Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

  War is Africa’s perpetual ripe fruit. There is so much injustice to resolve, such desire for revenge in the blood of the people, such crippling corruption of power, such unseemly scramble for the natural resources. The wind of power shifts and there go the fruit again, tumbling toward the ground, each war more inventively terrible than the last. In 1880, the British confiscated a Boer’s wagon because he had not paid his taxes. Needing nothing but the smallest of excuses, the Boers retaliated by declaring war against the British. Within a year, the British had been defeated. The Afrikaners would later call this their First War of Independence. The British would call it the First Anglo-Boer War.

  But the subsequent gold rush of 1886 attracted even more British to the Boer republics. Never forgetting their resentment, the Afrikaners refused to let the British vote. Even by the 1890s, when there were more British than Afrikaners in the republics, the Afrikaners denied the British the vote. This provoked the Second Anglo-Boer War, or what the Afrikaners called the Second War of Freedom, in October 1899. This time the British took no chances. Four hundred fifty thousand soldiers came to South Africa from Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada to fight fewer than sixty thousand Boers. This time the war was longer and even more excessively nasty and brutish than the last.

  Although the Afrikaners had no official army, they had been on the continent for two centuries and they had the land in their blood (to say nothing of their blood in the land). They needed no barracks or uniforms, and no generals to give them orders. They had sturdy horses, strong men and tenacious women. Their children were crack shots, raised to be tough and self-sufficient. On the other hand, the British troops wore impractical red jackets that shone out of the blond high veldt like stoplights. They didn’t understand the language of this wide, sad land, nor did they love it. The only way they could win the war was backhandedly—by starving and diseasing the Afrikaners out of existence. So between 1901 and 1902, the British scorched more than thirty thousand farms and placed almost all the Afrikaner women and children in the world’s first concentration camps. As many as twenty-nine thousand Boers died from the appalling conditions in those camps; so did twenty thousand blacks who had been caught working on Boer farms. By the time a peace treaty was signed at the town of Vereeniging on May 21, 1902, the British army had killed nearly one quarter of all the Boers in existence.

  Flip Prinsloo had come to Kenya as a baby with his parents and forty-seven other Afrikaner families from the Transvaal. The families were mostly bywoners (poor tenant farmers who had no hope of purchasing land of their own) or hensoppers (those who had surrendered to the British during the Boer War and who now found the shame of that surrender unbearable). Both the bywoners and the hensoppers wanted a large piece of free, unoccupied African land on which to settle. The last thing they wanted—having done little else in living memory—was to have to fight or die for that land. “But there it was and they were welcome to it,” Mum says. “No one else had settled there—too windy and far-flung for the tastes of most people.”

  The Uasin Gishu plateau on which the town of Eldoret now sits had been occupied in precolonial times first by the Sirikwa, then by the Masai and finally by the Nandi. In other words, the British considered it “unoccupied,” a perceived emptiness that irked them. Consequently, they offered it to the Zionists as a temporary refuge for Russian Jews until a homeland in Israel could be established. But the Zionists rejected the offer, some of them weeping openly at the 1903 sixth Zionist Congress and quoting from Psalm 137, “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.”

  So in semidesperation the British offered the land to British-abhorring Afrikaners from the Transvaal, and in 1908 more than two hundred Boers arrived by ship in Mombasa, Kenya. They took trains as far as Nakuru, where they purchased native oxen, which they trained to pull wagons all through the long rainy season of March, April and May. At the end of May, they began to climb from the Rift Valley, up the escarpment to their new homeland. It took them two months to cover one hundred miles, the wagons churning through mud up to the tops of their wheels and the forest dense and impassable in places. The trekkers cut bamboo to make causeways across swamps. The drivers stayed near the oxen, urging them step by slithering step.

  In a wetland at the top of the escarpment a wagon loaded with sugar sank up to its axles and all the sugar melted. While the trekkers struggled for days to free the wagon, a two-year-old girl died of pneumonia. The young men planted poles and created a rudimentary sacred site for the funeral, and the Afrikaners grieved in the way of stoical people, tight lipped and moist eyed. They buried the girl in a place which they called Suiker Vlei—Sugar Vlei—and the next day they freed the wagon and continued the journey to the Sosiani River.

  “There was at that time,” Mum says, “a hunter called Cecil Hoey who lived on the other side of what would become Eldoret. He saw what he thought was a long stream of smoke snaking its way up the escarpment onto the highlands. And then he realized he was seeing the pale canvas of covered wagons winding up to the plateau. It was the trekkers arriving.” Mum says, “Cecil took one look at that lot and predicted the end of the wildlife. He was right because when those Afrikaners first got there they had nothing to live off except what they could kill, and they finished off all the animals in no time.”

  The Afrikaners made harrows from branches and thorns bound with leather thongs made from zebra skin, they made soap from eland fat and they made shoes from the hides of giraffes. They ate what they could snare or shoot and they lived in grass-thatched houses made from their own mud bricks, baked in the high-altitude sun. “A lot of them were very basic,” Mum says. “They weren’t educated and they didn’t read anything except the Bible. But they were tough and resourceful and they could live off nothing, those people.” And then she sniffs and I can tell that it wounds her to make this next admission. “Well, that was most of them. But some of them were quite posh. One Afrikaner family was so posh that the Queen Mother stayed with them when she came to Kenya in 1959.” Mum pauses to let me absorb this startling knowledge. “Imagine that,” she says. “There’s no way our shoddy little house would have been fit for royalty, but there they were—those posh Afrikaners—entertaining the Queen Mother!”

  AT LAST CHERITO LURCHED ONTO the veranda with a tray of tea and a bottle of my grandmother’s homemade wine.

  “Thank you,” my grandmother said.

  Cherito staggered back into the kitchen. My grandmother’s hand hovered over the tray. “Tea, Mr. Prinsloo?” she offered. “Or something a little stronger?”

  Flip blinked.

  My grandmother poured them both a glass of wine. “It burns a little at first,” she warned, “but it’s not bad once you get used to it.” She took a sip of her wine. “Here’s to us.” She raised her glass. “There’re none like us, and if there were, they’re all dead.”

  Flip took a sip.

  “What do you think?” my grandmother asked.

  Flip’s lips were stuck to his teeth, so he did not answer.

  “Not bad, eh?” My grandmother poured herself another glass. “Mud in your eye,” she said. The second glass tasted better than the first, and working off the theory that the third would therefore be better than the second, my grandmother gave herself another helping. “To absent friends!” she cried. Which was how, when Flip finally got around to the reason for his visit, he found my grandmother in a pleasantly receptive mood.

  “I’ve been watching your daughter riding,” Flip said suddenly.

  My grandmother narrowed her eyes at him. “Have you?”

  “I like her style,” he said. “Lots of blood.”

  “Well,” my grandmother said, “I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.”

  There was a long pause. Flip cleared his throat. “Dingaan’s Day is coming up,” he s
aid.

  Each year on December 16 Afrikaners everywhere celebrated Dingaan’s Day. The most significant date in their calendar, it memorialized a battle in 1838 when a Voortrekker column defeated Dingaan’s Zulu warriors on the banks of a river in modern-day KwaZulu-Natal. In Zulu they call that battle iMpi yaseNcome, the Battle of Ncome River. In Afrikaans they say it was Slag van Bloedrivier, the Battle of Blood River. But whatever you call it, the outcome was the same. On that day—with everything you can imagine going against them—four hundred seventy Voortrekkers roundly defeated tens of thousands of Zulu warriors. By nightfall, the Ncome River ran red with the blood of three thousand slain Zulus. No Afrikaners were killed in the battle and only three were wounded. This proved, the Afrikaners said, that their tribe had a divine right to exist on South African land.

  My grandmother sighed and looked with some regret at her empty wineglass. “So it is,” she said. “How time flies.”

  Flip cleared his throat again. “I want to beat my cousin Pieter at the Dingaan Day races,” he said.

  My grandmother sat up. If there was one thing calculated to catch her interest, even through the fog of her homemade fig wine and lots of violent history, it was horse racing. “Is that so?”

  “Yes,” Flip said.

  “Do you have a good horse?” My grandmother gave a little hiccup and wagged her finger at Flip. “That’s the thing to win a race,” she said. “A good horse.”

  “I’ve got a very good horse,” Flip said. “But I need someone who will ride it. My sons.... Agh no, man.” Flip put his head in his enormous hands. “They’re no good.” He looked at my grandmother, his eyes desperate. “I want your daughter.”

  My grandmother gave another hiccup.

  “I’ll pay her,” Flip offered.

  My grandmother looked horrified and flapped a hand at Flip. “No, no, no. Don’t be silly.” She hiccuped again. “You must have her for nothing. Free to good friends. Go ahead. Take her.”

  SO THE NEXT AFTERNOON, Flip Prinsloo came to the house and picked up Mum and drove her to his farm. “He had a bottle of South African brandy under his seat,” Mum says, “and he’d take slurps out of it as we drove along. He offered me some, but I wasn’t about to drink from a bottle that some scrubby old Afrikaner had been gulping out of.” To make up for this, Flip bought my mother an enormous slab of chocolate when he stopped at the Venus Bar to replenish his brandy supply. “Which gave me spots,” Mum warns. “So that was an important lesson. If someone offers you either brandy or chocolate, you should always take the brandy.”

  At the farm, Mum was left alone in a dimly lit sitting room while lunch was prepared. “All the furniture pressed against the skirting boards and a host of immensely chilling ancestors glared down from the walls,” Mum says. Lunch was an awkward affair: “A very severe wife, a couple of hulking sons and one crushed-looking daughter-in-law.” Except for the occasional outburst in Afrikaans, the family ate in silence. “I didn’t understand what they said, but it certainly sounded as if they were plotting to kill me,” she says.

  Boiled mutton—“Grisly,” Mum says—was followed by stewed coffee and fried sweetbreads, and then Flip reached for his sweat-stained hat and pushed himself away from the table. “Time to race,” he said. The sons wiped their lips and stood up. They, too, reached for their veldskoen hats. “Kom,” Flip told Mum.

  The farm was on the edge of the plateau, and even though the Prinsloos had been cultivating it for fifty years, the buildings looked inadequate and hasty in the face of all the earth and sky they were trying to command. The place had a haunted feel, as if it were in mourning for its old self. From a roughhewn livestock shed a syce emerged, leading three horses: two ordinary-looking geldings and a bay mare plunging at the end of her lead rope.

  “Dit is jou perd,” Flip told Mum. “Violet.”

  Mum was speechless.

  “I’ll never forget the first time I saw her,” she says. “I don’t think she ever had two feet on the ground at any one time. She wasn’t tall but she had these long elegant legs, and a powerful chest. I could see, just looking at her, that she could run like the wind.”

  “Well,” Flip said. “Op jou merka. First one to the end of the maize field wins.”

  Without warning and certainly without waiting for my mother, the Prinsloo sons leaped onto the two geldings and took off along the edge of a maize field. “Those Afrikaners didn’t know how to train horses,” Mum says. “They just put very savage bits in their mouths and rode like mad.” Mum was still hopping about, trying to get her leg over the saddle, when Violet took off after the other horses.

  “I don’t know how I stayed on,” Mum says. “But I did. I somehow managed to scramble up into the saddle with the mare at full gallop, grab the reins and hang on while she flew up the maize field. And I beat the sons, both of whom had tumbled down antbear holes long before the finish line.”

  That December, Mum won the Dingaan’s Day race on Violet, outpacing Flip Prinsloo’s cousin Pieter by lengths. Flip was drunk with victory. He bought Mum slabs and slabs of chocolate at the Venus Bar and he offered to marry her off to his sons. “One was about thirteen and the other was already married,” Mum says. “But Flip said that didn’t matter. He said I could have either, or both—whichever I wanted.”

  “I don’t want your sons,” Mum told Flip. She didn’t want the chocolate either. She wanted Violet.

  Flip shook his head. “No, not the horse,” he said.

  “If I can’t have her, I won’t ride her,” Mum said.

  Flip fingered his hat. “Is that so?”

  “Yes,” Mum said.

  In the end, Mum and Flip struck a deal. She could borrow the horse all year for show jumping and hacking—anything she wanted—as long as she would ride for him every year on Dingaan’s Day.

  “Done,” Mum said, shaking one of Flip Prinsloo’s enormous hands.

  Flip fetched the brandy bottle from under his seat and took a long swallow. “Op Violet,” he said, offering Mum a sip.

  Mum put the bottle to her lips. “To Violet,” she agreed.

  So for the first time in her life, Mum won everything she entered: show jumping, racing, bending poles. “That mare had one speed: flat out. No one could stop her. I couldn’t stop her. But I could just about steer her and as long as I could stay on, we won, we won, we won. We won everything.”

  Nicola Huntingford and the Mau Mau

  Donnie on the farm. Kenya, circa 1960.

  Once a week my grandfather took Auntie Glug and Mum to one of the two movie theaters in Eldoret: either the Roxy or the Lyric. From one week to the next, Mum wallowed in the agreeable agony of having to choose between Rowan Tree fruit gums or Wilkinson’s dolly mixture. “By the time we arrived at the cinema, I’d be half dead with indecision because they were all such beautiful sweets,” she says. Then, having painstakingly selected the treats, Mum, Auntie Glug and my grandfather were shown to their seats by ushers who were dressed up like organ-grinders’ monkeys in funny little uniforms with fezzes perched on the side of their heads.

  The lights went down and, through the backlit mauve-gray gauze of cigarette smoke, the show began. First, a Pathé News reel, a jingoistic British production that always included something cheerful for the far-flung subjects. “The royal family doing something horsey or a factory in Manchester belching lots of patriotic smoke into a gloomy English sky,” Mum says. After the news, there was a pause while the adults refreshed their cocktails and the Indians who ran the movie theater sweated over the ancient, dust-rusted projection machines.

  “Finally, after much ado, the main event,” Mum says. “Usually a war movie with lots of wicked Nazis coming to a sticky end and heroic British soldiers prevailing against overwhelming evil. The sound system was awful, so we struggled if they showed a Western because we couldn’t understand their accents.” Mum gives me a reproachful look as if I were personally responsible for the shortcomings of John Wayne’s elocution. Then she continues in a more co
nciliatory tone. “Although their plots were very simple, of course, so it didn’t matter too much—a bunch of cowboys wiping out bunches and bunches of Indians.” Mum sniffs. “Very hard on their horses, we always thought.”

  She and I are having this conversation while driving north from Cape Town to Clanwilliam in the Western Cape, having rendezvoused for a holiday in South Africa. I have come from Wyoming and Mum and Dad have flown from Zambia to meet me. It is the end of the cold rainy season, and the air outside is humming in anticipation of the ferocious heat of summer, which is gathering strength, moment by moment. Each day begins with a memory of chill, but by noon baking waves are rocking the ground. Mum looks out the window, but I can tell she isn’t seeing the citrus farms, neatly laid out like strung jewels on pale sandy soil along the Olifants River, nor is she seeing the ash-purple fynbos that smothers the flanks of the mountains here. In her head, Mum is back in Eldoret, in a stuffy, smoke-filled cinema and it is the early 1950s.

  “And of course they never forgot the national anthem,” Mum says dreamily, putting her hand over her heart. “Every show they played ‘God Save the King’—or ‘God Save the Queen,’ whoever it was—and you had to leap to your feet respectfully, God save our gracious Queen, long live our noble Queen. God Save the Queen!” Mum is singing softly, “La la la la! Send her victorious, happy and glorious, Tra la la la la la laaa la la! God save the Queen.”

  She resumes her speaking voice and says with pride, “Did you know that Princess Elizabeth was actually in Kenya when her father died?”