’ descriptions of ‘their’ Africa; almost they hypnotise one into forgetting the realities in the background – the destruction of delicately balanced relationships between land and people, herds and people, wildlife and people. These love-affairs with Africa’s more salubrious areas were essentially perverse; the settlers became besotted by the physical environment while refusing to treat the inhabitants as fellow-adults. Notoriously their workers, of all ages, were referred to as ‘boys’; and probably few Whites are immune, even now, to this dangerous virus. I had diagnosed it in myself while staying with Moses’s family. After supper he borrowed my pencil torch, I assumed for some practical purpose. On realising that he merely wanted to play with it I insisted on having it back – for me it was a scarce resource – and as he poutingly surrendered it I caught myself thinking, ‘He’s just like a child!’

In Kenya most ‘natives’ seem to have been quite well treated when employed as loyal servants. Then they became part of the idyll and were affectionately described in much the same tone as devoted dogs or beloved horses. Their ceremonial dances, sometimes performed as part of the celebrations for a European twenty-first birthday party or wedding, were relished as another delicious ingredient of the African Experience, and later in my journey I was disconcerted to find this attitude persisting. An assiduously kind sisal plantation host went to great trouble to organise a display of tribal dancing, by his ‘boys’, for my entertainment. Without giving offence I could not express what I felt about tribal dances being thus degraded for the benefit of the Bwana’s guest. I have rarely spent a more uncomfortable hour, outwardly feigning interest, inwardly resenting my false position as a spectator of this sad parody.

Among certain missionaries – usually of American bible-belt extraction – contempt for ‘evil African superstitions’ also persists. Yet I, as an agnostic, can see no qualitative difference between believing in witchcraft and the power of the ancestors and believing in the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection, never mind transubstantiation and papal infallibility. However, America tends to produce the best as well as the worst. Vincent J. Donovan, an American Roman Catholic priest who lived for years among the Masai, admitted in Christianity Rediscovered:

As I witnessed the work of the witch doctor I felt sad and slightly sick, if not ashamed. Every single thing I saw him do, I recognized, not from my acquaintance with other pagan religions, but from my experience as a priest in our own Christian religion … The ordinary people, especially women, completely at the mercy and whim and arbitrariness and exclusiveness of the holy one; the offerings for the sacrifice and the daily sacrifice itself; the manipulation of sacred signs and relics; the air of unfathomable mystery about it all. There is scarcely a pagan trick that we Christians have overlooked.

By now a few generations have absorbed, most notably from Karen Blixen and Elspeth Huxley, the settlers’ view of the African – however likeable – as immeasurably and irredeemably inferior to his European master (or mistress). Both women wrote as supremely cultivated and sensitive representatives of their own culture, people incapable of crude racism – and thus, incidentally, reinforced the image of the ‘primitive’ African all the more subtly and strongly. To experience colonial thinking in the raw one has to read something like Erika Johnston’s deservedly forgotten The Other Side of Kilimanjaro, published in 1971. There one encounters, unadorned by mellifluous prose and unfiltered by poetic sensibilities, the White settlers’ conveniently narrow definition of ‘property’.

Piet Hugo was the only farmer who continuously suffered at the hands of the Masai. He has carried on a ceaseless struggle with them for they trespass with their cattle on his farm, bringing with them the danger of disease to his own herd … and as fast as he mends his fences so the Masai break through them again. Perhaps it is because Piet’s farm stretches further down into what used to be Masailand, and they do not seem to comprehend that the land they had freely grazed over for centuries now has an owner.

So, if you cultivate land you ‘own’ it. If you freely graze your cattle over the same land, as your ancestors have done for countless generations, you do not ‘own’ it; it is public property, to be appropriated by any enterprising, energetic White who covets it.

The White Highlands’ beauty, fertility and – at most seasons – agreeable climate of course made them alluring to Europeans. Yet it takes no great insight to discern another element at work in the colonial psyche. In very different (and frequently conflicting) ways, many of these administrators, missionaries and farmers were on lifelong ego-trips, inordinately proud of bringing law and order, Christianity and agricultural improvements to the ‘savages’. Should we take the Zeitgeist into account? It is always comforting, when reviewing ancestral sins, to be able tolerantly to murmur, ‘Father, forgive them, for they knew not what they did!’ No doubt we would like our own descendants to do the same for us, as they review the vicious injustices and ruthless ecological vandalism of the twentieth century. But how valid is this apologia? Our generation knows exactly what it is doing, but to do it is politically and/or commercially profitable so we bash on regardless, often not even bothering to devise those self-justifications so important to the early exploiters of Africa.

In her Preface to the 1983 Eland edition of Meinertzhagen’s Kenya Diary, Elspeth Huxley wrote:

One has only to dip into these diaries to apprehend how profound has been the revolution in our attitudes within the lifetime of many still alive … Today the tally of slaughtered animals, then present in such astonishing abundance, seems nauseating … [In Africa] literacy was unknown, superstition rife, and almost all the aids to a more civilized way of life were lacking. A great gulf then separated the pale and dark skinned races. Now it has been bridged by education.

A revolution in our attitude to animals has had to take place, so few remain. But has there really been a revolution in our attitude towards the ‘dark-skinned races’? And can it be argued that ‘the great gulf … has been bridged by education’? The quantity and quality of education on offer to Africans, either during or since colonial times, could build only an imitation bridge, unsafe to walk on.

A recent ‘international bestseller’, Kuki Gallmann’s I Dreamed of Africa, reveals how little has changed. In 1972, when the author migrated from Italy to farm 90,000 acres in independent Kenya, she reacted to her surroundings, as many reviewers admiringly noted, in a way ‘vividly reminiscent of Olive Schreiner, Karen Blixen, Elspeth Huxley and Beryl Markham’. One of her European friends was ‘warm as the earth, artistic and inventive … She loved Africa, the land and its animals, with a passion’ (my emphasis). The success of this book indicates that Kuki Gallmann’s image of Africa is the one with which, even in the 1990s, White readers are most comfortable. This endangers the Africans who, as I write these words, are being indirectly killed, in considerable numbers, by relentless First World profiteering.

Freewheeling down the day’s last incline, to the shore of Lake Victoria, I told myself, ‘Looking backwards is futile’. Yet to make any sense of East Central Africa’s shambolic present, one must be aware of the past. The disorienting pioneer missionaries, the ambivalent Protectorate Commissioners, the brutal German plantation farmers and thuggish ‘pacifying’ soldiers were active during the lifetimes of people still living. In historical terms, the Africans’ trauma is very recent. So why are we surprised when they sometimes behave like people collectively in shock?

My first glimpse of Africa’s biggest lake – almost as big as Ireland – disappointed me. Joseph Thomson, too, felt a sense of anti-climax when, on 10 December 1883, he reached the summit of a low hill after a fifteen-month walk from the coast, and saw only the Bay of Kavirondo – itself bigger than most European lakes yet seeming tame and cosy, shut in by several wooded islands.

Here my track joined a new road at a T-junction where a gaudy petrol station dwarfed the few nearby dukas. There was no hoteli, hence no tea. At 2.30, at lake-level, the heat was lung-searing. Sitting on a plastic crate outside a duka, I reminded myself that alcohol would be unwise. But four Coca-Colas proved unwiser still, activating an unpleasant digestive disorder (I think it’s known as heart-burn) which had never before afflicted me.

On this straight, level, treeless road the sun seemed to be attacking me personally. Occasionally Lake Victoria’s muddy shore appeared beyond lines of giant euphorbia candelabra, or plantain groves, or a papyrus swamp, or an expanse of yellowed grassland on which many cattle grazed – so many that none had adequate sustenance. Over-grazing is among Africa’s major problems yet herds are unlikely to be reduced while owning a few cows has a calming effect on senior bank officials.

Poor Thomson was suffering from malaria while foot-slogging through Kavirondo. Some warriors tried to block his way to the lake, fearing he might bewitch it, but their halfhearted opposition didn’t diminish his joy at having ‘opened up’ the route through Masai land. He had thus exposed Buganda to what was euphemistically known as ‘European initiative’. Hitherto the region had been shielded by the Masais’ exaggerated reputation for ferocity – exaggerated by the Swahili ivory- and slave-traders who wished to keep Europeans off their patch. Thomson noticed that in fact the coastal traders in his party were much more afraid of the Kikuyus’ poisoned arrows than of the Masai spears; the Masai were known to be disciplined warriors whereas Kikuyu attacks were arbitrary and treacherous. Having enjoyed ‘the supreme satisfaction of drinking the waters of Victoria Nyanza’, the 25-year-old Thomson could legitimately boast, ‘Without the loss of a single man by violence or the necessity of shooting a single native I have penetrated through the most dangerous tribes in Africa.’ He had called the coastal traders’ bluff. ‘The most dangerous tribes’, if treated as Thomson (but few other Europeans) treated them, were not so dangerous after all. The young Scotsman’s rare empathy with the Masai enabled him to describe their esoteric initiation rites and novel (to him) sexual predilections – in the customary Latin appendix. Presumably this was a device to prevent the Victorians’ womenfolk from acquiring knowledge of such matters; it cannot have been imagined that a classical education rendered people immune to ‘corruption’.

At 3.30 I collapsed for an hour under a giant mango tree overlooking the lake. Water was being fetched by processions of small children, head-carrying containers almost as big as themselves. Daily I marvelled at the Africans’ physical strength; both sexes and all age groups achieve feats that most Europeans couldn’t even attempt. But what are the side-effects? It cannot be good for any children whose bones are still soft to carry such weights. As the loaded children passed, one could see their stamina being tested to the utmost – and they were not enjoying the test. Yet while scampering down to the grassy shore, bearing empty containers, they exuded joie de vivre.

Beside me, on another segment of that tree’s massive root system, a pensive young woman awaited a bus. She wore purple lipstick and nail-varnish, a fussy frilly raspberry-pink blouse and a tight lime-green skirt; golden sandals matched her large plastic handbag. Having done well at school she wanted to ‘go into business’ but – ‘How can I start without capital? My father is rich but spends everything on my brothers. He tells me to marry now, he doesn’t like a daughter making her own money, living independently. I want to be rich because I work, not because my husband is a Big Man. In Kenya educated women know about that Women’s Liberation, but how can we find it?’ She looked over the lake. ‘There is only one way to get capital and now they say that’s dangerous. But people who have no choice take chances.’

The bus appeared and my companion jumped up. ‘So I go to Kisumu to work!’ As she waved from her privileged front seat, beside the driver, I felt cravenly relieved. Had our conversation been prolonged Abraham’s strictures would have compelled me to ‘share information’.

At 4.30 the sun felt bearable yet an hour later I stopped again, debilitated by the tarmac’s stored heat. A bar stood at a junction, twelve miles from Sondu, and I was about to enter it when two open-backed lorries came at speed from the Kisumu direction, halted at the junction and disgorged scores of warriors (or graduates?). These were clad in animal skins and armed with bows and arrows (not the sort used by hunters) and formidable six-foot-long broad-bladed spears. For an instant I felt afraid. Then the men loped away – off the road, into maize fields, moving silently and purposefully.

Turning back to the bar I saw a small, slim young Luo in the doorway, staring at the vanishing warriors. ‘Who are these people?’ I asked.

The young man blinked and moistened his lips and hesitated. Then he said, ‘I didn’t see them.’

This windowless, earth-floored shebeen was comparatively cool. Behind the bar stood a tall grim-looking elderly man who spoke no English. In a corner two giggling young women were drinking ersatz orange juice, the sort that stains your teeth for a week. I ordered two Tuskers; the young Luo seemed to need a drink. His name was Isaah and he claimed to have a BA in ‘History, Comparative Religion and Eng. Lit.’ He couldn’t have passed an O Level examination in any of these subjects yet he wanted – longed – to do a postgraduate course in Britain. Listening to him I felt a sort of despair, tinged with that guilt which, like the dust, gets into all one’s African reactions. Isaah was not stupid but had been messed up by an educational system that was irrelevant, inadequate, confusing and ultimately deeply frustrating. When I had explained, as gently as possible, that a postgraduate course in Britain could not possibly be organised, by anyone, he looked at me with a mixture of grief and resentment.

‘Why do tourists never want to help us? We like to help you, when you visit. But you just have fun in Kenya and then forget us. I go sometimes to the Masai Mara to try to meet very rich tourists – not like you, on a bicycle. But no one wants to help. Why?’

I must have looked as unhappy as I felt because suddenly Isaah leant forward to press my hand and said, ‘Don’t worry! I think you are too poor to help but you are a nice lady!’ He advised me to spend the night in Katika’s John Jameson lodging-house, ten miles further on, where he would join me later with his girlfriend (‘a very clever scientist’) and two of his brothers who had recently lost their government jobs for making mildly anti-Moi remarks. ‘They were lucky,’ grinned Isaah. ‘Before, people went to prison, or worse, for that …’ I never saw him again, which didn’t surprise me. That’s life, in Africa – as often as not.

Katika proved to be a shabby little township at a crossroads; the John Jameson seemed the biggest as well as the most respectable of its several lodging-houses. An agreeable quartet welcomed me on the long, narrow veranda, netted against mosquitoes. I sat beside a young Baptist minister who drank only ‘sodas’ and believed the IRA to be funded and trained by the Vatican. Opposite were an elderly teacher, a retired army officer (I wondered which army: he looked like an Amhara) and a down-at-heel businessman called Murphy Odiyo. To celebrate this coincidence Murphy stood me a beer (an unusual gesture in such a setting), then begged me to become his agent in Ireland, selling zebra-hides as car-seat covers. It was a treat, they all agreed, to have foreign company for the evening. The teacher observed, ‘Ordinary Kenyans meet few mzungus. We only see them, millions of tourists staring at us as if we were part of the wildlife.’

‘And thousands of expats,’ added Murphy, ‘living in their rich reservations and rushing around in their luxury vehicles to meet our Big Men.’

When a young Kisumu doctor joined us I sought information – to the evident discomfiture of my companions – about the workings of Kenya’s National AIDS Control Programme. I could have asked no better man. Dr Shikuku had spent the day collecting blood in the bush from young donors whom he described as ‘relatively low risk’. Blood donations in Nairobi, he said, had dropped from 26,000 units in 1981 to 8,000 units in 1991 ‘because people fear they can get the virus from giving blood’. (A not unreasonable fear, I reckoned, but tactfully didn’t say so.) The most recent HIV + figures were 7.5 per cent of blood donors and 12 per cent of pregnant women attending ante-natal clinics. ‘And worst of all,’ said Dr Shikuku, ‘the high-risk group mostly don’t want to know and won’t be tested.’ Wearily he shook his head. ‘So our carriers will go on increasing fast. We used to think the high-risk age group was 25 to 40, now we know it’s 15 to 60. The National AIDS Control Programme was given enormous funding – KSh. 800 million. Most of that’s spent on big salaries, air fares to international AIDS conferences, hotel bills and “expenses”, Pajeros serviced and run for personal use only. Millions of Kenyans now imagine the virus is going away, we’ve so little publicity about the rate of spread. Our government is the most irresponsible in Africa, things are much better organised in Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia.’

Certainly nobody in the large grubby restaurant off the veranda ‘wanted to know’. My two fellow-diners were truck-drivers being eyed hopefully by five adolescent girls in tawdry attire, clustered around the courtyard doorway. ‘Two into five won’t go,’ I reflected. But perhaps two would go into these five if their charges were low enough.

I devoured a mound of glutinous lukewarm rice and two greasy skinny chicken-wings. Then, crossing the courtyard to my room, I observed the truck-drivers each linking an expensively dressed bar-girl; one sensed long-term arrangements. Resignedly the teenagers drifted off to the veranda where my respectable friends had been replaced by a gathering of rumbustious young men drinking a colourless, sinister-smelling liquid; something similar gave me severe gout in Madagascar.

For 80 pence one can’t expect too much and it took time to manoeuvre Lear into my windowless cell, ventilated by spaces between the filthy walls and the tin ceiling. On the narrow sagging bed I wrote my journal by the light of my own candles; writing in public almost always drew a distracting crowd. At intervals during the night I was half-awakened by the impassioned quarrelling of two men in the next room or by drunken arguing, singing and laughter from the restaurant. All-night parties were a feature of such lodging-houses; doubtless the locals slept throughout the heat of the day.

The heat of the next day had wrecked me by ten o’clock, when I was struggling out of big, bustling, sweltering Kisumu, Kenya’s main port on Lake Victoria. From Kisumu to Maseno the threatening traffic was constant, the many townships were dreary, my brains felt fried and I hardly registered the landscape.

Seeing me drinking yet another litre of water under a wayside tree, several passersby paused to converse.

A Church of God freak reproved me for wearing trousers and asserted that alcohol is the sole cause of the AIDS epidemic – ‘If all remain sober, there is no filthy business.’

A hydraulics engineer begged me to find him a job in Ireland – ‘I am very much afraid of this AIDS killer but in Europe the women are still clean so I would be safe.’

A 30-year-old post office clerk had seven children (‘two others died of malaria’) and wanted no more. ‘But now we have ukimwi it is hard. If I go to other women I can get sick, if I stay with my wife she can get sick from too many children. Ukimwi makes educated people who understand it have more children – they are afraid to leave their wives. Bar-girls know how to stop babies so it was better for the over-population when we went to them. Now I am confused, people tell about so many different ways to stop babies. Which is best? You must have good information.’

‘Tube-tying,’ I said succinctly. The young man beamed and thanked me and went on his way. Then it occurred to me that I should have lectured him on his wife’s right to make these contraceptive decisions. My brains, as I have said, were fried that day.

At 3.30 I was slowly pushing Lear up a long steep hill to the town of Maseno, an educational stronghold founded by the Church Missionary Society (CMS). Maseno straddles the Equator, but even on the Equator how could the sun be so brutal at 5,000 feet? I wished I were cycling in Ireland, well wrapped up against the March east wind.

Then Damian came towards me, a willowy young man wearing blue jeans, a Berkeley University T-shirt and a slightly odd expression. He passed me with a civil greeting and a look of great curiosity, then a moment later was back by my side. ‘You look too tired,’ he said. ‘Go no further! Spend the night with John, our world-famous artist, a painter and sculptor. He likes to entertain foreigners.’

It seemed Damian was also an artist who had been apprenticed to John and was planning to settle in Uganda where, he fancied, tourist hotels would employ him to paint giant murals; thus he too would soon become world-famous. ‘Fame and popularity are the most important things in life,’ he assured me. ‘John is no longer a Christian because he is famous. I still believe in Christ because I am not yet a success and secure.’ As we turned towards John’s shamba I hoped the artist had little in common with his apprentice.

A steep rough track led to a wide ledge under a dramatic rock escarpment. The garden was more obvious than the house. Candelabra cacti towered over three other sorts; tall smooth grey papaya trees looked like telegraph poles decorated with tufts of vegetation; jacaranda, bougainvillaea and hibiscus spouted high fountains of colour between less familiar shrubs and trees; purple-flowered ground-creepers coiled between beds of scarlet salvias. At first all seemed wild and unplanned; in fact the whole had been carefully designed to act as a background to John’s work. Several pairs of wooden figures, fifteen feet tall and carved from single tree-trunks, formed archways over the paths. Particularly moving were two women with arms outstretched, hands meeting and clasped, one with a suffering face turned aside, avoiding the stern gaze of the other; and an old, dignified, devoted couple, each with one hand on a hip, the other hands joined. Under a flame-tree, carved from some wood resembling bog-oak, a naked musician sat on a low stool, legs wide apart, stringed instrument being played with exaggeratedly huge yet sensitive hands, eyes closed and mouth slightly open in ecstatic response to the beauty he was creating. Among the cacti were a totem pole hinting at the various stages of pregnancy; an exultant mother suckling her baby; an elder in Western dress enjoying a joke. Everywhere were weirdly beautiful abstract sculptures in both wood and stone – dreamy, sinuous, secretive pieces.

John’s wife Teresa – a secondary school headmistress – was small, neatly built, self-possessed. She welcomed me with a generous smile, explaining that John had driven to Maseno to deliver milk to an invalid relative. Then she apologised because I would have to wait for hot water; water was very scarce now, there was none running in the taps. It took time to persuade her that I did not need hot water, or indeed any washing-water, in view of the drought. Those of us who come from cold climates do not share the Africans’ obsession with personal cleanliness.

The large bungalow, starting from a colonial nucleus, had been extended at different times in different directions. In the spacious guest-room a row of books – mainly early British writing on Africa – stood between the twin beds. Children and servants swarmed; the latter, I came to realise, were poor relations. In John’s studio a display of international press-cuttings proved his fame but Teresa remarked that he wore it lightly. ‘It pleases him, but it doesn’t really matter – only his work matters.’ Often people urged him to move to Nairobi, to get on to the cosmopolitan scene, to look for commissions from expats who would pay lavishly for such unusual ‘souvenirs’. ‘But if he did that’, observed Teresa affectionately, ‘he wouldn’t be John.’

I was glad to have seen John’s work before he returned – a middle-aged man with a goatee beard who engagingly blended shyness as an individual and authority as a creator. It is always more satisfactory to respond solely to an artist’s work, detached from its human envelope. Had I met John first I might have wondered, afterwards, if my appreciation of his sculptures had been partly influenced by my appreciation of himself.

We were soon joined by John’s doctor brother and a writer friend who worked in both Swahili and English. That stimulating evening more than compensated for a hellish day. My heat-exhaustion forgotten, we talked until 1.30 a.m. – about Northern Ireland, the effects of Structural Adjustment on the African poor, the Rushdie Affair, the profit motive and commercial hype in relation to artistic endeavour, AIDS, the American constitution, the status of women in Africa, the impact of Christianity on East Africa, the catastrophic state of education throughout most of the continent. My four companions – witty, well-informed, articulate – were people content to live simply, secure in their African identity and proud of it, yet intellectually open to the whole wide world. Between them they didn’t have even one chip about anything: a rare enough form of liberty in Black Africa. They taught me much that illuminated the rest of my journey.

2

Graduates or Warriors?

Sotik to Maseno