While Daudi was dancing the night away in Grahamstown, a tragedy occurred at home, in Arusha; KK had died. There was no one to witness the event. And this caused a problem. Blame would be apportioned. Scape-goats would be found and sacrificed and, unless well handled, the death of this man of importance would result in nothing but problems for his major domo, Kicheche Kandowere.
This man about the farm had a healthy regard for figures of importance even when they were dead and the corpse of John Kostas Kokopoulos was no exception to this primary rule of survival.
Kandowere demanded to be well briefed on the event and soon discovered that it was only when Martini came into the house to prepare breakfast that KK was found seated on the side of his bed, dead.
When alive, that’s where he was each morning: On the side of his bed contemplating the hour and the contents of his trolley table.
Each night Martini would set it out with a thermos of tea and a plate of Marie biscuits. Leaning up against the trolley, whose wheels were locked, stood KK’s loaded twelve bore. At the point the barrel touched the trolley stood a torch on the tray. Also a box of cartridges. These items were a just in case the Somali gangsters who had been terrorizing the area should wish to interrupt KK’s wakeful night. He mainly slept during the day in his armchair. On the verandah. Overlooking the estate and the two mountains: Meru close by and Kilimanjaro in the distance.
He did not keep awake at night for fear of intruders. KK was fearless and so were his pack of dogs. The shotgun and torch were a long established habit forged over decades in the bush. Threatening things could happen in the night; dogs were poisoned or carried off by leopard or hyena. Thieves took their chances. Murderers and assassins prowled in the thin light of stars. Mischief was abroad. Yet never had he felt threatened. But just in case some danger came close it would find hot lead in greeting. Many was the time at his farms in Dongobeash and Magara that he would sense a prowler and shoot through the door in anticipation of an attack. And each time the dawn would reveal a corpse of a once deadly animal; though never a human, Man had more sense than to test KK’s senses in the dark.
*
Martini found him in death as he was in life at that time of day. Sitting on the side of his bed by the trolley. Words were never exchanged as Martini took the tray away to the kitchen. KK rarely looked up at his servant. But he would give a cough; the cough of an inveterate Nyota smoker. But this morning there was no cough and Martini paused to examine his master.
The stillness was not strange but the silent chest was a puzzle as was the lack of a lit cigarette. The head, large, large as in life was set low on massive shoulders and faced out across the room towards the mesh door which overlooked rows of coffee.
His hair was not as neat as usual; the thin waves of grey and white revealing only a hint of skull were normally brushed by now. His eyes were open and opaque as usual and his pua (nose), an object to be admired for its mass, best described by Poles as a kulfon, was no less admirable that morning. Yet it lacked its usual redness, as did the full lips. And the master had not shaved, which was most unusual. Still, best remove the trolley from beside his knees. And it was the subsequent stillness that made Martini look again more closely at his master who, after the trolley’s move, appeared to lean to one side in a most uncomfortable posture.
“Bwana Kosta. Habari zako leo. Mbona una ka hivyo vibaya?” … Why are you sitting so uncomfortably?
No reply. Just more of a lean. And then a slump of the top half onto the bed, and with the knees bent, KK’s legs up went up into the air, his feet in the mosquito net.
“Mungu Mkubwa! Great God. Bwana Kosta! ….. Ume kufa? Have you died! Mungu wangu! Ame kufa! Oh my God! He has died!
Martini left the trolley in the middle of the room and went out to call Kandowere.
This took some time because the farm’s foreman was unused to being roused so long before the workers’ parade at seven-thirty, still a good hour away. And there was a matter of protocol. Here was a question of status and Kandowere, as senior manyapara, was number one after KK. So he did not reply to Martini’s knock at the door. And anyway he was nursing a particularly pleasurable sensation that early morning.
And then came another knock and then a call from Martini.
The shenzi, (mongrel) thought Kicheche. Typical houseboy, sure to be complaining about something a woman would have dealt with in silence, daring not to unsettle the big man from continuing with his business.
With regret he desisted from further manipulation and eventually replied: “Yes, what do you want, Mpishi – boy. (Cook.)
“Haraka, Kandowere. Njo sasa hivyo! Mze ali kufa!”(Quickly. Come at once! The old man has died.)
Kandowere looked down along his belly to check that was not the case. But it was becoming so because his brain began to engage with the message coming through the door.
‘Nini? Una sema kweli?’ (What? Are you sure?) And with that he piled out of bed and was out of the door as soon as his thoughts had cooled sufficiently so as not to make a tent of his kanga.( Wrap-around shawl).
Together, the two men walked back into the house. And sure enough, the Mze was as dead as Martini had said; loud enough for every hut in camp to decamp into the morning mist which was soon dispersed by the hot breath of a growing chorus of ullalating women, barking dogs, cackling hens, bleating goats and mwelling children.
“Quickly. Let us get him properly into his kiti (armchair) before they all come to stare and before someone makes an entry..”
The two of them, one at the shoulders and the other at the knees lifted KK into the armchair. Martini lent the old man’s head carefully onto the antimacassar, remarking to himself how flat the back of KK’s head was. He had not before noticed this quality of the bwana’s skull. But close friends and family knew it well; the head of a poor Greek, flattened at the back by sleeping on a stone floor; so it was said of all whose heads were flat at the back; every single one of them according to Kleo: “Because they were all so poor in their mountain villages, not being able to afford mattresses or pillows, let alone beds. Unlike ourselves from Anatolia who were always better off than any other Greeks and princes in comparison to such paupers.” “Tfoo, tfoo.” (She would end such statements with a little theatrical spitting to emphasise the point made in favour of her own family and tribe; always, in her mind, superior to other Hellenes. And, in any case, she never did care much for Kokopoulos who had demanded her daughter’s hand in marriage by brandishing a pistol at her beloved John’s head. “Theos sihorestou.” (God forgive him: John, her late husband, not, Kokopoulos who outlived her by more than a decade. Theos sihorestou.)
*
Kandowere treated the lower body with less care, his mind racing to try to turn the situation to his own advantage.
“Now listen Martini. Let no one else into the room. Draw the curtains and lock windows and the door.”
“What! I am not staying with him in the dark!”
“No, you pumbafu! (Fool). Funga dirisha na mlango.. Alafu ngoja karibu mlango la nyumba kama korokoni.” Shut the room up and wait by the front door of the house like a night watchman.”
This Martini did, whilst Kicheche Kandowere went around the back of the house to address the gathering throng.
He spoke as their leader. Which he was. And corrupt though he was, he held the camp’s respect as head foreman, likely father of many of it’s children, lover to most of its women and regular supplier of pombe (beer) to its men. This was the key to his hold over the camp. And it was a golden key ever since he had come into considerable wealth as first link in the long chain that smuggled the gemstones (which KK had named Tanganite) from the mine near the farm to Misha’s fishing operation on Zanzibar. And from there to gem cutters in Iran, India, Holland and Hatton Garden.
Kandowere stored the gems in the plant pots on KK’s verandah until one day, when the regional commissioner and his party climbed out of three brand new long wheel base Land rovers, swept across the lawn and stepped up to see the old man on the verandah and inadvertently knocked one of the pots off its pedestal and down onto the herbaceous border at the front of the house below the raised verandah.
Kandowere saw this happen from his vantage point in the coffee bushes. He wet himself on the spot where he crouched rooted in fear of giving himself away.
KK, within Kandowere’s range of hearing said to his visitors: ‘Please think no more of it. They are only geraniums which I will ask the gardener to repot. The pot itself seems to be intact as it has landed on the soft earth of the bed. Si kitu. It is nothing. Karibu, karibu, karibuni wote. …. Welcome. Welcome all. Martini, chai tafazali. … Martin, tea please.’
As soon as the party left, Kokopoulos summoned the gardener.
Kandowere appeared instead, telling his master that the gardener was on the cho (loo) and that he, Kandowere would put things right immediately and in an instant he had the downed pot’s cache of gems, which was in a draw string pouch made of a bulls scrotum, safely in his soiled trouser pocket.
“Thank you, Kandowere. What’s that smell? It stinks of shit. What is it?”
“One of the dogs seems to have buried a rat here in the bed beside the fallen pot which brought it to the surface. I will go and get a spade and bury it deep and far away.”
“Thank you. You smelly old Kicheche! (Skunk).”
“Thank you bwana.”
And with that he ran to the mill race, bathed, took the pouch to his hut and came back to finish the job just when the gardener had finished his business in the choroni.
*
Though Kandowere was not a hairy man, he would have said to himself that the episode was a close shave.
Then, as luck would have it, Kokopoulos died in the night.
Kicheche, who understood gearboxes very well went into overdrive. Or rather his mind did so.
The dead Kokopoulos brought opportunities which multiplied in Kandowere’s rich imagination; the corpse was a godsend. Kandowere would become Head Mganga. He would preserve the body as he had countless times preserved trophies. Kokopoulos had taught him, using the skills of ancient Egypt in which he was well versed. Together they went to Lake Natron, in Masailand, to collect the same type of salts called by the same name (natron in Masai; magadi in Swahili) as used in pharaonic mummification.
Kokopoulos had, as Kandowere and many others knew, a hypothesis that Nilotics, like the Masai, were just that, Nilotics, who made the link with Upper Egypt and Meroe down the Nile and along the rift to Lake Natron in Masailand. It all fitted perfectly, but when he presented the scenario in a paper to the editor of The Tanganyika Record his article was rejected. Rejected by the leading light of the country’s paleohistory.
He was also the local District Officer who made KK’s early life in the Territory a misery by ordering the evacuation of KK’s first farm at Dongobesh where he and Martini and Kandowere had started farm-life together inside a baobab tree.
A house was built in due course, after the paw paw trees were planted into virgin earth. Earth cleared by Dongo hands and made safe by KK’s rifle. Then came the long wait for the trees to bear fruit which they started to do on the third anniversary of planting.
That year was to see the first harvest of papain during which each ripe fruit would be scarified by razor blade attached to a long stick. Juices, the consistency of single cream, oozed out and coagulated on the fruit and were then scraped off with a long wooden spatula and allowed to drop into a canvas trap, the circumference of the average tree’s leaf cover, attached onto the trunk, halfway between crown and ground.
The juice of the pawpaw fruit contained papain which had to be solidified before export to the USA where it was used as a meat tenderizer.
Solidification required a vast kiln into which the gum like extract from the fruit, scraped off the canvas traps onto metal trays, was dried to a near crystalline form and then packed into four gallon tins, the same as the tins in which paraffin was sold.
(As scrap, paraffin tins were in African eyes a most precious commodity and would be begged or borrowed ahead of any other unguarded or unwanted item in the European household. Tins would carry water or cook the meal or roof the hut. They were as precious to Africans as the tripod was to Ancient Greeks.)
The buildings and equipment for the end process of papain production was ready for the harvest to arrive just when the District Officer appeared at the farm to order the evacuation of all its labour; the Government’s responsibility.
And the cause of official concern for the welfare of KK’s labour? The return of sleeping sickness. Endemic in game herds, especially in buffalo, this disease, carried by tsetse fly, was a destroyer of human life. Slower to kill than yellow fever or malaria, borne by the anopheles mosquito which would yield to DDT, the tsetse fly could only be combated by evacuation. And by deforestation. And by devastation of property. Everything that Kokopoulos had built up from scratch at Dongobesh was abandoned to the insidious forces of decay by sun, wind, rain and invertebrate appetite. All went to dust and ruin.
*
Kicheche was not minded to allow Kokopoulos to go to dust and ruin. The dead master was going to be as valuable to him in death as he had been in life. And in life he had been greatly praised. So too must he be in death; Kicheche was set on giving Kokopoulos the benefit of divinity such as held by the Pharoes of whom KK had told him.
So he decided to mummify Kokopoulos. To present him as a divinity to any who should seek further account from him. He would say that he wanted to show the greatest respect possible for the great man; assuring him of immortality by preventing decomposition. Kandowere thought even of forming a cult around the preserved corpse. None could doubt his loyalty as servant to KK; none would doubt his devotion to him in death; in preserved immortality.
In according everlasting life to him, Kandowere was intent on perpetuating the memory of KK through dedicated discipleship; a religion in the making; a timeless and time sanctioned preoccupation amongst tribes and clans from the hills of Galilee to the foothills of Kilimanjaro and the plains beneath Mount Meru.
*
The task of mummifying Kokopoulos was no different to that of preserving the crocodile in the hall. It greeted all guests with a scare. Glass eyes gleaming, red jaws open, teeth whiter than in nature and doubly as fearsome; fourteen feet of body curved ‘S’ shaped, it could have been the real thing.
He had never before taxidermized a human being but Kandowere saw no difference in this regard between animal and human. He just got on with the job of producing from the corpse a good resemblance of the living Kokopoulos.
As a mummified deity his former master had one further use. He would solve the requirement closest to Kandowere’s interests: a failsafe store for the gems.
The sitting Kokopoulos was an ideal safe. His entire thoracic cavity was going to be as empty as a drum and through his open mouth, set in a grimace as he exhaled his last breath in the final moment of life, Kandowere would trickle in the gems which came to him for storage. And he would extract them through the leathery anus which was neatly plugged with a bundle of dried banana leaves in the colour and form of a perfectly shaped turd.
Kandowere had fashioned Kokopoulos as a purse which was to be presented to his fellow workers in the camp as their totem.
In exchange for a vow of secrecy and certain of group loyalty, Kandowere had decided to extend largesse beyond the regular supply of pombe for all in his care. He now promised his people greater material wealth; double the daily wage earned on the farm in exchange for absolute silence about the totemic Kokopoulos who, Kicheche, would assure all and sundry, would wreak death and destruction should the merest whisper of indiscretion come to his ears as Head Mganga, as Kandowere now styled himself.
To ensure total conformity, Kandowere appointed acolytes in each hut to report to him each day on what was being said and what was being thought. This intelligence service was in receipt of a doubling of the double daily pay. He also appointed two deputies, two women of witches fame whom all feared and had feared well before Kokopoulos had been mummified. He assured himself of their loyalty by eliminating the only threat to his authority: the camp Mganga.
Kandowere gave much thought to achieving this end and in the end it was a matter of money. He purchased an albino from the morgue in Arusha and had her delivered to the farm. He then infused her liver with poison before presenting the corpse to the Mganga.
True to practice the old witch doctor consumed the organ in the course of his divinations.
At last, Kandowere was in control of the entire camp. He instilled fear as stick and gave money as carrot.
And here was all the money to come from?
From the mines below the farm which were now producing stones in such quantity as to fill the mummy’s cavity by the end of each season, marked by the arrival of the big rains which caused treacherous flood waters to flow through the rude shafts sank into the ground by peasant farmers turned miners.
One such delivered to Kandowere a stone that was too big for the mummy to swallow; a gemstone over two kilograms in weight, the equivalent of 10,000 carats; a ruby the size of a red grapefruit. This was the stone that was to gain notoriety, being the subject of press coverage across the globe.
It gave Kandowere many sleepless nights which was rare for the camp rooster who nearly always went quickly to sleep with a smile on his face.
He decided never again to accept gems too big for Kokopoulos to swallow, leaving others to dispose of stones of such parameters. He concentrated on the routine and the routine brought him wealth, health and happiness.