By the end of the years of instability in the troops hierarchy, I had been making pretty good progress with my scientific research. It was now clear to me that if you had a choice in the matter, you didn’t want to be a low-ranking male. They had elevated levels of a key stress hormone all the time, indicating that everyday life was miserable enough to activate a stress response. Their immune systems didn’t seem to function as well as did those of dominant animals. They had less of the good version of cholesterol in their bloodstreams, and I had indirect evidence that they had elevated blood pressure. I had some idea about why these rank-related differences occurred. For example, if subordinate animals had less of the good cholesterol in their bloodstreams, was this because they secreted less of the stuff into the circulation or because they secreted the normal amounts but cleared it faster from the circulation than did dominant animals? It looked like it was the former. Or as with another example, people with major depression often have elevated basal levels of that same stress hormone that was elevated in the low-ranking males. I was finding that the hypersecretion in those baboons was due to the same constellation of changes in the brain and pituitary and adrenal glands that gave rise to the hypersecretion in depressed humans. I also observed that in a stable hierarchy, the dominant males weren’t the ones with the highest testosterone levels. Instead, it was the jerky subadult males starting fights who had the highest levels. I was pretty pleased with this discovery, as it ran counter to what was prevailing dogma in some corners of my field, namely that testosterone plus aggression equals social dominance.
Amid this scientific progress, I was forced to admit that I was no longer a kid out there. I was nearing the age when Jerry Rubin was no longer supposed to trust you. I now officially had a bad back, which made every hefting of a comatose baboon more than a little hairy, my stamina in the midday heat was definitely not what it used to be, and I had even had a serious, attentive conversation with a knowledgeable tourist on my most recent plane flight over about the salutary effects of oat bran on cholesterol levels (this was the 1980s, after all). And as a measure of my sagging decline into aging, I was finding with each passing year that I was finally being driven crazier by the rice, beans, and Taiwanese mackerel. Wonderfully, fortuitously, I was now getting funded regularly enough that I could afford to diversify a bit in my food supplies, to have a few more upscale items. However, as a measure that my actual tastes had not improved with time, this mostly took the form of buying numerous cans of sardines plus crates of spaghetti, to alternate with the mackerel, rice, and beans.
As the surest sign that I was growing up a bit, I now had my PhD and had started a couple of years of postdoctoral training. Back in my academic world, this meant that you were truly in limbo. You no longer got student discounts on movies and were having to start paying back student loans. On the other hand, you didn’t actually have a real job (a postdoc being this penurious journeyman stage of training that is really meant to delay people a few more years from entering the virtually nonexistent job market).
Naturally, my degree was meaningless to anyone I knew out in the bush. My prior student status had always been vaguely confusing to folks there. On one hand, only old men in Africa are able to grow a beard of any note, and my having a full beard had, I’m sure, always unconsciously biased people to assume that I was quite elderly (i.e., at least in my forties). On the other hand, being a “student” was an attribute only of kids less than ten years of age, before their parents ran out of school fees and the child was forced to resume doing something sensible, like tending the goats. So there was always this discordant feature of my being a late-twenty-something who looked like an old man and had the job description of a kid.
Mostly, various Masai men, like my friend Soirowa, wanted to know when my father back in our village of Brooklyn was finally going to give me my presumed inheritance of cows, now that I was no longer a student. Rhoda and friends, however, had some more pressing nosy questions—when was I finally going to get a wife and some kids? This was being asked with such resoluteness that it seemed likely that my mother had somehow put Rhoda up to it.
Questions like that reflected my growing connectedness with Soirowa and Rhoda’s village, which was due in part to the recent relocation of my campsite. In previous years, I had been farther upriver, at a site with a wall of bushes alongside the river, blocking the view of my camp from the Masai comings and goings just outside the park, on the other side of the river. This was fine, but a big drawback was that my campsite was, instead, quite visible from inside the park. There was a tourist boom going on, and minivans of Japanese tourists were incessantly barreling into my camp at the most inopportune times (while I was wrestling a baboon who was getting light from anesthetic, while bathing in the river, crapping in the bushes), cameras blazing, wanting to know where they could find a rhino to photograph.
So I’d moved downriver to a site much closer to the village and with far less privacy on that side. The advantage, though, was a mammoth thick wall of bushes and trees between my little cul-de-sac on the river and the main plains of the park, necessitating a complex, twisting path through the bushes for any vehicle. Satisfied that this was impenetrable to all but old bush hands like myself, I set up camp. Naturally, within a day, the first minivan of Japanese tourists had followed my clearly visible tire tracks into camp, searching for rhino.
So I was still being forced with surprising frequency to pose with my anesthetized baboons for pictures for tourists, while now being just a stone’s throw from Rhoda and Soirowa’s village. Mamas passed through camp each day on their way to find firewood, would stop to schmooze, even though I only spoke half a dozen words of Maa, and they only half a dozen words of Swahili and less of English. The kids would ignore their flocks of goats to hang out in camp, in the hope of my giving out some balloons or blowing soap bubbles. The old men of the village now included my camp in their daily rounds, in order to inquire upon the health of my distant parents and to request the gift of my watch for the umpteenth unsuccessful time.
Thanks to this proximity, I was beginning to be privy to all sorts of gossip. There was the British tour guide operator at a nearby camp who was carrying on with some tourist woman while his wife was in the UK with a dying parent. This was neither surprising nor interesting—a huge percentage of expatriates connected with the tourist trade in the park seemed to follow the grand old British tradition in Kenya Colony, which was to instantly become alcoholic adulterers and, worse, insufferably boring popinjays. What was interesting was the vague approval of his activities by everyone—it was a good thing to see that even white men go about the time-honored task of shopping around for a second wife.
More interesting was the wildly ambivalent gossiping about the kid from two villages over who had been working as a pot-washer in one of the tourist lodges and had recently been seduced and whisked off to America by a ravenous American tourist woman who was viewed as being mad as a hatter. On the one hand, there was clearly a squeamish revulsion at the mere thought of his having to be intimate with her. Race had nothing to do with it. Instead, it was the fact that skin was reported to fall off her face (i.e., she was sunburned), she was ancient as the hills (i.e., approximately forty), and, by being the sexual initiator, she was viewed as some sort of she-witch hyena who probably still had a clitoris. On the other hand, the kid was presumed to be living high on the hog in America, with limitless quantities of water and milk and cows blood to drink. (The story reverberated in the Masai villages for years to come and, not surprisingly, among the equally gossipy research community in the park. The woman was enormously wealthy and, in fact, even madder than a hatter. She kept this bush kid for years as her pet on her ranch, giving him flying lessons. Just when it seemed about time for her to tire of him and discard him, he made the typically Masai realpolitik move of discarding her first, taking up with an even wealthier, younger, crazier socialite in Montana. He eventually returned to Masai land, wealthy and corpulent, the subject of vast admiration, a man who had survived terrors that made him a warrior among warriors.)
And then there was gossip having to do with the goings-on in the village next door. Rhoda and a few of the women related the deal recently worked out by two elderly men there. Each was in the market for a new wife, and these old lifelong comrades at arms had come up with the fine scheme of each giving their youngest daughter to the other. Naturally, the daughters were not consulted, nor were their first wives (i.e., the mothers of these kids), but wailings and beatings were reported before everyone compliantly went about marrying. What was interesting here were not the particulars of the arrangement, as this was pretty routine stuff for the Masai. What was fascinating instead was the implied consciousness-raising creeping into these parts, as Rhoda and her cohort discussed this in scabrous, horrified tones. “Disgusting old men,” they snorted.
And best of all, I was even getting some dirty laundry about the village itself. It was evening, around the time that the mantle of alpha-maleness was slipping from Joshua to Menasseh. Samwelly, Soirowa, and I were hanging out around the campfire. The latest dry ice shipment had come in large plastic bags; Samwelly had stuffed them with leaves, and now we were lounging about on our pseudo-pillows, eating. It was a rice, beans, and Taiwanese mackerel night, if I recall correctly. We had put on chili sauce.
“Good chili sauce.”
“Really good.”
“Spicy.”
“Really spicy.” A hyena whooped in the bushes.
“Hyena.”
“Yup. That’s a hyena all right.”
“Good rice and beans. Spicy.” It was one of those evenings.
There was a full moon that I was reveling in so much that Soirowa finally asked me if there was a moon in the United States. Yes, but not as good as this one. As a treat, we munched on some dried fruit; a visitor from the States had recently passed through and left the delicacy with us. Samwelly and Soirowa liked it well enough but didn’t quite understand the need to dry fruit when you can just eat it plain easily enough. I explained that the winters in the United States are very cold, snow everywhere, and during the harvest, we must dry our fruit so that we can eat the rest of the year when there are no crops, when we are huddling inside. With my lame Swahili, I somehow left them with the impression that Americans live in caves during the six months of winter each year, subsisting on nothing but sulfurized pineapple spears.
We fall into telling each other stories. I tell about the American man who was born on another planet and is very strong and flies, and who fights for justice and freedom but must hide himself and pretend that he writes for the newspaper, and there is one woman who loves him. Samwelly says he thinks he heard that story from missionaries. Then Samwelly and Soirowa tell a story about the Ndorobo, a tribe of hunter-gatherers around here who are shrouded in myth, serving all the same cultural purposes as do the Gypsies. They are thought to steal Kikuyu and Masai and Kipsigi children and raise them as hunting dogs—not feeding them so that they are small, and sending them off on all fours to hunt for reed buck, and that the chief Ndorobo checks on these kids by turning himself into a colobus monkey and following them in the forest, watching from the treetops. “Does the chief turn back to a person from being a colobus?” I ask. Yes. “Are the stolen kids really hunting dogs or are they just acting like hunting dogs?” They don’t know, no one knows, because if you actually see them, they chase and kill you. “So how do you know about this story?” I ask. Because the Ndorobo brag about it when they come out of the forest to the trading posts—you see this reed buck here, it was caught by our band of Kikuyu-children hunting dogs, why don’t you buy it from me?
We escalate our scary stories. I tell about Cropsey, the wildman in the Catskills who ax-murders little boys, which is told to every Brooklyn Boy Scout, Cub Scout, summer camper, on his first camping trip. It seems that old Cropsey lived in the woods with his daughter. Boy Scouts were nearby, chopping wood, and because of carelessness, an ax went flying off and killed Cropsey’s daughter. And Cropsey went mad and ran off into the forest and he spends forever and ever creeping around waiting for Boy Scouts to murder with the very same ax and maybe tonight he is even somewhere around here, getting closer and closer, looking—quick, shine the flashlight in the listener’s face—for you! Samwelly is impressed, keeps saying, “Looking for you,” and shining the flashlight in his face. How old is Cropsey? he asks. One hundred twenty years old and he has iron teeth and glowing eyes. Where are the Catskills, near here? No, upstate New York.
Then Soirowa tells the story of the Masai who becomes unhinged and goes to live with the hyenas, living like one of them. He does not wear clothes and forgets the language of people, runs away from humans, and can be seen at a distance at dawn, eating with the hyenas on a kill.
This time we shudder for real, because this story is true. And then Soirowa reveals a recent piece of news about the man, something I suspect that Masai found profoundly disturbing and shameful, something probably most of them would just as soon not have had being told outside the members of the village—he has recently snuck into the village at night, and the smell of this hyena-man in their midst set the dogs to barking. By the time the men had gotten to him, he had killed a goat with his teeth and was tearing at its underbelly. He was covered with hyena shit from rolling in it, and his toenails had gotten so long that they curled up. Just like Howard Hughes when he became a hermit.
It was around the time that the river was haunted by the man who thought he was a hyena that I heard the story of the man who thought he was the king of Nubian-Judea. It could be directly traced as an unforeseen consequence of the aborted coup attempt of a few years before. It was told to me by a wonderfully animated Scotsman, sitting on the porch of Mrs. R’s boardinghouse in Nairobi that I frequented.
It seems that the Scotsman was accompanying a fellow countryman who worked at an aid project up at the edge of the desert. They had to deliver some piece of machinery to a colleague way the hell further north, about forty kilometers past the checkpoint that marks the beginning of the desert.
They’re in the middle of nowhere, empty, desolate, stinking hot, nothing but heat-crazed nomads now and then staggering around with their animals. They approach the checkpoint, which is a small hamlet. On their side is the last of the provincial districts that are governmental units. Ahead is the other half of the country, the Northern Frontier District, howling empty boiling desert full of nomads and cutthroat desert bandits who control everything except the occasional government outposts and the convoys that everyone must travel in to be safe. They’re hoping to get a pass to travel without waiting for a convoy, given that they just have to scoot the short distance past the border and quickly return.
Checkpoint. Some mud huts, comatose-looking Samburu tribesmen slouching in the scattered shade. Palm trees, sand, gravel, one lighter-painted hut with a tin roof and a flag. The government quarters. Normally, at these outposts in the middle of nowhere, the government man manning it is half-naked, forgotten, starved, wasting away. Many a governmental outposter I’ve met has nearly fallen upon me with a spray of gibberish, crazed sunstroke look in his eyes, delighted to talk to anyone who’s not Samburu, yammering and begging for news of the outside world, seeking to pull himself together in the tatters and rags of his uniform. Instead, the two Scotsmen enter the office and are confronted with a man with gelled, brushed-back 1950s American “Negro” pomaded hair, crisp white shirt, tie, pinstripe three-piece suit, and walking stick. This is the government man. They are led, with great formality and silence, to seats in front of his desk, at which he sits. Above his head is a photograph of the president. It is the obligatory official photograph; the president sits at his desk, pen in hand, glancing up from his busy affairs of state. Our government man assumes the precise same posture with his pen, glances up, and announces in superb English that he is ready to hear the nature of their petitioning.
The Scots explain where they are going and how they’d like a permit to just head on, without having to wait to go in a convoy. The government man asks a few perfunctory questions as to where they started off from today, how long they’ve been in the country, what do they think of the weather here. They answer, and suddenly, with stern finality, our government man announces to them that they are from the south of Scotland. He is correct. He looks at them keenly and identifies correctly the subregion of Scotland that they come from. You see, he explains, I knew many men from Scotland when I was training with the Royal Air Force. This explains a great deal—as a general rule, one only works for the government and gets assigned to a hellhole like this in the middle of nowhere if you’ve screwed up badly—the Northern Frontier District is full of border outposts manned by men being punished for getting a little too drunk on the job, or for blowing the whistle on some corruption or some such indiscretion. Following the coup attempt of a few years before, led by the air force, everyone who wasn’t hung was exiled out to godawful assignments. Thus, our ex-air force government man.
Without warning, he stands, looks skyward, makes some flourishing gestures with his arms, and shouts something in what turns out to be almost, but not quite, correct Gaelic for an old battle cry. This, it seems, is the announcement of the beginning of his inspection. He aggressively demands that they pull up their hair and expose their foreheads, so that he can take the full measure of them; specifically, he says, so that he can determine whether they have a criminal mentality. They comply, feeling nervous and irrationally criminal, as he ponders their foreheads, making humming noises to himself. They are forced to stand and grasp his wrist with their full strength, as part of some test that he refuses to explain. In the heat and the incongruity, it doesn’t seem to occur to them to object to any of this. They simply feel alarmed that they might fail his test.
He settles down for a complete interrogation. He looks at the Scots’ passports (which are irrelevant to the issue of his letting them go unescorted) and grows excited at one of them having been to Egypt from Kenya. He incorrectly identifies the flight number of the Egypt Air Nairobi-Cairo flight, apparently missing the number and time by only a digit or two. He then gives a short spirited lecture about the ethnic diversity of Alexandria, the type of fish found there, and, he claims, the abnormally late closing of the skull sutures in the children there, allowing the people sufficiently large brains to have built the pyramids.
He grows even more excited when he discovers that the same Scot had also been to Greece, saying that he will now read the passport stamp in proper Greek, will identify the town from which it was issued, and will then tell them about the people of that village. They await this feat. He correctly reads off the word stamped there, his pronunciation apparently being perfect. He proclaims it to be the name of a small town in the islands; in actuality, it is the Greek word for “entry.” He says the town has many ruins, healthy goats but small-skulled people, and says that he knows so much about the Mediterranean because in his former life, he was the governor general of Tiberius.
Ah-ha. At last, he has shown his hand; we’ve arrived at the core of his looniness. He says that there are two Italian missionaries in town whom he is keeping under house arrest because they say it is not possible that he was the governor general of Tiberius. (Later, after departing, the Scots run into these two Italians, who are on their way north to deliver a carburetor to their archrivals, three bearded Coptic missionary colleagues who every now and then manage to actually convert one of the animist nomads, only for the new acolyte invariably to be killed by outraged tribesmen. Their planned outing to the Coptics belies their being under house arrest. They claim no knowledge about the man’s claims regarding Tiberius, but say they have not gotten along with him since they corrected his near-correct proclamation regarding the year of the Vatican’s founding.)
Emboldened, perhaps taken to assume that the Scots’ silent wonder is supplication and loyalty, our government man suddenly stands majestically behind his desk and announces that he, in fact, is still the governor general of Tiberius, that he is raising an army of the faithful here in the desert, that soon they will march upon Nairobi in the south, that the president will flee and “run and eat grass like a zebra in the Serengeti,” that Nairobi will be burned and razed so utterly that even the wild animals will not venture there, and that he will then return to his outpost, declare the revival of his empire, and become the king of all Nubian-Judea.
He’s going like a banshee by then, breathing heavily and looking off into a far distance. He sits, spent, and extracts a pass from one of the desk drawers, allowing them to travel on alone. He rouses his energies again, with a flourish signs his name in phonetic Greek, stating that his signature is known and feared by bandits throughout the northern desert. The Scots depart, he once more lost in his president’s pose, consumed with the affairs of Nubian-Judea. When they return through the checkpoint later that day, he waves them through with a distracted, unrecognizing air.