‘I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.’
With this sentence Karen Blixen opens her account of life on a coffee plantation just outside Nairobi. It was the 1920s, and this was British East Africa, not Kenya – part of the (by then fading) British Empire. The book presents a vivid, if at times uncomfortable, picture of African colonial life and the relationships between colonists and native inhabitants.
The scent of wood smoke hangs in the air. Children play in the dusty soil. Small pigs, chickens and dogs wander at will between the wooden houses. And inside one a blacksmith is at work, shaping a machete over glowing coals. This is Phou Taen Khamu, home to some of the Khamu people, one of Laos’ minority ethnic tribes.
When the first Spanish explorers arrived in what is today northern New Mexico in 1540, and saw the adobe structures of Taos Pueblo, they believed that they had found one of the fabled seven golden cities of Cibola. These were rumoured to be dotted across the desert plains of this region. Some say the sunlight glinting off the straw embedded in the adobe mud fooled Europeans into thinking there was gold in the soil.
It happened that the Mogollon inhabitants of Chaco Canyon were forced to leave their home by a prolonged drought. Their ancestors had been told by the spirits ‘at the time of emergence’ that a place had been prepared in which they would live. So the tribe left their lands in Chaco and wandered through the American Southwest, pausing from time to time to call out ‘Haak’u’, which means ‘a place prepared’.