I learned during my stay that some of the Wanderobo had once mustered up courage to attack some Swahili, whom they had murdered, some of the tribe giving my men the details of their treachery; but, as a rule, they were much too timid to engage in anything of the sort.
One peculiar point about these people was that they all seemed to have a cast in the eye, which I was a good deal puzzled to account for. Whether the meat diet on which they lived so exclusively had anything to do with it, or whether it was owing to their dirty habits—and they certainly were most abominably dirty—I cannot say; but the peculiarity seemed almost universal in the tribe.
I made my camp at a good distance from the village, to escape the unpleasant odour of the decaying meat which was left about, and to escape the vermin, as their huts simply swarmed with fleas, and I well remember the first time that this was brought to my notice. I had been going through the village, and found my clothes covered with what I at first took to be grass seeds; but what was my disgust to find, when I attempted to brush them off with my hand, that I was literally alive with fleas!
Like all the natives, the Wanderobo are very superstitious, and if, on one of our hunting trips, we should happen to come across the carcass or skull of an elephant, every one of them would spit on it, at the same time plucking a handful of grass, and placing it on the animal’s head, and saying “Ngai” as they did so. This they believed would bring them luck in their hunting. They also were firm believers in the power of human beings to make rain, and in this connexion I had a rather amusing experience. Going down to the river one day for a bathe, I noticed some quartz, which I thought was likely to carry gold; so, selecting some pieces, I was pounding them up and washing them, to see if there really was any gold in it, when, chancing to look up, I saw quite a number of the Wanderobo, hidden in the bush, peering at me in a very curious fashion. I paid little attention to the incident at the time, and after my bathe went back to the camp, as usual. Some few days afterwards we had a shower of rain, and Olomondo and some of the other natives came to thank me for making it rain. I was, naturally, surprised, and said: “You need not thank me; I know nothing about it”; but they said: “Oh, yes, you do; you can’t deceive us, as we saw you making the rain the other day, in the river.” It is just the same if you do anything which appears to them to be out of the ordinary—they at once think that you are “making magic.”
I had a splendid time hunting with these people, and nearly every day, towards evening, I went out to shoot food for them, the country being like a large zoo, simply full of every kind of African game you can think of, including huge herds of zebra, giraffes, elephants, lions, hartebeest, eland, waterbuck, and occasional herds of buffalo—enough, in fact, to delight the heart of the most enthusiastic hunter. I shot several elephants, besides innumerable smaller game, and two lions—which animals the Wanderobo do not kill, since, as they cannot eat the meat, they do not consider them worth the trouble of killing. During our hunting together they killed some elephants, and it was agreed that when an elephant was killed, they should take one tusk and I the other, and I eventually used to get both by trading.
One of their methods of catching elephants and other animals was by the use of pits, which were dug wedge-shaped, so that when the animal fell in, it could not turn round or move, and therefore had no chance of getting out again; while, in some cases, sharp stakes were placed, point upward, at the bottom, with the object of impaling any animal that should fall in. These pits were so cleverly concealed that one had to be very careful not to fall into them oneself: the mouth being generally covered with sticks laid crosswise, with dry grass on the top. They had quite a lot of these pits, and caught a good deal of game by means of them.
While out hunting one day, I heard shots fired at a distance, and thinking it might be some white men, I sent some natives to find out, and gave them a note to carry to the strangers. They came back saying that they had seen two white men, and given them the note. As there was no answer, my own idea was that my messengers had got close up to the strangers, and then become afraid—possibly at the men themselves, but most likely on account of the note, which they regarded as some kind of fetish. I found out later that the strangers were two Germans, a Dr. Kolb and a Lieutenant, who were out hunting. Dr. Kolb was afterwards killed by a rhinoceros, and his grave, right away on the Guasa Nyero, is marked by huge heaps of stones. I passed it on my trip to Abyssinia, at a later period of my travels.
I stayed some months hunting with the Wanderobo, and so fascinating was the wild, free life, that I could scarcely tear myself away from it; while my followers, who shared the same feeling, had become so friendly with the Wanderobo that some of them had fallen into the habit of eating meat, a thing which they had never done before. This caused a lot of chaff in the camp, and some of their comrades began to call them Wanderobo, which is a term of contempt among the Kikuyu, as the word means a man without anything, a wanderer without any possessions—which fairly describes the tribe in question.
The incident of the note sent to Dr. Kolb was recalled to me some days later, when Olomondo presented himself at my tent, and said that if I would give him some “medicine,” he would give me some ivory; as he believed that, if he got the medicine, it would enable him to kill more elephants, while he himself would be safe from being killed. When I asked him what sort of medicine he wanted, he said “the same as I had sent to the white men.” I gathered from him that, before I sent the note to them, they had had bad luck, but that afterwards they had killed a lot of game: so I gave the chief a piece of paper, but he was not satisfied until I had written something on it. Not knowing what to write, I lapsed into rhyme (?), and Olomondo departed the proud possessor of a poetical effusion, of which the following is a sample:—
“I am chief of the Wanderobo hunters.