A Change in Altitude

by Anita Shreve

  Was this the real Africa? Margaret wondered as she was beckoned into the darkened hut to sit awhile. She chatted with Munira’s female relatives in her best, if rudimentary, Swahili. There were many smiles on both sides. Margaret examined the pictures that hung on the walls. One was a portrait of Jomo Kenyatta. The others were pages that had been ripped out of magazines and taped to the wall: pictures of the countryside, one of Mombasa, and one of a particularly difficult hairstyle of complicated braids. Margaret admired a red-and-yellow handwoven rug in the center of the room. Munira’s sister said she had made it, and Margaret complimented her. The cooking was done in a separate hut, one of the women explained, the hut that had a hole cut into the roof.

  Patrick and Margaret were plied with irio, a Kikuyu dish of mashed potatoes, maize, and peas, while outside, chickens ran in the dust. A goat was slaughtered in their honor, and Patrick and she were given the “delicacies” in a ceremonial manner. Margaret stared down at her tin plate. Biological forms she couldn’t identify sat in a pool of what she could only assume was blood. Patrick took a bite, which he swallowed nearly whole. Margaret summoned her courage and did the same, allowing only a hint of taste and texture as it went down. Refusing the delicacies would have been rude, a notion Margaret had intuited as soon as the plate had been put in her lap—the irony being that all of Munira’s family, at least a dozen siblings and cousins sitting at their feet, longed for the offal that had been given to Patrick and Margaret.

  They were offered pombe, a milder beer, which helped with the organs. As they were leaving the shamba, there were many handshakes and pleas to return. Margaret invited the family to visit them in Karen, a suggestion that was greeted with mild enthusiasm. (Patrick and Margaret had Munira’s extended family over for a typical American meal on the Fourth of July. They served hamburgers, potato salad, coleslaw, and strawberry shortcake for dessert. The Africans barely touched their plates. They would not pick up the hamburgers despite the fact that Patrick and Margaret demonstrated how to do so. They poked at the coleslaw, ate the potato salad—though they said it had a sour taste—and had only a bite of the strawberry shortcake. Too sweet, they proclaimed.)

  As Margaret and Patrick were about to climb back into Munira’s car to go home, Munira’s sister gave Margaret a basket of pawpaw and the rug Margaret had much admired when she’d entered the hut. Margaret was horrified by the gift of the family’s only rug and protested that she couldn’t possibly accept it, that their dirt floor would be bare without it. In the end, the rug was slipped through the back window and onto their laps. Though Margaret was embarrassed, she thanked them profusely for the generous gift. There would be other trips to other family shambas, but Margaret would never again make the mistake of admiring anything another woman owned.

  Once, Margaret went on a trip without Patrick. Aarya and Karim, a Pakistani couple who worked with UNICEF and who lived next door to Margaret and Patrick in Karen, had been given permission to view a Masai ceremony, one that took place only once every twenty years. Aarya asked Margaret if she wanted to tag along. It might be possible for her to take a picture or two, which would help Aarya and Karim document the siku kuu.

  They drove along a treacherous and winding route to the floor of the Rift Valley, where it was dusty and hot. It was easy to spot where the ceremony would take place: two hundred fifty manyattas formed a perfect circle a half mile across. Margaret felt as though they were journeying back in time to an ancient archaeological site. When they parked near the opening of the circle, they climbed atop the VW Kombi that Aarya had borrowed from UNICEF. A wind came up and stuck the dust to Margaret’s sweaty face. She had brought a hat and sunglasses, which were essential. Without them, she almost certainly would have gotten heatstroke.

  The ceremony they were to witness that day atop the Kombi was for women. A separate ceremony for men had taken place just two days before. Then, a group of young men had made the transition from warriors to junior elders.

  The purpose of this ceremony was to ensure fertility for each of the women who attended the ritual. Two thousand Masai participated, having come from as far as Kajiado. The event lasted the entire day.

  Close to five hundred women gathered at the center of the circle and began to sing and dance. They were magnificent, each a queen in her brightly beaded maridadi and red blankets. Every woman’s head had been shaved, while heavy jewelry (sometimes film canisters) hung from large and drooping ear holes. Occasionally, several of the women would throw themselves to the ground, wailing and beating their breasts.

  “These are the women who have not borne children,” Aarya, who was sitting with Margaret on the roof of the Kombi, explained.

  The dancing culminated in a four-step ritual. One by one, each Masai woman stepped to a small bath of honey beer made in a trough of dung. She touched her hand to the liquid and rubbed it on the insides of her thighs. She then went to another pot of honey beer in an animal skin and knelt down to sip from the beer or to be lightly slapped by the men with a branch of leaves dipped in the liquid. Her own marital and family status determined her treatment. From there, she walked to a group of men who sat with shallow dishes of white paint. The woman was painted on her face, back, or between her breasts, according to her fertility status.

  From there, the woman joined a growing semicircle of other women, who also began to sing and dance. A contingent of men, by now quite drunk, passed before each of them, spitting and spraying honey beer first onto the woman’s arm and then between her breasts, which she exposed. The woman was expected to stop singing and then to sit down once the men had blessed her in this way. Gradually all the music stopped. The symbolism was blatant.

  Early in the ceremony, Margaret had taken out her camera and snapped a couple of shots. She and Aarya hadn’t asked permission to photograph the event, and Margaret was reluctant to reveal the camera. Still, she wanted to capture the essence of the ceremony, the interactions between the men and the women. After perhaps fifteen minutes of quick, nervous shooting, Margaret felt a tug at her sleeve. Aarya pointed to a dozen Masai elders surrounding the Kombi. Margaret set the camera down on the metal roof, as if the innocent mechanism were a weapon.

  An elder who spoke rapid Swahili, which Aarya then translated to Margaret, asked for money. He pointed out that if he went into Nairobi to have a picture taken, it would cost him thirty shillings. “When you pay us this money,” he said, “that money can be gone in a day. It is so easy to spend. But if you have your photographs, they will be good for a hundred years.”

  While Margaret was trying to listen to the translation, a boy climbed up the Kombi behind her and snatched the camera. She was frightened, and although she wanted her camera back, she could not imagine getting off the bus and confronting what had now become forty or fifty elders attending to the matter. Each carried a spear or a panga. Karim, who’d been watching the ceremony from within the enclosure, jogged to the Kombi and spoke to the elders at length. He then turned his head up to Margaret and explained that unless she surrendered the film, she was liable for a three-thousand-shilling fine. Margaret nodded and said yes, she would give them the film. She simply wanted the camera back. But after a quick consultation, the Masai elders informed Karim of another decision they had made. They would no longer discuss the matter with Margaret, an elder explained, because she was a woman. And as women can have no possessions, the camera, in the eyes of the elders, did not belong to Margaret but to her husband. Did she have a husband? Margaret said that she did. In that case, she was told, she must send her husband back the next day and the matter would be discussed with him.

  “But it’s mine,” Margaret protested. “My husband had nothing to do with it. I own that camera.”

  “You cannot tell that to these men,” Karim, who had climbed to the roof of the Kombi, said. “They won’t pay any attention to you.”

  “Do what they say,” Aarya whispered beside Margaret.

  * * *

  The next morning, Patrick and
Karim drove to the circle of manyattas. Patrick asked to speak to an elder. He apologized profusely for his wife’s behavior, paid a small fine, and was given the camera back.

  When he returned to the house in Karen, camera in hand, he seemed slightly amused by the entire encounter, amused enough not to have minded the long ride to the Rift and back.

  Margaret, however, was furious. “Can’t you see how demeaning this is to me? To women?”

  “Of course it’s demeaning. That’s the point.”

  “Doesn’t that bother you?” she asked as she stared at the tainted camera on the hall table.

  “Not really,” he said.

  “How can you say that?” she asked, her voice rising.

  “You and I don’t live in that culture, Margaret. We don’t feel that way. The Masai have a separate culture with very different rules of behavior. The two cultures briefly intersected, on their territory, and a camera was confiscated. We got it back.”

  “But at what cost?”

  “What’s more important, your pride or the camera?”

  Margaret couldn’t answer him, because she didn’t know the answer. She was glad to have the Nikon back, but she was seething at the thought of having been demoted to the status of a child. Or would a male child have had more authority than she? It was days before Margaret could bring herself to pick up the camera again.

  Margaret was finding it increasingly difficult to fully absorb Africa when the very thing that had brought her to the country—her marriage to Patrick—was troubling her. In theory, the lingering tension between them seemed like such an easy thing to fix. In reality, it was not. Patrick handled it better, Margaret thought, because he was engaged by his work. She was fascinated with photography, but to what purpose? It had not been imperative for Margaret to have a job in Kenya—Patrick’s income supported them—but she had been feeling increasingly fraudulent. In June, Margaret determined to do something about that.

  After a particularly grim and rainy weekend of no social engagements and no excursions, she drove to Nairobi with a portfolio she had assembled the previous day. She parked the car on a side street off Kenyatta and walked into the offices of the Kenya Morning Tribune.

  “But maybe these are not so nice.”

  Solomon Obok sat across from Margaret at a metal desk so cluttered with papers that he’d had to lay her portfolio on top. He’d apologized for the mess, saying that he knew where everything was, but Margaret found that hard to believe. He’d begun with pictures she had taken of the countryside and portraits of men, women, and children (African, Asian, and white) she had done since arriving in the country. Those, he had admired, or at least Margaret had assumed he’d admired them, since he’d examined each slowly and nodded. Now, however, he was studying the clips she had brought from the Boston alternative paper, the pictures small and grainy and not at all as compelling as those he had just seen. How could a photograph of a meeting at the statehouse compare with small black bodies emerging from the dust of a truck that had recently passed their way?

  “You have improved since coming to this country,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  He removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. He had the blackest skin Margaret had ever seen on a human being. His face was oblique and long and handsome. When she had entered Mr. Obok’s office, he’d risen from his desk and had shaken her hand, immediately sitting again, as if he had only a minute or two to spare on her. In that time, she’d noticed his tall, slim frame and the grace with which he moved. His fingers, elegant and tapered, were smudged with pencil graphite.

  He set aside the newspaper photos and once again examined the portraits Margaret had taken.

  “This I like very much,” he said, referring to a shot of the mother on Kimathi Street whom Margaret had passed so often, the one who sat on the sidewalk with her children.

  “It is all here,” Mr. Obok said, lifting the photo and tapping it lightly with the backs of his fingers. “This is exactly what a good picture should be. It must tell the story at once. That and a headline should be able to stand alone. Of course, we wish to lead the reader to the text. We are a newspaper, so we cannot be as artful as we would like. But that does not mean that strictly reportorial photography cannot be art. If we have a great photograph, we will work a story around it. I am already thinking this would be a picture to illustrate an article on beggars. We might keep it for when the need to write such a piece comes round again.”

  “Thank you,” Margaret said.

  “I see that being a woman is perhaps advantageous for a photographer,” he said, reviewing the picture of the beggar and her children again. “The woman here might have pulled her head scarf over her face had the photographer been a man.”

  Margaret thought, but didn’t say, that if the man had put enough shillings in her tin cup, the woman would have let him take all the photos he wanted.

  Mr. Obok leaned back against his wooden swivel chair and for the first time actually looked at Margaret. She’d been surprised at how claustrophobic the office of the Kenya Morning Tribune was. Only Mr. Obok had his own separate space. Several chairs were scattered around the room—for editorial meetings, she guessed. From the front door, she’d been shown the way through a larger room of metal desks, each occupied by a reporter or a secretary or an advertising salesperson. Hardly anyone had glanced up at her as she’d made her way to Mr. Obok’s office. Putting together a newspaper, Margaret knew, required intense focus. The reporters searched for hot leads; the advertising executives, for great ad buys. Each of the desks had on it a manual typewriter and a telephone. Margaret had noted that there were no windows, which lent the place an air of the sweatshop.

  “You worked for this newspaper in Boston for how long?”

  “I had the job straight from college.”

  “You were lucky, then.”

  “Do I hear an American accent?” Margaret ventured.

  “I was educated at a college in Indiana.”

  Margaret couldn’t imagine Mr. Obok in Indiana. “Really? Where?”

  “A small Quaker college named Earlham. I was raised as a Quaker.”

  Margaret had guessed Mr. Obok, because of his name in addition to his looks, to be a Luo, or from a Nilotic tribe similar to the Luo. But she had to stretch her imagination to picture the Quakers moving into his parents’ village, converting the inhabitants there.

  “How did you manage the Hoosier winters?” Margaret asked.

  Mr. Obok smiled broadly—purple-black lips, white teeth tinged mauve near the gum line—and then he laughed. “My first year, I thought I would perish. The snow, it is like fire on the face, no?”

  “It is,” Margaret said, thinking of a Boston blizzard or, worse, an ice storm.

  “You are here for how long?” he asked.

  “We’ve been here eight months. We plan to stay for three years,” Margaret said, though she didn’t really know. She doubted anyone would give her a job if she said she was staying only a year.

  “You are married?”

  “Yes.”

  “What does your husband do?”

  “He’s attached to Nairobi Hospital. He’s researching equatorial diseases. In return, he gives free clinics around the country when asked.”

  “And he is staying here three years?”

  Margaret realized this was a fact that could be checked. “We believe we will be,” she said, sure that Obok could see the uncertainty on her face.

  “You do not have a work permit?”

  She shook her head.

  “So that is all right. I will hire you on a freelance basis. Almost all of the photographers I use work under those conditions. Either I will give you an assignment to photograph or I will buy shots from you that I might need in the future. I would, for example, purchase four of these.” He indicated the portfolio. Margaret was elated. “We cannot pay much here,” he added.

  Margaret had anticipated this. She’d almost said, but hadn’t, that she wou
ld work for him for nothing.

  “Three good photographs from an assignment will net you one hundred fifty shillings.”

  About twenty dollars, Margaret calculated.

  “Not much, according to American standards,” he added, “but I can offer you quite a lot of work. We are shorthanded here.” He smiled. “You might, on a good week, have as many as ten assignments.”

  Two hundred dollars a week. And more for the odd shot Mr. Obok would buy from her own collection. Margaret would be adventurous, she decided. She would take shots like the ones of the beggar woman and her children. Two hundred a week would be a good addition to Patrick’s modest stipend. He couldn’t help but be pleased by that.

  “That would be fine,” Margaret said, trying not to sound too eager.

  Mr. Obok had a captivating smile. “I am not averse to hiring expatriates,” he said, “as are some of my colleagues. I hire the best people I can find, regardless of tribe. Out in the newsroom, you will find Luo, Kikuyu, Nandi, Ugandans, Turkana, and Asians. I am a Luo. The expatriates tend to work freelance, as you will do. But you will find that even in the office, there will be some who will give you a cold welcome. You may find yourself journeying out to Tsavo, for example, with a reporter who feels that all jobs should be given to Kenyans. By the way, do you have transportation?”

  “Yes,” she said, “most days.”

  “Reliable?”

  Margaret shrugged her shoulders. “Pretty reliable,” she said.

  “Good enough.” Mr. Obok picked up the four photographs he wanted from her portfolio. “I will pay you one hundred shillings for each. Please give Lily outside all your information. Do you have your passport and visa information with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very fine,” he said, rising. “We give out checks on Thursdays. You can arrange to come in here, or we can send them to you.”

  Margaret’s post office box was at the hospital, which meant that Patrick would pick up the mail and bring it home, as he always did. She wanted to collect her own paycheck.