Once a year, the Mbatian family had a reunion. It was organized by the two wives. Six of their eight daughters had flown the nest, but they made the effort to return for the day, to honour their parents, get updates on each other, and celebrate with dancing, food, and even more dancing late into the night.
In recent years, Kevin had been there as part of the family, but not this time. As a result, Ole was finding it difficult to feel cheerful about anything at all.
In the midst of the early dancing, the postman and his bicycle reached the village. He went to the chief, of course, to greet him politely and say he sought permission to sleep over since it was getting dark. No one biked around the savanna in the darkness. Perhaps a blanket or a bite to eat might be included in the hospitality he was hoping for?
Chief Olemeeli never turned away a guest. Most times that was because he didn’t dare. This time it was because the guest had arrived on a bicycle, an honourable form of transportation.
‘Yes, indeed it is,’ said the postman.
He had an envelope for the medicine man. One with exciting stamps. Looked like it had come from far, far away.
Ole Mbatian was deeply moved by the letter from his vanished son. He read it through twice before interrupting the dancing to tell his double wives and eight daughters that he’d just received a letter from the boy who meant everything.
The boy who meant everything? At that, two of his daughters began to cry, another three joined them, and one wife stalked off while the other launched into a tirade.
‘Look what you’ve done, you stupid ass!’
There was something about women Ole would never understand. Kevin was the son God had sent straight from heaven, no middleman necessary, and placed before his feet. The boy who knew nothing about being Maasai and still came very close to becoming the best one of all.
Just three years after his birth on the savanna, he had already mastered the art of staring down a lion. What you needed to do was walk straight towards the animal at the exact right speed, your eyes fixed on its own. With not a hint of hesitation.
At that point, hesitation would be sparked in the lion, who had inherited the knowledge that an approaching body wrapped in checked fabric meant trouble. It was as if the shúkà spoke to the lion and said ‘I’m a Maasai …’ and concluded with ‘… come and get me if you dare.’
The two-hundred-kilo male did not dare.
Kevin was a master of the throwing club after only two years, including how to account for the effects of different wind speeds. The club-related test of manhood was to encounter a buffalo, the angriest animal on the savanna, and make it reconsider its decision to gore the two-legged being before it. Few creatures, with the exception of the gnu, think less than the buffalo. Only the very best can get a creature who almost doesn’t think at all to have second thoughts.
Kevin was one of them.
The final year of education was purely a formality, surviving from migration to migration, the time when hundreds of thousands of zebras and gnus ventured north from the Serengeti. Kevin, like the gnus, had crossed the Mara River without being attacked by crocodiles. The latter did it by sheer chance. Ninety-eight out of a hundred made it through. Kevin analysed his surroundings. Getting a feel for each crocodile. For who was in which mood. He swam with bow and arrow on his back in case he had miscalculated. Ole almost wished that would happen sometime, because how was the boy planning to shoot a crocodile while swimming? All Ole knew was that Kevin knew.
His beloved Kevin.
After his year on the savanna, the youth were ready for their test, the formal circumcision. Ole knew Kevin would come through that ordeal just fine as well. His father the medicine man would perform it. The knife wasn’t exactly dull, but it wasn’t too sharp either. It was part of the test, that the procedure should take its time and be felt. Anyone who made a sound while the medicine man worked could look forward to a future as a scrap dealer in Nairobi. At best. Banished from the village, in any case. Those who managed to keep quiet were true Maasai warriors, had taken that last step into the adult world, were free to marry and have children. Preferably sons. Or actually, preferably a mix, now that Ole thought about it.
If only Kevin had spoken more about it with his father, he could have received an alternative treatment. The smith was always happy to brand a full moon into the nape of those who preferred it. The important thing was that you felt pain and didn’t show it.
If only he had spoken with his father.
The whole village had searched for him for hours. All they found was what they didn’t find: Kevin’s backpack and the medicine man’s paintings. The boy must have taken off.
Ole’s heart broke. But when the letter arrived, it healed itself. Why, his son was in …
The one wife continued her tirade; the daughters kept crying. Ole went to the chief to get some peace and quiet.
‘Where is Sweden?’ he asked Olemeeli the Well-Travelled.
‘I’ve been everywhere,’ said the chief.
‘You have not. But where is Sweden?’
‘No idea.’
Up to this point, Ole had been feeling too old or too settled to travel any further than Tabaka or maybe Ndonyo, and even then only during the short rains. Now he was going beyond that, and with a spring in his step.
He knew that Olemeeli’s stubborn prohibitions kept them all unnecessarily in the dark about the many new things the kids in the village gossiped about. But what those things exactly were remained to be seen. The smith’s sister knew some stuff, but Ole Mbatian would prefer to remain ignorant than listen to her prattle on.
He brought four cows with him and herded them to Narok. Cows as payment. There, at the petrol station, worked one of the banished almost-Maasais. He had been watching cars come and go for years and was known for asking where people had come from and where they were heading. He himself had an old Toyota. For one cow, two at the most, he would surely offer to drive Ole the whole way.
‘Hello there, Hector.’
‘Oh, the great medicine man. The man with the dull knife. Have you come to cut off what’s still hanging on?’
To think he was still sulking after twenty years.
‘No, I’ve come to ask you to drive me to a special place, for the price of one cow in cash.’
You didn’t say no to a cow, not if you worked at a petrol station.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Sweden.’
Hector saw the cow vanish into thin air.
‘Never heard of it. The problem is, it might be across the sea, on the other side of Kilimanjaro. In which case you need a passport.’
‘A passport?’
‘Talk to Wilson at city hall. He’s a wizard with papers and stamps and stuff.’
Wilson? Another of the failures. It seemed to Ole that this journey was starting off on the wrong foot; he wasn’t having the luck he needed.
The head clerk at city hall had completely sat out the final year on the savanna but submitted to circumcision anyway, because he’d heard somewhere that it pleased God. Just to mess with the others, he had shouted and screamed and sworn while Ole did what he was tasked with doing; after all, he had nothing to lose. Then he swaddled his bloody genitals in fabric, packed his bags, and said he was going to see the world rather than stay put and become as insular as everyone else.
He got no further than Narok. But Wilson knew more than Hector about the world beyond the mountains.
‘You need to travel abroad,’ he said. ‘And to do that you need a passport.’
‘All this damn talk about passports.’
Wilson said that these could only be issued in Nairobi and to get one, you had to prove that you were Kenyan.
‘I’m Maasai,’ said Ole Mbatian the Younger.
‘You’re Kenyan as well, and my affidavit and stamps will prove that you exist.’
‘But I’m standing right here.’
For hundreds of years, the Maasai had been crossing the border between present-day Kenya and Tanzania without giving a thought to personal identification or an invisible border. No police on either side had ever dared to ask them to legitimate themselves.
But Ole didn’t have time to argue with Wilson about whether or not he existed. He would just have to go along with this passport thing if it was so important.
‘Well, get to stamping, then, so we can get on with this.’
It wasn’t that simple. Wilson’s stamps were very special and they had to be treated with respect. It might take a week. The medicine man was welcome to return then with his four cows.
But now Ole Mbatian grew furious. A week for one stamp?
‘Two stamps, if I may say so.’
And incidentally, the medicine man should know that it was much more than just the stamps. This was called administration – a very important line of work.
Ole had heard enough.
‘You can have one cow per stamp, and a third if you close your office right now, borrow Hector’s Toyota, and drive me to Nairobi. For the fourth you must give me cash. Not that I trust paper money, but it’s easier to carry in my luggage.’
Going against an angry Maasai warrior and medicine man was more than head clerk Wilson had bargained for. After a glance at his calendar he informed Ole that he could shorten the administration time a smidge. From one week to a quarter of an hour. The round trip to Nairobi, however, was a bit more problematic. Who did the medicine man expect would handle the important work at city hall in the meantime?
Ole had seen how a stamp worked; Hector could manage it.
Let Hector handle the stamps? Not on his life. That could lead to sheer chaos.
Wilson stuffed them into his briefcase, both the red one and the blue one.
‘Come on, let’s go.’
‘Didn’t you need fifteen minutes?’
‘I can stamp while I drive.’
The next day, a new passport was issued to Ole Mbatian the Younger, with an estimated birthdate.
‘A picture of me and everything,’ Ole said as he flipped through it. ‘Born on August seventh. That was more than I knew. What’s August?’
Wilson felt that it was impossible to tell when the medicine man was and was not joking.
‘I have to get home to Narok now,’ he said. ‘Safe flight, Medicine Man.’
‘Flight?’
No one had ever called Ole Mbatian stingy. No one would start now. Besides the agreed-upon compensation for Wilson, the medicine man instructed him to go back to their home village and fetch two more cows as thanks for his good service and steady stamping hand. For the best treatment he should turn to the chief rather than to one of Ole’s wives, especially not the first one. Or in fact the other one.
Wilson remarked that the medicine man was more honourable than he’d thought; he thanked him for the tip and wished him good luck on his journey.
Once the head clerk was off, only Ole and the civil servant with the Kenyan passport police were left. The medicine man asked if the officer could direct him to an airplane that was headed to Sweden. He couldn’t, and as if that weren’t enough, Ole was informed that he needed something called a visa to travel where he wanted to go. These were not merely handed out at the drop of a hat, not for Sweden.
Why the hell was everything so complicated? Ole questioned everything so emphatically that in the end, the civil servant ran out of arguments. And anyway, they were not his own arguments, but those of the Swedish embassy. To get out of standing there and being showered with curses he’d never even heard before, he decided to give the troublesome medicine man a ride over.
‘In my opinion, Mr Mbatian, your reasoning is both rational and clever,’ he lied, in the interest of getting the old man to shut up. ‘Please, come with me, I know who you ought to speak with.’
Fifteen minutes later, he deposited Ole outside the embassy, thus allowing his day to return to normal.
Within the stately embassy doors, the medicine man discovered a room where about twenty people were waiting their turn. The Maasai did not take a queue number, for he had never heard of doing so. He walked right past all twenty people and knocked on the receptionist’s window. Behind it sat a woman who was doing nothing. Ole felt it would be reasonable for her to do something else.
The woman looked up, annoyed. This wasn’t the first time a rural visitor had tried to cut in line. But then her expression changed and she opened her window.
‘Mr Mbatian! What an honour. What can I do for you?’
She well remembered the medicine man; she had been a patient of his seven years ago and had been eternally grateful ever since. In contrast to what she’d feared, her five children had not turned into six, seven, or possibly even more.
Ole Mbatian had treated hundreds of women like her and could not reasonably be expected to tell one from the next.
‘Nice to see you again,’ he said. ‘I remember you very well.’
After that he told it like it was: he was planning to pop over to Sweden to see what it was like there, and he had been given to understand that you needed any number of things to do so. He didn’t believe any more stamps were in order, however; he already had two.
The grateful receptionist needed to know who he would be seeing in Sweden, and the address of his intended lodgings. She also wanted to see Mr Mbatian’s airline ticket, especially the return one.
Ole shook his head – he was a medicine man, not an oracle. Who could say whom one might meet next, and under which sky one might sleep? The fact that you needed a ticket to fly was news to him, but he wasn’t surprised. Since everything else had to be so difficult, why not that too?
This wasn’t exactly the response the receptionist wanted. Or, rather: this was the exact response she didn’t want. But she had many years of service behind her and knew how things worked around here.
‘One moment, Mr Mbatian, I’ll see what I can do.’
She disappeared into an adjoining room along with the medicine man’s passport. In the span of four minutes she broke at least that many of the embassy’s visa rules, after which she returned to the medicine man and handed him his passport, visa and all.
‘Anything else I can do for you?’ she asked, expecting a no.
‘Since you have so kindly offered,’ said Ole. ‘I have some cash here. My chief’s preferred currency is actually cows, but that seemed impractical now that I’m going to fly and everything. Can you tell me how much this is and whether it will get me where I’m going? Otherwise I suppose I’ll have to walk the last little bit.’
The receptionist was concerned. What should she do now?
Then the queue behind the medicine man came to her aid. A general grumbling had arisen. How could this Maasai just walk in and be helped straight away, while everyone else had to wait?
She liked her job in customer service at the embassy. The only downside was the customers. It would be nice not to have to look at them for a while.
She placed her ‘back in a moment’ sign in her window, put on her thin coat, and came around to meet the Maasai.
‘Where are you going now?’ said the angriest of the men in the queue.
‘None of your damn business,’ the receptionist replied.
The nearest travel agency was right around the corner. The eternally grateful former patient walked briskly, and Ole kept pace with her.
The travel agency found a sufficiently cheap ticket to Stockholm, via Addis Ababa and Istanbul. Once that was paid for, Ole Mbatian’s travelling funds consisted of two thousand shillings, which is to say twenty dollars or one twenty-fifth of a cow. This prompted the receptionist to allow the ‘back in a moment’ sign to replace her for a bit longer. The last help Ole Mbatian received from her was in the form of a lift on her moped to Jomo Kenyatta Airport.
Ole thanked her for all her help, kissed her on the cheeks and the forehead, and stepped into the security area.
There he was immediately relieved of the spear on his back and the knife at his side.
‘But why?’ said the Maasai.
‘They can be dangerous,’ said the security worker.
‘Why else would I have them?’
People just got stranger the further he got from home. Ole Mbatian the Younger never went a metre without his weapons! He was just about to say so to the security worker when something further on caught his eye. What was that?
‘Oh well,’ said Ole. ‘Keep the spear and knife for now, if you must.’
And he hurried off towards what he had spotted.
During his very first encounter with an escalator at the airport in Nairobi, Ole Mbatian made up his mind to stop complaining about everything that wasn’t what he’d hoped for, or what he was used to.
Just think – a staircase that did your strolling for you in one direction, while in the other direction you would stand still no matter how hard you walked. Ole had fantasized about having the latter outside his own medicine hut, the one that had been sitting on the small rise on the outskirts of the village for three generations. That way the smith’s sister would never arrive.
Although this staircase ran on electricity, of course, which the chief had long ago forbidden along with typewriters and everything that came after. Ole was going to have a serious talk with Olemeeli the not-at-all-well-travelled once he got back home.
His journey continued. Changing planes in Addis Ababa was fine; all he had to do was ask where to go. A situation arose in Istanbul when Ole didn’t understand that modern toilets could be separated by gender. All of a sudden he found himself surrounded by angry women as he washed his feet in their sink.
All that came of this incident was that a Turkish airport security worker personally escorted the medicine man to the Stockholm gate, even as he praised the traveller’s ambitions to have clean feet.
The medicine man landed at Stockholm Arlanda Airport, where it turned out that the visa in his passport did just what the woman at the embassy in Nairobi had promised. Ole uttered a special thanks to the passport control officer for selecting a black stamp to mark his entry into the country; he already had red and blue. He didn’t know quite where they were, but still.
The officer thanked him for the praise, welcomed Ole Mbatian the Younger to the Kingdom of Sweden – and warned him about the temperature. It was not her duty to express opinions about visitors’ clothing, but in this case … a red-and-black checked cloth in combination with sandals and bare feet was not optimal for the current minus-fifteen-degrees weather.
Ole, who didn’t know that degrees could be divided into above and below, shrugged.
Outside the airport, the fabric of his shúkà immediately grew stiff, and his sandals slipped around in snow and ice. Fifteen degrees? That passport officer was making things up.
Ole had only experienced something like this once before. One of the most vexing ingredients in his medicine cabinet had the gall to grow just below the glacier atop Kilimanjaro, at an altitude that made you gasp for breath. But the medicine man had his calling, and since the antiseptic moss wouldn’t come to him, he would have to go to the moss. And now here he stood, in the same sort of cold, but with neither mountain nor moss.
A kind-hearted passer-by promptly talked Ole out of walking into the capital. It was too far and too cold.
But there was an express train. Which, naturally, you needed a ticket for. Ole skipped that part, and very soon found himself in dialogue with a uniformed man. The conductor of the train informed him that anyone without a ticket had to pay onboard, plus a penalty fee. Credit card or exact change only.
Ole didn’t understand a word of what the uniformed man had said in Swedish, and figured it was just as well, since he could guess what the man was after.
When the passenger didn’t respond and was dressed in an exceedingly un-Swedish fashion besides, the conductor suspected he ought to switch languages.
‘Do you speak English?’ he asked, in English.
The medicine man certainly did, but he didn’t think it was in his own best interest to initiate any in-depth conversations with the man who wanted the money he didn’t even have. A response in Swahili, any response at all, might help. He said what came to him in the moment.
‘Mke mmoja hatoshi, ila ukiongeza mke wa pili hilo nalo ni tatizo la kukupasua kichwa.’
‘One wife is not enough, but two wives are a problem that may cause your head to break.’
After thinking for a few seconds, the conductor decided that further argumentation was above his pay grade. He saluted and said in Swedish that the gentleman could keep his money, or – even better – use it to buy a winter coat.
Once he arrived in the Swedish capital, the medicine man needed somewhere to rest up. Sleeping under the open sky was out of the question; the weather in Sweden was too strange to do that.
A hut he could ask to step into was not to be found. This city was larger than he’d imagined. How would he find his beloved boy in all of this? Oh well, rest first. Search later.
He stepped out of Central Station and into the icy air and spotted the word ‘hotel’ across the street. He knew what that was; there was one next to city hall in Narok. Two rooms. Open now and then. A hotel was where you stayed if you didn’t want to sleep outside at night and could pay your way.
Now, that last bit. Ole Mbatian the Younger was fundamentally a prosperous man. So he told the woman from whom he attempted to let a room. He had eight hundred cows and over two hundred goats but had been unable to bring them all the way here. Back in Nairobi they had protested even at the sight of his spear and knife – what would they have said about the livestock?
The receptionist was young and had no experience checking in Maasai warriors. No wonder she misunderstood a few key points. What she thought she heard was that he had a spear and a knife and wanted to pay in cows. Or two hundred goats. But she wasn’t certain that he had threatened her.
‘We are a cash-free hotel,’ was what she managed to say.
The medicine man said that suited him just fine, since he essentially had no cash anyway. His point was that he wanted to sleep now and pay later. The young woman should not be anxious about this. Ole Mbatian the Younger was his name. Medicine man by trade. Where he came from, you either did the right thing or else you didn’t do much more after that.
In order to emphasize this last part, Ole raised his throwing club and smiled. In a friendly way, if he did say so himself.
With that, all doubt was eliminated. The man on the other side of her counter was a lethal threat. He had a spear and a knife hidden somewhere, and he intended to beat the receptionist to death with the club in his hand if he wasn’t assigned a room free of charge.
Ole Mbatian’s friendly assurances of integrity were received in a manner he could not have foreseen. Instead of showing him to his room, she began to shriek. There was no understanding why, but among the words Ole Mbatian caught were ‘police’ and ‘help’.