Naked in Dangerous Places

by Cash Peters

  “Have you ever built a house yourself?”

  “No. This is the work of women.”

  Uh-oh. Something tells me we've been here before.

  In fact, almost everything in this place is the work of women. The men put up the acacia fences, hone metal into sharp spears, and sit with penknives for hours, making sandals out of motorcycle tires; but all other jobs fall to their wives.

  Lucy, Wilson's lovely better half, emerges from the low arched doorway, head bowed. She's petite, but with large, masculine upper arms from a lifetime working in construction. Her delicate looks are set off by the jewelry she uses to adorn herself: copious strings of beads, topping off a cotton dress that clings to her hips but freefalls elsewhere. In her hands she holds a dirty plastic keg, which she plans to carry to the water hole by strapping it to her head.

  “Lucy is only one of my wifes,” Wilson informs me with some pride. “We Masai, we are allowed polygamy, so we have more than one wife.”

  “And how many do you have?”

  “Five.”

  Five wives? In some countries, that would be considered greedy.

  Not here. In a Masai village like this one, a man's wealth is calculated by the number of cattle he owns, and a woman is considered to be worth three cows. So, let me see … that's five wives … divided by … three plus four … carry the one … that means Wilson is worth about fifteen head of cattle. My God, the man's a bullionaire!

  “And what-number wife is Lucy?”

  “She is number one.” He smiles.

  “Ah. So she gets all your favors?”

  “Yes.” And he smiles again, only broader this time.

  Meanwhile, Lucy isn't smiling at all, I notice.

  Water for the village comes from a local spring fed by melting snows from Mount Kilimanjaro, an imposing purple silhouette hogging the western horizon across the border in Tanzania, and permanently obscured by sheaths of foaming cloud. The spring is reached by making a quarter-mile trek across a broad treeless plain—you know, the plain, the one where the lions, cheetahs, and hyenas live?

  Moments like this make me realize how very little I know about Nature. It's going to sound daft, but most of the information I've gleaned over the years about wild animals comes from cartoons I used to watch as a kid, and I'm learning a little too late that most of that information was pretty basic, if not full-blown inaccurate.

  So in the same way that cuddling a polar bear can lead to traumatic head and neck injuries—who knew?—I now find that:

  Hyenas do not have a rollicking sense of humor that makes them endearing to other species. They're actually ruthless killers that enjoy disemboweling things. You would be a good example;

  Whales are only hollow up to a point; you certainly can't live in one or build a fire on its tongue while you wait to be rescued;

  Flamingos, turned upside down, cannot be used to play golf;

  Elephants, rather than being gentle, playful, and harmless (and in some cases aerodynamic), in reality hate and fear human beings and will trample you to death at the first opportunity, flying down from the tops of trees in great numbers to attack you if you stray too close;

  Individual ants are absolutely devoid of personality and humor;

  Coyotes don't have the wit to send off for packages in the mail nor to assemble machinery when it arrives;

  There is no stage during an emperor penguin's life cycle when it learns to sing and dance;

  A snake's eyes do not revolve hypnotically just before it kills something;

  A zebra is a whole new animal—it's not a poorly designed horse;

  Barnyard pigs and geese don't discuss the farmer behind his back; and

  Lions, while they may give off an air of intelligent, affable nobility in films, are not smart academically, nor are they trustworthy in any meaningful way; by and large they exist solely to sleep, breed more lions, and kill everything else on this list (with the possible exception of penguins).

  As we stride boldly across the plain, Wilson assures me, hand on heart, that I'm in no danger from lions, not during the daytime, if we all stick together. But I'm not so sure.

  A hundred or so feet out, it's all spookily quiet and still, and I'm already feeling a little exposed, even though we're quite a sizable group by now. Not only have Wilson's other wives, numbers two through four, come along for the jaunt, each with a plastic beer keg strapped to her head, but we also have the crew running around filming us, plus someone else: a shady background figure sporting a red beret and carrying a loaded rifle. Not a soldier, even though he dresses like one; more likely a game warden. The guy never speaks, never allows himself to be caught on-camera. Prefers instead to loiter a few yards away from the group, staring vacantly off in another direction, distant but always with us, his presence underscoring my point for the umpteenth time, that if this weren't a TV show and I was actually stranded out here in the wilds on my own, I'd be a goner.

  “Oh, look!” Wilson cries, bending down to scoop something off the ground. Enthusiastically, he sticks a small brown pellet under my nose.

  “What is it?”

  “Donkey dung!”

  Oh my God. “Get it away from me! Get it away!”

  “This is from a donkey.”

  “Yes, great. Now, put it down!”

  He tosses it away, not quite understanding what the problem is.

  Turns out, this is his main area of expertise. There's nothing Wilson doesn't know about feces. And he has an infinite variety to choose from. In fact, what you don't realize when you see movies, and what documentaries never tell you about Kenya, I guess because it's not considered interesting, is that the whole place is ankle deep in shit. It's everywhere. The beautiful, sprawling savanna, the bushland, the lush wooded valleys, wherever you choose to set foot, it seems to be coated in a fine veneer of excrement from roaming animals. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that you can't walk five feet out here without stepping in something that squelches.

  “Look at this big slab of poo here,” I say, deciding to test his expert knowledge with a couple of dinner-plate-sized pats. “Which animal did that?”

  “This is buffalo dung,” Wilson declares with the lofty air of a man who's trodden in something similar on many memorable occasions. “It looks like cow dung but it's more solid.” And he crouches to show me.

  “No, don't pick it up!”

  Three feet farther on, I come across a whole cluster of cue-ball-sized droppings covered in flies.

  “What's this one?”

  “This one?” The poofessor peers closely at it.

  “And don't pick it up!”

  “This is donkey dung.”

  Again? Strange, because I've seen not a single donkey since we arrived. Giraffes, yes, buffalo, yes, even an elephant or two that wandered close to the perimeter fence of our hotel yesterday, but no donkeys. Yet their feces are like wall-to-wall carpeting.

  Bored already, I walk on in search of new thrills. “What else is there?”

  “Zebra?”

  Oooh.

  “Where's zebra dung?” Rushing to his side, I'm disappointed to find a bunch of brown golfballs, same as before. “That looks like donkey dung again.”

  “Yes, but it's bigger.”

  “And what's this one?” At my feet is a zigzag of chalky-looking hemorrhoids.

  “This is hyena dung.”

  “Why is it white?”

  Wilson grabs a handful and crumbles it into the wind.

  “It's white because the hyena eats a lot of ashes.”

  And a lot of people, he omits to say.

  To my relief, the watering hole is finally in view. Sadly, in my haste to reach it, I plant my foot squarely in a heap of grassy turds the size of grapefruit.

  YEEEEUUUWW!

  Behind me, his five wives start giggling.

  “This is elephant dung,” Wilson explains with great exuberance.

  “Really? Elepha—stop, don't pick it up!!”

 
; Too late. “Elephant dung we use for making fire.”

  They do. Like the Tanna islanders, the Masai, being un-corrupted by corporate greed, are earth-friendly, recycling every natural resource they can for reuse in the village. Nothing goes to waste. Their carbon footprint is the size of a doll's.

  The spring, when we reach it, is a pool of dark water behind some rocks, surrounded by a crescent of mud that's been churned up by the paws and hooves of a dozen other, not altogether friendly, species. It takes just a few minutes for the women to fill their plastic bottles to the brim. Instantly, each one becomes a dead weight that they must strap to their head and carry home.

  “What happens,” I ask squeamishly, because, like Jay, I slipped a disc once and can't look at these women staggering laden across the plain without remembering the horrific pain I was in for six months or more, “if you're out here and you get a back injury?”

  Wilson doesn't miss a beat. “That's why we marry more than one wife,” he replies cheerily.

  “You mean, you just dump her and get another one?”

  “Yes.”

  As predicted, by the time we reach the village again, Wilson's new house is well on its way to completion. A team of women swarms busily all over it, threading twigs together to bolster up the roof, then slapping on handfuls of a bright brown squishy substance to seal it. This primitive cement dries extra quickly in the noonday sun, forming a solid crust that, while it may crack and blister, is well up to code, strong enough to withstand heavy storms during the rainy season and keep the interior dry.

  Just one thing: that stuff they're slapping on, which I assumed at first glance to be mud—it's not mud.

  “This is a house of cow dung,” Wilson announces with the same pride he uses for telling people that his “wifes” do all the work. “Drawn from a cow, today. You see, it's quite wet.”

  I see only too well. The women's arms and legs are plastered in it.

  “So how long does it take a cow to poo a house?” I ask.

  “One day.”

  “One day??? That's all?”

  “Yes.”

  No wonder the cattle are so thin. They're practically hollow.

  One of the most remarkable things about the tribespeople, I notice, is how relaxed they are in front of the cameras. While the crew and I squeeze ourselves uncomfortably into their dangerous world, balking at the prospect of being eaten and refusing point-blank to hold a handful of wet feces up to our noses, Wilson seems incredibly at ease in ours. He takes direction like a professional, delivering information on cue, standing patiently on his mark during technical discussions, and if necessary—if the microphone misses a word, say, or there's a problem with the background that needs sorting out—going back to the beginning and repeating everything he's just said with the studied skill of someone who's appeared in way too many documentaries over the years to be fazed by retakes, cutaways, or the dozens of other minutiae that go into making pictures move.

  Whenever the camera's off, the rest of the Masai relax even more, becoming a little less last-century about everything, less “tribey,” and even letting us hug them—something they're obviously not used to; happily posing for photographs with the crew, especially the kids, who gather around in a large group, laughing and roughhousing, craving attention the way kids do everywhere.

  After a while, possibly because they're tired of being hugged, Lunch and Breakfast and some of the other warriors parade to a meadow, where they start to dance.

  Actually, it's less of a dance, more a raucous display of yelping and leaping up and down on the spot, but quite mesmerizing. I can't take my eyes off it.

  Despite all of their achievements over the years—staying alive being the main one, evidently—this is what the morani have come to be best known for: their dancing.

  Visitors and wildlife film crews puzzle endlessly about how these warriors manage to be so athletic and leap so high, sometimes three or four feet at a time; whereas to me, quite honestly, it's hardly a puzzle at all. I mean, am I really the only person over all these decades to figure out that it's because the dancers are wearing rubber sandals made from motorcycle tires? Come on, it's no secret!

  According to a man I met at our hotel, a major sneaker company once recruited tribesmen like these for one of its national TV ad campaigns. A film crew came to Africa, gave the warriors special promotional sneakers to wear, and asked them to perform their usual leaping routine for the camera, while chanting in a local dialect called Maa. You may even have seen the ad; I'm told it ran in America for a while. Then again, maybe you didn't see it, because it was yanked off our screens rather quickly, after Maa-speaking viewers2 noticed that what the tribesmen were actually singing was something along the lines of “These shoes are too small, these shoes are too small; we hate them.”

  There's no vouching for the accuracy of this story, by the way. But the man at the hotel swore it was true, and he was wearing a sports jacket, so I have no reason to doubt his word. Nor do I doubt that the Masai would do something like that. They have a wicked sense of humor. At one point, I ask Wilson what the Swahili word for “European visitor” is, thinking I can use it during my commentary for the show. He tells me it's msengo. Accordingly, throughout the Kenya episode, that's how I refer to myself: as a msengo. Only months later, after the episode has been rerun several times, not only in the United States but across the world, do I find out that msengo is Swahili for “homosexual.”

  Well, as you can imagine, I am outraged.

  “Oh, dear Lord, he's doing what??”

  “Preparing a dinner in your honor.”

  “Well, tell him to stop.”

  With night closing in and the bushland's broader definitions dissolving into twilight, and as the last few leafless trees turn to black skeletal fists against a pink-and-orange sky, the time is approaching to film me going to sleep in the village, which it's decided will happen inside Wilson's new, and still slightly wet, cow-dung house.

  Before that, though, we have to eat, and word right now is that Wilson has gone off somewhere to murder one of his goats.

  “You should come and watch the ceremony,” Eric urges. He wants to film it.

  “Not a bloody chance! I am not standing by while a poor little animal gets slaughtered on my account. It's barbaric. Tell Wilson I don't want it. I'm not hungry.”

  But the deed is already done and within an hour the two-dimensional goat, which didn't have much going for it in the first place, is in pieces. And any hope I might have of quickly reassembling it is reduced further still when I find part of its rib cage roasting over a crackling fire.

  “Sit—please,” Wilson says, indicating a log.

  Call me paranoid, but I'm acutely aware the whole time, as I settle down to eat under the stars, that hordes of scheming, ravenous eyes are trained on me from afar. Not in a Scooby-Doo way; I don't see pairs of white dots out in the blackness, but I definitely sense something.

  Now and then, dogs—the Masai's alarm system—growl, then bark crazily at the thornbush fence. Never a good sign. Something's out there, circling. There's also an indefinable sporadic chatter too, possibly from hyenas casing the joint.

  “Thank you very much for showing me around,” I say, chewing on a goat rib. One hundred percent gristle, I was right! “But from everything you've said, it's clear that if I go outside the village now I'll get mauled and eaten.”

  According to Jay's plan, this is Wilson's cue to invite me to stay in his lovely new dung hut tonight. And sure enough, the man plays his role like a pro.

  “Then you'll have to stay with us,” he volunteers.

  Stay overnight? Me? Here? Oh, gosh.

  Once again, glancing to one side, I catch the twinkle in Jay's eye.

  I have to say, the design of these bun-loaf houses is cleverer than it looks. The doorway isn't just a doorway; it's a mini maze, a tight, low-ceilinged corridor that winds around and back on itself like a paper clip before finally emerging into the room beyond, in
the hope that, should the lions make it past the morara and leap the acacia fences into the housing compound, they'll become so utterly baffled by the intricate entrance mechanism to each home, which works on the same principle as a roach motel, that they'll withdraw and revert to Plan A: chasing Lunch and Breakfast.

  On the inside, the hut has the feel of a subterranean cavern to it, all narrow and muddy, with a low ceiling that barely lets me stand up straight. There are three sections, each one partitioned by curtains: a small central living room, including a space where Wilson's wide-screen TV will go someday if Sony ever invents one that can be powered by excrement. Then, on either end, two bedrooms. Sole illumination is from a fire burning in a crude stone hearth, emitting a steady plume of smoke that fills the house with a thick, gaseous haze, clogging my throat and making my eyes sting. The Masai do this to kill mosquitoes and other bugs. How it doesn't kill the occupants too is beyond me.

  On the plus side, the house doesn't smell anywhere near as awful as I thought it was going to. More earthy than dungy. The bed I'll be sleeping on is yet another large slab of dried dung raised about six inches off the ground, compacted down, and covered with a blanket to hide—well, that it's a load of crap.

  While the camera is being set up to shoot all of this and Kevin's lighting the space,3 Jay takes me back outside, away from prying eyes. “So what are you going to do?” he asks, fixing me with his most earnest hangdog look.

  “What d'you mean?”

  “Will you be staying?”

  I didn't know I had a choice. But now that push has come to shove and lions have come to eat me, it seems I do.

  “I've been told that under no circumstances must I put the host in serious danger,” he continues, “and this could be a very dangerous situation. You heard the man: people get eaten. You'd be totally justified if you decided not to stay. If you want to come back to the hotel in the van with us, nobody's going to say anything.”