their wings and doing their death dance before paving the way for more suicidal insects. The locals stood and marveled: Muthungu ni hatari, they said, admiring the discoveries the white man had brought to their village. In that spirit, few spoke about the builders who had been killed or maimed in their labors, or devoured by wild animals at night while working. And those who did speak of these casualties concluded with philosophical zest: an abattoir is never without blood.
The house was completed in ten months, sixty days ahead of the projected deadline. McDonald devoted the last months to supervising the gardens as well as the jacaranda trees that he ordered planted along the road that led from the train station to his house so that Sally would be garlanded by purple blooms when she set foot upon the land in 1902. The idea of the blooms came straight from the Bible, or McDonald’s vague recollections from Reverend Turnbull’s sermons about Jesus’s dramatic entry into Jerusalem garlanded by palm fronds from enthused followers.
He thought the jacaranda reflected Sally’s beauty, and the trees were in full bloom when a horde of servants in a horse-drawn chariot was dispatched to fetch Sally from the Nakuru train station, only a few miles away. Some of the trees had shed their leaves, turning the black earth into a purple carpet. McDonald stayed home to receive guests who had been invited for the banquet. A band had been invited all the way from Nairobi to perform, as was the chef and the kitchen staff. It was the same chef who had cooked for the first colonial governor in 1901, and would be detailed to cook for the Queen of England when she visited the colony years later. The freshest English pastries had been delivered on the weekly flight that brought in the mail from Nairobi. The smells wafting, the piped music floating on the air, combined with the modulated laughter from guests who had already arrived, provided a sense of joy for those assembled.
At the dining hall, a matron hired from Nairobi had drawn up a list to ensure the right sort of people sat together. Engineers from the railway department, for instance, would sit with hoteliers and civil servants and businesspeople. The idea was to mix all manner of professions to spice up conversations and put different perspectives to debate.
The lilting music from the cellos and wind instruments was exactly right for the light refreshments being passed around. Reverend Turnbull was seated between an anthropologist named Jessie Purdey on field research from the University of London and a retired district commissioner named Henry James. On the other side of the table was a youngish woman with a sunburned face and freckled nose. Her name was Rosemary Turner and she giggled when Reverend Turnbull introduced himself.
“How can a reverend have such a cocky name?” she drawled. She proceeded to spend the rest of the evening stepping on his shoes and pinching his thigh.
What followed remains a topic of heated debate to this day, without a discernible conclusion or concurrence. With the passage of time, previous rumors would acquire more sinister pegs so that Sally, the malkia, became a legend in her own right. But as local people like to say, where there is smoke, there is fire, and the smoke and smog that clouded Sally’s visit had one consistent thread: she made a brief appearance at the party incognito before exiting fast.
There were claims that she sneaked into the party disguised as a beggar to test McDonald’s kindness, and was promptly chased away by the guards. Yet others claimed that when she arrived on the coast, she had visited a medicine man who gave her special herbs and charms that allowed her to transform herself into a cat, to spy on McDonald’s house and his friends before making her quiet exit, never to be seen again. Another rumor that became firmly entrenched in the Nakuru lore was that Sally arrived without any disguise, took one look at the edifice built in her honor, sneered that it resembled a chicken coop, and spat on the ground to show her disgust before walking away, with McDonald in tow, pleading with her to return to him.
So, to lay the debate to rest, here’s the true version of the events of that day: Sally arrived on the train from Mombasa as scheduled and saw the African servants waiting to receive her. They were holding a placard carrying her name. On it was McDonald’s looped scrawling, identifiable from a mile away. Sally waved at the servants, who scrambled for her luggage and packed it in the carriage. As she hoisted a leg up to board the carriage, that aforementioned cheeky whirlwind did its thing and she was left with her skirt briefly covering her face, mildly embarrassed but otherwise in good cheer, even after the servants abandoned their mission. The horse trotted back home without the distinguished guest but bearing her luggage.
McDonald panicked when he saw the horse return with the two suitcases but without the servants or Sally. He responded with mathematical precision: adding all the facts together, he concluded that the servants and Sally were together, as memories of that morning in South Africa flooded back to him. He paused to think further; there were four servants involved. Even with Sally’s preponderance for bedding her servants, she certainly couldn’t manage all of them at once. There was a wave of relief as he realized it was implausible that they were all together. Yet, the horse’s presence with Sally’s luggage showed she had met his servants. So where were they?
As guests continued to stream in and greet old friends, McDonald quickly organized a search party that tracked down all the servants within the hour. Recalling the abduction of some British engineers four years earlier, McDonald was fearful this could develop into another crisis, so he had ordered the servants to be restrained from escaping, using any means necessary—a coded message for what military men called “appropriate force.” From the servants’ cuts, bruises, and bleeding noses, it was evident that those unleashed on them had applied McDonald’s instructions to the letter. Some inebriated guests joined in the flogging as the four men were delivered to McDonald’s house, arms tied behind their backs and roped together so that if one fell, the others followed suit.
It was during this commotion that Sally stole into the compound, having spent the hour picking flowers while following the horse’s trail. She was actually tickled by the whole episode and thought no further about what may have prompted the servants’ flight. She instantly recognized the man who had been holding her placard. He had a wound under his left eye, and he looked pleadingly at her when she arrived. Sally thought of her naked truth, as she called her windy exposure. It was nature’s way of reminding her of her vulnerability, much the same way a hurricane sweeps onto the shores to return all the waste the humans have deposited in the sea for ages. Or a shoe that filters to the surface long after its owner is drowned. Sally thought she was being reminded of her own ordinariness, her near-nakedness reminding her of a birth into this new world, bearing nothing but her skin.
Sally did not speak a word nor venture beyond the porch; she simply turned around and went back the way she had come, a shudder in her chest, a quiver on the lip, as memories of her college days flooded in. She had enrolled at the University of London to study history and, out of curiosity, took a minor in African history. A huge chunk of the study was dedicated to the transatlantic slave trade. Sally had nightmares reading about the inhumane treatment the slaves were subjected to on those trips. But what broke her heart was encountering her great-grandfather in the list of merchants who transported African slaves through Bristol to the new lands. How could a man related to her have been party to such injustice?
Sally staged a solo protest against slavery by making amends to the next black man she encountered—a bearded student she had seen in the library a few times. He was from Ghana, shy, somewhat awkward. She invited him for a drink, gave her room number, and fled before he found his voice. He arrived as agreed and knocked timidly. Before the man could say Asantehene, Sally smothered him with kisses and undressed him, and it could have been misconstrued as rape had the young man not relaxed and grinned.
Sally’s one-woman protest did not end there; her tryst with the South African gardener was prompted by the same instinct: an unspoken guilt over past mistreatment of blacks through slavery and her patriarch’s complicity in it. After reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness days after its publication in 1899, her estrangement from white privilege was complete. How she rationalized that it was right or moral
