by Barry Lopez
Seating on that Nairobi flight to Harare is all economy class, but some of us have paid a little extra to be closer to the exits. We wait in a separate lounge at the gate where we can see all the other passengers go through a pat-down routine and have their hand luggage opened and searched. The tedium of such routine inspections often, of course, affects authorities at border crossings and security gates, and boredom feeds the desire in some of them for diversion. This situation felt like that to me. The five of us in business class were ushered through the gate without a pat-down, without having our hand luggage inspected. The workday seemed to be over as these men prepared to leave the gate. A few of them remained behind, talking together. One of them called to me to come back. He took my bag and one of the others began patting me down. I realized then that I might have made a mistake while sitting in the lounge by writing in a notebook. When traveling in developing countries, one generally shouldn’t take out a notebook and write anything down at a security point.
When I’d asked Richard where I might get detailed topographic maps of the land west of Lake Turkana, he told me it was not smart to travel through Kenya with such maps. In the moment I was glad I had no such maps with me, only an ordinary traveler’s map of the country. I hoped the two men now leafing through my notebooks would not confiscate them because of the sketch maps I’d made there. I was relieved when they began repacking the bag, but at the same time I became annoyed with a third man who continued to pat me down in the same places in a perfunctory way. He caught my eye and sneered at my annoyance, letting me know that he was in charge here, not the white man this time, the mzunga. He was nearly through with me when he came upon the deerskin pouch. He removed it. What was this? Some things from home, I said. A few stones. Some feathers.
I saw right away that he didn’t like this. “This is primitive,” he said. I asked him where he was from. Had he come to Nairobi to find work? Did he think about his homeland sometimes? Anger flared in his face. He shook the pouch in my face. “This is primitive!” he repeated. “Where is your Bible?”
Talking my way out of this was not going to be easy. I just hoped he would finish with his denouncement in time for me to board the twice-a-week plane. He began to lecture me about the backwardness of people who still live in the bush, and he instructed me in true Christian living until the outrage in him dissipated.
Now it would become a game.
“Go ahead, sir,” said one of the other men with mock politeness, his arm extended in a gesture he maintained. “Please, go ahead. You may board the plane now.”
I walked over to the man who had taken my pouch and asked for it. He flipped it to another man. I went to him. He tossed it back to the first man. The person I took to be in charge of the security crew, I could see, had grown tired of this game with a white man and wanted to leave. Eventually they gave the pouch back. I was so rattled it didn’t occur to me to check my carry-on bag for my notebooks until after we took off. They were all there, shoved into the bag in a jumble, along with clothing and a few books. If they had kept the notebook with the detailed drawing of Kamoya’s camp and the sketch of the route to Nakirai from Lodwar, what would they have made of it? What if they’d read my notes about the Pliocene, Turkana hairstyles, or Abyssinian rollers? As they thumbed through, what might they expect had been left out? To whom would they send the notebook for further scrutiny?
When the flight attendant arrived at my row with the offer of a cool drink, I realized I was still clenching my teeth.
* * *
—
JAMES COOK KEPT NOTES few have ever seen. These journal entries of his are different from the entries published in the official record of his great reconnaissance of the Pacific. The Admiralty vetted Cook’s journals before they were conveyed to the publisher, partly to ensure conformity with British social and religious mores, partly to ensure the continued good standing of the Admiralty with the House of Lords. The description of any controversy on a naval voyage needed to be phrased in such a way as not to embarrass anyone in a position of authority. Ideally, the published journals should merely expand upon and ornament what well-informed Englishmen already knew, or suspected, about the world. Officers were required to turn their journals over to the captain, and crewmen were forbidden to publish anything about a voyage.
Against the official published record of a naval voyage of exploration such as Cook’s, one had to consider the perceptions of literate crewmen who didn’t keep journals for fear of reprisals, or who did but never published them. In the second half of the eighteenth century, during the American and French Revolutions, British seamen were in the thick of the political, economic, and social upheaval of the time. They were witness to the injustice of the British system of naval conscription, to brutal corporal punishment aboard naval ships, and to ethical breaches by naval officers, none of which did the Admiralty want publicly exposed.
One must also consider that few British crewmen, even if they could write, had the education, command of language, or acumen to write with insight about what they were witness to. Like Ranald MacDonald, sailing aboard whalers before the age of oil, and aboard merchant vessels in the South China Sea in the wake of the Opium Wars, these sailors could not articulate what the reasons were for their contempt of those who tried to ensure that their voices were never heard. Only a few who, because of their international experience at sea, might carry doubts about the wisdom of British or American attempts to control other cultures, to take over their geographies and re-rig their economies, left discerning manuscripts behind. And fewer still, like MacDonald, managed a grand gesture of opposition. MacDonald wanted the shogun to understand that neither his warriors nor his traditions were a match for what was coming. The Americans would break into the “double-bolted kingdom” of Japan as efficiently and as successfully as British opium merchants had opened a reluctant Middle Kingdom, the Celestial Empire, to the tea trade.
What I had encountered at the gate of Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, from men Kenyatta had fought to free from colonial influence so that Kenyan people could determine for themselves both the direction and the rate of social and economic change in their country, was the residue of colonial resentment and the fanaticism of converts to the new system that colonialism had engendered. Whatever uncolonized Kenyans—Samburu, Maasai, Rendille, Swahili, Kikuyu—might have offered the imperfect world, it had been plowed under by colonials and converts like this.
* * *
—
LATE IN THE AFTERNOON the camp at Nakirai had the look of a parched dream. No movement, no color, no sound. Birds roosting in the acacias, rollers and weavers mostly, were perched there with mouths agape, panting.
I put my bags in the rear of the Land Rover Kamoya drove and settled my shoulder bag alongside my camp chair in the shade of the trees. Soon the others would rise from their naps. Christopher would bring tea. I would miss participating every day in a determined search with these men, looking for something that had meaning. I had seen here with them the outline of something I was after: an effort to cooperate, a deepened sense of purpose in the search for something nearly impossible to find, an emphasis on courteous regard, and the apparent absence of anyone’s insistent allegiance to any citadel of the intellect, to any tribe or nation or religion thought to be infallible.
It would be difficult to say goodbye here, to catch a bus the next morning and never see these men again. They had accommodated the mzunga from someplace far away, the mgeni. The outlander.
Once I was traveling with three Japanese men in northern Hokkaido. We had been welcomed into the home of an Ainu elder, a traditional man, a wood-carver. We entered accompanied by a translator who spoke Ainu and Japanese but not English. My companions had many questions for the Ainu elder about brown bears (a remnant population of about 1,100 roamed northern Hokkaido at the time; more do today), the traditional Ainu longbow, and other topics. I, too, had questions
, but mine had first to be translated into Japanese by the only one of my companions who spoke a little English, and then posed to the elder by the Ainu translator in the Ainu language. It would be inconsiderate to insist on this, so I asked that people make drawings whenever they could of whatever they were talking about. That way, with my Romanized Japanese/English dictionary in my lap, I could follow some of the conversation.
The Ainu elder sat on a straw mat on the floor with his legs straight out in front of him. It’s difficult to guess how old he was, perhaps in his mid-sixties. His hair and his beard were white. He seemed to think carefully about each question he was asked. But I could tell from his occasional bursts of laughter that he was enjoying saying derogatory things about the Japanese, his people’s longtime colonial nemesis. My Japanese companions laughed with him, signaling some kind of agreement with his assessments of Japanese people, letting him know he might not be that far off in an objective critique of the Japanese.
During the hour or so we were in his home, the elder was at work on two carvings. The blanks he used were peeled willow sticks about three-quarters of an inch thick and a foot long. He was planing them with a small knife, creating thick bundles of thin, curled shavings at different points along each stick. They were described to me as offerings (called inao in Ainu and gohei in Japanese), made to honor gods associated with a residence. Strictly speaking, they themselves are not “house gods.” (It was hours before I suddenly awoke to the fact of a remarkable cultural convergence here. Though inao and gohei carvings derive from two separate and distinct traditions, Shinto and Ainu, they look nearly identical.)
I was glad to have been in the elder’s home, but as we prepared to leave, of course, I felt a bit dejected at the thought of all that I’d missed in the conversation.
My Japanese companions and the Ainu translator were walking ahead of me when I stepped off the raised platform we’d all been seated on and reached for my shoes. Just then I felt a light touch on my shoulder and turned to see the Ainu man holding up the two carvings, one in each hand. He bowed slightly and handed them to me. At the same time he indicated we should keep going toward the others, standing now at the entrance to his home. There he spoke to the translator, who then spoke to the one of my companions who spoke a little English. He told me the stick in my right hand honored an Ainu hearth god. When I got home, I should place it next to the woodstove in my living room. The other honored a house guardian. It should be placed at the highest point of the ceiling on the top floor of my home.
We all bowed toward our host and the translator, awkwardly touched hands, and I departed with my friends.
* * *
—
AFTER TEA I said goodbye to Christopher, to Ngeneo and Wambua, and got in the Land Rover. Kamoya drove away slowly, bearing a little to the southwest, aiming to cut the road to Lodwar at some point farther to the west. Kamoya watched the ground to his right, Nzube watched to the left from the front passenger seat. Onyango was watching out the right window behind Kamoya, and I was backing up Nzube on the other side. Taking advantage of every opportunity.
If only to pay them back for all these men had given me, for their generous investment of time in me, I wanted to discover something significant before we reached Lodwar.
* * *
—
THE VEHICLE CARRYING US clambers slowly across the uneven plain, skirting thickets of brush, dropping into wadis and continuing on. In some sections of loose sand we temporarily lose traction and the Land Rover begins to settle on its axles before jumping ahead as Kamoya gears down. A couple of hours later we cross the Turkwel River on the main road and Kamoya weaves along rough dirt lanes in the settlement to a wooden gate in front of the Turkwel Lodge.
It is hot by the river, and humid. I suggest we all have a cold drink before saying goodbye. We sit at a small table on the hotel patio with our iced drinks, talking about certain episodes in the time we’d spent together, but the conversation is full of long silences. The Kamba men finger their sweating glasses. I offer that in a place like this there is as much to be unlearned as there is to be learned. Kamoya raises his head, looks squarely at me, and nods. Nzube says it’s strange, the way you expect to find something in certain places, but you find nothing. And then the other way around.
At a nearby table a few men are listening to music on a portable radio, a song about Nelson Mandela, whose name is repeated several times in the chorus. It is the time in Africa just before he is released from the prison at Robben Island. While the song plays, the four of us share furtive glances, wry smiles. This is not a topic that has come up among us before, but by their gestures the others convey the trend of their thinking. One day all the Bothas and racist Voortrekkers will be gone. Then will come the Mugabes, the Idi Amins, the Savimbis, and after that, they hope, the Mandelas. It will take a few generations to work it out.
The men finish their drinks, swirling the last ice cubes, taking each one in to crush it between their teeth. They shake hands with me. We embrace lightly, self-consciously. I thank each man individually, perhaps in too many words. They drive off to fill their water barrels, to pick up some millet and cigarettes and batteries, and then cross the bridge again and turn east on the road to Nakirai.
I watch them pass out of view from an open gate in front of the Turkwel Lodge.
I stare past the gate, up and down the dirt lane, narrow as an alley, indecisive—what next?—and enter the hotel to ask the desk clerk about the matatu, the one leaving the next day for Kitale. Yes, he says, it will come at 5:30 a.m. There are often last-minute changes with things like transport schedules up-country, so I ask the clerk how dependable “5:30 a.m.” is. “Oh, very dependable, sir. Right here at the hotel.” I inquire about a good place for supper. He gives me the name of the same restaurant Kamoya recommended. When I ask what time the place closes, I realize I’m back in the world of the wristwatch, the white tourist, identity papers, and unfamiliar currency. I don’t want to lose the rhythms I’ve been living by, but they’re quickly falling apart.
The room key is superfluous. The latch on the door does not lock. An opening in a side wall serves as the room’s only window, though there is no frame or glass. Above the iron bedstead and stained mattress is a hook for a mosquito net. The lone socket in the ceiling of the room has no bulb. After lighting a mosquito coil and placing it in the middle of the mattress on a metal tray, I tuck the mosquito net in smartly all around the mattress and leave. I’ve put my passport, airplane ticket, travel papers, notebooks, and binoculars into a day pack along with my wallet. I slide my padlocked duffels under the bed and depart the hotel.
As I exit the patio yard, I see, parked parallel to the chest-high wall that surrounds the lodge, an immaculate, pale green overland truck, a Mercedes-Benz cab-over vehicle with a cargo bed. A light tan canvas roof and side walls enclose the cargo bay, which is empty. Not considering the impropriety of it, I begin to inspect the truck more closely. I take in the massive bulk of the front and rear differentials, the drum winch mounted behind a formidable front bumper, and the capstan winch in the rear, both wound with 7⁄16-inch aircraft cable. Twin forty-gallon saddle tanks for fuel. All-terrain spare tires, one mounted on the roof of the cab, another between the side rails underneath the cargo bay, a bank of driving lamps on a stout push bar in front of the radiator.
I glance around to see whether anyone is watching before stepping on a foot rung that lets me peer into the cabin, to see a pair of shifters for the transmissions, the layout of dials in the dashboard. I circle the truck, searching for any sign of livery that might identify the owner or offer me a phone number. Nothing.
A fully capable machine. I have several questions for the driver, however, about the gearing, the size of the clutch plate, and the wading depth for river crossings. And where is it exactly that he’s heading?
I can’t locate the driver. The desk clerk has been watching me, and I t
hink finds my inspection of the truck presumptuous. He says he has no idea where the driver is and abruptly turns back to his work. When I return from supper, the truck is gone.
Standing in a large unpartitioned room with sloping concrete floors, I take a shower with a spray of water from a solar-heated roof tank. The inclined floors—the room also serves as an open latrine—slope downward toward a central waste pit.
I find the crowded, overloaded matatu at 6:00 a.m. at a different location in the village than the hotel and we leave from there for Kitale, an hour and forty minutes late. At the bus park there I spot, in among some thirty idling buses, the one bound for Nakuru. At Nakuru, I locate the bus for Nairobi.
* * *
—
WHEN I REACH the New Stanley Hotel, there’s a note from Richard. Could I possibly meet with him and Alan Walker the following morning at the museum to look at some australopithecine skulls? Underneath my weariness, I am starting to feel something strange, like a flu. In my room I begin to place a call to Richard’s home, but decide it will be better to get a shower and go to bed and call Richard later, or maybe in the morning. In the shower I begin to sweat and then to shiver. My joints tighten. I phone the hotel doctor. Malaria, the doctor says. Debilitating but not life-threatening. Try to ride it out. He’ll check in from time to time.
In my third-floor room I sweat, sleep a little, wrap myself in a blanket against the chills, and wait. When I’m awake, I drink room-service tea and bottled water and eat saltine crackers, which is all I can keep down. I read distractedly in two books, Gerard Manley Hopkins: Priest and Poet and Robinson Jeffers: Selected Poems. In my early teens I had been drawn to Hopkins (1844–1889), and in college I had discovered the American poet Jeffers (1887–1962), whom I initially took for a misanthrope. On this reading I get something different from Jeffers’s lines, something braver and more complicated. Hopkins, a Jesuit priest from a well-to-do family in Essex, is by comparison too much with God, I come to think, and not enough with man. And Jeffers, a recluse sensitive to the metaphysical insistence of the natural world, and critical of human failing, is more a realist than a misanthrope.