Tefuga Page 9

  “I haven’t finished yet. I’ve got to tell you why it was so important to me to meet you. I was the first grandchild, you see. Everyone was terribly disappointed I wasn’t a boy. I mean Mummy and Daddy, though they wore suits and cocktail dresses and talked English at home, they minded dreadfully. It was only my funny old peasant Granny who didn’t.”

  “Kitawa women appear to have considerable status.”

  “That’s right. So Granny sort of adopted me. Mummy’s very social. She didn’t mind. But from the very first Granny said, ‘I want this girl to be like the white woman who came and made pictures in the house of Kama Boi.’ She told my father to stop being a dentist and get rich. Mummy backed her up about that, of course. Just after I was born Uncle Elongo managed to get himself made Sarkin Kiti, and that was a help. And Mummy started to tolerate Granny a bit. I mean, after all, she wasn’t a stupid old peasant woman any longer, she was the sister of a big man up north. Mummy’s south—you couldn’t be souther—but that doesn’t stop her liking to tell her friends about the kids spending their hols in the palace at Kiti. We’d much rather have been in Switzerland, of course. So it all worked out wonderfully for me, just the way Granny planned. I went to school in England, and everything else happened. You see, Mr Jackland? Your mother is terribly important to me. I am what I am because of her. Meeting you is almost like meeting a brother I have never seen.”

  After a few initial hesitations Miss Boyaba had been speaking with some vehemence, using a lot of body language, tilting her head on her long neck and gesticulating with sinuous pale fingers. Her speech did not quite match these movements. It was as though English had been dubbed with technical perfection on to an African original. The oddity might have been less apparent if the school chosen for her had not been, even by English standards, out of key with its age—evidently one of those mainly devoted to equipping its pupils to appear on the first page of Country Life. Jackland was clearly amused, both in ways she did and did not intend.

  “I hope you don’t mind my saying that,” she said.

  “Of course not. Is your grandmother still alive?”

  “She died when I was in England. That’s why I’ve forgotten my Kiti. Mummy wouldn’t let Daddy talk it with me. I suppose …”

  She stopped, too late for tact. Jackland did not seem to mind.

  “My mother died somewhat earlier,” he said. “She preferred not to think about Africa in her later life, so I can’t tell you whether she would have been pleased. I am, though.”

  “I’m so glad.”

  “Do you know your uncle well?”

  “Oh, yes! That’s to say … I mean …”

  “Insofar as it’s possible to know an elderly and distinguished relative?”

  “He isn’t easy. Why?”

  “He’s been very friendly and helpful about the film. We wouldn’t have got it off the ground without him. On the other hand he has consistently managed to avoid telling me anything serious about the time when he worked for my parents. There’s one thing in particular I want to know.”

  “I’ll ask him, if you like. I’m a bit of a favourite.”

  “No, that won’t do. I wondered whether you’d ever heard him talking about those days.”

  “I don’t think so. He talks about growing up in the bush sometimes, and the old Kiti legends. Perhaps he doesn’t like thinking about when he was a servant. He can be very proud. Have you got the diary here?”

  “I’ll show it you when you come out to our camp to talk to Mary.”

  “Do you think she’ll really see me?”

  “I’ll put in a word for you.”

  “My boss wants me to ask about her love life.”

  “I can’t advise you on that.”

  “You don’t think I ought to? As a journalist, I mean?”

  “I have asked more impertinent questions in my time. Mary is a totally serious artist who defends that area by behaving as a totally frivolous person. If you want truly startling revelations for your listeners, ask her for her opinions on Africa … It sounds as if my riot has calmed down. What do you want to do? The chaps who are supposed to be patching the Old Palace up for us are nothing like ready. Builders are the same all over the world. I’ve got to go and negotiate with them about becoming extras, so that we can film tomorrow while they’re still working. The son speaks good English but I’m never sure how much the old boy in charge gets told. You wouldn’t care to come and interpret for me?”

  “I absolutely must pay my respects to Uncle Elongo first. That’s terribly important. After that.”

  “Right. I’ll drive down and see if I can get over the idea of clearing the modern gear out of sight. You go and find the Sarkin and then come down there and see how I’ve got on. Then I’ll take you out to the camp. This afternoon some of us are driving out to Tefuga.”

  “Oh! Can I come too? I haven’t been for yonks. There’s nothing to see, of course, but it’s still sort of special.”

  “If there’s room. The trucks have been playing up, so I don’t know how many will be going. My mother went there, of course. Twice.”

  Six

  Sun March 9

  Nothing in here for eight weeks—I just haven’t felt like it. Partly it was being too tired of writing ’cos of having to do all Ted’s reports and things for him, but underneath that I really didn’t want to. It was all my fault, boasting in here about how clever Ted and me were getting. Stupid, but I’ve honestly been feeling just like that. You see, two nights after I wrote that last bit we were doing it and it was lovely and we forgot about the beastly guinea worm and broke it. Poor Ted. He’s had an absolutely terrible time.

  First his arm swelled up like a balloon, end to end, and hurt like blazes, and then it burst into horrible sores. For a whole week he was in agony, living on whisky and aspirin, which meant he couldn’t make much sense of his work, poor angel, tho’ I did my best to sort the muddles out. Of course he wouldn’t have a doctor. The sores grew and grew. They smelt of cream cheese gone sour and when I washed them out bits just flaked off like pieces of old mushroom. Ghastly. I tweezed out anything I could see which might be worm and bathed it several times a day with weak carbolic and slowly, slowly it got better. The last bit of worm I got out was five inches long. Dead. (Ted swears that was the whisky. I think it was the carbolic.) It still took three weeks to heal after that.

  It’s an ill wind, as usual. Not just feeling closer to Ted and being needed, like I said last time. Helping with his work means I understand so much more. Mr Yo, the clerk, is perfectly useless, ever so smiling and willing but Ted can’t trust him to get the simplest thing right. Ted puts up with him ’cos he wears a robe and a little skull-cap, not shirt and trousers, like practically all the clerks do now, and anyway Ted says one of them would probably be just as hopeless. So it means Ted has to do practically all the paper-work himself. I’d no idea! All those words and figures going to and fro. Tiny little troubles up and down the province. Such stupid suggestions from Kaduna, such patient answers from Ted. Such tricky, trappy memos from Mr de Lancey at Birnin Soko. I’ve begun to hate that man, even tho’ his whole object is to get rid of KB, which I think would be an excellent idea! The old devil is only just hanging on, ’cos of Ted sticking by him and Kaduna not wanting to make up its mind. Ted’s only got one trump card which is that KB’s son who’d succeed to the emirship—it doesn’t have to be a son, but this time he’s the obvious man—he’d be just as hopeless as KB. His name’s Zarafio. He’s going on tour with us, so I’ll get a chance to see. We had to postpone the tour ’cos of Ted’s arm. Come to that in a mo.

  Another useful thing is I’ve really been able to get on with my Kiti lessons. So’s E. with his English—and he’s been marvellous about not showing off in front of Ted—honestly you wouldn’t know he understood a word we were saying. I hope I’ll be able to practise with real Kitawa when we’re on tour. I’m
good enough now for the lessons to be quite fun. We tell each other fairy-tales. I do Rumpelstiltskin and Goldilocks and he does Thunder-snake and The First People. That’s a funny one! The Kitawa are the only real people. There were nine of them to start with, and every Bakiti still has a bit of one of those nine in him. Or her. That’s what they are talking about when they wish each other a strong spirit. Anyway, when some of the animal-spirits saw how clever the new people were they were jealous, so they turned themselves into pretend people. Different animals turned themselves into different tribes. So the Hausa are really only horses and the Fulani are cattle and the Yoruba are foxes and so on. I asked about white people. E. didn’t want to tell me but I made him. We are really termites! I think that’s rather clever, specially when you remember they’ve never seen London, but Ted says it’s only because some termites are white too. Spoilsport!

  Talking of ill winds, the harmattan seems to be over. In fact it wasn’t that bad, and days when there was only just a bit of it made you feel pretty well. Now the weather’s starting to get really hot and we’re off on tour in the worst of it. If we put it off till the hot weather’s over it means the rains will have started, and that means tsetse, and that means we can’t take the horses. So there’s a terrific rush on and I oughtn’t to be writing this at all. I’m supposed to be spending all my sitting-down time mugging up my First Aid and Handbook of Tropical Medicine so I can be some use to everyone. Only I was sorting through my boxes deciding what I’d need when I found my diary and suddenly I felt the itch to start again. I’ve been punished enough for my boasting.

  Ted still hasn’t told Mr de Lancey I’m going, and now I’ve seen so much of the Govt papers I think I can see this isn’t really anything to do with Mr de Lancey, who wouldn’t give a hoot (except for wanting to put a spoke in Ted’s wheel, ’cos of Ted being his enemy.) Mr de Lancey’s v. contemptuous about what natives feel, it’s Ted who minds, and KB’s son who’s coming with us, Zarafio, is a bit of a stickler about being a strict Mohammedan, so he might try and make a fuss. But Ted could easily say Pooh to him and that would be that. What I think is deep inside him Ted really wants to keep me as separate as he can, not part of anything else at all, like KB’s wives in his harem. He wants to have me on tour with him (and I’m longing to go) but—oh, this is difficult, trying to explain what somebody else thinks when they don’t even know they’re thinking­ it!—suppose this was all part of a silly Shakespeare play where girls dress up as boys, he’d love that. Then I’d be his own special secret all day, and at night … The nights are important to me too, very, but I don’t think about them all day long. Ted does, I’m fairly sure—suppose ’cos he began so late. Oh, I’d like to scribble and scribble about this—terribly­ interesting—but there isn’t time. Must get on, shutting the house up. Dear Elongo’s staying to keep an eye on it. I wish he could come too.

  Mon March 10

  Time now, masses of it. I’m lying on my tum in our little tent with the flaps up and a mosquito net over me. Just getting dark. Proper stars, not fogged like down by the river. Millions of insects fizzing away in the bush all round. The bearers’ firelight away by the village—one of them playing a waily clay flute-thing. Night-smells from the bush, so all the same with its flat-topped trees and spiky tussocks and dust-patches. That’s what you see by daylight, of course—now you just feel it, huge dark Africa spreading away out there, full of nightmares if I wanted to let them come. If I reach over the edge of my palliasse I can touch the whole continent with my fingertips. But in here, under the Army and Navy lamp and the Army and Navy canvas, this is Europe! There’s a rest house we were supposed to sleep in and some of the boys had been ahead to clean it out, but it still stank of bats and the boys had killed a rat the size of a dachshund so I’m sure there were others and I absolutely put my foot down. Snakes! (I didn’t see any, but it’s obvious.) All that’s Africa. Europe for me, when it comes to that sort of thing!

  Ted’s down at the village, trying to smooth things over with Zarafio, who seems absolutely determined to make things as difficult as possible. Z. is a nasty twisty little specimen, I think. If he’s the best we can do by way of a successor to KB, heaven help us! And heaven help the Kitawa!! He’s not a proper Hausa, any more than KB, but he’s got it into his head that if he behaves like one, all stiff and grand and never showing his feelings, people are going to respect him. Ted admits he’s going to be just as bad as KB, only differently bad, but we’ve got to put up with him ’cos he’s the one the other Hausa want.

  Well, off we set this morning at 3 a.m. Ted, me, Kimjiri, Lukar, Mafote and Ibrahim to look after the horses, twenty boys and bearers. Some of them will come the whole way with us, others only for the first day, and we’ll pick up fresh ones as we go along. They get paid (not much) but they have to come whether they like it or not.

  Quite dark when we set off, and rather glorious, ’cos the boys had got a lot of twisted grass torches ready to light the way. So we rode along like that, the orangey light, and shadows jumping among the trees, the glisten off black shoulders, the last stars. Then the belt of thorn scrub creepy and mysterious, and out into the real bush. Plenty of dry grass here, so the boys tore it up by armfuls to make fresh torches till the sky went pale. Soon as it was light enough we kicked our heels in and took the horses cracking along, whooping like children having donkey-rides on the beach.

  Funny about the bush. You feel you’re right out in the open but actually you can’t ever see all that far ’cos there’s always a clump of flat-topped trees in the way, so soon as we were well ahead of the boys we left the track and found a way up a little hill—a bit of a wrestle, specially with Tan-Tan, but worth it ’cos of the view from the top, absolute miles, all the same. Clump after clump of trees mottling away. Most of them haven’t any leaves in the dry season, and everything’s yellow and brown and fawn and grey, specially dark grey, almost black, where the grass fires have been. (Almost all the grass gets burnt in the end, and ’cos of that the trees have corky, twisty trunks. The villagers start the fires ’cos they’re tired of the grass, or it’s honey hunters, or just an accident.) There were a few fires still burning, smoke drifting away across the sunrise. Everything else clean and new in the sideways light. Immense space and sky. Up on our hill—only a pimple really—I could feel how simply huge Africa is.

  And all so empty! No one there! Us the first people ever! I know that’s nonsense—bits of it are just as crowded as England and the people have been there for centuries, but it’s how it feels. I could see what the explorers saw—all that, and not belonging to anyone, so finders keepers! I didn’t have time, but one day I’ll try and get that feeling into a picture. We waited to watch the bearers come by (my tin bath is the first thing you see!) and then down and on to Ofafe where we were going to meet Zarafio’s lot.

  Typically African, he was two hours late. The whole idea of starting so early was to get the business at Ofafe done and move on before it got too hot, so we could all have a bit of a rest at the next village. I didn’t see any point in waiting for Z. I thought Ted might have got on with the assessment and so on at Ofafe, but Ted says no. There’s an official rule that D.O.s don’t conduct business with natives except through a representative of the Native Authority (that’s KB in our case). The idea is that the N.A. is really in charge and the White Man is only advising­—rubbish­, of course, and a lot of D.O.s don’t pay a blind bit of notice—but Ted says rules are rules and how are we ever going to teach the native to take responsibility if we keep going behind his back, so all we could do was wait. Our boys had brought a sort of folding roof which they put up to give us a bit of shade, but after a bit I thought I’d have a wander round Ofafe and see if I could find someone to practise my Kiti on. I took my medicine kit so as I could have an excuse.

  Ofafe’s quite a big village by Kiti standards, Ted says, but it’s still only about thirty huts, round, thatched like ours but much smaller and with the main pole over to
one side which gives the roof a tipsy look—and very ragged at the edges. The women do the thatching. Ted says they can build a hut in a day! All terribly poor-looking. Not a lot of people about. Dry season, so nothing much in the “gardens” which have sort of woven mat fences round them to keep wild animals out. Some of them are quite a bit away from the huts ’cos there’s only certain pockets where the soil’s good to grow crops on. Seeing it all so dry and barren it’s hard to see how even that few people stay alive. I went down to the water-hole, about two hundred yards from the village, where they’ve dug a hollow in a dry stream-bed and patiently scoop the water out with a bit of broken calabash, a saucer at a time. It took a woman ten minutes to fill her calabash. I sat on the bank beside one who’d finished and was waiting for her friend and wished her a strong spirit. She wished me back, a bit dubiously.

  I felt terribly excited. I longed to reach out and touch her glossy brown skin—she wasn’t wearing any clothes, of course, just a grass belt and a pretty grass collar woven to a pattern, like lace. She was so real, the first really real African I’ve met. Even dear Elongo isn’t quite the same, wearing a housecoat and not being in his own proper place and so on. It was a bit sticky, at first—she didn’t seem to want to talk to me, but then a horrid biting fly came and jabbed me and I slapped it dead and laughed and so did she and that was better. When her friend had filled her calabash I walked back with them and their three small children to the village. On the way I asked if there was anyone with cuts or sores I could help, and one of them went off and got an old woman who came hobbling along ’cos of a sort of boil on her ankle. I was terribly afraid it might be a guinea worm, but I don’t think so. I lanced it (I am getting brave!) and squeezed the pus out and put some boracic ointment on and a sticking plaster. The old woman was rather jolly about it all and some others came to watch, and I felt I was just getting somewhere when there was a noise from the other side of the village, one of the squeaky Hausa trumpets, and they all shut up like clams. They really didn’t want to talk to me at all. I know when I’m not wanted (Daddy taught me that, at least!) so I shut my box up and kept smiling and slipped away.