Lisa was introducing Richard to musical theater. She had a cassette player and a tape of Les Mis, and was walking Richard through the plot and lyrics. The bestial ways in which people were often treating each other made perfect sense to him. He leapt up with agitated concern when told that the white man Javert had revealed his identity. He found it hilarious that a policeman—typically a pretty malevolent and corrupt individual in these parts—got to sing also. All in all, he was mesmerized, as Lisa prepared him for each new song. It was easy to imagine him moving next to grand opera, maybe even Aïda, complete with the elephants.
It was right around the part that was certainly not going to make much sense to anyone here—the downtrodden rising up against injustice to man the barricades—that word reached camp: Joseph has gone mad! Joseph, a Masai security guard at the tourist camp, thwarting off raiding fellow Masai, protecting somnambulists from elephants, a silent innocuous man who had toiled for years in the vicinity without generating even the flimsiest of anecdotes, Joseph had gone mad.
First was Charles, the tourist camp laundry man, of the same tribe as Richard and Samwelly. Charles came in a rotund excitement reporting the undeniable evidence that Joseph had gone mad. That very day he had quit his job, a clearly lunatic act. Or at least Joseph himself reported such a brash move, as he gathered his few belongings into a bundle, for he had decided to kill himself for unknown reasons. And he was gone.
Soon Soirowa hurried in worried. He was a relative of Joseph’s in some way that we could never quite get straight from one explanation to the next. Joseph had indeed gone mad and was roaring up and down the river region, going from village to village, proclaiming that he was about to kill himself. But why? we asked. Because he is mad, explained Soirowa, departing anxiously.
The Masai children appeared soon, frightened. Joseph had indeed been seen, the innocuous silent Joseph lurching about the grassland between villages. “I will see you in heaven!” he shouted to the children, who shuddered at the retelling. We distributed balloons and made powdered fruit juice to comfort them, as we huddled in wonder.
By late afternoon, a murmuring crowd had gathered to gossip and speculate. Would he really kill himself? Of course, because he was crazy. But how did we know he was crazy? Because he had quit his job. But why any of this? People were replete with theories.
“You know, Joseph has an ulcer which is always paining him, so perhaps he is killing himself because it is too much pain.” This was Richard, who had an ulcer of his own.
“But he drinks so much, so that he will not feel the pain of his ulcer,” retorted Simon, the waiter.
“But drinking makes an ulcer hurt worse,” retorted Richard.
“But the drink makes you feel it less,” answered Simon.
We teetered on the edge of that unsolvable argument until Charles suggested that maybe Joseph had gone crazy from drinking too much.
Soirowa thought there were larger schemes afoot.
“At the ceremony at the village, the shaman said that Joseph had too much beer in his calabash for one man to drink and that he should give the rest of the beer to the shaman, and Joseph refused. So the shaman put a curse on him.”
“For a beer?”
“But that shaman demands beer from everyone and they ignore him.”
“But Joseph said he was not frightened of that shaman, so the shaman cannot curse him.”
“Of course he can. The shaman can do it. He can change you into a hyena if he wants, he can make your penis fall off,” said Charles, the room steward. It was not clear which was a worse fate.
“That shaman is not so strong, he is just an old drunk.”
“That’s why he would curse Joseph for a beer.”
So it went. Everyone was pleased and excited, and we scared ourselves speculating on whether Joseph would come that night, as a hyena, and murder us.
The next day, more rumors. Rhoda rushed in to say that he was still going to kill himself. Soirowa reported that Joseph was trying to borrow money to buy poison from a rare plant. The oddity of asking for money to be returned after you were dead lent peculiar credence to that story. The rangers were seen out patrolling with guns, and it was thought that Joseph had become so mad and dangerous as to require such an armed response, until it became clear that the rangers were merely searching for poachers. The warden was seen driving in the vicinity, and it was thought that he, the final authority, had been called in to track down mad Joseph, until it became clear that the warden was merely going for free lunch at the tourist camp. Joseph was reported seen by all, but never in the same place, speaking many different languages, making mysterious gestures that might have had meaning.
The next day brought reports from all over of the most shocking news: Joseph had become “somehow a white man.” The witnesses said he had become “somehow white,” his skin had become “somehow rough.” We cross-examined aggressively and forced everyone to the rational conclusion that he had been rolling in the whitish sand found on some parts of the banks of the river. Yet he was still proclaimed to have become somehow a white man. The children were kept inside the village that day, as were the cows.
The next day brought a resolution. In front of everyone, Joseph had emerged from the bush, somehow unwhite, had paid for a bus ticket to his hometown, and had bid everyone adieu without mention of seeing them next in heaven. But, Joseph, how are you? everyone had asked. I am all right. So now he is not mad, everyone agreed.
Upon questioning, the manager of the tourist camp said that Joseph had requested his annual leave, and reported that he planned to spend a few days visiting people at the local village before going home for the remainder.
Other than the, perhaps, occasional nocturnal shudder of the children remembering his warnings of the afterlife, the case was promptly forgotten.
That was the season that Lisa, nearing the completion of her PhD in clinical psychology, and I went on her busman’s holiday, as we visited every mental hospital in Kenya. And we asked the same sort of question to every staffer that we could find. How do people here decide when someone is mentally ill? You can have a Masai schizophrenic, from a culture where people are very nonverbal, where they spend most of each day alone with the cows, or a schizophrenic from one of the coastal tribes, from a highly sophisticated, verbal, urban setting. What symptom finally pushes the Masai family over the brink to bring their troubled kid to the authorities, what symptom for the coastal people? What are delusions of grandeur like in a desert camel herder? Does he claim to have twice as many camels as he actually has? What voices do people hear? What makes people here paranoid?
And every staffer gave us pretty much the same answer that Rhoda had given me many years before, after the incident with the psychotic woman with the goat in her mouth. They just act crazy, they all said. People just know when someone is acting crazy. Various academicians make their whole careers studying those cultural differences in symptomatology, but we never got a nibble from anyone; no one thought it was an interesting set of questions.
The patients themselves were plenty interesting. No elderly depressives, the types that fill American psychiatric wards—old age is anticipated with eagerness, the height of respect and power. Why get depressed then? Plenty of younger depressives, who seemed to be doing quite well—“Except when the hospital cannot afford antidepressants, then we get many suicides,” we were told by the doctor giving us the tour. Poignant. No teenaged viper-eyed killer-of-old-women-with-no-remorse sociopaths. They wind up in jail, in this society in which psychiatrists are not common fixtures in courts of law. Lots of epileptics—an illness classified as a psychiatric disorder in America only during the dark ages. Lots of kids with cerebral malaria. Lots of paranoid schizophrenics.
The most amazing thing was the lack of violence. The staffers thought we were exaggerating when we described how a major problem in American psychiatric hospitals was patients assaulting each other, assaulting staff No such thing here. No locks on the doors to the hospital. No one trying to escape. It made sense after the first visit—everyone gets their own bed, three meals a day. Unheard-of luxuries for most bush Kenyans. Why run away, why fight? In the yard, patients of both sexes, naked, with shaved heads, lounged around, slept, babbled, gesticulated. Some chased the chickens in the yard, some were chased by the chickens. One, a bent old man with gleaming eyes, hobbled over excitedly to Lisa, like a tortoise with a pleasing secret, and grasped her hand. “Mama has finally come, Mama has finally come,” he kept burbling.