Buses did not operate on this north — south road. There were no place names on my map, just Marsabit in the middle of the Dida Galgalu Desert — Samburu land — a day’s drive south. I was reassured by the fact that the trucks were full of cattle and not people, for in these parts cattle were valuable and people’s lives not worth much at all. Even when tribesmen were shot here on this border no one troubled to file a report. They only said, ‘The Borena are fighting’ or the Oromo, or the Somalis, or the shifta. No one knew the body count. If cattle had been slaughtered or rustled the exact number would have been known and lamented.
Each truck held twenty head of cattle. I paid three dollars to ride in the cab with the driver and three women and two infants and a bronchitic boy, a tubercular child of six or seven whom I caught drinking out of my water bottle. The women, one of whom was nursing a baby, were veiled and, being married, wore henna on their hands and feet. The lovely lacy floral designs seized my attention, even at seven in the morning on this hot day in this stifling cab.
‘Do not leave your seat, bwana — someone will steal it,’ said the tout who had taken my money.
Such a surprise that though we had traveled only half a mile across the border everyone here spoke Swahili.
After a great deal of shouting and a lot of quarrelling and a fight — the man had been thrown off the back for not paying up: he was defending his dignity by slapping at the men who had tossed him aside — we set off down the bad road south, into the heat and dust. The animals shuddered and trembled and on the worst parts of the road some of them fell down and were trampled and trapped by the others. The road deteriorated into a rutted rock-strewn track as soon as we left the border. There were three keepers among the cattle, who attacked the fallen animals, twisting their tails and smashing them in the face with sticks to get them upright. All the cattle were going to the slaughterhouse in Nairobi, and they were a melancholy sight, these animals, for they had rather benign faces and trusting eyes, and dumb and docile they were off to be butchered. In the absence of refrigerated trucks they had to be taken alive to be killed and drained of their blood, through the halal method, stipulated by the Muslim faith.
The driver, Mustafa, was a grumpy chain-smoking young man who apparently spoke only Swahili. ‘Wewe, muzungu,’ he said to me, when he wanted my attention. ‘You, white man.’ This sort of over-familiar word form was extremely rude but he was used to dealing with oafish budget-conscious backpackers. He clearly hated his job and you couldn’t blame him, the cab jammed with people, the truck bed filled with animals, and more men seated on the upper rungs, squatting on the cab roof and hanging from the sides, many of them chewing qât to stay serene.
I had seen poor roads on this trip but this one was spectacularly bad, worse than the no-road route through the Sudanese desert. This was a narrow track of deep, wheel-swallowing potholes and sudden ruts, hard steep waves of them that made the truck jiggle and jump. But the worst of it were the loose boulders. Broken and very sharp, they were so large they sent the truck in a toppling motion as it climbed them and plunged, throwing the cattle to the floor. Still early morning, but the day was very hot, there was no shade, and the land stretched ahead, white and dazzling, like an alkali desert. We were traveling at about ten miles an hour and had 200 miles ahead of us.
African children seldom cry — almost a miracle the way they are as patient as their parents — but the ones in the cab were screaming.
Because of the fighting in the area — yes, as the soldier had said, the Oromo had attacked some police posts — there were frequent checkpoints. Being African checkpoints, each one was a financial opportunity for the armed men who controlled it; so each stop was a shakedown. Mustafa palmed money to the men and drove on, grumbling.
I missed the congenial company of Tadelle and Wolde, I missed the much better roads and greenery of Ethiopia, I missed the Ethiopian courtesies. But I consoled myself with the thought that I had successfully made the transition into Kenyan territory. I was proceeding south, according to plan.
At mid-morning we stopped at a set of tin-roofed sheds by the roadside.
‘Chakula,’ Mustafa said. Food.
Platters of fatty goat meat and lumps of gray coarse porridge the Kenyans call ugali were set on the table in dirty enamel bowls. The Africans, men first, pushed to the food-splashed table and fell on it, snatching food and stuffing their mouths. I bought Mustafa a Coke to ingratiate myself and asked him when we might get to Marsabit.
He shrugged and swigged the Coke and said, ‘Si jui’ — I dunno.
The other Africans were breezy, too, even insolent, lots of Wewe, muzungu, and one man chewing a bone poked his goat-greased finger at me, ‘Wewe, mzee.’
‘Hey, you old man,’ eh? This can be a term of affection or respect, as it was when Jomo Kenyatta’s title was Mzee, emphasizing that he was an elder and leader. But it was pretty clear to me that I was just being mocked as an oldster.
‘Hapana mzee,’ I said, ‘Not old,’ in Kitchen Swahili, but Kitchen Swahili was all these northerners spoke, for they were Borena and Samburu people mainly, desert dwellers, without a common language. Swahili was grammatical and subtle only on the coast and in the few cities.
‘Mimi vijana,’ the man said, asserting his youth.
Another man with no fingers on his right hand, hitting a goat bone with his left fist, was clearly narrating in his language, Borena, that he was eating the best part, the marrow, which he smacked on to the table in a glutinous lump. He smeared it with his fingers and ate it greedily.
Outside, some of the other trucks in the convoy had stopped here, too, and soldiers traveling with them asked me if there was trouble (shauri) there.
‘There is war in Ethiopia? You have seen?’
These ignorant inhabitants, traveling on a hideous road in an overheated desert, in a neglected province of one of the most corrupt and distressed and crime-ridden countries in Africa regarded sunny threadbare but dignified Ethiopia as a war zone.
When we set off again I saw that one of the soldiers climbed on to the back of Mustafa’s truck. I was not sure whether I was concerned or relieved that we were traveling with a soldier carrying a high-caliber rifle.
The settlements visible in the desert were all Borena or else the Borena sub-tribes — the Mbuji people, the Ledile, the Gabra. They were all rather handsome men and attractive women, who lived sparely, among their diminishing flocks of goats. Even though they were herding the creatures over this vast desert there was not much grazing available. No rain had fallen for three years and they were being forced to eat their animals, which were their wealth. At a mission station there were Ledile people, just sitting, looking gaunt.
There was little else to eat, hardly any wildlife survived here. I saw some of the small deer they called dikdiks, and of course there were birds — kites, hawks, pigeons, and where there were thorn trees, some weaver birds darted around their many nests.
The road extended straight ahead — rocky, rubbly, pitted with holes — to the distant horizon, cutting between two lakes. The lakes were magnificent, shimmering in the sunlight, flat expanses of water, mirroring the sky and lending a coolness to the landscape, which invited the traveler and promised relief. But the lakes, of course, were mirages; only the rubbly road was real.
We were going so slowly that when a rear tire blew at two o’clock I heard not only the blow-out like a pistol shot but the hissing as the air streamed out. Mustafa brought the truck to a halt and got out, cursing.