By the criteria of all sorts of different tribes, I was now an adult. In America at large, this could be proven by my finally possessing a credit card. Within my tribe of eggheads, I had actually gotten a real job as a professor. And among the Masai, I returned during the reign of Nick with the most palpable symbol possible—after all those years of responding to any hint of intimacy by fleeing to my tent, I had finally found someone whom I wanted to flee to my tent with.
I had met Lisa toward the end of my postdoc in San Diego, just as I was about to move to Stanford. In my first conversation with her, I was already scheming, trying to convince her to move to the Bay Area—“You, of all people, would appreciate San Francisco,” I said, knowing neither her nor the first thing about San Francisco, but deciding that a pronouncement like that might be effective. And, ultimately, it was.
We were a funny combination of partial similarities. We were both lapsed field biologists, with me spending more and more time each year in the lab. Lisa had started off as a marine biologist, winding up doing some deadening research study on hermit crabs or some such thing, enough to convince her that this wasn’t her full-time destiny. Since then, she had moved into clinical neuropsychology. We both came from old-left families. For me, back in Brooklyn, this meant growing up with elderly relatives screaming at each other in Yiddish about Stalin’s betrayal of Trotsky, whereas for Lisa in Los Angeles, this meant hanging out with the likes of Pete Seeger and Joan Baez. We were both firm atheists. For me, it represented the outcome of much Sturm und Drang and twisting of my innards, while for Lisa, it had the relevance of rejecting the Easter Bunny. And we both came from multicultural communities—but for Lisa, this meant marching in Cinco de Mayo parades, whereas for me, it had meant knowing all the proper ethnic slurs by some precocious age.
She had a wonderfully sardonic sense of humor and sang like a dream. She actually knew about how the real world worked—in contrast to me—but that hadn’t soiled her sentimentality. She worked with her patients with Alzheimer’s disease or head injuries with an effectiveness and gentility that moved me to tears. We turned out to have a similar fondness for Old Testament names. And she was beautiful. Soon, we were passing the time on a flight to Kenya, Lisa planning our wedding invitations, me figuring out what I was going to tell Soirowa when he asked how many cows I had paid for Lisa.
It was wonderful, getting to reexperience Africa for the first time, vicariously, through Lisa. It was also impossible to resist playing the old Africa hand, given my weathering years of experience. I tried to give Lisa some sense of what a maneuvering, predatory place Nairobi was and promptly fell for an entirely new scam that she saw through in about five seconds. Once we got to camp, Lisa was extremely nervous about the army ants that she had been warned about, and I laughingly told her that we would go weeks without seeing one. Naturally, our second night in camp signaled the start of a half decade of virtually nightly army ant tidal waves that repeatedly rousted us from our tent. And she was a better darter than I within about two weeks.
Lisa’s presence opened up all sorts of new vistas. Camp was suddenly filled with all the kids from the village, hanging out to play, which made me realize that when I was there by myself, I must have seemed like a forbidding weirdo. Rhoda and the women also now made daily appearances to fill Lisa in on gossip that I hadn’t had an inkling of—who was sleeping with whom, who wasn’t sleeping with whom when you would have guessed them to, which man was spending each night rushing from the hut of one of his wives to that of another and another, convinced he was finally going to catch one of them with another man…. What did I know about any of this? Soon, Lisa got her first invitation to a clitorectomy, something I’d never so much as heard a whisper of before. Then there was the day that two prostitutes from the staff quarters at the tourist lodge came to camp, one of them hoping for some sort of medicine for what seemed like a venereal disease. Soon I’m sitting there with my medical books and Swahili dictionary, dead white male, arduously preparing the sentence, “Have you been having any discharge from your vagina as of late?” when Lisa just pantomimes blowing her nose, holding her hand as if it were wet, and then as if that wetness were flowing from between her legs—and got an emphatic “Yes” from the woman.
Having failed dismally to come off as an old Africa hand based on skills, I attempted to pass myself off as one the more traditional way, which was to go on constantly in a tiresome manner about how everything had changed from the good old days—“Why, when I first got here, the nearest whatever was forty miles away, and there was no such thing as a …, and you couldn’t go twenty feet without being chased by a … and now the whole place is just Disneyworld.” Lisa didn’t pay a whole lot of attention. Which was just as well, since within a few weeks of her arrival, we got a pretty emphatic lesson about how little had actually changed.
It was the year that Samwelly had moved on, having decided that he really needed a job for more than just the three months a year I was around. He took a job at the local tourist camp, sharing a room with Richard in the staff quarters, running security, designing the gardens, reconstructing the cabins, diverting the river when necessary. He would still drop over in camp at every opportunity to help with any architectural problems that might arise.
It became natural for Soirowa to move into camp with us. He brought along a distant relative, a kid named Wilson, who had come from the other end of Masai land for a prolonged stay with Soirowa’s family. They were your proverbial city and country cousins. Soirowa is the nearest I’ve met to the sort of noble, taciturn Masai who hangs out with the likes of Robert Redford in the movies. Wilson, in contrast, bordered on the effete, at least by Masai standards. He came from a different branch of the Masai, from a clan north of the county seat, which had long ago abandoned traditional ways. He spoke a considerable amount of English, dressed in Western clothes, came from a family that prided itself on its ability to farm maize, of all the un-Masai things. We suspected that in the local village, he was regarded as somewhat of a sissy. He was barely out of adolescence, gangly and loopy and uncoordinated, and his emotions spilled out all over the place in the most un-Masai fashion. He became downright doleful when he was unhappy, he giggled nervously when he watched me take testicular biopsies from baboons, he flapped his hands hopelessly and fell all over his feet when Lisa would tease him about something. One evening, Soirowa told us about his coming of age, his killing of a lion as part of his warriorhood. We asked Wilson whether he had done the same. No, I had to go to school, he lamented. We wondered if Wilson had come to stay with distant cousin Soirowa in the hope of some real bush Masai rubbing off on him.
Thus, we passed our days, Soirowa being the one to venture into buffalo-infested thickets for firewood when the rest of us were too chicken, Wilson the one to climb excitedly all over the car engine, checking the spark plugs daily. Then, one morning, the wailing began.
Richard, Lisa, and I were darting in one of our least favorite places, weaving through tourists, tents, vehicles, as the baboons wandered through the camping sites. We were getting ready to dart someone or other when the wailing began on the ridge behind the campsites, up where the villages began. Richard, who knew the Masai pretty well by now, immediately tensed. There is trouble, he said. The wailing continued, built, seemed to float between the two villages, a strangulated rhythmic cry that would only occasionally take on a human quality. We stood transfixed, breathing hard, trying to figure out what was going on; the tourists, taking our cue, were beginning to line up behind us, concerned, vigilant. “Maybe we should go over, see if someone needs some help,” Lisa suggested. “Maybe we should get ready to get the hell out of here but fast,” I retorted.
Masai women were pouring out of the village, running to the next one, all the while wailing, waving their hands above their heads in a histrionic stagy way that was all the more unnerving, since the Masai are rarely histrionic or stagy. We thought that there might have been a murderously awful fight in the village, the frightened lamenting women pouring out to seek shelter in the next village, until we noted that the women were running back and forth. Soon the wailing was piercing from both villages. To our considerable alarm, we saw that men were now running around like headless chickens as well. More villages joined in the wailing, up and down the river. “They are calling for help,” said Richard.
We all stood watching the inexplicable tumult, as if it were a tableau, something colorful and excited and native, captured in this rare National Geographic footage. We stood there gawking. The tourists behind us stood there gawking. And something reasonably terrifying happened to the camp guys standing behind them. The camping companies that would bring the tourists to these sites would send out guys from the agricultural tribes, based in Nairobi, as the tour leaders and cooks. But up and down the river, local guys from the Masai villages were hired for the scut work—guarding the camp, peeling potatoes, putting up tents. These were men usually fairly soiled from the detritus of their cross-cultural experiences—dressed in worn hand-me-downs discarded by the tourists, University of Somewhere shorts, El Paso chili bake-off commemorative T-shirts; ex-warriors who habitually took on the subservient, watchful air of people obsessed with handouts from the tourists.
So we and the tourists are standing there, and Joe Blow Masai, whom the tourists were earlier putting through the silliness of learning to do the bunny hop or something, Joe Blow, who is supposed to be peeling potatoes while this wailing is permeating everywhere—something happens to Joe. He runs behind a bush, and suddenly he tears out—his torn Waikiki Open T-shirt is discarded, he’s wearing his red cloak, he grabs a spear that has materialized from out of nowhere, and he’s gone. Up and down the river, at all the campsites, all the meek potato-peeling Joes run into bushes, emerge as warriors, and, wailing, run off into the National Geographic film.
It was a Kuria raid. Once the Kuria were just another tribe that got savaged by the Masai with regularity. But because they live south of the arbitrary line in the Serengeti that separates Kenya from Tanzania, their luck has changed. Tanzania is poorer than Kenya, the army is paid far worse, and some Kuria discovered that army guys could be paid to “lose” their weapons. Frequently, Kuria tribesmen who were army men themselves would lose their guns just before their discharge. And suddenly, the Kuria had automatic weapons to use when paying their respects to the Masai.
This time they had raided during the moonless night. Most of the cows were about twenty miles west, at a temporary corral. The Kuria had hit there, doing some shooting, stealing the cows. A Masai runner with the news had just covered the twenty miles, reached the village as we began our darting, and the wailing began, spreading from village to village.
The Kuria had had a few hours’ start, but they were lumbering through the grasslands with hundreds of cows, protecting them from predators, abandoning the slow ones with calves. The Masai warriors were grouping now and were about to do something perfectly traditional, if outlandish: they were going to run the thirty-odd miles after the Kuria and their cows, chase them down to the Tanzanian border, and, with their spears, face off against the guns to get the cows back.
Warriors were running every which way with spears. A first group sprinted past, crossed the river, began their run. Other groups were forming. Richard, Lisa, and I did the logical thing. We drove the car into thick bushes and hid. It seemed perfectly logical that our Masai neighbors would, any moment, confront us excitedly with their spears and volunteer us to drop them off at the battlefront. The last time the Kuria hit, two Masai got killed. The time before that, when the Kenyan rangers (predominately Masai) responded fast enough to get into it, twenty-two Kuria were killed. No, thank you, but I thought they’d be unimpressed if I tried to explain that my insurance policy explicitly forbade driving into battles against men with automatic weapons. So we hid in the bushes.
Eventually, the coast seemed clear and we scooted for camp. Halfway there we ran into Soirowa. His cows were gone too, and he was about to run to Tanzania with his spear. The usually stoic Soirowa was crying with rage, shivering with emotion and anticipation. He was waiting for us, not for a lift (we later realized, a bit shamefacedly but with relief as well, that the Masai would no more think of asking us to drive them into battle than to ask for advice on bleeding cows. This was a purely Masai affair), but to tell us of his departure. “I am going to get my cows in Tanzania,” he said, remembering to reassure us that he had collected firewood, before sprinting off to face the men with guns.*
Impressed, shaken, excited, we went to camp, where we found Wilson puttering about, making tea. Hiya, Wilson, so what do you think of all of this? He was not from here, it wasn’t his cattle. “Those Kuria, those people are fuck.” He was just learning how to curse in English. “They take the cows with guns, and now the Masai have to run to Tanzania. Even Soirowa, all his cows. Maybe he will get killed fighting them.” Incongruously, he chuckled a bit, passed us more tea.
Throughout the day, Wilson went about life as usual. Lisa was more than a bit astonished at the whole spectacle. She kept grilling Wilson. Are they really going to run to Tanzania? “Yes, maybe for two days.” How can they do that? “They are strong, they are warriors.” Just like that, they run to Tanzania and have to fight. Wilson, does this happen in your place also, people come and take your cows and then you have to fight? “Oh no, we are not like these Masai, running around in their cloaks. We raise maize,” he said proudly. No cows at all? I thought all Masai have cows, love them. “No, myself, no cows. I do not like cows, not like these dirty Masai, always thinking of their cows.”
She probed. So you do not care about these cows and the Kuria, you would not go running to Tanzania now. “Oh no,” he said with sudden emphasis. “I would go, myself, I would run to Tanzania right now.” But why didn’t you go? “Someone has to watch camp,” he said in a disappointed, petulant tone, as if he had to stay inside to practice his violin while the other boys got to torture cats. “I would run to Tanzania too, I would fight the Kuria.”
Wait, people are going to get killed fighting, why should you go, these are not your cows.
“I would fight them, I am not afraid to die.” But you don’t even like cows.
“No, I do not like cows. But I am not afraid to die for the ways of the cow.”
And with that, he turned his attention to more pressing interests, reminding Lisa of her promise to teach him how to make the toast of the French.