Reunion in Barsaloi (6 page)

W
e walk over to the nearby Mission. Every few steps I have to shake hands as people call out: ‘
Mama Napirai! Supa! Serian a ge?
’ The welcome after all these years is really incredible. At the gate to the Mission I recognize the doorman and another employee. We’d already been told Father Giuliani was no longer here, but a young Colombian priest welcomes us. He has no objection to us erecting our tents up here for a couple of nights. He’s been in charge of the Mission for a couple of years and has already heard the White Masai story.

Our cars are brought up into the Mission enclosure and a relatively flat piece of land found to park them on as there’s going to be a tent on the roof of each. The drivers set to it and half an hour later the sleeping quarters for my companions are all ready.

While the drivers are setting up a tent on the ground for me, Lketinga wanders up and stares at the roof tents in amazement. ‘What is this?’ he asks irritably. I laugh and explain to him that these are ‘houses’ for Albert and Klaus. As ever when something new and unusual is explained to him, he shakes his head and mumbles, ‘Crazy, really crazy! How can anyone sleep up there?’ Cautiously he climbs up a couple of steps on one of the two ladders and sticks his head in the tent. Before long we hear his amused laughter as he tells us: ‘Yes, oh yes, that looks just great!’

He’s almost certainly never seen a tent before, let alone one erected on the roof of a car. I know the whole business must seem extremely odd to him. It’s not at all normal among the Samburu for guests to bring their own accommodation with them. Whenever they are out and about they can always rely on a roof over their head. The only thing that matters is
following the rules of hospitality. I recall that my ex-husband was only allowed to spend the night in the homes of women who had a son of around the same age as him. Obviously a rule designed to avoid
hanky-panky
.

After Lketinga has finished inspecting the roof tents he asks with some concern where I’m going to be sleeping, here or in Mama’s
manyatta
. I point to the drivers who’re already putting up my tent. ‘Okay, no problem,’ he says calmly and goes over to help them.

I watch him in amazement. Normally among the Samburu building houses is something done by women. They cut down the thick and thin branches that make up the framework of the
manyatta
, drag them to the site and collect the cow dung and clay used to plaster the walls and the roof. As a result, houses – including all the domestic equipment – belong exclusively to the women. Men never own houses.

As youths they learn in their warrior years the art of surviving in the bush without a
manyatta
. After circumcision they leave their mother’s home and live in a male commune out in the bush. During this time they spend most nights in the open along with their cattle. If it rains they spread a cow skin over their heads and wait until the sun shines and they can dry out their kangas. They are, however, allowed to keep a few personal belongings in their mother’s hut and eventually spend the odd night there. But they must never eat anything in front of their own mother. Women who have been ‘circumcised’ – that is, married women – are not allowed even to see a warrior’s food.

Yesterday evening in Maralal Lodge James was telling us how hard the warrior period was for him. He had been brought up more in the school than in a
manyatta
and slept with his fellow pupils in ordinary rooms. But then after he was circumcised at sixteen he was obliged to go off into the bush for several months herding cows and carrying out all the traditional rituals, which was something he was not at all used to. The first time he settled down for the night on a cow skin in the open air, he could hardly sleep because of all the strange noises. Every time he woke up he kept groping around him in the dark for the walls.

Meanwhile my igloo tent has been finished and Lketinga is hammering the last peg into the ground. I’m moved by how helpful he’s being. In the old days when there was some work he wasn’t familiar with to be done, he used to say: ‘Oh, I don’t know how to do that, do it
yourself.’ We start sorting our luggage out and I drag my two huge bags into my tent. Before long Lketinga is sticking his head in and pointing to the bags asking, ‘Have you got any presents for me in there? Did James write to tell you what I’d like?’ All this with a face like a small child on Christmas morning.

I have to laugh and tell him proudly that one of the bags contains nothing but presents for the family, but he’ll have to wait as I’m going to give out the presents at my leisure in the morning when there aren’t so many nosy onlookers around. He finds this hard to cope with and in the end just before it gets dark I give in and between us we carry the heavy bag down to the corral where James is already waiting for us.

B
y now some sixty mostly white goats have come back to the corral and everyone’s very busy. The tiny kid goats are crying for their mothers and they themselves run around bleating if they’re not milked soon enough. Everywhere women and young girls are milking goats. They hold one hind leg of the goat between their knees and a calabash or tin cup under the udder while they milk it, usually with the goat’s own kid suckling one of the other teats.

This is the best time of day in the corral, the liveliest, when all the animals and the people who’ve been looking after them come home. Half an hour before the goats are due, Mama always sits outside the
manyatta
waiting for them, usually with one or two other women. As soon as she’s got the first fresh milk, she starts making
chai
for the child who’s been out with the goats and then cooks
ugali
for the other children and herself – the same meal every night.

Klaus is filming everything that’s going on. When the children realize what he’s doing they stop being so wary and start acting up for him, grabbing the baby goats and carrying them around. Even three-year-old Saruni jumps behind one of the littlest ones and expertly throws an arm around all four legs, lifting the little animal up and holding it towards Klaus with a look of triumph. He hardly knows where to point his camera next. Then when he starts showing them snatches of what he’s taken on his little monitor and they see pictures of themselves for the first time they all pile out of the house and cluster around him. Before long he’s surrounded by both young and old clamouring for a look at the little screen. Curiosity is the greatest ice-breaker.

While I’m sitting there watching all this revelry Lketinga’s younger sister comes up and greets me effusively. She was out with some of the goats and has only just come back. Of course, she asks about Napirai and I have to tell her everything. I was always very fond of her. She was married to a much older man when she was just a young girl and he died after her first child was born. Since then she has lived on her own, though she has had a few more children, but still cannot marry again. She always had a great sense of fun and still has, repeatedly hugging me and rubbing her head against my throat.

Lketinga comes over and interrupts his sister’s effusive outpourings to grab my arm and pull me to one side. In a serious voice he says, ‘Come and see which goat I am going to slaughter for you!’ Papa Saguna and James are already going through the herd and pulling one goat or another to one side. Lketinga joins in and the three of us white people are left standing there like witnesses to a death sentence. Eventually they make their decision: it is to be the biggest male.

Lketinga takes the animal by the horns and leads it out of the herd. At first it goes along quietly, but then suddenly starts bleating loudly. The noise is bloodcurdling. The other goats stand there chewing the cud while the big male struggles to get free. Albert goes off, saying he’ll come back when it’s all over.

Lketinga grabs my arm with his free hand in passing and says: ‘Come and watch. It’s your goat!’ I know it’s an honour for a woman to attend and don’t show my feelings as I watch the killing ritual. Papa Saguna grabs the animal by all four legs and throws it onto the ground on its side. Immediately Lketinga puts his hand around its nose and mouth to cut off its air supply. The animal writhes and jerks in its attempts to free itself, its stomach heaving up and down. It seems to me to take forever. Thank God it’s already dark and the only light is from the moon. It is a Samburu tradition that no blood should be spilled before the animal is dead.

While they’re suffocating the animal silently, life all around goes on as normal. A few children are running after kids while others are watching the slaughter. At last the goat stops struggling and Papa Saguna calls on Shankayon to fetch a sharp knife and a bowl. He whets the knife on a stone and then with a practised hand slits the animal’s throat. Immediately the blood gushes forth and the bowl underneath fills slowly with the
warm liquid while the goat’s head is tipped backwards. The animal’s yellow eyes stare lifelessly at the heavens.

Lketinga asks teasingly if I want to drink some of the blood. I say thanks but no, so he offers some to Klaus who’s already seen more than enough. James takes the bowl away and in the darkness I can just make out two warriors going with him. I ask Lketinga why he’s not going to drink any of the blood and he replies, ‘Because I’m not a warrior anymore.’ He then throws the dead animal onto a sheet of corrugated iron while his older brother slices through the pelt along the stomach from the breast to the genitals with a single cut. The little girls help him, one holding a torch, the others a leg each.

Now he begins to skin the animal, but for that he hardly needs a knife. With one hand he pulls at the pelt while keeping the body down with the other. Quickly and easily the pelt comes away from the flesh. I watch in fascination as the whole scene unfolds without a drop of blood being spilled. It takes barely twenty minutes before the animal is lying in front of us completely skinned. Now the belly has to be opened up and the intestine and internal organs removed. Papa Saguna sorts everything out neatly, laying the various body parts separately on the corrugated iron. I get out of the way as I remember from the old days how awful the stench is. After all I’m intending to eat some of this meat later.

I join the others in the house to drink hot
chai
poured from the thermos. Little Albert runs off to hide behind his mother again and watches me with fearful eyes. James starts telling us how the locals in the village reacted when I wasn’t among the first of our party to arrive. ‘You know, most of them didn’t believe that you would really come back after fourteen years. And when only Klaus got out of the first car they thought they had been proved right. Here’s a
mzungu
, they thought, come to tell us Corinne’s not coming after all. But I calmed them down and told them you were just visiting the school first. Then I heard people saying to one another: she’s coming like a queen with two cars and two drivers. First just one car turns up and a white man gets out to explain things and set up a camera. And then she only turns up later. They all agreed: only a queen is moving in this way.’

We all burst out laughing. I really hadn’t been expecting to be compared to a queen, although I was aware that turning up with two big four-wheel drives and chauffeurs was going to cause a bit of a fuss. After
all, they only knew me driving my clapped-out old Land Rover myself. James repeats the story a couple of times, getting the same laughs each time. This afternoon he’d heard that even people who didn’t know me but had simply heard of me were excited by our visit.

Outside, under the full moon and thousands of stars, there is nothing to be seen of the goat’s body. Instead Lketinga is already sitting by the fire turning a few pieces of meat on a grill. It has already been decided which pieces will be served to the older men, which to the women, and which may be given to the uncircumcised boys and girls. I remember Mama cooking the offal, feet and head in the
manyatta
. I sit down next to Lketinga by the fire and watch the fat dripping from the roasting meat. It’s hard to believe that just an hour ago this was a live animal standing in front of us.

We try to start a conversation but it’s not easy to find the right things to talk about. When I go to talk about the book he says: ‘Later. Not now.’ When I try to tell him some of the things that happened after I left, he says: ‘I don’t want to talk about our time in Mombasa, or else I’ll go crazy again. I have changed my lifestyle. I don’t drink anymore. I’m content. I have three wives and I’m happy.’ Well, up to a point – I don’t think he’s still entitled to count me among his wives but this isn’t the moment to go into that. So I tell him about Napirai, our daughter, what she’s doing in school, which subjects she likes and which she doesn’t, that she might like to get a job instead of staying on at school. That’s something he understands straight away of course: ‘Yes, she is clever like me.’

They’re cooking meat in the
manyattas
too now and everywhere there’s the smell of smoke. Gradually I realize I’m really hungry and look forward to biting into a big chunk of meat, even if it is likely to be tough. At last everything’s ready. We sit down around the table in James’s house and a big metal pot filled with chunks of meat is placed in the middle. Everybody tucks in, some chewing on ribs, other sinking their teeth into hunks of leg meet. To me it’s all wonderful, but Albert and Klaus only eat the minimum required by politeness.

After our orgy of goat meat we slowly make our way to our beds, tired and exhausted by the journey and all the events of the day. Lketinga walks up to the Mission with us and we agree to meet up here in the morning for tea.

Albert, Klaus and I sit down on our camp stools outside for a few moments to talk over everything we’ve seen and done. The drivers remind
us we have a full fridge in the car and it doesn’t take much for us to decide on a gin and tonic to round off the day. We’re only a few minutes’ walk from the village but already it seems like a different world again. I’m sitting comfortably on a camping stool with a cold drink in my hand speaking German with two white people. Suddenly the whole thing seems surreal. I’ve never looked at Barsaloi from this perspective before.

Klaus drags me from my reverie by recounting his meeting with Lketinga before we arrived in the village. As soon as he climbed out of the car he spotted Lketinga under the thorn tree. James was standing next to him talking to him, but then disappeared into his house. Klaus felt a bit out of his depth and didn’t quite know what to do. Then he plucked up courage, shouldered his camera and went up to Lketinga. As he tried to introduce himself, Lketinga looked at him blankly for a second then turned away and continued staring down the road towards the river. Klaus felt like he was being completely ignored. After what seemed like an eternity he heard Lketinga say in reproachful tones: ‘You are late!’ Relieved finally to get a few words out of him, he started trying to explain why we had taken so long, but was immediately, rudely interrupted: ‘I know everything,’ said with an extremely disparaging expression. This got him really worried thinking, oh God, what’s going to happen when Corinne gets here? How are we going to get along here for several days if he acts like this all the time? The minutes drag by, and then eventually he hears Lketinga say: ‘Do you have a cigarette?’

‘You’ve no idea how glad I was to hear him say that. Under the circumstances I was just really pleased to be able to do something he’d appreciate. He took the cigarette and said ‘Let’s go in the shadow.’ So there we stood, the pair of us, in the shade of the thorn tree. I can tell you I’ve never been so glad to see anyone arrive as I was when you two turned up!’ says Klaus, leaving us in stitches of laughter. Actually I really could feel sorry for Klaus, being able to picture so well his description of my
ex-husband
’s behaviour and the sort of dirty look he can give.

But that apart, we’re all agreed that the way people welcomed us, including Lketinga, has been far better than we had even hoped. I drain my drink happily as the two men climb on top of their vehicles and into their tents. I crawl into my own little igloo tent and get myself comfortable in my sleeping bag. The drivers are still sitting outside, chatting quietly to one another. From the village comes the occasional
bleating of the goats and once a dog barks briefly. I can just make out human voices like a low distant murmuring. I would give anything to know what Lketinga and Mama and all the others are thinking about us and our first day together again. As far as I’m concerned I couldn’t be more pleased at how it’s gone and I feel all warm inside. I just wonder if they feel the same.