A lesson.

A lesson.

Kwa nini unasafiri peke yako?
Why are you travelling alone?

As at first we all drove into the boarding school garden
I could smell the hot pepper trees,
They bore intense red beads of tongue-sting,
And aromatic leaves that we all picked and intended to press.
The benches under the trees were the bones of a cricket era,
Bleached to a pale,
Like tender English skin.

I unpack, and then I explore the grounds alone,
The peculiarity of horse stables with resident scorpions,
The signs by the waterhole; "Uwi mawangalifu - chui!"
To warn of the leopards that lurk in the fever trees,
The menu, Sunday roast with freshly killed goat's meat.
The English and the African.
All this would have been frightfully proper,
In that gung ho, 1920s, afternoon-tea time
Inside there are sepia photos of girls in shining shoes,
Here again, in the old swimming pool holding a snake,
Here sitting under a pepper tree, playing with a kitten.
And in one corner there is a girl with glasses and a pile of books
under her arm,
And an old grinning Kikuyu man with one tooth,
And hanging from his hand the tail of a lion.
She looks just like me.

After tea I return to the garden,
Walk for a while with a book and a glass of goat's milk
But I cannot settle.
As I come down the long hill from the dorms
The grass is wet with rain caused by my 'areas of low pressure and high
humidity',
And your holy dung beetles are pushing the sun over the lip of the
world
In a blazing defiance of the West.
As I wonder out the differences between us,
You, the Dark Continent,
Me, the pale onlooker,
I realise how Africa teaches something new everyday,
New people can be met,
New places visited,
And new and wonderful things learnt.
But I realised that meeting myself,
Just here,
In the space between my avid eyes and my dusty hands,
And learning of myself,
Was the most humbling and inspiring lesson.
Africa showed me that I didn't need an aeroplane to find the peace I
was looking for.
I had it in my heart all along.