Dance of the Jakaranda by Peter Kimani

Author:Peter Kimani
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2017-01-11T05:00:00+00:00

What Captain John Adams omitted in his report was the fact that Chief Lonana’s band of warriors, spurred on by the strong medicine of Kioni—the seer who had warned about invading white butterflies long before the onset of the British—halted the railway reconnaissance for one whole year as they defended their land.

But that was well before McDonald arrived on the scene and steered the rail construction from the coast to the hinterland. They were about sixty miles from the Nakuru station, and on the homestretch to the lakeside town of Kavirondo, where the train was to end its run, when the news of Chief Lonana’s daughter erupted, and McDonald picked up the intelligence that trouble was afoot.

Locals had been grumbling that the foreigners were out to erode their morals, just as some seers had prophesied, and various colonial chiefs had submitted dozens of cases to McDonald’s office complaining about the womanizing conducted by the railway construction staff, a vice that appeared to enjoy subtle official backing. The evidence that the foreigners were complicit in promoting immorality was that mubea—a preacher, a man of God­—was adopting children born out of such relations between local girls and foreign men. That was why Seneiya had been sobbing. She didn’t want to surrender her baby to mubea, as other girls had reportedly done in other villages.

The man known as mubea was, of course, Reverend Turnbull, and his adoption campaign, which in later years morphed into a large humanitarian organization dedicated to orphaned children, was promoted by McDonald for two reasons: It was a conduit for the disbursement of huge sums of money that McDonald gave the reverend as an expression of gratitude for his willingness to step in when needed to negotiate with the local communities. The other reason was that while he was not interested in preserving local customs, McDonald feared mixed-race children would encourage integration when he was busy keeping racial segregation policies in place. Treating multiracial children as an isolated special group was his way of enhancing the stigma, thereby nullifying the prospects of widespread miscegenation.

But what elevated Seneiya’s pregnancy from a case of personal choice to communal humiliation was the renewed interest in the seer’s warning that the white butterflies would scorch every plant dry and push entire villages to the throes of starvation, a vision that was interpreted in spiritual terms. The community elders concluded that the foreigners traversing their land would lead to the community’s moral decadence and its ultimate decay. They had heard that the invading men had left a trail of yellow children in the villages that they had coursed through, after planting the mysterious iron snake in the earth.

Without the cultural practices observed by the community since the beginning of time, Kioni had prophesied, the community would be decimated within the blink of an eye. And while social mores looked down strongly on those who conceived before marriage, those who bore children with foreigners acquired a special blemish—no man was willing to take them, even as a second or third wife.

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