about silly dresses and even sillier books? I want to hear about that Zeppelin.’
Leon sighed. This was not a subject he had any intention of discussing, but how could he evade this woman’s steely clutches without being unforgivably rude? He was just pondering his next move when he heard a man’s voice, clearly somewhat the worse for wine, braying across the table.
‘I say Courtney, is it true you have a Masai blood brother?’
The voice belonged to a newcomer to Kenya, who called himself Quentin de Lancey and affected the mannerisms of the upper class, though his appearance was far from noble. He was overweight and prone to become both red-faced and very sweaty in the heat, which caused his thin, reddish-brown hair to lie in damp strings across his pale, flabby skin.
‘Something of that sort,’ Leon replied, noncommittally.
When he was a nineteen-year-old Second Lieutenant in the Third Battalion of the King’s African Rifles his platoon sergeant had been a Masai called Manyoro. Leon had saved Manyoro’s life in battle, and when Leon had then been court-martialled on trumped-up charges of cowardice and desertion it had been Manyoro’s evidence that had saved his neck. There was no man on earth whose friendship he valued more highly.
‘And a coon name? Bongo-something, was what I’d heard.’ A few people smiled at that, one of the women tittered. ‘Bongo from Bongo-bongo-land, what?’ de Lancey added, looking delighted by his own rapier wit.
‘The name I received was M’Bogo,’ said Leon, and a wiser, or more sober man than de Lancey might have heard the note of suppressed anger in his voice.
‘I say, what kind of name is that?’ de Lancey persisted.
‘It is the name of the great buffalo bull. It represents strength and fighting spirit. I count myself honoured to have been given it.’
Again, it took a fool not to heed the warning contained in the phrase ‘strength and fighting spirit’, and again de Lancey was deaf to it. ‘Oh, come-come, Courtney,’ he said, as if he were the voice of reason and Leon the common fool. ‘It’s all very well getting on with these people, I suppose, but let’s not pretend that they are anything but a lesser race. A chap I know was up-country a few months ago, looking for a good spot to start farming. He hung a paraffin lamp by his tent when he stopped for the night. The next thing he knew there were half-a-dozen nig-nogs coming up out of the bush, absolutely stark bollock naked apart from those red cloak things they wear.’
‘It’s called a shuka,’ said Leon.
Beside him, Amelia Cory-Porter’s eyes had widened and she was breathing just a little more heavily as she sensed that the man beside her was readying himself to impose his authority, possibly by force.
‘Yes, well, whatever it’s called, the poor chap was absolutely terrified, real brown-trouser time,’ de Lancey said. ‘Turned out the niggers just wanted to sit by his tent, cocks swinging gently in the breeze, gawping at the light – my chum didn’t know where to look! They’d never seen anything like it, thought it was a star trapped in a bottle.’
Leon realized that he had clenched his napkin in his right fist and recognized the signs of an imminent explosion. Control yourself, he thought. Count to ten. No point making an exhibition of yourself over one blithering idiot.
He consciously relaxed his body, much to Amelia’s disappointment as she felt her own gathering anticipation subside.
‘It’s true that the first sight of a white man and his possessions comes as a surprise,’ Leon said, as dully as possible, hoping to close the subject and move on.
‘Of course it does,’ said de Lancey, who was equally keen to prolong the thrilling sensation of being the centre of everyone’s attention. ‘These people haven’t developed anything that remotely passes for a civilization.’
Leon gave an impatient sigh. Damn! I’m just going to have to put this buffoon in his place.
‘The Masai have no skyscrapers, or aeroplanes, or telephones in their world, that is true. But they know things that we cannot begin to understand.’
‘Go on then, what sort of things?’
‘Even a Masai child can track a stray animal for days across open country,’ Leon said. ‘They’ll spot the faint outline of an elephant’s footprint on a patch of rock-hard earth where you or I would see nothing but dirt and stones, and identify the precise animal to which the print belongs. If the Masai soldiers I once had the privilege to command came across the trail of an invading war-party from another tribe they would at once know the number of men in the party, the length of time since they had passed and the destination to which they were heading. And if you doubt the capacity of the African brain, de Lancey, answer me this: how many languages do you speak?’
‘I’ve always found the King’s English perfectly adequate, thank you, Courtney.’
‘Then you are two behind a great many Africans, who speak three languages as a matter of course: their tribal tongue; the lingua franca spoken by everyone in the nation of which their tribe is part; and the language of their colonial masters. So the particular Masai who calls me M’Bogo grew up speaking Masai. As a young man he joined the King’s African Rifles where the ranks spoke Kiswahili, which he swiftly mastered. In recent years he has become fluent in English. These men are not niggers or coons, as you like to call them. They are a proud, noble, warrior race who have grazed their cattle on these lands since time immemorial, and in their own environment they are every bit our match and more.’
‘Well said,’ said a small man, with a bald pate and a scattering of silver hair, peering across the table through a pair of steel-framed spectacles.
‘Well, I still say that there is a reason why we are their masters and they our servants,’ de Lancey insisted. ‘They’re just a bunch of bone-idle savages and we are their superiors in both mind and body.’
Having dismissed the option of beating de Lancey to a pulp, Leon had been wondering how he could teach him the lesson he so richly deserved, and now a stroke of inspiration came to him. ‘Would you like to put that proposition to the test?’ he asked.
‘Ooh …’ purred Amelia. ‘This is going to be fun!’
‘How so?’ de Lancey asked, and for the first time a note of caution entered his voice as it occurred to him he might just have blundered into a trap.
Leon thought for a moment, working out a way to draw de Lancey in, while still ensuring his ultimate humiliation. ‘I will bet that one Masai from my Lusima estate can outrun any three white men you put up against him.’
‘In a race, do you mean?’
‘In a manner of speaking. What I have in mind is this …’ Leon leaned forward onto the table so that everyone could see and hear him clearly. He wanted this to be public. ‘One week from today, we will all meet up again at the polo field. String a rope around all four sides of one of the fields. The competitors will run around the field, outside that rope. D’you follow?’
‘Yes, I believe so,’ said de Lancey. ‘They all run round the field and if a white man wins the race I win the wager, and if your darkie wins, you do?’
Leon smiled. ‘Actually, that would be too easy for the Masai. They would be insulted by the very idea and say that one of their young
