Garden life

The first year in Kenya was discoloured by nostalgia. Mom and dad missed their friends, many of whom were now in jail. Songs amplifying the feeling of loss spun on our turntable: Songs of the French Resistance by Yves Montand; Paul Robeson songs; Pete Seager songs; Joan Baez, Miriam Makeba and songs of the South African struggle.

On the cover of the South African album was the picture of an anti-pass demonstration. A great weal of dust rises and a policeman lash out with long knobkerries. A falling women reaches with her hands to regain her balance and fend off the attack.

Mom sometimes held my hand and asked me to sing along with her:

“We shall overcome. We shall overcome. We shall overcome, someday. Oh I do believe that we shall overcome some day.”

And, at 4, listening to her quavering voice I could feel my throat fill so fast with tears I could almost drink them.

My parents looked longingly at pictures of purple mountains with flowery meadows in the foreground: the Karoo, Natal, pictures of Cape town and then they would tell us how wonderful South Africa was. If we enjoyed ripe pineapple, papaya and guava from Nairobi market, then in South Africa there were also grapes, peaches, melons and blood oranges. Through the lense of nostalgia South Africa was green and large.

Mom and dad remained South Africans in exile throughout their odyssey. But slowly they began to gather Kenyan identity too. We three boys grew up as Kenyans.

Dad and mom, would drive off into town early in the morning when the garden was bright with dew. Dad was busy at the Daily Nation. All his young journalistic momentum rolled out energetically from the South African maelstrom into the early period of Kenyan independence and helped make him an important figure in Kenyan Journalism. Mom would have preferred us to be in Tanzania or Zambia where the liberation movement people were gathering and organising to resist and overthrow colonialists and unjust regimes. But instead she found herself in Kenya, where there was a strong white community that in shared many of the faults of the white community in South Africa.

In Langata garden life was our little world. Sometimes, if you got up very early, a buck would come and graze on the lawn. There were the chameleons we found in the lower branches of the frangipani tree. That most beloved of lizards sways, its tiny claws clutch and unclutch, its eyes swivel. Stroke its cool and soft belly with care.

Safari ants bite you first in the webbed skin between your toes. In numbers they moved in a in great seething maroon ribbon. Our servant, Odaouda, would take a large can of kerosene, splash the liquid quickly and generously along the length of the line and set fire to it.

The most frightening insects to me were locusts with their dry rustling armour and busy mandibles. Disturbed, from stillness, they could burst into purposeful whirring movement. I wasn’t afraid of mantises though, ant least not until one dipped its triangular head down, nipped my finger and then flew off having drawn a red bead of blood.

Our day would flow on until Whizzy leaped off. His ears would herar the car long before. He ran up the road and a minutes later we would hear the clattering of a VW Beetle coming down the path through the trees.