Sure, it was great getting to hang out with a bunch of baboons, but the rest of the novel world I had flung myself into that first year was pretty interesting as well, and at the top of the list of amazing things for me to assimilate was having Masai as my neighbors. Most of Kenya never was a National Geographic special, and much of what still is is fast disappearing. Of the forty or so distinct tribes in the country, perhaps thirty of them are made up of agriculturalists, most of them ethnically Bantu—farmers eking out a living on the terraced slopes of their overpopulated mountains with one or two members of each extended family in the cash economy, trying to get the money for a first bicycle, watch, or pair of jeans, or to replace the traditional grass thatch roof with tin. These people are abundantly aware that there is an outside world and occasionally get enough of a glimmer of what that might mean so as to fervently want a piece of it for themselves and their kids.
But in the far corners of the country are the handful of tribes who are not trying to change, who have not yet become embarrassed by who they are. On the coast, by the Indian Ocean, are the Swahili Muslim tribes whose antiquity and culture and self-assurance put anything in the West to shame. Pushed into the remaining tracts of thick rain forests are the last hunter-gatherers, ethnically related to the Pygmies and Bushmen in other parts of Africa—silent, diminutive, graceful people whose ancient lifestyle predates the invention of agriculture, predates the dominating influx of the Bantu tribes.
And in the parts of the country often regarded as open, howling wastelands are the nomadic pastoralists. Wanderers, contemptuous of hunting, contemptuous of farming, those in the north living off the blood and milk of camels and goats, and in the more benign southern grasslands of my baboons, off of the blood and milk of their cows. It is a pattern repeated throughout Africa—the Watutsi of Rwanda, the Dinkas of Sudan, and, as the most likely to grace the cover of some Out of Africa coffee table book, the Masai of my neck of the woods. All of them ethnically and linguistically related; tall, angular Cushitic or Nilo-Hamitic people. Regal, aloof, intensely clannish, warlike as hell, raiding and plundering the agricultural tribes of whatever area they were passing through since time immemorial. I’ve always been intensely charmed by a theory that has floated around for years that way back when, a couple of millennia ago, the ancestors of all of these cow people were a garrison of Sudanese soldiers on the southern edge of the decaying Roman Empire—there is apparently some support for this idea in the clan and military organization of all of these tribes, as well as in the patterns of some of their military regalia. They happened to wander south a bit down the Nile, discovered that the agriculturalists were pushovers, and just kept wandering, until they had spread out all over the continent.
The Masai certainly fit that pattern. They had appeared on the Kenyan scene somewhere in the nineteenth century, wandering down from the northern deserts and wreaking havoc among everyone in their path. By the turn of the century, they had pretty much displaced the local Kikuyu farmers from the central highlands of Kenya, the lush heartland of the agricultural region. Today, a century later, the rivers and mountains of that region still bear Masai names.
Inconveniently, the Masai had usurped the Kikuyu just around the time that the Brits had started flexing their colonial muscles with plans to do the same. The Kikuyu seemed like altogether more reasonable people to steal land from than the Masai. Things might have turned nasty, requiring a bit of a dust-up, had not a jolly good pandemic intervened to help enforce Pax Britannia. In 1898, a staggering outbreak of a cattle disease called rinderpest occurred, killing about 80 percent of the cows and, as a result, a big chunk of the Masai as well. That took a bit of wind out of the sails of the famed warriors, making them altogether more docile negotiating adversaries. In 1906, the Brits concluded a treaty with the Masai. In exchange for giving up the plush central highlands, the Masai would get not one but two promised lands, one a desiccated track of grassland in the north, the other, my baboons’ grassland of the south, plus a corridor linking the two to facilitate cattle drives. Swell deal; the Masai decamped. Within a few years, the Brits had taken away the northern land plus the now superfluous corridor, everyone squeezed into the southern grasslands, which turned out to have pretty substantial amounts of cattle sleeping sickness. Even though the Masai would continue to this day to be ferociously predatory toward their immediate neighbors, never again would they pose the threat of occupying some land that the Brits had measured out for a cricket pitch.
And so, the Masai have lived happily ever after. They have resolutely tried to hold back the twentieth century while much of the rest of the country leapt into its worst excesses, washed down with a bottle of Coke. Sure, in some corners of Masai land, change was coming. In the county seat, for example, fifty miles from my game park, one might spot some Masai guys hanging out and chewing the fat, half in business suits, holding briefcases, half in cloaks, holding spears. But in the relatively isolated corner I had settled in, nothing had shifted much. The nearest school was thirty miles away and perhaps one person per village spoke Swahili, every man still had to kill a lion with his spear in order to achieve warrior status, marriages were still polygamous, and wedding parties still always featured big tureens of coagulated cow’s blood for dessert. It was not yet a world that was particularly open to new ideas.
I discovered this in a rather disconcerting way one morning during that first season in the troop. I had just pulled off a great darting, although a slightly unfair one. Solomon was in his first consortship with Devorah, the young daughter of highest-ranking Leah. They were mating in the bushes, mating in a tree, mating in the open field. She had a maximal swelling, probably ovulating, probably smelled like a dream, and ol’ Solomon couldn’t keep away from her. No, no, it’s not what you think, I did not sneak up and dart Solomon in the back while he was mating. I have my professional standards. I darted Daniel. Squirrely little adolescent Daniel was sneaking around all day watching the two—couldn’t take his eyes off them, spent the whole morning following at a not-so-discreet distance, trying to see the action, craning his neck, taking it all in, no doubt hoping to pick up some pointers from Solomon on how to meet female baboons.
So Daniel was more interested in voyeurism than keeping an eye on me, let his guard down, and I had zipped a dart into his keister. He had gone under fast, easy fun darting, and I was gamboling back. About a kilometer’s walk to the Jeep, and he didn’t weigh much. I was actually sort of skipping back, happy, with Daniel cradled in my arms. Great morning.
Marching over hill and dale with my sleepy boy, I encounter two Masai warriors, wrapped in their distinctive red cloaks and nothing else, guys from the village past the one where I was beginning to make some friends. They are quite interested in the baboon. I put him down for a rest, want to show him off. Lookihere, look at my baboon.
“Is he dead?” Atypically for these parts, one of them spoke some Swahili in addition to Maa, the language of the Masai. My Maa was nonexistent, but my Swahili was sort of serviceable.
“Nah, just sleeping.”
“Why is he sleeping?”
“I have given him a special medicine to make him sleep.”
“If you give that medicine to a man, will he sleep?”
“You betcha,” I say. I go on, stating what seems to be an obvious truism. “That is because the body of a baboon is very much like the body of a man.”
Both warriors seem utterly perplexed by this idea.
“No it is not,” says the other Masai through his friends translation. “A man is a man and a baboon is a wild animal.”
“Yes, but we are very close, we are almost like relatives.”
“No we are not,” says the Masai, who is seeming a bit piqued.
I push my point. “But once we were even like baboons, we even had tails, we were close relatives.”
“No way.”
“Yes, yes, up north, in the desert, they have even found bones of people who are not really people, they are half people, with heads like baboons.”
“No way.”
“Yes, in my country, the doctors can even take the heart out of a man and give him the heart of a baboon, he will be fine, he will live to be an old man (okay, so I exaggerate medical progress a bit). I could take out your heart and give you a baboon heart and you would still be a warrior.”
“You cannot. No way.” He’s getting a bit testy. The other Masai has been bending down, examining Daniel, picking through his fur, exposing the surprisingly white skin of a baboon.
“Look,” I say, pointing to the white skin, “just like mine.”
“No, you are a red man.” I find this to be immensely pleasing, although no doubt he means I look like a white guy out in the sun on his way to a melanoma, rather than noting my natural resemblance to Crazy Horse.
“No, I am really a white man.” I hitch up my shorts, expose my untanned rear. “Look. White, just like the baboon.”
Suddenly, I get this giddy desire to shock these guys a little. I continue, “These baboons really are our relatives. In fact, this baboon is my cousin.” And with that I lean over and give Daniel a loud messy kiss on his big ol’ nose.
I get more of a response than I bargained for. The Masai freak and suddenly, they are waving their spears real close to my face, like they mean it. One is yelling, “He is not your cousin, he is not your cousin! A baboon cannot even cook ugali!” (Ugali is the ubiquitous and repulsive maize meal that everyone eats here. I almost respond that I don’t really know how to cook the stuff either, but decide to show some prudence at last.) “He is not your cousin!”
He is pointing the spear right at me, and real slow and calm I say, Okay, okay, you’re absolutely right, you know what? He’s not really my cousin, he is not a relative, I’ve never even seen this guy before in my life, I just work here, etc. After many words of this sort, the Masai are finally mollified, put down their spears, and tell me in very broken Kenyan English that they are my friends very much.
End of incident, we go our separate ways swearing eternal brotherhood. How unlikely it would have been to be speared by a fundamentalist wearing no pants.
A short time later, I got another lesson as to how the Masai were dealing with new ideas. I had made my contacts with the nearest village, was beginning to make some acquaintances there, and had lucked out in finding an ideal person to introduce me to that world. My first friend was Rhoda, half Masai and half Kikuyu, the village’s emissary to the outside world. Most probably, Rhoda’s mother was taken by Masai warriors during a raid on a Kikuyu village, resulting in her forced marriage into Masaidom. Her mother had presumably been old enough to have learned much about her own tribe as well as the outside world that was just encroaching at the time, and Rhoda had been brought up as a complete anomaly—she speaks Swahili and some English in addition to her Maa and Kikuyu, can read a bit and handle money, can hitch a ride fifty miles to the county seat and negotiate the sale of some of the village’s cattle and coordinate purchasing desired supplies in return. She has single-handedly brought driblets of the Western world into the village and, by inventing the middle class in the village, has also invented class lines in this “African socialist” society as well.
On some occasions, I was struck with how much of the outside world Rhoda could have gotten hints of, while still having an utterly Masai mindset. This I experienced the day I quizzed her about how to say “lion” in Maa. I had been leafing through my new Maa dictionary and had discovered that there are actually two names for lion. One, which I had been taught by Rhoda, turns out to be the fake name for lion. It is the one you say out in the open, and is not the real name. The real name, in contrast, is said only in the safety of your house at night. The dictionary explained that the Masai believe that if you say the real name of the lion out-of-doors, the lion will hear its name being called, will come and eat you.
Howsabout it, Rhoda, is that true? Yes, it is true, you should not say that name; she gets visibly itchy each time I do. Aw, come on, Rhoda, the lion isn’t going to come. Yes, I have seen that many times, it will come and eat you. Aw, come on, really. Well, I have heard that that will happen.
I push harder. Come on, Rhoda, are you telling me that the lion will hear its name, you know that lions cannot understand that, they wouldn’t come.
Yes, they will come.
The lion understands Masai language?
Finally, she gets irritated, and in one petulant paragraph, sums up the two worlds she knows about and how she balances them.
“The lion cannot understand its name. Anyone who has been to school knows that a lion cannot understand the language of people…. But if you say that word too many times outside, the lion will come and eat you.”
The subject was closed, as far as she was concerned.
Now, I was about to discover just how much Rhoda was able to embrace outside ideas while still keeping one foot anchored in Masaidom. It had been a fabulous morning with the baboons. Young serene Joshua had been working his charm with skittish Ruth, consorting with her; some jerk adolescent male was hassling Job and had been mauled as a result by the righteous Rachel; Benjamin had sat next to me on a log. It didn’t get better than that, so I’d decided to take off the rest of the day, to drop in on the village to visit Rhoda and her family. Rhoda looks completely Kikuyu: a little dumpling of a woman amid all the lanky ectomorphic Masai. Giggly, effusive, and motherly—more traits to set her apart from most of the villagers. Normally missing is her husband, who is a ranger in the park and is usually assigned to some distant outpost, patrolling for poachers. He is the tallest, gangliest, meanest, scariest-looking Masai I’ve ever known, especially when he is carrying an automatic weapon in his ranger’s uniform. Actually, he is exceedingly gentle, especially when talking about the baby rhino under his guard, or when bending over double literally and figuratively to dote on small, pear-shaped Rhoda, whom he calls “mama.” They make one of the odder-looking couples around, if one of the most endearing. Just to add some waves to the placid scene of a nuclear family are his second and third wives, both of whom are quite junior to Rhoda and are gently bossed around by her. The minute Rhode’s husband is off duty, he is out of uniform and back in his Masai cloak, cruising the village with his wives and many children. One child does not accompany him, however, as that one got some sort of fever and encephalitis during his first rainy season, so far as I can reconstruct, and was left a hydrocephalic monster with the neurological reflexes of a newborn. Rhoda and her husband spent god knows how many months’ salary to buy an absurd, poignant British perambulator, circa 1940, that now sits in the mud and cow-dung house, the swaddled bug-eyed head of the kid peering out from it, moaning chronically.
Anyway, I stop in to say hello, and Rhoda takes advantage of the situation to commandeer my vehicle. Soon, we are driving the three kilometers to the trading post, instead of her having to walk. I find myself nostalgically reliving the irritation that all boys feel when forced to go shopping with Mom. We go into the store—also mud and dung and branches, run by the other half Masai, half Kikuyu, in the region, an old grizzled friend of Rhoda’s. Rhoda inspects the twenty-odd items available in the store—two types of blankets, soap, soda, maize meal, eggs, sugar, tea, flashlights, batteries, bulbs, malaria medicine, snuff (a favorite of Masai). Then she goes to work comparative shopping. She has me stretch out the two types of blankets to compare their length and to estimate which would cover her children. This is academic—she is just window-shopping for blankets today, and besides, the same two models are the only ones that have ever existed here. She checks out the soap, hefts the individual flashlight bulbs, and finally settles on her choices for the day: an egg and two potatoes. She is happy with the half hour of shopping, and we return to the village, where I am invited for tea.
Trouble starts. Serere, the younger brother of her husband, is there and drunk. Serere is a fine man who, unfortunately, is hurtling toward the frequent accompaniment of Masai elderhood, namely being drunk half the time. Over the course of the traveling I would do throughout Africa in my free time in the years to come, it would become apparent that drunks were a major problem, but only if they were friendly drunks, as Serere always was. Angry drunks would be simple, because the same thing would always happen. Invariably, I would be hitching through some hamlet, waiting to catch a lift, and I would be accosted by an angry drunk who wanted to fight. Always an angry, incoherent character who in mixed English and Swahili would tell me that he wanted to fight, was going to fight me, and that he was an “A—number one Mr. Big [an idiom in Swahili—bwana kubwa] absolutely kung fu Muhammad Ali.” I would be unafraid, not because I am capable of winning a fistfight with anyone except Mother Teresa, but because I would always be saved in the same way. I would stand there smiling moronically. A crowd would form and out of it would always burst an incredibly meek man, always in a white shirt and—here’s the giveaway—pen in his shirt pocket. It would be the town schoolteacher, horrified at the insult to a visitor, the possibly literate and thus distinguished whitey. He would indignantly intervene with Mr. Kung Fu Muhammad Ali and, since, like all schoolteachers here, he would probably have been the schoolteacher since time began, the drunk was once his pupil and was under his magic sway. A veritable Norman Rockwell scene would ensue—“Schoolteacher admonishing his former pupil, the town drunk,” drunk sheepish, incoherent apologies, looking at his feet, etc. Schoolteacher would then happily take me to his place for tea, where he would quiz me on the American presidents, attempt to discuss our lord Jesus Christ, and make me give him an example of my penmanship.
Thus, the mean drunks are easy, if you remember the order of the presidents. It’s the friendly ones who are a problem. The minute they see you, they want to kill something for you. I once visited a friend at his family farm. His older brother George, drunkard, bully, black sheep, wife beater, child abandoner, etc., took a shine to me, and spent four days while I was there trying to slaughter his only cow, goat, so on, in my honor. The very last dinner, we’re all sitting round the fire pit and gorging ourselves, all except George, who is missing. Suddenly, he bursts into the room, glowering in drunken concentration. In his hands he is holding a chicken. He marches up to me and in a spasm of alcoholic oration, sputters, You … are … my …friend!, and flings the chicken at me. Unfortunately, in his state, he has neglected to bind its legs and wings, and the bird goes scattering in terror, flying, squawking, crapping all over us and the food.
Now a similar menace, Serere immediately wants to slaughter one of his few goats in my honor (mind you, this is a village I constantly drop in on). I talk my way out of it, and he retreats to the corner, a bit sullen. Rhoda and I settle in for tea. As always, it is an interesting affair watching someone find anything in a Masai house. They are made of mud and dung, a labyrinth from the doorway so that no light penetrates except for holes here and there in the roof that let in shafts of light. Somewhere in there is a cow skin bed, somewhere some goats, maybe an old man sleeping off his boozing with Serere, somewhere the nightmare perambulator child.
We sit contentedly drinking tea. Rhoda goes to a secret cubbyhole where she has hidden more and, disaster!, she discovers someone has taken her stash of money. Rhoda, half Kikuyu, half Masai, the leading edge of all that is modern in this village, was among the first to introduce cash into the Masai world, and she is using every cent of hers and her husband’s (one of the only men working a “job”) to pay school fees for the kids. The money is gone. She knows the culprit—Serere has taken the money and used it for drink at the local tourist camp’s staff canteen instead of drinking the home brew. Serere, proud arrogant Masai warrior and elder, admits his crime with a proud dismissive shrug, as if to say, Woman, this is my prerogative. Rhoda, with a howl, smashes him across the side with a firewood log.
All hell breaks loose. Serere regains his footing while Rhoda, wailing and shouting, chases him around the room. Once, he stands his ground shakily and reaches for his spear, as if to do her in, and Rhoda, outraged at his impertinence, decks him again with the log. More shouting and wailing, and the room quickly fills with villagers, excited and voyeuristic. Old grizzled elders take the corner, the young mamas stand behind Rhoda, everyone else crowds in to watch.
A scene out of a temperance play ensues. Rhoda and her female coterie wail and complain. Five years ago, the government would come to Masai country and demand one child per district per year to send to school, and parents hid their loved ones against the horror. By now, women like Rhoda in each village are agitating for the kids to be sent to schools—bookless, penless, paperless, nearly teacherless huts perhaps thirty miles away where school fees are demanded in exchange for a dubious education. The avant-garde in Masai land want their kids educated, and none more than Rhoda and her band. She and her supporters wail that the old men have got to stop drinking up all the school fees for the kids, the kids have to go to school. Rhoda takes the lead—she is articulate, she is the radical in the village, the new wave, Bolshie bra burner who, with her half-Kikuyu heritage, has brought all sorts of suspicious ideas into the village but is tolerated because of her smarts, her outside skills, her schemes for bringing cash into the village. And for what, to have it drunk up by you stinking old men! The accusation has generalized beyond Serere, now perhaps comatose on the floor, and has focused on all the old geezers. The goings-on are being translated from Maa into Swahili and English for me, and various individuals in the fray seem to be turning to me at various points in the argument, glancing at me expectantly. I begin to suspect with some horror that I am being viewed as an arbitrator.
Rhoda’s women are certain that it’s a swell idea to spend their money shipping the kids away to the empty schoolhouse with no books or paper or pencils before they are shipped back a few years later to tend the cows. “You old men have to stop drinking the school fees so that the children can go to school and wear school uniforms.” The old men say, in effect, Schooling, a waste of time, stupid stuff, we old men work hard, we should be able to get blind stupid falling-down drunk whenever we want to (an old man here is anyone over twenty-five, an ex-warrior, and thus an elder likely to have recently married a thirteen-year-old. Contrary to the claims of these particular old men, old men do the least work in the village, the order of labor generally being women, children, dogs, donkeys, and only then the men). Amid continued yelling, the old men are adamant—“Ah, school, stupid stuff. What good is school anyway?” they demand.
The women fall back, a bit confused. In truth, Rhoda is the only one to have a clear idea of what a school really is, having gone to one for a bit. They regroup, confer, and start yelling, “Well, you old men have to stop drinking up all the money because there is no money to spend for food for the children.” Aw, gowon, the old men say, we’re Masai, there’s plenty of food, there’s cows, aren’t there? There’s always cow blood for the kids to drink, there’s always milk, whataya dames complaining about anyway, Jeez Louise, etc. They’re chortling and making fun of Rhoda and her band, which is shrinking in number by the minute. Aw, the kids look fine, the old men conclude (actually, protein malnutrition, malaria, tuberculosis, and every parasite ever known runs rampant in these kids). Rhoda, alarmingly, suddenly demands my judgment. I hem and haw, and come up with an attempt at a compromise:
“Look, if the kids are well fed and go to school now, they will learn so much and afterward get such good jobs and bring home so much money that you old men will be able to get drunk all the time on the really good stuff, the stuff they sell to the white people in the tourist lodge.”
This is briefly acclaimed, but is lost in a sudden outburst of old men complaining about Rhoda—who is this Kikuyu woman anyway? She looks kind of short and round to me, not sure if we should trust her, blah blah.
Rhoda, in a fury, as her last supporters melt away, gives an impassioned tirade: “All of us women and Robert here agree that you old men must stop getting drunk and using money that should be for school and food for the children and all you dirty Masai should start washing the children’s eyes so that they stop getting eye disease, my kids don’t get eye disease, and all of you old men should start wearing pants and believe in our lord Jesus Christ.”
Oh ho. The Christianized Kikuyu half of Rhoda has come out with a vengeance, and she goes on about the twin themes of all agricultural Kenyans when they complain about the Masai—too much bare buttocks and not enough Jesus. And I’ve been dragged in as a supposed member of the Cover Your Buns for Christ Party.
The meeting breaks up in a general confused hubbub as the old men filter out, chortling and victorious, off for a drink in the shade of a tree. Serere rouses himself from the dust long enough to announce the killing of a goat in my honor; he is ignored. I quickly make my escape.