Travel

Misty Mountains of East Africa

Kilimanjaro rising behind the Chyulu Hills, Ukambani, Kenya. Photo taken from the Mombasa Highway during the December short rains.

Mount Kenya from the plane window, looking over the European-owned wheat farms of Laikipia

It is one of history’s bizarre anecdotes, that one of these two old volcanoes was once given away as a birthday present. But before I reveal how this happened, please take a look at the map. Head for the centre.

Here you will see that Tanzania’s Kilimanjaro and Kenya’s Mount Kenya lie pretty much on the same north-south axis, albeit a couple of hundred miles apart. In an earlier post about Denys Finch Hatton’s burial place in the Ngong Hills (to the left of Nairobi on the map) I quoted Karen Blixen’s description of how one sunset, she and Denys had witnessed a simultaneous sighting of Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya. This must have been something to see, for these mountains can be frustratingly elusive when it comes to showing themselves. One moment you can be looking them full in the face; the next they have dissolved into a clear blue sky as if they were never there. You blink and wonder how this could have possibly happen. It is doubtless a quantum physics thing, but in the absence of more scientific explanations, the phenomenon anyway seems quite mystical. It is not surprising, then, that local people have long regarded these mountains as sacred places that may, from time to time, be visited by the Creator.

But to return to the mountainous birthday gift.

If you look again at the map you will see how the border between Kenya and Tanzania makes a sudden kink to encompass Kilimanjaro. This daft piece of map-making is testimony of a tussle in colonial expansionism (Britain versus Germany) and the kind of queenly megalomania that thought it perfectly reasonable to take possession of someone else’s mountain and then make a gift of it to a fellow monarch, a personage whom she rather despised even though he was a close relative.

I’m sure you will have guessed by now that we are talking of Queen Victoria and Kaiser Wilhelm. One can only presume that someone who also called herself the Empress of India would think nothing of the sharing out of stolen mountains. I dare say she thought it made up for the fact that she had bagged the territories now known as Kenya and Uganda when Wilhelm had wanted them too. Perhaps she also thought that giving Wilhelm the taller of the two would also help to placate him. If she had stopped to consider the fact that Kilimanjaro was only a dormant volcano, she might have had second thoughts. It was altogether too ominous a gift.

In the end the whole land-grabbing deal was ratified in the Heligoland Treaty of 1890, and the map-makers then duly drew a line straight through the middle of Maasai territory coupled with the requisite detour round Kilimanjaro. They called one side British East Africa, and the other German East Africa. Meanwhile the locals, who comprised very many different ethnic communities, were largely unaware how far they had been scrambled, or indeed scrobbled, to borrow a term of dastardly rapine from John Masefield and The Box of Delights. They were soon to find out. On the British side it began with the setting up of forts along the proposed line of rail for the Uganda Railway. This 600-mile line from Mombasa to Lake Victoria would be the means by which the Empress of India would get her troops (mainly Indian ones) swiftly to the source of the Nile. Why she would ever need to do this will have to wait for another post. Suffice it to say that this project was substantially dafter than the giving of mountains as birthday presents. Even at the time people thought so. In Britain they called it the Lunatic Line. In East Africa the invaded called it the Iron Snake.

Glimpse of Kilimanjaro on the flight from Zanzibar to Mombasa

Street-wise on Mombasa Beach

Mombasa Beach is as busy as any street, and like any downtown district anything can be traded there. In the margin between ocean and hinterland, people feel they can live outside accepted moral and cultural bounds. Kikuyu boys may dress up as Maasai to cash in the ‘warrior’ cachet that is so attractive to European women; white women of a certain age think it OK to flaunt themselves on the sands with lovely young Kenyan boys whose real hope is to be adopted or sponsored through school; dope can be bought along with the kanga wraps and hand-carved giraffes. All, then, may not be quite what it seems in this Indian Ocean ‘paradise’.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Street Life

Reflections on Wolverhampton

Sometimes we rural Much Wenlock souls get to visit the city, our nearest one being Wolverhampton. A couple of Sundays ago we were lucky enough to have tickets to see the Tord Gustavsen Quartet at Wolverhampton University’s Arena Theatre (Jazz at the Arena). It was the final night of their British tour, and what a night it was – utterly captivating musicianship. You can see Peter Bacon’s review at The Jazz Breakfast.

En route to the concert, and to prepare myself for some Nordic introspection and reflection, I thought I’d dabble in a little West Midlands Noir. I used my Canon Powershot A430, bought on Ebay for twenty quid, and then fiddled about on Windows Live Photo Gallery. The shots were taken near the theatre and include St Peter’s Church and other University of Wolverhampton buildings. While I was in the Arena bar I also happened to notice that it had a reflective ceiling.

Weekly Photo Challenge: reflections

TORD GUSTAVSEN QUARTET: THE WELL

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3A6ziUPbdk

In the pink in Maine and Massachusetts

Sometimes it feels really good not to have to write anything!

Ailsa’s travel theme: pink Go here and below for more pink posts:

Travel Monkey

Foto Challenge

Figments of a DuTchess

So where’s the snow?

being mrscarmichael

Inside looking out on Lamu Island

WordPress Photo Challenge: Inside

A Word A Week Challenge: Sleep (Lamu Dreaming)

Caught inside a Kikuyu garden: a memorial to Karen Blixen’s lover, Denys Finch Hatton

This was not supposed to happen. In fact you could say it adds insult to irony: that a man so steadfastly dedicated to an unfettered life in the wilds should, in death, end up hemmed in, and so very domesticated within this small Kikuyu shamba. Yet here it is, the mournful stone obelisk, marking the grave of Denys Finch Hatton, son and heir of the 13th Earl of Winchilsea, Great White Hunter, and lover of two women far more famous than he is: writer Karen Blixen (Out of Africa) and aviator and race horse trainer Beryl Markham (West with the Night).

Yet another woman, the one whose shamba this is, shows him a new kind of love, taking care of the garden around the obelisk. If you want to visit the place it is not easy to find – either her little smallholding on the Ngong Hills, or the grave within. When we visited years ago we found only a hand-painted signpost nailed to a tree. We parked in a paddock outside the farmhouse door and were charged a few shillings. We could have bought a soda too, if we’d wanted. We could not see the grave though, and soon found that it was deliberately hidden from view by an enclosure of old wooden doors. More irony here of course. More symbols of shut-in-ness.

Denys spent most of his life in Africa avoiding any kind of confinement – out in the Tsavo wilderness, running shooting safaris for the rich and aristocratic. His clients included the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) . In fact it was during the safaris for the Prince in 1928 and 1930 that Finch Hatton began to promote shooting on film rather than with a gun.

His lover, Karen (Tanne), Baroness von Finecke-Blixen lived in a small house below the Ngong Hills, some twelve miles outside Nairobi. By the time she started her affair with Denys she was divorced from her charming, but philandering husband, Bror, although they always remained friends. Her family had invested a great deal in the couple’s coffee farm, and Karen struggled to make a success of it. But the location was entirely wrong, and in the end she was forced to sell up and leave Kenya. It was during the period of selling the farm that she heard news of Denys’s death.

Looking towards the Ngong Hills from inside the veranda at Karen Blixen’s house. The house now belongs to Kenya’s National Museums.

Denys Finch Hatton’s untimely end may be put down to his passion for flying. For those of you who remember Sydney Pollack’s 1985 film Out of Africa, some of the most elegiac moments of the film are when the celluloid version of Finch Hatton (Robert Redford) takes Karen Blixen (Meryl Streep) into the skies above the Rift Valley. Denys died in his Gypsy Moth in 1931, and in unexplained circumstances. He was taking off from the airstrip down in Voi in southern Kenya when his craft exploded. He and his Kikuyu co-pilot were killed. Denys was forty four.

View towards Nairobi from Denys Finch Hatton’s Grave, and overlooking another Kikuyu smallholding.

By the time of his death, his relationship with Karen was well on the wane, and he had already started an affair with the younger Beryl Markham. His biographer, Sara Wheeler says in Too Close to the Sun, that there is circumstantial evidence to suggest that Beryl was pregnant with Denys’s child, but that she then had an abortion. To have known this would have truly broken Karen Blixen’s heart: her letters show that she had longed to have a child with Denys.

With yet another twist of irony, it was with his death, that Karen somehow reclaimed him, remembering that he had told her of his wish to be buried in the Ngong Hills. The spot he had chosen was one that Karen had decided on for her own grave.

Denys Finch Hatton

Karen Blixen with her deerhound Dusk

There was a place in the hills, on the first ridge of the Game Reserve, that I…had pointed out to Denys as my future burial-place. In the evening, while we sat and looked at the hills from my house, he remarked that then he would like to be buried there himself as well. Since then, sometimes when we drove out in the hills, Denys had said: ‘Let us drive as far as our graves.’ Once when we were camped in the hills to look for buffalo, we had in the afternoon walked over to the slope to have a closer look. There was an infinitely great view from there; the light of the sunset we saw both Mount Kenya and Kilimanjaro. Denys had been eating an orange, lying in the grass, and had said that he would like to stay there.

Out of Africa

The obelisk was only put up later by Denys’s brother. During Karen’s last days in Kenya she had the site marked with white stones from her own garden, and as the grass grew up after the long rains, she and Farah, her Somali house steward, erected a pennant of white calico so she could see the spot from her house, some five miles away.

Sometime after she had returned to Denmark she received a letter with some strange news about the grave:

The Masai have reported to the District Commissioner at Ngong, that many times, at sunrise and sunset, they have seen lions on Finch Hatton’s grave in the the Hills. A lion and lioness have come there, and stood, or lain, on the grave for a long time…After you went away, the ground round the grave was levelled out, into a sort of big terrace. I suppose that the level place makes a good site for the lions, from there thy can have a view over the plain, the cattle and game on it.

Out of Africa

Tish Farrell is an award winning writer for young people. Her latest novella is on Amazon Kindle (5 star review):

Secrets, conspiracies, tragedy, dark comedy – a fast-paced novella of interwoven tales set somewhere in East Africa. For young adults and adults alike.

Just one more push…

On the Niger River, Mali

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Every Day Another Story

Abandoned: Great Zimbabwe

Inside the Great Enclosure of Great Zimbabwe. These magnificent walls have survived for nearly seven centuries, and not a lick of mortar to keep them standing.

No one knows exactly why this great African city was abandoned. For some 350 years, until around 1450 AD, Great Zimbabwe had been a flourishing merchant centre that drew in from the surrounding country supplies of gold, copper, ivory, animal skins and cotton. The city’s entrepreneurs then traded these goods on to the Swahili city states of Sofala and Kilwa on the East African coast. (You can read more about the Swahili HERE). In return, the traders brought back luxury goods – jewellery, decorative pieces such as 13th and 14th century Chinese celadon dishes and Persian ceramics.

The city’s ruins cover 80 hectares, its many stone enclosures commanding the southern slopes of Zimbabwe’s High Plateau watershed between the Zambezi and Limpopo Rivers. The site is well watered with good grazing throughout the year. It is above the zone of the deadly tsetse fly that can infect both cattle and humans with sleeping sickness; and the plateau’s granite scarps provide plentiful building stone and other raw materials. Even so, these favourable circumstances do not explain why this particular settlement rose to such prominence.

For Great Zimbabwe was not a singular phenomenon. Contemporary with it, and across the High Plateau region, are the remains of at least a hundred other mazimbabwe (houses of stone). Several were large enough to have been the capitals of rival states. Others may have been satellite communities occupied by members of Great Zimbabwe’s ruling lineage.

So who were the city’s builders?

During Zimbabwe’s colonial times, and until independence, the Rhodesian government actively supressed evidence that Great Zimbabwe was built by Africans. Many of the other stone ruins were destroyed or re-purposed by European settler farmers. The official view claimed that the city was Phoenician, and that the Queen of Sheba’s fabled kingdom of Ophir had been discovered. Archaeologists, however, have long demonstrated that it was the cattle-owning Karanga Shona who built Great Zimbabwe. The first phase of stone building began around 1100 AD. Thereafter, the city’s rising fortunes and successive building phases suggest its increasing control of the ancient High Plateau trade routes to the Swahili cities of Sofala and Kilwa.

Gold was the key commodity, and it is likely that it was Great Zimbabwe’s successful cattle production that provided it with the trading power to secure gold supplies from mines some 40 kilometres away. The more prosperous the city became, the more sophisticated its demonstrations of prestige. In around 1350 AD the Great Enclosure of finely dressed stone was built. This huge elliptical structure with its mysterious platform and conical tower is thought to be the royal court. There is no indication that the walls were defensive. This was a regime confident in its power and authority.

Peter Garlake’s reconstruction of the Great Enclosure Platform from Life at Great Zimbabwe, Mambo Press 1982

Then why did the city decline?

There are various explanations: the people had let their herds overgraze the land; they had cut down all the trees; there was a prolonged period of drought as may happen in southern Africa. But somehow none of these theories quite explain why, after 350 flourishing years, a community of perhaps 20,000-plus people should simply pack up and leave. Did all these farmers, herders, miners, craftspeople, soldiers, traders, accountants, court personnel and the city’s rulers leave on a single day, or did the city die slowly? The archaeological evidence does not say.

But we do know there were disruptive external forces at work. In the 15th century the Portuguese invaded the Swahili coastal city of Sofala. They were on the hunt for gold and so pressed inland with Swahili guides. Their interfering presence drove the trading routes north, giving rise to the Mutapa state. This new state may well have been founded by people from Great Zimbabwe. Certainly by this time the Swahili traders were coming up the Zambezi to trade with the Shona directly, the old trade route through Great Zimbabwe no longer used. At this time, too, we see the beginning of another Shona city state with the building of the stone city at Khami near Bulawayo in southwest Zimbabwe. In the following centuries this became the centre of the Torwa-Rozvi state whose other major cities during the 16th and 17th centuries included Naletale and Danangombe.

The Great Enclosure entrance at Great Zimbabwe built c.1350 AD

And so into history…

Of course with the Portuguese incursions comes the first documentary evidence. From the early 1500s Zimbabwe’s royal courts enter the historic record in the accounts of the Portuguese conquistadores. In 1506 Diogo de Alcacova writes to his king, describing a city of the Mutapa state

“called Zimbany…which is big and where the king always lives.” His houses are “of stone and clay and very large and on one level.” Within the kingdom there are “many very large towns and many other villages.”

The Portuguese historian Faria y Sousa also describes the King of Mutapa’s great retinue which included the governor of the client kingdoms, the commander-general of the army, the court steward, the magician and the apothecary, the head musician “who had many under him and who was a great lord”. Also noted were the vast territories over which the king ruled, the revenues and subject kingdoms of the king’s several queens.

And suddenly we have a true glimpse of what this land called Zimbabwe might have looked like in the past, a bustling, mercantile, metropolitan culture, supported by gold miners, farmers, cattle herders and craftspeople. And so it remained until well into the 18th century, albeit with a shift of Shona power to the southwest and the Torwa-Ruzvi state as the Portuguese presence caused increasing instability. Then in the 19th century came new invaders – the Nguni, the Ndebele and the British.

This centuries old heritage of royal courts is not a picture that the likes of Cecil Rhodes or, the later Rhodesian government of Ian Smith ever wanted anyone to see. And so in the end this is not so much a story of a city abandoned by its people, but of a people wilfully excluded from their past. In 1980 when Zimbabwe became an independent state, some of this past was reclaimed: the new state took its name from the first great Shona city, and adopted for its flag and coat of arms, an image of one of the city’s ceremonial soapstone birds. These are small steps forward, but there is still a long way to go before the world sees the indigenous histories of the Africa continent in their true perspective, and acknowledges their intrinsic cultural worth.

There is more about Great Zimbabwe in an earlier post HERE.

References: The classic work on the excavations of the city is Peter Garlake’s Great Zimbabwe 1973. For an overview of the mazimbabwe culture see Innocent Pikirayi’s The Zimbabwe Culture AltaMira Press 2001. For a wider historical perspective Randall L. Pouwels The African and Middle Eastern World, 600-1500 Oxford University Press.

Feeling shy, but darned if I’ll show it

I took this photo while we were out on Kenya’s highland farms looking for smut infested napier grass. You can read the full story HERE. This little boy was torn between wanting to know what we were doing on his farm, and not wanting to talk to us. I love the nonchalant drape of his arm on the fence post.

Go here for more bloggers’ compositions in response to the Daily Post photo advice: http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2014/02/27/rule-of-thirds/

Horsemen of the Maghreb: the Berber

They call themselves i-Mazigh-en ‘the noble people’ and they have inhabited western North Africa for at least 12,ooo years. Or as the 8th century Tunisian historian Ibn Khaldun put it:

“The men who belong to this family of peoples have inhabited the Maghreb since the beginning.”

This might be mythically ‘true’ but scientific enquiry has produced other scenarios. For instance DNA tests show that i-Mazigh-en have common traits with the Sami reindeer herders of Scandinavia. They seem to have arrived in North Africa from the Near East back in the Mesolithic era, in other words before the development of agriculture. Over the millennia they have absorbed many different ethnic groups, including Neolithic farmers, Romans and much, much later, the Bedouin Arabs who began to invade the Maghreb from the mid-600s AD and, in the process, largely converted the Berber to Islam.

The name Berber appears first in Roman accounts, and probably derives from the Roman habit of calling non-Latin speakers barbarians. (At least this is the sort of thing my Latin teacher used to tell us). The ancient Berber kingdom of Numidia (202 B.C. – 46 B.C.) once extended along Africa’s western Mediterranean seaboard including territory that is now part of modern day Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. Numidia’s border effectively cut off Roman Carthage from the African hinterland, which may explain why the Romans were set on annexing the kingdom. During the last two centuries BC, Numidia became highly Romanized, at different times serving as either a Roman province or a client state.

Today the are some 9 million Berbers in Morocco, 4 million in Algeria as well as significant populations in neighbouring countries. Most Berbers are farmers. They grow wheat, barley, fruit, olives, nuts on lowland farms and graze their flocks of goats and sheep in mountain pastures during the summer months. They also keep mules, oxen, camels and horses for work and transport. Then there are the nomadic pastoralists. These include the Tuareg of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, who though sometimes seen as a separate people, in fact carry Berber genetic markers that suggest they may be members of the founding Berber population.

These photos, however, were all taken in rural Morocco, somewhere on the road from Marrakech to Fez (Atlas mountains in the distance). Again they come from G’s slides of his overland trip, and they show a traditional Berber performance of the Fantasia, known locally as lab el baroud “the gunpowder play”. On this occasion village people were commemorating the 25 years rule of King Hassan II (1929-1999), but the Fantasia can also mark the conclusion of wedding celebrations, and other seasonal festivals.

The performance harks back to past days of warfare, mimicking the charge formation by Berber and Arab desert riders. It hardly needs me to say that the synchronised charge, followed by the firing into the sky of antique muskets or muzzle-loading rifles, requires great riding skill. The horses also are especially bred and selected for the purpose. Lab el baroud has become the equivalent of a martial art. Each region in Morocco may have several fantasia groups or serba, amounting to thousands of riders nationwide. The 19th century image below shows how little has changed, at least at the time when these photographs were taken.

Édouard Detaille painting : Fantasia de Spahis (1886)

But in other ways, Berber culture has moved on. Well, it has and it hasn’t. Make up your own mind with this performance of desert blues from the Tuareg band Tinariwen.

Frizz’s Tagged ‘H’