‘Cheerio, mate,’ Ben called out, waving symbolically with a monkey-wrench.
I said goodbye to them all, and hoisted my bag on to my shoulder and walked away from the truck. I had seen items in travel magazines all the time advertising ‘Overland Africa — Experience the Adventure.’ And now I knew what this adventure entailed. If you are on such a group tour, you are the human cargo, one of a truckload of young people, many of them good-hearted, some of them very silly, sitting on a bench on the truck bed, earphones clamped tight, eating dust, listening to your Enya tape. You might get held up by shifta, you will certainly be held up by flat tires, you will seldom wash. No one calls out ‘Are we there yet?’ because no one except the driver has the slightest idea of the route or the difficulty. We had crossed the wide Dida Galgalu Desert, and north of Marsabit the Ngaso Plain. We had climbed to the Kaisut Plateau and been stranded for two days in Serolevi on the Losai Reserve, and had traversed the foot of the desert mountain, Olkanjo. If you had asked any of them where we had traveled the answer would have been, ‘Was that where Kevin barfed?’ or ‘Was that where jade gagged?’ or ‘Was that where the road sucked?’ After months of trucking in Africa everyone on board has the dull torpid smile and brain-damaged look of a cultist.
‘Aren’t you a little old for this, Dad?’ my children say, when I relate a travel experience that involves the back of a truck. My answer is: Not relly. It is not the truck that makes me feel old — big efficient trucks overcome obstacles that baffle little cars. It is the passengers who make me feel — not old, not fogeyish, but out of place. I had been grateful for the ride, grateful to Ben and Mick for their ingenuity and patience; I was also grateful to leave, even if leaving meant wandering down the main street of Archer’s Post, a tiny dust-blown town in the middle of nowhere.
Teenaged boys left their perches at the shops and followed me, pestering me, asking me where I was going, where I was from. They were used to foreigners in Archer’s Post — the Samburu Game Reserve was west of here, and I saw game lodges advertised on signposts at the edge of town. Tourists were sped here in minibuses, fresh from the plane, dressed in very expensive safari clothes, with pith helmets and khaki jackets. Their trousers had eleven pockets, their sleeves were trimmed in leather and amply gusseted.
When the pestering boys had surrounded me and were making a nuisance of themselves (‘Wewe, muzungu’) and I was on the point of shouting at them, a Jeep approached. I raised my hand for it to stop. It did so: a miracle.
Saved again by another nun, Sister Matilda, with a familiar accent.
‘Yes, I am from Sardinia! Get in — we can talk!’
And, recalling Italy, we traveled south to Isiolo. It was only an hour away by this fast car, but we had not gone far down the road when the unfamiliar smell of rain-soaked fields rose to cool the air. The fields were green, the road muddy in places. I had not seen mud since Addis Ababa. There were pastures, cornfields, smallholdings and wooded valleys, and hills scored with the furrows of cultivation. Tufted green copses graced the banks of little creeks.
‘Did you have any trouble on the road?’ Sister Matilda asked.
‘We were shot at by shifta around Marsabit. Several trucks were attacked. Was it in the newspaper?’
‘No!’ She laughed. ‘ “Shot at.” That is not news in Kenya!’
Obviously not, for that day’s Nairobi Nation was for sale in Isiolo, and near dusk, traveling to Nanyuki in a matatu — a speeding minivan with bald tires, jammed to capacity with ripe perspiring Kenyans — I read the day’s news: ‘47 Shot Dead in Village Attack’ — 600 members of the Pokot tribe taking revenge on a village in western Kenya, torching 300 huts, stealing hundreds of cattle, and killing teachers, students, women and children as young as three months. There was a story about a fourteen-year-old boy who was killed in crossfire between cops and robbers in the town of Kisii. Yet another story related the theft of four million shillings in an armed robbery: ‘The police collected AK-47 cartridges at the scene.’ There was a vivid and grisly account of a riot at a soccer match, and an update on Kenya’s AIDS epidemic.
Compared to this, pot shots at south-bound trucks on the Marsabit road was not news at all, and anyway, the desert between the Ethiopian border and Nanyuki did not exist in the minds of most Kenyans.
‘The north is not Kenya,’ an African told me in Nanyuki. ‘It is not Somalia or Ethiopia. It is another country. The Kenyan government does nothing for it. It is a place run by foreigners — they manage everything, the schools, hospitals, churches. They are run by charities and aid agencies and NGOs, not by us.’
He was not angry or cynical, nor even grateful; just speaking the plain truth.
The Sportsman’s Arms Hotel in Nanyuki was hosting a conference on camel health. British soldiers from the army post nearby were playing pool and howling at each other in the upstairs lounge bar, while Africans were chuckling into cell phones in the lobby. Chuckling was all I ever saw African cell phone users do. On the road near the hotel prostitutes in tight dresses were walking up and down in stiletto heels — the wrong footwear for a muddy road, but what the helclass="underline" this was civilization.
9. Rift Valley Days
In the East African bush, apart from the ritual warnings of hungry armed shifta, no one seemed to worry much about crime. Cattle rustling, of course, was the exception, but that posed no risk to the sort of traveler I was — a dusty note-taking fugitive with a small bag, an evasive manner and no time constraints. I knew I was out of the bush and near an African town or city when the crime warnings were numerous and specific, and always illustrated by a grim story. Nothing was grimmer or more graphic than an African warning.
The nearer I got to Nairobi the worse the warnings. I was in Nanyuki when people told me of the many dangers. If you are involved in a car hijacking, surrender your car: a woman was killed, stabbed in the eye, by hijackers just last week. Hand over your wallet to robbers without hesitation: a man was slashed to death by muggers yesterday, literally disarmed, his limbs lopped off with pangas (machetes). Don’t be misled into thinking that crime happens only at night, I was cautioned: seven armed men robbed a perfume shop at midday on Kenyatta Avenue in Nairobi this week. But if you go out at night you will definitely be robbed, I was assured. ‘There is a one hundred percent chance of it. I am one hundred percent sure.’ Don’t resist, give them what they want and you will live.
I was still in cool green Nanyuki, lying in the morning shadow of 17,000-foot-high Batian Peak of Mount Kenya, graced with scoopings of snow, an ice field and — wonderful on the Equator — a number of visible glaciers.
A man of the Meru people said to me, ‘Spirits live there. The mountain is sacred to us. We go to the mountain to pray.’
But even Mount Kenya was being robbed. That same week, a deal was made by some politicians in the Kenyan government to sell off hundreds of square miles of protected land in the ancient forest of the mountainside to loggers and developers.
I traveled to Nairobi in an overcrowded Peugeot taxi, nine of us crushed into a five-seater, and so I spent the entire trip, two hours, in the arms of a man named Kamali. He was a professional guide. He had in his bag a new book about lions by a British author, Elizabeth Laird, with a handwritten dedication: To Kamali, who told me stories about lions I shall remember for the rest of my life.