The Immanence of God in the Tropics by George Rosen

Author:George Rosen [Rosen, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781935248323
Publisher: Leapfrog Press

Kenya, 1980

A Good White Hunter

Atherton was from somewhere else. Sometimes he could barely remember where. Barrow, he would say, or Bolton, names from a hat. The names all meant the same to the Kigeli. An Englishman, they would think, an mzungu.

Occasionally he did get letters from home, a cousin who tried to keep in touch and sent him newspaper clippings. A doctor’s family had moved into the small Midlands town, with unemployed relatives and strange cooking odors, and the editors were worried about being overrun by Pakistani hordes. Atherton had never written back about his own marriages to African women, his black children. He’d never written back at all.

Atherton had three wives. The first was a matter of love and need. The others, from his point of view, were hardly intentional, a confusing set of obligations he had fallen upon the way a lizard might walk into a child’s banana-leaf snare, for lack of adequate peripheral vision.

He had been married to Rebekah Ndaru barely a year when the first young cousin had returned from Nairobi to their home district, pregnant and ashamed. He had been told by his in-laws in a ceremonious council of sugar beer and ancient milk—the same vile substance that, stored for months in a gourd, always seemed to Atherton to presage some disastrous family duty—that the child would need a father. They did not tell him directly that he was to be that father. Rebekah told him that herself in his bed. The cousin had already promised she would always show deference to the elder wife and she could be of use to the household. She could help in the fields, digging and weeding. The girl had said she would never return to the city.

Atherton hadn’t the slightest notion how to make such a decision. He didn’t know what was allowed and what was forbidden. He didn’t know if he really had any choice at all. Was he permitted to feel imposed upon? Threatened? Upset? Was he permitted to covet the young girl’s body?

Atherton did covet the young girl’s body. It was the hormonal fullness of her pregnancy, the shining luster of her skin, that tipped the balance for him. He dreamed of other children, his own, running through the tall grass of the compound. It was all addled together in his mind: the promise of new sex, the taste of sour milk, the starting of a dynasty.

In the meantime, his kingdom was close to disaster. The corrugated tin of Rebekah’s roof leaked and there were rats in his own house. A man from the Government had convinced him to grow something called macadamia nuts on his land without telling him that it would take five years for the things to yield. Atherton had gone to Nairobi looking for work but the capital was now full of other white men, birds of passage, with more education than he could ever hope for, briefcases full of degrees and qualifications. They worked for the Government and the UN and an incomprehensible host of international commissions.

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