by Peter Kimani
“Yala, my bossman, I’m going to plant a beacon today!” Ahmad shouted. “Today is today, he who say tomorrow is a liar!”
Babu did not respond, but as usual that didn’t dampen Ahmad’s enthusiasm. Ahmad went to meet the young women who were actually girls, with legs thin like stilts, just sturdy enough to carry their own weight, not to mention the loads of firewood.
Babu could tell the girls were enjoying Ahmad’s banter, but they tensed when he said something and pointed in his direction. All the girls cast their eyes down. Ahmad lifted the chin of the most striking girl Babu had noticed through the telescope. The girl walked hesitantly toward him, dragging her feet like an animal being led to the slaughterhouse.
The sun was setting in the west, and its rays had softened. The light hit the girl smack in the face. She raised her hand to shield her eyes. Babu stepped sideways and blocked the sun with his head. The girl looked up. She was shorter than he, and her eyes had such a piercing intensity he almost had to protect himself from her gaze. He did not know what Ahmad had told the girl, and since she was within his grasp, he figured he was supposed to do something.
He stroked her brow and she averted her gaze. He touched her breasts, first the left one, then the right. She sighed and shut her eyes. She walked on, as if to lead him, and he followed meekly. She threw down the load of firewood and sat next to it. They were in a marshland and cooing flamingos could be heard in the distance. He wanted to ask if she’d heard about the arrival of the birds, but decided against it. The linguistic barriers were just too immense. It was best to undertake what could be communicated by touch. He spoke to her in a mix of Punjabi and English and broken Swahili. The girl spoke the local language, Maa, which Babu did not understand. She shut her eyes and made no effort to resist his touch, which kept probing and probing.
They finally lay side by side. The girl said something and started sobbing. She looked at him, her eyes pleading as she moaned: “Mubea, mubea.” She turned and lay prostrate. “Mubea, mubea.”
Babu had dropped his pants to his ankles, and he went on with his probe, looking for the dark tunnel that he hoped would lead to some light. He swelled with excitement at the sight of her nakedness, as a vibration surged through him and built to a momentum he could hardly contain. He felt relief at the release of the tension that had been welling in him, while a knot of anger and frustration began coiling in his belly. But then he went limp, as his mind flashed back to the sea. He heard Nahodha hurling his curses in a furious torrent: May your women be barren, may your seeds dry up! May enemies triumph over you! He wondered if Nahodha’s curse had something to do with his failure to rise to the occasion, but he recalled he had failed similarly on his first night with Fatima, after their hurried wedding before they set sail for East Africa.
Afterward, when Ahmad sought to know how he had fared with the local girl, Babu deflected the question and responded that undressing a Maasai girl was like skinning a goat. “Everything is all sewn up.”
Ahmad laughed heartily and said: “Bhai, hope you found the right place!” Then he sobered: “Did she say mubea?”
“Yes, she did,” Babu responded, puzzled.
Ahmad’s guffaw resurged, now with a new intensity.
Babu stood intrigued by Ahmad’s line of inquiry. He opened his mouth to speak but decided against it. Six months later, he wished he had.
10
It seemed inordinate that the infraction would bear such grave consequences. But those were different times, when honor came before all else. On that memorable day of Mariam’s visit, as Babu lay on the floor whimpering like an old dog, he remembered his awkward copulation with that girl delivered by Ahmad.
Babu was back in the swamp and the sun was on the girl’s forehead. He lay on top of her, shifting his weight around until his head finally shielded her from the direct sun. A bunch of droplets converged around the girl’s nose and he wiped them away with one stroke of his tongue. He kissed her lips lightly, but his tongue felt dry and the girl seemed indifferent to his probing.
Mubea, mubea! he remembered the girl whimpering, again averting her gaze as she sobbed.
“Must have felt something like being born again,” Ahmad had said when Babu rejoined him. “After all those years of celibacy.”
Babu had assented with as much enthusiasm as he could muster: “Something close to that . . .”
Ahmad’s conclusion about Babu’s sexual encounter as some sort of rebirth would prove prophetic in a startling manner. Months later, when news spread that the girl was heavy with child, it spawned a scandal that nearly derailed the rail and yet again resurrected McDonald’s grudge against Babu.
The girl’s name was Seneiya; she was the daughter of a traditional Maasai chief, Lonana. She was royalty among the locals, for a traditional chieftain was an inherited title handed down from father to son. To complicate matters further, Seneiya was not only betrothed to marry Lempaa, son of another powerful traditional chief in the neighboring village, she was also the favorite daughter of Chief Lonana.
Again, that might not mean much, except for the fact that Chief Lonana had made it into the history books, although most of his exploits were grossly misrepresented.
This is how Captain John Adams wrote about his expedition across Maasailand and his first encounter with Chief Lonana:
Situational Report: The Maasai Land Agreement of 1896
Commissioner of British East Africa Protectorate
When the history of the Lunatic Express is finally written, a reasonable chunk should be devoted to the initial assessment of the Laikipia Escarpment. Our experience there should also inspire policy change to embrace divide-and-rule and other forms of unconventional warfare, which have paid great dividends in Maasai land.
The Maasai are a fierce, warlike tribe who thrive on milk and blood from their long-horned zebu animals. For initiation, young men known as morans kill lions with their bare hands and are reputed for their womanizing. All one needs is to plant a spear outside a hut and the man who lives there will quickly understand his wife is busy with someone else and move on, perhaps to plant his spear at another man’s hut.
Since the sociocultural setting of the Maasai seems ripe for deeper intellectual inquiry, I will confine my observations to the preliminary surveying of the railway line, which I conducted between June 1, 1895 and December 2, 1895. Our aerial reconnaissance using flying boats operating from Lake Kavirondo had confirmed to us that the shortest route from the coast of Mombasa across the Nyika plateau was through the Rift Valley. What we did not know was that the fierce Maasai tribe occupies the whole region. We were also unaware of their strong aversion to foreigners. The terrain around the escarpment works to the locals’ advantage. The railway workers would be spotted from afar and taken down with well-aimed poisonous arrows, well-slung stones, or were speared in an ambush. After losing four men in such attacks, and worried that the railway assessment would not be completed as scheduled, I devised other tricks to access the Laikipia Escarpment.
I played the divide-and-rule card on two blood brothers after spies confirmed Chief Lonana was feuding with his brother Sadaka.
Our spies reported the nomadic community to be thriving through livestock production, shifting to new pastures according to the rhythms of nature.
We were thinking hard how to exploit the rift between the two brothers. But God works in miraculous ways. As we were cracking our heads on the matter, I learned that our School of Tropical Medicine was about to open a field station in the colony.
The recent discovery of foot-and-mouth disease in Europe couldn’t have come at a better time! Our spies were given pellets containing the virus that they dropped in select paddocks. Before long, the Maasai herds started dropping like flies from the virus, or nagana, as the Maasai called the disease. Unable to move in search of pasture and with gums too diseased to chew any food, herds starved by the thousands.
With livelihoods destroyed, the community started blaming Chief Lonana f
or not advising their medicinemen to concoct something to counter the white man’s medicine. We used that window of opportunity to prop up Sadaka against his brother by sending in agricultural extension officers who sprayed Sadaka’s paddocks with a foot-and-mouth antidote. A resurgent Sadaka staged a palace coup, so to speak, and dethroned his brother as the chief. I elevated him further to make him the Paramount Chief of the Maasai.
The Maasai Land Agreement of 1896 is the enduring tribute to that shrewd diplomacy that led to several million acres of rich, arable land being signed over for British occupation and exploitation. The lease agreement is for 100 years—far longer than I suspect the rail will live.
What Captain John Adams omitted in his report was the fact that Chief Lonana’s band of warriors, spurred on by the strong medicine of Kioni—the seer who had warned about invading white butterflies long before the onset of the British—halted the railway reconnaissance for one whole year as they defended their land.
But that was well before McDonald arrived on the scene and steered the rail construction from the coast to the hinterland. They were about sixty miles from the Nakuru station, and on the homestretch to the lakeside town of Kavirondo, where the train was to end its run, when the news of Chief Lonana’s daughter erupted, and McDonald picked up the intelligence that trouble was afoot.
Locals had been grumbling that the foreigners were out to erode their morals, just as some seers had prophesied, and various colonial chiefs had submitted dozens of cases to McDonald’s office complaining about the womanizing conducted by the railway construction staff, a vice that appeared to enjoy subtle official backing. The evidence that the foreigners were complicit in promoting immorality was that mubea—a preacher, a man of God—was adopting children born out of such relations between local girls and foreign men. That was why Seneiya had been sobbing. She didn’t want to surrender her baby to mubea, as other girls had reportedly done in other villages.
The man known as mubea was, of course, Reverend Turnbull, and his adoption campaign, which in later years morphed into a large humanitarian organization dedicated to orphaned children, was promoted by McDonald for two reasons: It was a conduit for the disbursement of huge sums of money that McDonald gave the reverend as an expression of gratitude for his willingness to step in when needed to negotiate with the local communities. The other reason was that while he was not interested in preserving local customs, McDonald feared mixed-race children would encourage integration when he was busy keeping racial segregation policies in place. Treating multiracial children as an isolated special group was his way of enhancing the stigma, thereby nullifying the prospects of widespread miscegenation.
But what elevated Seneiya’s pregnancy from a case of personal choice to communal humiliation was the renewed interest in the seer’s warning that the white butterflies would scorch every plant dry and push entire villages to the throes of starvation, a vision that was interpreted in spiritual terms. The community elders concluded that the foreigners traversing their land would lead to the community’s moral decadence and its ultimate decay. They had heard that the invading men had left a trail of yellow children in the villages that they had coursed through, after planting the mysterious iron snake in the earth.
Without the cultural practices observed by the community since the beginning of time, Kioni had prophesied, the community would be decimated within the blink of an eye. And while social mores looked down strongly on those who conceived before marriage, those who bore children with foreigners acquired a special blemish—no man was willing to take them, even as a second or third wife. So news of Seneiya’s pregnancy was seen as a serious assault against the community. The Maasai youth organized quickly to fight back, razing one camp and uprooting all rails leading from Nakuru to the Laikipia Escarpment.
11
McDonald sat under the eaves of his camp house burrowed in thought. He was out of his depth, unable to figure out how to surmount the new challenge facing his railway enterprise. He recalled his tribulations at the coast, when he’d had to use every trick in the book to coax the locals to work. He shook his head in disbelief at the memory of that day when he had appeased the locals by offering rams for sacrifice in a heathen ritual. That was before his patience snapped and he exploded in violence, ordering the use of dynamite to destroy the kaya. It was an episode recorded in local lore as the day the figs walked and birds froze in midair. Alternatively, it was remembered by some as the day of the earthquake, for the powerful blast upturned trees, casting light upon the dark enclave that had preserved the power and the mystery of ancient gods for generations.
From his soldierly experience, McDonald knew the destruction of a place of worship was considered an act of terror—which was prohibited in conventional warfare—but nothing about the locals was conventional. The destruction, however, did end up leading to a predictable outcome associated with conventional wars: the locals submitted. And his railway work had progressed, slowly but surely. All that was now in serious jeopardy because, yet again, his vision of the future of the colony was in conflict with the locals’ past, which defined their present. If the railway construction was derailed by the Maasai resistance, then all he had strived to achieve over the past few years would end in ignominy. He would be remembered as the captain who ran the train into the wilderness.
McDonald rose and kicked a table in fury, spilling the cinnamon tea that he had been served, the china crashing to the floor. The noise drew a male servant outside who silently picked up the broken china and retreated back to the kitchen. He did not inquire if there had been an accident, or if McDonald needed a fresh cup. He was used to his boss’s tantrums.
McDonald waited until the servant was out of sight before removing a shoe to inspect his foot. His kick had left red splotches on his toes. Now his foot resembled his face. McDonald examined his foot further, noting the rough edges of his toes that had been smoothed out by his shoe. He winced in pain as he sat back and propped up the hurt foot on a stool, cursing under his breath. He was still cursing when Reverend Turnbull arrived. Both men paid each other visits without advance warning, but on this occasion McDonald had sent for Reverend Turnbull because he wanted a sympathetic ear to help him think through the task ahead.
“We have only sixty miles to go, then this.” McDonald gesticulated toward the open expanse, looking to the west where the sun was setting. A solitary cactus was silhouetted, its trunk thrusting a three-finger salute.
“As locals say,” Reverend Turnbull responded quietly, similarly looking toward the setting sun, “it’s like eating the whole cow but failing to finish off the tail.”
“My friend,” McDonald said, mildly irritated, “since you understand these people so well, why don’t you ask them to lay off the rail?”
Reverend Turnbull smiled. “And they will ask you to lay off their land . . .”
“I can see whose side you’re on!” McDonald charged, rising, one foot still in a boot, the other bare, causing him to limp slightly.
“I’m glad you do!” Reverend Turnbull countered enthusiastically, which McDonald mistook for sarcasm. “And I suppose,” Turnbull continued in the same tenor, “since you think this is a spiritual warfare, it must be met with the full force of our spiritual arsenal!”
“There is no need to be sarcastic.” McDonald recalled, once again, the incident on the coast, when he’d dragged Reverend Turnbull to the sacred kaya grove where he offered the rams. “This time, I’m done with appeasement. I plan to crush these savages into smithereens.”
“And how do you intend to go about that, my good friend?”
“That’s why I called you, isn’t it?”
“You are the soldier. I am a preacher. I can only offer prayers . . .”
At that point, the servant reentered with fresh cups of tea: cinnamon for McDonald and tangawizi for Reverend Turnbull. He had served Reverend Turnbull enough times to remember his preference. The servant smiled gently. “Hujambo, reverend? Karibu chai.”
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Turnbull returned the greeting and inquired about the servant’s family, addressing the man by his name. Hemedi said he was fine, but he remained rooted, his left shoulder stooped awkwardly in the reverend’s direction.
McDonald was about to dismiss the servant when he addressed Turnbull directly. “The cow—the cow has calved,” Hemedi said.
“That’s wonderful news,” Turnbull replied enthusiastically. “Is she producing enough milk?”
“Not much. Just enough for our baby and the calf.”
“Don’t tell me you had double blessings: a baby and a calf!”
“Yes, reverend, we have been blessed twice.”
“Are you suggesting that cows here deliver babies instead of calves?” McDonald sneered.
Hemedi started to explain that his wife had delivered in the same week the calf was born, but Reverend Turnbull cut in. “Don’t mind him,” he said, waving toward McDonald.
“Can we wean the calf yet?” Hemedi asked.
“No, not yet,” the reverend responded. “But you can save a lot of milk by milking the cow instead of letting the calf suckle. Mix the milk with warm water.”
“Thank you for the tip. And thanks for the good seed,” Hemedi went on. “The calf is very strong.”
“It’s my pleasure, Hemedi. Do you have a name for the calf?”
At this point, McDonald sprang to his feet, wincing in pain before limping off to the edge of the courtyard. He looked over at the Laikipia Escarpment that separated the railhead from its final destination. On the horizon, rain clouds were gathering. He intently watched the skies, taking in the clouds of different hues. The skies resembled islands in the ocean, bearing a permanence that he knew would not survive the wind of night.
