‘I had a parish in New Jersey for twenty years!’ And now his parish was one of the biggest and wildest in Africa.
The welding seemed to be going very slowly, though Mick was still kneeling, pinching a small piece of smoked glass in front of one eye, and torching a leaf. The only person who seriously minded the delay was the grumpier of the two soldiers. I realized that his complaining had its origins in fear: fear of a late start, fear of being ambushed, fear of the darkness that allowed shifta to approach.
I was chatting to a policeman at the checkpoint when a white Land-Rover — aid workers’ vehicle, a medical charity logo on the side — came to a halt. The man and woman inside showed their passports — Americans.
Are you going south?’ I asked.
They said they were, and had begun to inch forward, as the barrier was lifted.
‘I’m with that big truck,’ I said quickly. ‘We have a broken spring. Could you give me a lift to Archer’s Post or Isiolo?’
‘We don’t have space,’ the man said, not making eye contact.
‘Yes, you do — the whole back seat.’
‘Sorry.’
He was moving but I was walking beside him, my hand on his open window.
I said, ‘All right, don’t help me. We’ll get the truck fixed. But it’s a long empty road to Isiolo and if we see you broken down or in trouble by the side of the road — fuck you, we’re going right past you.’
This propelled him faster and so I let go. After the dust settled I could hear the zapping of Mick’s welding torch, and men shouting drunkenly in the bar, and children playing. I found a book about the IRA in the truck, Killing Rage, by Eamon Collins, a former IRA hitman. The book was a memoir but confessional in its truthfulness, full of killing motivated by the sort of tribalism that would have not been out of place in Samburu land. After assisting in many murders, some of them of innocent victims — the wrong man, or unlucky bystanders — Collins dropped out and went into hiding, where remorsefully he wrote this account of his homicidal pettiness.
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.