by Paul Theroux
Besides Ben and Abel, on the Africa overland truck there was Mick, a Yorkshireman, who as chief mechanic quietly boasted of having a complete welding kit on board, a spare engine and a generator. The seven paying passengers were seriously shaken, the effect of having been attacked and shot at by shifta the day before. One, Jade from New Zealand, was asthmatic and the stress was giving her symptoms of suffocation – or was that caused by dust blowing through the open truck? Another, a Canadian of about twenty – an immigrant from the Ukraine – welcomed me on board, then gave me an insane grin.
‘Yeah. This is a good day to die,’ he said, as I swung myself on board. He said this often; he had no other conversation. Not so much a victim of post-traumatic stress as a natural pain in the ass.
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 beca
me 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.
Mick jacked the truck up and set out the tools – generator, welding gear, steel boxes, basins of socket wrenches and spares, spare spring leaves. And as the sun descended towards the desert horizon, he and Abel took turns trying to dislodge the broken springs. As dusk fell, they had still made little headway.
Ben said to me, ‘Fancy spending a night in the desert?’
‘We must leave right now,’ the soldier said. ‘These people will take advantage of us.’
Yanking on a broken spring leaf with a crowbar, Ben said, unper-turbed, ‘Oh, aye.’
Counting the soldiers, there were twelve of us, and darkness would soon be upon us – hunger, too. Bored already with sitting, I said I would put myself in charge of the evening meal. There were chickens running around, there was rice in the shop. The friendliest woman in the village was a Kikuyu woman named Helen, who wore a green dress and said, ‘I am a missionary of the Full Gospel Church. I am bringing Jesus here.’
‘Are these your chickens?’
She said they were and that for 1700 shillings, about $20, she would kill three chickens and make potato stew and chapatis to feed the twelve of us and some of her family.
Darkness had fallen but Helen began to stoke three cooking fires, and over by the truck the welding had begun, Mick squinting through a small piece of smoked glass because his welding mask was broken. The bright sparks of the welding attracted people from huts at the edge of Serolevi, who sat and watched the action.
I helped Helen peel potatoes. I was impressed by her cooking skill and appalled by the disorder, for she squatted in a mass of chicken feathers and eviscerated birds and potato peels, hot coals and pots of sloshing water. But this was the Serolevi method: smoky fires, dented stew pots, scorched meat.
I sent a small boy to the shop for a bottle of beer and then sat on a log, peeling potatoes and swigging beer, and feeling an obscure sense of contentment.
‘Beer is bad,’ Helen said, giggling.
‘Beer is not mentioned in the Bible,’ I said. ‘Jesus drank wine. He also made wine. Preferred it to water. Changed water into wine at the wedding feast at Cana. His own mother requested it. Where does it say that alcohol is bad?’
‘In Galatians.’
‘Where Paul condemns drunkenness and reveling?’ I said, ‘Helen, I wouldn’t have thought a warm bottle of Tusker outside a mud hut in Samburu land constituted drunken reveling. What?’
She saw the joke, she was laughing, but she said, ‘You will not be saved.’
‘A man asked Jesus, “Good master, how shall I find the Kingdom of Heaven?” Jesus said, “Love thy neighbor. Obey the Commandments.” ’
‘Johns says you must be born again. You’re a good peeler,’ she said, hoisting the potatoes.
She was good-natured and quick, just thirty-two – the average life expectancy in Kenya was just over forty. She was not married.
‘You haven’t met Mister Right.’
‘Jesus is Mister Right.’ She was slapping dough now, clapping it between her hands, making chapattis.
Feeling fortunate, I laughed and drank another Tusker and thought: I love this place, I love sitting in the pink afterglow of the sunset, peeling spuds and talking about salvation. The heat of the day had gone, the air was mild, there were children everywhere, fooling, fussing, teasing each other, among the flaring fires and the aromatic steam of chicken and potatoes.
Darkness lay around us; the only points of light were the cooking fires and the blinding blue arc of the welding torch. Then the welding torch died: the generator was out of gasoline, and the welding could not be completed until more gasoline was brought from Archer’s Post. We might be stuck for a few more days. I did not care. Others found it appalling.
This dire news seemed to bring on Jade’s serious asthma attack. She said she could not breathe. She was made comfortable by the helpful backpackers and soon a Land-Rover full of robed Somalis arrived at the checkpoint. Jade begged them to take her. ‘I need to get to a hospital.’ They stuffed her in the back of their vehicle with Laura and sped south, into the darkness.
The rest of us had dinner. The local headman, a young man named Chief George, joined us, and so did some others who had been hanging around, looking hungry. There were fifteen of us altogether. I helped Helen dish up the food.
Scooping with a bent spoon, I said, ‘This may be one of the few occasions when you’ve been waited on by a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.’
Hearing ‘American,’ Chief George said, ‘I hear some American people are poor. We do not think of whites as poor. Also, that some cannot speak English. How can this be in America?’
He claimed that Samburu herdsmen could walk forty miles a day, and that women could walk faster and farther than men.
He said, ‘Women have a better rhythm. Men walk fast then have to rest. Women don’t rest.’
On a padded shelf of the open jacked-up truck that night I lay and drowsed. The dry air was dead still and odorless. No water meant no insects. Silence and darkness and no one stirring. The almost full moon, deep orange from the risen dust, appeared late, casting a glow upon the desert around us.
In the morning, the Canadian backpacker saw me and said, ‘This is a good day to die.’ He looked around Serolevi, the dead thorn trees, the scattered children, our damaged truck. ‘Yeah.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Do I get the prize for being the craziest guy on the truck?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Know where we are? Figawi. For where the fuck are we?’
‘The Figawi safari.’
‘Yeah. Looks like we’re stuck today, too. Want to smoke some herb?’
All he did was gabble. Meanwhile, Abel had hitched a ride to Archer’s Post to buy some more gasoline for the generator. The night had been benign but daylight was a reminder that there was no shade here, nowhere to sit except on the log in front of Helen’s hut. By mid-morning no vehicles has passed in either direction and the temperature was back in the nineties.
What I had taken to be an improvised squatter settlement near an army checkpoint was in fact a village of several hundred Samburus. It was the army checkpoint that was improvised. The schoolhouse was empty, unused – ‘no money for teachers’ – but there was a bar, a tin-roofed shack, where men drank beer throughout the day, starting at eight in the morning and fighting over space at the small pool table. On the side of the bar was a sign in Swahili and English: Ministry of Health, UNFPA – UN Population fund. Protect yourself and your friends. Use a condom (tumi mpira). Help yourself below. But the tin dispenser was empty.
Boys ornamented in the traditional limooli fashion – spears, skirts, beads – tended goats in nearby fields, and now and then children appeared with buckets of water. I borrowed a plastic basin from Helen and followed some of these water carriers down to the borehole, which was a standpipe past the abandoned schoolhouse. A trickle of water dribbled out of the pipe. I put down my basin and watched it slowly piddling and calculated that it would take the best part of an hour to fill a bucket.
When I had a few quarts I went into a field and washed my face and dumped the rest on my head, marveling at the heat of the sun beating on my wet hair. Then I found another log to sit on and went on reading. I felt only mildly inconvenienced, because I had no deadline to meet: no one was expecting me. Most of all I felt privileged that I was now in a Samburu village in the middle of the northern Kenyan desert, living in perfect safety, talking to local people, and observing a way of life that was not discernable from the road.
That day, few vehicles went past the checkpoint. The Bishop of Marsabit, a voluble Italian named Father Ravisi, sailed through, stopping briefly to hug the villagers and joke with them in Swahili.
‘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.