Excerpt from Out of Africa: On Unsettling Native Habits

"For some time I had a small farm up at Gil Gil, where I lived in a tent, and I travelled by the railway to and fro between Gil Gil and Ngong. At Gil Gil, I might make up my mind very suddenly, when it began to rain, to go back to my house. But when I came to Kikuyu, which was our station on the railway line, and from where it was ten miles to the farm, one of my people would be there with a mule for me to ride home on. When I asked them how they had known that I was coming down, they looked away, and seemed uneasy as if frightened or bored, such as we should be if a deaf person insisted on getting an explanation of a symphony from us."

"[Kamante] had no gift whatever for admiration. He might acknowledge, and think well of the wisdom of animals, but there was.. only one human being of whose good sense I heard him speak approvingly; it was a young Somali woman who some years later came to live on the farm. He had a little mocking laughter, of which he made use in all circumstances, but chiefly towards any self-confidence or grandiloquence in other people. All natives have in them a strong sense of malice, a shrill delight in things going wrong, which in itself is hurting and revolting to Europeans. Kamante brought this characteristics to a rare perfection even to a special self-irony, that made him take pleasure in his own disappointments and disaster, nearly exactly as in those of other people."