Christopher Hollis . the wind of change . the first white settlers came to the Highlands in 1904 and therefore an old man like Kungo could remember a time before there was a white man in the land . he had seen the Serkali , as the Kikuyus called the British government , come , and if he could only manage to live a few years longer , there seemed every likelihood that he would see them go . the whole business was turning out to be that of but one long lifetime . Kungo sat outside his thingira - his bachelor &apos;s hut - and watched the hot equatorial sun going down the sky . he had called to his senior wife to bring him some beer . she made her beer out of sugar-cane and he preferred her brew to that of any of his other wives . she brought him a calabash and he sat drinking it , and as he drank , he meditated . the memories of a life came back to him . the first white men to come to Nanyuki were the missionaries , and the first of them whom Kungo ever met was Father McCarthy . that was a very long time ago - more , far more , than a hundred seasons - for Kungo always reckoned his time by the seasons of six months , since the rains and the crops come every six months . he did not reckon in years as the white men so absurdly do . Kungo remembered Father McCarthy well - a tall , white old man with piercing eyes . he was a good man and a kind man , and he and his fellow priests had taught Kungo and the other tribesmen some lessons which they had been glad to learn . they had shown them how they could plant their crops and tend them so that the yield would be increased . they had cast a spell on the tsetse fly so that it did not eat their herds and they could now drive their herds into districts where herds had never been able to go before . they had shown them how to build up their land on the hillsides in terraces , so that the rain no longer washed all their soil away . all these were good lessons . once when his first wife was ill , Father McCarthy had taken her to Nyeri to a bad-smelling house called a hospital , where a white witch-doctor had cut her open with a panga and snatched out from her stomach the devil by which she was bewitched within . he had then sown her up with a needle , and , after a time she had come back to him cured and able to bear more children . this , too , was a good thing to have done , and seemed to show that the white witch-doctors - their mundumugu - had more powerful spells than had the mundumugu of the Kikuyu . if so , it must be that their God was more powerful than the Kikuyu &apos;s Ngai , and indeed Kungo had for a time accepted the God of Father McCarthy - had become a servant of the Bwana Jesus - and had defied the old law of Ngai . it had seemed to him clear when his wife came back from the hospital that it was the Christian God who now sat on Kerinyaga in place of Ngai . but in his old age he did not feel so sure . a hyena had left its droppings near his thingira . he looked at them with disgust and with terror . Father McCarthy , he well knew , would have said that a hyena &apos;s droppings were a hyena &apos;s droppings and nothing more . but all the Kikuyu believe that there is a thahu - a curse - in a hyena &apos;s droppings . would it not be as well to go to the mundumugu , to kill a goat and get purification from the thahu ? he did not say that the Bwana Jesus was not powerful for evil , as Father McCarthy had taught . but was that any reason why Ngai should not be powerful , too ? might it not be that there were many gods , all of whom had their power for evil ? and was it not sensible prudence to avoid offending any of the gods ? besides , though Father McCarthy was a good and kind man and taught lessons which they did well to learn , he also said things which it was less easy to believe and which Kungo had never been able to find sensible . when Father McCarthy came , Kungo was still a young man . he had just bought his second wife . Father McCarthy told him that he should not have more than one wife . what then should he do with the second wife ? he asked . should he just turn her out to starve ? if he sent her back to her parents , they would certainly not return the bride-price with which he had bought her . oh , no , said Father McCarthy , he should keep her , but he should not use her as a wife . this was plain madness . it had seemed to him plain madness , but at least he had imagined that , mad or not , it was the custom of the white man . Father McCarthy and the other priests with him had a special thahu , placed upon them by the Bwana Jesus , which forbade them to lie with women at all , but he soon learnt that this thahu did not fall upon all white men - that some white men did lie with women - and indeed when , shortly afterwards , a white man , Bwana Dillon , came and built a shamba and set up a farm amongst them , he brought a memsaab with him and for a time he lived with her . among the white men , Kungo was told , a man has one single wife . it seemed a strange custom and it was hard to see for what purpose a man would trouble to make himself rich , if he could not buy more women with his riches . nevertheless , if that was the white man &apos;s custom , he had said , so be it . Kungo was not greatly concerned to understand . then after a time Bwana Dillon &apos;s memsaab went away . they said that she had left him and had gone over the sea to a country called England . for a time Bwana Dillon lived , it seemed , alone . then one day , he too went away , and when he came back he brought with him another memsaab . he had , so Kungo was told , been what was called divorced and had married a new wife . indeed after a time he divorced that wife too , and married a third . Father McCarthy had left by then , so Kungo was not able to consult him to find if he had understood it rightly , but it appeared that among the white men it was possible for a man to have as many wives as he liked , provided that he only had one at a time . this surely , Kungo thought , was not a sensible arrangement . it was much better for a man to have all his wives at the same time , as then the wives could share out among themselves both the burden of the work and the burden of child-bearing . the white man &apos;s arrangement did not seem to him to be fair on the women . it is right that women should control their desires . for that reason , said Kungo , do we circumcise them , and , if one of my wives runs away to lie with another man , then , as is the custom , I bind a hot stone beneath her knee-caps to cripple her tendons , so that she can never run again . this is obviously common sense . but how can one expect a woman to control her desires if she is the only woman who can serve her man ? Kungo of course had , like all Kikuyu , ever since his boyhood , lain with any girls wherever opportunity offered . since Ngai had given him his desires it was but natural and right to satisfy them . he had always been careful in obeying the custom of the tribe . he knew well that it was wrong to impregnate an unmarried girl , for to do so would reduce her bride-price and would thus be an injustice to her parents . therefore he had never sought to lift the second apron which all unmarried girls wear in copulation to guard themselves against being impregnated . but to lie with a girl could not be wrong . indeed , if there were no fornication , how could the girls tell which men they liked and which they disliked ? yet Father McCarthy told him that fornication , too , was wrong - that it was wrong to lie with any woman unless a man was married to her . this also he found strange and once again , when he came to know other bwanas - bwanas who had not , like Father McCarthy , fallen under the thahu which forbade them to lie with women - he found that this custom was by no means a general custom of the white man . Bwana Dillon had after a few years got tired of farming . so he started instead what he called a country club for the rich bwanas and for bwanas who came from over the sea , where they could go and get drunk when they got tired of looking at the wild animals . Bwana Dillon hired Kungo to come and work in that club , and it was thus that Kungo came to learn something of the ways of the white man . he had seen how in their dances the white men and women held one another obscenely , the arm of the man around the woman as if she was a whore , and as he brought them their drinks he would often hear the white men talking easily and casually of the women with whom they had lain . they did not know that he understood English and therefore talked before him without restraint , but , though he did not know all English words , he had early got to know the words which the English most commonly used - such as those for food and drink , the government , and fornication , and motor cars - which were the subjects upon which they mainly talked . what Kungo could not for some time understand was why , though those bwanas lay with unmarried girls and though the girls did not use a second apron , yet it did not seem often to happen that the girls had children . it was not until he was an old man that one day his son , who , as was the way of the world , had left the shamba and gone to work in a hotel in Nairobi , explained to him that the white women did have a second apron of a sort , which they put on when they lay with men and which guarded them against pregnancy . or sometimes it was the man who brought the apron as a gift when he came to lie with the woman . the white woman &apos;s second apron was , said his son , a small apron of rubber . he had often seen it among the luggage of the guests at the hotel and a friend had explained to him its purpose . Kungo had then understood why white unmarried women were not more often pregnant , but , if so , why did they object to the Kikuyu girls if they wore a second apron , which was surely in every way a more seemly and decent habit and in accordance with the custom ? white people , it seemed , when one looked into it , did much the same things as Africans , though in a less reasonable fashion . it was only that they talked differently and pretended to act differently . it was natural that a man should wish to beget as many children as possible , and the more wives he had , the more children could he beget and with the less inconvenience . a rich man - it was only reasonable - would buy as many women and as fat and with as broad pelvises as he could afford . besides , since it was forbidden for a man to lie with his wife for twenty-four months after she had born him a child , for fear that her milk would fall on him and cause a thahu , or when a cow was about to calve , it was necessary that he should have more than one wife . 