Tim Bannerman's Orchid Chronicles - Part 2 - The Lion Hunt
What is an orchid? Well, everyone knows it’s one of those pink things tied on to a stick you see inside the supermarket as you go in. Isn’t it?
Well, yes – but, of course, it’s a bit more than that.
Orkhis is the Greek word for testicle. Yes, really. Not quite florist-speak, if you know what I mean. ‘I’d like a nice testicle for my Great-Aunt’s 90th birthday, please’. No. Orchid does sound rather better.
Named so, because of the tubers, the twin bulbous roots which you would normally find underground, or under the earth in the nice pot by the window in the conservatory. Not all orchids have these, a handsome pair with one sack dormant while the other one does the work, swapping over next time round. But many do. And Aristotle’s prize pupil, Theophrastus, decided that orkhis was a good name for them back in the day so who are we to argue? (By the way, if you’re interested, his Characters are priceless. I think my children may recognise a hint of the ‘Late-Learner’ in me, let alone too many of the others).
But orchids can adopt many different kinds of root systems, from tubers, to spreading threads underground, known as rhizomes, to the ones that grow only on trees – epiphytic as they’re called – and many others and all dependent on mycorrhizae or a fungal symbiosis between the roots and the earth or host in or on which they thrive . And more besides.
If you haven’t gathered it already, you should know I’m not a botanist. No. Just an orchid nut, or orchidophile, to use a posher word, so I won’t attempt to embark on a scientific explanation of how orchids work as I’m bound to get it wrong. Put it this way, there’s a good reason for not digging them up in the wild and plonking them in your garden, hoping for a lovely show next year. It won’t work.
As for the flowers, Charles Darwin wrote: ‘The flowers of orchids, in their strange and endless diversity of shape, may be compared with the great vertebrate class of Fish, or still more appropriately with tropical Homopterous insects, which appear to us as if they had been modelled in the wildest caprice’, adding ‘but this no doubt is due to our ignorance of their requirements and conditions of life’.
In Australia, there’s one that grows, all 150 tightly packed, tiny little white, sweet-scented flowers to each plant, completely underground. Rhizenthella gardneri is its name. How do you know it’s there? Well, apart from the farmer who discovered it by accident from the smell coming up from a crack in the ground, you don’t – unless you’re an Aboriginal, of course, or a satellite. Creepily, they can spot them better than you and I from the bumps in the ground.
But while tropical orchids are the ones most people are familiar with and can see splashing their pinks and scarlets over many a supermarket shelf and practically every garden centre, a lot of people aren’t aware that they are sitting on 56 species of native, indigenous orchid right here in the British Isles.
The difference though is you need to know where to find them and what they look like. Some of them are not only very small and highly camouflaged, they can be incredibly rare, even where you know they have been seen before.
I must have hunted out an awful lot of those 56 species now, with my wife, Gill, and our children, Leo, Josh, Amy and Sam, or my brother, Andrew, or frustrated friends, after 40 years or more. Some though are so elusive, shy, rare or protected, we still haven’t found them, even after all these years of looking.
But why should orchids be any more interesting than other types of flowers?
The answer is, of course, they’re not. You could spend years learning about the daisy family for a start, or any other genus of flowering plant for that matter. Just ask my children, all thoroughly grown up now, about the hunt for the Pasque Flower up on the Ridgeway when my daughter, Amy, was still a tiny thing, wrapped up in Gill’s coat. All right, it was a Force 8 gale, and hailing, and I insisted it was worth, as Leo put it, ‘trying to kill your daughter’ in order to pursue the quest. But we found it! And she’s got a tiny one that she drags out in all weathers of her own now. So what’s the problem?
But there is something about orchids, even on a tiny scale compared to the big, blousy things in the garden centre, that is uniquely seductive, even glamorous.
And, as I said, ultimately addictive. They are dangerous things, orchids, like gambling, drugs or alcohol. Once you’re hooked, they may never let you go.
After meeting Roger, the botanist, in the airport in Khartoum, back in December 1974, Pad and I had spent a few weeks with a man of the old-fashioned, colonial type who had lived out in Kenya, to rhyme with quinoa, as he called it, since the 1920s.
Charles Winnington-Ingram, younger son of the Bishop of London, had joined a distinguished and much decorated soldier, Brigadier-General Arthur Wainewright, related to my father’s family and, together, they carved a farm out of the bush at a place called Thompsons Falls on the Aberdare Hills in the great Kenya Rift Valley, in the way British colonial types did in those days.
Charles with the Maasai
To help them, they employed many people from the Maasai Tribe who were indigenous to that part of Kenya and indeed the whole sweep of the Rift Valley from North of Nairobi down into Tanzania. With the influx of the British, much of their traditional grazing grounds were displaced in the appropriation of land by such as my cousin and Charles and it wasn’t until independence that the land gradually returned into African ownership.
From the 50s on it was a troubled time in Kenya and no-one came out of it well. The Mau-Mau Uprising, brutally put down by the British, as well-documented, eventually led to the ending of colonial rule in 1963. The handing over of the farm at Thompson’s Falls to new African proprietors followed soon after.
It seems though that Charles and my cousin, Arthur, had treated the Maasai not just with genuine care and respect from the outset but had worked assiduously on their behalf to help protect their traditions and way of life from the many risks and exploitations that prevailed over that time. In return, the Maasai continued the relationship with Charles after Arthur’s death in 1970, aged 97, honouring him with the courtesy title of Elder of the tribe, complete with Lion’s Mane Head-dress to go with it, a mark of valour given to a moran who had caught a lion and killed it. Charles would have been much too modest and shy to wear it, in our presence at least. But it was indeed, the highest of honours and must have been duly earned.
Hand in hand with this honour, came a permanent guard of 6 or more Maasai moran, the young male Maasai warriors who protected him in his home in Langata and were given instruction in cultivation and animal husbandry by Charles in his 10 acre plot in return.
Maasai moran
So when these two innocents abroad fetched up and brought chaos to Charles’s ordered world, it wasn’t long before we were firmly if not unkindly rehoused in the Maasai schoolroom in the large well-tended grounds of this strangely time-warped world.
Time-warped, in that here was to all appearances a 1920s Surrey villa set in an ageless African environment with the jet-trails of the 1970’s playing noughts and crosses overhead. But here, in the schoolroom, we could breathe the rich ochre scent of freedom and make as much mess as we liked.
Ochre was the source of the red colouring on the skin of the moran which flickered through the light and shade as they glided silently on their guard duty in the garden or stood, iconically, impossibly still like slim, sleek herons on one leg, with the other foot crooked and resting on the knee of the standing leg, their spear a useful prop to lean on.
The schoolroom was where Charles would give them lessons on land and animal management, including a very basic grounding in English. However one quickly got the impression that like any adolescent young men more used to living life in the open air, they would prefer to be anywhere rather than squeezed into the schoolroom for their lessons. So when we moved in, they heaved a collective sigh of relief that they would no longer have to put up with Charles droning on unintelligibly on some subject they had spent the last few thousand years doing quite happily without him.
Our freedom, however, did not extend to the strict code of punctuality for meals with Charles. Dressing for dinner was de rigeur with all the old-fashioned rituals one might find in a novel by P.G. Wodehouse or the deeply dodgy Dornford Yates, mirrored by the décor and heavy 19th century English furniture inside the house. Come 6 o’clock, we would be expected to partake of a pink gin, dressed in jacket and tie, ready for our four-course dinner, which always ended with a savoury, such as angels on horseback to follow after the bread-and-butter pudding and roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and pea soup cooked by Paulo that evening.
Most important of all though, we were free to befriend and be befriended by the moran themselves who, over the next few weeks leading up to Christmas, introduced us to an African world we could never have known otherwise.
Not only did we sit out late finding ways to communicate with our new friends, they sang traditional Maasai and Kipsigis songs and helped us understand something of their way of life – their language, beliefs, traditions and history – and what they thought of the modern world around them now.
As we gained their trust, so they showed us more and more of what it meant to be a moran – a proud representative of young, newly (and painfully) circumcised manhood in the form of a warrior of this great tribe, much feared and respected for their courage and skills in the art of defending their lands, traditions and possessions, in particular their cattle, over many hundreds of years.
Although outlawed now, in order to gain their full status as a blooded moran they had to hunt and kill a lion. Not only that, but true glory was attained by catching the tail of the lion first – before the spear had been thrown.
Think about it.
And so it was that, one evening, they told us that a lion had not only been seen in the vicinity but had, allegedly, either taken a human victim, or had threatened to, and was, therefore, likely to try again. What more excuse did they need?
Would we like to come with them to try and find this lion? asked Olimberi, one of the moran we’d got to know. If we encountered it, one of them would have the opportunity to win the true laurels of manhood. Would we come to witness it, under their protection?
Pad and I looked at each other. Hunting flowers was one thing, yet to come, but a lion?
Well, when else would we have the chance to be part of a lion hunt? And while Charles was away… Yes! Of course! What could possibly go wrong?
So, on the night ordained, we set off, in single file, moran ahead and behind us in their red shuka, the moonlight glinting off their ochred skin where it was bare and glittering on the ornaments they wore around their necks and round their braided heads.
They were all armed with spears and gave Pad and I each a simi, the short stabbing stick carried by most moran which was supposed to be illegal outside their own territory. But if you were a policeman, would you want to disarm a fully-loaded Maasai moran? Discretion might dictate not.
It is at these moments that, above all, one learns to really look. And really listen. Be more tinglingly alive than at any time other than in the line of fire, I imagine.
And maybe a lion hunt qualifies in some way for that description – a Moment of Truth, if you like. A time when Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Mortality’ can take on an acute consciousness of just how vulnerable as human beings we are, simi or no simi. However fairer the odds to the lion.
We walked in single file down into the valley below and across the Tana River as dusk grew darker and the moon grew brighter, towards where the lion had last been seen. We observed absolute silence, trying to learn some of the secrets of stealth that had been bred into these young warriors from birth. Every rustle in the undergrowth, every flicker of light or movement, raised the sense of alertness to a pitch I had never known before.
Sight, hearing, sensitivity to the slightest possibility of disturbing the stillness and revealing our presence to a predator that might be waiting for us behind the next bush, round the next corner – all our senses were alive and quivering.
This was the difference between being a tourist on safari, the mzungu with the Kodak Instamatic, and a little white boy in too deep in a world of which he had no conception and little sense of – well, let’s leave it at ‘little sense’.
We were in their hands, these young, fine men, with their braided hair, matted with the same ochre that covered their bodies as their and our hunter-gatherer forebears from hundreds of thousand years ago had done to disguise their natural body odours from their wary prey. This iron oxide, mixed with fat, also had the virtue of being an anti-bacterial agent with similar properties to iodine, which helped protect them from the many contaminants present in animal carcases and other potential sources of infection. Such as wounds from a lion.
We followed these young men, trusting that they knew what they were doing. It was in such contrast to many an evening in their boyish company when we had laughed ourselves silly in human kinship and a common sense of the absurdity of so much of the way the world works, or doesn’t.
But they were born hunters, trained to kill, masters in the art of stealth – weren’t they? And they would protect us should things turn nasty – and not just run away and leave us to our untimely fate. Wouldn’t they? We could but hope.
Tim translated these traditional Kipsigis and Maasai songs at the time, with the help of a dictionary and the singers themselves.
