The details changed, but the theme was the same for each dream. It was certainly not nightly, but still occurred with surprising frequency, given how long it had been since I was getting beaten up in junior high school. In the dream, I might be traveling on the subway. A gang of thugs confronts me, planning to rob me. Or I may be walking down a street, and a dangerous murderer is about to make me the victim of a random act of savagery. Or perhaps I am sitting quietly in my room, and a frenzied mob bursts in, intent on some act of incoherent political revenge. In any case, I am about to be hurt badly, and I am frightened. And here the dream was always the same. Somehow, I talk my way out of it. Sometimes, I talk in a way to show that I am even tougher, more street-smart, than they, and they back off. Sometimes, in a premeditated way meant (literally) to be disarming, I am buffoonish, so amusing and entertaining and unthreatening that soon I am considered one of the guys, long enough to make my escape. Sometimes, I try an unorthodox, straightforward approach. I say, “Look, there’s just me and a whole bunch of you; you can obviously beat the crap out of me, but what is it going to accomplish?” Somehow, that gets to them, and they leave me alone. Sometimes, there is a bizarrely psychotherapeutic flavor to the dream; I am able to empathize, perceive the thug’s very core of hurt and resentment and troubles and speak to it, an almost Quakerly centering on him as a person, and soon he is no longer a threat.
When in Africa, the dream even took on an appropriate, colorful local flavor: I am a gnu, surrounded by hyenas, and I beat them into submission with a lecture on predator-prey ratios. I am a hartebeest, pursued by a leopard that I manage to convince of the wisdom of vegetarianism.
Always talking my way out. It was perfect—if I ever finished grad school, I might even get a job where the only weapon of the trade was lecturing people into submission. But then there was the day in Kenya when it didn’t work.
It was 1982, during the reign of Saul, and Kenya was in the news, always a bad sign. When the Third World makes it into our Western awareness, it’s usually because of some tragedy, some drought, pandemic, or something explosively violent and abrupt to jostle our consciousness. This time it was a truly messy coup attempt. The whole thing was both amateurish and suitably sordid—a planned coup that apparently encompassed key elements of all branches of the military, university, and government opposition, all screwed up by a group of air force officers who decided to jump the gun and do it on their own weeks early. A key moment when the president could have been grabbed that was lost in drunken revelry, an army that vacillated half a day deciding whether to back their erstwhile air force coup colleagues who had proven unreliable or to come out against the air force. The university students who made a grand, romantic suicidal miscalculation in terms of showing their enthusiasm for the air force revolutionaries just as the latter were getting their asses kicked.
The army rolled in and quickly routed the air force rebels. The students emerged for their rally in support of the new revolutionary junta just in time to be bazookaed by the army. The government regained the radio station and, in order to instill confidence in the populace, ordered everyone to go downtown and start shopping immediately, just as a major tank battle began there. The civilian casualties were numerous and unacknowledged.
The beaten air force took to the hills, forests, and back alleys, fell into guerrilla attacks, frantic attempts at sprints for safety, and just plain old-time banditry. A group of them held on to the main air force base to the north, threatening to bomb and strafe Nairobi if they were not given amnesty. With the general military action quieting down in Nairobi, the populace exploded into an orgy of civil unrest, sometimes over the protest of the controlling army, sometimes with its instigation. This mostly consisted of devastation of the Indians.
At the start of the British adventure in East Africa, coolie laborers had been imported from India to build the railroads and gradually to provide the comfortable colonial infrastructure familiar from the raj. And, taking advantage of the superior education of the Indians as compared to the Africans, the Brits had ensured that the former filled a necessary niche—just as with the Jews of medieval Europe, it was next to impossible for the Indians to own land and to farm, or to serve in the government. Instead, just as with the Jews, they had no choice but to evolve into the mercantile class, the shopkeepers, the money-lenders, and for close to a century, the Africans’ hatred of them had been building. In colonial times, a peasant in the bush might never in his life have seen one of the white overlords, the people controlling the economy of the colony, yet it would be the Indian shopkeeper, running the remote trading post in the hamlet, who demanded that peasants money. And now in spanking, modern Nairobi, in which the tiny Indian minority constituted the bulk of the middle class, little had changed—it would now be some Bantu government official in a pinstripe suit setting economic policy, often based on how much of the economy he could stuff in his pocket, but this was a mere abstraction for the average African; it was still the Hindu shopkeeper ringing up the cash register.
So the anger at them simmered. In recent years, it was no longer just for the Indians’ wealth, but also for their refusal to become “real Africans” (a complaint, usually between the lines but sometimes in the lines themselves, that centered on the fact that Indian women never married or slept with African men). And any demagogue could unite disparate and hostile tribes by attacking the Indians—Idi Amin was never more popular in Uganda than when he summarily stripped the Indians of their citizenship and property and threw them out of Uganda; “wealth for all” was the official slogan for the persecution.
The situation for the Indians in Kenya always felt to me like Berlin in the 1930s. And the aftermath of the coup became their Kristallnacht. They were subjected to a ferocious pogrom of looting and plundering, and the hospitals were overflowing with the Hindu victims of beatings and gang rapes.
The tumult went on for days, until the government visibly regained control. Whatever was to be looted had been, and the glaziers were going into action; the air force rebels were gradually rooted out from their lairs, and the national anthem was played repeatedly over the government radio station.
In the aftermath came a long stretch of trials officiated by bewigged magistrates. The government had a slight problem, in that it couldn’t readily admit that the coup was a case of the air force guys jumping the gun on a massive planned revolt that permeated numerous branches of society. Instead, the coup had to be presented in the most minute, concrete ways as resulting from the actions of this handful of unconnected madmen. The newspapers screamed with details about the senior private who first started shooting, about the enlisted man who drove the private’s vehicle for him, about the revolutionary musicologist who chose the celebratory records to be played over the air after the radio station had been seized by rebels. Eventually, everyone appropriate was duly hanged or locked away forever. But then the government had to get all the folks who were obviously in on planning the big coup that never came off, without admitting that an event indicating such widespread dissatisfaction could have been contemplated. A series of flimsy purges of the coup’s obvious godfathers was carried out, highlighted by the show trial of the attorney general, where the official charges were something on the order of his being a smart aleck and having a Caucasian wife and foreign friends.
Soon everything was back in order, and the tourist industry resumed, unruffled.
I reached Kenya on the first commercial flight into the country after the start of the coup. I had been itching to go and decided not to defer. I pooh-poohed the Western reports of the violence, planned to scoot out of Nairobi as quickly as possible and get to the quiet countryside. I was depressed about some personal events back in the States and figured some civil unrest would clear up the neurotransmitter problems in my head. And besides, if anything hairy came up, I would talk my way out of it.
The last leg of the Pan Am flight went from Lagos to Nairobi. There were three other passengers in the 747, which was an experience in terms of personal service from the twenty or so flight attendants. There was one frantic Hindu businessman rushing home to his family whose safety was unconfirmed, and a tourist couple who seemed only marginally aware of the fighting. I took them under my wing and regaled them with useless hints about black-marketing and getting fraudulent visa stamps. We were met at the airport by an automaton of a functionary who welcomed us to Kenya and told us what a happy place it was, and we were loaded into an army troop carrier. Nighttime, soldiers everywhere, grim-faced. We were told exasperating news—because of the shoot-to-kill curfew in effect, we were being taken to the main hotel in the center of town, where we would have to stay until the next morning. This was fine with the tourist couple, as they had reservations there anyway. The businessman was frantic, as this meant another twelve hours until finding his family. And I was cheesed off, as this was a hotel that I had previously entered only in order to steal toilet paper, and the one night was going to wipe out my budget. Nevertheless, it did seem a bit unreasonable to ask the army to drop us off at various places. At the hotel, I was escorted to my room by the unruffled assistant manager, who, in a voice as if he said this nightly, advised me to sleep on the floor and keep the window shades drawn. Throughout the night, I heard gunfire on the street.
The next day brought some feeling of the devastation. Soldiers were everywhere, nests of machine guns set up on every corner. There was still active looting and fighting in one corner of town, but elsewhere, everyone had basically been ordered to go back to normal. The citizenry had adopted the interesting accommodation of walking to work with their hands up in the air and identity cards in their mouths; when in Rome, etc., and soon I was salivating inelegantly on my passport.
I stopped in at the various places in town, both to check on acquaintances and to try to pull together the necessary supplies to get out to the bush. One shop I knew was in a shambles, the Hindu shopkeeper hospitalized from a skull fracture suffered while defending the place. Another man was missing, in hiding, his store trashed. Another had resumed anxious, wary business, and seemed near tears as he recounted events. I made the rounds and everyone was a mess.
Around noon, I discovered the current disadvantages of being a naked man in Nairobi. The place had always had a disproportionate share of naked people in its streets—it had always struck me that when people in Nairobi who were not that many generations (or even years) removed from the bush had their occasional psychotic breaks, the first addled thing they would do was toss off all their Western clothes. (Years later, my clinical psychologist wife, in her conversations with Kenyan colleagues, would confirm my impression that this was indeed a common event.) So Nairobi had always had more than its share of ranting and raving naked men and had treated them with a certain aplomb. Now it meant trouble. Many of the air force rebels had taken refuge in Nairobi buildings and alleyways, when their triumph had come up short. The lucky ones would find someone to waylay—kill the guy, steal his civilian clothes, and slip into the crowd with his identity card in their teeth. Those not so fortunate were all independently reaching the same odd conclusion—dump the air force clothes and make a run for it naked. Every few hours an air force desperado would make his nude run and be gunned down by an army unit, and it was around noon that I got to see my first street execution. Army flatbed trucks intermittently rumbled through with naked corpses. They stopped for traffic lights in a way that was both incongruous and calming, leading to an odd air of normalcy.
By late afternoon, I had made my way to Mrs. R’s boardinghouse, the place on the edge of town where I stayed, the house of the old Polish woman who would rent beds or floor space or tent space to overlanders passing through. I had not seen Mrs. R for a year, which would normally make for an excited return. Now I felt as if I were the first person to successfully smuggle supplies into the Warsaw Ghetto. There had not been a new face since the coup; everyone had been huddling inside for days, sleeping on the floor to avoid flying bullets, coping with the enforced blackout. Coming in from the outside world, I was able to bring information about what was going on a mile away, in contrast to the state-controlled radio station, which, now back in the hands of the state, was spouting every type of gibberish—old quiz shows, country-western music—but no reliable news. Everyone was tired and frazzled and hungry from the food shortages, which were acute by now. I brought in cookies that my mother had baked for me. Mrs. R, Stefan and Bogdan, the two Polish boys who had been regulars there for years, and I huddled in the corner of her room. I split up the cookies, Mrs. R produced a bottle of soda she had hidden, the brothers came up with something. They were euphoric with the food, and thus so was I; there was something excitingly stoic about sharing the bits of food amid candlelight and distant gunfire.
Going to sleep that night, it all seemed a fine adventure. The upsetting things I could explain away—it was horrifying that the Hindus had been trashed but inevitable given the scapegoat role they had been maneuvered into in the country. The two Swiss overlanders at Mrs. R’s who had been beaten up by soldiers the day before had simply done things the wrong way. One was big and stocky and seemed, at least to me, inordinately white, and he had to have seemed provoking to the army men. Both had unfriendly, scowly faces, and that couldn’t have helped. And neither spoke Swahili or English—they didn’t have a hope of talking their way out of whatever they had blundered into. I was not worried.
The next day, I was ready to clear town except for a few last chores. I had my vehicle, had bought enough food to get me through the next few weeks, had retrieved my camp supplies out of storage. I went over to the Game Department to check in. It was about ten miles out of town, at the entrance to Nairobi National Park. The park was closed because of the troubles. The main air force base bordered the park, and when the army had attacked, many of the air force men went over the fence and were running loose in the park, armed and panicked. They had shot animals, perhaps for food, perhaps in a displacement frenzy. They had also waylaid a group of rangers and escaped with their clothes—the naked bodies had been found. The park staff was reasonably freaked out, and I commiserated.
Returning, I passed through a number of army checkpoints. They were ostensibly checking to see if anyone was air force trying to escape, if anyone was taking advantage of the situation to hoard supplies. They were clearly also roughing up people, hassling, robbing, seeking private vengeances. I was waved through the first two checkpoints and managed shit-eating howdy grins for the soldiers as I passed.
At the third one, on a remote bend in the road, the three soldiers motioned with their guns for me to pull over. I got my passport and research permit ready. I got a smile ready. I had planned that the best approach for dealing with any checkpoints would be to say hello exuberantly in Swahili, howsitgoing’s, all the usual blandishments that occupy the first five minutes of encountering anyone here, to ask lots of questions about their exploits, to congratulate the soldiers on their difficult and important task of saving the country, to be smiley and starry-eyed and unfazed, and to just keep talking.
I got out smiling as the three soldiers approached.
“Bwana, you have a problem, this is very bad, you have a problem, bwana, a big problem,” the first one was chanting.
I was going to say “Howsitgoing, guys? There’s no problem” in my best Swahili slang. I said, “Howsitgoing” as the first soldier pushed me against the door of my car. Again, I said, “Howsitgoing?” He slammed me against the door again, harder. All three were around me now. There was an odor of alcohol.
I was somewhat breathless by then, but still began, in an airy voice, to say “There’s no problem.” At the first syllable, they slammed me repeatedly against the door. The first soldier had been pushing against my chest. By now, a second one had me by the collar and was hitting my head against the glass. I suddenly noticed my head hurting.
The one with his hands on my neck was curling his lips back, displaying his teeth with the effort he was extending. It occurred to me that he was smiling, and, in an instant’s stupidity, I thought, Oh, he’s the one I should be talking to.
While collecting my thoughts as to what to say, I turned my head and smiled sunnily at him. I think I even chuckled, to show him that I was relaxed and that they could relax too. Still showing his teeth, the soldier punched me hard in the stomach.
Something was odd about my perception. My stomach was hurting terribly, but the pain seemed to be inside my head as well. My head seemed thick, stuffed, imploded. There was a taste of vomit, and I could not catch my breath. They were punching me in the stomach again. Or maybe it was still the first punch I was feeling. I seemed to be having trouble paying attention.
Suddenly, I was paying attention. One of them was holding a knife to my throat. Again, there was a chant of “You have a problem, bwana, this is very bad, you have a big problem.”
A thought repeated through my head—Be careful with that thing. Be careful with it. It was close to my throat. I didn’t speak, just looked from face to face. They had grown still as well.
Someone yanked off my watch; I felt the band break in the process. A voice boomed, real close, “Now you have no problem, bwana.” Abruptly, they began laughing as the knife was lowered. And then one of them struck me on the side of the head, knocking me to the ground. They were already walking away, examining my watch among them.
I stood up, uncertain, wondering if I should run. One of them gestured angrily at me, at the car—“Go on, get out of here.”
I left as they hooted. Never since that time has it occurred to me that I can talk my way out of anything.