Cairo to Kisumu

by Frank G. Carpenter

The dress of the Kikuyus consists mostly of grease, clay, and telegraph wire. The grease makes their brown skins shine, the red clay gives it a copper hue, and the telegraph wire loads their arms, necks, and ankles. The grease is usually mutton fat and the clay is the red earth found everywhere. The more rancid the fat the better they seem to like it. The average man or woman so smells to heaven that one can distinguish a native’s existence long before he sees him. They soak their hair with this tallow until under the tropical sun you can almost hear the stuff sizzle. They stiffen their hair with clay so that it can be put up in all sorts of shapes. I examined one man’s head the other day. It was a pale brick-rust colour and covered with something like ten thousand individual curls which stood out over his pate like the snakes of the Medusa. Each curl was an inch long and had been twisted by a professional hairdresser.

This man had six long pipe stems in his ears. Each was as big around as a lead pencil and about the same length, and was fastened through a hole made in the rim of the ear by a kind of brass button. These stems standing out at the sides of his head looked almost like horns, save that they projected from the ears. He had beads in the lobes. One of the men with him had the lobe of his ear so stretched that it held a plug as big as an apple. I bought the plug of him for three cents, and the man then took the two lobes of his ears and joined them together under his chin, tying them there with a bit of fibre in order that they might not catch on a branch as he went through the forest.

The Kikuyus live in small villages that look like collections of haycocks until one comes close to them. When one gets inside he finds they contain as many animals as men. The houses are thatched huts built about six feet apart in circles around an inclosure in which the cattle, sheep, and goats are kept at night. The sheep and goats often get inside the huts. Each circle of houses usually belongs to one family, a chief and his relatives thus living together. The huts have wooden walls about four feet high with conical roofs. The boards, which are about eighteen inches or two feet wide, are chopped out of the trees with the native axes. A native and his wives will require about ten days to build a shelter. The wood used is soft, and the kind is regulated by the government, which charges sixty-six cents for enough lumber to build one shack.

From the Uganda and Kenya jungles thousands of pounds of ivory go down to Mombasa. The best tusks come from the uplands of British East Africa, and the ivory from one bull elephant may pay a hunter’s expenses.

The Kikuyu woman, as in most African tribes, is privileged to do all of the work. When going to the fields she often carries her baby in a sort of pouch, or sling, suspended from her shoulders.

Besides its huts, each family has two or three granaries for its supply of Indian corn. These are made with thatched roofs, wicker walls and wicker floors, and are raised a foot or eighteen inches off the ground. They are usually about as big around as a hogshead and six feet high.

The Kikuyus are practically vegetarians. They live on corn, beans, sweet potatoes, and a kind of millet. They have a few cattle and some sheep, but they consider them too valuable to be slaughtered and only eat them when the cattle are sick or become injured in some way and have to be killed. They have no chickens, and eat neither fowls nor eggs. This is because, in the past, the crowing of cocks would give away the locality of a village, thereby bringing down its enemies and the slave traders upon it.

These people have many dishes like ours. They eat roasting ears off the cob, and they boil beans and corn together to make a kind of succotash. They have also a gruel made of millet and milk, and if one of the family becomes sick he is sometimes given mutton broth. In their cooking they use clay jars which they rest upon stones above fires built on the ground. They use gourds for carrying milk and water, and bags of woven bark ranging in size from a pint to four bushels are used for all sorts of purposes. The larger ones serve for the transportation of their grain to the markets.