From My Grandmother's Files: Colonialist Childhood, Part 1
by Shirley A. Littleford Johnsen, edited by Kirsten Ellen Johnsen
I’ll never forget the morning I first met our new “houseboy” Philamone Mukinaka. He was very tall, black, and fierce looking. [He was, also, a grown man.] His flaring nostrils and beaded forehead with tribal face markings looked ominous to me as he towered over my chair and asked, “Blagafest, Missy?” He was asking me if I wanted breakfast.
Philamone was Somali, not native to our part of Rhodesia. He proved to be a very loyal servant, dependable and intelligent. Unlike the other servants, the expected routine of the day did not have to be incessantly repeated to him. He proved to be the most dependable and intelligent of any houseboy we ever hired. He called me “Missy.” My brothers, he called the “little bwanas” and my sister, “little Missy.” My mother was justly honored by being called simply: “Mama.” He loved the “little bwanas,” my brothers, and the ‘little Missy,” my sister. Tom knew this and played it for all it was worth.
Philamone knew that Dad, the Bwana Macubwa, insisted that we all be at the table at mealtimes. Tom would lie abed while Philamone pleaded with him to hurry up for “Blagafeste.” Tom made him put on his socks and carry him piggy-back into the bathroom and down the hall. It was all in fun, but Philamone really believed that Tom would get a hiding if he didn’t make it to the table on time.
“Ini lo indaba?” is a Kaffir expression, meaning: “What’s the matter?” or “What’s going on?” An indaba is a kind of powwow. Kaffir is a very simplified language, a mixture of African dialects and Afrikaans, or South African Dutch. It has no tenses, a limited vocabulary, and relies heavily on tone of voice for emphasis or meaning. “Footsack” means everything from “Please leave” to “Get the hell out of here” when delivered with force. Expressions that we learned in Kaffir are still used in our family, even by my Norwegian husband. Sometimes Bert will say to me, “How about a little blagafest?
During those days in Africa that slipped into years, I was for the most part, quietly observant. The natives were then called "boys" or Kaffirs, neither term knowingly used by us as derogatory.
We soon learned that chameleons were feared, also maninge skellum. Our second day on the Roan, my brother Buddy and I walked to the township of Luansha at the outer edge of the mining compound. We cut through fields of tall elephant grass, criss-crossed by narrow winding paths used by the natives. We could have walked on the road, but that would have been too dull.
On the way home, Buddy's keen eyes spotted a lizard. He picked it up by its tail. We recognized it from National Geographic pictures as a chameleon, distinguishable by their independently moving swivel-eyes and the ability to camouflage themselves by taking the color of their surroundings. Buddy found another chameleon, which he also captured, and then a third and a fourth which he convinced me I had to carry.
Thus encumbered, we came upon a group of natives walking in from the bush. A spear-carrying man was walking in front, followed by several women balancing huge loads of branches on their heads. Some carried babies on their backs, kept in place by strips of calico wrapped around the mothers' bodies.
At the sight of the two white children carrying four wiggling chameleons, the whole party fled, streaking to the right and left sides of the path and quickly disappearing from our view in the tall elephant grass.
When we reached home, our newly hired native houseboys also disappeared. The only one remaining was our head houseboy Philamone. He was not so superstitious, but he explained how the chameleons were "maninge skellum". We knew they were not poisonous, for Dad had given us a briefing on the snakes, lizards and other animals to avoid. When pressed for a reason, Philemone told us the story, "When all the animals were to take messages to Him Whose Name Is Not Spoken, the chameleon or "Hamba-gashli" (Go-Slowly) was the last to arrive. Thence it became known as an 'imfwiti' or evil spirit."
Repeated demonstrations to show the houseboys that the chameleons bite is not only harmless but painless, did not convince them. Dad told us that the chameleon changed colors to be camouflaged in the forest. However, he said, the one color it could not emulate was red, though he might try until he burst. Thereafter, my second brother Tommy was caught persistently trying to keep one of the lizards on a small red carpet.
The wild animals who were in evidence in the copper fields were, of course, the roan antelope, the sable, hardebeest, water buck, bush buck, tsessebu, puku, duiker, klippinger, Hippo-Kafue, as well as lion, leopard, buffalo, warthog, bush pig, anteater, hyena, jackal, fox, wildcat, porcupine, hare, mongoose, galago, lemur, baboon, wild dog, crocodile, turtle, and agamo - the blue lizard.
We soon had a little river monkey, as well as bush babies, a praying mantis, and a frog—for which I made blue silk pants.
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