Because of the fighting in the area – yes, as the soldier had said, the Oromo had attacked some police posts - there were frequent checkpoints. Being African checkpoints, each one was a financial opportunity for the armed men who controlled it; so each stop was a shakedown. Mustafa palmed money to the men and drove on, grumbling.
I missed the congenial company of Tadelle and Wolde, I missed the much better roads and greenery of Ethiopia, I missed the Ethiopian courtesies. But I consoled myself with the thought that I had successfully made the transition into Kenyan territory. I was proceeding south, according to plan.
At mid-morning we stopped at a set of tin-roofed sheds by the roadside.
‘Chakula,’ Mustafa said. Food.
Platters of fatty goat meat and lumps of gray coarse porridge the Kenyans call ugali were set on the table in dirty enamel bowls. The Africans, men first, pushed to the food-splashed table and fell on it, snatching food and stuffing their mouths. I bought Mustafa a Coke to ingratiate myself and asked him when we might get to Marsabit.
He shrugged and swigged the Coke and said, ‘Si jui’ – I dunno.
The other Africans were breezy, too, even insolent, lots of Wewe, muzungu, and one man chewing a bone poked his goat-greased finger at me, ‘Wewe, mzee.’
‘Hey, you old man,’ eh? This can be a term of affection or respect, as it was when Jomo Kenyatta’s title was Mzee, emphasizing that he was an elder and leader. But it was pretty clear to me that I was just being mocked as an oldster.
‘Hapana mzee,’ I said, ‘Not old,’ in Kitchen Swahili, but Kitchen Swahili was all these northerners spoke, for they were Borena and Samburu people mainly, desert dwellers, without a common language. Swahili was grammatical and subtle only on the coast and in the few cities.
‘Mimi vijana,’ the man said, asserting his youth.
Another man with no fingers on his right hand, hitting a goat bone with his left fist, was clearly narrating in his language, Borena, that he was eating the best part, the marrow, which he smacked on to the table in a glutinous lump. He smeared it with his fingers and ate it greedily.
Outside, some of the other trucks in the convoy had stopped here, too, and soldiers traveling with them asked me if there was trouble (shauri) there.
‘There is war in Ethiopia? You have seen?’
These ignorant inhabitants, traveling on a hideous road in an overheated desert, in a neglected province of one of the most corrupt and distressed and crime-ridden countries in Africa regarded sunny threadbare but dignified Ethiopia as a war zone.
When we set off again I saw that one of the soldiers climbed on to the back of Mustafa’s truck. I was not sure whether I was concerned or relieved that we were traveling with a soldier carrying a high-caliber rifle.
The settlements visible in the desert were all Borena or else the Borena sub-tribes – the Mbuji people, the Ledile, the Gabra. They were all rather handsome men and attractive women, who lived sparely, among their diminishing flocks of goats. Even though they were herding the creatures over this vast desert there was not much grazing available. No rain had fallen for three years and they were being forced to eat their animals, which were their wealth. At a mission station there were Ledile people, just sitting, looking gaunt.
There was little else to eat, hardly any wildlife survived here. I saw some of the small deer they called dikdiks, and of course there were birds – kites, hawks, pigeons, and where there were thorn trees, some weaver birds darted around their many nests.
The road extended straight ahead – rocky, rubbly, pitted with holes – to the distant horizon, cutting between two lakes. The lakes were magnificent, shimmering in the sunlight, flat expanses of water, mirroring the sky and lending a coolness to the landscape, which invited the traveler and promised relief. But the lakes, of course, were mirages; only the rubbly road was real.
We were going so slowly that when a rear tire blew at two o’clock I heard not only the blow-out like a pistol shot but the hissing as the air streamed out. Mustafa brought the truck to a halt and got out, cursing.
It was the middle tire – there were eight on the rear axles, two sets of four, to support the heavy weight of the cattle. A small rusty jack was dragged out and assembled, and slowly the truck was raised, the wheels taken off, the blown tire examined. It was not just a hole in the tube but a rent in the tire that was so large the African examining it could put his whole arm through it.
That was to be expected here – by me, anyway; apparently not by them, for they had no spare. They shook out rubbish from a burlap sack – tubes, patches, big crowbars, flat pieces of iron, tubes of glue, and something that looked like an antique foot-driven bellows – and began amateurishly to whack the wheel, as though they had never been in this fix before. Their iron tools bent as they tried to prise the tire from the rim.
They took turns fighting the tire and failing, while the rest of us stood in the intense heat of the desert sun. There was no shade, no relief from the blinding light and heat, though several men crawled into the semi-darkness under the jacked-up truck and went to sleep.
Mustafa, who rarely spoke and did so only in Swahili, offered his opinion in English, saying to me, ‘Thees focking bad road.’
I thought: This is not good – a breakdown in the desert, in a place where no one cares whether I live or die; stuck and stranded among the most incompetent and unresourceful mechanics I have ever seen.
An hour of this and then a loaded cattle truck rumbled past us, not stopping, obviously not giving a shit about the fix we were in. But this truck reminded me that we were supposed to be traveling in a convoy. I also thought: I should have bailed out and gone with them. I walked a little distance from our dilemma and searched the horizon for another truck. After twenty minutes or so I saw clouds of rising dust – a truck.
I stood in the road and waved at the approaching truck, another cattle truck, and when it slowed I climbed to the cab, which was crammed with women and children, and asked for a ride.
‘You can come, but you must ride on top.’
I got my bag from Mustafa’s truck and threw it up to the men riding on top, then hurried after it, for the truck had not really stopped but was still rolling past Mustafa’s stranded vehicle and the assembled klutzes who were fiddling with the patches – one slapping an enormous chunk of rubber against the hole in the tire, as a possible fix. It was clear to me that they would still be there tomorrow, among dying cattle, still faffing with the flat tire.
Now I saw them receding into the distance. I was balanced on the frame over the cab, holding on to the pipe frame, in the hot wind and the choking dust. The truck swayed, very unstable because of the high center of gravity and the weight of the cattle.
Yet I was calm, even happy. I wrapped my jacket around me to protect me from the dust and watched the suffering cattle. Weak from thirst, tottering from the movement of the truck, slumping to their knees and now and then knocked to the truck bed, they were getting smacked in the chops and their tails twisted. I could hear their pained mooing over the chunking of the wheels on the road.
Deep in the desert were the camel trains of the Borena, pure panic cloaked in beauty, the yellow robed women walking ahead, the men guiding the camels. It was a lovely sight and yet it was a matter of life or death, illustrating the desperate need for water. No rain, no nearby wells; so the camel train went a great distance and returned laden with jerry cans and drums of water. Each camel was covered in heavy tin containers, slopping the animals’ shanks.
I had to hold tight to stay upright on the truck. The road was not only rocky but here it ceased to go straight – it wound between huge humps, too small to be hills, but obstructions all the same. We went very slowly. I could not see ahead. I was relieved that, as we were moving so slowly, I did not have to cling so tightly.
Then I heard a loud bang, and thought: Oh, no, a blowout. But another bang followed it, and the men on top pushed past me to dive into the mass of groaning cattle.
I got a glimpse of two men in dusty robes, their faces hidden by bands of cloth, standing in the road, with rifles held upright, firing into the air.
Two things happened then. First, and startlingly, the man crouched beside me – a soldier – lifted his rifle and began firing directly at the men, both of whom ducked behind boulders. Second, the truck accelerated, moving so fast that it pitched and rolled down the narrow defile between the humpy hills, like a toppling yacht traveling down the face of a wave.
And at the same time I was diving down from the top bars of the truck with the other men, and dangling behind the metal sides (thinking, Is this steel bulletproof?) and over the staggering cattle. We went from five to twenty-five miles an hour, not great acceleration perhaps but enough to drag us out of range of the armed men and to demonstrate our resolve to get away.
The men were shifta, classic highwaymen positioned in a perfect place. The truck had slowed down to a crawl in a spot that was squeezed between two hiding places, and the men stepped out and fired in the air to get our attention. Perhaps they had not counted on being fired upon; more likely they were surprised by the driver stamping on the gas and getting us out of there.
The soldier clinging to the bars beside me on our truck shook his head and laughed.
I said, ‘Shifta?’
‘Yah.’ He smiled at my grim face.
I said, ‘Sitaki kufa,’ I don’t want to die.
He said in English, ‘They do not want your life, bwana. They want your shoes.’
Many times after that, in my meandering through Africa, I mumbled these words, an epitaph of underdevelopment, desperation in a single sentence. What use is your life to them? It is nothing. But your shoes – ah, they are a different matter, they are worth something, much more than your watch (they had the sun) or your pen (they were illiterate) or your bag (they had nothing to put in it). These were men who needed footwear, for they were forever walking.
When we were underway again the truck moved with greater urgency, the cattle falling faster than ever on top of each other, the ragged cowboys manhandling them. But soon we were at a checkpoint and had to stop. Four soldiers manned this checkpoint, deliberately dawdling, demanding to see my passport (Wewe, muzungu), and being officious.
This checkpoint reassured me, it seemed as though it might serve as a barrier to keep the bandits at bay. The other passengers who had been riding on top appeared to think so too. They resumed their seats, the road improved, we were moving quickly now towards higher ground and the hills ahead, and the setting sun. The greenery was not a mirage but rather the natural foliage of the town of Marsabit.
The truck came to a halt in the market of this small dirty settlement and I lowered myself to the ground and realized that I was trembling, with a hint of that hysterical happiness that takes hold when you have just had a close call, the giddy certainty that you have survived.
I walked around and found a place to stay, the Jey-Jey, a hotel run by a genial Muslim, who also called me mzee. Was it my impending birthday that made this word a particular irritation? Another three-dollar room. I had a shower in the communal wash-house, then walked to the market and drank a Tusker beer and talked to some locals, boasting, ‘I got shot at!’ No one was surprised or impressed. They shrugged. ‘It’s the shifta road.’
Back at the Jey-Jey, I met a man who had just arrived, having been at the rear of the convoy. He was an exhausted-looking Englishman – sweaty, dirty, unshaven, pissed-off, red-eyed, laboring with a heavy duffel bag.
‘How’s it going?’
‘We got shot at!’ he shouted.
‘So did we,’ I said, ‘back where the road winds between those mounds.’
‘We must have been right behind you,’ he said in a strong Lancashire accent. ‘But they got nowt. I fucking floored it, and the soldiers up top were shooting to kill.’
He was Ben Barker, driver of a truck carrying paying passengers on an Africa overland trip. After dinner we found his brother Abel, who was one of his mechanics, and went for a beer in the Marsabit market. Ben described his route. He had fixed up an old diesel truck and started from his home in Grange-over-Sands, heading east via Turkey, then through Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and the Sudan – a barge across Lake Nasser. He too was headed for Cape Town. He had seven backpackers on board and was happy for a small fee to include me as far as Nairobi.
‘I don’t mind the driving,’ Ben said. ‘The worst of this sort of traveling is when the people in the truck get all south-faced and whingey. “And why can’t we see the crocodiles, then?” “Why are we driving today?” “Can’t we bloody stop for a while?” ’
Scruffy though it was, Marsabit was an oasis in the middle of widely scattered villages of pastoralists whose animals were in bad shape because of the successive droughts, or agriculturalists whose gardens were weedy and stunted. Because of this, Marsabit was the haunt of aid workers and agents of virtue, many of whose spiffy white Land-Rovers were parked at the Jey-Jey.
The model had been described by Mr Kurtz in Heart of Darkness: ‘Each station should be like a beacon on the road towards better things, a center for trade of course, but also for humanizing, improving, instructing.’ This was of course before disillusionment set in and Kurtz became a cannibal chieftain.
A similar scheme had been mooted fifty years earlier than Kurtz’s by Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House, who was ‘devoted to the subject of Africa’ and whose obsession, to the utter neglect of her distressed family in London, was an ‘African project’ Her scheme involved ‘the general cultivation of the coffee berry – and the natives – and the happy settlement on the banks of the African rivers, of our superabundant home population … educating the natives of Borrioboola-Gha on the left bank of the Niger.’
Fiona and Rachel worked for a British charity. What Kurtz was trying to accomplish on the Congo, and Mrs Jellyby on the Niger, they were attempting in the region of Marsabit. They were on their weekly trip, up from the south. They were in their mid-twenties, damp-faced from the heat and their long drive. They had a driver, however, and a high-tech vehicle that was worth a fortune. Am I imagining that the logo on the side showed a weeping continent and the slogan, Shed Tears for Africa?
‘We have a wet feeding tomorrow,’ Fiona said.
Rachel said, ‘Ninety underweight children, some of them malnourished – infants up to four-year-olds.’
‘What is a wet feeding?’
‘That’s porridge. Unimix for nutrition – maize, beans, oil, some sugar and fat. Americans call it Corn Soy Blend.’
‘You are going to a village to dump Unimix in a trough for people to eat?’
‘I wouldn’t put it that way,’ Fiona said.
I said, ‘We used to say, “Give people seeds and let them grow their own food.” ’
‘The rains have been unreliable,’ Rachel said.
‘Maybe they should relocate. If they relocated they might find work, and they might plant gardens if you weren’t feeding them.’
‘We save lives, not livelihoods,’ Fiona said, and it sounded like a phrase from a brochure that might have been drafted by Mrs Jellyby.
I said, ‘Or family planning advice – you could give them that.’
‘We don’t discuss family planning,’ Rachel said. ‘We feed children under five and lactating mothers. Why are you looking at me like that?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Something about “supervising a wet feeding.” It sounds like something you’d do in a game park.’
They were insulted and I was sorry I’d said it like that, because they were obviously hard working and earnest, and they had come a long way to dish up porridge for some ashen-faced tots in the north Kenyan desert.
I said, ‘In a game park, in a bad year, the rangers might spread some bales of lucerne near a waterhole to help the hippos make it through the season.’
They just looked at me, unhappy to be challenged.
I said, ‘And what would happen if you just sent the food?’
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‘Their parents would steal it and let the kids die.’
In other words, natural selection. It was why the Samburu were so tough. The strongest survived, weak children died; children died all the time in Africa and yet even with AIDS and infant mortality the population growth was the highest in the world. But it had been high in Victorian England, as well. In Thomas Hardy’s novel, Jude the Obscure, the doomed and starving village children leave a note, Because we are too menny.
Fiona and Rachel were good-hearted, and earnest in their mission. But it fascinated me that in order to feed these ‘underweight children’ they had to battle the parents, who wanted (and who could blame them?) to snatch the food from the children’s mouths. Or was this over-dramatizing the situation, for there was often a note of melodrama among relief workers, charity in Africa frequently being a form of theater.
‘How long will you be doing this?’
‘I’m leaving next week,’ Fiona said.
‘I’ve got a month more,’ Rachel said.
‘So it’s possible that these people you’ve been feeding with Unimix will be left in the lurch after you go.’
‘The whole scheme comes up for review in a few months,’ Fiona said, turning bureaucratic.
Just to satisfy myself I visited Marsabit’s secondary school the next morning and met one of the head teachers, Mr Maina, who had lived in Marsabit his whole life, except for the years he had spent getting his education degree. He absolutely denied that anyone in the district was foodless. He emphasized that there was more food than ever because of the government’s indifference to traditional cash crops.
‘The farmers in Kenya are very demoralized, because the government does not support them,’ Mr Maina said. ‘In so many places the farmers have torn up their coffee bushes to grow cabbages and maize for subsistence.’
‘Why doesn’t the government care?’
‘Why should they care? They get money from the World Bank, and the IMF and America and Germany and everyone else.’
In a word, the Kenyan government too was dependent on its own version of Unimix in the form of donor country money. It was a proven fact that this money went into the pockets of politicians. At that moment, Dr Richard Leakey, a white Kenyan, headed a commission to uncover corruption in Kenya. But within weeks of uncovering a great deal of corruption, Dr Leakey was removed from his post and was fighting a corruption charge leveled against him by the Kenyan government.