But my people, inspired by what to them might seem an actual, renewed meeting with me – for the African has a capacity for disregarding distances of space and time – on leaving the solicitor’s quarters laid their way round by the post office, looked up the Indian professional letter-writer in his stall there and had this learned man set down for them a second message to me. In such way the letter, first translated in the mind of the sender from his native Kikuyu tongue into the lingua franca of Swahili, had later passed through the dark Indian mind of the scribe, before it was finally set down, as I read it, in his unorthodox English. Yet in this shape it bore a truer likeness to its author than the official, conventional note, so that as I contemplated the slanting lines on the thin yellow paper, I for a moment was brought face to face with him.

Juma wrote: ‘Some fire came into my house and ended one excellent goat.’ He also acquainted me with the negotiations around his daughter Mahô’s marriage, speaking with scorn of the purchase price offered by her Kikuyu suitor. The moving passage about my predilection for little Mahô and the trouble I had taken to teach her to read obviously called for a reply from me, which might prove useful in the bargaining.

Ali Hassan, who had been personal boy to my mother when she had come out to visit me on the farm, during the Italian-Abyssinian war had accompanied General Llewellyn to Addis Ababa, and wrote: ‘Things was not very good here. If the old Memsahib was been in this place, this people would not behaved such as they do.’ Ali had Swahili blood in him, and the swift, incalculable manner of the Swahili. At first I had found him somewhat incongruous in my house. But he was steadier than he looked, a good worker, observant and with an unexpected mildness of mind.

Kamante wrote: ‘I got newly female infant from my wife, who is somewhat good sort.’