One day I woke up in Nanyuki, went to my favorite cafe, and found 14 Swedes.
You hear a lot of fantastic stories about white people here. I've been told that there's a McGill M.A. student who's been going around Nanyuki for weeks looking for me, but no one can remember his name. One afternoon in Dol Dol, Mwenda told me "Nick, there's a beautiful Danish girl in my mother's pub. I'm going to introduce you to her," but when we walked in thirty seconds later, the pub was filled with old, drunk men. The great Dane had vanished. One of Vivien's friends is in Nanyuki, apparently, but hasn't made his presence known to anyone. In a large city, maybe these white people-as-Bigfoot stories would be understandable, but Nanyuki is a small place, and Dol Dol even smaller. If you go to the health clinic on any given morning, you're liable to run into half of Laikipia's white population. If you go to Marina Grill in the afternoon, you're liable to find the other half. You just won't find the McGill student, the beautiful Danish girl, or Vivien's friend, those white ghosts who have managed, somehow, to escape detection.
The strangest rumors we've heard, however, were about the Swedes. Apparently, my organization had made arrangements to host some Swedes. When I first arrived, I heard it would be two Swedes. Then, a few weeks later, I heard four. Then six. Then Sunday, I found the whole retinue sitting in Camcorner: 12 students, two teachers, male and female, all wearing capri pants and chain smoking Marlboros. And as strange and unfriendly as they are, it's nice to have them around for a few days.
There are few pleasures quite so sublime as feeling like an old hand in something at which you once had to work hard. And fitting in here was hard work. I just hadn't realized how far I'd come until I saw these fresh-off-the-boat Swedes, scared of street children, unable to understand even the most basic Swahili, and without a single African friend. My heart swelled with a sense of superiority, a fine enough reward for weeks of hard work and misunderstanding. Because as much as Dol Dol occasionally drives me crazy, I do now feel at home there. I have friends who are concerned if I'm not around for a few days, neighbors who come to borrow candles and invite us for tea and Scrabble, and there are several alcoholic school teachers who insist I owe them beers.
I think the Swedes are visiting Dol Dol today. I just hope they don't mess the place up too much.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Friday, June 22, 2007
The Culturally Rich and Materially Poor
After a long period of idleness brought about by cancelled meetings, vanishing bosses and events like presidential visits and primary school track and field which brought the community to a standstill, we’ve spent the last two weeks doing genuine, sometimes exhausting and frequently frustrating work. It’s been great. The plan is to bring a VCT (Voluntary Counseling and Testing) to Dol Dol to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS and get people tested. It seems like everywhere else in Kenya has had one of these campaigns, but Dol Dol’s never had one and it’s a definite need.
Looking at surveys we conducted in the targeted areas, one of the most glaring things that pops out is the amount of unprotected sex that’s going on. In a place like North America, high levels of unprotected sex would imperil some individuals, but because the norm is serial monogamy, the spread of HIV would be relatively slow. Here, where the culture favors polygamy, and for the unmarried to have lots of sexual partners during the same period, the introduction of even one infected person into the web of sexual relationships would imperil the whole community in a matter of months. This underscores the importance of testing, of course, but it’s also gotten me thinking about the relationship between culture and development.
It can be seen as heresy to say that culture is restraining the Maasai’s development, because in a sense their culture is the Maasai’s greatest asset. Maasai culture is marketable and has been since the arrival of the British colonists and the anthropologists who followed them, but it continues today. The Maasai make up 1.4% of the country’s population, but inhabit a much more important place in the world’s consciousness than the Kikuyu, Luo, Luhya, Kalenjin, Akamba and the dozen other more numerous tribes which you’ll never hear about unless Kenya falls into a civil war. Down on the coast and in Nairobi, Maasai morani pose for tourists’ pictures for $1. In Nanyuki, prostitutes dress up in Maasai garb to attract the attention of potential clients. A Maasai I met from the diplomatic police corps complained that the Toronto Metropolitan Zoo had shamelessly ripped off Maasai culture in designing its exhibits. Maasai culture is big business, but very rare is the prosperous Maasai village. I can’t help but think that other elements of the culture, some of the deeply-held values and traditions, rather than the dances and jewelry and warriors slaying lions, are playing a bigger role in shaping the course of development.
When I got here and found out that the Maasai measure status and wealth by the size of their herds, not their cash holdings, I thought that was kinda cool. Then I looked around. In a bid to show their status and wealth, many Maasai have assembled mega-herds, which the land cannot sustain. The contrast is stark between the privately owned ranches, where the animal-to-land ratio is kept low and there is a thick cover of knee-high grass, and the Maasai group ranches, where the grass has been grazed into oblivion and the soil is left unprotected to be washed away by every rain. Then, of course, when a drought inevitably comes and thins out the herds, people lose a quarter or a third of their wealth, money which could have sat safely in the Barclay’s Bank in Nanyuki earning interest. But hey, that’s the culture here.
Likewise, the Maasai disdain for farming and fishing costs them dearly. Two weekends ago, work took me to a village on the east side of the division. Here the land had originally been occupied by the Maasai, but migrants from elsewhere in the country, who brought their agricultural traditions and expertise with them and knew good land when they saw it, moved in. A farmer on a small plot can make $800 or so in an average year; by contrast, a herder would have to sell about 70 goats or 20 cows, more than many herders even own, to earn that much. But the Maasai consider themselves herders, and as I said, if they sold off their herd to get some (literal) seed money, they’d risk losing status. By the same token, Laikipia’s streams are stocked with big, tasty trout that the Kikuyu and others profitably sell, but the Maasai don’t like to eat fish and don’t see the point in fishing. At the workshop, when I sat down with some fried tilapia, I was asked why I was eating snake.
The cultural norms that marry off girls at a young age, deny them education and then shackle them at home all day with domestic duties deprive the Maasai of half of their potential productive workforce. Most of the shops in Dol Dol are run by women, but all but a few are non-Maasai migrants. Because their mothers are undereducated and overworked, most children are not read to, are not nurtured, the boys sent out to play with each other and the girls put to work in the house as soon as they’re physically able. And of course, the family patterns put the community at grave risk for HIV and other STDs.
Certainly, aspects of Maasai culture can be harnessed for development. In two areas of the division, the close-knit nature of the group ranches has allowed for community-based eco-tourism projects that have brought significant income to the residents. The traditional system of age-set oversight and elder adjudication of behavior has kept order and maintained low crime rates in the absence of much formal law enforcement. And the cultural trappings of Maasai life have bound together a small group of people, spread from Mukogodo to central Tanzania, into one coherent group.
At the same time, many people here, especially of my generation, are much more adamant than I am about the fact that old values are impeding development. These Young Turks of Mukogodo at least pay lip-service to the ideas of diversifying income, empowering women, and practicing monogamy, but it remains to be seen whether they will bring change in the community, and sometimes I’m skeptical. When one of the youth groups showed me their new, collective farm, I was excited; then I learned that they had put a Kikuyu in charge of running it. So it goes.
Looking at surveys we conducted in the targeted areas, one of the most glaring things that pops out is the amount of unprotected sex that’s going on. In a place like North America, high levels of unprotected sex would imperil some individuals, but because the norm is serial monogamy, the spread of HIV would be relatively slow. Here, where the culture favors polygamy, and for the unmarried to have lots of sexual partners during the same period, the introduction of even one infected person into the web of sexual relationships would imperil the whole community in a matter of months. This underscores the importance of testing, of course, but it’s also gotten me thinking about the relationship between culture and development.
It can be seen as heresy to say that culture is restraining the Maasai’s development, because in a sense their culture is the Maasai’s greatest asset. Maasai culture is marketable and has been since the arrival of the British colonists and the anthropologists who followed them, but it continues today. The Maasai make up 1.4% of the country’s population, but inhabit a much more important place in the world’s consciousness than the Kikuyu, Luo, Luhya, Kalenjin, Akamba and the dozen other more numerous tribes which you’ll never hear about unless Kenya falls into a civil war. Down on the coast and in Nairobi, Maasai morani pose for tourists’ pictures for $1. In Nanyuki, prostitutes dress up in Maasai garb to attract the attention of potential clients. A Maasai I met from the diplomatic police corps complained that the Toronto Metropolitan Zoo had shamelessly ripped off Maasai culture in designing its exhibits. Maasai culture is big business, but very rare is the prosperous Maasai village. I can’t help but think that other elements of the culture, some of the deeply-held values and traditions, rather than the dances and jewelry and warriors slaying lions, are playing a bigger role in shaping the course of development.
When I got here and found out that the Maasai measure status and wealth by the size of their herds, not their cash holdings, I thought that was kinda cool. Then I looked around. In a bid to show their status and wealth, many Maasai have assembled mega-herds, which the land cannot sustain. The contrast is stark between the privately owned ranches, where the animal-to-land ratio is kept low and there is a thick cover of knee-high grass, and the Maasai group ranches, where the grass has been grazed into oblivion and the soil is left unprotected to be washed away by every rain. Then, of course, when a drought inevitably comes and thins out the herds, people lose a quarter or a third of their wealth, money which could have sat safely in the Barclay’s Bank in Nanyuki earning interest. But hey, that’s the culture here.
Likewise, the Maasai disdain for farming and fishing costs them dearly. Two weekends ago, work took me to a village on the east side of the division. Here the land had originally been occupied by the Maasai, but migrants from elsewhere in the country, who brought their agricultural traditions and expertise with them and knew good land when they saw it, moved in. A farmer on a small plot can make $800 or so in an average year; by contrast, a herder would have to sell about 70 goats or 20 cows, more than many herders even own, to earn that much. But the Maasai consider themselves herders, and as I said, if they sold off their herd to get some (literal) seed money, they’d risk losing status. By the same token, Laikipia’s streams are stocked with big, tasty trout that the Kikuyu and others profitably sell, but the Maasai don’t like to eat fish and don’t see the point in fishing. At the workshop, when I sat down with some fried tilapia, I was asked why I was eating snake.
The cultural norms that marry off girls at a young age, deny them education and then shackle them at home all day with domestic duties deprive the Maasai of half of their potential productive workforce. Most of the shops in Dol Dol are run by women, but all but a few are non-Maasai migrants. Because their mothers are undereducated and overworked, most children are not read to, are not nurtured, the boys sent out to play with each other and the girls put to work in the house as soon as they’re physically able. And of course, the family patterns put the community at grave risk for HIV and other STDs.
Certainly, aspects of Maasai culture can be harnessed for development. In two areas of the division, the close-knit nature of the group ranches has allowed for community-based eco-tourism projects that have brought significant income to the residents. The traditional system of age-set oversight and elder adjudication of behavior has kept order and maintained low crime rates in the absence of much formal law enforcement. And the cultural trappings of Maasai life have bound together a small group of people, spread from Mukogodo to central Tanzania, into one coherent group.
At the same time, many people here, especially of my generation, are much more adamant than I am about the fact that old values are impeding development. These Young Turks of Mukogodo at least pay lip-service to the ideas of diversifying income, empowering women, and practicing monogamy, but it remains to be seen whether they will bring change in the community, and sometimes I’m skeptical. When one of the youth groups showed me their new, collective farm, I was excited; then I learned that they had put a Kikuyu in charge of running it. So it goes.
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Choosing your God in Laikipia
Because it's Sunday and I'm in Nanyuki, I've been thinking about religion all day. I was woken up at 7:30 by the singing of the congregation in the skeleton of their half-finished church across the street. I turned on the TV and found every station showing Christian programing. I walked into town past a church where, all morning long, the pastor screams and screams over a microphone, and when I got into town, I found almost every business closed for the Sabbath. Kenya is, in some ways, an extraordinarily religious place. Except for the few Muslims, almost everyone will describe himself or herself as devoutly Christian. Dol Dol, with a population generously given at 2,000, has about a dozen congregations, ranging from the well established Catholic mission stocked with 3 priests and 10 nuns to home-grown Protestant groups that meet every Sunday under particularly shady trees. Every photocopy place in Nanyuki seems obligated, perhaps by some old colonial ordinance, to plaster its walls with print-outs of Christian themed jokes, poems and inspirational quotes. At the paralegal training I went to two weeks ago, every session was started with a prayer, a hymn and a sermon. After one sermon about how certain sinners (adulterers, drunkards, etc.) would be barred from heaven, the town drunk interrupted the session to ask the chaplain to define exactly what kind of drunkenness he had meant. Even the fiery female lawyer from the women's rights organization, educated in England and brought to Nanyuki to instruct the men on the importance of respecting human rights, took time out of this task to comment on the "abomination" of homosexuality and the "sham" of evolution. This left me wondering how the wealthy, probably liberal, women in Europe and North America that fund her organization would react to her words.
Under this veneer of Christian piousness, the people of Laikipia maintain a lot of old traditions and beliefs. While Christians back home point to the Bible as requiring chastity and monogomous marriage, here polygamy, adultery, and general sexual promiscuity are still very much the norm, and it's not at all unusual to find a Christian with 3 wives and twice that many girlfriends. In general, the Maasai don't seem to like the proscriptions of Christianity; the Catholic church is particularly popular among young people because it's more tolerant of drunkenness than the Protestant ones. Nor have the Maasai given up their old spirituality. The stories they tell of their origins owe a lot more to Maasai creation myths than to Genesis. Many people still go to soothsayers and spiritual healers. One of the most educated men in town, a former schoolteacher and community leader, told me that a mystic attributed his illness to a curse placed on him by a woman he had spurned, so now he's biding his time until he can go to Samburu to confront her. Mukogodoans who are really sick go to a village called Wamba. About half go to the huge, Catholic-run hospital there. The other half go to the house of the most famous witch doctor in northern Kenyan, located across town.
Given the Maasai's conscious effort to preserve their cultural traditions, it's not surprising that some of the Maasai spirituality lives on. What needs explanation is the thorough adoption of at least nominal Christianity, and I think the right explanation is a secular one. The Maasai have converted for very practical reasons: education, food, money, etc. Most education grants and food aid come through the churches, and most NGOs active in the region are at least theoretically faith-based. All of the churches say that they give aid based on need, not the recipients' beliefs, but it certainly helps if you know the priest, minister or reverend. Even the small congregations take up collections, some of which go to aid members in need, and sermons tend to stress financial gain. It seems, however, that the churches with the most resources get the largest flocks. Long before the government stepped in, it was these churches that provided the region its infrastructure. The missionaries are now reaping the rewards, in the form of large flocks, for decades of hard work making themselves the source of largesse in the community. I just wonder if they've really won the battle for all of those souls.
Under this veneer of Christian piousness, the people of Laikipia maintain a lot of old traditions and beliefs. While Christians back home point to the Bible as requiring chastity and monogomous marriage, here polygamy, adultery, and general sexual promiscuity are still very much the norm, and it's not at all unusual to find a Christian with 3 wives and twice that many girlfriends. In general, the Maasai don't seem to like the proscriptions of Christianity; the Catholic church is particularly popular among young people because it's more tolerant of drunkenness than the Protestant ones. Nor have the Maasai given up their old spirituality. The stories they tell of their origins owe a lot more to Maasai creation myths than to Genesis. Many people still go to soothsayers and spiritual healers. One of the most educated men in town, a former schoolteacher and community leader, told me that a mystic attributed his illness to a curse placed on him by a woman he had spurned, so now he's biding his time until he can go to Samburu to confront her. Mukogodoans who are really sick go to a village called Wamba. About half go to the huge, Catholic-run hospital there. The other half go to the house of the most famous witch doctor in northern Kenyan, located across town.
Given the Maasai's conscious effort to preserve their cultural traditions, it's not surprising that some of the Maasai spirituality lives on. What needs explanation is the thorough adoption of at least nominal Christianity, and I think the right explanation is a secular one. The Maasai have converted for very practical reasons: education, food, money, etc. Most education grants and food aid come through the churches, and most NGOs active in the region are at least theoretically faith-based. All of the churches say that they give aid based on need, not the recipients' beliefs, but it certainly helps if you know the priest, minister or reverend. Even the small congregations take up collections, some of which go to aid members in need, and sermons tend to stress financial gain. It seems, however, that the churches with the most resources get the largest flocks. Long before the government stepped in, it was these churches that provided the region its infrastructure. The missionaries are now reaping the rewards, in the form of large flocks, for decades of hard work making themselves the source of largesse in the community. I just wonder if they've really won the battle for all of those souls.
Sunday, June 10, 2007
The "Mungiki Menace", again
I didn't really intend to write today, but I got a few emails from people concerned over the news about all of the violence in Kenya (and they all cited the BBC, so I guess American TV has dropped the ball on this one), so I thought it would be good to let everyone know how things stand and reassure you of my safety. Things are undeniably bad down the road in parts of Nairobi and Central Province. The Mungiki beheaded a local official and three of his family members and neighbors last week in a district called Muranga'a and killed two police officers in Mathare, a Nairobi slum with 500,000 inhabitants. The police cracked down, killing a few people in Muranga'a and sealing off Mathare before going door to door and killing 33 people. Most of the dead were shot in the back of the head, and it's become clear that of the 40 or so people who have been killed in total, only a few were Mungiki. Life can be astoundingly cheap here/
I, however, am not in one of the problem areas, and for once Rift Valley Province is untouched by violence. Nanyuki is a diverse town, and while the majority of the population is Kikuyu and there are a few Mungiki in town, things are peaceful here. In mid-May, the Mungiki distributed leaflets in Nanyuki, and most other cities with a large Kikuyu population, inciting the youth to let Kibaki know that he was letting down his tribe. The youth here don't seem to have responded. Someone I know, a friend of a friend, was arrested this week and beat up by the police for having dreadlocks, since the Mungiki used to wear dreads before the group was outlawed and went underground, but it's pretty safe to say he's not a sect member. Everything else I've heard is second-hand, but I've heard plenty. The Mungiki have become an obsession here, with the newscasts invariably leading with the latest Mungiki news and the newspapers devoting the first three or four pages to Mungiki stories, with one of the papers running a multi-paged section titled "The Mungiki Menace" every day. The stories come in two varieties and are irresistable. The newest stories are first-person tales of police brutality in Mathare, but the most common story is still an expose about the initiation rituals of the Mungiki, with some unnamed source discussing how he was made to drink human blood and swear an oath to abstain from alcohol, drugs and sex with non-sect members. The exception to the anonymity of sources is one MP, Kihara Mwangi, who claimed that he witnessed 10 other Kikuyu MPs, including some members of the Cabinet, be administered Mungiki oaths. The assumption is that Kihara is now a dead-man-walking. We'll see.
I, on the other hand, am safe. The Mungiki have targeted matatu drivers, police and local administrators whom they see as uncooperative, and I do not fall into those categories. For that matter, I've never been to the Nairobi and Central Province shantytowns where Mungiki operates and the police go trawling for suspects. Dol Dol, where I spend most of my time, has a majority Maasai population and is completely safe from everything but elephants. So while the news stories are cause for concern, they're not a cause for concern on my behalf.
I, however, am not in one of the problem areas, and for once Rift Valley Province is untouched by violence. Nanyuki is a diverse town, and while the majority of the population is Kikuyu and there are a few Mungiki in town, things are peaceful here. In mid-May, the Mungiki distributed leaflets in Nanyuki, and most other cities with a large Kikuyu population, inciting the youth to let Kibaki know that he was letting down his tribe. The youth here don't seem to have responded. Someone I know, a friend of a friend, was arrested this week and beat up by the police for having dreadlocks, since the Mungiki used to wear dreads before the group was outlawed and went underground, but it's pretty safe to say he's not a sect member. Everything else I've heard is second-hand, but I've heard plenty. The Mungiki have become an obsession here, with the newscasts invariably leading with the latest Mungiki news and the newspapers devoting the first three or four pages to Mungiki stories, with one of the papers running a multi-paged section titled "The Mungiki Menace" every day. The stories come in two varieties and are irresistable. The newest stories are first-person tales of police brutality in Mathare, but the most common story is still an expose about the initiation rituals of the Mungiki, with some unnamed source discussing how he was made to drink human blood and swear an oath to abstain from alcohol, drugs and sex with non-sect members. The exception to the anonymity of sources is one MP, Kihara Mwangi, who claimed that he witnessed 10 other Kikuyu MPs, including some members of the Cabinet, be administered Mungiki oaths. The assumption is that Kihara is now a dead-man-walking. We'll see.
I, on the other hand, am safe. The Mungiki have targeted matatu drivers, police and local administrators whom they see as uncooperative, and I do not fall into those categories. For that matter, I've never been to the Nairobi and Central Province shantytowns where Mungiki operates and the police go trawling for suspects. Dol Dol, where I spend most of my time, has a majority Maasai population and is completely safe from everything but elephants. So while the news stories are cause for concern, they're not a cause for concern on my behalf.
Thursday, June 7, 2007
Elephants, Real and Metaphorical
Watching from the dirt track to Arjijo, I saw them start to move. First one, then a second, then a third, the big gray boulders started to roll down to the valley below. One turned in profile, exposing a long, white curved tusk. I had finally seen elephants, not in a game reserve or a ranch, but on my morning commute. I was heading to Arjijo to interview neophyte farmers and bee-keepers on their organizational needs- one of which, it turned out, was protection from elephants- but the entire time I was working there, I was thinking about the elephants I might run into on the way back.
Animals, for the most part, don’t much interest me anymore. Donkeys, sheep and cows graze on my front yard, camels stampede down my road, monkeys scamper around the trees between the house and town, gazelles and antelope are almost as common as deer are back home, and I was greeted on arrival to Dol Dol by two herds of zebras and another of giraffes. It’s easy to get used to them all. Elephants are different, though, even to the Maasai. As best I can tell, elephants are the one animal that they fear. The Maasai view is that elephants have it out for humans, since humans alone can kill elephants, and the smell of a human can therefore drive an elephant into a killing frenzy. Having talked to enough Maasai, all of whom seem to have a brush-with-elephant-caused-death story, I’ve begun to believe it. I scan the landscape for damage inflicted by elephants on trees, fences and sheds. I listen when David tells me that if I run into an elephant, I should disrobe so that it will be fooled into attacking my clothes. I take a keen interest when Joseph and Mwenda debate whether a minibus driver should reverse or accelerate in the face of a charging elephant. I sit up and notice when the news reports that a poll worker in the district was trampled by an elephant while walking back from a local primary election. Mostly, though, I forget what my science teacher taught me about elephants being docile herbivores. If these people who laugh at lions, hyenas and cobras fear elephants, then so will I.
Now I’m in Nanyuki, where the only thing that can trample me is a matatu, but I’m still dealing with a sort of elephant: Maasai elders. Big, ornery and powerful, these men are just as dangerous as the animals the youths compare them to. I’m at a workshop for training paralegals with representatives from all over Mukogodo, and about half of them are testy older men. They spend half the time yelling at each other about old political disputes and spend the other half of the time yelling at feminists. You see, the workshop is being run by a women’s rights NGO based in Nairobi, which sent up some fiery female lawyers to try to talk some sense into these men, men who could teach the Taliban a few things about misogyny. It’s been an interesting clash of ideas. Maasai men in their forties and older womanize prodigiously but usually have two or three wives by now. They typically marry a generation or two below themselves, and last year someone’s 8 year-old wife was taken away by the authorities and placed in a Nanyuki orphanage. The vast majority of men beat their wives and Maa even has a specific word- kitala- for the refuge a woman takes with her relatives after she’s been beaten by her husband and before the elders convince her to return home with him. By the time they’re beaten by their husbands, though, women are used to their treatment and put up little fight. As children, they were pulled out of primary school, circumcised, and sold off to their husbands for 7 cows (9 if they’re impregnated before marriage). There’s even a kind of purdah, a segregation of sexes. Maasai tradition states that Morani, the warrior age set, cannot eat meat that has been seen by women, so an entire generation of men isolates itself from women three times a day, going off to roast goats in the bush. If you walk down the street in Dol Dol, you almost exclusively see men lounging around, as the women are all at home doing work. They collect water and firewood, cook, clean, and milk the cows. Except for the boys and young teenagers who herd the cattle, males usually drink and chew qat. One of the many Maasai taboos prevents men from entering the kitchen after they’re circumcised, so there are rules against them sharing domestic duties. The good news is that Maasai men of my generation are a lot less, or less blatantly, misogynist than their fathers are. But those old elephants are still around, and are running the show for now.
I really don’t want to sign off with a NOW screed, so I’ll give you some good news. My quest for Kenyan celebrity was not, as I feared, derailed when I was evicted from the VIP section. Yesterday, I was flipping through the TV, and saw a segment on the Swahili news about Kibaki’s visit to Dol Dol (if only I spoke Swahili, I could tell you why there was a 10 minute segment on national TV about a week-old presidential visit). About three minutes in, there’s a shot of the crowd, and plainly visible is a mzungu looking quite dashing in a red shirt. It was a much better way of getting on TV than being trampled by an elephant.
Animals, for the most part, don’t much interest me anymore. Donkeys, sheep and cows graze on my front yard, camels stampede down my road, monkeys scamper around the trees between the house and town, gazelles and antelope are almost as common as deer are back home, and I was greeted on arrival to Dol Dol by two herds of zebras and another of giraffes. It’s easy to get used to them all. Elephants are different, though, even to the Maasai. As best I can tell, elephants are the one animal that they fear. The Maasai view is that elephants have it out for humans, since humans alone can kill elephants, and the smell of a human can therefore drive an elephant into a killing frenzy. Having talked to enough Maasai, all of whom seem to have a brush-with-elephant-caused-death story, I’ve begun to believe it. I scan the landscape for damage inflicted by elephants on trees, fences and sheds. I listen when David tells me that if I run into an elephant, I should disrobe so that it will be fooled into attacking my clothes. I take a keen interest when Joseph and Mwenda debate whether a minibus driver should reverse or accelerate in the face of a charging elephant. I sit up and notice when the news reports that a poll worker in the district was trampled by an elephant while walking back from a local primary election. Mostly, though, I forget what my science teacher taught me about elephants being docile herbivores. If these people who laugh at lions, hyenas and cobras fear elephants, then so will I.
Now I’m in Nanyuki, where the only thing that can trample me is a matatu, but I’m still dealing with a sort of elephant: Maasai elders. Big, ornery and powerful, these men are just as dangerous as the animals the youths compare them to. I’m at a workshop for training paralegals with representatives from all over Mukogodo, and about half of them are testy older men. They spend half the time yelling at each other about old political disputes and spend the other half of the time yelling at feminists. You see, the workshop is being run by a women’s rights NGO based in Nairobi, which sent up some fiery female lawyers to try to talk some sense into these men, men who could teach the Taliban a few things about misogyny. It’s been an interesting clash of ideas. Maasai men in their forties and older womanize prodigiously but usually have two or three wives by now. They typically marry a generation or two below themselves, and last year someone’s 8 year-old wife was taken away by the authorities and placed in a Nanyuki orphanage. The vast majority of men beat their wives and Maa even has a specific word- kitala- for the refuge a woman takes with her relatives after she’s been beaten by her husband and before the elders convince her to return home with him. By the time they’re beaten by their husbands, though, women are used to their treatment and put up little fight. As children, they were pulled out of primary school, circumcised, and sold off to their husbands for 7 cows (9 if they’re impregnated before marriage). There’s even a kind of purdah, a segregation of sexes. Maasai tradition states that Morani, the warrior age set, cannot eat meat that has been seen by women, so an entire generation of men isolates itself from women three times a day, going off to roast goats in the bush. If you walk down the street in Dol Dol, you almost exclusively see men lounging around, as the women are all at home doing work. They collect water and firewood, cook, clean, and milk the cows. Except for the boys and young teenagers who herd the cattle, males usually drink and chew qat. One of the many Maasai taboos prevents men from entering the kitchen after they’re circumcised, so there are rules against them sharing domestic duties. The good news is that Maasai men of my generation are a lot less, or less blatantly, misogynist than their fathers are. But those old elephants are still around, and are running the show for now.
I really don’t want to sign off with a NOW screed, so I’ll give you some good news. My quest for Kenyan celebrity was not, as I feared, derailed when I was evicted from the VIP section. Yesterday, I was flipping through the TV, and saw a segment on the Swahili news about Kibaki’s visit to Dol Dol (if only I spoke Swahili, I could tell you why there was a 10 minute segment on national TV about a week-old presidential visit). About three minutes in, there’s a shot of the crowd, and plainly visible is a mzungu looking quite dashing in a red shirt. It was a much better way of getting on TV than being trampled by an elephant.
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
Robert, the President, and a Plumber
Let me tell you about Robert. I met him on my very first day in Nanyuki when he tried to sell me a Swedish-English dictionary, but it was only in the pub in Dol Dol, when he proclaimed his love of reggae and its stars “Bob Marley, Chuck Norris, etc.” that I really warmed to him. In a village with more than its share of eccentrics, Robert, with qat on his lips, beer on his breath, and Winnie the Pooh on his sweatshirt, stands out. It is something of a Dol Dol tradition for him to be locked up for causing a disturbance at community events, and I find his ability to disrupt every event, year after year, a sign of admirable endurance. He has much more energy than you’d expect of a man of his 40 or so years. While most of his contemporaries lounge in the shade, he ambles down the street, hugging his friends and greeting them in Maa, English and five words of what may possibly be Italian. When the Ph.D student here launched an anti-littering program, Robert was the first to join, picking up trash from the ground and sticking it in bushes, berating schoolchildren who made the mistake of dropping garbage within his field of vision, and yelling the program’s name at passers-by. When I got back from Nanyuki last Monday, however, I was worried about him.
It’s just that he was so excited for the president’s visit: “Everyone here is scared of the Big Men, but not me! I’m going to talk to them! The Ministry of Humanity and Justice gives me that right.” For three days, he spoke of nothing but the evils of littering and the rights granted to him by the Ministry of Humanity and Justice. The problem for Robert is that Kenya doesn’t have a Ministry of Humanity and Justice, it has a Ministry of Justice, and that Ministry of Justice takes an interest in people like Robert, especially when it concerns the president. I was really relieved, then, to see Robert alive, though being dragged into a police Land Cruiser, after he tried to deliver a pamphlet on the evils of littering to President Kibaki’s podium.
Robert’s ability to avoid being shot was a lone bright moment in an otherwise dark day for Dol Dol. To start with, Kibaki was late. He was supposed to arrive in March; this was rescheduled to Tuesday, then 11:30 on Wednesday, then 1:30. He didn’t actually arrive until 5, and by then many people who had arrived early in the morning had to leave to bring the herds in before dark. They didn’t miss much. Oh, the local dance groups were good and the song lyrics inspired (“President, please give us a district/ And we will support you”), but the groups had been practicing all over town for two weeks and I now hum that song in my sleep. The real disappointment, however, was Kibaki himself. The local MP introduced him by reminding the Maasai that, as good children, they should be obedient and grateful. Kibaki took to the podium, and finding his prepared remarks rather than Robert’s anti-littering literature, proceeded to instruct the audience to stop selling their young daughters off as brides and to start paying taxes. That’s fine advice, but if you’re going to play the fatherly role in Kenya, you’re expected to bring gifts. This was Kibaki’s failing: no district, no land rights, no electricity. All he brought was $40,000 for the girls’ high school and $10,000 for the boys’. Insult was added to injury as the rumor that Kibaki’s people had slaughtered 30 cows and 75 goats proved to be false, and the crowd went home disappointed, tired and hungry. The feelings soon coalesced into anger, even rage, but in the days that followed this too passed and people began to speculate about what Raila Odinga, the opposition frontrunner, will offer when he visits later this year.
For me, it was also a day of dashed hopes, especially my desire for Kenyan celebrity. An hour before Kibaki arrived, as I was winding my way through the crowd, I was pulled away by one of the boy scouts who doubled as crowd control at the event. Apparently I was being taken to the V.I.P. seating tent, which faces the crowd. That I got this special treatment only because I was one of five white people in a crowd of a thousand bothered me little and I tucked my shirt in as I approached the tent, preparing for my star turn. However, the V.I.P. section was already filled with various dignitaries, ranchers and women in large hats, so the boy scout went to consult with his boss. A moment later, to my dismay, I was being led to a seat 6 feet away from the podium behind which Kibaki would be standing (and which Robert had been trying to use as a library of anti-littering tips). This was too close. In the regular, old VIP section, I reasoned, I could pass for a rancher’s son or maybe one of the more obscure Leakeys, but in my new seat I would probably have to pretend to be Kibaki’s wife. The long arm of the law saved me from that, as a policewoman quickly came to me to say that the entire section was reserved for members of the cabinet, and that I’d have to move. As it turned out, I was forced back into an even worse position in the crowd than I’d had before the scout’s intervention, and the ability to untuck my shirt on such a hot day was little consolation. (By the way, I hope I’m not endangering Kibaki’s life by saying that at no point in this process was I asked for identification or to empty my pockets of their visibly bulky contents-my camera and phone. I feel like things may have played out differently if this were America or Canada).
At least I can raise my spirits with the gift of music, having acquired a battery-powered radio while in Nanyuki last weekend. We get good reception on two Nairobi stations in Dol Dol. One usually plays Christian reggae (Chuck Norris’ favorite kind, I’m told) and the other plays the top 10 songs from last December. It’s pretty sweet living there, especially since the toilet was also fixed this week. It was, as expected, an ordeal. The plumber/locksmith/mechanic showed up drunk, having consumed his advance in the form of bathtub booze, and without any of his tools. He gamely tried for an hour to perform the repairs with a branch he pulled off of our front yard, but gave up and went back to town to get his tools. On the way, he got into a yelling match with one of our neighbors. Three hours later, after a liquid lunch, he came back with his tools and a small posse, and they staggered their way through the repairs. Fantastic. I don’t get to enjoy the fruits of his labor, however, because I’m back in muddy old Nanyuki for the week. Oh, and Robert! I don’t want to leave you thinking he’s sleeping on the floor of the Mukogodo jail. He was released the next day because, he says, the president called the jail on his behalf, telling the warden that he supported Robert’s important work on the environment. The president even sent him a letter, and Robert says he’s going to show it to me when I get back to Dol Dol. I can’t wait.
It’s just that he was so excited for the president’s visit: “Everyone here is scared of the Big Men, but not me! I’m going to talk to them! The Ministry of Humanity and Justice gives me that right.” For three days, he spoke of nothing but the evils of littering and the rights granted to him by the Ministry of Humanity and Justice. The problem for Robert is that Kenya doesn’t have a Ministry of Humanity and Justice, it has a Ministry of Justice, and that Ministry of Justice takes an interest in people like Robert, especially when it concerns the president. I was really relieved, then, to see Robert alive, though being dragged into a police Land Cruiser, after he tried to deliver a pamphlet on the evils of littering to President Kibaki’s podium.
Robert’s ability to avoid being shot was a lone bright moment in an otherwise dark day for Dol Dol. To start with, Kibaki was late. He was supposed to arrive in March; this was rescheduled to Tuesday, then 11:30 on Wednesday, then 1:30. He didn’t actually arrive until 5, and by then many people who had arrived early in the morning had to leave to bring the herds in before dark. They didn’t miss much. Oh, the local dance groups were good and the song lyrics inspired (“President, please give us a district/ And we will support you”), but the groups had been practicing all over town for two weeks and I now hum that song in my sleep. The real disappointment, however, was Kibaki himself. The local MP introduced him by reminding the Maasai that, as good children, they should be obedient and grateful. Kibaki took to the podium, and finding his prepared remarks rather than Robert’s anti-littering literature, proceeded to instruct the audience to stop selling their young daughters off as brides and to start paying taxes. That’s fine advice, but if you’re going to play the fatherly role in Kenya, you’re expected to bring gifts. This was Kibaki’s failing: no district, no land rights, no electricity. All he brought was $40,000 for the girls’ high school and $10,000 for the boys’. Insult was added to injury as the rumor that Kibaki’s people had slaughtered 30 cows and 75 goats proved to be false, and the crowd went home disappointed, tired and hungry. The feelings soon coalesced into anger, even rage, but in the days that followed this too passed and people began to speculate about what Raila Odinga, the opposition frontrunner, will offer when he visits later this year.
For me, it was also a day of dashed hopes, especially my desire for Kenyan celebrity. An hour before Kibaki arrived, as I was winding my way through the crowd, I was pulled away by one of the boy scouts who doubled as crowd control at the event. Apparently I was being taken to the V.I.P. seating tent, which faces the crowd. That I got this special treatment only because I was one of five white people in a crowd of a thousand bothered me little and I tucked my shirt in as I approached the tent, preparing for my star turn. However, the V.I.P. section was already filled with various dignitaries, ranchers and women in large hats, so the boy scout went to consult with his boss. A moment later, to my dismay, I was being led to a seat 6 feet away from the podium behind which Kibaki would be standing (and which Robert had been trying to use as a library of anti-littering tips). This was too close. In the regular, old VIP section, I reasoned, I could pass for a rancher’s son or maybe one of the more obscure Leakeys, but in my new seat I would probably have to pretend to be Kibaki’s wife. The long arm of the law saved me from that, as a policewoman quickly came to me to say that the entire section was reserved for members of the cabinet, and that I’d have to move. As it turned out, I was forced back into an even worse position in the crowd than I’d had before the scout’s intervention, and the ability to untuck my shirt on such a hot day was little consolation. (By the way, I hope I’m not endangering Kibaki’s life by saying that at no point in this process was I asked for identification or to empty my pockets of their visibly bulky contents-my camera and phone. I feel like things may have played out differently if this were America or Canada).
At least I can raise my spirits with the gift of music, having acquired a battery-powered radio while in Nanyuki last weekend. We get good reception on two Nairobi stations in Dol Dol. One usually plays Christian reggae (Chuck Norris’ favorite kind, I’m told) and the other plays the top 10 songs from last December. It’s pretty sweet living there, especially since the toilet was also fixed this week. It was, as expected, an ordeal. The plumber/locksmith/mechanic showed up drunk, having consumed his advance in the form of bathtub booze, and without any of his tools. He gamely tried for an hour to perform the repairs with a branch he pulled off of our front yard, but gave up and went back to town to get his tools. On the way, he got into a yelling match with one of our neighbors. Three hours later, after a liquid lunch, he came back with his tools and a small posse, and they staggered their way through the repairs. Fantastic. I don’t get to enjoy the fruits of his labor, however, because I’m back in muddy old Nanyuki for the week. Oh, and Robert! I don’t want to leave you thinking he’s sleeping on the floor of the Mukogodo jail. He was released the next day because, he says, the president called the jail on his behalf, telling the warden that he supported Robert’s important work on the environment. The president even sent him a letter, and Robert says he’s going to show it to me when I get back to Dol Dol. I can’t wait.
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