Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [17]
At the turn of the century, my grandfather’s father looked at his growing family—three young boys—and decided that he couldn’t raise them on a vicar’s income in England. So like a lot of other people buying into the myth of East Africa’s munificence, he thought he’d try to make a go of it in Kenya. “Everyone thought they could go out there and grow coffee, but it wasn’t as easy as it sounded and my grandfather wasn’t the least bit interested in coffee, he was too spiritual, too otherworldly, too learned and scholarly to come to grips with farming, so that failed,” Mum says. “He built a church somewhere, but the thing burned down. And then the youngest of the three boys, Tony, became terribly ill.”
The child was raced to the Eldoret hospital, but he died of septicemia. He was ten years old. “I don’t think the family ever recovered from Tony’s death. His parents went into a deeply profound mourning. They didn’t really care about money or much of anything practical to begin with, but after Tony died, they gave up caring about worldly things altogether.”
My grandfather’s oldest brother, Uncle Dicken, grew up to become a linguist and an anthropologist, and he wrote the first dictionary of the Nandi people. “He lived with the Nandi for ten years, knew all their customs and everything. This was back in the late 1920s and 30s when it wasn’t very fashionable to go off and live with the natives, but he didn’t do it in a creepy sort of way, he was studying the people.” Mum narrows her eyes at me and says, “I just know you’re going to put that in an Awful Book and make it sound as if he went native, but he didn’t. He was very British and very proper, and I am sure he didn’t touch a young Nandi maiden or anything horrible like that.”
This remark made me think Uncle Dicken must have done something to unnerve Mum, an impression that was enhanced when I discovered a paper titled “Sexual Growth Among the Nandi of Kenya” that cited his work. The sex life of a Nandi boy, according to the research of my great-uncle Dicken, “begins as soon as he has emerged from the seclusion of circumcision (kakoman tum) and a girl’s when she reaches the age of puberty, i.e. about twelve. . . .”
My grandfather, Roger “Hodge,” taught himself engineering and was hired to build the branch railway line from Eldoret to Kitale. “He had a donkey for transport,” Mum says, “but the donkey fell in love with a herd of zebra and ran away to be with them. After that Dad had to use a bicycle.”
It wasn’t long after losing his donkey and taking up with a bicycle that my grandfather met and married my grandmother. Then war broke out and everyone reassessed their idea of home and loyalty, and my grandparents found themselves back in Skye from where my grandfather enlisted, lying that his mother was “Scotch” so that he could join up with the Cameron Highlanders. Seeing that he had grown up and worked in Kenya, the war board sent him to Burma and put him in charge of Nigerian troops.
“Well, you know how the Brits are,” my grandfather told me once when my grandparents came out to visit us in Malawi. “They don’t know there is a bloody great difference between a Nigerian and a Kenyan, let alone between a Kikuyu and a Kalenjin or an Igbo and a Hausa.” My grandfather chewed on the end of his pipe, and belched a cloud of fragrant tobacco at me. “Can’t say I thought much of Nigeria,” he said. “All the Brits thought it was the prime spot, but it was swampy hot, for one thing, and smothered in mosquitoes