To Serve

"I'm sorry, what was that you just said, Mrs. Pettington?"

What a tiresome woman. I had just now been distracted from listening to her by the way she snapped her fingers at Kisula and then gave him a distasteful look when he refilled her coffee cup.

"I said, Mr. Woolston, that I hardly think we need worry about these rumblings from the tribal huts. England has held this protectorate in Tanzania since the war, and we will do so as long as the London cafés need their coffee."

"I do hope so, Mrs. Pettington, of course," I said. "But still, I do advise you—and Mr. Pettington—that you'd best make contingency plans on sharing out the holding of your coffee plantations so that production won't lag if the Nyerere government is brought in, as rumored. I don't think he will rush to nationalize as long as we have a transition schedule that will continue to keep production at a robust level. The new Tanzania will need this trade just as much as the old one did."

"The new Tanzania," Mrs. Pettington snorted. "No such thing."

And then she turned to Kisula, who was standing, ready to serve, in the doorway into the residence and gave him the evil eye. "You aren't listening, are you, boy?" she exclaimed sharply.

"No ma'am," Kisula replied. "I am here to serve. But if you prefer, madam, I can remove yourself."

"Yes, do," Mrs. Pettington said sharply.

I sighed and looked out from the covered veranda, beyond the long lawn, toward the shimmering, blue Lake Victoria. Sitting here, with the lush frangipani and bougainvillea clambering over the porch posts and framing what was, to me at least, the most beautiful vista in the world, I could only sigh at what was—in contrast to what inevitably was to be.

The Mrs. Pettingtons of the world would never see it until too late. We would not make the seventies—hell, we wouldn't even likely make the mid sixties—with the World War II British colonial system that was trying to hold central-east Africa together for God and Queen.

The coffee trade must continue. The Pettingtons were one of a handful of British plantation owners in this region of Tanzania, in the robusta-growing flatlands of Mwanza on the southern edge of Lake Victoria, who produced much of the coffee beans being exported to Europe. If . . . no, not if, when the native Tanzanians took the reins of the government at the end of a British UN protectorate that had gone on longer than anyone could have imagined it would, there would be inevitable and massive changes in the economic and social structure here. The Pettingtons must realize that. Surely they couldn't be that dense. I had invited them to come into Mawaniza, to my residence, to discuss this. And only the hard-boiled wife had appeared. The husband no doubt was sticking his head in the sand, full of hope and a prayer, on this one.

The others were beginning to sell an increasing number of shares in their plantations to members of the Sukuma tribe. The Pettingtons were one of only a few families holding out. But they were the largest of the landholders. They also were the most racist of them all.

"Really, Clive," Mrs. Pettington was whispering in an insistent voice. "Do you just let him stand around and listen in to your conversations like that always?"

"Kisula is—"

"One of them. A Sukuma. I declare they are going to murder all of us in our beds one of these days. And he's a big bruising one. And so uppity."

I was confused about what she meant by uppity—but only for a minute. I remembered how surprised she was when she had arrived and asked Kisula a question, and he had answered in more cultured British tones than she could manage with her Cockney background. Her attitude toward him had gone considerably downhill from there. I so wanted to point out that Kisula was son of a Sukuma chief and therefore of higher standing in his culture than she, a butcher's daughter, was in hers.

"You don't need a native houseman, Clive. You need a wife—and Indian servants. The only trustworthy servants here are the Indians."

"Perhaps we should talk about the harvest projections before you leave, Mrs. Pettington," I interjected. The sooner I got rid of this horrid busybody, the better, I thought. Her milquetoast husband was so much easier to deal with, but it was a mistake to try to reason with either of them. Trash. These people were trash. Mr. Pettington had been sent out here precisely because he had married Mrs. Pettington. Lord help them if they were forced out of their holdings and shipped back to London. No, not if . . . when.

"First, I really would like to have another cup of coffee, Clive, if you please. Where is that darkie anyway?"

"You insisted—" I started, supremely exasperated at this point, but Mrs. Pettington pressed on.

"My Indian houseman would have seen the cup empty long before now. Such sloven fools, these Sukuma natives."

I rose and reached for the coffee pot in the center of the table, but a strong, brown hand was there before me, and Kisula was pouring Mrs. Pettington another cup of coffee and whispering deferentially, "Yes, ma'am, thank you ma'am."

"You were listening in, weren't you?" Mrs. Pettington growled. Then she turned to me. "Clive, really . . ."

I had a splitting headache before I could dislodge Mrs. Pettington. I also had heard more than I'd ever want to know about the status of the available and suitable young women from Mawaniza all the way to Mount Kilimanjaro.

"You are a sturdy and handsome man, Mr. Woolston," she had said, "and quite well fixed and stable in your coffee exporting district manager position. I can bring you into contact with any number of suitable young women. You must come out to Green Gate Farm in the spring. We must get you settled. And I have several very good Indian servants in mind. I . . ."

Kisula had diplomatically withdrawn from the porch as the sun dipped lower and lower to the west of the lake and Mrs. Pettington showed little inclination to leave.

I did not offer her supper, however, and she eventually got the message and huffed off in the backseat of her vintage Bentley, being driven by one of her stiff-form Indian servants.

I entered the house, and Kisula was standing there, looking sympathetic. I could not face him after the ugly treatment Mrs. Pettington had given him. I didn't know what to say. And so, as usual, I retreated into my English-bred refusal to face reality.

"I have a headache and it's been a long day, Kisula," I said. "I think I shall retire early without supper."

"Yes, thank you, Master Clive," Kisula answered in that perfect King's English of his, learned at a local Sukuma school as insistent on the fundamentals as the best of our British schools in the protectorate were. "Do remember to open all of your windows tonight and to close up the mosquito netting. It will be a hot night, and you will be glad of the cross ventilation."

I went to my room and picked up a novel, a new Irving Stone best-seller,

The Agony and Ecstasy

, the title of which made me laugh at the irony it evoked. It represented my current existence perfectly.

I stripped down and pulled on my sleeping shorts, taking very much to heart that tonight would be a scorcher, and I padded around the room and opened floor-to-ceiling windows. I stood at the windows overlooking the lake for several minutes and savored the beauty of the approaching evening. A light rain had started to fall, which was a blessing. The night now wouldn't be quite as hot as anticipated. The sound of the raindrops on the tin roof were soothing, and it didn't take long for my headache to drift away—along with all memories of Mrs. Pettington's horrid visit.

Drawing, almost unwillingly, away from the window, not knowing how many peaceful twilights like this I would be able to enjoy in Tanzania on the cusp of independence, I closed the inside shutters over the open window and then padded around to the other three walls, each with two windows, and shut those windows as well.

The rain would have forced the mosquitoes into hiding out in the garden wherever they hid during a rain, but I knew it would only be a matter of a half hour or so until the rain stopped and they would start seeking out their human prey. I climbed through the gossamer mosquito netting, my Irving Stone novel in hand, pulled it to again, and settled on the white linen bedspread, not bothering to turn it down to sleep on the sheets. I was ensconced in a world of cloudy white, floating, as, after only a few pages of reading, I slowly sank into a peaceful sleep, in a world where there were no cares, no injustice in the world—and no Mrs. Pettingtons.

Hours later, in the dark of the night, with the crickets in full chatter, the shutter on one of the windows facing the front veranda opened silently, so silently that I didn't hear it. Nor did I hear the pad of bare feet on the polished wooden floor, or feel the added wisp of breeze as the mosquito net was parted, briefly. I was in such deep sleep that I didn't feel the crisp crackle of the starched white linen coverlet or my book being carefully lifted off my chest and moved to the nightstand or the slight creaking of the mattress as 180 pounds of muscle lowered itself beside me.

I did awake—nearly—though, to the strong arms embracing me and the hot breath of my lover on the hollow of my neck and his lips closing on one of my nipples.

I sighed in recognition that Kisula had come to me in the night. I had not expected him to. I had expected him to be angry at the way I had let him be treated by Mrs. Pettington. I felt so ashamed and so helpless. I could not expect him to visit me—my lover, my master.

But he was kissing me. He slid his hand below the waistband of my night shorts, and he found me down there and was bring me to life.

I moaned and turned my face to him, and we kissed. I opened my lips to him, surrendering to his mastery, and his tongue entered my mouth, victoriously. But it was not a victory of the sword. It was a victory of peace, of yearning love.

When his kiss had finished, I was moaning at his possession of me. My hips were rising and falling with the stroking of his hand on my cock.

"I'm sorry, Kisula," I whispered. "She was such a cow. I should have—"

"Shh, shh, Master Clive," Kisula whispered in that cultured English of his. "You cannot control it. It is what it is. But now is now."

I reached down and put hands on his hips, and, knowing what I was offering, Kisula rose and knelt over me, his knees on either side of my waist and his hands reaching for the top of the headboard above my head, as I raised my face to his fully engorged cock, opened my mouth over the tip of it, and began to give him deep-throated suck.

He was big—long and thick—beyond that of any of the Europeans I had been with before. And he was hard bodied and meaty. Not an ounce of fat on him, but a heavily muscled ebony beauty, chocolate brown skin with black tattooing. Who would have known that the Sukuma produced such magnificent specimens of men—or that Kisula had come to me, was showing me the depths of ecstasy I never before had known.?

The agony of being here, in Tanzania, at a pivotal time like this, when time itself held its breath, not knowing, not wanting to even think, of the dangers around the corner. And the ecstasy of Kisula devoting himself to me, giving himself to my needs. Making love to me in the dark of the night while all of Tanzania held its breath—imbuing me with Africa when his hot, brown, throbbing cock took possession of the very center of me.

Kisula was moving down my body. Kissing his way down my chest and my belly and possessing my cock between his thick lips, as I groaned and moaned my love for him. My surrender, willing him to do whatever he wanted with me. His lips were moving lower, tonguing at my channel opening, taking my hands by the wrist as I moved them down to stroke the tight black, thick curls on his nearly shaved head.

I was writhing under the attentions of his tongue, moving my hips to his invasion and begging him to give me relief, to take me now, wanting the fullness of him inside me, opening me up, stretching me, and moving inside me, throbbing cock gliding along undulating channel walls.

But tonight, he didn't listen. Tonight he continued to fuck me with his tongue, bring me to the brink, and then send me cascading over the edge in a cry of passion and release of my seed up my belly.

And then he was laughing lightly, rising over my chest and widening the stance of his knees, pushing my thighs farther apart, pushing his knees under my buttocks, and causing my pelvis to rise to him. And then, still holding my wrists in his strong grip, he was entering me and entering me and entering me. I cried out a primeval cry in the taking, the never-ending taking, as he sank deeper and deeper inside me, spreading my channel, pulsating in its welcoming rhythm to the throbbing of his possessing cock. As he slid ever farther inside me, dividing me, splitting me in two. I began to moan and to groan and to move my hips, fucking myself on his gigantic possessing ramrod, begging him to take me to paradise.

He laughed softly again and began to pump me. And to pump me and to pump me, as my spirit floated up from the bed and out onto the lawn and then over the lake. Forgetting all of my cares, all of my worries, living in the moment of the magnificent fuck. Becoming one with Kisula, becoming Sukuma, becoming Africa.

I panted and lurched in answer to his jerks and murmurs of joy as he ejaculated in three forceful flowings deep inside me.

Later, as the first birds of the morning presaged the start of another day on the banks of the shimmering blue Lake Victoria, I turned my face to Kisula, as I lay in his embrace, both of us on our sides and my buttocks spooned into his groin.

"Kisula, I can't go on like this. I'm so, so sorry."

"Hush, hush now, Master Clive," Kisula whispered. "It is what it is."

"Kisula, I wouldn't for a million years. . . . I love—"

"Shh, shh, Master Clive. You must not say it. This is Tanzania. You must not."

"But are you happy, Kisula?" I asked, somewhat idiotically, grasping for anything that would make me feel better—not so much the ugly European.

"My cock is happy," Kisula answered "That is enough. Can you feel my happy cock?"

And I could. Kisula was hard again; his cock had been encased between my thighs under my balls and he had been slowly moving it back and forth, causing me to breathe heavily and to start to moan.

"Yes, yes, I feel it Kisula. You are so huge. I cannot believe that I can—"

"Mr. Cock would like breakfast, Master Clive. Do you think Mr. Cock could have his breakfast before we rise and meet the day?" And there was that pleasant little laugh of his again.

"Oh, yes. Oh, god, yes," I murmured. And then I jerked and grunted as Kisula raised my leg for greater access, and Mr. Cock entered me and started to greet the day, as I groaned and moaned and melted to my African lover.

* * * *

It was the most important meeting of my year. The inspection trip by the country director of the coffee importing company, Sydney Thornton. The company had the protectorate divided into two production districts, but Thornton's district was much the larger, and he was the man in charge out here. My district, covering the area on the southern rim of Lake Victoria, produced the robusta blend of beans, But this was less than 15 percent of our coffee bean exports from Tanzania. Sydney Thornton, from his own coffee plantation at the base of Mount Meru, to the east, in the uplands that included Mount Kilimanjaro, supervised the bulk of the coffee bean production in the arabica beans.

Sydney Thornton was a large, rotund man, of slow, cane-assisted gait and heavy breathing at the least sign of exertion. He must have been sweating up a storm under his starched white suit, but he somehow soldiered on, without mussing a crease or showing discomfiture in any other aspect than his "might this be the last gasp?" belabored breathing.

I greeted him at the top of the stairs from the beaten-dirt driving court to the veranda, and we sat at the same table where Mrs. Pettington has so recently tortured me into a splitting headache.

I barely knew Sydney Thornton. I had passed through Arusha, where he kept his offices, while en route here the previous fall, and he had been polite and correct, but he had not invited me out to his coffee plantation on the lower slopes of Mount Meru. He had told me he'd been here since the Germans held the country and called it Tanganyika, that his whole life had been devoted to raising and perfecting the coffee bean, and that he wouldn't recognize England if he were suddenly set down in it.

I felt sorry for him now. What did a man like him do when independence came and his land and livelihood—and mere presence—would no longer be his to decide?

But still, he sat there before me, not even acknowledging Kisula, as the beautiful Sukuma man stood differentially over him and offered him his choice of coffee and biscuits in that subservient murmur of his. At the moment Sydney Thornton seemed to me wholly, painfully England and all that arrogant subjugation of one peoples by another represented. The specter of the Mrs. Pettingtons of Britain's colonial world rose before my eyes and merged with this lump of a man, in his perfectly pressed, almost-intolerably hot white linen suit, stubbornly forcing the reality of Africa to bend to the old-world demand of the British Empire.

And I snapped.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Thornton. I cannot pretend any longer." And I turned to Kisula and said, "Come, Kisula, come sit here beside me. We will host Mr. Thornton together as we are. As equals. As full partners."

Kisula's eyes opened wide and I could see him start to tremble. The whole, false world order of the genteel British colonial system was crashing before our eyes, here, on my Veranda on the shore of Lake Victoria. And a burden was rising off my shoulders. It no longer mattered. My job for the British system no longer mattered to me. I would take my stand and live with my banishment.

"Master Clive . . . No. You should not—"

Kisula was beside himself with concern. This obviously was too much for him, too soon. But I did not care. The Africans were going to seize their lands and their dignity from the white man, the colonial empires, one way or the other. I could not wait. I owed it to Kisula not to wait.

I laid my hand on Kisula's arm and reached over with the other and gently took the coffee pot from him. And then I pulled him over to the chair next to mine at the table and gently pushed him down into the seat with my hand now on his shoulder.

Kisula sat as if in a trance. His face was frozen in shock. I put a coffee cup and saucer in front of him and slowly poured him a cup of coffee. All the time, I could not bring myself to look at Thornton.

I started to speak. "I'm sorry, Mr. Thornton, but it's time for the change. We must change ahead of a forced transition that will take the company out of our hands, whether we like it or not. Kisula is the son of a chief of the Sukuma. They will own and control all of the coffee plantations in this region soon—perhaps within a couple of years. It's time to wake up to reality. Kisula is my partner. We can't do better than to start including him and the Sukuma in our plans."

It was only when I had finished this speech, delivered rapidly, almost in one breath, for fear that if I had stopped, I could not complete it, that I looked up, first at Kisula and then at Sydney Thornton.

Kisula still sat, in shock. But he sat tall. All of the Sukuma sat tall. They were a proud people, with every right to be.

But when I looked at Thornton, what I saw was not at all what I expected to see. He was smiling. Not a broad smile, but a small, knowing smile.