A Guide to the Beasts of East Africa Read online

  My friend Kennedy told me that when he was thirteen he had the idea of trying to open a mango seed. After attempting to hack it open with his mother’s bread knife and crack it open with his father’s hammer he was no nearer his goal, but he wasn’t going to be beaten. It was time to bring in the big guns. He placed the slippery seed on a chopping block and picked up the seven-pound sledgehammer. Hell no! Why not use the fourteen-pounder? Not taking his eye off the seed, he swung that hammer high over his shoulder and down on to the target. Bullseye. The mango seed shot out from under the sledgehammer like a rocket, and he told me that he reckoned it might have kept going all the way to the greenhouse if it had not met his right shin. If you have ever had a pain so sudden and intense that you aren’t even able to scream, he told me, you will know exactly how it felt. The agonized roar that started in his solar plexus got as far as his Adam’s apple but just couldn’t find a way out past his clenched teeth. He might, he said, have made a little squeak – a small yip, at most. Tears rose into his eyes. Time seemed to stop. As it turned out, his leg was not permanently damaged. The egg-sized swelling lasted a couple of weeks, the bruise was gone in a month. But that mango seed left an indelible impression on his mind – and I pass his tale on to you for what it’s worth.

  Mr Malik put down his cup. A dog barked. There seemed to be more and more dogs in the neighbourhood these days – for security, people said. Petula had tried to persuade him to get one, but Mr Malik had always maintained that guard dogs were like guns – more dangerous to their owners than to any potential wrongdoer. While there were bars on the windows of his house – which would, no doubt, keep out the average burglar – they had not been put there to keep out men. They were there to keep out monkeys. Nairobi’s few parks, but mainly its suburban streets and gardens, provide food and shelter for hundreds of monkeys which come in two varieties – the common vervet and the Sykes. Both are about the size of a cat, but the vervet is leaner and lighter. If you are still in any doubt, you can recognize the male vervet by its bright-blue scrotum. Both species made occasional visits to Number 12 Garden Lane and, being possessed of the usual simian acquisitiveness, happily reached into any open window to extract whatever they could get their monkey mitts on. Hence the bars, and the necessity of keeping small objects at least the length of a monkey’s arm away from them.

  From a croton tree at Number 12 Garden Lane came a familiar sound. Even now Mr Malik still got a strange feeling in his bowels whenever he heard the loud three-note call of the large brown bird common in many parts of Africa called the hadada. How long had it been since he had gone on his first weekly bird walk of the East African Ornithological Society, led by the lovely Rose Mbikwa? How long since he had danced that dance with her at the Nairobi Hunt Club Ball? Four years. Ah well, thought Mr Malik, getting to his feet, it wasn’t as if he was a good dancer. In his dreams he glided over the dance floor like Fred Astaire; in real life he feared he looked more like a waltzing warthog. It was time to find the binoculars and get on his way. Even if Rose Mbikwa was still away in Scotland, he didn’t want to keep his friends at the bird walk waiting.

  4

  Each aardvark has two exits to its burrow

  Rose Mbikwa’s mother had long ago expressed her wishes. She wanted to die at home in Edinburgh sitting at the bridge table, having just bid and won a grand slam; failing that, she said, a small slam redoubled and vulnerable would do nicely. Though she had been unsuccessful in this ambition, her husband and daughter agreed that dying in her favourite armchair already on to her second gin and tonic of the evening and more than halfway through the Times crossword was almost as fitting a departure. Rose’s father, though crippled by rheumatism these several years, assured Rose he could manage. The day before the funeral she flew from Nairobi to Scotland and unpacked her bags in the very bedroom she had grown up in. From now on she would be looking after her father in the big old Morningside house, and that was that.

  In truth, this was no burden for Rose. The word ‘duty’ never entered her head. She was simply doing what needed doing for a man she loved and respected. She would continue to do so for as long as necessary. When her husband Joshua Mbikwa had first been arrested in Kenya all those years ago by order of the then president, she had not campaigned for his release from a sense of duty. It had simply been the right thing to do. After Joshua’s death in the plane crash four years later, she had not stayed on in Kenya and started up the tourist guide training programme at the museum out of a sense of duty. It was her small contribution to the land she had fallen in love with. The programme was now going well. Her son, their only child, was grown up and happy and enjoying his job in Geneva. She was needed more in Edinburgh than Nairobi. The choice had not been difficult.

  Rose was surprised how quickly she had fitted back into Edinburgh life. Though her father could not get out of the old house much, the door was wide and the world could get in. Friends came to call and stayed to gossip. Her father’s sister and her mother’s two brothers provided all the family they needed. The two families had always been close. None of them had moved away from Edinburgh, and their regular Sunday get-together at the old house in Glenlockhart Road was a weekly ritual that Rose looked forward to. She would cook the lunch, as her mother had before her. Her father would choose the wine and whisky. Each week the ritual would be completed when Auntie Jean sat down at the piano after the meal. All the family sang – you would almost have thought they were Welsh.

  All this is not to say that Rose didn’t miss Kenya. Even after four years back in Scotland she sometimes woke up thinking she was in her upstairs bed in Serengeti Gardens. The emptiness of Edinburgh streets disconcerted her still; the streets of Nairobi were always thronged not just with cars and trucks and matatus but with people – people on bicycles, people on foot. She missed the smells of Africa, and the faces and the sound of African voices. The birds? Well, probably best not to think about the birds.

  Mr Malik eased his old green Mercedes into a space in the car park of the Nairobi Museum. Quite a crowd had already assembled – the usual mixture of black, brown and white. They were greeted by Jennifer Halutu, who had been leading the walks ever since Rose Mbikwa’s departure. Though Jennifer Halutu was a kind and competent woman, Mr Malik missed Rose. He wished he could hear again her loud, clear speaking voice bringing everyone’s attention to a chestnut-fronted bee-eater on a telephone wire or a black kite – which is not really black, but brown – soaring over the city.

  Before they decided where they would go that day, Hilary Fotherington-Thomas had something to tell them all.

  ‘I have some bad news and some good news. I regret to say that Dr Neil Macdonald, the father of Rose Mbikwa, died six days ago. Many of you will remember Dr Macdonald from his many visits to Kenya. He was eighty-four years old and died at home in Scotland. He will be missed. The good news is that Rose is coming back to Nairobi very soon. I had an email from her this morning. She is flying in tomorrow.’

  Though Mr Malik immediately felt a small flutter in his heart, it was overruled by a stern admonishment from his brain. It had been four years. Rose Mbikwa would probably not even remember his name, let alone that dance at the Hunt Club Ball.

  After a show of hands it was agreed that, as there were plenty of cars this morning, they would go to the State Agricultural Research Station. A small patch of forest near the entrance to the station, a pond that was used to store water for irrigation, and coffee and tea bushes extending over several acres made for a variety of bird habitats with the chance to see anything from a kingfisher to an eagle. As usual, Mr Malik’s old friend Thomas Nyambe rode in the front passenger seat for the journey, and a gaggle of Young Ornithologists – in this case three male and two female – squeezed into the back. Forty minutes later they arrived at the gates of the agricultural station.

  ‘Follow me,’ said Jennifer Halutu.

  One of the YOs pointed out a pair of augur buzzards circling overhead – one light, one dark.

 
‘Ah yes, buzzards,’ said Mr Nyambe. ‘That reminds me …’

  Mr Malik took out his pen, opened his notebook, and began to write.

  By the time the walk ended at noon Mr Malik had recorded the names of forty-two species of Kenyan birds – one of the YOs’ sharp pairs of eyes had even spotted a rare dwarf bittern standing motionless among some dead rushes on the far side of the pond. He had also noted that the Secretary of State for Development had now dined twice at the Hilton with senior representatives from one of the world’s leading producers of GM maize, that the Minister of Finance had again left the country ‘on private business’ – flying Swiss International – and that despite his assurances that national parks were for people not profit, the Minister of Agriculture and Tourism had given the go-ahead to his wife’s cousin for another private development on the shores of the Kiunga Marine National Reserve.

  The biggest news that Thomas Nyambe had passed on, though, concerned the new Minister for the Interior. After the previous minister had been forced to resign by revelations in the Evening News about unauthorized slum clearing in Nairobi’s Kibera district, the new minister had vowed to relocate people only when new housing was available. He would, he had declared, make this his mission. Not only that, he would ensure complete transparency of the process, with open tenders for government housing contracts and a free and fair ballot system for choosing who would occupy the new houses. But according to what Mr Nyambe had heard from one of his fellow government drivers, not only was the building project stalled (despite all that money from the EU), but the list of those eligible for the houses – should they ever be built – seemed only to include members of the minister’s own constituency.

  ‘Thank you, my friend, for your company and your conversation,’ said Mr Malik, closing his notebook.

  ‘And thank you, my friend,’ said Mr Nyambe. ‘It is good to share things. Sometimes I think that there should be more sharing in the world.’

  Which, by coincidence, is exactly what Petula wanted to talk to her father about at breakfast the very next morning. Mr Malik wasn’t sure he understood all the details, but it seemed that the new Communications Director from Geneva, who she’d met the day before, was keen to set up a local website for Clarity International through which people with interesting inside information – ‘whistle-blowers’, Petula called them – could reveal what they knew to the world. The tricky thing was to make sure that while anyone could post their information, it couldn’t be traced back to them. This was just the kind of thing where Petula, with her passion for all things to do with computers, knew she could be useful. She seemed quite excited.

  5

  The sand of its digging does not blind the porcupine

  ‘Did you hear, A.B.? Tomorrow’s talk has been cancelled.’

  ‘The Thursday lecture, you mean?’

  ‘Yes. Damned shame, I was looking forward to it. “Safeguarding Nairobi’s Water Supply in the Twenty-first Century” – should have been interesting.’

  Mr Gopez put down his glass and reached for the bowl of chilli popcorn.

  ‘Me too – always like a good fairy story. Chap drowned, did he?’

  ‘Died of thirst, I heard,’ said Mr Patel. (Nairobi’s water supply, like most of its municipal services, is often a little erratic.) ‘Ah, there you are, Malik. Speaking of drowning, you’re looking a little damp about the noggin. Raining outside, is it?’

  Mr Malik decided to ignore him.

  The picture of ourselves that we carry in our minds is seldom the one we see in the mirror. No matter what our age, no matter what our sex or skin colour, few of us view our image in the looking glass with one hundred per cent personal approval. Too short or too tall; too thin or too fat; our eyes too close together or a little too far apart; our nose too big or too small. Of all our physical features, hair seems to give the least satisfaction. Too straight or too curly; too pale or too dark; too thick or too thin – or there is simply not enough of it. Hence Mr Malik’s hairstyle.

  The classic comb-over is not a matter of sudden whim. A man does not wake up one day, examine his reflection in the mirror and think to himself: ‘Right, no more Mr Baldy – it’s comb-over time.’ He does not decide that from this day forth he will let grow what hairs remain on one side of his head, that he will cherish and nurture them as the vigneron his vines. He does not then begin to coax the hairs with brush or comb, and perhaps a little Brylcreem, to wind their way over his scalp. No man believes that his family and friends, confronted with such a tonsorial transformation, will immediately forget that he was ever bald, that they will think that a miracle has occurred, and the part of his scalp that was once bare has blossomed with hair as the desert blossoms after rain.

  No, such things happen slowly, over many years. A man notices a little thinning of the hair. It is the matter of a moment to conceal this by altering the flow of the rest of his hair. As the thinning increases, the time and care taken to disguise it increases. All too soon the man finds himself on the horns of a dilemma. Should he continue with an artifice which is looking more and more unnatural by the month, or should he dispense with it – in effect, go bald overnight? Mr Malik had long ago decided to take the former path. No matter how long it took him each morning or how often the abominably hairy Patel teased him, as long as a single hair grew on his head, that hair would be plastered up and over his scalp in glorious defiance of the effects of age, gravity and male hormones.

  ‘Did you hear?’ said Mr Gopez. ‘Looks like there’s going to be a water shortage tomorrow.’

  ‘Really?’ said Mr Malik. ‘I thought that new dam on the Thika River was supposed to stop all that.’

  ‘What he means is that the lecture’s been cancelled,’ said Mr Patel, ‘the one about our water supply.’

  ‘Speaking of that new dam on the Thika River,’ said Mr Gopez, ‘have you chaps read the paper? You don’t just need the water, you need the pipes. The old ones all leak, apparently, and according to what I’ve just been reading in the Evening News that aid money from Norway for new ones seems to have leaked too.’

  ‘It’s still there, you know,’ said Mr Patel.

  ‘I wish I could share your optimism. It’ll have been channelled into some secret bank account in Liechtenstein by now, mark my words.’

  ‘Not the money, the gun – the one he shot Erroll with. It’s still there, in the Thika River, where he threw it on the way to Nyeri.’

  ‘Oh my God, Patel, you’re not still going on about your damned Delves Broughton?’

  ‘Look, A.B., he told that girl all about it. What’s-her-name – Carberry’s daughter. He told her the very next day. It’s all in the book that English journalist wrote, and in the one she wrote too. He admitted that he’d shot Erroll. Not only that, he told her what he’d done with the murder weapon. On the way up to Nyeri he’d stopped at Thika and chucked the gun over the bridge into the falls. You must have read it – White Handkerchief, or whatever it was called.’ He turned to Mr Malik. ‘You’ve read it, haven’t you, Malik?’

  ‘I think you may mean White Mischief.’ Mr Malik nodded. ‘Yes, I’ve read it.’

  ‘Well, what about the other book?’ said Mr Gopez.

  ‘Not that Secret Service assassination thing,’ said Mr Patel. ‘I thought we’d agreed to ditch the conspiracy theory.’

  ‘No, no. I’m talking about the book by that other woman.’

  ‘You wouldn’t by any chance be referring to Diana Lady Delamere and the Lord Erroll Murder, would you?’ asked Mr Malik. ‘By Mrs Leda Farrant?’

  ‘That’s the one. Correct me if I’m wrong, but she says that in the 1960s some local journalist chappy came up with some new evidence and got a story published in the Sunday Nation putting the finger squarely on Diana. The paper got cold feet, thinking she’d sue. They pulled the story – but not before the first edition had gone out. Much to their surprise, nothing happened. No writ, nothing. A few days later this chap’s boss was playing cards at the Muthaiga Club, and
who should be on the same table as him? Diana. He thought he should say something – apologize, you know. She waved his explanation aside. “Oh, everyone knows I did it,” she said.’

  ‘Yes, A.B.?’

  ‘Well, there you are, that’s what I’m saying. She admitted it.’

  Mr Patel shook his head in disbelief.

  ‘That is hardly what I would call an unambiguous admission of guilt. Even if she did say it, does it not occur to you that her words might have been intended as ironic?’

  ‘And if I might put in a word here,’ said Mr Malik who, being no less fascinated by the case than anyone else in Kenya, had indeed read all the books about the Erroll case he could get his hands on over the years (and dozens of newspaper articles besides), ‘it seems that once again we are faced with the problem of hearsay evidence. The woman who wrote this book – and, as far as I remember, she paints a far from flattering picture of Diana – bases her conclusions on a conversation at which she was not herself present.’

  ‘Exactly my point, Malik,’ said Mr Gopez with a triumphant smile.

  ‘What point?’ said Mr Patel. ‘A moment ago you were saying that Diana did it.’

  ‘The point I was trying to make, Patel, is that Malik is right. Hearsay evidence is like one of those verbal agreements in Hollywood you read about – not worth the paper it’s written on. Same with your Delves Broughton.’

  At this point, some of you may be feeling just a little confused by all these references to this and that theory by this and that writer. So, while our friends at the Asadi Club order another round of Tusker beers and make further inroads into the bowl of chilli popcorn on the table in front of them, let me summarize.

  White Mischief – later made into a film of the same name – was published in 1982 by the English journalist James Fox. The book reads like a true-life detective story and was based on the transcript of the 1941 Broughton murder trial and interviews which Fox and his colleague, the English writer Cyril Connolly, conducted from 1969 onwards with as many as possible of the key players then still alive. His story goes like this.