When I went off to Africa for the first time to join the baboons, I had an array of skills and experiences that would prepare me for anything I’d encounter in that new world. I knew a great deal about the subway system in New York City and, to top that off, had even obtained a driver’s license a week before leaving for my trip. I had been to a few of the Mid-Atlantic states, as well as to New England. I had backpacked extensively in the Catskill Mountains in New York and once had to lie very still while a porcupine waddled past my sleeping bag. I had managed to make a campfire once, allowing me to melt my Velveeta cheese on my crackers, instead of eating them cold, as was my typical meal on a backpacking trip. I had even broadened my food horizons in other ways, preparing myself for the novelties about to come—I had recently escaped the dietary restrictions of my Orthodox religious upbringing, and thus, in the prior year, had had my first slice of pizza, first Chinese meal, and first Indian food (although, admittedly, in the last case, I ate only the rice, denouncing everything else as too spicy to possibly be safe). Best of all, in case there were any fronts in which I was lacking in useful experiences, I had read a book on almost any subject that could possibly be relevant to my new life ahead. I’d be able to handle anything thrown at me.
Arriving at the airport in Nairobi at dawn, I had rejected the taxis waiting for the tourist groups, instead taking the city bus into town. Jammed into a crowd, barely holding on to my overstuffed backpack and duffel bag, I stared out the window, trying to absorb every detail. There were volcanic mountains in the distance, open plains spotted with acacia trees, there were men out in the fields already, women walking alongside the road with baskets of food balanced on their heads. I couldn’t believe it—everyone was black. I was in Africa, it had actually happened. It took me a while to be drawn back to events in the bus, to notice that a middle-aged man, seated nearby, was offering to hold my bag amid our lurching over the potholes. Actually, he was forcefully commandeering my bag, repeatedly saying, “My arms are strong, white man, my arms are strong,” in English, with an intensity that puzzled me. Gingerly, I let him hold it, feeling half grateful and half distrustful. When the time came for him to leave, he returned my bag with apologies that he couldn’t help further, pushed his arms against the bus seat so as to lift his torso into the air, and dropped to the floor of the bus on his hands and knees. Crab-walking down the stairs and onto the Nairobi street, he turned once to shout over his shoulder, “My arms are strong,” chuckling, delighted. I had just met my first street beggar crippled by polio.
So I settled in to Nairobi for the week it took to arrange permits and transportation out to the park. Almost immediately, it became apparent that I was speaking the wrong kind of Swahili. I had learned it from a Tanzanian law student at my university. As part of Tanzania’s socialist experiment, tribalism was being slowly eradicated, and everyone learned rich, complex, elegant Zanzibari Swahili as a first language. In neighboring Kenya, a chaotic tribalism prevailed, where you were raised with your tribal language, along with those of your closest tribal ally and closest tribal enemy, and where Swahili might only be acquired later. Most people spoke some Swahili, and almost everyone spoke it horribly, especially in Nairobi, where it had taken on a broken, slangy, urban form. I had done the equivalent of showing up in the Bronx, speaking the Queen’s English. Nobody understood a word I was saying, nor I them.
Despite the communication problem, I still managed to have my share of first-day experiences. Within rapid order, I was billed for a fake government tax by the clerk at the hotel I had been directed to, was overcharged by the proprietor of the first food kiosk I went into, and was hustled for money by a university student from Uganda. He explained to me that his family had been killed by Idi Amin, he had escaped as a refugee, he was trying to get the money to go back and take part in the revolution. We had a long discussion about this, sitting in the shade of some trees on the grounds of the national museum, as he spoke with fervor about his desire to bring a Western-style democracy to his homeland. I gave him an absurdly large amount of money. In the years to come, he would become a familiar face to me, working the tourists on the museum grounds as a refugee from whatever African country whose recent political turmoils had managed to catch briefly the awareness of the West.
By the end of that first day, I had concluded that everything was going just fine. I had learned about an interesting government tax on lodging. I had learned that I needed to pay more attention to the posted prices in the food kiosks, as I had mistakenly thought the prices were less than they actually were, forcing the poor proprietor into the uncomfortable position of having to tell me I owed him more money. And best of all, I had done my part to help bring a two-party democratic system to Uganda.
So went my first week in Nairobi, and it should have been dizzying, making my way through this tumult-filled Third World city, not knowing a soul, every food, every face, every gesture, utterly alien, more alien than anything I’d ever encountered. But instead, it was kind of a blank for a simple reason. I didn’t even know which direction to face, but throughout, I had the same thought, over and over—somewhere out there, beyond the spanking new skyscrapers, beyond the shantytown, beyond the immaculate colonial Brit suburbs, it all melted away and the bush began. Everything else was just me holding my breath until I could get there, to the place I had been planning for most of my life.
Finally, the day came. I had made my way in town to the office of the wildlife conservation group, where I had a “contact.” This overstated the connection considerably—a secretary there had merely been notified from the States that some kid with my name was going to show up, and she should help me out a bit. It was wonderfully exciting. The mere existence of my name on a piece of paper in this office, even horribly misspelled and with my fore- and surnames reversed, was immensely thrilling, made me feel like an old Africa hand. I was given instructions about how to catch a bush plane out to the game park, and the name of the bush pilot—up to two contacts now in Africa! I was supposed to hook up with two grad students in the game park, and to overlap with them for a few months while I learned the ropes. The secretary somewhat convincingly promised to radio-call them, to make sure they’d eventually come fetch me from the airstrip.
And so there I was on a tiny plane bouncing in a rainstorm cutting across the Rift Valley, the cloud layer too low to allow the slow emergence of this new world below me. Instead, we swam in clouds until the last thirty seconds of descent. With a sudden burst of visibility, I got a glimpse of scrub plains and zebras and wildebeests sprinting off the runway to avoid our plane, and I found myself in the diorama.
I will forever ache with the knowledge that I can never again spend my first weeks out in the bush—a first introduction to the baboons, a first afternoon spent meeting the nearby villagers, the first realization that behind every bush and tree there was an animal. Each night in my tent, I would fling myself down in exhaustion at all the novelty, with the fatigue of looking and listening and smelling at everything so intently.
The first, most potent lesson that I got, naturally, was that things were not as I had anticipated. I had steeled myself for years in expectation and acceptance of the dangers I would face in the bush, had bid farewell to my loved ones at home as if I might not return. I had fully prepared myself for predators and buffalo and poisonous snakes. Instead, a far bigger problem was the constant bugs in the food.
I had learned that the local tribespeople were formidable—the warlike Masai, famous for their plundering and raiding; fearsome, intimidating neighbors. I had not anticipated that the biggest difficulty that the Masai would pose would be the mamas sitting around camp each afternoon, snickering and gossiping and chortling at seemingly anything I did, crowding around in curiosity with no concept of privacy or personal space, endlessly trying to cadge my possessions as gifts.
I had accepted that I stood the risk of some appalling tropical disease, would be braving malaria, bilharzia, or schistosomiasis. Instead, my ill health soon took the form of having low-grade nonspecific runs for a year nonstop, plus lying awake for hours each night, scratching between my maddeningly itchy toes at the mildewy fungus that had bloomed there.
Most of all, I had dwelled on the psychological challenges I was likely to face in that sort of isolation, knowing no one on the continent, working and living alone much of the time, being isolated from the outside world except for a mail drop once every few weeks. I was quite familiar with the phenomenon of most Peace Corps volunteers sinking into a depression somewhere around the tenth month of their first year, just when friends got bored sending letters, when the rainy season was at its peak, when the loneliness and alienness began to feel intolerable. I was prepared for that. Little did I know that I would think that I was cracking up from the isolation in the very first month.
The trouble was elephants. Did you know that female elephants have breasts? By this, I do not mean rows of teats, a mama elephant lying on her side with dozens of little piglet elephants nursing with their eyes still closed. I mean breasts, two huge voluptuous billowy mounds, complete with cleavage. I bet you had no idea, did you? Nor did I—it is a subject rarely broached in our public schools. I’m out in the bush that first month, armed with binoculars and stopwatch and notepad, spending the days carefully watching baboons mating left and right. And then, suddenly, some pachyderms come cruising past, and I see some elephant with these, well, breasts. And the natural first reaction is to think, Oh, great, I’m such a horny lascivious pathetic adolescent that after a mere month of isolation in the bush I’ve already cracked, I’m hallucinating breasts the size of Volkswagens on the elephants. Horrors, to have one’s psychotic break occur so soon, and to have it take the form of a puerile sexual obsession many embarrassing steps below gawking at National Geographic nudies. I was greatly relieved to eventually discover that the elephant’s breasts were real, that I was not having some Marlin Perkins wet dream.
It was shortly after my epiphany concerning the elephants that I had one of even greater consequence. The grad students had left and I was alone at the field site, a beautiful mountain overlooking the baboons’ plains below. It was late afternoon and I was relaxed, fairly pleased with myself—I was beginning to be able to differentiate the various baboons from one another with some consistency. That morning, the aggressive Nebuchanezzar, whom I already disliked, had had a fight with a coalition of the aging Aaron and young Joshua. It was a complex, sustained battle in which the outcome had flip-flopped repeatedly, bursts of tight snarling and lunging among the three of them interspersed with high-speed chases over the field and through the bushes. The fight had lasted a couple of minutes until Joshua and Aaron prevailed by a narrow margin, and I had managed to follow the sequence and write down the details in my notebook. I was beginning to get the hang of this observational stuff.
I was lounging in front of my tent, watching the harem of impalas that lived in the nearby bushes, when a Land Rover belonging to the rangers down at the park gate bounced over the crest of the mountain’s ridge and came along the dirt road into camp. I passed through their gate daily and made a point of always stopping to chew the fat with these guys. This was my first community in which one has the archetypally African experience of spending fifteen minutes merely exchanging greetings and salutations: My friend, how are you today? How was your night? How is your work? What do you think the weather will be tonight? What news of the cows of the parents of your sister’s husband? And so on.
The vehicle pulled up. There were three rangers squeezed into the front and something big in the back. They opened up the back doors, and I saw that it was a dead zebra.
The senior ranger approached me with the usual greetings, while one of the junior guys went to work on the zebra with a machete. That’s a dead zebra, I said, interrupting his inquiries about my parents’ health. Yes, of course. Where did it come from? We shot it. You shot it!? Hunting was illegal in Kenya, banned from top to bottom, a source of great pride and self-congratulation in luring tourists to come see Kenya’s game parks rather than those of its neighbors, a measure of the country’s commitment to conservation and the Edenic preservation of its parks. Why were these game park rangers shooting game?
As we spoke, another ranger approached me with the handiwork of his machete, the back leg of the zebra. He tossed it to me, a huge muscular shank of leg, with bits of grass still clinging to the hoof. Was the zebra sick? I asked, hoping they would explain that they had killed it out of mercy. The ranger misunderstood what I was implying—“No, of course it was not sick, we wouldn’t bring meat from a sick animal, this was a big strong male.” He was a bit indignant.
They were getting back in the vehicle, probably miffed at my diffidence about their gift. As they started the engine, I managed to ask, Isn’t it against the law to shoot zebras? The senior ranger looked at me coolly and said, The warden has not paid us in weeks, he is keeping our money for himself, we have no meat.
I sat there cradling the zebra leg in my arm for some time, consumed with my multiple layers of confusion. At age thirteen, I had become vegetarian in some sort of addled gesture to test my self-discipline and irritate my parents. Both motives had succeeded handsomely, and with the passing years, I had become even more doctrinaire about the whole thing and had added on some sensible reasons for the restrictiveness—animal suffering, an ecological consciousness, a health awareness. I had decided that I would eat whatever I had to in Africa, had accepted that as part of my adventure, but I had still managed, a few months into my time there, to avoid any actual meat. So here was my reintroduction to carnivory.
The other problem was a practical one. How the hell did you prepare this? The last meat I had eaten was no doubt a pastrami sandwich at a delicatessen in junior high school, or my mother’s stuffed cabbage meatballs. I had spent all of college in the dormitories subsisting on the horrid purple-flavored yogurt that was their sop to the vegetarians, and during the vacation breaks when I had stayed in the dorm, my forays into preparing food on my own had consisted of going to the local grocery to buy purple-flavored yogurt. I was living on rice and beans and cabbage in camp, occasionally even managing to cook them adequately. I hadn’t a clue what to do with the zebra leg.
Mostly, there was this yawning moral question. Those rangers had killed this zebra, just because they wanted some meat. They were poachers, and here I was with part of their spoils. Should I report them to the warden? But the warden was stealing their salaries. Whom should I report the warden to? Should I go and confront all of them, reason with them, convince them of their error? Who the hell was I to judge them? I could barely wipe my nose. And these rangers had brought me a gift. But they had killed a zebra. But why should a zebra be more valuable than the cows they were allowed to kill? It seemed immoral to actually eat the thing. But it seemed more immoral to waste it, to just toss it in the bushes.
I sat there paralyzed, the moral quandary beginning to coalesce into a term paper, when I noticed that the open muscle of the leg was already covered with flies. Without being aware of quite how I arrived at the decision, I carefully began to skin the leg with my Swiss army knife, and to then hack off pieces of muscle, chopping them into little squares. I made a complete mess of it, with blood and tissue everywhere; that night, hyenas were all over that spot just outside my tent, rooting out the scraps. I began to cook the chunks, letting them molder over the fire for hours, burning the hell out of them, transforming them into tasteless leather, unrecognizable as something that that morning had helped a zebra thunder across the savanna.
It was not possible to “eat” those chunks or, to frame it even more mechanically, to “chew” them. I was feeling so detached, starting to consume these leathery crisps, that it occurred to me that this was the textbook definition of “mastication,” using my primate incisors to cut and shear, and my broad molars to grind repeatedly at this inedible mass.
As I sat there masticating away on the first few pieces of what would be my meals for days to come, eating this illegal meat, a sudden realization swept over me from out of nowhere. I actually stopped chewing, openmouthed, half from the fatigue of all this primate mastication and half with the sheer weight of my sudden knowledge. With a shock, I thought: That Ugandan student … that Ugandan student the other week at the museum … the one I gave that huge amount of money to … that guy wasn’t really a Ugandan student. It was as if my vision had suddenly cleared. It dawned on me as well that I had been ripped off repeatedly by the guy at the food kiosk where I had returned each day, and by the clerk with the imaginary government tax at the lodging place. All this swept over me in a sudden, sagging realization, this sense of, What the hell is with this place, is everything some sort of scam? If it wasn’t a case of the snake bringing me an apple from the Tree of Knowledge, it was at least the rangers bringing me poached zebra kabobs from the Tree of Wising Up.
I spent a horrible, sleepless night, suffering from the synergistic effects of being at a moral crossroads coupled with stupefyingly acidic gas from the charred zebra. The next day, it happened—I lied for the first time in the Garden of Eden. I passed through the park headquarters, as I did most days. I had somehow fallen into the habit of having to give a ride way out of my way to a particular ranger. I would deliver him to a village at the far end of the park’s boundary, out of which, after a period of incoherent shouting, he would emerge silently, in order for me to return him to the headquarters. He was rather brusque and aggressive with me, and in the weeks during which this odd chauffeuring had evolved, I repeatedly reminded myself that I had to be more understanding, that this was no doubt a sort of crudeness found in men from the bush, that he was unused to dealing with someone from a foreign culture. Sometime during that sleepless night, it instead occurred to me that he was an asshole who was exploiting me, and that he was doing some sort of shakedown of the villagers to which I blithely squired him. As usual, he waved me down with his rifle, and in response to his demand that we leave immediately for that village, I took a deep breath and lied. In the careful, offhanded way that I had rehearsed half the night, I said that I had to do something first, and that I’d be back in a few minutes. And instead, I hightailed it through a back track up to my mountain where I sat, glowing with a sense of triumph, picking zebra from my teeth.
There was no turning back. Oh, it wasn’t as if I was out robbing banks under an assumed name by the next day. It wasn’t even so much a behavioral change on my part. Instead, it was the start of my perceiving that things here worked utterly differently than anything I’d previously known. It was a constant source of confusion to me. People were generally far friendlier than any from my world, people with next to nothing were achingly generous with the little they had. But it was all within this framework of someone constantly being up to something. People with uniforms and weapons victimizing those without. People running shops who tallied the bills constantly bilking the customers who couldn’t read or add numbers. Jobs that were available only for certain tribes, that were available only for those who agreed to kick back parts of their salaries to the boss. Health officials who stole the monies for vaccines, relief officials who pocketed the food monies, endless buildings or roads sitting uncompleted because some contractor or other had run off with the funds. Soon I saw one of the whitey versions of it. My next supply trip into Nairobi, I switched to staying at a rooming house run by Mrs. R, an elderly Polish settler, a place filled with white hitchhikers and overlanders boasting of smuggling and bribings at border posts, with tips on black-marketing illegal cash and where to have fake visa stamps made. I saw my first police shakedown: it was on a city bus that was stopped for inspection of IDs. The cops methodically worked their way down the aisle, relieving people of cash, until they spotted me gawking in the back and abruptly sent us on our way. A few days later, I got to see an event classic to an African or Indian city—a thief caught by a crowd and beaten into a coma in a joyous, frenzied outburst.
There was no shortage of explanations for the endless scams and maneuvers and cheatings and victimizations amid a world of people of intense decency. The desperation of being desperately poor. The raw tribal animosities that made “us’s” and “them’s” in ways I couldn’t begin to detect. The most venal of corruption. A Wild West mentality, small-town boredom, unbridled selfish capitalism without even the pretense of regulations and restraint. Maybe this was how my own world worked, if I had ever bothered to experience anything outside of my ivory tower. Maybe this was also how the ivory tower worked, if I wised up a little there as well. But it was a startling revelation, as the animals continued to graze in the museum diorama I thought I had gone to live in. And it was remarkably preparative for my own minor descent a few months later.
Basically, the professor who sent me out there forgot that I existed. It was four or five months into that first season. I came to Nairobi to call him in the States, at great expense, politely reminding him that money was due. Oh, right, sorry about that, I forgot, money will be cabled to the game park within the week. I’d hitch back and go back to work, only to have a few weeks go by with no money. Back to Nairobi, a slightly more desperate call, Oh damn, sorry, completely slipped my mind, money will be cabled in the next few days. Soon, I was utterly broke and stranded in Nairobi. I couldn’t afford to call this guy anymore, and there were no such things as collect calls from Africa in those days. I would never have contacted my parents for help—my independence was of paramount importance, and I rationed my shrinking funds to include the postage for the cheerful weekly aerograms I sent. The U.S. embassy turned out to be useless for Americans in Nairobi unless they were wealthy businessmen. I knew no one in Kenya who had any money. In fact, I basically knew no one in Kenya. Out of desperation, I took to a life of crime. And it worked.
The first scam I worked out was astonishingly simple. In the land of ex-British colonialism, of whites pouring in with their tours and vacations, the last thing any Kenyan would expect from a white guy would be that he was trying to rip off a meal, or a loaf of bread, or 20 shillings. It’s not that whites were considered above larceny. It’s just that they had proven themselves more concerned with stealing far larger things (e.g., your ancestral land, your nation).
First, getting more money. I had inadvertently entered the country with 50 undeclared dollars in 10-dollar bills. I had it in my knapsack, separate from my stash of travelers’ checks, and I had simply forgotten to declare it at customs. In future years, I would do cartwheels to smuggle in undeclared cash for emergency black-marketing. But that first season, I had simply forgotten to declare the cash. Once I discovered my error, I even went to the government bank to try to declare it and fill out the appropriate legal forms. The clerk was utterly perplexed by me—at first, he made a halfhearted attempt to steal the money from me, to hold it there for presumed safekeeping, but seeing my insistence that he come up with some nonexistent form for me to do after-the-fact declaring of foreign currency, he finally brusquely told me to get lost.
So I had some undeclared cash and decided to try to black-market it, piecemeal. Normally, as I was slowly learning from the overlanders at the rooming house, this was done with careful, paranoid, silent Hindu businessmen with terrible complexions who owned the downtown electronics shops, part of the Indian middle class of East Africa. These are the credible businessmen who would give you, perhaps, 10 shillings to the dollar, instead of the going rate of 7 in the banks. Instead, I’d put on my backpack, walk down the main street of Nairobi, gawking at the people like a newcomer. Street sharps would instantly approach me, offering to change money at outlandish rates—change money? Change money? One dollar, 25 shillings. As I had learned, these were, of course, thieves. They normally get you in an alleyway and, if you are lucky, merely shout in a panic about how the “police” have found us, everyone run, and in the tussle, you lose your money. The less articulate fellows merely bash your head in in the alleyway and take your money.
This time, instead of telling the con artists to screw off, I say, Oh great, just got here to Nairobi, looking for someone to change money with, 25 shillings, what a great rate, glad to meet you. Tell him I only have 10 American dollars with me right now, but at the hotel where I’m staying (mention a fancy one), I have five hundred dollars that I want to change. Can you change the 10 right now and then meet me later for the 500?
Gulp, says the thief. Even thieves are sometimes disciplined, and he does a quick calculation—if he gives me 250 shillings for the 10 dollars now, this dumb-ass kid is going to come back with 500 bucks and then I bash his head in. Money is exchanged, friendship is sworn, a follow-up meeting time is arranged. Avoid that street thereafter, working a different one with the next 10-dollar bill.
This worked fine for making the money stretch. As the crisis worsened, even that money was finished. I sold my camera and film at awful prices. I lived for days on nothing but starch, which made me dizzy and stupid. I left the rooming house, took to sleeping in the city park, stole toilet paper from a downtown hotel. Four years earlier, in my first year of college, I had once traveled a great distance to see someone I barely knew who I felt sure would allow me to kiss her at the end of the day. Now, I hitchhiked two days to offhandedly drop in on a near-stranger of a researcher who I felt sure might feed me.
Eventually, I evolved my next scam. I would go to the city market, where there was a labyrinth of vegetable stalls. Sellers plead with you to buy their cabbages. When you are closer to them, they also try to sell you pot if you look like a plausible customer. I am told that some even do sell it, rather than merely rip you off or inform on you to the police, who then blackmail you.
You line up to buy vegetables with money you do not possess. Slick seller inquires whether you want pot. Yes, you betcha, what price. He names some silly price, you agree, proclaiming what a bargain it is. You arrange to return later with the money, he insists that you, his good friend, leave with free vegetables. Naturally, you avoid that stall thereafter. Critical thing is to start with the stall in the very back, and work your way forward with each day, so that you never encounter one of your disappointed friends again, who presumably now wants to slit your throat.
Finally, a number of days into not eating, I made the decision to just plain steal. The strategy seemed to be to simply walk into a middling-class hotel, sit down at the dining room table, and act colonial and confident, giving the number of your supposed room for billing when asked. No Kenyan waiter would dream of challenging you, I assumed. I had targeted the YMCA, planning to pass myself off as a young Christian man who had paid for a room. And on the very day that I intended to execute my plan, the cabled money appeared, the professor finally remembering my existence. Somehow, in my dizzied, food-deprived state, the YMCA seemed to me to have played some role in my salvation. And I would not forget this. A year later, as Uganda was in the middle of a war to overthrow Idi Amin, I would sleep in a bombed-out, roofless YMCA in a small Ugandan town and would give the proprietor what he considered to be an immense sum of money toward rebuilding the roof, thus atoning for my life of crime.