Dogs in the Sun

Chapter Three

31 Dogs in the Sun Chapter Three T he white man was called Harrington. Pete Harrington. And his wife’s name was Lucy. He used to go out everyday carrying strange things he called field instruments. I don’t know me how to describe them. You can only describe the things you know or which look like something you know. These things the white man carried everyday did not look like anything I had ever seen. So I cannot describe them. But I can call some names: kamra, lensiz, bainokiulaz. These ones did not talk. He had two things that talked. One was a seliula foun, another a lep tap. The seliula foun was a small thing which he held in his hand close to his ear. He was a big man with the hands of a tapper and when he held that foun near his ear and was talking to it and it was talking to him too, if you only looked at the two of them from far, you knew that he was talking to his big hand and the big hand was talking to him too. You had to come closer and look at his big hand well and then you would see the little foun buried in it and talking to him. As for the second one, he carried it on his thighs like a hungry child crying, and opened its big looking glass and looked at it at the same time as his fingers danced on the lower part as if on a luung. At times too that one sang; but on the whole it was silent and only the man looked at the looking glass from time to time like at his face and then murmured as his head went from one end of the looking glass to the other. To me this man was a medicine man. 32 G. D. Nyamndi He drew a lot. Mainly birds. But also butterflies. He seemed to be after everything that flew on wings. His wife too went out a lot. But unlike the man who searched the sky, she liked to look into the earth. It was as though they had divided the property of the spirits among themselves, he with the sky, she with the earth. She liked to dig up little things from the earth and hold them in her white hands and look at them closely. She would come back in the evening with a bag full of things without name, which she spread on a large table and threw into little groups and pinned papers in the middle of each group. The white man did not like Ikom Winjala very much. He said there was something about the man that made liking him very difficult. What it was he did not say. “I can only just about tolerate him,” he usually said. One thing he also said which I found difficult to understand was that in addition to not liking Winjala, he respected him. I found this hard to understand. How could you not like a man and at the same time respect him? He said he had observed Winjala closely and found that he had something in him that no-one could change, and that thing was his sense of who he was. He said most people in his own country were like that. They knew that the world had to come to them and not them to go to the world, and that if the world came to them it left what it brought with it outside and took only what they said and did. He had that kind of feeling about Ikom Winjala, feelings of a man who knew where he put his foot, who left a troubling impression of being on top, in command, even from down where he stood. The white man’s work with birds he shared with liking other animals. To show how he liked these other animals, he built a fence in one corner of his big compound and put some in it: one green snake, a tortoise, a deer and a baby monkey, each one with its own place where it lived. Birds too also came in many numbers to eat some of the food 33 Dogs in the Sun given to the animals. This made the white man very happy. At times he jumped among the birds like a drunk...