It was a fitting day for my Jeep’s engine, which had been sputtering ominously for a month, to give up the ghost, as that morning, I’d seen what had to have been one of the finales of old Isiah’s life. He was the oldest male in the troop, by far, ancient, wild-eyed, arthritic, wasted. His personality seemed to consist mostly of his being old. He hobbled around, kvetched and clucked and groaned when he would sit down, repositioning himself repeatedly, swatting at the kids. He was not grandfatherly, charming, or going quietly into the night. I saw what I believe to have been his last mating that morning. Esther, a young kid coming into estrus who couldn’t get any of the big guys interested, wound up being in a consortship with Isiah. He did a fairly credible job of keeping up with her, remembered the old moves about herding her away if any threatening males were around (in this case, young juveniles). Finally, he mounted her and, in the throes of the unaccustomed excitement, threw up on her head. Such was Isiah’s farewell to the amorous life (as well as poor Esther’s introduction). He disappeared forever shortly thereafter, probably picked off by a hyena or lion.
So with Isiah’s tryst recorded in the archives, I turned my attention to the Jeep, which had clearly taken a turn for the worse that day. It expired some fifty yards from the mechanic’s at the park headquarters, and his diagnosis was that some part or other had to be replaced. A few hours’ worth of arduous radio calls to Nairobi brought the news that said part was not to be had anywhere in the country for a few weeks until some foreign exchange crisis could be resolved and a shipment of auto parts sitting on the docks in Mombassa on the Indian Ocean could be unloaded.
Faced with my work completely shutting down for a while, I did the only sensible thing, which was to grab my backpack, catch a ride with some tourists to Nairobi, just go travel somewhere, anywhere in East Africa that hitchhiking would take me.
I start off in Nairobi by going to the industrial area to find the petrol tankers doing the long-haul transcontinental trips. I hang out in the truck yard all day, finally find a tanker heading my way, weasel my way on. It is a cranky old Leyland, with a narrow bed jammed in the cab, bottles and cans of food everywhere, thousands of gears and widgets and tools and rags and oil cans—a soapbox racer that was somehow supposed to make it to Uganda. The drivers are two coastal lslamics—Mahmoud and Ismaeli, both wasted, sullen, sitting chewing on some mildly amphetamine-like plant from the coast. The lorry proves to be capable of nothing more than 15 miles an hour, so we creep off west of Nairobi into the sunset.
Dawn comes, we are still creeping along up a 9,000-foot escarpment. What an odd thing, moving at a steady walking speed in a lorry for hours on end, just sitting back and watching the scenery. We finally reach the top of the escarpment and the sorely tested lorry collapses utterly. Pile out, pore over the engine, and pronounce it near death. Mahmoud catches a bus going in the opposite direction, back to Nairobi for a mechanic. Ismaeli and I settle in for what turns out to be two days of sitting next to the lorry. My comprehension of his Swahili becomes more adept as he becomes less sullen. I am initially frustrated with the delay, but decide that this is absurd to worry about. So we sit. Soon Ismaeli disappears into the cartons of the cab, emerges with his prayer mat. A bit of cogitating upon the sky, he decides where east is, and goes about his praying. He soon is lecturing me about the Arabic roots of Swahili, enthusiastically assigning Swahili the status of a simple dialect. I delight him with examples of how close Hebrew is to Arabic. He ventures to place Hebrew as an Arabic dialect also, and when I fail to complain about that, he says I should bother no more with my food, I will eat along with him. His meals turn out to be, of all things, spaghetti. Ismaeli is from what was originally Italian Somaliland, and has picked up a passion for the stuff from the ex-colonials. He makes a huge pot of it on a kerosene stove, throws in some questionable camel’s milk that he has brought along in a skin. We fall to eating, tremendous amounts, with our hands. He settles into praying and, bored, I pull out my alto recorder and begin to play a bit. This proves a revelation to him, and before long, Ismaeli has commandeered it away from me, tootling on it gingerly. He proves unable to get much out of it in the way of melody, but has a wicked Somali-Arabic sense of rhythm. He has soon incorporated the recorder into his praying. Sitting there, reedy and ascetic, noodling away with these sort of impatient rhythmic spasms, eyes closed, swaying back and forth. Suddenly, the moment is right, he drops the recorder and flings himself on the mat. So the time passes, I slowly become Arabic Italian, eating spaghetti and listening to Ismaeli chanting and ululating away.
The second morning another petrol lorry comes along, and it is decided that I will continue on that one. Ismaeli clearly covets the recorder, but settles for one of my sweaters, as he is dressed only in coastal casual and nearly freezes each night. The new petrol lorry seems equally senescent, but I jump in anyway. The driver is Jeremiah, a gigantic burly gruff older man. He has a stylishly shaved head, wears a rather natty embroidered fez, heavy square black-framed sunglasses, and has a marvelous upper incisor of gold. He has tremendous forearms, which impress me considerably. The assistant, in contrast, is Jonah, who is about thirty, with sunken eyes and scraggly beard, and reeking of undernourishment. His clothes are a shambles, covered with grease. He seems passably nice, in a thoroughly downtrodden way.
At a mountain village we stop for lunch. I reach for my food, but Jeremiah herds me along with him into a food kiosk. The normal procedure now would be to scan the menu painted on the wall and order something, but this seems to be other than Jeremiah’s style. With a belligerence that initially shocks me, he bullies and threatens everyone in sight, and within minutes has the kiosk staff galvanized into uncertain action. Some run next door to buy fresh tomatoes and onions. Others get hot peppers from somewhere. A boy is dispatched to the meat shop to have some goat cooked, posthaste. Like a king in his court, Jeremiah clears off a table and, wielding a knife, begins slicing, dicing, and anything else imaginable with the utensil. Tomatoes in one bowl, spices off to one side. Peppers sequestered somewhere, meat arrives and is chopped. I attempt to help with my lowly pocketknife and am reprimanded and returned to the crowd of spectators that has gathered. Jeremiah continues to shout orders and pronounce judgment on each new item brought to him. His wrath is Olympian at the insufficient number of onions. Finally all is prepared, each item chopped and resting in its bowl. With manic grace, Jeremiah dumps everything onto the tabletop, mixes it by hand, and we all fall upon the food, grabbing great hunks of meat, wrapping it around tomatoes and onion. Jeremiah leads the way, holding on to a hot pepper in his right hand, taking a bite of it, then jamming in as much other food as quickly as possible to absorb the heat.
Toward the end of the meal, Jeremiah requisitions a share of it for Jonah, who has stayed on the lorry. Staggering out after the feast, I ask why Jonah has remained there. “He likes lorries.” This proves to be a statement that does not begin to approach the magnitude of the truth. Jonah, indeed, does like lorries. His job is to sleep on the lorry at night as a watchman and to serve as the general handyman; whether his obsession brought him to this perfect occupation or whether it only bloomed and festered after he had begun his trade, Jonah has allowed his life to become inseparably intertwined with the lorry. In short, he will not leave it. For days afterward, watching carefully, I never see him set foot on the ground. Whenever we eat, he instead scurries around on the trailers, checking petrol barrels, adjusting an infinity of bolts and latches, polishing the hood and doors of the cab meticulously, all without touching the ground, swinging from cab to trailer to cab to bumper. I conclude that his malnourished appearance is due to former head drivers who, unlike Jeremiah, failed to bring food to him at meals. He projects an air of subdued fervor, of his destiny with lorries as nothing less than a case of divine sentence passed upon him. He proves skilled at swinging out of the cab while we’re moving, crawling to the second trailer, and urinating out the back of it.
We leave. Jeremiah is delighted with the meal, and soon falls into an odd song in his native Kikuyu. He has an undefined rumbly bass, which fills up the lower half of the cab. The song is generally lugubrious, but with occasional bouncy points at which he pats the top of his fez rhythmically.
Reaching the town of Eldoret in western Kenya one late afternoon, we also break down, seriously. I go off for a walk and return to discover that I’ve been traded to Pius, another driver heading for Rwanda. Thus began by far the worst nightmare of any of my travels in Africa. It started with a somewhat bizarre though innocuous evening. Pius, whose hometown is Eldoret, is the leader of a gang that is obviously the coolest collection of guys this side of the Rift Valley. He is young, quite tall, and thin. He wears skin-tight jeans, a sports shirt open to his pants, a flashy sports jacket, shades, a dangling cigarette, and, to top it off, an absolutely ludicrous pair of bright red six-inch platform shoes. I meet the guys, all similarly dressed. Everyone is chain-smoking and with the platform shoes all are at least 6 foot 14. Somehow I am introduced as “Peter,” which quickly catches on despite my protests. Pius and the Boys go strutting out, as I hurry along after them. They are well armed with American slang.
“Man, Peter, we’re gonna show you Eldoret tonight.”
“Fuckin right, Peter.”
We strut on. Hit the first bar, the crowd clears. I anticipate them getting into a fight with other patrons over an imagined insult.
“Gimme a fuckin beer.”
“Gimme a fuckin beer.”
“Gimme a fuckin beer.”
“Gimme a fuckin beer.”
“And one soda for me too, please.” There are limits to one’s transformations. Move to another bar. I seem to have captured their vague affections for no obvious reason.
“Yeah, man, Peter’s okay.”
“Yeah, Peters okay.”
“Yeah.”
While this wasn’t my textbook idea of fun, at least it seemed tolerable in the scheme of things. I would go along with Pius, we would hop in his vehicle tomorrow, bid the Boys good-bye, and go to Kampala. I had no premonition of the nightmarish quality that Pius would take on instead. In retrospect, I am not sure if he was truly malevolent, or just a rough bush Kenyan who didn’t quite know how to go about being hospitable, or if I had somehow become a subject in some brainwashing experiment.
At dawn, I am awakened by Pius, fresh in clean new sports jacket, the rest of the outfit intact. “Today, Kampala, man, Peter, just stick with me.” I rouse myself in hopes of actually going. “But first a drink.” In we go. I am feeling mealy and diseased from lack of sleep and initially decline the Coke that Pius has delivered to go with his beer. I eventually drink it out of politeness, and he gets me another one, which I drink. We move to another bar, “And soon we leave,” and soon to another. It is early afternoon. I am feeling hungry, because my every attempt at food is always jocularly shouted down by Pius and the Boys, with a Coke replacing the food. I protest about whether we are leaving, feeling a bit surly and unappreciative, as if I have somehow missed a subtle point in the conversation that would have explained why we were still here. Pius responds by looming over me menacingly and demanding I lend him 40 shillings. I numbly comply, he returns with another soda, which he makes me drink. My teeth take on a Coke fuzz. Pius is indefatigable, always moving on to new places. It has somehow evolved that I am being herded about by him and the Boys; midafternoon, I realize that they have not let me out of their sight since dawn. I am hungry and sick of Cokes and more arrive that I am expected to drink. He treats me with solicitous brotherly care that seems to barely mask the suggestion of wild violence. More moving around, more Cokes. I begin to look for ways out, but Jeremiahs lorry is still out of it, hood up, mechanics at work, Jonah peering from the trailer. I sink into carbonated oblivion, begin to feel disconnected from myself as if my body has somehow become that of this Peter, and I am stuck inside him. Exhaustion. More sodas. Pius borrows more money, returns some of the previous, begins an incoherent talk about taking me with him to Zaire to smuggle diamonds.
“Yeah, Peter’s all right.”
“Yeah, Peter’s all right.”
“Yeah, Peter’s all right.”
We push on, moving into a night similar to the previous. No one seems to require sleep except me, or else they sleep in shifts so that there are always a few of them there to keep me awake, keep me moving, keep me drinking Cokes. Four in the morning, finally asleep in one of the bars.
Dawn, two hours of sleep. As if I’m utterly incapable of learning, Pius is able to rouse me again with promises. “Ah, today, Kampala, man.” Back to the bar, the guys there already, pushing me along when I get uncooperative. More sodas. Drinking into oblivion. I’ll never get out, I’ll the in Eldoret.
Around noon, like a savior, Jeremiah reappears. I rush to him for help, but he motions me away, as he is about to start preparations for another of his meals. He is dressed in a one-piece jumpsuit, which emphasizes his voluminous head in a way that would impress even the most jaded of observers. He has on a scarf and, of course, his fez, and has perhaps dressed up just for the meal. Pius and the Boys join in, herd me along, following Jeremiah. He obtains his tomatoes and onions without much difficulty, but the search for acceptable meat is Odyssean. Store after store, Jeremiah checking carcasses of cows, sniffing slabs of meat, rejecting here, chastising owners there, accepting a few choice offerings. He seems to be known everywhere and no money is ever visibly exchanged. A crowd has now gathered, following. Some get to carry the tomatoes or onions, but the meat is Jeremiah’s domain. The selected samples go into various pockets of the jumpsuit. At one place he actually searches through his pockets, finds the right piece, and trades it in for a different one. Finally we all congregate at a table where the preparation rituals are repeated. We fall upon the food. I repeatedly broach the subject with Jeremiah of his saving me from Pius. “We talk after lunch.” Lunch finished, Jeremiah disappears to wash his hands, Pius pulls me away and herds me to the other end of town for sodas. More money lent, endless Cokes, threats that I’m not even certain about.
Evening. We pass Jeremiah’s lorry, where Pius wakes Jonah seemingly out of spite. Jonah asks me if I could bring him a soda sometime the next day, as he has become thirsty.
Morning, more of the same, no sleep, sinking deeper into hell. I decline my first offered Coke, at 7:00 in the morning, but then remember Jonah and say yes. Pius is suspicious. “What do you want it for, for Jonah?” I admit to it. He grabs me and tells me I’d better not try to get a soda to Jonah or else I’m in trouble. “Now do you want a soda?” I admit to no longer being in need of one. Good, he gets me a soda, which I’m forced to drink. I begin to make plans for my escape, my confrontation with him, and assume that he will knife me. Early afternoon, we are on the way to a new bar, I am just about to explode into a tirade about the whole situation, to tell him I’m leaving, when Pius suddenly brightens. “Ah, look who is here, Peter,” as a car pulls up alongside us. Great, now what. Of all people, it is his mother. “Peter, this is my mama.” We drive to their house on the edge of town, she is impossibly sweet to me. “And what are you doing here in Kenya, Peter?” Pius has turned into a little boy, doting and giggly around his mama, shyly showing off family photos, drinking lemonade with me. To his credit, he even seems a bit embarrassed by his asinine shoes. Only this transformation keeps me from seeking help with his mother. “Madame, you’re son is a Beelzebub and has made a captive of me” seems inappropriate, as if I’ve imagined the former Pius as he now rushes to help his mother carry in things from the car. We go, I shaking hands with her, Pius kissing her good-bye as we leave the car in town. We turn the corner, Pius savagely pushes me into a bar; back to business.
Early evening, in the bar. I go to the bathroom and Pius’s toadies slip up—no one accompanies me. I see my chance to escape and decide to give up my backpack and possessions, trivial loss. I sprint out the back, into the street, and there’s another lorry there, the engine revving, about to leave. I run over, begin to climb up the cab to ask the driver for a lift anywhere, when I am grabbed and pulled down. It is Pius. Forget it, I say, my name is Robert, I’m getting out of here, I’ve had it. No you’re not, that man will cheat you, he is very bad. Don’t give me that, I’m leaving. I begin climbing up again, when Pius wrenches me back, knocks me to the ground. It hurts, I feel a childish rush of tears, of feeling petulant instead of outraged or terrified. The Boys are out by now, I am hustled back in. Pius seems mildly uncomfortable about the whole scene, as if some social faux pas has been committed. “Aw come on, Peter, let’s get you a soda.”
Toward midnight as I sit drooping away over another Coke, Pius suddenly says, “Ah, Peter is tired, we have to get him to sleep.” I am herded into a rooming house next door, where I am dumped into a bed and wished good night. Can this be true, this luck? I fall asleep and shortly afterward am awakened by hammering at my door. It is Pius, in sunglasses, cigarette, bikini underpants, and, of course, platform shoes. He is accompanied by what appear to be two prostitutes who are shoved into my room. “Yeah, Peter, all right!” The door slams. I politely explain that I am going to sleep, and the two women storm out and are soon engaged in some argument with Pius, tossing abuse upon him for reasons hopefully unrelated to me. Things are thrown, there is a beating, much yelling and crying; this goes on through much of the sleepless night.
Morning, back at the bar, over a Coke. I am desperate, and during the night, I have decided to poison Pius by slipping barbiturates into his beer. I have brought them along on the trip as emergency painkillers, and I am hoping to put him in a coma. Instead, luck is finally with me, and for no obvious reason, this is one beer too many for Pius at such a delicate time of day. He becomes violently ill, puking in the bar as he heaves toward the bathroom. His flunkies follow; one grabs me by the wrist and pulls me along. I am told to get a towel from the barroom. I run out and realize—I am alone. As a measure of the desperate extent to which I have been isolated, starved, exhausted, scared, confused, I pause for a second, worrying that I will be punished badly. Pius retches again in the bathroom, the Boys are arguing about what to do. I grab my pack and run out.
It is sunny, people are going about normal activities, on their way to work, maybe anticipating lunch. My luck is still with me. Miraculously, Jeremiah is there with his lorry, which is operable and seems ready to go. Jonah motions me on, I hide in the back. For an excruciating half hour, Jeremiah starts the engine, fumfers with things in the cab, gets out to polish the hood ornament, shakes hands, waves good-byes. I cower in the trailer, awaiting my recapture. And Pius and the Boys never emerge. We leave. I crawl to the cab while we are moving, with Eldoret safely out of sight, no sign of Pius. I swing into the cab using Jonah’s technique.
“Mister Peter, you have left Pius. Very bad man.”
By evening we have reached Kitale, home of Jeremiah’s sister. We stop there for the night. I am still shaken with relief at my escape from the madman, readily fall into the maternal care of his sister and a number of her friends. The one-room house is filled with heavy maternal women who giggle at my every move. I am in ecstasy at the healthy family atmosphere. Children abound, Kikuyu music is on the radio, everyone is dancing and jiggling around. Jeremiah’s brother-in-law is a doughy friendly man who seems useless at mechanical skills and has saved up an array of objects: lamps, kerosene stoves, flashlights—for Jeremiah to fix.
We sit down to eat, a communal bowl of stew. I continue to swoon in the safe atmosphere. Jeremiah’s sister disappears for a while and emerges with the evening’s prize—Jonah—whom she has either coaxed off the lorry with a bowl of food or caught by surprise and dragged off bodily. Her physical resemblance to Jeremiah makes the latter more plausible. Jeremiah, meanwhile, is engulfed with kids; he tries the ploy of being gruff, which doesn’t work, and is soon singing his hat song, pounding away at his fez, the kids on his lap. Jonah nervously eats and is allowed to leave only on condition that he take some more of the food out with him.
It is evening, I get the rewards of survival “Jeremiah’s sister is calling me Robert, there is a bed available for me, I will be allowed to sleep. After spending the previous four days cursing the continent for giving rise to a Pius, it turns out all I need is a good night’s sleep to wake up in love with Africa again.