1
Message from Nungwe
How is it possible to bring order out of memory? I should
like to begin at the beginning, patiently, like a weaver at
his loom. I should like to say, 'This is the place to start;
there can be no other.'
But there are a hundred places to start for there are a
hundred names - Mwanza, Serengetti, Nungwe, Mob, Nakuru.
There are easily a hundred names, and I can begin best by
choosing one of them - not because it is first nor of any
importance in a wildly adventurous sense, but because here it
happens to be, turned uppermost in my logbook. After all, I
am no weaver. Weavers create. This is remembrance -
revisitation; and names are keys that open corridors no
longer fresh in the mind, but none the less familiar in the
heart.
So the name shall be Nungwe - as good as any other -
entered like this in the log, lending reality, if not order,
to memory:
DATE - 16/6/35
TYPE AIRCRAFT - Avro Avian
MARKINGS - VP - KAN
JOURNEY - Nairobi to Nungwe
TIME - 3 hrs, 40 mins.
After that comes PILOT: Self; and REMARKS - of which there
were none.
But there might have been.
Nungwe may be dead and forgotten now. It was barely alive
when I went there in 1935. It lay west and south of Nairobi
on the southernmost rim of lake Victoria Nyanza, no more than
a starveling outpost of grubby huts, and that only because a
weary and discouraged prospector one day saw a speck of gold
clinging to the mud on the heel of his boot. He lifted the
speck with the tip of his hunting knife and stared at it
until it grew in his imagination from a tiny, rusty grain to
a nugget, and from a nugget to a fabulous stake.
His name eludes the memory, but he was not a secretive
man. In a little while Nungwe. which had been no more than a
word, was both a Mecca and a mirage, so that other
adventurers like himself discounted the burning heat of the
country, the malaria, the blackwater, the utter lack of
communications except by foot through forest trails, and went
there with shovels and picks and quinine and tinned food and
high hopes, and began to dig.
I never knew what their digging got them, if it got them
anything. because, when I set my small biplane down on the
narrow runway they had hacked out of the bush, it was night
and there were fires of oil-soaked rags burning in bent
chunks of tin to guide my landing.
There's not much to be seen in light like that - some dark
upturned faces impassive and patient, half-raised arms
beckoning. the shadow of a dog slouching between the flares.
I remember these things and the men who greeted me at Nungwe.
But I took off again after dawn without learning anything
about the success of their operations or the wealth of their
mine.
It wasn't that they meant to keep those things concealed;
it was just that they had other things to think about that
night, and none of them had to do with gold.
I had been working out of Nairobi as a freelance pilot
with the Muthaiga Country Club as my headquarters. Even in
1935 it wasn't easy to get a plane in East Africa and it was
almost impossible to get very far across country without one.
There were roads, of course, leading in a dozen directions
out of Nairobi. They started out boldly enough, but grew
narrow and rough after a few miles and dwindled into the
rock-studded hills. or lost themselves in a morass of red
muram mud or black cotton soil, in the flat country and the
valleys. On a map they look sturdy and incapable of deceit,
but to have ventured from Nairobi south towards Machakos or
Magadi in anything less formidable than a moderately powered
John Deere tractor was optimistic to the point of sheer
whimsy, and the road to the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, north and
west through Naivasha, called 'practicable' in the dry
season, had, when 1 last used It after a mild rain, an
adhesive quality equal to that of the most prized black
treacle.
This minor defect, coupled with the fact that thousands of
miles of papyrus swamp and deep desert lie between Naivasha
and Khartoum, had been almost flippantly overlooked by a
Government road commission which had caused the erection,
near Naivasha, of an impressive and beautiful signpost
reading:
To JUBA - KHARTOUM - CAIRO
I have never known whether this questionable encouragement
to the casual traveller was only the result of well-meant
wishful thinking or whether some official cursed with a
depraved and sadistic humour had found an outlet for it after
years of repression in a muggy Nairobi office. In any case.
there the sign stood. like a beacon, daring all and sundry to
proceed (not even with caution) towards what was almost sure
to be neither Khartoum nor Cairo, but a Slough of Despond
more tangible than, but at least as hopeless as, Mr Bunyan's.
This was, of course; an exception. The more travelled
roads were good and often paved for a short distance, but
once the pavement ended, an aeroplane, if one were at hand,
could save hours of weary toil behind the wheel of a lurching
car provided the driver were skilful enough to keep it
lurching at all. My plane, though only a two-seater, was busy
most of the time in spite of competition from the then barely
budding East African - not to say the full-blown Wilson -
Airways.
Nairobi itself was busy and growing - gateway to a still
new country, a big country, an almost unknown country. In
less than thirty years the town had sprung from a collection
of corrugated iron shacks serving the spindly Uganda Railway
to a sprawling welter of British, Boers, Indians, Somalis,
Abyssinians, natives from all over Africa and a dozen other
places.
Today its Indian Bazaar alone covers several acres; its
hotels, its government offices, its racecourse, and its
churches are imposing evidence that modern times and methods
have at last caught up with East Africa. But the core of it
is still raw and hardly softened at all by the weighty hand
of British officialdom. Business goes on, banks flourish,
automobiles purr importantly up and down Government Road, and
shop-girls and clerks think, act, and live about as they do
in any modern settlement of thirty-odd thousand in any
country anywhere.
The town lies snugly against the Athi Plains at the foot
of the rolling Kikuyu Hills. looking north to Mount Kenya and
south to Kilimajaro in Tanganyika. It is a counting house In
the wilderness - a place of shillings and pounds and land
sales and trade, extraordinary successes and extraordinary
failures. Its shops sell whatever you need to buy. Farms and
coffee plantations surround it for more than a hundred miles
and goods trains and lorries supply its markets with produce
daily.
But what is a hundred miles in a country so big?
Beyond are villages still sleeping in the forests, on the
great reservations - villages peopled with human beings only
vaguely aware that the even course of their racial life may
somehow be endangered by the persistent and irresistible
pressure of the white man.
But white men's wars are fought on the edges of Africa -
you can carry a machine gun three hundred miles inland from
the sea and you are still on the edge of it: Since Carthage,
and before, men have hacked and scrabbled for permanent
footholds along the coasts and in the deserts and on the
mountains, and where these footholds have been secured, the
right to hold them has been the cause of endless dispute and
bloodshed.
Competitors in conquest have overlooked the vital soul of
Africa herself, from which emanates the true resistance to
conquest. The soul is dot dead; but silent, the wisdom not
lacking, but of such simplicity as to be counted non-existent
in the thinker's mind of modern civilization. Africa is of an
ancient age and the blood of many of her peoples is as
venerable and as chaste as truth. What upstart race, sprung
from some recent, callow century to arm itself with steel and
boastfulness, can match in purity the blood of a single Masai
Murani whose heritage may have stemmed not far from Eden? It
is not the weed that is corrupt; roots of the weed sucked
first life from the genesis of earth and hold the essence of
it still. Always the weed returns; the cultured plant
retreats before it. Racial purity, true aristocracy, devolve
not front edict, nor from rote, but from the preservation of
kinship with the elemental forces and purposes of life whose
understanding is not farther beyond the mind of a native
shepherd than beyond the cultured fumblings of a mortar-board
intelligence.
Whatever happens armies will continue to rumble, colonies
may change masters, and in the face of it all Africa lies,
and will lie, like a great, wisely somnolent giant unmolested
by the noisy drum-rolling of bickering empires. It is not
only a land; it is an entity born of one man's hope and
another man's fancy.
So there are many Africas. There are as many Africas as
there are books about Africa - and as many books about it as
you could read in a leisurely lifetime. Whoever writes a new
one can afford a certain complacency in the knowledge that
his is a new picture agreeing with no one else's, but likely
to be haughtily disagreed with by all those who believe in
some other Africa.
Doctor Livingstone's Africa was a pretty dark one. There
have been a lot of Africas since that, some darker, some
bright. most of them full of animals and pygmies, and a few
mildly hysterical about the weather, the jungle, and the
trials of safari.
All of these books, or at least as many of them as I have
read, are accurate in their various portrayals of Africa -
not my Africa, perhaps. nor that of an early settler. nor of
a veteran of the Boer War, nor of an American millionaire who
went there and shot zebra and lion, but of an Africa true to
each writer of each book. Being thus all things to all
authors, it follows. I suppose, that Africa must be all
things to all readers.
Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno;
it is a photographer's paradise. a hunter's Valhalla, an
escapist's Utopia. It is what you will, and it withstands all
interpretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world or
the candle of a shiny new one. To a lot of people, as to
myself, it is just 'home'. It is all these things but one
thing - it is never dull.
From the time I arrived in British East Africa at the
indifferent age of four and went through the barefoot Stage
of early youth hunting wild pig with the Nandi, later
training race-horses for a living, and still later scouting
Tanganyika and the waterless bush country between the Tana
and Athi rivers, by aeroplane, for elephant, I remained so
happily provincial I was unable to discuss the boredom of
being alive with any intelligence until I had gone to London
and lived there a year. Boredom, like bookworm, is endemic.
I have lifted my plane from the Nairobi airport for
perhaps a thousand flights and I have never felt her wheels
glide from the earth into the air without knowing
the uncertainty and the exhilaration of firstborn adventure.
The call that took me to Nungwe came about one o'clock in
the morning, relayed front Muthaiga Country Club to my small
cottage in the eucalyptus grove near by.
It was a brief message asking that a cylinder of oxygen be
flown to the settlement at once for the treatment of a gold
miner near death with a lung disease. The appeal was signed
with a name I had never heard, and I remember thinking that
there was a kind of pathetic optimism about its having been
sent at all, because the only way it could have reached me
was through the telegraph station at Mwanza - itself a
hundred miles by native runner from Nungwe. During the two or
three days the message had been on its way, a man in need of
oxygen must either have died or shown a superhuman
determination to live.
So far as I know I was the only professional woman pilot
in Africa at that time. I had no freelance competition in
Kenya, man or woman; and such messages or at least others not
always so urgent or melancholy, were frequent enough to keep
me occupied most days and far too many nights.
Night flying over charted country by the aid of
instruments and radio guidance can still be a
lonely business, but to fly in unbroken darkness without even
the cold companionship of a pair of ear-phones or the
knowledge that somewhere ahead are lights and life and a
well-marked airport is something more than just lonely. It is
at times unreal to the point where the existence of other
people seems not even a reasonable probability. The hills,
the forests, the rocks, and the plains are one with the
darkness, and the darkness is infinite. The earth is no more
your planet than is a distant star - if a star is shining:
the plane is your planet and you are its sole inhabitant.
Before such a flight it was this anticipation of aloneness
more than any thought of physical danger that used to haunt
me a little and make me wonder sometimes if mine was the most
wonderful job in the world after all. I always concluded
that, lonely or not, it was still free from the curse of
boredom.
Under ordinary circumstances I should have been at the
aerodrome ready to take off for Nungwe in less than half an
hour, but instead I found myself confronted with a problem
much too difficult to solve while still half asleep and at
one o'clock in the morning. It was one of those problems that
seem incapable of solution - and are; but which, once they
have fastened themselves upon you, can neither be escaped nor
ignored.
A pilot, a man named Wood who flew for East African
Airways, was down somewhere on the vast Serengetti Plains and
had been missing for two days. To me and to all of his
friends, he was just Woody - a good flier and a likeable
person. He was a familiar figure in Nairobi and, though word
of his disappearance had been slow in finding attention, once
it was realized that he was not simply overdue, but lost,
there was a good deal of excitement, Some of this, I suppose,
was no more than the usual public enjoyment of suspense and
melodrama. though there was seldom a scarcity of either in
Nairobi.
Where Woody's misfortune was most sincerely felt, of
course, was amongst those of his own profession. I do not
mean pilots alone. Few people realize the agony and anxiety a
conscientious ground engineer can suffer if an aeroplane he
has signed out fails to return. He will not always consider
the probability of bad weather or a possible error of
judgement, on the part of the pilot, but instead will torture
himself with unanswerable questions about proper wiring. fuel
lines, carburation, valves, and all the hundred and one
things he must think about. He will feel that on this
occasion he must surely have overlooked something - some
small but vital adjustment which, because of his neglect, has
resulted in the crash of a plane or the death of a pilot.
All the members of a ground crew, no matter how poorly
equipped or how small the aerodrome on which they work, will
share equally the apprehension and the nervous strain that
come with the first hint of mishap.
But whether storm; or engine trouble, or whatever the
cause, Woody had disappeared, and for the past two days I had
been droning my plane back and forth over the Northern
Serengetti and half the Masai Reserve without having sighted
so much as a plume of signal smoke or the glint of sunlight
on a crumpled wing.
Anxiety was increasing, even changing to gloom, and I had
expected to take off again at sunrise to continue the search;
but here suddenly was the message from Nungwe.
For all professional pilots there exists a kind of guild,
without charter and without by-laws. It demands no
requirements for inclusion save an understanding of the wind,
the compass, the rudder, and fair fellowship. It is a
camaraderie sans sentiment of the kind that men who
once sailed uncharted seas in wooden ships must have known
and lived by.
I was my own employer, my own pilot. and as often as not
my own ground engineer as well. As such I might easily,
perhaps even justifiably, have refused the flight to Nungwe,
arguing that the rescue of the lost pilot was more important
- as, to me, it was. But there was a tinge of personal
sympathy about such reasoning that weakened conviction, and
woody, whom I knew so little and yet so well that I never
bothered to remember his full name any more than most of his
friends did, would have been quick to reject a decision that
favoured him at the expense of an unknown miner choking his
lungs out in the soggy swamplands of Victoria Nyanza.
In the end I telephoned the Nairobi Hospital, made sure
that the oxygen would be ready, and prepared to fly south.
Three hundred and fifty miles can he no distance in a
plane. or it can he from where you are to the end of the
earth. It depends on so many things. If it is night, it
depends on the depth of the darkness and the height of the
clouds, the speed of the wind, the stars, the fullness of the
moon. It depends on you, if you fly alone - not only on your
ability to steer your course or to keep your altitude, but
upon the things that live in your mind while you swing
suspended between the earth and the silent sky. Some of those
things take root and are with you long after the flight
itself is a memory, but, if your course was over any part of
Africa, even the memory will remain strong.
When, much later than Nungwe or Tripoli or Zanzibar, or
any of the remote and sometimes outlandish places I have
flown to, I crossed the North Atlantic, east to west, there
were head lines, fanfare, and, for me, in any sleepless
nights. A generous American press found that flight
spectacular - and what is spectacular is news.
But to leave Nairobi and arrive at Nungwe is not
spectacular. It is not news. It is only a little hop from
here to there, and to one who does not know the plains of
Africa, its swamps, its night sounds and its night silences,
such a flight is not only unspectacular, but perhaps tedious
as well. Only not to me, for Africa was the breath and life
of my childhood.
It is still the host of all my darkest fears, the cradle
of mysteries always intriguing, but never wholly solved. It
is the remembrance of sunlight and green hills, cool water
and the yellow warmth of bright mornings. It is as ruthless
as any sea, more uncompromising than its own deserts. It is
without temperance in its harshness or in its favours. It
yields nothing, offering much to men of all races.
But the soul of Africa, its integrity, the slow,
inexorable pulse of its life, is its own and of such singular
rhythm that no outsider, unless steeped from childhood in its
endless, even heat, can ever hope to experience it, except
only as a bystander might experience a Masai war dance
knowing nothing of its music nor the meaning of its steps.
So I am off to Nungwe - a silly word, a silly place. A
place of small hopes and small successes, buried like the
inconsequential treasure of an imaginative miser, out of
bounds and out of most men's wanting - below the Mau
Escarpment, below the Speke Gulf, below the unsurveyed
stretches of the Western Province.
Oxygen to a sick miner. But this flight is not heroic. It
is not even romantic. It is a job of work, a job to be done
at an uncomfortable hour with sleep in my eyes and half a
grumble on my lips.
Arab Ruta calls contact and swings the propeller.
Arab Ruta is a Nandi, anthropologically a member of a
Nilotic tribe, humanly a member of a smaller tribe, a more
elect tribe, the tribe composed of those too few, precisely
sensitive, but altogether indomitable individuals contributed
sparingly by each race, exclusively by none.
He is of the tribe that observes with equal respect the
soft voice and the hardened hand, the fullness of a flower,
the quick finality of death. His is the laughter of a free
man happy at his work,a strong man with lust for living. He
is not black. His skin holds the sheen and warmth of used
copper. His eyes are dark and wide-spaced, his nose
full-boned and capable of arrogance.
He is arrogant now, swinging the propeller, laying his
lean hands on the curved wood, feeling an exultant kinship in
the coiled resistance to his thrust.
He swings hard. A splutter, a strangled cough from the
engine like the premature stirring of a sleep-slugged
labourer. In the cockpit I push gently on the throttle,
easing it forward, rousing the motor, feeding it, soothing
it.
Arab Ruta moves the wooden chocks from the wheels and
steps backwards away from the wing. Fitful splashes of
crimson light from crude-oil torches set round the field
stain the dark cloth of the African night and play upon his
alert, high boned face. He raises his hand and I nod as the
propeller, whirring itself into invisibility, pulls the plane
forward, past him.
I leave him no instructions, no orders. When I return he
will be there: It is an understanding of many years - a
wordless understanding from the days when Arab Ruta first
came into my father's service on the farm at Njoro. He will
be there, as a servant, as a friend - waiting.
I peer ahead along the narrow muram runway. I gather
speed, meeting the wind, using the wind.
A high Wire fence surrounds the aerodrome - a wire fence
and then a deep ditch. Where is there another aerodrome
fenced against wild animals? Zebra, wildebeest, giraffe,
eland - at night they lurk about the tall barrier staring
with curious wild eyes into the flat field, feeling cheated.
They are well out of it, for themselves and for me. It
would be a hard fate to go down in the memory of one's
friends as having
been tripped up by a wandering zebra. 'Tried to take off
and hit a zebra!' It lacks even the dignity of crashing into
an anthill.
Watch the fence. Watch the flares. I watch both and take
off into the night.
Ahead of me lies a land that is unknown to the rest of the
world and only vaguely known to the African - a strange
mixture of grasslands, scrub, desert sand like long waves of
the southern ocean. Forest, still water, and age-old
mountains, stark and grim like mountains of the moon. Salt
lakes, and rivers that have no water. Swamps. Badlands. Land
without life. Land teeming with life - all of the dusty past,
all of the future.
The air takes me into its realm. Night envelops me
entirely, leaving me out of touch with the earth, leaving me
within this small, moving world of my own, living in space
with the stars.
My plane is a light one, a two-seater with her
registration letters, VP-KAN, painted boldly on her
turquoise-blue fuselage in silver.
In the daytime she is a small gay complement to the airy
blue of the sky, like a bright fish under the surface of a
clear sea. In darkness such as this she is no more than a
passing murmur, a soft, incongruous murmur above the earth.
With such registration letters as hers, it requires of my
friends no great imagination or humour to speak of her always
as just 'the Kan' - and the Kan she is, even to me. But this
is not libel, for such nicknames are born out of love.
To me she is alive and to me she speaks. I feel through
the soles of my feet on the rudder-bar the willing strain and
flex of her muscles. The resonant, guttural voice of her
exhausts has a timbre more articulate than wood and steel,
more vibrant than wires and sparks and pounding pistons.
She speaks to me now, saying the wind is right,the night
is fair, the effort asked of her well within her powers.
I fly swiftly. I fly high south-southwest; over the Ngong
Hills. I am relaxed My right hand rests upon the stick in
easy communication with the will and the way of the plane. I
sit in the rear, the front cockpit filled with the heavy tank
of oxygen strapped upright in the seat, its round. stiff dome
foolishly re minding me of the poised rigidity of a passenger
on first flight.
The wind in the wires is like the tearing of soft silk
under the blended drone of engine and propeller. Time and
distance together slip smoothly past the tips of my wings
without sound, without return. as I peer downward over the
night-shadowed hollows of the Rift Valley and wonder if
Woody, the lost pilot, could be there, a small human pinpoint
of hope and of hopelessness listening to the low. unconcerned
song of the Avian - flying elsewhere.
