Free The Flame Trees of Thika by Elspeth Huxley

the long whip he cracked continually above their backs stung them like a hornet when he so intended, he did not use it with cruelty.
    ‘You’ve got those oxen eating out of your hand,’ Robin commented with admiration.
    ‘Your boys know nothing, man,’ our neighbour replied with contempt.
    ‘We are all amateurs,’ Robin admitted. ‘But Sammy is a good boy.’
    ‘He is a stuck-up nigger and he will not speak to me again like that.’
    ‘He doesn’t mean to be rude.’
    Robin spoke apologetically; as a matter of fact, he was not at all sure that he was right. Mr Roos made no distinction between Sammy and the Kikuyu; to him, they were all niggers; and Sammy’s pride had been touched. Mr Roos was not going to stand for insubordination and decided to put the matter to the test. They were on the shamba, ploughing the last furrow before outspanning for the rest of the day. The Dutchman rasped out an order; Sammy ignored it, and walked away. Whereupon Mr Rood threw down his whip, took a run at Sammy, and kicked him on the backside. There was a Kikuyu youth standing by with a light spear in his hand. Sammy stumbled, wrested the spear from the startled youth, and turned to face the Dutchman with murder in his eye.
    Robin acted quickly. He brought Sammy down with a sort of rugger tackle and the spear was knocked away harmlessly. The Kikuyu came and picked it up and Sammy stood there quaking with rage. He was not just trembling, he was shaking all over like molten lava in a live volcano; his head was thrown back and there was foam on his lips. Mr Roos shouted at him, demanding that he should be flogged then and there. Robin refused, if only because the Dutchman’s arrogance annoyed him; Mr Roos had bullied and blustered and behaved, Robin said afterwards, as if Sammy had been intent on starting a new Zulu war.
    ‘You let a nigger strike a white man,’ the Dutchman cried, himself quivering with rage, ‘and next they will kill you in your bed.’
    ‘That would be much more comfortable than in the open,’ Robin replied. The more Mr Roos stormed, the more stubborn Robin became. It was this attitude among the British that all the Boers loathed and feared. Theirs was simple. White men were few in a savage black land and only by standing together and stamping on the least sign of resistance could they hope to survive. The British feudal spirit that prompted them to protect their own men against, as it were, rival barons, appeared to the Dutch as a base betrayal. The British were concerned with personal status, the Dutch with racial survival. Each of the two peoples feared, distrusted, and even detested the other’s point of view.
    Our neighbour went angrily away and did not let the matter rest there. In his view it should all have been settled, as these matters generally were, with twenty strokes of the hippo-hide whip, but as
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obstinacy prevented this, he still had the right of appeal to the law. He rode off to see the District Commissioner at Fort Hall, between thirty and forty miles away. A few days later a pink-faced young man sheltering beneath a very large topee arrived on a pony to say that a summons for assault had been taken out against Sammy. Robin was angry, Tilly alarmed, Sammy, when summoned, coldly contemptuous, and the young official confused.
    ‘I understood that he was violent and you wanted him arrested,’ he said. He had brought two large uniformed askaris, who arrived later on foot.
    ‘I can’t have him taken away or I shan’t get the land ready before the rains,’ Robin said. ‘It was all Roos’s fault anyway.’
    ‘I’m afraid he means to press the charge. We’d heard rumours that your boy was a bad hat who’d been stirring up trouble among the Kikuyu. In fact I had orders to bring your wife and daughter to Fort Hall if there was any sign of unrest.’
    The young man sounded disappointed. He had evidently hoped to bring a dangerous situation under control with two askaris and his own