by Paul Theroux
Mark, the Samburu policeman who was hitching a ride with us, told me that he wasn’t happy traveling with soldiers.
‘Because if the shifta see them they know they have to fight,’ he said. ‘They will shoot our tires, or the radiator. They might shoot the driver. They shot one last week. If they are really hungry, they will shoot us.’
‘They do not want your life, they want your shoes. That’s what I was told.’
‘If you don’t give them your shoes they will take your life.’
This was all unsettling, because being stranded here at Serolevi, we had been left behind by the convoy that was headed to Nairobi. When we finally did set off we would be going alone, a big lumbering target on an empty road.
Under a tree, with nothing to do, I asked Mark about female circumcision among the Samburu.
‘Yes, it is the tradition, everyone does it – the Borena, the Rendille, the Meru. But I have never seen it, because women circumcise women and men circumcise men,’ he said. ‘The clitoris is cut off. Completely off.’
‘Painful,’ I said.
‘Of course painful – she gets no medicine. But she must not show pain. She lies here. She says nothing. It is done so she will not feel pleasure with sex. Otherwise she will need men. But this way her husband can go away and she will remain faithful always.’
‘At what age?’
‘Can be any age. It must be before she is married. If she is to be married at sixteen it is done then. Or at twenty.’
‘But she might be having sex before then.’
‘Of course she is having sex before then. She is having sex from an early age. But’ – he gestured for my attention to make sure I understood – ‘only with her age group.’
He explained that there was no sanction against a boy or girl of twelve having sex, or a pair of fourteen-year-olds playing at it, or two fifteen-year-olds. But an older man was forbidden to engage in sex with a young girl unless he had marriage in mind. Within the same age group almost anything was permitted.
‘There are risks, though,’ Mark said. ‘If the girl becomes pregnant and has a child she will not find anyone to marry her. A man wants someone fresh, and his own child. The father of the child will deny he is the father if he does not want to marry. She might become a man’s second wife, or else not get married at all, just raise her child alone.’
‘Will she be conspicuous in the village?’
‘Yes, because when a woman is circumcised and married she wears different clothes – to show everyone she is a married woman.’
This folklore and the IRA book were so depressing, I went to Helen’s house and planned another meal. This time I did not argue about the Bible. Instead, I let Helen teach me some gospel hymns in Samburu. Helen clapped her hands and sang in a joyous way:
Marango pa nana!
Shumata tengopai!
Na ti lytorian – ni!
(This world is not my home!
My home is in heaven!
Where God is!)
With that promise you were conditioned to brush off the years of drought, the poor harvests, the abandoned schoolhouse, the damaged borehole with its trickle of water, the awful bar with drunken men, the clitorectomy, and Kenya’s horrible AIDS statistics: they were just blips in the vale of tears on the way to heaven.
The welding was done, but there comes a point in all African journeys, usually late in the day, when it is wiser to hunker down with the other prey than stir and tempt the predators, virtually all of whom roam at night. This is as true in the bush as it is in any African city. And so we had another night in Serolevi, another meal, more starlight, and early the following morning set offfor Isiolo, at the edge of the desert.
We did not make it. On a particularly bad stretch of road, where we were expecting shifta, there was a loud bang, and we fell to the floor again. But again it was a blown tire. This did not stop us, but it slowed us, and from the way the vehicle listed it was obvious the welded spring had lost its bounce and was settling on to the axle. We crept along, the chassis banging.
Letting go of the anxiety from the fix we were in – it was clear we would be stranded again soon: why worry? – I looked at the scenery. No landscape since I had left Cairo had been as beautiful as this desert land of northern Kenya. It had hardly been settled, it was nominally Kenya but it was off the map, its unearthly appearance making it seem enchanted.
We were on a high plain, and although the land was mostly flat and gravelly, there were sudden and stupendous erupted mountains all over it, at a distance. Some of them were huge, five- or six-thousand-foot-high bread loaves – tall steep mountains of stone, beautifully smooth, with rounded summits and very little vegetation, not like anything I had ever seen before, but suggesting the surface of another planet, the dark star of Africa.
Several hours passed as we rolled along slowly, the bruised vehicle on the bad road. The road was famous for bandits yet it was noon and so hot that nothing stirred – not even dikdiks or camels. For much of that day we had traveled through a land without people. The Canadian man was gabbling. I knew what he was saying, and so I turned away and lifted my eyes to the hills.
Archer’s Post was a small smudge far away. Seeing it, I reassured myself that if we broke down right here in this wadi I would grab my bag and hike the rest of the way: the distance was walkable. But that was not necessary. The truck was lopsided from the cracked spring and the blown tire flapped, but we made it to the main street – the only street – in Archer’s Post. There, with Ben’s news that it might be another night of repair, and that asthmatic Jade had to be rescued from the hospital, and the Canadian grinning – a self-appointed bore with one remark – I made a decision to bail out. I would abandon the congeniality of this Africa overland trip and take my chances with the next bus to Isiolo, if there was a bus. Group tours were not for me.
‘Cheerio, mate,’ Ben called out, waving symbolically with a monkey-wrench.
I said goodbye to them all, and hoisted my bag on to my shoulder and walked away from the truck. I had seen items in travel magazines all the time advertising ‘Overland Africa – Experience the Adventure.’ And now I knew what this adventure entailed. If you are on such a group tour, you are the human cargo, one of a truckload of young people, many of them good-hearted, some of them very silly, sitting on a bench on the truck bed, earphones clamped tight, eating dust, listening to your Enya tape. You might get held up by shifta, you will certainly be held up by flat tires, you will seldom wash. No one calls out ‘Are we there yet?’ because no one except the driver has the slightest idea of the route or the difficulty. We had crossed the wide Dida Galgalu Desert, and north of Marsabit the Ngaso Plain. We had climbed to the Kaisut Plateau and been stranded for two days in Serolevi on the Losai Reserve, and had traversed the foot of the desert mountain, Olkanjo. If you had asked any of them where we had traveled the answer would have been, ‘Was that where Kevin barfed?’ or ‘Was that where jade gagged?’ or ‘Was that where the road sucked?’ After months of trucking in Africa everyone on board has the dull torpid smile and brain-damaged look of a cultist.
‘Aren’t you a little old for this, Dad?’ my children say, when I relate a travel experience that involves the back of a truck. My answer is: Not relly. It is not the truck that makes me feel old – big efficient trucks overcome obstacles that baffle little cars. It is the passengers who make me feel – not old, not fogeyish, but out of place. I had been grateful for the ride, grateful to Ben and Mick for their ingenuity and patience; I was also grateful to leave, even if leaving meant wandering down the main street of Archer’s Post, a tiny dust-blown town in the middle of nowhere.
Teenaged boys left their perches at the shops and followed me, pestering me, asking me where I was going, where I was from. They were used to foreigners in Archer’s Post – the Samburu Game Reserve was west of here, and I saw game lodges advertised on signposts at the edge of town. Tourists were sped here in minibuses, fresh from the plane, dressed in very expen
sive safari clothes, with pith helmets and khaki jackets. Their trousers had eleven pockets, their sleeves were trimmed in leather and amply gusseted.
When the pestering boys had surrounded me and were making a nuisance of themselves (‘Wewe, muzungu’) and I was on the point of shouting at them, a Jeep approached. I raised my hand for it to stop. It did so: a miracle.
Saved again by another nun, Sister Matilda, with a familiar accent.
‘Yes, I am from Sardinia! Get in – we can talk!’
And, recalling Italy, we traveled south to Isiolo. It was only an hour away by this fast car, but we had not gone far down the road when the unfamiliar smell of rain-soaked fields rose to cool the air. The fields were green, the road muddy in places. I had not seen mud since Addis Ababa. There were pastures, cornfields, smallholdings and wooded valleys, and hills scored with the furrows of cultivation. Tufted green copses graced the banks of little creeks.
‘Did you have any trouble on the road?’ Sister Matilda asked.
‘We were shot at by shifta around Marsabit. Several trucks were attacked. Was it in the newspaper?’
‘No!’ She laughed. ‘ “Shot at.” That is not news in Kenya!’
Obviously not, for that day’s Nairobi Nation was for sale in Isiolo, and near dusk, traveling to Nanyuki in a matatu – a speeding minivan with bald tires, jammed to capacity with ripe perspiring Kenyans – I read the day’s news: ‘47 Shot Dead in Village Attack’ – 600 members of the Pokot tribe taking revenge on a village in western Kenya, torching 300 huts, stealing hundreds of cattle, and killing teachers, students, women and children as young as three months. There was a story about a fourteen-year-old boy who was killed in crossfire between cops and robbers in the town of Kisii. Yet another story related the theft of four million shillings in an armed robbery: ‘The police collected AK-47 cartridges at the scene.’ There was a vivid and grisly account of a riot at a soccer match, and an update on Kenya’s AIDS epidemic.
Compared to this, pot shots at south-bound trucks on the Marsabit road was not news at all, and anyway, the desert between the Ethiopian border and Nanyuki did not exist in the minds of most Kenyans.
‘The north is not Kenya,’ an African told me in Nanyuki. ‘It is not Somalia or Ethiopia. It is another country. The Kenyan government does nothing for it. It is a place run by foreigners – they manage everything, the schools, hospitals, churches. They are run by charities and aid agencies and NGOs, not by us.’
He was not angry or cynical, nor even grateful; just speaking the plain truth.
The Sportsman’s Arms Hotel in Nanyuki was hosting a conference on camel health. British soldiers from the army post nearby were playing pool and howling at each other in the upstairs lounge bar, while Africans were chuckling into cell phones in the lobby. Chuckling was all I ever saw African cell phone users do. On the road near the hotel prostitutes in tight dresses were walking up and down in stiletto heels – the wrong footwear for a muddy road, but what the hell: this was civilization.
9 Rift Valley Days
In the East African bush, apart from the ritual warnings of hungry armed shifta, no one seemed to worry much about crime. Cattle rustling, of course, was the exception, but that posed no risk to the sort of traveler I was – a dusty note-taking fugitive with a small bag, an evasive manner and no time constraints. I knew I was out of the bush and near an African town or city when the crime warnings were numerous and specific, and always illustrated by a grim story. Nothing was grimmer or more graphic than an African warning.
The nearer I got to Nairobi the worse the warnings. I was in Nanyuki when people told me of the many dangers. If you are involved in a car hijacking, surrender your car: a woman was killed, stabbed in the eye, by hijackers just last week. Hand over your wallet to robbers without hesitation: a man was slashed to death by muggers yesterday, literally disarmed, his limbs lopped off with pangas (machetes). Don’t be misled into thinking that crime happens only at night, I was cautioned: seven armed men robbed a perfume shop at midday on Kenyatta Avenue in Nairobi this week. But if you go out at night you will definitely be robbed, I was assured. ‘There is a one hundred percent chance of it. I am one hundred percent sure.’ Don’t resist, give them what they want and you will live.
I was still in cool green Nanyuki, lying in the morning shadow of 17,000-foot-high Batian Peak of Mount Kenya, graced with scoopings of snow, an ice field and – wonderful on the Equator – a number of visible glaciers.
A man of the Meru people said to me, ‘Spirits live there. The mountain is sacred to us. We go to the mountain to pray.’
But even Mount Kenya was being robbed. That same week, a deal was made by some politicians in the Kenyan government to sell off hundreds of square miles of protected land in the ancient forest of the mountainside to loggers and developers.
I traveled to Nairobi in an overcrowded Peugeot taxi, nine of us crushed into a five-seater, and so I spent the entire trip, two hours, in the arms of a man named Kamali. He was a professional guide. He had in his bag a new book about lions by a British author, Elizabeth Laird, with a handwritten dedication: To Kamali, who told me stories about lions I shall remember for the rest of my life.
‘Kamali’ was a nickname. It meant vervet monkey, a name he had been given by some people in the west of Kenya for his cleverness and good humor. He was knowledgeable about the north and the behavior of animals and the minutiae of conducting a safari.
Kenya had been put on the map by hunters, and by people who wrote about hunting. Hemingway’s name comes quickly to mind, and so does Karen Blixen’s; but much earlier there was the Tarzan-like figure of Colonel Patterson and his Man-Eaters of Tsavo. What all such books about Kenya have in common is an obsession with animals and a lazy sentimentality about servants and gun-bearers. No crime, no politics, no agents of virtue appear in these books. Hemingway’s Kenya might never have existed – at this distance in time it seems the private fantasy of a wealthy writer bent on proving his manhood, and the hunting safari one of the more offensive kinds of tourist one-upmanship.
‘There is no hunting anymore,’ Kamali said. ‘I’m so glad.’
I looked out the window for anything familiar. I had spent years in the late sixties going back and forth from Uganda to Kenya, but now I saw nothing that I recognized except signboards lettered with place names. It was clear to me on my way to Nairobi that the Kenya I had known was gone. I didn’t mind: perhaps the newness would make this trip all the more memorable.
Our overstuffed Peugeot was doing eighty. I said to Kamali, ‘Mind asking the driver to slow down?’
‘Pole-pole, bwana’ Kamali said, leaning forward.
Insulted by this suggestion, the man went faster and more recklessly. Because so many of the Kenyan roads were better than before, people drove faster and there were more fatal accidents. ‘MANY DEAD IN BUS PLUNGE HORROR’ is a standing headline in Kenya.
‘That was a mistake. I should have said nothing,’ Kamali said.
Police roadblocks – there were eight or ten on this road – did nothing to deter the man from speeding. He stopped. The car was in bad shape, obviously, and overcrowded. The policeman glared at us and cowed the driver but when he had detained us for a few minutes, he waved us on.
‘Look – the slums,’ Kamali said as we entered the outskirts of Nairobi. ‘They worry me the most.’
We were hardly past Thika, which had once been the countryside, written about in an amiable way as a rural idyll by Elspeth Huxley, who had grown up there. Now it was a congested maze of improvised houses and streets thick with lurking kids and traffic and an odor of decrepitude: sewage, garbage, open drains, the stink of citified Africa.
Going slowly, our car was surrounded by ragged children pleading for money and trying to insert their hands through the half-open windows.
‘Be careful when you see totos like this,’ Kamali said. ‘Sometimes they can take their own feces in their hand and put it on you, to make you give them something.’
Giving you shit in the most literal sense.
The traffic was being held up by a crowd of people rushing across the road, and by curious drivers, slowing down for a better look.
‘Look, see the thief,’ Kamali said.
It was a sight of old Africa, a naked man running alone down an embankment and splashing across a filthy creek, pursued by a mob.
‘They have taken his clothes. He is trying to get away in the dirty water of the river.’
But he was surrounded. There were people along both banks of the creek, holding sticks and boulders, laughing excitedly at the man who was so panicked he did not even think to cover his private parts, but just ran, his arms pumping, splashing in the disgusting mud.
The crowd surged towards him, swinging sticks, and then the traffic began to move.
‘They will kill him,’ Kamali said.
Once, even in my memory of it, Nairobi had been a quiet market town of low shop houses and long verandas, two main streets and auction halls, where farmers came to sell their harvest of coffee or tea. It was overnight by train to the coast – because of the danger of bilharzia tainting freshwater lakes and rivers, Mombasa-by-the-sea was the only safe place to swim. In the opposite direction it was overnight by train to Kampala. The Ugandan line through the highlands was bordered by farms.
The White Highlands had been aptly named: Indians and Africans were forbidden to raise cash crops by the British colonial government. Indians were shopkeepers, Africans were farm laborers, or else just lived in villages and worked the land. The few tourists who visited were timid sightseers or just as timid hunters, taken in hand by white guides and brought within range of wild game. Apart from that Kenya worked on the old colonial system of landowners and businessmen being squeezed by greedy politicians, and the rest of the population were little more than drudges and whipped serfs.
