Quotation

For British East Africa, war meant stopping the land-greedy Germans from taking everything we believed was rightfully ours. Large portions of the protectorate had become battlefields, and men everywhere—Boers and Nandis and white settlers, Kavirondo and Kipsigis warriors—had left their ploughs and mills and shambas to join the King’s African Rifles. === The women did all the carrying and the hoeing, the weaving and ploughing. They cared for the animals, too, while the warriors hunted or prepared for the hunt, oiling their limbs with rendered fat, plucking small hairs off their chests with tweezers kept in pouches around their necks. These totos kneeling on the ground would one day aim not at gourds but bushpig, steenbok, lion. What could be more thrilling? === “Mother and Dickie aren’t coming back, are they?” He gave me a pained look. “I don’t know.” “Perhaps she’s waiting for us to come to her.”