Hippo whip (another story from Demeter)

This morning, at Demeter's breakfast call, she and I were discussing elder daughter's new life in London.

Two of elder daughter's flatmates are pretty blonde South Africans.  Elder daughter likes them very much, but is sometimes uncomfortable with their attitudes towards the service professions, like their monthly cleaner, for example.  The girls grew up in wealthy suburbs, where the home-help do the ironing and wear uniforms -- and, of course, are black.

Demeter was remembering her girlhood in Kenya, where it was expected for the white households to hire Africans.  My grandmother, a middle-class product of Wolverhampton, was leery, but each time a position became available for household work, there was a long line-up of applicants.  Demeter believed it was, in part, because her father, a scientist and the son of a Welsh blacksmith, insisted that the family be unfailingly polite to the staff.  

As a result, Demeter was horrified, when visiting classmates, to observe how they spoke to the servants.

"We would have been punished for being so rude to anyone," she said.

She paused.  "Although there was that one time...."

She was eleven.  Her parents had gone into "town", i.e. Nairobi, and her sister, the middle child, was visiting friends.  That left her alone in the house with her seven-year-old brother, and the kitchen staff.  Most Africans working for my grandparents were Kikuyu, but, at this time, there was a new employee belonging to one of the other dozen or so indigenous ethnic groups of Kenya.  This man got into a heated argument with a Kikuyu called Kamal.  Things escalated and the men grabbed kitchen knives.

Demeter said that she and her little brother were nearly beside themselves with terror.  Thinking only that they had to stop the men from murdering each other, she pulled her brother into a nearby room where her grandfather had kiboko, simple whips made of leather, displayed on the wall.  In a panic, they hauled them down, and drove the men into the garden.  The men didn't need much convincing; they fled over the wall.

When my grandparents returned, the man deemed to have started the fight was dismissed.

"It must have been the man who wasn't Kikuyu," mused Demeter, "because I don't remember his name."

I was intrigued by the idea of the kiboko, so, when I got home, I started googling.  

I got Koboko. It's a Nigerian whip, apparently dreaded by Nigerian children. At lunchtime, I showed Demeter pictures of kobokos, and she assured me the word was "kiboko".  More searching revealed that kiboko is Swahili for "hippopotamus".  Demeter spoke Swahili as a child, yet had never heard this.

"We didn't see hippos where we were."

Finally, I found it:

See, this is the proper use of the Internet...

Dis-maize

I'm sitting next to Demeter at the bus stop.  Rather to my despair, she's planning dinner, after a hearty lunch.

"And we can get…" She stops, bows her head in frustration.
"Can you describe it?"
"We used to call it meeli in Kenya."

My Swahili is limited.
"Honey?"
"You hold it and you bite off bits of it…"
"Corn?"
"I hate this!  I hate losing words!"

Later, I check Google Translate, which tells me that the Kiswahili word for corn is mahindi.  I check for different types of corn, different African languages dialects (there are at least five in Kenya), different spellings. Meeli doesn't come up.

Demeter is adamant.  She and her siblings called corn meeli.*

We get the corn, but it's too early and it's bitter.

(*Update:  Friend of the Right Hand tells me it's mealie, from the Afrikaans word mielie, so my mum and her family somehow got the word from South Africa, despite living in Kenya.)

Tales from Demeter

For those of you who need a Greek mythology refresher: When Hades, Lord of the Underworld, abducted Persephone, her mother Demeter, Goddess of the Harvest, was so distraught that the growing season came to an abrupt halt and life on earth was in peril. Zeus, the head honcho Greek god, ordered Hades to return Persephone, but she had eaten six pomegranate seeds while in Hades, so now she returns to Demeter for only half the year and we get winter for the other half (sometimes even longer in Ottawa).

It seems appropriate somehow that my mother's birthday is just past the middle of winter, the "cross-quarter day" of Candlemas, halfway between the winter solstice and spring equinox. Wiarton Willie, our official Ontario groundhog, has decreed that winter will last another six weeks, but the school crossing guard pointed out that that was going to happen anyway, besides, the snow often hangs around well into April. On the other side of the continent, Demeter will start making plans for our annual summer visit to Victoria, where, since mid-January, the snowdrops are out, and the first cherry blossoms will soon be glowing along certain streets.

Here in Hades, I look out at the flash-frozen streets and think of Africa. My mother was born in Wolverhampton, but her sister and brother were born in Kenya. My grandfather was studying the tsetse fly at the East Africa Trypanosomiasis Research Organization, and moved his family out to Kabete, just outside of Nairobi when my mum was two. Her stories of growing up in Kenya were a bedtime staple for my sister and me: "Ragbags" the houseboy (the children couldn't pronounce his real name), who would sneak meals up to my mother when she had been sent to bed without supper; a pet giraffe, clearing out of the house to let the ants march through (an effective cleaning, as it turns out), and one of my favourites, the story of Galoomph.

Galoomph was the nickname of one of my mother's high school teachers. She wasn't called that to her face, of course. She had very large feet (galoomph, galoomph, galoomph...). Every now and then, in the middle of a lesson, she would stop dead, staring off unseeing into the distance. Her face would go very white and her eyes seemed to go black as her pupils dilated. The students simply sat quietly until she returned to herself.

Galoomph had been living in Singapore when the Japanese invaded. She was on one of the evacuation ships, but boats were being torpedoed all around. Galoomph had been a champion swimmer, and in she dove, again and again, trying to rescue the people struggling in the water. Finally, they had to tie her to a bed to save her from her own desperation and exhaustion.

There were less bleak stories too. We always asked to hear about how the girls in the science laboratory would deliberately mix chemicals to drive the students out in a cloud of stench. The teacher would calmly herd them to a lawn outside and read to them from a textbook, while selected girls would wriggle off on their bellies to raid the pomegranate tree. How many pomegranate seeds did Demeter eat, I wonder? Were the seeds of our separation sown even then?