And there were two soldiers, a smiling one who never spoke, and a cross talkative one named Andrew, who was grumbling from the moment we left Marsabit. The sight of Samburu tribesmen on the road — in bright togas, with earrings and beads, carrying rifles and walking sticks — roused him to fury.
‘They are all shifta,’ the soldier named Andrew said. ‘Him and him. And over there, all of them. The Kenyan government supplies them with guns because the people demand it. “We want to protect our cattle.” But they use the guns to attack people on this road. Forty people have been killed in the past two months.’
We were in scrubby desert, as desolate and dry and vast as the day before, and the road just as bad. I was sitting in the truck with the shell-shocked backpackers. Gasping Jade; the girls, Rebecca and Laura, with Walkmen on their heads, listening to Tracy Chapman; Mick’s girlfriend, Judy (Mick was in the cab with Ben); Abel stretched out on a bench, and the Canadian grinning at the road ahead, murmuring, ‘This is a good day to die.’
Besides the Samburu, Rendille people also inhabited this area. The Rendille were so ornamented and colorful they often appeared on postcards. Kenyan Warriors in Traditional Costume, the cards would say. They wore stiff beaded visors on their brows and tight braided locks smeared with red ochre shaking at the back of their heads; they bristled with elaborate necklaces and gorgets of red and white beads; armlets, bracelets, anklets. Part of their attire was weapons, throwing clubs shaped like maracas jammed into their beaded belts, and knives with decorative sheaths. They carried spears and wore bright red sarongs. They were the personification of adornment and you could spot one of these Rendille warriors a mile away in the Dida Galgalu Desert, which was perhaps the whole point.
Two of them waved us down on the road in the middle of nowhere. We picked them up but their Swahili was so rudimentary the soldiers could not converse with them. One said, ‘Laisamis’ — the soldiers recognized the name as a mission thirty miles down the road. They sat, saying nothing, but allowed themselves to be photographed by Rebecca.
Laisamis, a Catholic mission, was also a desert settlement of Rendille people. There were no trees, there was no shade, yet it was market day, hundreds of gaily dressed people squatting in the dust among a large church, a small school, a bore hole and many scattered crudely built huts. Rendille ornamentation was limited to the person; the huts were simply rounded masses of twigs and thatch, inhabited by people in colorful plumage. A line from Conrad came to mind: ‘There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine.’
Jade the asthmatic begged to stay a while at Laisamis, saying that she was having trouble breathing. She looked very ill, her eyes sunken and red, her face pale, and in her worst attacks her lips turned blue. The back of the truck in the heat and blowing dust of the Dida Galgalu Desert did not seem to me the happiest place for an asthmatic, and Jade was clearly suffering but did not complain. While Ben tried to get her electric nebulizer working — he said he might be an hour — I went bird-watching in a grove of thorn trees at the edge of the desert. Apart from the hawks and the vultures, there was a grackle-sized bird, red and black and brilliant green, a lovely bird with a lovely name, the Superb Starling.
An off-duty Kenyan policeman named Mark strolled over and said he needed a lift. Ben obliged him, because although he was in street clothes he had his pistol with him and another weapon was useful in this road of ambush-minded shifta. Mark was a Samburu.
‘After you are circumcised you make the choice to go to school or look after the animals. If you look after the animals you dress as these men do. We call them limooli’ — that was how he wrote it, but he pronounced it mowlé. ‘My brother is one. The Rendille copied this from us.’
‘My asthma’s playing up again,’ Jade said. She was fighting for breath and apologetic and looked awful; but she had a support group of sympathetic women in the truck, Sarah, Laura, Judy and Rebecca, who attended her with medicine and atomizers. The shifta ambush had bonded them. Sarah, who was nineteen and about to enter an English university, had sobbed with fear after the gunshots.
In the early afternoon, riding down the road, there was a terrific bang, so sharp, so loud, we all dived to the floor. The two soldiers snatched their rifles and looked for shifta, as Ben drove on. But there were no more bangs. In fact, the truck was slowing down.
‘We blew a tire,’ Mick said, sticking his head out of the cab.
‘Yesterday we thought it was a tire,’ Judy said. ‘But it was shooting.’
No one regretted hitting the deck, It served as emergency drill.
‘Yeah, this is a good day to die,’ the Canadian said.
We limped four miles to a cluster of huts, so few of them they hardly constituted a village. The place was called Serolevi. It existed because there was a barrier in the road, and being a military checkpoint it had a name. This was in the heart of Samburu land, in the desert of scrubby bushes and dead thorn trees and overdressed and overornamented Samburu herdboys. No shade, nowhere to sit, just dust and gravel, a handful of lost-looking people and some indolent policemen.
Mick and Abel jacked up the truck, Ben supervising. The tire was changed in half an hour. This speed was in great contrast to the cackhanded incompetence shown by Mustafa and his men the day before. While they worked I looked around the settlement and thought: God, what an awful place. There was a shop — just a shed with one shelf, and on the shelf raw blocks of soap, rice, maize flour, dry crackers, and Kasuku Brand fat. Kasuku is Swahili for parrot, so I made a predictable joke about parrot fat and the woman shop owner sighed with boredom.
‘Those mountains ahead,’ Ben said as we were loading the tools. ‘Isiolo is behind them’
Isiolo was our objective, the edge of the desert, a decent-sized town with food and water.
‘Archer’s Post is before that,’ Andrew the soldier said. ‘That is the worst place for shifta.’
It was the thing I hated hearing from an African: There are bad people ahead.
I asked if I could ride in the cab. Ben said, ‘Fine,’ and we set off again, Mick at the side window, me in the middle. The road was so bumpy, with long deep holes that made the truck thump and roll, that both Mick and I braced ourselves, our feet against the dashboard.
On an especially bad stretch of road the truck rose and fell heavily, the chassis banging hard with the sound of a hammer on an anvil. Ben came alert at the wheel, his head cocked, and said, ‘Shit.’
Mick said, ‘What?’
‘She’s listing. Fuck.’ He rolled to a halt and got out to examine the undercarriage, then delivered the news. ‘We knackered a spring. Three big leaves. Chassis’s resting on the axle. Shit. Fuck. I was afraid of that. Shit.’ He put the truck into gear and began making a U-turn. ‘I was dreading this road ever since we left Cairo.’
‘So was I,’ I said.
‘Why didn’t you take the flipping plane?’
‘Because I wanted to see what was on this dreaded road.’
‘A thousand miles of hassle,’ Ben said.
But Mick was thinking about the broken spring. He said, ‘Got to weld the leaves. Maybe chain her up, or summat.’
We drove back very slowly to Serolevi, the settlement that had made my heart sink. Our escort soldiers became agitated, even the one who was usually calm. ‘We fix and go,’ the irritable one said. But Ben did not even bother replying. The damage to the truck was serious. Even I could see the smashed spring and the body of the heavy truck threatening to snap the axle.