Aagaard African Adventures

When my father was appointed the first Norwegian ambassador to Kenya after its independence in 1963, my family did not have the slightest idea where Nairobi was or what to expect when we got there. I remember pulling out the old family atlas and looking for British East Africa; it dawned on me that there was no longer such a place. The three former colonies, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika, were venturing out on their own, fiercely wanting to demonstrate to the world that they were now independent. Each country in turn would court the Western world for financial and technical assistance, one result being the need for embassies. The rest is history.

Upon learning that we were moving to “Darkest Africa,” my mother immediately insisted on living on the ninth floor because of all the snakes she presumed crawled everywhere; my little sister of six wondered if our skin color would change. A report borrowed from the American embassy quickly eased our fears. We learned that the climate was most agreeable despite the fact that the city almost straddled the equator because the altitude was close to six thousand feet. No houses needed central air or heat. There was cheap and plentiful labor, excellent hotels and restaurants, modern hospitals, a university, a theater, a good library, clubs, museums, and beautiful gardens everywhere, but no nine-story buildings. Kenya was famous for its national parks teeming with game; hunting safaris were still being conducted in the traditional way, and photo safaris were just becoming popular.

Among the European settlers were a surprising number of Scandinavians, especially Norwegians and Danes, most of whom were farmers. Many had ventured out to Kenya in the early part of the century before WWI or between the wars, as did Finn’s parents. Some grew coffee, as Karen Blixen described so passionately in her famous book Out of Africa; others grew tea or raised beef or dairy cattle. These early settlers were adventurous and independent, largely living by their own hard work, initiative, and ingenuity; they certainly did not expect any handouts. Many were eccentrics; some led rather colorful lives; most worked and played hard. Theirs was a tough life—strange diseases affected valuable imported livestock, wiping them out with uncanny regularity until effective vaccines and dips were developed. Crops were constantly threatened by a different array of devastating plagues. Rains failed, or were too plentiful. Lion killed the cattle, and locusts and armyworm devoured everything in their way, leaving behind a landscape totally stripped of all edible vegetation, causing famine for both man and beast. Malaria and numerous other diseases wore humans down. These early settlers were courageous; their perseverance and tenacity are still evident in their descendents.

Independence brought to Kenya a new breed of mzungu or white people; the Western world was eager to assist the budding nation with funds and by sending numerous advisors. Engineers came to help build roads and bridges; economists and tax experts brought a new kind of bureaucracy; veterinarians endeavored to improve the African livestock, and so on. Fortunes were lost to corruption, greed, and inefficiency, but some of the aid was actually helpful, and the experts invariably came away with a better understanding of Africa’s multiple problems and how difficult it was to provide any meaningful and lasting assistance.

Norway, a small but rich and generous country, sent its quota of experts; at one time over one hundred Norwegian families lived in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. My father had his hands full dealing with the Norwegian and East African governments, and my parents made a point of getting to know all the other Norwegian families. My mother soon found there were no snakes to worry about; my family quickly got used to the perfect climate, beautiful gardens, and the easy life of the privileged in Nairobi.

Finn’s mother in their Yatta ranch living room. Their home was a haven, an oasis of civilization in the African bush.

In the meantime I had set my heart on trying to get into college to become an occupational therapist. One of the prerequisite requirements was to have worked a certain number of months in a hospital and to work as an assistant to an established occupational therapist. The school approved of my getting this experience in Kenya, and I arrived in Nairobi in 1965, very young and very white.

Kenyatta Hospital was a big district facility for Africans, with over a thousand beds and very limited resources; you had to be pretty strong to survive being admitted. It lay within walking distance of the embassy; I got many stares as I walked—white people simply did not walk! I was purely a volunteer, with no medical background; my job was to work with children ages three to ten, to try to play with them and get them to eat. AIDS had not yet reared its ugly head, but plenty of other serious conditions existed here, especially malnutrition. The patients were mostly boys; girls had no value in Africa’s eyes—it was not worth the bother to bring them to the hospital. These little scraps of humanity with their bulging tummies and imploring eyes were pathetic to see, and their apathy and listlessness shocked me, a privileged, inexperienced Scandinavian girl. Because of their weakened state, fully one-quarter of them succumbed to various childhood diseases like the common cold, chickenpox, and measles. It was a tough lesson to see that Mother Nature was not kind or forgiving; only the fittest and strongest survived.

In the old days the typical African woman bore seven or eight children in order to raise two. Children were a man’s wealth, his old-age security. Who else but his children would take care of him in a society lacking welfare? African women today still have as many babies, but thanks to modern medicine the high infant mortality rate has dropped, even though many young children still die prematurely due to ignorance and a growing number of mouths to feed. Birth control is not popular; in many instances men forbid it, and as a result Kenya has one of the highest population growths in the world—four percent a year.

After living with my parents in Nairobi for more than a year, I was accepted into the college, and I believed that finally I knew what my future held. I never perceived Kenya as a future home, even though I had grown to appreciate the beauty and variety of its natural resources and its people. As a family we had seen a few of the game parks teeming with animals; we had swum in the Indian Ocean among exotic coral fish. A friend had horses, and I had ridden in the area where Karen Blixen had her coffee plantation; I had climbed the lower peak of majestic Mount Kenya, where reside permanent glaciers though it is on the equator. The months I had spent in this beautiful country had been instructive and exciting, but it was a temporary adventure; now it was time to go back to Norway and get serious with college. There I would experience again the thrill of cross-country skiing and hiking in the forests around Oslo, the city of my birth, leaving memories of Africa behind.

Sometime in 1965, Mr. and Mrs. Aagaard, the oldest Norwegian settlers in Kenya, invited the Norwegian Ambassador and his family to lunch at Yatta Ranch. The party consisted of my parents, my seven-year-old sister, and myself. I recall driving out from Nairobi—it seemed we were going to the ends of the earth. The first hour’s drive took us to the small town of Thika on tolerable roads. Thereafter the pavement ended, but the road continued eastward, red and dusty, into the endless unknown. Its corrugation was like nothing we had previously experienced—it shook us and the car to the core. Every time we hit a pothole we were engulfed in a billowing cloud of red dust that penetrated every crack and filled our eyes and noses till we could literally grit our teeth. When we met another vehicle, the column of dust behind it swallowed us up and obliterated the road and any oncoming traffic for quite a long time. That was a most “interesting” drive.

Finally we spotted a riot of color alongside the road; this was the sign we had been looking for—magnificent bougainvilleas marking the entrance to the ranch. An elderly couple greeted us with genuine warmth in front of their low, stone house with a spacious veranda facing the vast African plains. Welcome coolness met us within. Old family portraits and rows and rows of well-read books graced the walls; shining brass and polished table tops added to the peaceful and civilized atmosphere—a stark contrast to the rough roads. This home was a haven, an oasis in the African wilderness.

Presently the son of the house appeared; Finn was shy and quiet, and I honestly don’t recall if we even talked to each other. I do remember a handsomely tanned face and powerful arms, but otherwise took little notice of him. Lunch was served in the traditional style by the faithful and well-trained houseboy, who was barefoot and wore a canzu and fez; he looked as if he had stepped out of the pages of A Thousand and One Nights in his flowing white robe and tall crimson hat with a golden tassel. Soup arrived first, then a platter of impala chops in sour-cream sauce. To this day I can still smell that dish and feel the soft texture of the meat. Finn told us in a simple and matter-of-fact manner how he would often walk out from the house in the evening when his mother needed meat and take an impala ram. It impressed me that he mentioned it with as little bravado and bragging as my mother would have told a friend about going to the grocery store when she needed meat. Our lives were so different, even if we spoke the same language.

Berit skinning the zebra, with brother and mother holding legs.

As soon as lunch was over, a friend of Finn’s came over, Soren Lindstrom, a Dane and yet very much a Kenya boy. The two excused themselves and went off, and I never offered them another thought. Little did I know that three years later I would be married to Finn and that Soren would join us on several photographic safaris around East Africa. A lifetime later Finn remembered the day the ambassador and his family came to visit; he recalled a young Norwegian girl, quite attractive, with a lot of joie de vivre, but said that he did not pay much attention to her. What was an ambassador’s daughter to him?

Months later, just before I was to go back to Norway to start college, one of the Norwegian experts and a friend of the family invited my mother, brother, and myself to join his family on an informal little hunting safari. Accompanying us would be a fellow Norwegian, Finn Aagaard, whom we had briefly met at lunch with his parents at Yatta Ranch. At the time I did not know it, but Finn was working on the requirements for becoming a professional hunter. By guiding resident hunters for nondangerous game, he could prove to the game department that he had gained the experience needed for running safaris with clients. We camped down in the Rift Valley under umbrella-shaped trees that I later learned were acacias; there was a ramshackle collection of tents and no African staff. My brother, who was out for the school holidays, wanted to hunt something, and after checking his shooting skills, Finn let him go after an impala. Finn, my mother, and I were spectators from the top of a hill. The relentless wind made the red oat grass covering the plains look like shining copper waves in the evening sun. It was August, the coolest month in Kenya, and I was very cold. Finn must have noticed me shiver, for he insisted I wear his old army jacket; I accepted it gratefully, and it felt warm and secure.

My brother eventually got his impala, and Finn gutted it with obvious expertise; since none of us had ever seen this done before, he gave us a little anatomy lesson on the spot. Then he threw the carcass in the back of his Land Rover pickup and we drove back to camp. My mother and brother sat in the front while I crouched in the back with the dead impala. I was blissfully happy; I loved being out in the bush, and the magic of Africa had been nibbling at my heartstrings for some time. Here we were bouncing along, the impala and I, dust pouring in, but soon I was singing to myself and found that by putting my cold hands into the animal’s still-warm body cavity I was quite comfortable. Finn turned around and looked at me, astonishment showing in his face. Later he wrote that when he saw this ambassador’s daughter, who had been brought up in many cities of the world, singing happily in the back of his hunting vehicle with bloodstained hands inside the impala, he started to pay attention.

That evening we all sat around the campfire, listening to the African night sounds. Finn explained them all in his low, patient way, and I began to understand how perfectly at home he felt under the stars. There were no mysteries—he knew and understood the way of the game, the names of the birds, the lay of the land. This was his life, his land. It never occurred to me that we might someday share it; our lives were too different, our backgrounds too far apart.

The next morning we drove out from camp to find a zebra for my brother. Finn wrote in his diary: “The zebra was a bit of a boo-boo. The stallion was closest and in plain sight, so I thought he would take it, but he shot another instead. I should have made absolutely certain he knew which one I intended him to shoot.” It was typical for Finn to write little notes like this in his diaries; he used them as lessons to perfect his own hunting and guiding skills. When he started to skin the zebra, he threw his spare knife toward us, hoping that my brother would lend a hand, but I picked it up first. I thought it looked like fun to take the striped hide off, even though I had never skinned anything other than fish before. Finn showed me the basics and left me to myself. Skinning a zebra was hard work; you had to separate every inch of skin from the body, and it didn’t pull off like that of a whitetail. Not only must you make certain to avoid cutting holes in the skin, you must also leave as little meat on the skin as possible. Any remaining meat had to be laboriously scraped off before you could put salt on the hide to preserve it and prevent hair from slipping.

Back in camp I spent several hours scraping the hide, taking special care to remove all the fat under the mane. Skinning is basically women’s work; it is tedious, repetitive, and exacting. Most women these days would disagree, of course, but look at many primitive societies and you will see that it is so, and there is a certain satisfaction in knowing you have done the job right.

The magic of the African bush was starting to work its mysterious spell—the campfires with the quiet night noises; the yellow fever trees silhouetted by magnificent sunsets; the hard work, dust, sweat, and all; the friendship developing with no interference from more “civilized” hustle and bustle. The unhurried pace of the safari world drew me; I felt alive and happy that I had had a chance to sample it, however briefly. It was with real sadness that I helped to break camp; I was certain this would be my last safari. I thanked Finn for sharing his world with us and never expected to see him again.