‘They are tough all the same.’
‘To be eighty years old in Africa is to be tough. Particularly for a woman, because she has learned from childhood to look after others rather than to be looked after.’
‘In Europe and America,’ chipped in the Matron, ‘women live longer than men because they are exposed to less hardship. But in our pastoral areas, men live longer, because the women’s work is so much harder.’
‘Even Rahel,’ the Vicar went on, ‘– Rahel is the one who may have had a stroke – has a story you could hardly bear to hear. The record book only gives the bare bones of it. And yet she is not from the Emergency area and indeed Luo women have a relatively high status in their community. Would you like her to tell you about it?’
Once roused, tidied, introduced, Rahel was more than willing to go over it all again, and a schoolgirl was summoned from a neighbouring house to interpret from Luo into English. Friends gathered round to support even though they might not understand. Mrs Reinhold sat obligingly with a notebook, conscious that an example was being set up for her.
‘Vitalis was getting on for eighteen when his father died, and mad keen to follow in his footsteps. So he joined up. It was probably the best thing he could do. I took it for granted, really. It was the only kind of work I knew much about, and he was not all that good at school to look for an office job. Margaret – they had all been baptised by then – was nearly sixteen, and soon afterwards she married a man from Seme and they moved to Tanganyika. Florence studied up to standard four and she stayed with me. After the town kind of life we lived in quarters I didn’t much like the idea of being inherited by some old man in Uyoma. My co-wife had a grown-up son by then, so she was able to stay with him in our own dala. So we arranged that she would prepare the fish that end and I would collect them off the bus in Kisumu and sell them in the market. When Florence was a little older she got a job as a ward-maid in the hospital and was able to help me pay the rent of the little room we had. I wasn’t really a very keen churchgoer then – in any case you lose a lot if you’re not in the market on Sundays – but my church friends were pleased that I had refused to be passed on to another man, and so they tried to teach me more and I got some comfort out of it.
‘But then our troubles started. I don’t mean to say that our husband’s death was not a trouble, but that was in the course of nature. He had put a lot of his Post Office money into a boat for his eldest son, Omondi, and that’s where a lot of our fish came from. But Omondi, the first child of my co-wife, was perhaps not meant to be a fisherman. He was a bit clumsy. He was not properly a saved man but he did not go in for the full boat-rituals either.’
There was a pause here, because the schoolgirl came from an inland area and had no idea of the mysteries of the lakeshore and the fishing cults. With a long explanation and a few Swahili words thrown in, she managed to convey the idea.
‘He said they were expensive and a waste of time. But a man who does not believe in anything will surely come to grief, and unfortunately the end came on a day when he had taken his younger brother out with him. None of the men came back and there was no trace of the boat. For a long time my co-wife was completely broken down – sons gone, boat gone, and the families of the other men blaming her for what had happened. It was a terrible time. Her elder daughter had been sent to boarding school up to standard eight and was training as a teacher, a great thing in those days, but she got pregnant and ran away from the college and we never heard what became of her or received any dowry. The little one was now about thirteen and doing well at school, but of course she had to leave because there was no money for fees, and she was needed to help her mother with the fish business.
‘We managed to keep on, but not very easily. We worked – jowa, that time, in the 1950s, we worked. We were happy in a way because of the Uhuru we were hearing about. But these young people think that to have a job is just enjoyment – money at the end of the month and the rest of the time sitting around drinking tea – that is far from it, mama.’
The schoolgirl giggled. Her fees depended on the commission her mother made getting orders for shoes and knitwear from bored girls in office after office she dropped into for a chat during a carefully planned working day. Mrs Reinhold frowned: one of her daily problems was the clamour for jobs from people who had never learned what it meant to have a job.
‘Florence had her little bit of money but of course she wanted shoes out of it, a handbag, skin cream – you ask Wairimu, she has worked for wages ever since she was young, she knows what girls are: but work, running here, running there, carrying the dirty pans, going to rooms where people were half-dead, cut open and stinking, or even completely dead, that is not easy, and without the praise a nurse gets for it either. Whether you had a bad head or what, always running, and mother always asking for rent out of your money: myself I was providing the food, the market payments, the charcoal, the fares to Uyoma. I think if we had been working alone we might have made a fair profit, but having always to allow a share to Min Omondi, who was in a very low state anyway because of the expense of that big funeral, it was a hard grind. Often we had only the leftover fish to eat, the ones that would not last till morning, and the smell seemed to be around us day and night.
‘So I was not surprised that Florence wanted to get away from it. She started to spend nights at her girlfriend’s place in railway quarters. I could not object so long as she was helping me. Girlfriends, of course, have brothers, cousins, uncles: don’t suppose I hadn’t thought of it. Soon she was wanting to be married by a Kisumu man.
‘Well, of course I asked, “What about the dowry? Where are your uncles to speak for you? Where is your mother from? Do you have regular work?”
‘He was a gardener and groundsman at one of the schools.
‘“It’s a bit late, mother-in-law, isn’t it, to be asking these questions?”
‘That’s what he said to my face. No respect at all.
‘“I reckon you’ve got less than four months to get them answered, Min Florence. I’m ready to give her a roof and a name for the baby,” he said to me. “And if my brother can help me to scrape together five hundred shillings, that might pay your rent for a year, I suppose. As to talk about registering the marriage, leave that till we see how we get on. If you think with all that education she’s fit for a doctor or a lawyer, then you’d better look after the bastard yourself, hadn’t you?”
‘And what could I do? It wasn’t like now, when a girl goes back to work a month after she’s had her baby whether she’s married or not. I couldn’t have kept the two of them, and in any case she was set on having this husband. But I felt my heart sinking, for he was not clean in the way that a man who has come home from honest work and respects his neighbours makes himself clean, and not careful, even in the way that a man living under begging eyes on low wages can be careful. It was a weary year for me. If it hadn’t been that Vitalis sent me a few shillings out of his pay now and then, I don’t know how I’d have got through it.
‘By this time it was the late fifties: conferences going on, elections, parties forming and reforming, Women’s Progress movement, more and more children going to school – it was exciting if you think back over it. And me getting near the end of my womanhood, almost crying at the waste of it, but getting some strength from those church women I worked with. I knew in any case that none of those layabouts who tried to get on visiting terms with me were fit to stand in the same drill yard as the husband I’d lost. Besides, I was a grandmother already, though Margaret did not write to me, and not wanting to give Florence any excuse for misbehaving either (as though she needed one). Perhaps