AMONG THE KIKUYUS AND THE NANDI
Shortly after leaving Nairobi by train for Lake Victoria I came into the
land of the Kikuyus, where I stopped off for a while. Over a million of
these native people live in the country about two thousand feet above
Nairobi. We could see their farms and villages everywhere as we rode by
on the railway. In clearing the land they first burn off the trees and
other vegetation, then work the ground until it is barren. After that
they clear more land, letting the first tracts lie fallow until Nature
revives them. Some of the Kikuyu farms are no bigger than a bed quilt;
others cover a quarter of an acre, and some twice as much. The fields are
not fenced, and now and then a rhino or hippo gets in and wallows, while
near the woodlands the monkeys pull up the crops. The chief thing raised
is Indian corn.
The dress of the Kikuyus consists mostly of grease, clay, and telegraph
wire. The grease makes their brown skins shine, the red clay gives it a
copper hue, and the telegraph wire loads their arms, necks, and ankles.
The grease is usually mutton fat and the clay is the red earth found
everywhere. The more rancid the fat the better they seem to like it.
The average man or woman so smells to heaven that one can distinguish a
native’s existence long before he sees him. They soak their hair with
this tallow until under the tropical sun you can almost hear the stuff
sizzle. They stiffen their hair with clay so that it can be put up in all
sorts of shapes. I examined one man’s head the other day. It was a pale
brick-rust colour and covered with something like ten thousand individual
curls which stood out over his pate like the snakes of the Medusa. Each
curl was an inch long and had been twisted by a professional hairdresser.
This man had six long pipe stems in his ears. Each was as big around
as a lead pencil and about the same length, and was fastened through a
hole made in the rim of the ear by a kind of brass button. These stems
standing out at the sides of his head looked almost like horns, save that
they projected from the ears. He had beads in the lobes. One of the men
with him had the lobe of his ear so stretched that it held a plug as big
as an apple. I bought the plug of him for three cents, and the man then
took the two lobes of his ears and joined them together under his chin,
tying them there with a bit of fibre in order that they might not catch
on a branch as he went through the forest.
The Kikuyus live in small villages that look like collections of haycocks
until one comes close to them. When one gets inside he finds they contain
as many animals as men. The houses are thatched huts built about six
feet apart in circles around an inclosure in which the cattle, sheep,
and goats are kept at night. The sheep and goats often get inside the
huts. Each circle of houses usually belongs to one family, a chief and
his relatives thus living together. The huts have wooden walls about four
feet high with conical roofs. The boards, which are about eighteen inches
or two feet wide, are chopped out of the trees with the native axes. A
native and his wives will require about ten days to build a shelter. The
wood used is soft, and the kind is regulated by the government, which
charges sixty-six cents for enough lumber to build one shack.
[Illustration: From the Uganda and Kenya jungles thousands of pounds of
ivory go down to Mombasa. The best tusks come from the uplands of British
East Africa, and the ivory from one bull elephant may pay a hunter’s
expenses.]
[Illustration: The Kikuyu woman, as in most African tribes, is privileged
to do all of the work. When going to the fields she often carries her
baby in a sort of pouch, or sling, suspended from her shoulders.]
Besides its huts, each family has two or three granaries for its supply
of Indian corn. These are made with thatched roofs, wicker walls and
wicker floors, and are raised a foot or eighteen inches off the ground.
They are usually about as big around as a hogshead and six feet high.
The Kikuyus are practically vegetarians. They live on corn, beans, sweet
potatoes, and a kind of millet. They have a few cattle and some sheep,
but they consider them too valuable to be slaughtered and only eat them
when the cattle are sick or become injured in some way and have to be
killed. They have no chickens, and eat neither fowls nor eggs. This is
because, in the past, the crowing of cocks would give away the locality
of a village, thereby bringing down its enemies and the slave traders
upon it.
These people have many dishes like ours. They eat roasting ears off the
cob, and they boil beans and corn together to make a kind of succotash.
They have also a gruel made of millet and milk, and if one of the family
becomes sick he is sometimes given mutton broth. In their cooking they
use clay jars which they rest upon stones above fires built on the
ground. They use gourds for carrying milk and water, and bags of woven
bark ranging in size from a pint to four bushels are used for all sorts
of purposes. The larger ones serve for the transportation of their grain
to the markets.
The Kikuyu looks upon the females of his family as so much available
capital. If a man has fifteen or twenty wives, he is supposed to be rich
beyond the dreams of avarice. I hear that many of the chiefs have a dozen
or more, and that since the British have begun to exploit the forests,
the more industrious of the native men have been rapidly increasing their
families. A good girl, large and healthy, will bring as much as fifty
sheep. A maiden is supposed to be ready for sale at twelve years, and
twenty dollars in cattle or sheep is an average price. For this sum the
woman should be large, well formed, and fairly good looking. Homely or
lean girls go cheap and often remain single, in which case they have to
work for their parents. A man may pay down ten sheep and agree to bring
in the balance from month to month as he and his wives earn the money
for them. He goes into the woods and cuts down trees, being paid so much
per stick. If he works hard, he may make three or four dollars a month,
and if, in addition, he has several women to help him, his income may be
doubled or trebled.
In such work the men cut the wood and the women carry it on their backs
to the market. They are loaded up by their husbands, a piece of goat skin
separating the rough sticks from the woman’s bare skin, and the burden
being tied on by a rope of vines which rests on the forehead. In addition
to this goat skin on her back, the woman usually has an apron or skirt of
skin tied about the waist and reaching to the knees and sometimes below
them. A strong, lusty girl can carry as much as two hundred pounds of
wood in this way, and her husband does not scruple to pile on all she can
take.
In coming from the plains over the mountains into the Great Rift Valley
I rode for miles through the woods and had a chance to see what the
British Government is doing to save the forests.
The wooded area of Kenya extends over three thousand two hundred
square miles, of which the tropical forest covers about a hundred and
eighty-three square miles, the remainder being upland or highland,
containing valuable trees. Transportation facilities are so limited,
however, and much of the country is so little known that the British have
only made a good beginning in exploiting the timber resources and in
scientific forestry work.
Lumber is high. Leaving the Kikuyu hills, one finds that there are woods
all the way to the ridge known as the Escarpment and they extend for
some distance down the sides of the Rift Valley. Here in the valley
itself the country is mostly pasture and there is no timber of any
account. In the forest region above referred to the woods are thin, and
in many places the original growth has been cleared by the Kikuyus. The
government is now prohibiting their practice of burning the wood, and
doing all it can to save the trees remaining and to build up new wood
lands. I met at Naivasha an Australian, one of the heads of the forestry
department, who told me that the government had nurseries at Mombasa,
Nairobi, Escarpment, and Landaivi. Near Mombasa they are setting out teak
trees, while at Nairobi they have planted a large number of acacia and
eucalyptus trees, imported from Australia. The eucalyptus grows well at
Nairobi. I saw trees there seventy-five feet high although they were only
five years old.
The forest manager told me he was labouring under the greatest of
disadvantages in his efforts to raise new trees. He said he had to fight
not only the natives, but also the monkeys, baboons, and other wild
animals. The woods are full of monkeys, among them a dog-faced baboon
which grows as big as a ten-year-old boy. This creature barks like a
dog and acts like a devil. It watches the planting, then sneaks in at
night and digs up the trees. If seeds are put in, it digs them up and
bites them in two, and if the trees should sprout it pulls the sprouts
out of the ground and breaks them up and throws them away. As a result,
the nurseries have to be watched all the time by men with guns in their
hands. If the men have no guns the baboons will jump for the nearest tree
and grin from the branches, only to return to their devastating work
as soon as the watchmen go away. If guns are brought out, the animals
realize their danger and run for their lives. These monkeys also dig up
the Indian corn planted by the Kikuyus, and are said to be far worse than
crows and blackbirds combined.
At one of the stations between Naivasha and the Escarpment I saw a
half-dozen Nandi, including two women. The men were almost naked, save
that they wore cloaks of monkey skins with the fur on and strips of
cowskin about the waist. The women had on waist cloths and blankets of
cowhides tanned with the hair on. These blankets were fastened over one
shoulder, leaving the arms and half of the breasts bare. The Nandi were
walking along the railroad track, and were closely watched by the station
agents, for they are great thieves, and the British have had trouble with
them because they steal the bolts and rivets which hold the rails to the
ties, and even climb the telegraph poles after the wire. The native men
are crazy for iron. They can use the bolts and rivets for slingshots
to brain their enemies. All the iron they have had in the past has
come from digging up the ore and smelting it, so you can imagine how
delightful it is to a Nandi warrior to pick up a fine, death-dealing iron
bolt all ready for his sling. The Nandi live northwest of Naivasha, on a
plateau which contains iron deposits, and they make a business of mining
and smelting. Since the railroad has been built, they have come down from
time to time and raided the tracks, and the British have had several
little fights with them to drive them off.
These Nandi are among the bravest of the African natives. They are
much like the Masai, delighting in warfare, and ready to fight at the
least provocation. They are more civilized than the Kikuyus, and do
considerable work in iron and leather. They have cattle, sheep, and
goats, while a few do some farming. Like the Masai, they bleed their
cattle and drink the blood hot, sometimes mixing it with their porridge.
After bleeding, they close the wounds so that the cattle grow well again.
They are good hunters and have large dogs with which they run down the
game, so that it can be killed with spears. They also trap game by
digging wedge-shaped pits and covering them over with grass. They have
donkeys to carry the iron ore from the mines to their furnaces, where
they turn it into pig metal.
I understand that the Nandi live about the same as the other natives
about here. They have circular huts of boards roofed with thatch. Each
hut has a fireplace in the centre on each side of which is a little bed
consisting of a platform of mud built along the wall of the hut. The
people sleep on the mud, using round blocks of wood for pillows. The
children sleep with their parents until they are six years of age, when
they are shoved off into a smaller hut outside built especially for
them. The Nandi believe in witches and medicine men, and have a sky god
to whom they pray every morning and to whom they sacrifice when times are
hard.
Nearly all of these Africans believe in witch doctors. The Wakamba, whose
country I passed through on my way to Nairobi, not infrequently kill the
women of their tribe when they are charged with witchcraft, and there is
a record of something like forty having been murdered this way within the
last few years.
I saw these Wakamba on the Athi plains and in and about Nairobi. They are
tall and fine looking, with woolly hair, rather thick lips, and almost
straight noses.