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...