Authors: Isak Dinesen
An old lady sat in a party and talked of her life. She declared that she would like to live it all over again, and held this fact to prove that she had lived wisely. I thought: Yes, her life has been the sort of life that should really be taken twice before you can say that you have had it. An arietta you can take
da capo
, but not a whole piece of music,—not a symphony and not a five-act tragedy either. If it is taken over again it is because it has not gone as it ought to have gone.
My life, I will not let you go except you bless me, but then I will let you go.
One year we had an eclipse of the moon. A short time before it was to take place I had the following letter from the young Indian Stationmaster of Kikuyu station:—
“H
ONOURED
M
ADAM
,—I have been kindly instructed that the light of the sun is going to be put out for seven days running. Leave alone the railway trains, I beg you kindly inform me, as I believe that nobody else will kindly inform me, whether during this period I shall leave my cows to graze in the surroundings, or shall I collect them into the stable?—I have the honour to be, Madam, Your obedient servant. P
ATEL
.”
The Natives, who have a strong sense of rhythm, know nothing of verse, or at least did not know anything before the times of the schools, where they were taught hymns.
One evening out in the maize-field, where we had been harvesting maize, breaking off the cobs and throwing them on to the ox-carts, to amuse myself, I spoke to the field labourers, who were mostly quite young, in Swaheli verse. There was no sense in the verse, it was made for the sake of the rhyme:—“Ngumbe na-penda chumbe, Malaya-mbaya. Wakamba na-kula mamba.” The oxen like salt,—whores are bad,—The Wakamba do eat snakes. It caught the interest of the boys, they formed a ring round me. They were quick to understand that the meaning in poetry is of no consequence, and they did not question the thesis of the verse, but waited eagerly for the rhyme, and laughed at it when it came. I tried to make them themselves find the rhyme and finish the poem when I had begun it, but they could not, or would not, do that, and turned away their heads. As they had become used to the idea of poetry, they begged: “Speak again. Speak like rain.” Why they should feel verse to be like rain I do not know. It must have been, however, an expression of applause, since in Africa rain is always longed for and welcomed.
At the time when the near return of Christ to the earth had become a certainty, a Committee was formed to decide upon the arrangements for His reception. After some discussion, it sent out a circular which prohibited all waving and throwing about of palm-branches as well as all cries of “Hosanna.”
When the Millennium had been going on for some time, and joy was universal, Christ one evening said to Peter that He wanted, when everything was quiet, to go out for a short walk with him alone.
“Where do you want to go, my Lord?” Peter asked.
“I should like,” answered the Lord, “just to take a walk from the Praetorium, along that long road, up to the Hill of Calvary,”
Kitosch’s story has been in the papers. A case rose from it, and a jury was set to go through it from beginning to end, searching for enlightenment; some of the enlightenment will still be found in the old documents.
Kitosch was a young Native in the service of a young white settler of Molo. One Wednesday in June, the settler lent his brown mare to a friend, to ride to the station on. He sent Kitosch there to bring back the mare, and told him not to ride her, but to lead her. But Kitosch jumped on to the mare, and rode her back, and on Saturday the settler, his master, was told of the offence by a man who had seen it. In punishment the settler, on Sunday afternoon, had Kitosch flogged, and afterwards tied up in his store, and here late on Sunday night Kitosch died.
Upon the matter the High Court was set in Nakuru, in the Railway Institute, on the 1st of August.
The Natives who gathered and sat round the Railway Institute, will have been wondering what it was all about. To their mind the case was plain, for Kitosch had died, of that there was no doubt, and, according to Native ideas, a compensation for his death should now be made to his people.
But the idea of justice of Europe varies from that of Africa, and, to the jury of white men, the problem of guilt and innocence at once presented itself. The verdict in the case might be one of murder, of manslaughter, or of grievous hurt. The Judge reminded the jury that the degree of
an offence rests upon the intentions of the persons concerned, and not upon the results. What, then, had been the intentions, and the attitude of mind, of the persons concerned in the Kitosch case?
To decide upon the intention and attitude of mind of the settler, the court had him cross-examined for many hours a day. They were trying to make up a picture of what had happened, and brought in all the details that they could lay hands on. It is in this way written down that when the settler called Kitosch, he came, and stood three yards away. This insignificant detail in the report is of great effect. Here they are at the opening of the drama, the white and the black man, at three yards’ distance.
But from now on, as the story advances, the balance of the picture is broken, and the figure of the settler is blurred and grows smaller. It cannot be helped. It becomes only an accessory figure in a great landscape, a pale puny face, it loses its weight, and looks like a figure cut out in paper, and it is blown about, as by a draught, by the unknown freedom to do what it likes.
The settler stated that he began by asking Kitosch who had given him permission to ride the brown mare, and that he repeated this question forty to fifty times; he admitted at the same time that nobody could possibly have given Kitosch any such permission. Here his perdition begins. In England he would not have been able to ask a question forty to fifty times, he would have been stopped, in one way or the other, long before the fortieth time. Here in Africa were people to whom he could shriek the same question fifty times over. In the end Kitosch answered that he was not a thief, and the settler stated that it was as a result of the insolence of the answer that he had the boy flogged.
At this point the report has got a second irrelevant, and
effective, detail. It says that during the flogging, two Europeans, who are designated as friends of the settler, came over to see him. They looked on for ten minutes, or a quarter of an hour, and walked away.
After the flogging the settler could not let Kitosch go.
Late in the evening, he tied Kitosch with a rein, and locked him into his store. When the jury asked him why he did so, he gave an answer that he had no sense, he said that he wanted to keep such a boy from running about on the farm. After supper, he went back to the store, and found Kitosch lying unconscious a little way from where he had tied him up, with the reins loosened. He called in his Baganda cook, and with his assistance tied up the boy tighter than before, with his hands fastened to a post at his back, and with his right leg tied to a post in front. He left the store, locking the door, but half an hour later went back there, got hold of his cook and the kitchen-Toto, and let them into the store. Then he went to bed, and the next thing he remembered, he said, was that the Toto came from the store, and told him that Kitosch had died.
The jury kept in mind the words that the degree of an offence rests upon the intention, and looked for an intention. They went into a number of detailed questions about the flogging of Kitosch, and about what happened after, and as you read the papers you seem to see them shake their heads.
But what now had been the intention and the attitude of mind of Kitosch? This, when gone into, was found to be a different thing. Kitosch had had an intention, and in the end it came to weigh in the scales of the case. It can be said that by his intention, and his attitude of mind, the African, in his grave, saved the European.
Kitosch had not much opportunity for expressing his intention.
He was locked up in the store, his message, therefore, comes very simply, and in a single gesture. The night-watch states that he cried all night. But it was not so, for at one o’clock he talked with the Toto, who was in the store with him. He indicated to the child that he must shout to him, because the flogging had made him deaf. But at one o’clock he asked the Toto to loosen his feet, and explained that in any case he could not run away. When the Toto had done as he asked him, Kitosch said to him that he wanted to die. At four, the child said, he again said that he wanted to die. A little while after, he rocked himself from side to side, cried: “I am dead!” and died.
Three doctors gave evidence in the case.
The District Surgeon, who had done the post mortem examination, pronounced death to be due to the injuries and wounds that he had found on the body. He did not believe that any immediate medical attention could have saved Kitosch’s life.
The two doctors from Nairobi, called in for the defence, were, however, of a different mind.
The flogging in itself, they held, was not sufficient to have caused death. An important factor came into the matter, not to be ignored: that was the will to die. On this point, the first doctor stated, he could speak with authority, for he had been in the country twenty-five years, and knew the Native mind. Many medical men could support him that the wish to die, in a Native, had actually caused death. In the present case the matter was particularly clear, for Kitosch had himself said that he wanted to die. The second doctor bore him up in this point of view.
It was very likely, the doctor now went on, that if Kitosch had not taken this attitude, he would not have died. If, for instance, he had eaten something, he might not have
lost courage, for starvation is known to reduce courage. He added that the wound on the lip might not be due to a kick, but might be just a bite by the boy himself, in severe pain.
The doctor, furthermore, did not believe that Kitosch would have made up his mind to die till after nine o’clock, as by that time he seemed to have tried to escape. Neither had he died till after nine o’clock. When he had been caught in the attempt to escape, and had been tied up again, the fact of being a prisoner, the doctor said, might have weighed on his mind.
The two doctors from Nairobi summed up their view of the case. The death of Kitosch, they held, was due to the flogging, to starvation, and to the wish to die, the latter being the subject of special emphasis. The wish to die might, they considered, have been caused by the effects of the flogging.
After the doctors’ evidence, the case turned upon what was called in Court “The wish-to-die theory.” The District Surgeon, who was the only one who had seen Kitosch’s body, rejected the theory, and gave examples of cancer patients of his practice who had wished to die, but all the same had not died. These people, however, were found to have been Europeans.
The Jury in the end gave a verdict of: Guilty of grievous hurt. The same verdict was applied to the Natives accused, but it was considered that as they had acted under the orders of their master, a European, it would be an injustice to imprison them. The Judge imposed a sentence of two years R.I. on the settler, and of one day on each of the Natives.
It seems to you, as you read the case through, a strange, a humiliating fact that the Europeans should not, in Africa, have power to throw the African out of existence. The country is his Native land, and whatever you do to him,
when he goes he goes by his own free will, and because he does not want to stay. Who is to take the responsibility for what happens in a house? The man who owns it, who has inherited it.
By this strong sense in him of what is right and decorous, the figure of Kitosch, with his firm will to die, although now removed from us by many years, stands out with a beauty of its own. In it is embodied the fugitiveness of the wild things who are, in the hour of need, conscious of a refuge somewhere in existence; who go when they like; of whom we can never get hold.
Just at the beginning of the long rains, in the last week of March, or the first week of April, I have heard the nightingale in the woods of Africa. Not the full song: a few notes only,—the opening bars of the concerto, a rehearsal, suddenly stopped and again begun. It was as if, in the solitude of the dripping woods, some one was, in a tree, tuning a small ’cello. It was, however, the same melody, and the same abundance and sweetness, as were soon to fill the forests of Europe, from Sicily to Elsinore.
We had the black and white storks in Africa, the birds that build their nests upon the thatched village roofs of Northern Europe. They look less imposing in Africa than they do there, for here they had such tall and ponderous birds as the Marabout and the Secretary Bird to be compared to. The storks have got other habits in Africa than in Europe, where they live as in married couples and are symbols of domestic happiness. Here they are seen together in big flights, as in clubs. They are called locust-birds in Africa, and follow along when the locusts come upon the land,
living high on them. They fly over the plains, too, where there is a grass-fire on, circling just in front of the advancing line of small leaping flames, high up in the scintillating rainbow-coloured air, and the grey smoke, on watch for the mice and snakes that run from the fire. The storks have a gay time in Africa. But their real life is not here, and when the winds of spring bring back thoughts of mating and nesting, their hearts are turned towards the North, they remember old times and places and fly off, two and two, and are shortly after wading in the cold bogs of their birth-places.
Out on the plains, in the beginning of the rains, where the vast stretches of burnt grass begin to show fresh green sprouting, there are many hundred plovers. The plains always have a maritime air, the open horizon recalls the Sea and the long Sea-sands, the wandering wind is the same, the charred grass has a saline smell, and when the grass is long it runs in waves all over the land. When the white carnation flowers on the plains you remember the chopping white-specked waves all round you as you are tacking up the Sund. Out on the plains the plovers likewise take on the appearance of Sea-birds, and behave like Sea-birds on a beach, legging it, on the close grass, as fast as they can for a short time, and then rising before your horse with high shrill shrieks, so that the light sky is all alive with wings and birds’ voices.