Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [37]
Mum shakes her head. “A few days later and it would have been fine for my father to shoot a Kikuyu because the British had declared a state of emergency by then. But on that afternoon it wasn’t okay.” A trial was held and my grandfather was sentenced to one day in jail. There was an outcry from the community. “My father was the starter at the races that afternoon,” Mum explains. “He couldn’t possibly spend the day in jail. He was the only one who knew how to do the starter flags.”
After the state of emergency was declared, British soldiers poured into the country and white settlers joined their ranks. By the end of November 1952, eight thousand Kikuyu had been arrested. Far from subduing the tension, attacks against British settlers escalated. Until January 1953, Mau Mau attacks against settlers were isolated and only men were targeted. But on the twenty-fourth of that month, the hacked and tortured bodies of a young British settler family were discovered on their farm—Roger Rucks (aged thirty-seven), his pregnant wife, Esmee (aged thirty-two), and their son, Michael, (aged six). Their Kikuyu cook (tellingly, his name and age were not given in any of the reports) had also been beaten and chopped to death.
Settlers fired their Kikuyu servants, and arrests of suspected Kikuyu insurgents as well as of innocent Kikuyu bystanders intensified. By the end of 1954, British soldiers were holding as many as seventy-seven thousand Kikuyu men, women and children in cramped, unhygienic concentration camps. They forced detainees to work, and if they refused, the prisoners were beaten, sometimes to death. One prisoner, John Maina Kahihu, describes the atmosphere in these camps vividly: “We refused to do this work. We were fighting for our freedom. We were not slaves.... There were two hundred guards. One hundred seventy stood around us with machine guns. Thirty guards were inside the trench with us. The white man in charge blew his whistle and the guards started beating us. They beat us from 8 am to 11.30. They were beating us like dogs. I was covered by other bodies—just my arms and legs were exposed. I was very lucky to survive. But the others were still being beaten. There was no escape for them.”1
Jittery settlers made plans to leave Kenya, hastily selling their farms and setting sail for Australia or Britain. Forever after they would bore to death anyone who would listen about the perfect equatorial light of East Africa. “When-wes” they were called, as in, “When we were in Kenya. . . .” But everyone understood that the old colonial Kenya was over. No matter how many British soldiers were sent to the colony, no matter how many Kikuyu were shot or arrested, the minority’s complacent picnic on the backs of a deeply angry majority was over.
At about this time, Flip Prinsloo returned to the Huntingfords’ door and asked to see my grandmother. Once again, my grandmother sat out on the veranda with Flip and poured them both a glass of homemade wine. “Here’s to us,” she said, raising her glass.
“Ja,” Flip agreed. He turned his glass in his hand for some moments before taking a drink. “Well,” he said after the sting of the wine had subsided enough to let him speak. “You’ve lost this war.”
“Yes, we already know that,” my grandmother said.
They finished their drinks in near silence and then Flip got to his feet. “We’re going back to South Africa,” he said.
“So I heard,” my grandmother said. She lifted the bottle. “Won’t you stay and have the other half?”
“Nee dankie.” Flip jammed his veldskoen hat back on his head. Then he took a deep breath. “If your daughter wants the horse, I’ll take a hundred pounds for it.” He stood his ground for a moment as if expecting the money to materialize on the spot.
“I see,” my grandmother said.
Flip nodded and in the intervening moments the fragile peace that my grandmother and he had made between the British and the Boers reverted to mutual suspicion. “Good-bye, Mrs. Huntingford,” Flip said.
“God speed to you, Mr. Prinsloo,” my grandmother replied.
My grandmother watched Flip Prinsloo’s retreating