Farewell to the Other

Dol Dol is somewhere behind me, in the green grass, mud and inundated gullies of Mukogodo in a rainy season. Saturday was my last day there, and after another day in Nanyuki to tie up some loose ends, I’ll get to play tourist for two weeks in Nairobi and on the coast. My mom sent me an email predicting that my last days in Dol Dol would be bittersweet, and of course she was right. There’s something in human nature, I think, that leads us to romanticize a place that we’re leaving after a long time. No matter how angry or frustrated a place makes us, there will always be things which tug at our hearts, which make us wish we had a few more weeks to spend there. I imagine, even as Moses led them across the parted Red Sea, there were more than a few Israelites thinking about how much they’d miss seeing the light of late afternoon reflected off the Nile.

Of course, Dol Dol tested this theory by showing its most repulsive side as we were leaving. At our farewell party on Friday night, one of my bosses got stupendously drunk, stole 500 shillings meant to reimburse us for the party expenses, kicked, punched and beat a fellow attendee and then passed out in the street. At a soccer game Saturday afternoon, a woman got stupendously drunk, started a fight, punched a baby in the head and was then beaten very nearly to death by her own brother as dozens of people cheered him on. Even still, the theory holds.

Part of my premature nostalgia revolved around saying farewell to my friends, of which I can count quite a few. It’s not just a feeling of missing them, but of abandoning them to the intermittent boredom and insanity that marks the day-to-day life of the place. But there are other attachments: to the sunsets over the mountains, to scattering the Vervet monkeys that cluster among the cacti, to the way young women, upon seeing an elder along the road, stop and stand stock still with their heads bowed until they’re acknowledged by the elders. I don’t think I would agree to return to Dol Dol for another three months, but I’ll miss the place.

If I returned, however, I’d find it a very different place- Dol Dol has been awarded its district. It’s fitting, in a way, that the issue which exploded during my first week in Dol Dol should be resolved during my last. From what I’ve heard, I have the speaker of the Parliament to thank for the closure. A Laikipiak Maasai and a local boy, he decided it was time to give up his job- and with good reason, since the speaker doesn’t get to vote on bills or shape policy, but instead has the unenviable task of getting Kenyan parliamentarians to show up on time and follow proper procedure. He decided he wanted to be a bona fide MP, which couldn’t happen in Kikuyu-dominated Laikipia, so he lobbied quietly for months, and the result is Laikipia North, a district and constituency to be headquartered in Dol Dol. Its boundaries, in keeping with the Kenyan political tradition, were drawn to ensure the greatest possible degree of ethnic homogeneity: the Maasai, just 10% of the old Laikipia District, will represent 90% of the population of Laikipia North. Because the Laikipiak Maasai are a tiny ethnic group, with only around 20,000 people, the district will be one of Kenya’s smallest, but it will bring all the trappings and perks of district-hood to Mukogodo.

The survey for the electrical lines has been done already, and the work will start next week to bring electricity from Meru to Dol Dol. The speaker is selling his house in town to the government (at an exorbitant price) so that it can house the new District Commissioner, who is arriving sometime this month. The various ministries and district offices will probably be built along the road in from Nanyuki. That spine-shattering road is going to be leveled and paved all the way from Nanyuki to Dol Dol, and a new road will run east from Dol Dol to Meru. As a result, Dol Dol will lose what is, to my mind, its defining characteristic: its location at what is literally the end of the road. Very soon, it will find itself part of the wider world. Safaricom has already picked out where it’s going to build its new cell tower, and the internet is sure to follow the government into town.

Of course, people have been thrilled by the news. Money will flow in- Laikipia North will get its own Constituency Development Fund, a sum of money transferred from the central government to each parliamentary constituency to be used on local development projects. The new district will get its own Constituency AIDS Control Council (CACC) and District AIDS and STD Control Officer (DASCO) to throw funds around, which would have been great to have two months ago when we were scouring the division for money. The Laikipiak Maasai will now control a seat in Parliament, and it’s therefore a safe bet that national political leaders will visit the community more often and be more generous when they do.

But the community has been flooded by money before and is no richer for it. Three or four years ago, a lot of locals in Dol Dol were awarded a huge cash settlement by the British government for the pain and suffering caused by accidents involving old military ordinance left on their land. The money that each of them received reached into the hundreds of thousands of dollars and, in an area where the average annual income is much less than $1,000, could seemingly last even a wastrel of a Maasai for several lifetimes- but every last shilling of it is already gone. The victims/beneficiaries recently went on TV to claim that the British had cursed the money, but there’s a simpler explanation. The Maasai of Dol Dol have shunned cash and bank accounts as stores of value; in the local reckoning, that’s what cattle are for. Money is for spending. So when some of these men got huge sums of money, they spent it. Most of it was blown on beer and women, but some people put it to more extravagant use, chartering flights to posh lodges in Maasai Mara for lunch, Mombasa for dinner. Some of the money went to cattle, but most of those cows died during the drought. No one used it to buy businesses, build houses, or improve the local infrastructure; so far as I know, the largest investment made with the lawsuit earnings was a mid-sized truck. Nobody built a fortune with that money, and because they developed expensive tastes and addictions, most of the awardees are poorer than they were before they got the money.

So I’m not ready to celebrate for Dol Dol just yet. I don’t know if I’ll find things any better if I return- I just know it will be different. For me, and for the people of Dol Dol, it’s time to say goodbye to the Other, and hello to Kenya.