Mr. Morley I Presume

Of All the Madness I experienced as a child, nothing reached a higher quotient of insanity than the geography lessons. I was instructed to draw the course of the Euphrates River and to mark and name the principal tributaries. Who was I at the age of eight to decide the relative eminence of rivers? I still do not know where the Euphrates rises and falls. I sometimes wonder whether, indeed, the Euphrates is still rising and falling, so seldom do I hear it mentioned. And even today, as I travel the globe, I am still trying to hide the fact that I have only the haziest idea of how the world fits together and why, for example, when flying out of Britain, I must pause at Frankfurt en route to Kenya. I had decided on Kenya for a holiday, because if one is to bask in the sun, it's smart to get as close to the equator as possible. Mombasa is not only near the equator, it is thoroughly spoiled. I am not one for the unspoiled (continued on page 130) Mr. Morley, I Presume (continued from page 121) terrain, the empty beach, the thornbush, the flyblown kiosk with the lukewarm beverage. Give me the marble terrace, the steps leading down into the water. I can ignore the high-rise apartment at my back. I am looking the other way.

When I leave the water, I like elegant patio furnishings and a cool drink--not out of the coconut but from the refrigerator. I like the loving care of the barman, not the childlike friendliness of the noble savage. I am not interested in ecology. I refuse to worry about the fate of the spotted hartebeest. If it's had its day, that's all right with me. I shall manage without the creature. On the other hand, when it's hot, I prefer not to manage without ice and air conditioning. Why should I?

It was exceedingly hot in Mombasa. I had only to put my nose outside and the skin peeled. Fellow visitors coated their features with cream and wore plastic shields. My world was full of the chicken-mayonnaise crowd and I was content to lie in the shade behind some rocks and watch a honeymooning French couple play chess every afternoon under a coconut tree.

In the bar one evening I met a man who had a house in Lamu, a town farther up the East African coast toward Italian Somaliland; and the next morning I was flying there. I decided against making the journey by road and dugout canoe through the mango swamps, as I didn't fancy having to stand upright in the latter, watched by rapacious crocodiles. When we landed, the pilot warned us against taking photographs of the ground staff, who were convicts. They seemed remarkably young to be serving prison sentences. But farther along the path to the jetty and the motorboat that was to take us across the lagoon to the town itself, we came upon a more mature group breaking stones.

In Lamu, I was welcomed by the curator of the museum, who introduced me to his parrot. The parrot came from London and hadn't learned to fly, on account of a defective wing. Each afternoon at four local time, which is petshop closing time in Britain, the parrot insisted on being put to bed in a dark room with the door locked. Until that happened, he screamed.

The rest of the town came from Alice in Wonderland. Once upon a time, Lamu was the richest port on the coast, with plumbing far in advance of anything Europe had experienced up to then--including the bidet. Wealthy residents even drove gold rods into the walls of the houses by way of ostentation. Little remains of the elegant extravagance that demanded four slaves to a canopy as the local sherifs paraded the main street. The sherifs still parade, holding their own umbrellas; the sons of the prophets are everlastingly marrying the daughters of the faithful, and everlastingly divorcing them the next morning. A night with a sherif for her virgin daughter, and mother goes to heaven, or so they tell her.

A great deal remains in Lamu, including even the British. There are many cannons on the waterfront and a plethora of bones in the sands beneath. Lamu played a home match around 1800 against the neighboring island of Pate and won 1700 to 6--a famous massacre, as when the tide went out suddenly, the away team couldn't get off the reef. Usually when Lamu lost, she lost to the cannibal tribes, the Portuguese, the Ethiopians and, of course, the British.

One afternoon I lunched on my hotel terrace and noticed the beach being patrolled by soldiers. The oldest of all the English residents had taken to exposing himself by the water's edge and the newly appointed district commissioner was determined for some reason to catch him in the act. "Will they shoot him?" I asked anxiously. They won't even catch him, I was told. His wife is keeping him indoors.

Later, I signed the visitors' book immediately below the Aga Khan, who had just left. There is one family in Lamu that subscribes to his faith and he had taken pains to meet them, but not while he was alone. If you are a follower of the Aga's and catch him alone, he must accede to your request. The family was anxious to buy the local mosque at a knockdown price, knock it down and build a hotel. The Aga Khan was courteous, circumspect and perpetually accompanied on his walks along the waterfront.

On the way back from Lamu I stopped in Malindi, Kenya, to lunch with the British and take tea with the Krauts. Nationalism is encouraged by the package tour. The Germans are winning hands down; there are at least four jumbo flights each week from Frankfurt. Of the Americans, there is little sign along the coast. They simply haven't the time to lie around in the sun; besides, that sort of life comes easier and cheaper at home. If they come to this part of Africa at all, it is to Mombasa or Nyali Beach, and then only for two or three nights, to rest up between safaris. Americans are in the game game, and how well they play it. The men try to look and dress like Stewart Granger; the women favor Dorothy Lamour--the head turbaned, the figure sheathed in fiery African colors. They are armed with cameras, not rifles; zoom lenses, not cartridges.

There is not really a great deal to buy in Africa, but Americans have a stab at shopping. Occasionally, they are stabbed themselves. One party, in particular, was nearly speared to death by the Masai because they laughed too loudly and bent themselves double, pretending to have been wounded by the dancers' spears. The tribesmen, suddenly bored by audience participation, decided to play it for real. None of the visitors was killed, but the guilty tribe was punished by being deprived of the dance concession for a spell.

Some tourists also ask for trouble by stepping out of jeeps to feed an elephant the remains of a picnic lunch or by climbing down from a tree hut to proffer a leopard a drink. Punishment when it comes is condign; an elephant takes its time trampling a man to death. When it's finished, all that's left is a thin, red mush.

Of course, not all trouble is invited. There can be no harm, surely, in tea on the lawn and no blame attached to anyone, except possibly the lioness herself, if she chooses to hunt and catch a baboon among the chocolate biscuits and the buttered scones. "Two of my guests finished up in the trees and quite an old lady up to her neck in the pond," Mr. Pascoe told me. Mr. Pascoe is manager of the appropriately named Hunter's Lodge, which stands just to the side of the Nairobi-Mombasa highway. "We have a good many lions here," he went on proudly. "I usually take guests for an evening ramble and we nearly always see something, even if it's only a snake."

Water holes are a great feature of the game lodges. Floodlit and with a thoughtfully provided artificial salt lick, they provide an opportunity for the game to have a look at the guests in their natural habitat. All day the latter have been bouncing around in jeeps, making it difficult for the elephant and particularly the leopard to count them accurately. But here, bunched at the bar, they can be inspected by the wart hogs and hyenas at leisure.

Sitting next to me at the bar was a Kenya policeman's wife, who had lived in Africa all her life and who knew a good deal about the Mau Mau. "We had a cook in those days," she told me, "who was one in a thousand, the kindest, most obliging, most dedicated cook in all of Africa, famous for his spaghetti soufflé. With this talented man in the kitchen, I couldn't go wrong as a hostess and he might have stayed forever, had not my husband come home one evening and told me that our splendid chef was the senior Mau Mau oath administrator for miles around. It was a terrible oath, you know," she continued, "the worst sort of black magic and quite unmentionably obscene. Arrangements were made that he be arrested in his own village because he was such a charming old man. That night the fellow cooked his last soufflé, or so we thought, and the next day we drove him back to his home, where a dozen soldiers were waiting. He got into the truck and bumped off to prison and, (continued on page 236) Mr. Morley, I Presume (continued from page 130) as we thought again, his death. Then about three months later, my husband and I went to dinner at the home of the police commissioner. The meal began with spaghetti soufflé."

I asked her about problems confronting white Kenyans these days and she thought cattle rustling was as serious as any. The whole farming economy is undermined by the necessity of enclosing the stock every evening. It means cows can't be left out to pasture but have to be driven into pounds. Their grazing is interrupted and the milk yield and growth rate are far lower than they should be. When cattle are stolen, the farmer must do everything possible to recover his beasts, otherwise he will lose more of them next time. The thieves have to be tracked, sometimes for weeks, and all other work on the farm comes to a standstill; and when the cattle are found they have to be driven home and they lose more weight in the process.

My companion was one of the few white Kenyans I met who didn't seem affronted by the way things were going. The others always prefaced their opinions by confiding how long they had lived in Kenya. They felt a peculiar sense of injustice at the nationalism they were now encountering. Whatever their attitude had been before independence, they no longer clapped their hands and shouted for Charley. When they spoke to their African servants, they almost whispered their requests, couching them in the reasonable terms in which one might address a difficult seven-year-old. "Don't scream," they seemed to be pleading, "and don't stamp your foot, but just run along like a good boy and see if you can find Mummy a little more ice. Won't that be fun, now?"

How much fun the Africans have these days is difficult to assess. The women lead lives of incredible austerity; each day they must walk miles in search of firewood and to fetch water from the communal tap. They also must do the housework and till the fields and mind the herds and contrive at the same time to dress elegantly and to carry their youngest on their back.

For men, life is easier. Unless, that is, they elect to work in the hotels, where they must watch the guests waste the bath water and leave the food untouched on their plates. What do they think of the luxury in which we wallow, compared with the deprivation and undernourishment of their own folk? I asked the proprietor of Leisure Lodge, arguably the most comfortable and certainly the most beautiful hotel in Kenya. He told me that the African wasn't undernourished, that most Europeans were far from clean and only with the greatest reluctance would he be willing to entertain one in his home. This was particularly true of hippies, whose physical presence nauseated him.

According to the proprietor, his staff had no need to work; they were all possessed of small holdings that brought them adequate incomes. They worked in order to pay for more wives. The acquisition of wives was a complicated and lengthy game. "It is played," he explained, "rather like Monopoly."

"But if you were an African awakened in the night by your child crying for a drink of water, how would you feel if you knew the nearest tap was five miles away?" I asked. "Would you go yourself? Would you send your wife?"

"I would wake my wife," he told me, "and she would give the child a coconut or a glass of goat's milk. Very few Africans drink water."

I wasn't sure whether I believed him or not. I recalled the experience of one settler who had taken his head cattle man, a Masai tribesman, to the Royal Show in London last summer. After two days he was asked what had struck him most forcibly. "Those taps," he said, "all those taps."

There is a man called Donovan Maule, an actor like myself, who went to Nairobi after the last war and decided to stay and found a stock company. Curiously enough, he made a fortune, retired and built himself and his wife a bungalow on a creek near Mombasa. The theater is now run by his daughter. They still play Rattigan and Coward and Priestley and Maugham, but the heart and the profit have gone out of the business. "A lot of our patrons have had to pack up and go home. They don't like it, you know; England isn't what it was, any more than this place. What they dread most is having to retire to somewhere like Canterbury." He poured me another gin and slapped his wrist. "We don't get mosquitoes here, you know."

"Nor in Canterbury," I told him, but he seemed unconvinced.

In what was once called the White Highlands, beyond the Aberdare mountain range, the British still farm the land, but no longer with the confidence they used to display when the Mau Mau was around and each settler had a gun at the ready. They have put their guns away but still greet the stranger on their stoop with caution. They know that his briefcase hides no fearsome machete, but more probably just a letter from the president, himself, inquiring in the politest possible manner whether perhaps the present owner might care to sell his property. After that, of course, it's only a matter of time before Canterbury, or a bungalow near Mombasa, becomes a reality.

The mission pilot was on his honeymoon and lived in Abyssinia. He was the only man I saw in Africa actually eat a coconut and he did it with expert ease, even producing a bowl for the milk. He had been married only three days, which was perhaps why, in true African fashion, he neglected to offer his wife any until he had almost finished it. There was plenty of coconut meat for both of them, and as he munched, he explained why he found it necessary to spend an hour on his knees each week, specifically asking the Almighty to put an end to the permissive society in West London.

"Are you praying for a holocaust?" I asked him.

"If necessary."

"Tell me," I urged, "about Addis Ababa. Is it true the penalty for stealing is to cut off a hand?"

"Sometimes."

"My goodness," I told him, "I wouldn't like to see that sort of thing in Britain. Think of the number of one-armed shoppers you'd meet. I think I prefer the permissive society."

On my last night in Africa, I hired a launch in order to inspect the carmine bee eaters. Extraordinary birds, which look like psychedelic starlings, who choose to roost each evening in one particular clump of mango trees three or four miles upstream from the creek on which stands the Mnarani Country Club. The club is an elegant establishment, much patronized by big-game fishermen and, especially, the present Lady Delamere. The murder case in which her husband, Delves Broughton, was tried and acquitted of the killing of "Boy" Errol in the Fifties still provokes raised eyebrows and lowered voices wherever two or three Kenyans are gathered together with a stranger who will listen to the tale.

Upstream, we dawdled by the riverbank. I was convinced the boatman was uncertain which mango clump harbored the birds. But no, it was too early and they hadn't yet arrived. Meanwhile, he showed me huge pelicans perched in banyan trees and egrets fishing from the bank and sea eagles circling above and, rounding a bend of the river, a village built on the mud flats with children calling us to come closer and be inspected for cigarettes. My boatman ignored them and, turning the boat suddenly, brought us back downstream. He's lost, I told myself, we'll not find them now, it will be too dark to see. Then suddenly the carmine bee eaters came swooping and soaring, settling for a moment and then flying away, and returning, and all the time the beat of their wings and the sound of their voices filled the air with excitement.

This is Africa, I told myself. This is what I came to see, and wondered if it was true that these were the only carmine bee eaters in the world and this the only mango swamp they patronized. But when it was quiet again and darkness fell and we journeyed back downstream to the country club, I found myself considering for the 100th time the riddle of Delves Broughton.

The rip-roaring days are over for the British. Now they walk abroad as delicately as the Japanese. In Kenya, they are remembered, but without gratitude. They set an example of incorruptibility in the administration that has not been followed. They planted sisal and grew groundnuts and became croppers. They left Kenya no richer than they found it, but look, an African will tell you, look what they got out of it for themselves.