Hold the Enlightenment

by Tim Cahill

  Peter and Margot live at Ndarakwai, a former cattle ranch about four thousand feet up the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, and, in the past five years, working with their Masai and Chagga neighbors, they have managed to bring back the game that had once been decimated in the name of African beef. There are zebras and baboons and elephants and leopards and giraffes on the ten-thousand-acre ranch, all protected by several highly paid antipoaching rangers. There are, Margot told me, even three lions on the place now. She asked me not to mention that to her Masai neighbors.

  The Masai revere all creatures—they call them God’s cattle—but lions are exempt from this wide-scale veneration. Lions kill cattle. Indeed, a week before the donkey conference, I spoke with Thomas, the Masai ranch manager at Ndarakwai and he told me a story about the lion he had killed single-handedly. He was staying at his parents’ boma, a Swahili word that means “fort,” when he heard a rustling in the thorns outside. Now, a Masai boma is usually surrounded by a ten-foot-high, three-foot-deep fence of thorny branches cut from acacia trees. Another fence inside the outer one—equally high, equally deep—serves as a pen for the livestock. The huts are usually situated in the narrow space between the inner and outer fences, and that was where Thomas heard the lion one night. He stepped outside, barefoot, armed with a flashlight, a knife, and a spear. The lion had penetrated the outer fence, and was standing about fifteen feet away. Thomas hurled the spear and caught the lion in the heart and lungs. It died very quickly.

  “I’d killed maybe six lions before,” Thomas said, “but always with thirty or forty other men.” The lion was fed to the dogs—“we like dogs; we hate lions”—but the big cat’s tail was fixed on the end of a long stick. The next morning, Thomas, with his arm painted white, carried the stick and led the village in a kind of skipping run while everyone sang the lion song. Single guys who kill lions, he led us to believe, pretty much have their choice of single women.

  The Joneses had invited Thomas to come to the United States, in fact to my hometown in Montana, where Mi … uh, Margot still had a house. Thomas was anxious to walk among Montana cows. He’d seen pictures of them and found them astounding. The small, heat-resistant African cattle he knew came up to his chest at the shoulder, and even the fattest of them still showed a faint ridge of rib. “But your cattle,” he said, “I don’t believe them. I think they are blown up with air. They look like they are going to explode.”

  Thomas, like most Masai, was tall and slender and immensely dignified. When he went on safari he wore Western clothes: neatly pressed pants, boots, a clean dress shirt. His parents walked naked under their shoukas and said that he was now “one of those who fart in their clothes.” Thomas, in his fart pants, wouldn’t feel at all out of place in any major American city, except for his earlobes, each of which has a dime-sized hole in it. Most Masai (and Barabaig) have such ear loops, and, in the city of Arusha, they’re considered the mark of a country bumpkin. Several plastic surgeons there specialize in repairing loops, and Thomas wanted to fix his ears before coming to America. Michael Llewelyn, a photographer from Los Angeles who was along for the trip, told Thomas that he thought the surgery was a bad idea: ear loops would be considered incredibly smart and trendy among the Americans he knew, many of whom only had nipple and nose rings. Still, Thomas was adamant.

  At the moment, he was showing off the ranch and the three of us were strolling along an elephant trail not far behind a sizable herd, judging by the number of trees that had been butted down so the beasts could get at the green leaves that grew above the reach of their trunks.

  “People say the elephants destroy trees,” Thomas said. “I say they plant them, because the elephant eats the seed pod, takes it far from the mother tree, then drops it on the ground in a big pile of fertilizer.”

  In the space of an hour’s walk, we saw guinea fowl, zebras, bushbucks, kudus, impalas, banded mongooses, elephants, giraffes, baboons, and dik-diks, a horned antelope the size of a bunny that I immediately recognized as a jackalope.

  Meanwhile, at the main house, Peter worked out the logistics for a three-week walking safari. Margot wouldn’t be joining us, because she had to stay home and oil her elephant. It was just a baby, a yearling that Margot and Peter had found wandering about a nearby waterhole, alone and forlorn, apparently lost or abandoned by its mother. The Joneses had built a stockade and gotten permission from the Tanzanian game department to raise the creature until it was old enough to be released into the wild, but the project had turned out to be bigger than they’d ever imagined. Elephants are social animals, and it was necessary to have someone with the animal twenty-four hours a day, so three local men now had full-time jobs for the next several years. In addition, a baby elephant spends a lot of time standing under its mother, in the shade, where it rubs its back on mom’s belly, which keeps its skin smooth and supple. Without a mother around, the baby elephant had grown sunburned, and experts had advised rubbing down its cracked skin several times a day with coconut oil, which was Margot’s job.

  That left me, Michael, Peter, and Gobre, one of Peter’s antipoaching rangers, on the safari, along with several African men we’d meet later. Peter and I had discussed this trip many times over the years. No white person had been where we were going, as far as he knew, not in recent memory, anyway. There would be Masai and Barabaig cattle herders at the beginning of the trip, and then we’d get into Sandawe country. Agriculturists and beekeepers, the Sandawe are generally smaller and less physically imposing than the other two tribes, but they are renowned bow hunters who supplement their crops with game meat, crack archers who are greatly feared in war. The Masai say that you can’t hide from a Sandawe arrow: the little bastards can shoot them around corners. When Sandawe come to Arusha or Dar es Salaam, they get jobs as night watchmen, and they are the men you see in the evening sitting outside imposing homes or corporate headquarters or government buildings wearing shorts and holding bows. People in Tanzania don’t mess with an armed Sandawe.

  And so, as Margot oiled her elephant, we piled into one of Peter’s Land Cruisers and started off on the ten-hour drive south to Kalema, where we would begin our foot journey through a region of Tanzania one guidebook called “arid, featureless, and monotonous.” We parked in a secure area north of town and began walking. There were now three local Sandawe with us. One was Gele, so named because when he was born, his umbilical cord was buried near a baobab tree, or gele in Sandawe. Baobabs look as if they’re growing upside down with their roots in the air: a tree that started off life with giant sequoia ambitions got a third of the way there and erupted into an angry tangle of bare, Medusa-like branches. The trees are plentiful in this part of Africa, and, sure enough, a second member of our group was also named Gele (guess where his umbilical cord was buried?), though he asked us to call him Motabo, which means “Thursday,” after the day he was born. The third Sandawe was an older man named Ali. He didn’t mention his umbilical cord.

  We walked on paths that skirted the cornfields, then wound slowly down through towering grasses to the dry bed of a “sand river,” where the water runs thirty feet high in the wet season. Now, there was only a wide, winding gully of sand and a few community wells dug ten feet deep into the riverbed.

  Gele saw a dead acacia tree that looked as if it had been attacked by Lizzie Borden. “Sandawe,” he said. There was food in the dead tree that only his people ate. He demonstrated, whacking at the wood with a heavy, long-handled hatchet called a hengo. As chips fell away from the tree, we could see large bore holes, and in these holes were white grubs as long as my index finger and thicker than my thumb. We took a dozen back to our camp and Ali split a stick, arranged the live grubs just so, and placed the stick in the ground, leaning over the fire, so that the unfortunate grubs were roasted alive. In an hour or so, they were done. The grubs had the consistency of roasted marshmallows—crispy on the outside, squishy on the inside—and because they were very fatty, I can only describe the taste as that of “creamy bacon.”

>   The next day, we crossed the sand river and met a Sandawe man who asked us if we were Arabs. We laughed a bit and said we were English and American. The man, a little irritated, said, “How am I supposed to know? I live in the bush.” He’d only seen white people going by in cars, on the road. The man wanted to know where we were going. Kwa Mtoro, we said, a town about a week’s walk away. “On those feet?” the man asked. He seemed astonished. It was our first encounter with the African perception that white men can’t walk.

  Actually, aside from the dust and midafternoon heat, it was a pleasant stroll for all of us. Peter had hired a couple of donkeys and no one carried a particularly heavy pack. We walked east, along ancient trails between water holes, paths that had been used by Arab slave raiders and Victorian-era English explorers. We were in the depths of a valley, ringed by distant mountains, and the ground under our feet was sandy in the dry season. There were golden grasses, calf-high, growing under pleasantly spaced glades of thorny acacia trees so shaped and patterned by the wind (and grazing giraffes) that they looked a bit like a formal topiary garden in a Northern California wine-growing region. Napa. Sonoma.

  Occasionally, I stumbled over round, steering wheel–sized holes: an elephant’s wet-season passing baked into the trail. We saw antelope of various sorts, the tracks of giraffe, and the chalky-white scat left by hyenas, animals that are able to digest bones. Peter pointed out a place where a cobra had crossed the trail, a long, straight track like that of a smooth-tired motorcycle.

  This wasn’t the game park experience, where tourists are confined to cars and the animals are all about, all the time. It wasn’t Ndarakwai, where rangers protected the game. This was Africa, where people lived, and hunted, and where the animals were anything but naive.

  We camped near a community well shared by Barabaig, Sandawe, and a few clans of Masai. A young Barabaig boy herding cattle passed by just before sundown, and Gobre spoke to him urgently in his own language. It was important that the cattle be moved immediately, and the boy ran them off into the tall grass. Apparently, Gobre’s warning came too late, however, because minutes later a Barabaig man, presumably the boy’s father, arrived waving his stick and yelling at Gobre. The two passed angry words, until the stick man left, muttering darkly.

  Our camp was a mishmash of tribes—Sandawe, Warangi, Hehe, white guys—and no one understood what had just happened. Gobre explained that one Barabaig may not see another’s cattle. He could curse the cows out of sheer jealousy. It happened all the time. Some clans were famous for sorcery, and the talent for witchery was passed down from father to son. Since “we Barabaig aren’t particular about who sleeps with our wives,” any man might have the talent. You couldn’t trust anyone.

  “Wait,” I said, “you’re jealous about cattle but not about your wives?”

  “Of course,” Gobre said. This, I thought, was animal husbandry taken to a certain extreme.

  “Can you curse cattle?” I asked.

  “No,” Gobre said, “but there are many who can.”

  The other Africans thought this was all pretty silly—a Barabaig thing—and we began talking about the differences between Tanzanian tribes. There are 120 of them, none of which forms more than 10 percent of the population. Yet the country is not riven with the genocidal tribal wars that have devastated neighboring Burundi, Rwanda, and Zaire. This is largely the accomplishment of the country’s first president, Julius Nyerere, who took office after independence in 1961. An erudite man—he is still known as “the Teacher”—Nyerere made Swahili, the traditional idiom of trade, Tanzania’s national language. No one tribe was favored and everyone could finally communicate with everyone else. In time, Tanzania became an island of relative peace in the bloody chaos that is contemporary Africa, and, indeed, when then-President Clinton visited Arusha—where the Rwanda war-crimes tribunals were being held—he referred to the city as “the Geneva of Africa.”

  Whites have always been a small minority in Tanzania: just another tribe with our own odd customs, like the tendency to be more jealous about our wives than our cows. There was a short period of German colonialism before the First World War, and Hendric, our chef, was proud of the fact that his people, the Hehe, had mounted a hard-fought rebellion. After the war, the British claimed Tanzania (then Tanganyika) as a “protectorate,” not a colony. Consequently, the vast majority of British subjects in East Africa preferred to settle in nearby Kenya, an actual colony of the British Empire, upon which the sun would never set. Tanganyika earned its independence in 1961, without a single drop of blood shed. In 1964, it combined with the island of Zanzibar to become Tanzania.

  So there wasn’t an unpleasant air of anticolonial hatred that whites are sometimes subjected to in Africa; neither was there the equally objectionable fawning that I’ve sometimes experienced elsewhere on the continent.

  Which isn’t to say we don’t come in for our own share of teasing. In any African tea shop, for instance, the cup is filled absolutely to the brim. Whites, however, prefer and receive a slightly less generous pour. It was Hendric’s opinion that we do it that way so we won’t burn our long noses.

  All in all, the Africans said, as we sat by the fire, it was often easier to talk to whites than it was to Africans of other tribes. This is because many tribes that once warred with one another now have what is called “a teasing relationship.” If, for instance, Hendric put his T-shirt on inside out, a Warangi could claim the garment and Hendric would have to give it to him. Should a Sandawe ask to see anything Hendric owned—a pack of cigarettes, a pair of shoes—he had to place the object on the ground. If he just handed it over, the Sandawe would own it. This “teasing” is entirely preferable to war, and the various relationships are even recognized in Tanzania’s informal outdoor courts.

  One day, we visited the boma of a Barabaig man named Kisurumbu, also called John. The interior thornbush corral contained what seemed to be an enormous number of cattle, and there were several dirt-floored huts scattered about, one for John, one for each of his three wives, and another for his unmarried younger brother. The women all wore stiff, beaded cowhide dresses of the type once worn by American Indians, along with white bracelets cut from some PVC piping stolen from a foreign-aid water project. Older women had ceremonial scars about the eyes.

  The children were eating ugali, which is boiled cornmeal, white as Styrofoam and of about the same consistency. They drank milk as well, enormous quantities of it while the cows bellowed away in the inner corral. As the sun rose higher in the sky, we were assaulted by wave upon wave of flies, great, hateful clouds of them crawling about on our arms and legs and faces.

  The flies were particularly attracted to milk, and they covered the mouths of the children and infants in heaving black masses. It looked like a late-night TV commercial urging viewers to save the children, except that these kids were laughing merrily and were as roly-poly as any well-fed American infant. Still, conditioned by commercials, and repelled by the flies, I felt an urge to reach into my pocket and save the children.

  That changed about the time John’s teenage brother, Hamisi, let the cows out to graze for the day. There were just over four hundred of them, and I knew an average cow would fetch $150 at the market, with the best animals selling for over $200. John also had several donkeys, some sheep, and a herd of goats. He told us he owned more livestock up north. I didn’t ask how many more cows he had—this is aggressively impolite, as it is in Montana—but it seemed to me that John and his family had a net worth of somewhere near $100,000. They were well-to-do by almost anyone’s standards, and they lived in close proximity to their wealth, which is to say, in the barnyard. The flies were one measure of their affluence.

  Hamisi let the cows out of the boma to graze and I strolled along with him. The boy was thinking about marriage, and wondered what Americans paid in terms of a bride price.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Her father gets nothing?”

  “We make the deal with the girl. What
do you guys pay?”

  Hamisi said that the typical Barabaig gave the father two large rounds of chewing tobacco, four four-gallon cans of honey worth about $40 apiece, and one cow. When the wife becomes pregnant, it cost another cow. It used to be a lot more, as many as ten cows, for instance, but these days women were becoming very undependable, and quite reluctant to follow the unwritten rules. Sometimes—this was hardly thinkable—if they didn’t like you, they’d just go away.

  “That’s when we pay,” I said, out of sad experience.

  “When they go away, you pay the father?”

  “The woman.”

  Hamisi shook his head in wonder at the infinite imbecility of the white tribe.

  We strolled through the sandy soil under the acacias taking care to avoid the piles of cowflop. It occurred to me that Tanzania’s tribes, with their teasing relationships, had a droll and entirely indigenous sense of humor. I meant to explore it.

  “So what’s the funniest thing that happens out here?” I asked.

  “Well,” Hamisi replied thoughtfully, “sometimes someone tries to steal the cows.”

  This did not seem a matter of great hilarity to me. “No,” I said, “I mean something even funnier than that.”

  “Sometimes a calf gets stuck in the birth canal,” Hamisi said. “Then you have to call a person who can get it out.”

  I admitted that must be a real knee-slapper when it happened. “But what I mean,” I said, “is something that really makes you laugh every time you think about it. Something so hilarious you can hardly stand it.”