Normally that murder would have been discussed for months people would have been positively grateful for something to talk about. Yet it was a farming district, where those isolated white families met only very occasionally, hungry for contact with their own kind, to talk and discuss and pull to pieces, all speaking at once, making the most of an hour or so’s companionship before returning to their farms where they saw only their own faces and the faces of their black servants for weeks on end. There was, it seemed, a tacit agreement that the Turner case should not be given undue publicity by gossip. A very bad business, came the reply-and that was the end of it. A bad business, someone would remark and the faces of the people round about would put on that reserved and guarded look. It was as if they had a sixth sense which told them everything there was to be known, although the three people in a position to explain the facts said nothing. For they did not discuss the murder that was the most extraordinary thing about it. Many must have snipped out the paragraph, put it among old letters, or between the pages of a book, keeping it perhaps as an omen or a warning, glancing at the yellowing piece of paper with closed, secretive faces. When natives steal, murder or rape, that is the feeling white people have.Īnd then they turned the page to something else.īut the people in the district who knew the Turners, either by sight, or from gossiping about them for so many years, did not turn the page so quickly. People all over the country must have glanced at the paragraph with its sensational heading and felt a little spurt of anger mingled with what was almost satisfaction, as if some belief had been confirmed, as if something had happened which could only have been expected. It is thought he was in search of valuables. The houseboy, who has been arrested, has confessed to the crime. Mary Turner, wife of Richard Turner, a farmer at Ngesi, was found murdered on the front veranda of their home-stead yesterday morning. It is by the failures and misfits of a civilization that one can best judge its weaknesses.