In Praise of Savagery (9 page)

Thus it was that we found ourselves standing in front of Mr Bhola’s garage-cum-hardware store in Maralal.

‘Rope,’ said Kibiriti, ‘you will need rope. And sacks. Many sacks.’

We couldn’t see how or why we might need these things, but he seemed to know what he was doing and so we let him get on with it.

‘And you will need water-containers.’

‘Ahem …’ said Frazer, holding up the two-pint British Army waterbottle he had clipped to his belt, ‘We have waterbottles.’

‘No,’ said Kibiriti, ‘these are not big enough. You will need these’, and with this, Mr Bhola came out of his shop carrying a stack of large plastic jerry-cans, such as you might see bolted to the side of a jeep.

‘These are good,’ said Kibiriti.

‘And pangas,’ he said, at which Mr Bhola went into the back of the shop and came out carrying an armful of broad-bladed machetes.

‘Five,’ said Kibiriti.

Mr Bhola counted out five of the knives and put them down on the rapidly growing pile of provisions.

‘Excuse me,’ said Andy, ‘but what will we need these for?’

‘Protection,’ Kibiriti said.

‘And that would be protection from what, exactly?’

‘It is nothing,’ he said, ‘just some Shifta.’

‘Shifta?’

‘Bad men.’

Frazer, Andy and I looked at each other.

‘But it is not a problem,’ Kibiriti continued, ‘Chukana will come with you also. He has a Kalashnikov. Now, you will need to eat. We must have flour.’

And he then proceeded to buy four 20-pound sacks of maize flour. The sort of quantity we might want, say, if we were
planning to open a bakery. Or if we were planning be quite a long way from bakeries and such things for quite some time. I had a suspicion it was going to be the latter, rather than the former.

Following on from the flour came large metal cooking-pots, large quantities of tea and sugar and also plugs of tobacco.

‘We don’t smoke,’ said Frazer.

‘They are to trade,’ Kibiriti said, ‘with the desert people. They are not familiar with paper money. Also you will need camels.’

These were not something that Mr Bhola stocked, nor was he able to supply the men skilled at handling them. For these, Kibiriti suggested we head out the next day to the wells at Ilaut, some sixty miles to the north, where the Rendille tribe watered their herds, and where we might engage the men and beasts we needed. From there, he said, we could load up our provisions and then start out on our walk.

‘Where are we going to, exactly?’ said Andy.

‘Wilfred says that you would like to see the desert and Mount Kulal. Also Lake Turkana. And also the oasis at South Horr. These are places he visited many years ago, with camels.’

‘I see,’ I said, ‘and about how far is it?’

It would be twenty miles, Kibiriti said.

It seemed a long way to walk in the heat, but I reckoned we could handle it.

‘And the next day,’ said Kibiriti, ‘twenty miles also. And then twenty miles the next. Every day twenty miles. And when you finish, I will come to collect you.’

‘Ah. I see. And how far will we be walking, altogether? Just out of interest.’

We would be walking somewhere on the far side of 200 miles.

Once we had obtained our provisions, Kibiriti took us out in his brother Lawi’s motor-car, a Toyota Land Cruiser.

It was not at all certain whether Lawi knew he had the car, or whether he would be happy if he did know.

It was, it seems, something of a sore subject with Kibiriti. And with Lawi also, but for different reasons.

‘I would not take it so often,’ said Kibiriti, ‘but Wilfred will not buy me one.’

‘No?’

‘No.’

We drove on at some speed, bumping and rattling as we flew over the rutted track, the Toyota’s suspension making grating and grinding noises whenever we hit a particularly big bump.

‘He will not buy me one,’ said Kibiriti, ‘because he says I drive too fast.’

‘Oh.’

And quite suddenly he veered from the track, slamming his foot on the accelerator and surfing the car across the sand and scrub. A large, prickly thorn bush seemed to be his chosen target, but before the car hit it a big flightless bird shot out from behind it, and Kibiriti put the car into a slide, flattening the bush as
he swerved after it. The engine stalled and the bird made its escape.

‘A pity,’ said Kibiriti, watching it run off as he restarted the engine, ‘These birds are very tasty.’

Several other sorties after other wildlife of various shapes and sizes met with a similar lack of success, and we ended up at a wooden hut several miles out of Maralal, outside which stood a rusty oil-drum on hot coals, in which bubbled a foul-smelling grey liquid with white froth upon it. By this drum, fly-encrusted goat entrails hung from hooks, drying in the sun. And beneath the entrails squatted an ancient and wrinkled woman, scrubbing white-eyed, fire-blackened goat heads with a wire brush.

As we climbed out of the car the woman rose and grinned, revealing her two remaining teeth. I was half-expecting her to hail one of us as Thane of Cawdor, but instead she ushered us inside, to where clusters of Samburu men sat around tearing at the chunks of boiled goat meat which were heaped on communal chopping-boards placed in the centre of the tables at which they sat.

Luckily, or indeed unluckily, a table had recently been vacated—as could be seen by the scraps of skin and bone left strewn all over the chopping-board and spilling onto the table, and by the flies that had gathered to share in these scraps. An old man motioned to us to sit down, upon which he brought handfuls of boiled goat to pile on top of the previous diners’ leftovers. The old woman, meanwhile, brought us chipped enamel mugs filled to the brim with the steaming grey liquid from the drum.

Then both man and woman stood back, arms folded, to watch us tuck in.

Sir Sidney Barton was not known for displays of temper.

A lawyer by training, he disapproved of them, as a rule, and held them to be a sign of weakness in a man’s argument. To lose one’s temper, for him, was a sign that the other fellow held all the high cards in the game.

Since being appointed British Minister in Addis Ababa he had become known for his quiet diplomacy, his ability to have just the right words in just the right ears to make the wheels turn to achieve a satisfactory outcome.

And yet, faced with the stubbornness, the obduracy, the deafness to all reason of this man sitting implacably across the table from him, his fingers meshed in self-satisfaction across the front of his buttoned-up jacket, he felt the blood rushing to his face.

‘Damn it all!’ he exclaimed, rising to his feet and thumping the table with his fist. ‘You
will
let him go. Or you won’t hear the last of this from me.’

The Governor of Chercher Province inclined his head slightly to one side, closing his eyes for a moment before speaking.

‘No. It is out of the question, I am afraid. Completely out of the question.’

‘Do you realise,’ said Sir Sidney, ‘quite how much money has
been invested in this venture? Not the least of it by your own Emperor.’

‘That may well be the case. But circumstances change. As, indeed, they have. It is a dangerous place at the best of times, and if I were you I would hesitate to allow this young man’—he nodded towards Thesiger, who sat, tense and alert, at the end of the table—‘to travel in such a place even then—and to put not just his own life at risk, but the lives of his companions with him. But you cannot fail to be aware of the present situation in Bahdu. In such circumstances it would be little short of suicidal—’

‘But sir,’ interjected Thesiger, ‘I have assurances from the Asaimara.’

The Governor gave a little snort.

‘So you say,’ he said, ‘and it might be interesting, perhaps, to see what these “assurances” would amount to in practice. But you will not have that opportunity. This is my final word on the matter.’

He rose to his feet.

‘And now,’ he said, ‘if you two gentlemen will excuse me, I have pressing business to attend to.’

‘Very well,’ said Sir Sidney. ‘If that is your word, then we must respect it.’

‘I am glad that we agree on this. Good day, gentlemen.’

‘And no doubt,’ Sir Sidney continued, ‘you are well aware of your personal contractual obligations for having permitted the expedition to begin, and costs to be incurred, and then cancelling your permission. But this is something we can return to at a later date, when you have more time …’

We engaged Chukana, the man with the Kalashnikov and the knowledge of the way across the desert to the north, and we paid him a thousand Kenyan shillings, his wages in full and in advance.

On the next day, however, the day of our departure for Ilaut, Kibiriti returned from Chukana’s hut with a worried look on his face.

Chukana was unwell, he said, and indisposed.

He was this way on account of being blind drunk, having converted his entire wages into alcohol and downed the lot the previous night.

He would be going nowhere in a hurry, said Kibiriti, except to vomit.

Although, he said, he had not even bothered to move to do that, judging by the state of his hut: it seemed that he preferred, in his current state, to roll over and do it where he lay. Or not even to roll over, come to think of it.

But on a positive note, he said, he had managed to obtain the services of another guide—and a cook—at short notice. This guide was Chukana’s cousin, a young man called Osman, and the cook went by the name of Leleruk, as I recall. Between them, they would only want 800 shillings, partly on account of neither of them having a Kalashnikov—or indeed any kind of a gun. And
partly, also, on account of the fairly rudimentary nature of Leleruk’s cooking skills. But at least Osman knew the way.

‘And the Shifta?’ I said.

Apparently, in recent months, bands of Shifta had been crossing the Somali border. They had killed two people in the desert two weeks before, and robbed several more.

‘This is not a problem,’ said Kibiriti, ‘the Rendille will be armed.’

I did ask what it was that the Rendille would be armed with, exactly, but he was somewhat vague on the details, and answered with a sort of wave of the hand.

‘We must leave,’ he said, ‘there is much to do.’

We drove north; and as we drove the land became ever flatter and ever hotter.

From time to time we passed small villages, some the pointed-roofed huts of the Samburu and others the domed, skin-covered ‘igloos’ of the Turkana and Rendille peoples.

Like the Samburu, the Turkana and the Rendille have their own distinctive manner of dress.

Turkana men wear their hair pulled back into a ‘bun’ which is caked in clay and painted, so that it takes on the appearance of a decorated coconut-shell, while the women shave only the sides of their heads, weaving the remaining crest into patterns of tiny plaits.

The Rendille, both male and female, are less flamboyant than their neighbours, many wearing only cloth or skin ‘skirts’—and beads for women—and being naked from the waist up.

We saw ostriches, and tiny deer known as dik-dik, as we bounced and clattered along the road, which had become, by now, no more than a vague shadow of a trail among the sand and scrub and scattered rocks, until at last we reached the herders’ settlement of Ilaut, where we unpacked our provisions and made camp by the side of one of the main goat highways.

‘Tomorrow,’ said Kibiriti, ‘we will have camels. And Rendille.’

In the morning we went with Kibiriti to the wells to look for men who might go with us across the desert.

We heard the wells before we saw them: a hypnotic, melodic droning sound which I took, at first, for some strange chance effect, a fortuitous harmonic combination of the deep, contented lowing of the hundreds upon hundreds of sheep and goats that clustered around the stone troughs that stood by a deep hole or void in the ground.

As we approached, however, we realised that the sound was coming from beyond the animals, from the hole itself; and as we reached it we looked down to see a wide, deep hole stretching many feet down into the ground, down into darkness, and the walls were cut up at the side into rough steps, upon which stood a long human chain of Rendille, passing tin buckets of water from hand to hand from the dark depths, and chanting as they worked.

The chant was an endless repetition, with variations, of two syllables, over and over again. One man made a long, deep ‘nnn’ sound, to which all the others replied with a sort of nasal vowel sound; or that was the constant basis of their response, but on top there was change and fluctuation as men mixed in other sounds and voices, and as the buckets came up and the clear water was
poured into the troughs. And the animals clustered around, drinking their fill, and the empty buckets were passed down, hand over hand, and constantly replaced with full ones passed up from below. And it was the sound of life, the sound that signified life and was life, and that brought life into the barren land, and sustained life when all else around was emptiness.

A cup was passed to us and we each drank from it, Frazer, Andy, Kibiriti and me, and it was cool and fresh, and tasted of the earth.

And later that morning, Kibiriti came back to our camp by the goat highway followed by two Rendille, leading three camels.

‘This is Apa,’ said Kibiriti, motioning to the elder of the two Rendille. ‘He will take you across the desert. He does not speak English, but Osman speaks his language. He can translate for you.’

We shook hands.

Apa did not have a gun, but both he and his companion carried spears. With which, no doubt, you can bat Shifta bullets out of the way if you’re quick enough.

‘And this is his cousin,’ said Kibiriti, and we all shook hands with the younger Rendille.

I noticed them both giving Andy something of a queer look as he offered his hand, and also exchanging glances when they heard him talking to us in English.