trifles: blankets and guns mostly. But in the end,’ he shrugged, ‘what can you do? They sold the land to Mr Rhodes. And Mr Rhodes sold the land to Sir Stewart.’
‘Hrmp,’ said Agnes – the universal sound for ‘I am satisfied with this story but I still have questions’ – and leaned back in her seat. The taxi was stuck in traffic, surrounded by the running patter of touts and hawkers selling maize, rabbit (live, skinned, pelt), wallets, fruits, cigarettes. Ronald wondered what Agnes would think if she could see these young boys threading around the dusty vehicles, forming a shifting tangle of humans and things. He looked out of his open window at the sights of almost-home: flame trees competing with jacarandas and bougainvillea for beauty. Flashes of brown skin that made him want to jump out and walk among the people, descend into that warm bath of personhood. And the sun! The sun in its constancy, hot and high in the sky, neither anticipated nor avoided. Just there, not even worth discussing.
When they arrived at their hotel, it turned out that crafty old Crofty had booked them separate rooms. Ronald grudgingly admitted that this was safer. Kenya was a newly independent nation and there was no need, as he told Agnes, ‘to be canarying in the coal mine of racial equality’. He promised he would sneak into her hotel room later. But by the time he had found it, let himself in and crawled under her mosquito net, Agnes was asleep, her tousled head the picture of fluster and flush. For a moment, he thought he saw an eye opening in the middle of her forehead – no, it was just the moon flashing through the parted curtains. He kissed her where the moonlight had flickered and left her to her beauty sleep.
* * *
Because Ronald was Agnes’s ‘caretaker’, as he informed the busybodies at the Nairobi aerodrome, brandishing a Wainscroftian letter of confirmation, they could sit next to each other on the flight to Mpika. The rest of the passengers fell into their accustomed segregation, but no one batted an eye when he slid in beside Agnes. She seemed sleepy in the way of a baby who wants to forget the danger it’s in. But Ronald still found the motions of aeroplanes disturbing – like being in a canoe, except you might rock one way and never rock back, and you never see the waves coming. More to distract himself than to amuse her, he regaled Agnes with more Shiwa Ng’andu stories, shouting over the engines’ buzz.
Ronald Banda had grown up in the staff compound, in a brick house with a chimney, under the shade of the imported blue gum trees. Every day, he went to Timba school, where he was taught English, Latin, maths and agriculture, with selected doses of British ‘culture’: drawing, hymns, a Christmas play for the chapel service. After their lessons, the Shiwa kids were free to roam. They pushed tyres with sticks or kicked patchwork balls made of plastic bags or old rubber. They climbed trees and hunted kalulu and jumped through the spray from the gardeners’ hoses and played field games like tug-of-war and egg-and-spoon. They loitered in the shop to bother the Indian shopkeeper Mr Shem, or in the office to bother the Jewish bookkeeper Ba Fritzi.
The best times were when they gathered in the welfare centre to watch films. Ba Golo, as they called Gore-Browne, had brought a projector from England in the 1940s. The machine, with its rattling hot glow, had screened boring films at first: English Gardens, The Queen’s Guards. Then the westerns came, with their horses and guns, low-slung voices and twanging music. The first time a Shiwa audience saw John Wayne die, the women started up a fanfare of mourning like he was a long lost relative. When Wayne came back to life in the very next film, the audience erupted again.
‘But why?’ asked Agnes. ‘Were they happy?’
‘No!’ Ronald laughed. ‘They said it was cheating!’
Treats like cinema night were rare. The boys were expected to work. Ronald helped in the lime and orange orchards, the trees like brides with their white flowers and jewels of fruit. He would fetch logs from the woodpile to be fed into the boilers, tip piles of orange blossoms into the big copper vats where they would be pulped into a sludge through which steam would pass. There they would condense, leaving behind their precious, fragrant residue. Essential oils had