Crossing a flat stretch, we slowed for a truck ahead of us. We watched it fish-tail through mud as it climbed to the top of the ridge, chewing up the road. The truck got across the ridge. Because we had slowed down, we did not. We backed down the incline. When we tried to get out of the mud, we only dug ourselves deeper. Darkness was creeping across the land. We locked the car and flagged down the first vehicle that came along. It took us back to David’s house.

Over dinner we talked about the young men we’d met: about how Anastasio seemed carefree and guileless while Barnabas was reserved and self-protective. We noted how Anas plunged into social contact, sensing in an uncomplicated, almost thoughtless way what people were and accepting them for it.

“That business about the elevator,” Donanne said. “Wasn’t that charming?”

“It’s as if Anas is standing on the threshold of manhood,” I said. “He’s thrilled by the wider world opening up for him. Why does Barnabas hold back?”

“He’s crossed that threshold,” David replied. “He has a better idea of what that wider world is all about.”

“Which is…?” I asked.

“Well, it’s about more than elevators and ice cream and the roar of jets,” David said. “Barnabas understands that at university he’ll be entering an alien culture, the white man’s modernity. You saw that homestead he comes from.”

“But he has to go forward.”

“Of course,” David agreed. “He may spend much of his life traveling between the two worlds, between two sets of values, two ways of life, two styles of living.”

“The prospect of that must be a little scary.”

David nodded. “He’s glimpsed the dislocation that’s ahead of him. But it was probably scary for his father to leave Mbere over his stand about female circumcision. That’s come all right in the end. Barnabas can take heart from that.”

The next morning we had a slow breakfast in order to give the sun time to dry out the road. We returned to our mud-stuck car with David and two Africans. We spent an hour trying to extricate it. The Africans and I got thoroughly mud-splattered, trying to stuff vegetation under the wheels while Donanne sat at the steering wheel. David, the former District Officer in the British Colonial Service, walked about in his best DO manner, accomplishing little. Finally a woman with a panga came along. Seeing the men’s inability to solve this problem, she took charge. She walked a few yards into the bush, chopped at vegetation with her panga, directed the men where to place it and soon had us out of the mud.

We had spent a weekend with the new men of Mbere and an academic studying them. At the end of it the wisdom we had learned was this: if you are stuck in the mud in Mbere, find a woman with a panga.

Barnabas

It’s unusual for a journalist working overseas to get an up-date on the ordinary people he’s interviewed. But six years later, back in California where I was breaking into film writing and Donanne was working at Santa Barbara’s Natural History Museum, we got a letter from David. He had returned to Mbere to follow up on the work he had done there.

Anastasio, David reported, had obtained “a decent pass” on his higher school exams. “He is now working in the personnel department of Kenya Industrial Estates. It’s a para-statal body that encourages small Kenyan industries, and the head of the personnel section comes from the same area of Kenya.

“Although Anastasio visits Mbere on occasional weekends, he lives and works now in Nairobi,” David’s letter went on. “Like many other young city men he is rather a fop about clothes, but he seems to be doing quite well.

“Anastasio was married this February and asked me to be a groomsman. It was all very grand, the wedding. A’s fiancée has been to secondary school – somewhat unusual for a girl from a backward area – and (to use a nice Ghanaian expression) ‘a pregnancy sprang in.’ So her parents made Anastasio pay for a big wedding and an excessive amount of bridewealth.” David estimated $1100 in bride-wealth, $600 for the wedding itself and some $1200 to build a house. Anastasio’s total debt for the wedding – $2900 – represented almost two years of his present income of $130 a month.

“Barnabas is doing very well,” David wrote. “He went on to university, did a degree in agriculture, taught at an agric college for a few years, then returned to University of Nairobi to do a masters. He expects to go on to a Ph.D.

“Barnabas stayed for the night here recently,” David went on. “I was impressed by his concern for his own area – he hopes to do his thesis on goat ranches in this semi-arid area. So many agric officials concentrate on the high income areas and forget their poor and backward homes.”

Next post: Chaos masquerading as a country: Nigeria!

The visit to Mbere served as the seed for Fred’s story “North of Nairobi” in the collection AFRICA, AFRICA! Fifteen Stories. It’s available at www.FredericHunter.com.

Read “North of Nairobi” right here:

NORTH OF NAIROBI
At Embu the asphalt paving ended. I did not go far along the murram road before I hit patches of standing water and mud. Once I traveled beyond the area where most people spoke some English, the car slid onto the shoulder and would not move. It was not badly mired, but I could not budge the car myself. I sounded the horn. No one came to help. I was stranded. I paced on the road and swore at everything in Africa that does not work.
After about half an hour a teenaged boy came riding along on a bicycle. He had two long planks of wood strapped to the carrying rack. I waved to him and called, “Could you help me?”
“It is all right,” he answered, slowing and dismounting. “I have helped to push many people from mud. My father often gets himself stuck.”
The teenager carefully laid down his bike so as not to damage the planks and came toward me. “Does your father have a car?” I asked. There would not be many car-owners in this district.
“He borrows a Toyota.” The boy smiled behind his glasses, shyly, but with a knowing resignation. Then he added, “But he does not drive very well.”
The boy examined the position of the car. He smiled and said, “I will look for some people to help us,” and trudged off into the bush. I liked his openness and the curious feeling of confidence he gave me that he would shortly resolve my predicament. And he did. After about twenty minutes he reappeared with half a dozen Africans he had found somewhere. They pushed the car free of the shoulder on the first try. I thanked them all and offered the boy a ride.
We lashed his bicycle and the wooden planks to the rear of the car. As we started along the road, he asked, “Are you the American journalist?” It turned out that he knew my anthropologist friend Edgar and had heard from his father that a journalist was arriving for the weekend. “He is Edgar’s great friend,” said the boy.
I acknowledged that, indeed, I was a journalist. Wanting to be friendly – he had, after all, been friendly to me – and seeing a certain bafflement about me in his eyes, I explained that most overseas journalists reported only on events in places like Nairobi. Nonetheless, I had a hunch that the real life of Africa was in the countryside. So I had come to take a look.
“Will you write about us?” the boy asked.
I said that perhaps I might find something to interest American readers, but perhaps not.
“It is all right,” he told me once again.
“I take it you can direct me to Edgar’s house,” I said. “I’m not sure I can find it from his directions.”
The boy smiled as if with a knowledge that directions were not Edgar’s strong point. Then he said, “I am sorry that it took me so long to get help. But when I speak their language, they hear my accent and they do not trust me.”
I glanced at him. “You are not Mbere then?” I asked.
“I am from Nyanza.” He spoke a sentence or two in a tribal language and watched my reaction. “That was Luo,” he said. “Did you understand it?”
I shook my head. “What are you doing here?”
“I live here. My father is the government officer.”
“You mean the district commissioner?”
The boy laughed. “He is really the agricultural assistant. But he calls himself the government officer to seem more important. The Mbere laugh at him for this.”
“Do you think it’s funny?”
“Yes,” he said after a moment. Then he added, “But in Africa we do not laugh at our fathers.”
“Do you like it here?”
“It is all right.”
“But you’d rather be in Nyanza?”
“Yes, it is my home. My mother is there with my brothers and sisters.” After a pause he added, “My father has taken an Mbere wife.”
“I see.”
“It is difficult,” he said. I glanced across at him. He was looking straight ahead through the windshield and I wondered if he was glad to have someone to talk to about it. “She is no older than I am, and she does not really want me to live in the house.” He fell silent. Then after pointing out a turning, he continued, “She does not speak Luo and she is not happy when my father and I use our own language. But if I speak Mbere, she laughs and calls me ignorant.”
“Do you go to school here?” I asked. He nodded. “And you have friends?”
“A few. But more and more it becomes complicated with them, too.” He gazed pensively at the road. “Last summer all my Mbere friends were circumcised,” he explained. “We Luos do not circumcise. Now my schoolmates think they have become men while I am still a child. And I do not think that Mbere men like it that an uncircumcised child-man like me lives in the same house with one of their women.”
We reached the long, rutted drive to Edgar’s house and I invited the boy to come in and say hello to my host. But he declined. He said that he might come by later in the afternoon. He untied the bicycle and the planks from their perch on the rear of the car and retied the planks to the carrying case. As he was about to ride off down the road, I asked, “Would you mind if I took your picture?”
The request surprised him. Why would I want his picture? Then he smiled shyly, “Will it appear in a magazine?”
“Maybe in a newspaper.”
He seemed pleased at being connected to America in even so tangential a way and posed beside his bicycle. I withdrew the notebook from my jacket pocket and got his name – Stephen – and his age which was 16. Then I asked, “Have you talked to your father about these problems with your schoolmates?”
Stephen nodded. “I asked him to let me go back to Nyanza. Edgar has told him that he should let me return. But my father says that we are all Kenyans now and it does not matter where we live or who is circumcised.” Stephen said nothing for what seemed a long while. “The school fees he would have to pay in Nyanza are higher,” he explained at last. I asked Stephen once again if he would like to come in and say hello to Edgar; perhaps we could have some lunch together. But he refused again very politely. “Perhaps I will come by later on,” he said and rode off.

Edgar’s house was large and stood on a rise of land. It was the former residence, so he’d told me, of the European foreman of the now-defunct British-American Tobacco Company processing plant. It was past 2:30. Hungry and quite thirsty, I was glad to arrive.
But the house was deserted. The doors were all locked. I walked around the house trying them. I hallooed, but no one was about, not even a servant. I was surprised to find the place deserted. Edgar had told me on the phone that he’d be there, drafting a report. But no matter. I took out reading I had brought and made myself comfortable on a porch overlooking the countryside.
In fact, I did not know Edgar well. The first time I met him, shortly after I’d been assigned overseas, he came to lunch with an historian specializing in pre-colonial Africa whom I’d called for a briefing. Edgar was then acting chair of the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. As we ate together at the Faculty Club, a preoccupation intensified the school-masterish formality that he had picked up in some non-California life. He had grown up in English-speaking South Africa, I learned, and without evidence I attributed his fuss-budget quality to the schooling he’d received there. After attending university Edgar had joined the British Colonial Service during its last years and had served as a District Commissioner in what is now Tanzania. Later he received a PhD** in Anthropology from Oxford; his dissertation detailed how life was lived and organized in a small town in the hinterlands behind Accra. During our lunch Edgar said quite frankly that he was fed up with California. Wistfully he mentioned more than once that he still owned land in the Ghanaian town and hoped to retire there.
While we waited for coffee, Edgar acknowledged that he’d become a center of controversy on campus. He had reprimanded a young social anthropologist; “dressed him down,” was his term. This colleague was an iconoclast of romantic reputation who lectured barefoot wearing only khaki shorts and a tank top. Sometimes he did not appear for his classes at all. It was not surprising, Edgar said, given the nature of students, that many of them rallied to the instructor’s defense. But I felt that it had surprised Edgar. I sensed that he still expected to be treated like a DC**. Apparently students had picketed his classes; they had written angry letters to the student newspaper. Edgar merely said, “We soldier on.”
After reading on the porch for about fifteen minutes I no longer felt alone. Looking up, I saw an African with a studiedly tweedy look staring at me through the glass of the porch doors. He wore glasses, a tie, a rumpled shirt and suit trousers. He was smoking a pipe and a copy of the Economist hung from his hand. We stared at each other for a moment.
“Is Dr. Pettys around?” I finally asked, rising from the wooden chair.
“No, he’s not,” said the African through the door.
A pause. We continued to stare at each other. “This is his house, isn’t it?”
“Yes, this is his house.”
The African gazed at me without expression, and I noticed that he stood in stockinged-feet. “Dr. Pettys told me he’d be here.”
“He’s in hospital.”
“Is he all right?” I tossed my reading aside. “Look, could you open this door? What’s happened to Dr. Pettys?”
The African smiled, unlocked the door and opened it. “Perhaps I meant ‘at’ hospital,” he said. I felt that he had taken some pleasure in needlessly arousing my concern. “Edgar’s quite all right. The houseboy had an accident, and Edgar has run him to hospital.”
I explained that I had come as a weekend guest and asked if I might come inside. “Yes, please come,” the African said finally. “Have you had any lunch?”
“No, as a matter of fact, and I’m starving.”
“Let’s nip into the kitchen and see what’s there.” I brought my overnight case inside and found the kitchen myself. The stocking-footed African was there, getting beer for us. “There’s tinned meat in the fridge,” he said, “and bread there in the plastic. Make yourself a sandwich if you like.”
I asked, “What happened to the servant?”
“He was putting my bicycle into a shed I use when I don’t come by car. A large pane of glass fell on him. Nasty business.”
“A pane of glass? How did that happen?”
“I’ve no idea. Curious kind of accident, isn’t it?”
“Will the man be all right?”
“Oh, I expect so. These fellows are quite hearty. Here’s to your health.” He lifted his glass to me, drank some beer and padded back into the main room of the house.
When I joined him there, he had settled onto the couch; he had apparently been napping there when I arrived. He was rattling his magazine and noisily sipping his beer. Standing over him I introduced myself, giving my name; I hoped to elicit a corresponding introduction from him. He offered his hand, but without otherwise stirring and then indicated a chair across from him.
“I’m afraid I haven’t any idea who you are,” I said, sitting down.
“Oh,” he replied, “I’m Quentin Owino, the government officer here.”
“Ah ha!” I said, taking fresh interest in the man. I wondered if Stephen had refused my invitations to come inside the house because he knew his father would be there. “Edgar has influential friends.”
My flattery pleased him. He looked up from his paper and smiled. “I am the second most important man in Mbere,” Owino said. “After Edgar.” I smiled at this compliment to my host. “We are great chums,” he added.
“Government officer?” I asked. “What does that mean: District Commissioner?” Owino would know that this was the position Edgar had held. I wondered if he saw himself in the same role, the civilizer’s role.
“One does many jobs in a small place like this,” he replied.
“I think it must have been your son who rescued me from some mud.” I described the boy.
“That would be Stephen,” Owino said. “A jolly good chap, if I may say so.”
“Yes, I quite liked him. I suppose he must miss Nyanza.”
“Did he say that?”
“He merely said his mother was living there.”
“He gets there often enough,” Owino said. “It is best for him to know more than one village.” He smiled. “Travel broadens, as they say. Don’t you agree?”
“I suppose it does. People here accept him, do they?”
“Of course. Why not? We’re all Kenyans now.” He smiled again. “Actually this is great experience for him. Look at the British. They sent their children off to school at the age of six. And they conquered the world.” He laughed. “Stephen is happy here.”
I drank some beer and looked about the room. Owino filled his pipe and continued to watch me. “It must be a great challenge,” I said, wanting to draw him out, “being the government’s officer in a place like this.”
He shrugged this off. “Mbere is not much of a place,” he said. “A small tribe, no political influence, clients of the Kikuyu. Most of the people are ignorant and want to stay that way.”
“But it was chosen as a target area for rural development, wasn’t it? Isn’t that why Edgar’s here?”
“Yes, but how much has been accomplished? Edgar can tell you about that.” Then, perhaps recalling that I was a journalist, Owino fussed at the lighting of his pipe, watching me carefully, wondering if he would be quoted. “But, of course, government service is challenging anywhere,” he commented for safety’s sake.
“You’re being too modest,” I said, pushing him a little. “You are a Luo and that can’t make you very popular here – even if you are all Kenyans.”
He shrugged again and smiled half to himself. “Indeed, there is still some truth to that, regrettably,” he acknowledged. “But I am perhaps unusual. I do not leave the division every weekend, for example, like most government officers. The people respect that. It means that I am less a stranger to them.”
“You and Stephen live as bachelors, do you?”
“We Africans do not make good bachelors.” Owino smiled and punctuated the smile with a shrug. Surely I understood. “I have taken an Mbere wife,” he said. “A year ago. I needed a wife to cook my food and give me sons. Why should I have the expense of keeping a servant?” We laughed together. “You will say I am an exploiter,” he giggled, “but it is not true.”
The sweet scent of his pipe tobacco began to fill the room. Edgar’s house was starting to seem more like the faculty club where I had met him than a living room in rural Africa. Owino smiled with a touch of bravado that masqueraded as pride. “She has already given me a son.”
“You must be very proud of yourself,” I said. “Congratulations.”
He shrugged. “It is a way to show that we are all Kenyans.” Then he added,
“There are many sons left in me. It is good for the Mbere to understand that.”
I sipped some beer. “Maybe I’ll have a sandwich,” I said. I went into the kitchen, found bread, peanut butter and jam and proceeded to make us each a sandwich. I sensed that Owino would be happy to eat Edgar’s food, especially if I prepared it.
He soon entered the kitchen and watched me. Then he challenged: “You perhaps do not think polygamy civilized.”
“I have no views on the matter,” I said. “However, I’m sure it’s a lot more complicated to have two wives than to have only one.”
“It is perhaps less civilized than monogamy,” he said. “But the Mbere regard it as a sign of wealth and prestige. So it has done me no harm to have a local wife.”
“Is it difficult for Stephen?”
“Why should it be?” he asked quickly. I answered with a shrug. “There are no difficulties.” After a moment he added, “Some minor irritations, that’s all. The woman wants to feel important and orders Stephen around. Of course, he does not like it. I tell him to be patient. She does it mainly because she is Mbere and knows she is ignorant. She feels inferior to us.”
I cut the sandwiches in halves, put them onto coffee saucers that did not match and handed the larger sandwich to Owino. “Why not send him back to Nyanza?” I asked.
“A son is a joy to a father – especially a son who is so superior.” I nodded. “You think me unreasonable,” Owino charged.
“How could I? I know nothing about the matter.”
“If I send him back to Nyanza,” he explained. “His mother will put him to work. Ever since I married here, she complains that she has no money. I want Stephen here to make sure he does not neglect his education.” Owino poured us each another beer and we took them and the sandwiches back into the living room. “It is very probable that Stephen will pass his Higher School Certificate Examinations well enough so that the government pays his entire university education.” Owino lowered his voice confidentially. “And I tell you his chances of getting a place at the University of Nairobi, which is entirely run by Kikuyus, are better if he passes from a school in Mbere than one in Nyanza.”
“He should be very pleased with himself here then,” I said.
“Well, yes.” Owino shrugged. “Perhaps he does not like the living arrangements. He has his private room. I wanted to put an outside door in it for him, but it is a government house and this is against regulations. He wanted to build a small house for himself like some of his Mbere friends have done, but that, I think, is asking for trouble.”
“Why is that?” I inquired. I remembered Stephen’s wooden planks. Had he intended them for this purpose?
“Mbere boys build themselves small houses once they are circumcised. We Luos do not circumcise; manhood is more than the cutting off of a foreskin, although some people do not understand this. But if Stephen as an uncircumcised Luo builds himself a hut, there will be trouble. The Mbere do not yet regard him as a man. It is not the sort of trouble that cannot be straightened out. I am the government officer here, after all. Still trouble avoided is the best kind to have.”

We now heard a car pull into the drive. “Must be Edgar,” I said. I started toward the door. Owino lagged behind, putting on his shoes.
Outside Edgar was standing before the Landrover, peering into the garage where the glass had fallen. In a short-sleeved khaki shirt and work shorts that matched the sandy color of his hair, wearing desert boots and knee-socks, his arms akimbo, he seemed never to have stopped being a DC**. We shook hands. I said I’d had no trouble finding the place and had had some lunch with the help of Owino.
“Still here, is he?” Edgar’s voice carried an edge of irritation. “We’ve had a real balls-up,” he said. “Owino tell you about it?” I said that he had. “No damn coincidence the glass fell.”
“Foul play?”
“Bloody booby-trap. Meant to fall. Not sure who the intended victim was: me or Owino. I’m damned sure it wasn’t Kamau.”
Edgar wore the expression of fuss-budget impatience I remembered from our first meeting at UCSB**. I was amused, but did not show my reaction; booby-traps were a serious matter. In fact, I was glad to see him – and not only because a working anthropologist makes an excellent contact for a journalist covering Africa.
When I first arrived in Nairobi, I often wished I had kept in closer contact with Edgar; I wondered if he were still at UCSB**. Then on a reporting trip I saw him at Roberts Field in Liberia. We were waiting for the same plane. I re-introduced myself and we rode together to Freetown, Sierra Leone, where I left the flight.
He had just arrived from the States, he said, after what had been an almost intolerable year at UCSB**. “I have never been so ready to leave anywhere,” he said. “Faculty discipline totally collapsed. Faculty-student communication no longer exists.” He had been forced to fire the young anthropologist who had been such a problem. The action had triggered a campus row. Students had demonstrated; some called him a “fascist pig” to his face. Colleagues had questioned his professional credentials, merely because he was born in South Africa. He shook his head as if still not quite able to conceive of what had gone wrong.
“I’ve never so longed for the order of Africa,” he continued. “Yes, I said: the order. Life in the sophisticated world is too chaotic. That’s why I’ve come back. I may give up teaching.” He had arranged an early sabbatical and would spend the upcoming academic year in Kenya, evaluating an intensive development program in Mbere Division a couple of hours north of Nairobi. The program would be launched almost immediately. He was eager to get started.
Africa had given Edgar a giddy sense of renewal. When we said goodbye on the Freetown tarmac, his joyfulness amused – and also touched – me. “Look at that!” he said enthusiastically. He pointed across the airstrip to a trio of women carrying babies on their backs and clay pots on their heads. They were moving with a peasant grace beneath flowering trees; behind them lay crudely tilled fields and thatched huts. I saw them as elements in an overall picture of stunted personal development and cruel, needless poverty. Edgar saw them as beautiful.
“A classic scene!” Edgar commented, smiling. “Listen to their laughter!” And, indeed, a rich, throaty laughter floated from them through the morning heat and quietude. “They’re in harmony with their environment,” he said. “And their traditions.” He grinned. “How glorious to be back home in Africa!” When my luggage arrived, we shook hands and agreed to meet in Nairobi.
Over the following months we did occasionally meet there. He always invited me to visit Mbere. But whenever I expressed interest in actually doing so, he suggested that I hold off. A few matters remained to be processed through the ministry. “Wait till the project really gets started,” he would say. Behind this excuse I sensed that as a man might want to be alone with his bride, Edgar wanted to be alone with Africa. Since he was unmarried – except to his work – I did not press the matter.
But ministerial delays dragged on. Eventually his invitations became more heartfelt. “You really ought to come,” he would say in a tone of loneliness. “I’d love to talk with an American.” He would add, “I live like a king in Mbere. Really, I’ve begun some ethnography. It’s fascinating stuff.”
By late April annoyance and frustration were sounding in his voice. The ministry had not acted. Misunderstandings, inefficiency and fear of decision-making had delayed the Mbere project by more than a year. His sabbatical was almost over; it had been wasted – at least in terms of his observing a microcosm of rural development and doing scholarly writing about it. Whether or not the ethnography would justify his remaining in Mbere seemed unclear. And so I had agreed to a visit.
“Will Kamau be all right?” I asked now.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “In hospital for a week. I don’t know what we’ll do for chak while you’re here. I cook worse than you do.” He eyed me dryly. “My hunch is that as a chef you’ve given a few blokes the trots in your time.” He looked back into the garage where the glass had fallen. ‘The question right now,” he said, “is what do we do about this?”
A young man now emerged from so deep inside the garage that I had not seen him earlier. He was perhaps twenty, spare and loose-jointed, not tall so much as very slender. He wore a white long-sleeved shirt and dark trousers fastened by a belt so long that it seemed to loop beyond the buckle almost halfway around his body. He had a studious look, emphasized by glasses and a copy carried lightly in his hand of the tabloid-sized Nairobi Daily Nation which he used as a briefcase. He gazed at me without hostility, but I sensed that he was not prepared to accept me merely as a friend of Edgar’s as both Stephen and Owino were ready to do. Instead he would watch to see who I turned out to be. “This is Barnabas,” Edgar said. “The chief informant of my ethnographic study.”
“Hello, Barnabas,” I said, offering my hand which he shook. Since Edgar had not stated the information, I gave him my name and explained that I was an American from Nairobi.
“Journalist,” Edgar said.
Barnabas nodded, but said nothing.
“Barnabas is a local celebrity,” Edgar continued. “Passed his Higher School Certificate Examination. Which only about a dozen boys from Mbere have ever done.”
“Congratulations,” I said, wondering if this were not the exam Owino intended Stephen to pass. I wondered, too, if the time would ever come when Edgar would call a twenty-year-old a “young man” instead of a “boy.”
“Barnabas goes to university next fall,” Edgar went on. “And all the girls in the Division come out to watch him walk by.”
Barnabas smiled and lowered his eyes.
“What would you like to study?” I asked.
“I would like to become a doctor,” he told me. “The people here still practice traditional medicine. But they no longer believe strongly in its cures and so they are not so effective. I would like to bring modern medicine to Mbere.”
“Good,” I told him. “Can you study that in Nairobi?”
“Perhaps I must go to U.K**.,” he replied.

Inside the house Edgar made himself a sandwich in the kitchen while I talked with Barnabas and Owino. Before long Owino went to join Edgar. I could not help noticing the look of distrust that Barnabas cast at him as he left.
“I need a favor, old man,” Owino said to Edgar in the kitchen. “You couldn’t lend me five hundred shillingi, could you?” My conversation with Barnabas had not resumed and we both overheard Owino’s request for what would have been about seventy dollars. I glanced at Barnabas.
“Jeremiah up to his old tricks?” we heard Edgar ask.
“I’m afraid so,” Owino told him. I picked up a magazine and thumbed through it. Barnabas opened his copy of the Daily Nation and shuffled through papers. We both heard the conversation continue.
“You’re going to have to stand up to him, you know,” Edgar said.
“But how?” Owino asked. “If I refuse him money, he calls her home and I have no one to cook my meals.”
“Just now I have no one to cook mine either,” complained Edgar lightly.
“But I sleep with this cook,” Owino reminded him. “So it is very hard.”
“Send her and the baby up to Nyanza. Let her see how good you are to her. Let her see what it’s like to be a second wife.”
“She would never go to Nyanza.”
“You’re her husband. Make her go. In any case, I can’t spare more shillingi.”
I glanced again at Barnabas; he was studying me. Since it was obvious that we had both heard the conversation in the kitchen, I asked: “What’s that all about?”
Barnabas paused a moment as if trying to decide if I merited an explanation.
“How about three hundred? Is that possible?”
“I’m sorry, Quentin. The bank is closed.”
Barnabas and I were still looking at one another. He said quietly, “Owino’s wife is the daughter of a local chief. He keeps changing the terms of the bridewealth arrangement because he wants money.”
“I thought bridewealth was fixed at the time of the marriage.”
Barnabas nodded. “But Owino is not Mbere. So when Jeremiah insists that he owes more money, his kinsmen support him. If Owino does not pay, they go to his place and bring his wife and the baby back to her father’s shamba.”
“Why does Jeremiah need money?” I asked.
“He buys cars,” Barnabas said. “Toyotas. Used.”
“He has more than one car?”
“It is not hard to drive a car into the ground here. Especially a used one, badly maintained. Jeremiah never gives care to his cars and when the local mechanics can no longer repair a car he has mistreated, he buys a new one. He bought his fifth Toyota this week. He’s having a beer party for his kinsmen at his shamba today.”
“The kind of money Owino’s asking for in there: that can’t buy a car.”
“It buys the beer,” said Barnabas.
“What buys the cars?”
“Jeremiah sells tribal land to Kikuyu land merchants. They pay him in used Toyotas.”
“Is tribal land his to sell?”
“No. But he is the chief.”
“Can’t you get rid of him?” Barnabas said nothing. “There must be some process for that,” I said.
“In the old days,” he replied, “when a chief outlived his wisdom, people killed him. We can’t do that anymore.”
I detected the slightest of twinkles in Barnabas’ eyes.

Later that day outside Jeremiah’s compound, young men sat drinking beer lolling on the fenders or sitting inside the rusting hulks of four Toyota sedans. Because my car was unknown to them, they stared when it pulled up and parked. When our party left the car and the young men saw who we were, they hailed Edgar in friendship, bidding him to have some beer. They sang out as well as at Owino, in a manner that struck me as companionable, but also derisive. His status as government officer won him little respect with this gang. They hailed Barnabas, but he maintained a scholar’s distance from the rowdies. As for Stephen, who had joined us, he too kept his distance. The young men seemed openly scornful of him.
We passed the newest Toyota, bright red and newly waxed. A once-dented front fender, now repaired, had paint of a different, more orange hue. I asked Barnabas about the young men’s taunts. “They say Stephen cannot drink beer,” he explained. “It is not for children. Beer can be drunk only by circumcised men.”
The compound was no more than a collection of mud and wattle huts and granaries with a platform upon which grasses for thatching had been piled. There were also a small, roofed enclosure for calves and a larger cattle corral of thickly packed tree branches and stumps. Edgar led us through it with the measured, imperial pace that I supposed he had used during his tenure as a District Commissioner and had picked up from movie versions of “King Solomon’s Mines.” We moved forward to greet the patriarch – obviously Jeremiah – who sat on a contraption of bent tree branches shaped into a chair and covered with a cowhide. He had gray bristles for a beard and watched us through half-closed but intelligent and suspicious eyes. As Edgar reached him, he lurched to his feet. They bowed to one another and shook hands. Owino bowed as well, taking the old man’s hand deferentially, holding it in both of his. I was introduced and bowed deeply.
Edgar congratulated the old man on his acquisition of yet another Toyota. He accepted beer and waited while Bentley, one of Jeremiah’s sons, brought him a chair. He said to me in a low voice, “Have Owino give you a shamba tour. He’s worked with Bentley. I’m going to give the old boy what-for about the glass in the garage.”
I collected Owino who had gotten himself some beer and asked to see the shamba. He called to Bentley who ignored him until Edgar intervened and in his best DC** manner instructed him to show me around. Barnabas and Stephen tagged along.
As we headed toward the fields, a figure flashed past. Stephen called out, “Anas!” and ran after him. A youth Stephen’s age poked his head around the back of a hut. Barnabas called out to him, a friendly taunting in Mbere. The youth – Anastasio was his name – appeared. He was introduced to me and carefully wiped his hands against his shirt. He gazed at me as if beholding a ghost or some figure of wonder, then offered one of the still-wet hands for me to shake.
“He has never seen an American before,” Barnabas said.
Stephen explained that we were old friends; he had rescued me from mud. “Anas” was impressed. Stephen grinned and asked, “Were you carrying water?”
Anas seemed uncertain what to say. But since his shoes and pants legs were splattered, the answer was clear.
“It is all right!” said Stephen with a laugh. “I won’t tell. Barnabas doesn’t care. And Bentley won’t notice.”
Anas looked up ahead where Owino was walking with Bentley. “It is so much easier for me to carry it than for her to,” he said. “And anyway we are in higher school now and they are telling us things must change.”
“I am going to build my house,” Stephen told Anas. “Will you help me? Or do you have to stay and drink beer in those dead cars?”
“I can help you,” Anas replied softly. “You helped me.”
Barnabas looked concerned at hearing this declaration. He slowed his pace to separate himself from the others and since I was walking with him, I slowed as well. I asked about the shamba’s crops. He pointed out those in a five-acre plot: cow peas, finger millet, sorghum and maize, subsistence crops all laid out in precisely straight rows. A three-acre section was devoted to cotton, Jeremiah’s cash crop. “Owino has made quite a good shamba here for Jeremiah and Bentley,” he said. He added, “It could do with a bit of weeding.”
“What was all that about the water?” I asked. Barnabas glanced at me with a look of either confusion or defensiveness, I was not sure which. I persisted, “Is there something about Anas carrying water that is…” I let my voice trail off.
Barnabas said nothing for a moment, then decided to speak. “Anas is a man now. He has been circumcised.”
“And carrying water: that’s women’s work?” On the drive up from Nairobi I had seen women struggling with large drums of water on their backs. They supported the drums, their necks straining, on tumplines that stretched across their foreheads. In Kikuyu villages I had seen women who had carried water this way for so long that tumplines had formed depressions across their foreheads.
“Traditionally carrying water is the work of women,” Barnabas said. I made no reply. After a moment he continued, “Anas does not like to see his mother carrying water. He is much stronger than she is. But the other men here say that it is her job. So he does it when he hopes they will not see.”
We walked on and I thought of the men drinking beer in the derelict Toyotas. After a moment I said lightly, “Sometimes my women readers ask me exactly what it is that African men do.”
Barnabas smiled, but said nothing.

When we caught up with the others, Bentley was bending over a mesh trap he had built to cover a hole in the ground. Caught in the trap were hundreds of flying ants. They resembled large-bodied balls of fat the size of a little finger to the first joint; to these succulent blobs Nature had attached long, transparent wings. On these the fattened ants flew out of the ground, venturing forth to start a new colony. I had encountered such ants in my own yard. I had even felt terrorized by the fluttering of their wings for the entire experience was like an eco-horror movie come true. But I had learned not to step on the ants. Wherever I squished them, they left grease spots that lasted for months and I could not wear the shoes indoors.
Now Bentley stuck his hands beneath the mesh and extracted a handful of the ants. Some were motionless; the wings of others still fluttered. He closed the trap and transferred the ants into a woven basket he carried. He withdrew his hand with one of the insects held between his fingers. He closed the basket, ripped the wings from the specimen he held and plopped it into his mouth. He closed his eyes. He smiled as a child might with candy. The other Africans gathered around him, begging him to open the basket. When he did, they each reached in, withdrew insects, removed their wings and ate them, chattering and laughing at the pleasure of the delicacy.
After a while Stephen came over to me, carrying several ants in a nest made of his hands. Barnabas and Anas tagged behind him. “Please,” he said. “Would you like?”
I smiled. “No, thank you,” I replied.
“They are delicious,” Anas assured me.
“I’m sure they are.”
“You will not have?” Stephen asked again.
When I declined, Stephen and Anas watched me with fascination, grinning, smacking and licking their lips as they plucked wings from the ants and tossed them into their mouths. Barnabas stood several paces away and watched me as well, eating ants as one might eat popcorn one kernel at a time.
“You think we are barbarians, don’t you?” he challenged. “For eating ants.”
“No,” I said.
“Then why not have one?” he asked.
“Not my thing,” I said. “I couldn’t eat snails in France. Or greasy meat pies in England. I don’t like tofu in Nigeria. Or in California.”
Stephen and Anas watched me, grinning and eating. Barnabas studied me, unsure what to make of me. I realized that trotting out the places I’d been only exaggerated the differences between us.
Before I could think of a way to close the gap, we heard Owino and Bentley arguing. “But you must weed if you want good crops,” Owino declared. Bentley shrugged off this advice, fiddling with the trap which he had now completely cleaned out. “If you don’t weed, the worms will eat them, not your family.” Bentley shook his head. He checked the trap again and moved off.
As we followed him back to the compound, Owino said: “He won’t weed.”
“It is women’s work,” said Anas.
“Well, where is his wife? Why doesn’t she weed? They will lose their crops.”
“She is eating right now at her father’s shamba,” said Anas.
“And he is surly to me because he’s sleeping alone?” Owino dusted off his trousers and tightened the knot of his tie. “It is not my fault he’s sleeping alone.” We walked for a moment in silence. “Bentley has a good garden there, thanks to my advice,” Owino said. “But he won’t even do weeding for his own good. What ignorance!”
“It is not ignorance!” Anas said, obviously annoyed with Owino. “It is tradition.”
I was surprised he spoke so forthrightly to a man so much older.
“Traditions are holding you back,” replied Owino. “Time to abandon them.”
“If we abandon our traditions,” Anas replied, “we stop being Mbere.”
“Is that a loss?” Owino asked. “What have the Mbere ever achieved?”
“Why do you say that?” Barnabas retorted. “You are not superior to us.”
“No,” Owino agreed, “I am not superior to you. But education is better than ignorance. Doing a little work is better than being lazy and drunk all the time.”
“Let’s not argue,” Stephen said. “We are all friends.”
“If education makes you superior to us,” Barnabas asked, “why do you make yourself unclean with one of our women.”
“I am not looking for an argument. We are all Kenyans now. We must all work for a more productive Kenya. You know that’s all I meant.”
We walked the rest of the way back to the compound in silence. We found Edgar at the Landrover, showing a rifle to Jeremiah and the drunken young men who watched in confused silence from the hulks of the abandoned Toyotas. I took it that Edgar had told Jeremiah about the glass positioned in his garage to do injury to someone. Now, by displaying the rifle, he was emphasizing that he would take action against anyone caught setting traps at his house. Perhaps this was the way a District Commissioner would handle matters in what, to me, was clearly a bygone era. Glancing at the sullen expressions of the men listening to Edgar, I wondered what their reactions would be to his treating them this way.

When we left, Owino stayed at Jeremiah’s compound. He insisted that Stephen remain as well despite the taunts the drunken layabouts still directed toward him. No one urged the pair to remain, I noticed. I was not certain why Owino insisted. Perhaps it was the availability of free beer. Or perhaps he thought that he and Stephen should try to firm up relations with the locals.
Edgar wanted to give his two informants, Barnabas and Anas, new assignments and took the four of us to a village shop where he bought us chai, local tea brewed as dark and thick as a soup. As Edgar rattled on about the new material he wanted, the two young men studied me. The presence of an American seemed to make it impossible for them to concentrate on Edgar’s instructions. Once we were alone I would apologize for spinning such webs of fascination.
After a time Barnabas asked me, “Will you write a story about us for your newspaper?”
“I’ve been wondering about that,” I acknowledged. I asked what they considered newsworthy about Mbere. What in the Division might interest my readers? They seemed stumped at first, but finally settled on the fact that the situation of their lives was gradually improving. I did not tell them that such a report would baffle my editors, men who thought news should emphasize problems and prophesy crises. I told them I was glad to learn about improvements. But I admitted that some things mystified me. “For example,” I said, “will Stephen ever be accepted in Mbere?”
The two young men looked at one another as if each hoped the other would deal with the question.
“Or is he accepted?” I went on. “His father keeps saying that all of you are Kenyans now. Is that true? Is the problem that I just don’t see it?”
They shrugged. They glanced at one another and then at Edgar. He smiled encouragingly, interested to see how they would handle this test.
Barnabas offered, “Well, we are all Kenyans now. That’s true.”
“So it doesn’t matter that Stephen is old enough to be a man and yet he is not circumcised?”
They were silent. Then Anas said, “Owino is not circumcised and everyone accepts that he is a man.” He added, “Stephen is my friend. I accept him as a man.”
I said I had the impression that the layabouts at Jeremiah’s did not.
“What exactly is the problem?” asked Edgar. “Is it circumcision or tribalism?”
The young men seemed uneasy at the mention of tribalism. It was a subject that must be discussed very discreetly.
“Things are changing,” Barnabas said. “But it takes time. Twenty years ago when it came time for my oldest sister to be circumcised, my father announced that he would not allow this ritual to be performed on any of his daughters. And he had eight of them.”
“Why was this?” I asked.
“Because it’s painful. It hurts women. In male circumcision the body is not really damaged. The pain lasts only a few days. With women it is different.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Quite a famous story hereabouts,” Edgar said.
“My father made his declaration and everyone opposed him. His parents. His brothers and their wives. My grandmother insisted that no Mbere girl achieved full womanhood unless she passed through this test. But my father held firm. When his parents and other villagers insisted it must be done, he moved away.”
“And he’s come back now?” I asked.
Barnabas nodded. “His mother lives with us now in the compound. Some of my uncles live there, too. My father has made things change. Maybe it is not so important about Stephen.”
“What do you say?” I asked Anas.
He seemed unwilling at first to reply. When no one else spoke, he finally said, “My father is a chief. He upholds tradition.”
“Owino claimed you should abandon tradition,” I said.
“How can we do that?” Anas asked. “I think my father is right. If we abandon our traditions, we will stop being Mbere.” He paused for a moment. Then he added, “But Stephen is my friend. I don’t know what to say. I accept him as a man whether he has a foreskin or not.”

Edgar and I found enough tins in the pantry to make ourselves some chak. While eating it, I asked how Jeremiah had reacted to receiving “what for.” “His dignity is offended, of course,” Edgar acknowledged. “But he’ll get the word out. That’s the important thing.”
We talked about his informants and I tried out some of my impressions on Edgar. I said that Barnabas struck me as being one of the new men of Mbere, of Kenya. Whereas, while Stephen and Anas were standing poised on the threshold of manhood, thrilled by the wider world opening before them, Barnabas had already crossed that threshold. He had taken a look at the world beyond it and had seen an alien culture with alien values, Western culture, white man’s modernity. “Going to university,” I said, “he’s about to step out of the tribal culture into the modern one, right? Must be a scary prospect.”
“Yes and no,” Edgar replied. “Barnabas will spend much of his life traveling between the two cultures. He’ll live with two sets of values, two styles of living.”
“Will he study medicine?” I asked.
Edgar thought that unlikely. “The government will tell him what to study and what they need are people trained in agriculture. If Mbere Division is fortunate, Barnabas will practice what he’s learned here. But most agriculture officials gravitate to the high-income areas. He may do that.”
“Will he turn out to be Owino then?”
“I hope not,” Edgar said. “Quentin’s been shunted off to a backwater where he can do little good and little harm. Why, I’m not sure. Must have crossed someone. Or infuriated someone by trying to be a white man.” Edgar assumed that upward mobility for Barnabas, who had an intellectual bent, would come through teaching and advanced degrees. “He might provide the brains for a successful agri-business – if he can partner himself with a man who has contacts. Probably a Kikuyu. Tough getting ahead when you’re from a minor tribe.”
“What about Anas? Always a peasant?”
“He’ll finish school here. Maybe even manage a decent pass for his school certificate. Then he’ll dash off to Nairobi. What happens then is anyone’s guess.”
“And Stephen?”
“A complicated question,” Edgar said. “Barnabas is stuck being forever an Mbere. And there are times when that will seem a real prison. Stephen is going to be what his father has in mind when he says: ‘We are Kenyans.’ We won’t know for a while whether that means he’ll be nothing or a new kind of–”
There was a sharp knocking at the door. Then suddenly Barnabas was standing in the kitchen, panting hard, a look of terror on his face. “Could you come?” he asked Edgar. “Stephen’s been hurt.”
“What’s happened?”
Barnabas looked at Edgar, then at me as if in my presence he could not speak. “You can tell us,” Edgar said. “What’s happened?”
Finally he managed to say, “They circumcised him.”
Edgar and I did not understand. We frowned at one another.
“Please come,” Barnabas pleaded. “They circumcised him. And the knife–”
“Where is he?” Edgar stood. He shoved his plate aside and nodded to me.
“He’s at Jeremiah’s,” Barnabas said. “They slit the top of–”
“Can you drive?” Edgar asked me. “I’m low on petrol.”
We hurried outside to the car. Edgar sat beside me in the passenger seat and Barnabas crawled into the back. I raced over unfamiliar roads in the dark. Edgar gave me directions and questioned Barnabas.
He reported that several hours after we left the compound Jeremiah and Owino argued about the bridewealth payment Jeremiah insisted Owino owed him. The young men drinking in the Toyotas had sided with Jeremiah. They had eventually gone to Owino’s house to fetch his wife and bring her home, intending to keep her at Jeremiah’s until the bridewealth debt was paid. At Owino’s they discovered Stephen and Anas who had begun to build Stephen’s house. The young men objected to this: Stephen was acting like a man, but he was not yet circumcised. They taunted and baited Stephen. A fight broke out. They seized both young men and took them back to the compound. There Jeremiah as chief would rule on whether or not Stephen could build the house. But Jeremiah wasn’t there. The young men had more beer. Eventually they decided to settle the matter themselves. They stripped Stephen. When Anas tried to stop them, they tied him up. Five men held Stephen down, one on each of his arms and three on his legs. The man who wielded the knife sliced through most of the foreskin. Then his hand slipped. The knife had cut into the tip of Stephen’s penis.

When we got to Jeremiah’s place no one was around except the old man. He was dead drunk on too much beer – or pretending to be – sitting in his newest Toyota. Barnabas shouted repeatedly for Stephen. At last we heard whimpering and found him cowering in bushes in a fetal ball. He was holding a cloth to his groin and bleeding. He would not let us see the bleeding. I got a blanket I kept in the trunk of the car and cloaked him in it. When he would not stand, remaining coiled into himself, whimpering, Barnabas, Edgar and I lifted him and carried him to the car. We placed him on the rear seat. We had to leave Barnabas behind; there was no room for him in the car. Edgar held Stephen’s hand. Once we hit the Nairobi road, he climbed into the rear seat. He held the boy like a father while I drove as fast as I dared through the black night.

When we got to Nairobi Hospital, nurses put Stephen on a gurney and rolled him into a surgery. Edgar in high DC** dudgeon insisted on accompanying him. The head nurse telephoned a surgeon. When he arrived and saw me, he waved. He was an American I had met socially. I knew he would do the best he could.
The doctor insisted that Edgar leave the surgery. He joined me outside where the air was cool and the darkness peaceful. “Those infernal Africans,” he said. “Drunken louts. How could they!”
I said nothing.
“I’m fed up with Kenya,” Edgar went on. “This has been an intolerable year. I can’t wait to get back to teaching people who want to learn.”
I moved off and paced. Eventually I found another entrance to the hospital. I went inside and waited near the surgery.
Finally the doctor emerged. Stephen was going to be all right, he said. He had removed the foreskin and repaired the wound to the tip of the penis. “His equipment won’t win any beauty contests,” the surgeon said. “But he’ll be able to father children.”
“That’s a relief,” I replied.
“He may not have as much pleasure doing it as most men,” he continued, “but he’ll be able to do it.”
I thanked the surgeon and went to find Edgar. I told him the news and we went to the car. As we drove to my house through the darkness, neither of us spoke.

Continuing our circuit of Mbere, David led us toward Riandu Primary School. The homestead of Philip, the elder of one of Mbere’s 50-odd clans, was there. David wanted to check in with Philip to learn what had come of his desire to sell another piece of land.

The Mbere were a small tribe, clients of the more numerous and influential Kikuyu, the tribe chiefly responsible for Kenya’s push to independence. Philip’s desire to sell the piece of land stemmed from his determination to acquire yet another Toyota. He wanted the Toyota even though he could not drive. His son chauffeured him around the district.

Philip of the Toyotas

This would be Philip’s second Toyota. He had already sold one piece of land to Kikuyu outsiders. They had paid 20,000 shillings (then a bit less than $3000) plus a Toyota valued at Shs. 10,000 (about $1500). The bargain had turned out badly for Philip, for the Toyota proved to need constant repair. Even so, he maintained brand loyalty.

In fact, Philip bought the first Toyota in a deal in which each side cheated the other. If the Toyota was a lemon, well, Philip did not really own the land he sold. It actually belonged to his entire clan. Even as an elder, he had no right to sell the land. He assumed that when the long-promised land adjudication process got under way, the Kikuyu speculators would discover that their title to the land was invalid. The adjudicators would tell them to return it to the clan and do what they could privately to repossess what they’d paid for it. By then Philip would have another Toyota bought in the same way.

Probably the land speculators understood the game. As Kikuyus, they were counting on the advantages of belonging to a numerous and influential tribe. At the end of the day the adjudicators, probably brother Kikuyus, might well give them title to the land.

At Philip’s homestead Anas saw Johnson, his age-mate. They had reached manhood together through the crowning event of their lives, their circumcision. This rite, which Mbere girls as well as boys underwent, symbolized successful passage through tribal testing into adulthood. Afterwards a girl was ready for marriage and usually soon entered one. A young man would build and live in his own house and refrain from the work of women and boys.

Anas teased Johnson because he still carried water for his mother. Johnson shrugged, reluctant to admit this failing. “It’s so much easier for me to carry,” he mumbled. “Anyway isn’t that what they’re teaching us at school?” he added. “To respect women?” Anas rolled his eyes: obviously a white man’s notion!

As we continued David’s circuit, driving toward Siakago, the colors of Mbere Division shone fresh and intense in the rain-washed air. Its green terrain rolled expansively into the blue and purple distances, promising fertility, but failing to deliver it. Clouds still hung dramatically overhead. Except for the car’s motor the countryside was clothed in a magnificent and all-pervading stillness.

Siakago was a small place: about a dozen commercial buildings, several of them bars, and an open-air market built at a fork in the road. David stopped the Land Rover not far from where a young man, spare and loose-jointed, leaned against a tree. Glasses rode his nose to mark him as an intellectual. The blue suit he wore indicated that he was no stranger to places like Nairobi. But he was very thin. The belt encircling his waist continued halfway around his body; it suggested youth and many meals missed. But the adoring young girls crowding about him suggested star-quality; they seemed content merely to behold his bashful being. To show that he was not cowed by white men, he said to David: “You are late.”

David acknowledged this fact and introduced us. “This is Barnabas,” he said. “Quite a celebrity hereabouts.” The young man nodded. He had passed his Higher School Certificate examinations, tests sent out from England and graded there. He had done so well, in fact, that he qualified for a four-year government-paid course at the University of Nairobi. Only a dozen Mbere boys had ever achieved this accomplishment. It accounted for Barnabas’ star power.

“What will you study at university?” Donanne asked.

“Med’cine.” Barnabas told us that although traditional doctors still practiced in Mbere, people no longer believed in their cures as they once had. When he qualified as a doctor, Barnabas said, he would probably work for the government.

In the late afternoon we drove Barnabas back to his homestead in Kiritiri. On the road we picked up his younger sister. As we approached the homestead, Barnabas gave her his packages to carry; she took them proudly. We entered the homestead walking single file, Barnabas leading us, moving easily and empty-handed toward the thatched mud houses in his blue suit.

Watched by large-eyed children and heralded by barking dogs, we passed between the houses of Barnabas’s relatives. We met his father, Stephen, a man with a gentle and intelligent face. It was alert, alive, etched with character developed across a long life. Stephen had eight daughters and a son. Unlike most peasant fathers, he had educated all of them. Barnabas showed us the new house he was building himself and led us through his father’s farm: a four-acre patch of subsistence crops – cow-peas, finger millet, sorghum, and maize all laid out in precisely straight rows – and a two-acre patch of cotton, his cash crop.

This homestead proved to be a place of celebrated men, Stephen setting the example for his son. Some time earlier Stephen had defied tribal tradition. When his first daughter entered puberty, he announced his opposition to clitoridectomy, female circumcision. He declared that no daughter of his would undergo the operation. Mbere was shocked. His parents opposed him. No Mbere female acceded to true womanhood, his mother claimed, unless she underwent this test. Without it no daughter of his would ever find a husband. The opposition was so strong that Stephen moved away from Mbere. But things had harmonized again. Stephen’s brothers had settled with him at his homestead. His mother also lived there.

Barnabas came back with us as far as the Land Rover. As we drove to the road, he stood blue-suited in a crowd of children, waving against the cloud-dark sky.

Next post: How it’s easier to get to Mbere than to leave it.

This visit to Mbere served as the basic material for Fred’s story “North of Nairobi” in the collection Africa, Africa! Fifteen Stories.
Fred has just published a new romance mystery novel JOSS The Ambassador’s Wife, set in southern Africa.
Check out both books at www.FredericHunter.com.

Read the story “North of Nairobi” right here:

NORTH OF NAIROBI
At Embu the asphalt paving ended. I did not go far along the murram road before I hit patches of standing water and mud. Once I traveled beyond the area where most people spoke some English, the car slid onto the shoulder and would not move. It was not badly mired, but I could not budge the car myself. I sounded the horn. No one came to help. I was stranded. I paced on the road and swore at everything in Africa that does not work.
After about half an hour a teenaged boy came riding along on a bicycle. He had two long planks of wood strapped to the carrying rack. I waved to him and called, “Could you help me?”
“It is all right,” he answered, slowing and dismounting. “I have helped to push many people from mud. My father often gets himself stuck.”
The teenager carefully laid down his bike so as not to damage the planks and came toward me. “Does your father have a car?” I asked. There would not be many car-owners in this district.
“He borrows a Toyota.” The boy smiled behind his glasses, shyly, but with a knowing resignation. Then he added, “But he does not drive very well.”
The boy examined the position of the car. He smiled and said, “I will look for some people to help us,” and trudged off into the bush. I liked his openness and the curious feeling of confidence he gave me that he would shortly resolve my predicament. And he did. After about twenty minutes he reappeared with half a dozen Africans he had found somewhere. They pushed the car free of the shoulder on the first try. I thanked them all and offered the boy a ride.
We lashed his bicycle and the wooden planks to the rear of the car. As we started along the road, he asked, “Are you the American journalist?” It turned out that he knew my anthropologist friend Edgar and had heard from his father that a journalist was arriving for the weekend. “He is Edgar’s great friend,” said the boy.
I acknowledged that, indeed, I was a journalist. Wanting to be friendly – he had, after all, been friendly to me – and seeing a certain bafflement about me in his eyes, I explained that most overseas journalists reported only on events in places like Nairobi. Nonetheless, I had a hunch that the real life of Africa was in the countryside. So I had come to take a look.
“Will you write about us?” the boy asked.
I said that perhaps I might find something to interest American readers, but perhaps not.
“It is all right,” he told me once again.
“I take it you can direct me to Edgar’s house,” I said. “I’m not sure I can find it from his directions.”
The boy smiled as if with a knowledge that directions were not Edgar’s strong point. Then he said, “I am sorry that it took me so long to get help. But when I speak their language, they hear my accent and they do not trust me.”
I glanced at him. “You are not Mbere then?” I asked.
“I am from Nyanza.” He spoke a sentence or two in a tribal language and watched my reaction. “That was Luo,” he said. “Did you understand it?”
I shook my head. “What are you doing here?”
“I live here. My father is the government officer.”
“You mean the district commissioner?”
The boy laughed. “He is really the agricultural assistant. But he calls himself the government officer to seem more important. The Mbere laugh at him for this.”
“Do you think it’s funny?”
“Yes,” he said after a moment. Then he added, “But in Africa we do not laugh at our fathers.”
“Do you like it here?”
“It is all right.”
“But you’d rather be in Nyanza?”
“Yes, it is my home. My mother is there with my brothers and sisters.” After a pause he added, “My father has taken an Mbere wife.”
“I see.”
“It is difficult,” he said. I glanced across at him. He was looking straight ahead through the windshield and I wondered if he was glad to have someone to talk to about it. “She is no older than I am, and she does not really want me to live in the house.” He fell silent. Then after pointing out a turning, he continued, “She does not speak Luo and she is not happy when my father and I use our own language. But if I speak Mbere, she laughs and calls me ignorant.”
“Do you go to school here?” I asked. He nodded. “And you have friends?”
“A few. But more and more it becomes complicated with them, too.” He gazed pensively at the road. “Last summer all my Mbere friends were circumcised,” he explained. “We Luos do not circumcise. Now my schoolmates think they have become men while I am still a child. And I do not think that Mbere men like it that an uncircumcised child-man like me lives in the same house with one of their women.”
We reached the long, rutted drive to Edgar’s house and I invited the boy to come in and say hello to my host. But he declined. He said that he might come by later in the afternoon. He untied the bicycle and the planks from their perch on the rear of the car and retied the planks to the carrying case. As he was about to ride off down the road, I asked, “Would you mind if I took your picture?”
The request surprised him. Why would I want his picture? Then he smiled shyly, “Will it appear in a magazine?”
“Maybe in a newspaper.”
He seemed pleased at being connected to America in even so tangential a way and posed beside his bicycle. I withdrew the notebook from my jacket pocket and got his name – Stephen – and his age which was 16. Then I asked, “Have you talked to your father about these problems with your schoolmates?”
Stephen nodded. “I asked him to let me go back to Nyanza. Edgar has told him that he should let me return. But my father says that we are all Kenyans now and it does not matter where we live or who is circumcised.” Stephen said nothing for what seemed a long while. “The school fees he would have to pay in Nyanza are higher,” he explained at last. I asked Stephen once again if he would like to come in and say hello to Edgar; perhaps we could have some lunch together. But he refused again very politely. “Perhaps I will come by later on,” he said and rode off.

Edgar’s house was large and stood on a rise of land. It was the former residence, so he’d told me, of the European foreman of the now-defunct British-American Tobacco Company processing plant. It was past 2:30. Hungry and quite thirsty, I was glad to arrive.
But the house was deserted. The doors were all locked. I walked around the house trying them. I hallooed, but no one was about, not even a servant. I was surprised to find the place deserted. Edgar had told me on the phone that he’d be there, drafting a report. But no matter. I took out reading I had brought and made myself comfortable on a porch overlooking the countryside.
In fact, I did not know Edgar well. The first time I met him, shortly after I’d been assigned overseas, he came to lunch with an historian specializing in pre-colonial Africa whom I’d called for a briefing. Edgar was then acting chair of the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. As we ate together at the Faculty Club, a preoccupation intensified the school-masterish formality that he had picked up in some non-California life. He had grown up in English-speaking South Africa, I learned, and without evidence I attributed his fuss-budget quality to the schooling he’d received there. After attending university Edgar had joined the British Colonial Service during its last years and had served as a District Commissioner in what is now Tanzania. Later he received a PhD** in Anthropology from Oxford; his dissertation detailed how life was lived and organized in a small town in the hinterlands behind Accra. During our lunch Edgar said quite frankly that he was fed up with California. Wistfully he mentioned more than once that he still owned land in the Ghanaian town and hoped to retire there.
While we waited for coffee, Edgar acknowledged that he’d become a center of controversy on campus. He had reprimanded a young social anthropologist; “dressed him down,” was his term. This colleague was an iconoclast of romantic reputation who lectured barefoot wearing only khaki shorts and a tank top. Sometimes he did not appear for his classes at all. It was not surprising, Edgar said, given the nature of students, that many of them rallied to the instructor’s defense. But I felt that it had surprised Edgar. I sensed that he still expected to be treated like a DC**. Apparently students had picketed his classes; they had written angry letters to the student newspaper. Edgar merely said, “We soldier on.”
After reading on the porch for about fifteen minutes I no longer felt alone. Looking up, I saw an African with a studiedly tweedy look staring at me through the glass of the porch doors. He wore glasses, a tie, a rumpled shirt and suit trousers. He was smoking a pipe and a copy of the Economist hung from his hand. We stared at each other for a moment.
“Is Dr. Pettys around?” I finally asked, rising from the wooden chair.
“No, he’s not,” said the African through the door.
A pause. We continued to stare at each other. “This is his house, isn’t it?”
“Yes, this is his house.”
The African gazed at me without expression, and I noticed that he stood in stockinged-feet. “Dr. Pettys told me he’d be here.”
“He’s in hospital.”
“Is he all right?” I tossed my reading aside. “Look, could you open this door? What’s happened to Dr. Pettys?”
The African smiled, unlocked the door and opened it. “Perhaps I meant ‘at’ hospital,” he said. I felt that he had taken some pleasure in needlessly arousing my concern. “Edgar’s quite all right. The houseboy had an accident, and Edgar has run him to hospital.”
I explained that I had come as a weekend guest and asked if I might come inside. “Yes, please come,” the African said finally. “Have you had any lunch?”
“No, as a matter of fact, and I’m starving.”
“Let’s nip into the kitchen and see what’s there.” I brought my overnight case inside and found the kitchen myself. The stocking-footed African was there, getting beer for us. “There’s tinned meat in the fridge,” he said, “and bread there in the plastic. Make yourself a sandwich if you like.”
I asked, “What happened to the servant?”
“He was putting my bicycle into a shed I use when I don’t come by car. A large pane of glass fell on him. Nasty business.”
“A pane of glass? How did that happen?”
“I’ve no idea. Curious kind of accident, isn’t it?”
“Will the man be all right?”
“Oh, I expect so. These fellows are quite hearty. Here’s to your health.” He lifted his glass to me, drank some beer and padded back into the main room of the house.
When I joined him there, he had settled onto the couch; he had apparently been napping there when I arrived. He was rattling his magazine and noisily sipping his beer. Standing over him I introduced myself, giving my name; I hoped to elicit a corresponding introduction from him. He offered his hand, but without otherwise stirring and then indicated a chair across from him.
“I’m afraid I haven’t any idea who you are,” I said, sitting down.
“Oh,” he replied, “I’m Quentin Owino, the government officer here.”
“Ah ha!” I said, taking fresh interest in the man. I wondered if Stephen had refused my invitations to come inside the house because he knew his father would be there. “Edgar has influential friends.”
My flattery pleased him. He looked up from his paper and smiled. “I am the second most important man in Mbere,” Owino said. “After Edgar.” I smiled at this compliment to my host. “We are great chums,” he added.
“Government officer?” I asked. “What does that mean: District Commissioner?” Owino would know that this was the position Edgar had held. I wondered if he saw himself in the same role, the civilizer’s role.
“One does many jobs in a small place like this,” he replied.
“I think it must have been your son who rescued me from some mud.” I described the boy.
“That would be Stephen,” Owino said. “A jolly good chap, if I may say so.”
“Yes, I quite liked him. I suppose he must miss Nyanza.”
“Did he say that?”
“He merely said his mother was living there.”
“He gets there often enough,” Owino said. “It is best for him to know more than one village.” He smiled. “Travel broadens, as they say. Don’t you agree?”
“I suppose it does. People here accept him, do they?”
“Of course. Why not? We’re all Kenyans now.” He smiled again. “Actually this is great experience for him. Look at the British. They sent their children off to school at the age of six. And they conquered the world.” He laughed. “Stephen is happy here.”
I drank some beer and looked about the room. Owino filled his pipe and continued to watch me. “It must be a great challenge,” I said, wanting to draw him out, “being the government’s officer in a place like this.”
He shrugged this off. “Mbere is not much of a place,” he said. “A small tribe, no political influence, clients of the Kikuyu. Most of the people are ignorant and want to stay that way.”
“But it was chosen as a target area for rural development, wasn’t it? Isn’t that why Edgar’s here?”
“Yes, but how much has been accomplished? Edgar can tell you about that.” Then, perhaps recalling that I was a journalist, Owino fussed at the lighting of his pipe, watching me carefully, wondering if he would be quoted. “But, of course, government service is challenging anywhere,” he commented for safety’s sake.
“You’re being too modest,” I said, pushing him a little. “You are a Luo and that can’t make you very popular here – even if you are all Kenyans.”
He shrugged again and smiled half to himself. “Indeed, there is still some truth to that, regrettably,” he acknowledged. “But I am perhaps unusual. I do not leave the division every weekend, for example, like most government officers. The people respect that. It means that I am less a stranger to them.”
“You and Stephen live as bachelors, do you?”
“We Africans do not make good bachelors.” Owino smiled and punctuated the smile with a shrug. Surely I understood. “I have taken an Mbere wife,” he said. “A year ago. I needed a wife to cook my food and give me sons. Why should I have the expense of keeping a servant?” We laughed together. “You will say I am an exploiter,” he giggled, “but it is not true.”
The sweet scent of his pipe tobacco began to fill the room. Edgar’s house was starting to seem more like the faculty club where I had met him than a living room in rural Africa. Owino smiled with a touch of bravado that masqueraded as pride. “She has already given me a son.”
“You must be very proud of yourself,” I said. “Congratulations.”
He shrugged. “It is a way to show that we are all Kenyans.” Then he added,
“There are many sons left in me. It is good for the Mbere to understand that.”
I sipped some beer. “Maybe I’ll have a sandwich,” I said. I went into the kitchen, found bread, peanut butter and jam and proceeded to make us each a sandwich. I sensed that Owino would be happy to eat Edgar’s food, especially if I prepared it.
He soon entered the kitchen and watched me. Then he challenged: “You perhaps do not think polygamy civilized.”
“I have no views on the matter,” I said. “However, I’m sure it’s a lot more complicated to have two wives than to have only one.”
“It is perhaps less civilized than monogamy,” he said. “But the Mbere regard it as a sign of wealth and prestige. So it has done me no harm to have a local wife.”
“Is it difficult for Stephen?”
“Why should it be?” he asked quickly. I answered with a shrug. “There are no difficulties.” After a moment he added, “Some minor irritations, that’s all. The woman wants to feel important and orders Stephen around. Of course, he does not like it. I tell him to be patient. She does it mainly because she is Mbere and knows she is ignorant. She feels inferior to us.”
I cut the sandwiches in halves, put them onto coffee saucers that did not match and handed the larger sandwich to Owino. “Why not send him back to Nyanza?” I asked.
“A son is a joy to a father – especially a son who is so superior.” I nodded. “You think me unreasonable,” Owino charged.
“How could I? I know nothing about the matter.”
“If I send him back to Nyanza,” he explained. “His mother will put him to work. Ever since I married here, she complains that she has no money. I want Stephen here to make sure he does not neglect his education.” Owino poured us each another beer and we took them and the sandwiches back into the living room. “It is very probable that Stephen will pass his Higher School Certificate Examinations well enough so that the government pays his entire university education.” Owino lowered his voice confidentially. “And I tell you his chances of getting a place at the University of Nairobi, which is entirely run by Kikuyus, are better if he passes from a school in Mbere than one in Nyanza.”
“He should be very pleased with himself here then,” I said.
“Well, yes.” Owino shrugged. “Perhaps he does not like the living arrangements. He has his private room. I wanted to put an outside door in it for him, but it is a government house and this is against regulations. He wanted to build a small house for himself like some of his Mbere friends have done, but that, I think, is asking for trouble.”
“Why is that?” I inquired. I remembered Stephen’s wooden planks. Had he intended them for this purpose?
“Mbere boys build themselves small houses once they are circumcised. We Luos do not circumcise; manhood is more than the cutting off of a foreskin, although some people do not understand this. But if Stephen as an uncircumcised Luo builds himself a hut, there will be trouble. The Mbere do not yet regard him as a man. It is not the sort of trouble that cannot be straightened out. I am the government officer here, after all. Still trouble avoided is the best kind to have.”

We now heard a car pull into the drive. “Must be Edgar,” I said. I started toward the door. Owino lagged behind, putting on his shoes.
Outside Edgar was standing before the Landrover, peering into the garage where the glass had fallen. In a short-sleeved khaki shirt and work shorts that matched the sandy color of his hair, wearing desert boots and knee-socks, his arms akimbo, he seemed never to have stopped being a DC**. We shook hands. I said I’d had no trouble finding the place and had had some lunch with the help of Owino.
“Still here, is he?” Edgar’s voice carried an edge of irritation. “We’ve had a real balls-up,” he said. “Owino tell you about it?” I said that he had. “No damn coincidence the glass fell.”
“Foul play?”
“Bloody booby-trap. Meant to fall. Not sure who the intended victim was: me or Owino. I’m damned sure it wasn’t Kamau.”
Edgar wore the expression of fuss-budget impatience I remembered from our first meeting at UCSB**. I was amused, but did not show my reaction; booby-traps were a serious matter. In fact, I was glad to see him – and not only because a working anthropologist makes an excellent contact for a journalist covering Africa.
When I first arrived in Nairobi, I often wished I had kept in closer contact with Edgar; I wondered if he were still at UCSB**. Then on a reporting trip I saw him at Roberts Field in Liberia. We were waiting for the same plane. I re-introduced myself and we rode together to Freetown, Sierra Leone, where I left the flight.
He had just arrived from the States, he said, after what had been an almost intolerable year at UCSB**. “I have never been so ready to leave anywhere,” he said. “Faculty discipline totally collapsed. Faculty-student communication no longer exists.” He had been forced to fire the young anthropologist who had been such a problem. The action had triggered a campus row. Students had demonstrated; some called him a “fascist pig” to his face. Colleagues had questioned his professional credentials, merely because he was born in South Africa. He shook his head as if still not quite able to conceive of what had gone wrong.
“I’ve never so longed for the order of Africa,” he continued. “Yes, I said: the order. Life in the sophisticated world is too chaotic. That’s why I’ve come back. I may give up teaching.” He had arranged an early sabbatical and would spend the upcoming academic year in Kenya, evaluating an intensive development program in Mbere Division a couple of hours north of Nairobi. The program would be launched almost immediately. He was eager to get started.
Africa had given Edgar a giddy sense of renewal. When we said goodbye on the Freetown tarmac, his joyfulness amused – and also touched – me. “Look at that!” he said enthusiastically. He pointed across the airstrip to a trio of women carrying babies on their backs and clay pots on their heads. They were moving with a peasant grace beneath flowering trees; behind them lay crudely tilled fields and thatched huts. I saw them as elements in an overall picture of stunted personal development and cruel, needless poverty. Edgar saw them as beautiful.
“A classic scene!” Edgar commented, smiling. “Listen to their laughter!” And, indeed, a rich, throaty laughter floated from them through the morning heat and quietude. “They’re in harmony with their environment,” he said. “And their traditions.” He grinned. “How glorious to be back home in Africa!” When my luggage arrived, we shook hands and agreed to meet in Nairobi.
Over the following months we did occasionally meet there. He always invited me to visit Mbere. But whenever I expressed interest in actually doing so, he suggested that I hold off. A few matters remained to be processed through the ministry. “Wait till the project really gets started,” he would say. Behind this excuse I sensed that as a man might want to be alone with his bride, Edgar wanted to be alone with Africa. Since he was unmarried – except to his work – I did not press the matter.
But ministerial delays dragged on. Eventually his invitations became more heartfelt. “You really ought to come,” he would say in a tone of loneliness. “I’d love to talk with an American.” He would add, “I live like a king in Mbere. Really, I’ve begun some ethnography. It’s fascinating stuff.”
By late April annoyance and frustration were sounding in his voice. The ministry had not acted. Misunderstandings, inefficiency and fear of decision-making had delayed the Mbere project by more than a year. His sabbatical was almost over; it had been wasted – at least in terms of his observing a microcosm of rural development and doing scholarly writing about it. Whether or not the ethnography would justify his remaining in Mbere seemed unclear. And so I had agreed to a visit.
“Will Kamau be all right?” I asked now.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “In hospital for a week. I don’t know what we’ll do for chak while you’re here. I cook worse than you do.” He eyed me dryly. “My hunch is that as a chef you’ve given a few blokes the trots in your time.” He looked back into the garage where the glass had fallen. ‘The question right now,” he said, “is what do we do about this?”
A young man now emerged from so deep inside the garage that I had not seen him earlier. He was perhaps twenty, spare and loose-jointed, not tall so much as very slender. He wore a white long-sleeved shirt and dark trousers fastened by a belt so long that it seemed to loop beyond the buckle almost halfway around his body. He had a studious look, emphasized by glasses and a copy carried lightly in his hand of the tabloid-sized Nairobi Daily Nation which he used as a briefcase. He gazed at me without hostility, but I sensed that he was not prepared to accept me merely as a friend of Edgar’s as both Stephen and Owino were ready to do. Instead he would watch to see who I turned out to be. “This is Barnabas,” Edgar said. “The chief informant of my ethnographic study.”
“Hello, Barnabas,” I said, offering my hand which he shook. Since Edgar had not stated the information, I gave him my name and explained that I was an American from Nairobi.
“Journalist,” Edgar said.
Barnabas nodded, but said nothing.
“Barnabas is a local celebrity,” Edgar continued. “Passed his Higher School Certificate Examination. Which only about a dozen boys from Mbere have ever done.”
“Congratulations,” I said, wondering if this were not the exam Owino intended Stephen to pass. I wondered, too, if the time would ever come when Edgar would call a twenty-year-old a “young man” instead of a “boy.”
“Barnabas goes to university next fall,” Edgar went on. “And all the girls in the Division come out to watch him walk by.”
Barnabas smiled and lowered his eyes.
“What would you like to study?” I asked.
“I would like to become a doctor,” he told me. “The people here still practice traditional medicine. But they no longer believe strongly in its cures and so they are not so effective. I would like to bring modern medicine to Mbere.”
“Good,” I told him. “Can you study that in Nairobi?”
“Perhaps I must go to U.K**.,” he replied.

Inside the house Edgar made himself a sandwich in the kitchen while I talked with Barnabas and Owino. Before long Owino went to join Edgar. I could not help noticing the look of distrust that Barnabas cast at him as he left.
“I need a favor, old man,” Owino said to Edgar in the kitchen. “You couldn’t lend me five hundred shillingi, could you?” My conversation with Barnabas had not resumed and we both overheard Owino’s request for what would have been about seventy dollars. I glanced at Barnabas.
“Jeremiah up to his old tricks?” we heard Edgar ask.
“I’m afraid so,” Owino told him. I picked up a magazine and thumbed through it. Barnabas opened his copy of the Daily Nation and shuffled through papers. We both heard the conversation continue.
“You’re going to have to stand up to him, you know,” Edgar said.
“But how?” Owino asked. “If I refuse him money, he calls her home and I have no one to cook my meals.”
“Just now I have no one to cook mine either,” complained Edgar lightly.
“But I sleep with this cook,” Owino reminded him. “So it is very hard.”
“Send her and the baby up to Nyanza. Let her see how good you are to her. Let her see what it’s like to be a second wife.”
“She would never go to Nyanza.”
“You’re her husband. Make her go. In any case, I can’t spare more shillingi.”
I glanced again at Barnabas; he was studying me. Since it was obvious that we had both heard the conversation in the kitchen, I asked: “What’s that all about?”
Barnabas paused a moment as if trying to decide if I merited an explanation.
“How about three hundred? Is that possible?”
“I’m sorry, Quentin. The bank is closed.”
Barnabas and I were still looking at one another. He said quietly, “Owino’s wife is the daughter of a local chief. He keeps changing the terms of the bridewealth arrangement because he wants money.”
“I thought bridewealth was fixed at the time of the marriage.”
Barnabas nodded. “But Owino is not Mbere. So when Jeremiah insists that he owes more money, his kinsmen support him. If Owino does not pay, they go to his place and bring his wife and the baby back to her father’s shamba.”
“Why does Jeremiah need money?” I asked.
“He buys cars,” Barnabas said. “Toyotas. Used.”
“He has more than one car?”
“It is not hard to drive a car into the ground here. Especially a used one, badly maintained. Jeremiah never gives care to his cars and when the local mechanics can no longer repair a car he has mistreated, he buys a new one. He bought his fifth Toyota this week. He’s having a beer party for his kinsmen at his shamba today.”
“The kind of money Owino’s asking for in there: that can’t buy a car.”
“It buys the beer,” said Barnabas.
“What buys the cars?”
“Jeremiah sells tribal land to Kikuyu land merchants. They pay him in used Toyotas.”
“Is tribal land his to sell?”
“No. But he is the chief.”
“Can’t you get rid of him?” Barnabas said nothing. “There must be some process for that,” I said.
“In the old days,” he replied, “when a chief outlived his wisdom, people killed him. We can’t do that anymore.”
I detected the slightest of twinkles in Barnabas’ eyes.

Later that day outside Jeremiah’s compound, young men sat drinking beer lolling on the fenders or sitting inside the rusting hulks of four Toyota sedans. Because my car was unknown to them, they stared when it pulled up and parked. When our party left the car and the young men saw who we were, they hailed Edgar in friendship, bidding him to have some beer. They sang out as well as at Owino, in a manner that struck me as companionable, but also derisive. His status as government officer won him little respect with this gang. They hailed Barnabas, but he maintained a scholar’s distance from the rowdies. As for Stephen, who had joined us, he too kept his distance. The young men seemed openly scornful of him.
We passed the newest Toyota, bright red and newly waxed. A once-dented front fender, now repaired, had paint of a different, more orange hue. I asked Barnabas about the young men’s taunts. “They say Stephen cannot drink beer,” he explained. “It is not for children. Beer can be drunk only by circumcised men.”
The compound was no more than a collection of mud and wattle huts and granaries with a platform upon which grasses for thatching had been piled. There were also a small, roofed enclosure for calves and a larger cattle corral of thickly packed tree branches and stumps. Edgar led us through it with the measured, imperial pace that I supposed he had used during his tenure as a District Commissioner and had picked up from movie versions of “King Solomon’s Mines.” We moved forward to greet the patriarch – obviously Jeremiah – who sat on a contraption of bent tree branches shaped into a chair and covered with a cowhide. He had gray bristles for a beard and watched us through half-closed but intelligent and suspicious eyes. As Edgar reached him, he lurched to his feet. They bowed to one another and shook hands. Owino bowed as well, taking the old man’s hand deferentially, holding it in both of his. I was introduced and bowed deeply.
Edgar congratulated the old man on his acquisition of yet another Toyota. He accepted beer and waited while Bentley, one of Jeremiah’s sons, brought him a chair. He said to me in a low voice, “Have Owino give you a shamba tour. He’s worked with Bentley. I’m going to give the old boy what-for about the glass in the garage.”
I collected Owino who had gotten himself some beer and asked to see the shamba. He called to Bentley who ignored him until Edgar intervened and in his best DC** manner instructed him to show me around. Barnabas and Stephen tagged along.
As we headed toward the fields, a figure flashed past. Stephen called out, “Anas!” and ran after him. A youth Stephen’s age poked his head around the back of a hut. Barnabas called out to him, a friendly taunting in Mbere. The youth – Anastasio was his name – appeared. He was introduced to me and carefully wiped his hands against his shirt. He gazed at me as if beholding a ghost or some figure of wonder, then offered one of the still-wet hands for me to shake.
“He has never seen an American before,” Barnabas said.
Stephen explained that we were old friends; he had rescued me from mud. “Anas” was impressed. Stephen grinned and asked, “Were you carrying water?”
Anas seemed uncertain what to say. But since his shoes and pants legs were splattered, the answer was clear.
“It is all right!” said Stephen with a laugh. “I won’t tell. Barnabas doesn’t care. And Bentley won’t notice.”
Anas looked up ahead where Owino was walking with Bentley. “It is so much easier for me to carry it than for her to,” he said. “And anyway we are in higher school now and they are telling us things must change.”
“I am going to build my house,” Stephen told Anas. “Will you help me? Or do you have to stay and drink beer in those dead cars?”
“I can help you,” Anas replied softly. “You helped me.”
Barnabas looked concerned at hearing this declaration. He slowed his pace to separate himself from the others and since I was walking with him, I slowed as well. I asked about the shamba’s crops. He pointed out those in a five-acre plot: cow peas, finger millet, sorghum and maize, subsistence crops all laid out in precisely straight rows. A three-acre section was devoted to cotton, Jeremiah’s cash crop. “Owino has made quite a good shamba here for Jeremiah and Bentley,” he said. He added, “It could do with a bit of weeding.”
“What was all that about the water?” I asked. Barnabas glanced at me with a look of either confusion or defensiveness, I was not sure which. I persisted, “Is there something about Anas carrying water that is…” I let my voice trail off.
Barnabas said nothing for a moment, then decided to speak. “Anas is a man now. He has been circumcised.”
“And carrying water: that’s women’s work?” On the drive up from Nairobi I had seen women struggling with large drums of water on their backs. They supported the drums, their necks straining, on tumplines that stretched across their foreheads. In Kikuyu villages I had seen women who had carried water this way for so long that tumplines had formed depressions across their foreheads.
“Traditionally carrying water is the work of women,” Barnabas said. I made no reply. After a moment he continued, “Anas does not like to see his mother carrying water. He is much stronger than she is. But the other men here say that it is her job. So he does it when he hopes they will not see.”
We walked on and I thought of the men drinking beer in the derelict Toyotas. After a moment I said lightly, “Sometimes my women readers ask me exactly what it is that African men do.”
Barnabas smiled, but said nothing.

When we caught up with the others, Bentley was bending over a mesh trap he had built to cover a hole in the ground. Caught in the trap were hundreds of flying ants. They resembled large-bodied balls of fat the size of a little finger to the first joint; to these succulent blobs Nature had attached long, transparent wings. On these the fattened ants flew out of the ground, venturing forth to start a new colony. I had encountered such ants in my own yard. I had even felt terrorized by the fluttering of their wings for the entire experience was like an eco-horror movie come true. But I had learned not to step on the ants. Wherever I squished them, they left grease spots that lasted for months and I could not wear the shoes indoors.
Now Bentley stuck his hands beneath the mesh and extracted a handful of the ants. Some were motionless; the wings of others still fluttered. He closed the trap and transferred the ants into a woven basket he carried. He withdrew his hand with one of the insects held between his fingers. He closed the basket, ripped the wings from the specimen he held and plopped it into his mouth. He closed his eyes. He smiled as a child might with candy. The other Africans gathered around him, begging him to open the basket. When he did, they each reached in, withdrew insects, removed their wings and ate them, chattering and laughing at the pleasure of the delicacy.
After a while Stephen came over to me, carrying several ants in a nest made of his hands. Barnabas and Anas tagged behind him. “Please,” he said. “Would you like?”
I smiled. “No, thank you,” I replied.
“They are delicious,” Anas assured me.
“I’m sure they are.”
“You will not have?” Stephen asked again.
When I declined, Stephen and Anas watched me with fascination, grinning, smacking and licking their lips as they plucked wings from the ants and tossed them into their mouths. Barnabas stood several paces away and watched me as well, eating ants as one might eat popcorn one kernel at a time.
“You think we are barbarians, don’t you?” he challenged. “For eating ants.”
“No,” I said.
“Then why not have one?” he asked.
“Not my thing,” I said. “I couldn’t eat snails in France. Or greasy meat pies in England. I don’t like tofu in Nigeria. Or in California.”
Stephen and Anas watched me, grinning and eating. Barnabas studied me, unsure what to make of me. I realized that trotting out the places I’d been only exaggerated the differences between us.
Before I could think of a way to close the gap, we heard Owino and Bentley arguing. “But you must weed if you want good crops,” Owino declared. Bentley shrugged off this advice, fiddling with the trap which he had now completely cleaned out. “If you don’t weed, the worms will eat them, not your family.” Bentley shook his head. He checked the trap again and moved off.
As we followed him back to the compound, Owino said: “He won’t weed.”
“It is women’s work,” said Anas.
“Well, where is his wife? Why doesn’t she weed? They will lose their crops.”
“She is eating right now at her father’s shamba,” said Anas.
“And he is surly to me because he’s sleeping alone?” Owino dusted off his trousers and tightened the knot of his tie. “It is not my fault he’s sleeping alone.” We walked for a moment in silence. “Bentley has a good garden there, thanks to my advice,” Owino said. “But he won’t even do weeding for his own good. What ignorance!”
“It is not ignorance!” Anas said, obviously annoyed with Owino. “It is tradition.”
I was surprised he spoke so forthrightly to a man so much older.
“Traditions are holding you back,” replied Owino. “Time to abandon them.”
“If we abandon our traditions,” Anas replied, “we stop being Mbere.”
“Is that a loss?” Owino asked. “What have the Mbere ever achieved?”
“Why do you say that?” Barnabas retorted. “You are not superior to us.”
“No,” Owino agreed, “I am not superior to you. But education is better than ignorance. Doing a little work is better than being lazy and drunk all the time.”
“Let’s not argue,” Stephen said. “We are all friends.”
“If education makes you superior to us,” Barnabas asked, “why do you make yourself unclean with one of our women.”
“I am not looking for an argument. We are all Kenyans now. We must all work for a more productive Kenya. You know that’s all I meant.”
We walked the rest of the way back to the compound in silence. We found Edgar at the Landrover, showing a rifle to Jeremiah and the drunken young men who watched in confused silence from the hulks of the abandoned Toyotas. I took it that Edgar had told Jeremiah about the glass positioned in his garage to do injury to someone. Now, by displaying the rifle, he was emphasizing that he would take action against anyone caught setting traps at his house. Perhaps this was the way a District Commissioner would handle matters in what, to me, was clearly a bygone era. Glancing at the sullen expressions of the men listening to Edgar, I wondered what their reactions would be to his treating them this way.

When we left, Owino stayed at Jeremiah’s compound. He insisted that Stephen remain as well despite the taunts the drunken layabouts still directed toward him. No one urged the pair to remain, I noticed. I was not certain why Owino insisted. Perhaps it was the availability of free beer. Or perhaps he thought that he and Stephen should try to firm up relations with the locals.
Edgar wanted to give his two informants, Barnabas and Anas, new assignments and took the four of us to a village shop where he bought us chai, local tea brewed as dark and thick as a soup. As Edgar rattled on about the new material he wanted, the two young men studied me. The presence of an American seemed to make it impossible for them to concentrate on Edgar’s instructions. Once we were alone I would apologize for spinning such webs of fascination.
After a time Barnabas asked me, “Will you write a story about us for your newspaper?”
“I’ve been wondering about that,” I acknowledged. I asked what they considered newsworthy about Mbere. What in the Division might interest my readers? They seemed stumped at first, but finally settled on the fact that the situation of their lives was gradually improving. I did not tell them that such a report would baffle my editors, men who thought news should emphasize problems and prophesy crises. I told them I was glad to learn about improvements. But I admitted that some things mystified me. “For example,” I said, “will Stephen ever be accepted in Mbere?”
The two young men looked at one another as if each hoped the other would deal with the question.
“Or is he accepted?” I went on. “His father keeps saying that all of you are Kenyans now. Is that true? Is the problem that I just don’t see it?”
They shrugged. They glanced at one another and then at Edgar. He smiled encouragingly, interested to see how they would handle this test.
Barnabas offered, “Well, we are all Kenyans now. That’s true.”
“So it doesn’t matter that Stephen is old enough to be a man and yet he is not circumcised?”
They were silent. Then Anas said, “Owino is not circumcised and everyone accepts that he is a man.” He added, “Stephen is my friend. I accept him as a man.”
I said I had the impression that the layabouts at Jeremiah’s did not.
“What exactly is the problem?” asked Edgar. “Is it circumcision or tribalism?”
The young men seemed uneasy at the mention of tribalism. It was a subject that must be discussed very discreetly.
“Things are changing,” Barnabas said. “But it takes time. Twenty years ago when it came time for my oldest sister to be circumcised, my father announced that he would not allow this ritual to be performed on any of his daughters. And he had eight of them.”
“Why was this?” I asked.
“Because it’s painful. It hurts women. In male circumcision the body is not really damaged. The pain lasts only a few days. With women it is different.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Quite a famous story hereabouts,” Edgar said.
“My father made his declaration and everyone opposed him. His parents. His brothers and their wives. My grandmother insisted that no Mbere girl achieved full womanhood unless she passed through this test. But my father held firm. When his parents and other villagers insisted it must be done, he moved away.”
“And he’s come back now?” I asked.
Barnabas nodded. “His mother lives with us now in the compound. Some of my uncles live there, too. My father has made things change. Maybe it is not so important about Stephen.”
“What do you say?” I asked Anas.
He seemed unwilling at first to reply. When no one else spoke, he finally said, “My father is a chief. He upholds tradition.”
“Owino claimed you should abandon tradition,” I said.
“How can we do that?” Anas asked. “I think my father is right. If we abandon our traditions, we will stop being Mbere.” He paused for a moment. Then he added, “But Stephen is my friend. I don’t know what to say. I accept him as a man whether he has a foreskin or not.”

Edgar and I found enough tins in the pantry to make ourselves some chak. While eating it, I asked how Jeremiah had reacted to receiving “what for.” “His dignity is offended, of course,” Edgar acknowledged. “But he’ll get the word out. That’s the important thing.”
We talked about his informants and I tried out some of my impressions on Edgar. I said that Barnabas struck me as being one of the new men of Mbere, of Kenya. Whereas, while Stephen and Anas were standing poised on the threshold of manhood, thrilled by the wider world opening before them, Barnabas had already crossed that threshold. He had taken a look at the world beyond it and had seen an alien culture with alien values, Western culture, white man’s modernity. “Going to university,” I said, “he’s about to step out of the tribal culture into the modern one, right? Must be a scary prospect.”
“Yes and no,” Edgar replied. “Barnabas will spend much of his life traveling between the two cultures. He’ll live with two sets of values, two styles of living.”
“Will he study medicine?” I asked.
Edgar thought that unlikely. “The government will tell him what to study and what they need are people trained in agriculture. If Mbere Division is fortunate, Barnabas will practice what he’s learned here. But most agriculture officials gravitate to the high-income areas. He may do that.”
“Will he turn out to be Owino then?”
“I hope not,” Edgar said. “Quentin’s been shunted off to a backwater where he can do little good and little harm. Why, I’m not sure. Must have crossed someone. Or infuriated someone by trying to be a white man.” Edgar assumed that upward mobility for Barnabas, who had an intellectual bent, would come through teaching and advanced degrees. “He might provide the brains for a successful agri-business – if he can partner himself with a man who has contacts. Probably a Kikuyu. Tough getting ahead when you’re from a minor tribe.”
“What about Anas? Always a peasant?”
“He’ll finish school here. Maybe even manage a decent pass for his school certificate. Then he’ll dash off to Nairobi. What happens then is anyone’s guess.”
“And Stephen?”
“A complicated question,” Edgar said. “Barnabas is stuck being forever an Mbere. And there are times when that will seem a real prison. Stephen is going to be what his father has in mind when he says: ‘We are Kenyans.’ We won’t know for a while whether that means he’ll be nothing or a new kind of–”
There was a sharp knocking at the door. Then suddenly Barnabas was standing in the kitchen, panting hard, a look of terror on his face. “Could you come?” he asked Edgar. “Stephen’s been hurt.”
“What’s happened?”
Barnabas looked at Edgar, then at me as if in my presence he could not speak. “You can tell us,” Edgar said. “What’s happened?”
Finally he managed to say, “They circumcised him.”
Edgar and I did not understand. We frowned at one another.
“Please come,” Barnabas pleaded. “They circumcised him. And the knife–”
“Where is he?” Edgar stood. He shoved his plate aside and nodded to me.
“He’s at Jeremiah’s,” Barnabas said. “They slit the top of–”
“Can you drive?” Edgar asked me. “I’m low on petrol.”
We hurried outside to the car. Edgar sat beside me in the passenger seat and Barnabas crawled into the back. I raced over unfamiliar roads in the dark. Edgar gave me directions and questioned Barnabas.
He reported that several hours after we left the compound Jeremiah and Owino argued about the bridewealth payment Jeremiah insisted Owino owed him. The young men drinking in the Toyotas had sided with Jeremiah. They had eventually gone to Owino’s house to fetch his wife and bring her home, intending to keep her at Jeremiah’s until the bridewealth debt was paid. At Owino’s they discovered Stephen and Anas who had begun to build Stephen’s house. The young men objected to this: Stephen was acting like a man, but he was not yet circumcised. They taunted and baited Stephen. A fight broke out. They seized both young men and took them back to the compound. There Jeremiah as chief would rule on whether or not Stephen could build the house. But Jeremiah wasn’t there. The young men had more beer. Eventually they decided to settle the matter themselves. They stripped Stephen. When Anas tried to stop them, they tied him up. Five men held Stephen down, one on each of his arms and three on his legs. The man who wielded the knife sliced through most of the foreskin. Then his hand slipped. The knife had cut into the tip of Stephen’s penis.

When we got to Jeremiah’s place no one was around except the old man. He was dead drunk on too much beer – or pretending to be – sitting in his newest Toyota. Barnabas shouted repeatedly for Stephen. At last we heard whimpering and found him cowering in bushes in a fetal ball. He was holding a cloth to his groin and bleeding. He would not let us see the bleeding. I got a blanket I kept in the trunk of the car and cloaked him in it. When he would not stand, remaining coiled into himself, whimpering, Barnabas, Edgar and I lifted him and carried him to the car. We placed him on the rear seat. We had to leave Barnabas behind; there was no room for him in the car. Edgar held Stephen’s hand. Once we hit the Nairobi road, he climbed into the rear seat. He held the boy like a father while I drove as fast as I dared through the black night.

When we got to Nairobi Hospital, nurses put Stephen on a gurney and rolled him into a surgery. Edgar in high DC** dudgeon insisted on accompanying him. The head nurse telephoned a surgeon. When he arrived and saw me, he waved. He was an American I had met socially. I knew he would do the best he could.
The doctor insisted that Edgar leave the surgery. He joined me outside where the air was cool and the darkness peaceful. “Those infernal Africans,” he said. “Drunken louts. How could they!”
I said nothing.
“I’m fed up with Kenya,” Edgar went on. “This has been an intolerable year. I can’t wait to get back to teaching people who want to learn.”
I moved off and paced. Eventually I found another entrance to the hospital. I went inside and waited near the surgery.
Finally the doctor emerged. Stephen was going to be all right, he said. He had removed the foreskin and repaired the wound to the tip of the penis. “His equipment won’t win any beauty contests,” the surgeon said. “But he’ll be able to father children.”
“That’s a relief,” I replied.
“He may not have as much pleasure doing it as most men,” he continued, “but he’ll be able to do it.”
I thanked the surgeon and went to find Edgar. I told him the news and we went to the car. As we drove to my house through the darkness, neither of us spoke.

The second morning of our visit as we drank coffee, Anastasio appeared out of nowhere. Suddenly he was sitting comfortably among us as if he had been there for hours. He’d come up through the archway of acacias from the mud, wattle and corrugated tin-roofed building that served as the local butchery. His father had slaughtered a cow the day before to raise school fees for his sons. On this last day of school vacation Anastasio had been helping him sell the meat.

He had come to the house because he was one of the informants for David’s study of rural development among the Mbere. Anastasio was sixteen, short and slight, with a large head sitting on narrow shoulders. He had an open and friendly face. His wide, smiling mouth was pleased to accept coffee. When he went out to the kitchen to fetch it, David explained that he had recently taken Anastasio on his second-ever trip to Nairobi, that miracle of glitter and tall buildings.

“What were the highlights of your visit to Nairobi?” Donanne asked him when he returned from the kitchen.

“What struck you most?” I asked.

He gazed at us with intelligent, curious eyes, especially at me, appraising The American Journalist David had told him was coming to visit. “Will you write about me in your American newspaper?” he asked.

“Perhaps,” I said, fully intending to. “Mbere is not the sort of place one usually does a story about. But it’s possible.”

Anas, as David called him, grinned with a natural gaiety, pleased to sit on the cusp of fame. “David took me out to Embakasi,” he said. This was the Nairobi airport. “I have never heard such noise!” He covered his ears with work-hardened hands. “We have no noise like that in Mbere.” He considered other impressions of Nairobi. “Do you know that people pay four shillings for ice cream at the Hilton Hotel?” We nodded; we ourselves had paid that exorbitant price. (Four shillings was worth about 60 cents American.) “It is too much,” Anas said. “What surprised me most, though, was– You walk into a room and the door closes. And when it opens again, everything is changed. You are in a different place.” He looked at David. “What is that called?”

“An elevator,” David said.

“Would you like to see where I live?” Anas asked.

“Please,” I replied. “I may need that for the story I’ll write.”

We walked around the neighborhood, David shaking hands, introducing us and gathering news. We ended up at Anas’s family’s homestead: three mud-and-thatch houses, two granaries on stilts, a platform upon which grasses for thatching were piled, a small roofed corral for calves and a large cattle corral of thickly packed tree branches and stumps. The largest of the homestead’s three houses contained the kitchen. In this house Anastasio’s father and mother lived with his three younger brothers. These boys had not yet been circumcised and were still considered children. The eldest son, his wife and baby occupied another house. Anas, circumcised less than a year but now a man, lived alone in a very small third house which, following established tradition, he had built himself – in about a week.

Where Anastasio's parents and three brothers live

Anas’s house contained a work area – a table piled high with school books and a kind of low chair-side table that he used as a stool – and a smaller sleeping area. This space contained only a bed. On a cord stretched length-wise above it Anas hung all his clothes. A mud partition about five and a half feet tall divided the two areas. Into the mud walls Anas had stuck two smallish panes of glass as well as a very small door, disengaged from a cabinet. This he opened for light and air.

Our stop at Anastasio’s parents’ compound was only the first of our visits that day in Mbere. We met other villagers and learned about their lives. And we discovered when we tried to return to Nairobi that uncertain roads had other ideas. We would get stuck in mud and only a Kikuyu woman with a panga seemed able to rescue us.

Next post: Meet Barnabas, another of David’s Mbere District informants.

This visit to Mbere served as the basic material for Fred’s story “North of Nairobi” in the collection Africa, Africa! Fifteen Stories.
Fred’s new romance mystery novel JOSS The Ambassador’s Wife has just been published.
Check out both books at www.FredericHunter.com.

Read the story “North of Nairobi” right here:

NORTH OF NAIROBI
At Embu the asphalt paving ended. I did not go far along the murram road before I hit patches of standing water and mud. Once I traveled beyond the area where most people spoke some English, the car slid onto the shoulder and would not move. It was not badly mired, but I could not budge the car myself. I sounded the horn. No one came to help. I was stranded. I paced on the road and swore at everything in Africa that does not work.
After about half an hour a teenaged boy came riding along on a bicycle. He had two long planks of wood strapped to the carrying rack. I waved to him and called, “Could you help me?”
“It is all right,” he answered, slowing and dismounting. “I have helped to push many people from mud. My father often gets himself stuck.”
The teenager carefully laid down his bike so as not to damage the planks and came toward me. “Does your father have a car?” I asked. There would not be many car-owners in this district.
“He borrows a Toyota.” The boy smiled behind his glasses, shyly, but with a knowing resignation. Then he added, “But he does not drive very well.”
The boy examined the position of the car. He smiled and said, “I will look for some people to help us,” and trudged off into the bush. I liked his openness and the curious feeling of confidence he gave me that he would shortly resolve my predicament. And he did. After about twenty minutes he reappeared with half a dozen Africans he had found somewhere. They pushed the car free of the shoulder on the first try. I thanked them all and offered the boy a ride.
We lashed his bicycle and the wooden planks to the rear of the car. As we started along the road, he asked, “Are you the American journalist?” It turned out that he knew my anthropologist friend Edgar and had heard from his father that a journalist was arriving for the weekend. “He is Edgar’s great friend,” said the boy.
I acknowledged that, indeed, I was a journalist. Wanting to be friendly – he had, after all, been friendly to me – and seeing a certain bafflement about me in his eyes, I explained that most overseas journalists reported only on events in places like Nairobi. Nonetheless, I had a hunch that the real life of Africa was in the countryside. So I had come to take a look.
“Will you write about us?” the boy asked.
I said that perhaps I might find something to interest American readers, but perhaps not.
“It is all right,” he told me once again.
“I take it you can direct me to Edgar’s house,” I said. “I’m not sure I can find it from his directions.”
The boy smiled as if with a knowledge that directions were not Edgar’s strong point. Then he said, “I am sorry that it took me so long to get help. But when I speak their language, they hear my accent and they do not trust me.”
I glanced at him. “You are not Mbere then?” I asked.
“I am from Nyanza.” He spoke a sentence or two in a tribal language and watched my reaction. “That was Luo,” he said. “Did you understand it?”
I shook my head. “What are you doing here?”
“I live here. My father is the government officer.”
“You mean the district commissioner?”
The boy laughed. “He is really the agricultural assistant. But he calls himself the government officer to seem more important. The Mbere laugh at him for this.”
“Do you think it’s funny?”
“Yes,” he said after a moment. Then he added, “But in Africa we do not laugh at our fathers.”
“Do you like it here?”
“It is all right.”
“But you’d rather be in Nyanza?”
“Yes, it is my home. My mother is there with my brothers and sisters.” After a pause he added, “My father has taken an Mbere wife.”
“I see.”
“It is difficult,” he said. I glanced across at him. He was looking straight ahead through the windshield and I wondered if he was glad to have someone to talk to about it. “She is no older than I am, and she does not really want me to live in the house.” He fell silent. Then after pointing out a turning, he continued, “She does not speak Luo and she is not happy when my father and I use our own language. But if I speak Mbere, she laughs and calls me ignorant.”
“Do you go to school here?” I asked. He nodded. “And you have friends?”
“A few. But more and more it becomes complicated with them, too.” He gazed pensively at the road. “Last summer all my Mbere friends were circumcised,” he explained. “We Luos do not circumcise. Now my schoolmates think they have become men while I am still a child. And I do not think that Mbere men like it that an uncircumcised child-man like me lives in the same house with one of their women.”
We reached the long, rutted drive to Edgar’s house and I invited the boy to come in and say hello to my host. But he declined. He said that he might come by later in the afternoon. He untied the bicycle and the planks from their perch on the rear of the car and retied the planks to the carrying case. As he was about to ride off down the road, I asked, “Would you mind if I took your picture?”
The request surprised him. Why would I want his picture? Then he smiled shyly, “Will it appear in a magazine?”
“Maybe in a newspaper.”
He seemed pleased at being connected to America in even so tangential a way and posed beside his bicycle. I withdrew the notebook from my jacket pocket and got his name – Stephen – and his age which was 16. Then I asked, “Have you talked to your father about these problems with your schoolmates?”
Stephen nodded. “I asked him to let me go back to Nyanza. Edgar has told him that he should let me return. But my father says that we are all Kenyans now and it does not matter where we live or who is circumcised.” Stephen said nothing for what seemed a long while. “The school fees he would have to pay in Nyanza are higher,” he explained at last. I asked Stephen once again if he would like to come in and say hello to Edgar; perhaps we could have some lunch together. But he refused again very politely. “Perhaps I will come by later on,” he said and rode off.

Edgar’s house was large and stood on a rise of land. It was the former residence, so he’d told me, of the European foreman of the now-defunct British-American Tobacco Company processing plant. It was past 2:30. Hungry and quite thirsty, I was glad to arrive.
But the house was deserted. The doors were all locked. I walked around the house trying them. I hallooed, but no one was about, not even a servant. I was surprised to find the place deserted. Edgar had told me on the phone that he’d be there, drafting a report. But no matter. I took out reading I had brought and made myself comfortable on a porch overlooking the countryside.
In fact, I did not know Edgar well. The first time I met him, shortly after I’d been assigned overseas, he came to lunch with an historian specializing in pre-colonial Africa whom I’d called for a briefing. Edgar was then acting chair of the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. As we ate together at the Faculty Club, a preoccupation intensified the school-masterish formality that he had picked up in some non-California life. He had grown up in English-speaking South Africa, I learned, and without evidence I attributed his fuss-budget quality to the schooling he’d received there. After attending university Edgar had joined the British Colonial Service during its last years and had served as a District Commissioner in what is now Tanzania. Later he received a PhD** in Anthropology from Oxford; his dissertation detailed how life was lived and organized in a small town in the hinterlands behind Accra. During our lunch Edgar said quite frankly that he was fed up with California. Wistfully he mentioned more than once that he still owned land in the Ghanaian town and hoped to retire there.
While we waited for coffee, Edgar acknowledged that he’d become a center of controversy on campus. He had reprimanded a young social anthropologist; “dressed him down,” was his term. This colleague was an iconoclast of romantic reputation who lectured barefoot wearing only khaki shorts and a tank top. Sometimes he did not appear for his classes at all. It was not surprising, Edgar said, given the nature of students, that many of them rallied to the instructor’s defense. But I felt that it had surprised Edgar. I sensed that he still expected to be treated like a DC**. Apparently students had picketed his classes; they had written angry letters to the student newspaper. Edgar merely said, “We soldier on.”
After reading on the porch for about fifteen minutes I no longer felt alone. Looking up, I saw an African with a studiedly tweedy look staring at me through the glass of the porch doors. He wore glasses, a tie, a rumpled shirt and suit trousers. He was smoking a pipe and a copy of the Economist hung from his hand. We stared at each other for a moment.
“Is Dr. Pettys around?” I finally asked, rising from the wooden chair.
“No, he’s not,” said the African through the door.
A pause. We continued to stare at each other. “This is his house, isn’t it?”
“Yes, this is his house.”
The African gazed at me without expression, and I noticed that he stood in stockinged-feet. “Dr. Pettys told me he’d be here.”
“He’s in hospital.”
“Is he all right?” I tossed my reading aside. “Look, could you open this door? What’s happened to Dr. Pettys?”
The African smiled, unlocked the door and opened it. “Perhaps I meant ‘at’ hospital,” he said. I felt that he had taken some pleasure in needlessly arousing my concern. “Edgar’s quite all right. The houseboy had an accident, and Edgar has run him to hospital.”
I explained that I had come as a weekend guest and asked if I might come inside. “Yes, please come,” the African said finally. “Have you had any lunch?”
“No, as a matter of fact, and I’m starving.”
“Let’s nip into the kitchen and see what’s there.” I brought my overnight case inside and found the kitchen myself. The stocking-footed African was there, getting beer for us. “There’s tinned meat in the fridge,” he said, “and bread there in the plastic. Make yourself a sandwich if you like.”
I asked, “What happened to the servant?”
“He was putting my bicycle into a shed I use when I don’t come by car. A large pane of glass fell on him. Nasty business.”
“A pane of glass? How did that happen?”
“I’ve no idea. Curious kind of accident, isn’t it?”
“Will the man be all right?”
“Oh, I expect so. These fellows are quite hearty. Here’s to your health.” He lifted his glass to me, drank some beer and padded back into the main room of the house.
When I joined him there, he had settled onto the couch; he had apparently been napping there when I arrived. He was rattling his magazine and noisily sipping his beer. Standing over him I introduced myself, giving my name; I hoped to elicit a corresponding introduction from him. He offered his hand, but without otherwise stirring and then indicated a chair across from him.
“I’m afraid I haven’t any idea who you are,” I said, sitting down.
“Oh,” he replied, “I’m Quentin Owino, the government officer here.”
“Ah ha!” I said, taking fresh interest in the man. I wondered if Stephen had refused my invitations to come inside the house because he knew his father would be there. “Edgar has influential friends.”
My flattery pleased him. He looked up from his paper and smiled. “I am the second most important man in Mbere,” Owino said. “After Edgar.” I smiled at this compliment to my host. “We are great chums,” he added.
“Government officer?” I asked. “What does that mean: District Commissioner?” Owino would know that this was the position Edgar had held. I wondered if he saw himself in the same role, the civilizer’s role.
“One does many jobs in a small place like this,” he replied.
“I think it must have been your son who rescued me from some mud.” I described the boy.
“That would be Stephen,” Owino said. “A jolly good chap, if I may say so.”
“Yes, I quite liked him. I suppose he must miss Nyanza.”
“Did he say that?”
“He merely said his mother was living there.”
“He gets there often enough,” Owino said. “It is best for him to know more than one village.” He smiled. “Travel broadens, as they say. Don’t you agree?”
“I suppose it does. People here accept him, do they?”
“Of course. Why not? We’re all Kenyans now.” He smiled again. “Actually this is great experience for him. Look at the British. They sent their children off to school at the age of six. And they conquered the world.” He laughed. “Stephen is happy here.”
I drank some beer and looked about the room. Owino filled his pipe and continued to watch me. “It must be a great challenge,” I said, wanting to draw him out, “being the government’s officer in a place like this.”
He shrugged this off. “Mbere is not much of a place,” he said. “A small tribe, no political influence, clients of the Kikuyu. Most of the people are ignorant and want to stay that way.”
“But it was chosen as a target area for rural development, wasn’t it? Isn’t that why Edgar’s here?”
“Yes, but how much has been accomplished? Edgar can tell you about that.” Then, perhaps recalling that I was a journalist, Owino fussed at the lighting of his pipe, watching me carefully, wondering if he would be quoted. “But, of course, government service is challenging anywhere,” he commented for safety’s sake.
“You’re being too modest,” I said, pushing him a little. “You are a Luo and that can’t make you very popular here – even if you are all Kenyans.”
He shrugged again and smiled half to himself. “Indeed, there is still some truth to that, regrettably,” he acknowledged. “But I am perhaps unusual. I do not leave the division every weekend, for example, like most government officers. The people respect that. It means that I am less a stranger to them.”
“You and Stephen live as bachelors, do you?”
“We Africans do not make good bachelors.” Owino smiled and punctuated the smile with a shrug. Surely I understood. “I have taken an Mbere wife,” he said. “A year ago. I needed a wife to cook my food and give me sons. Why should I have the expense of keeping a servant?” We laughed together. “You will say I am an exploiter,” he giggled, “but it is not true.”
The sweet scent of his pipe tobacco began to fill the room. Edgar’s house was starting to seem more like the faculty club where I had met him than a living room in rural Africa. Owino smiled with a touch of bravado that masqueraded as pride. “She has already given me a son.”
“You must be very proud of yourself,” I said. “Congratulations.”
He shrugged. “It is a way to show that we are all Kenyans.” Then he added,
“There are many sons left in me. It is good for the Mbere to understand that.”
I sipped some beer. “Maybe I’ll have a sandwich,” I said. I went into the kitchen, found bread, peanut butter and jam and proceeded to make us each a sandwich. I sensed that Owino would be happy to eat Edgar’s food, especially if I prepared it.
He soon entered the kitchen and watched me. Then he challenged: “You perhaps do not think polygamy civilized.”
“I have no views on the matter,” I said. “However, I’m sure it’s a lot more complicated to have two wives than to have only one.”
“It is perhaps less civilized than monogamy,” he said. “But the Mbere regard it as a sign of wealth and prestige. So it has done me no harm to have a local wife.”
“Is it difficult for Stephen?”
“Why should it be?” he asked quickly. I answered with a shrug. “There are no difficulties.” After a moment he added, “Some minor irritations, that’s all. The woman wants to feel important and orders Stephen around. Of course, he does not like it. I tell him to be patient. She does it mainly because she is Mbere and knows she is ignorant. She feels inferior to us.”
I cut the sandwiches in halves, put them onto coffee saucers that did not match and handed the larger sandwich to Owino. “Why not send him back to Nyanza?” I asked.
“A son is a joy to a father – especially a son who is so superior.” I nodded. “You think me unreasonable,” Owino charged.
“How could I? I know nothing about the matter.”
“If I send him back to Nyanza,” he explained. “His mother will put him to work. Ever since I married here, she complains that she has no money. I want Stephen here to make sure he does not neglect his education.” Owino poured us each another beer and we took them and the sandwiches back into the living room. “It is very probable that Stephen will pass his Higher School Certificate Examinations well enough so that the government pays his entire university education.” Owino lowered his voice confidentially. “And I tell you his chances of getting a place at the University of Nairobi, which is entirely run by Kikuyus, are better if he passes from a school in Mbere than one in Nyanza.”
“He should be very pleased with himself here then,” I said.
“Well, yes.” Owino shrugged. “Perhaps he does not like the living arrangements. He has his private room. I wanted to put an outside door in it for him, but it is a government house and this is against regulations. He wanted to build a small house for himself like some of his Mbere friends have done, but that, I think, is asking for trouble.”
“Why is that?” I inquired. I remembered Stephen’s wooden planks. Had he intended them for this purpose?
“Mbere boys build themselves small houses once they are circumcised. We Luos do not circumcise; manhood is more than the cutting off of a foreskin, although some people do not understand this. But if Stephen as an uncircumcised Luo builds himself a hut, there will be trouble. The Mbere do not yet regard him as a man. It is not the sort of trouble that cannot be straightened out. I am the government officer here, after all. Still trouble avoided is the best kind to have.”

We now heard a car pull into the drive. “Must be Edgar,” I said. I started toward the door. Owino lagged behind, putting on his shoes.
Outside Edgar was standing before the Landrover, peering into the garage where the glass had fallen. In a short-sleeved khaki shirt and work shorts that matched the sandy color of his hair, wearing desert boots and knee-socks, his arms akimbo, he seemed never to have stopped being a DC**. We shook hands. I said I’d had no trouble finding the place and had had some lunch with the help of Owino.
“Still here, is he?” Edgar’s voice carried an edge of irritation. “We’ve had a real balls-up,” he said. “Owino tell you about it?” I said that he had. “No damn coincidence the glass fell.”
“Foul play?”
“Bloody booby-trap. Meant to fall. Not sure who the intended victim was: me or Owino. I’m damned sure it wasn’t Kamau.”
Edgar wore the expression of fuss-budget impatience I remembered from our first meeting at UCSB**. I was amused, but did not show my reaction; booby-traps were a serious matter. In fact, I was glad to see him – and not only because a working anthropologist makes an excellent contact for a journalist covering Africa.
When I first arrived in Nairobi, I often wished I had kept in closer contact with Edgar; I wondered if he were still at UCSB**. Then on a reporting trip I saw him at Roberts Field in Liberia. We were waiting for the same plane. I re-introduced myself and we rode together to Freetown, Sierra Leone, where I left the flight.
He had just arrived from the States, he said, after what had been an almost intolerable year at UCSB**. “I have never been so ready to leave anywhere,” he said. “Faculty discipline totally collapsed. Faculty-student communication no longer exists.” He had been forced to fire the young anthropologist who had been such a problem. The action had triggered a campus row. Students had demonstrated; some called him a “fascist pig” to his face. Colleagues had questioned his professional credentials, merely because he was born in South Africa. He shook his head as if still not quite able to conceive of what had gone wrong.
“I’ve never so longed for the order of Africa,” he continued. “Yes, I said: the order. Life in the sophisticated world is too chaotic. That’s why I’ve come back. I may give up teaching.” He had arranged an early sabbatical and would spend the upcoming academic year in Kenya, evaluating an intensive development program in Mbere Division a couple of hours north of Nairobi. The program would be launched almost immediately. He was eager to get started.
Africa had given Edgar a giddy sense of renewal. When we said goodbye on the Freetown tarmac, his joyfulness amused – and also touched – me. “Look at that!” he said enthusiastically. He pointed across the airstrip to a trio of women carrying babies on their backs and clay pots on their heads. They were moving with a peasant grace beneath flowering trees; behind them lay crudely tilled fields and thatched huts. I saw them as elements in an overall picture of stunted personal development and cruel, needless poverty. Edgar saw them as beautiful.
“A classic scene!” Edgar commented, smiling. “Listen to their laughter!” And, indeed, a rich, throaty laughter floated from them through the morning heat and quietude. “They’re in harmony with their environment,” he said. “And their traditions.” He grinned. “How glorious to be back home in Africa!” When my luggage arrived, we shook hands and agreed to meet in Nairobi.
Over the following months we did occasionally meet there. He always invited me to visit Mbere. But whenever I expressed interest in actually doing so, he suggested that I hold off. A few matters remained to be processed through the ministry. “Wait till the project really gets started,” he would say. Behind this excuse I sensed that as a man might want to be alone with his bride, Edgar wanted to be alone with Africa. Since he was unmarried – except to his work – I did not press the matter.
But ministerial delays dragged on. Eventually his invitations became more heartfelt. “You really ought to come,” he would say in a tone of loneliness. “I’d love to talk with an American.” He would add, “I live like a king in Mbere. Really, I’ve begun some ethnography. It’s fascinating stuff.”
By late April annoyance and frustration were sounding in his voice. The ministry had not acted. Misunderstandings, inefficiency and fear of decision-making had delayed the Mbere project by more than a year. His sabbatical was almost over; it had been wasted – at least in terms of his observing a microcosm of rural development and doing scholarly writing about it. Whether or not the ethnography would justify his remaining in Mbere seemed unclear. And so I had agreed to a visit.
“Will Kamau be all right?” I asked now.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “In hospital for a week. I don’t know what we’ll do for chak while you’re here. I cook worse than you do.” He eyed me dryly. “My hunch is that as a chef you’ve given a few blokes the trots in your time.” He looked back into the garage where the glass had fallen. ‘The question right now,” he said, “is what do we do about this?”
A young man now emerged from so deep inside the garage that I had not seen him earlier. He was perhaps twenty, spare and loose-jointed, not tall so much as very slender. He wore a white long-sleeved shirt and dark trousers fastened by a belt so long that it seemed to loop beyond the buckle almost halfway around his body. He had a studious look, emphasized by glasses and a copy carried lightly in his hand of the tabloid-sized Nairobi Daily Nation which he used as a briefcase. He gazed at me without hostility, but I sensed that he was not prepared to accept me merely as a friend of Edgar’s as both Stephen and Owino were ready to do. Instead he would watch to see who I turned out to be. “This is Barnabas,” Edgar said. “The chief informant of my ethnographic study.”
“Hello, Barnabas,” I said, offering my hand which he shook. Since Edgar had not stated the information, I gave him my name and explained that I was an American from Nairobi.
“Journalist,” Edgar said.
Barnabas nodded, but said nothing.
“Barnabas is a local celebrity,” Edgar continued. “Passed his Higher School Certificate Examination. Which only about a dozen boys from Mbere have ever done.”
“Congratulations,” I said, wondering if this were not the exam Owino intended Stephen to pass. I wondered, too, if the time would ever come when Edgar would call a twenty-year-old a “young man” instead of a “boy.”
“Barnabas goes to university next fall,” Edgar went on. “And all the girls in the Division come out to watch him walk by.”
Barnabas smiled and lowered his eyes.
“What would you like to study?” I asked.
“I would like to become a doctor,” he told me. “The people here still practice traditional medicine. But they no longer believe strongly in its cures and so they are not so effective. I would like to bring modern medicine to Mbere.”
“Good,” I told him. “Can you study that in Nairobi?”
“Perhaps I must go to U.K**.,” he replied.

Inside the house Edgar made himself a sandwich in the kitchen while I talked with Barnabas and Owino. Before long Owino went to join Edgar. I could not help noticing the look of distrust that Barnabas cast at him as he left.
“I need a favor, old man,” Owino said to Edgar in the kitchen. “You couldn’t lend me five hundred shillingi, could you?” My conversation with Barnabas had not resumed and we both overheard Owino’s request for what would have been about seventy dollars. I glanced at Barnabas.
“Jeremiah up to his old tricks?” we heard Edgar ask.
“I’m afraid so,” Owino told him. I picked up a magazine and thumbed through it. Barnabas opened his copy of the Daily Nation and shuffled through papers. We both heard the conversation continue.
“You’re going to have to stand up to him, you know,” Edgar said.
“But how?” Owino asked. “If I refuse him money, he calls her home and I have no one to cook my meals.”
“Just now I have no one to cook mine either,” complained Edgar lightly.
“But I sleep with this cook,” Owino reminded him. “So it is very hard.”
“Send her and the baby up to Nyanza. Let her see how good you are to her. Let her see what it’s like to be a second wife.”
“She would never go to Nyanza.”
“You’re her husband. Make her go. In any case, I can’t spare more shillingi.”
I glanced again at Barnabas; he was studying me. Since it was obvious that we had both heard the conversation in the kitchen, I asked: “What’s that all about?”
Barnabas paused a moment as if trying to decide if I merited an explanation.
“How about three hundred? Is that possible?”
“I’m sorry, Quentin. The bank is closed.”
Barnabas and I were still looking at one another. He said quietly, “Owino’s wife is the daughter of a local chief. He keeps changing the terms of the bridewealth arrangement because he wants money.”
“I thought bridewealth was fixed at the time of the marriage.”
Barnabas nodded. “But Owino is not Mbere. So when Jeremiah insists that he owes more money, his kinsmen support him. If Owino does not pay, they go to his place and bring his wife and the baby back to her father’s shamba.”
“Why does Jeremiah need money?” I asked.
“He buys cars,” Barnabas said. “Toyotas. Used.”
“He has more than one car?”
“It is not hard to drive a car into the ground here. Especially a used one, badly maintained. Jeremiah never gives care to his cars and when the local mechanics can no longer repair a car he has mistreated, he buys a new one. He bought his fifth Toyota this week. He’s having a beer party for his kinsmen at his shamba today.”
“The kind of money Owino’s asking for in there: that can’t buy a car.”
“It buys the beer,” said Barnabas.
“What buys the cars?”
“Jeremiah sells tribal land to Kikuyu land merchants. They pay him in used Toyotas.”
“Is tribal land his to sell?”
“No. But he is the chief.”
“Can’t you get rid of him?” Barnabas said nothing. “There must be some process for that,” I said.
“In the old days,” he replied, “when a chief outlived his wisdom, people killed him. We can’t do that anymore.”
I detected the slightest of twinkles in Barnabas’ eyes.

Later that day outside Jeremiah’s compound, young men sat drinking beer lolling on the fenders or sitting inside the rusting hulks of four Toyota sedans. Because my car was unknown to them, they stared when it pulled up and parked. When our party left the car and the young men saw who we were, they hailed Edgar in friendship, bidding him to have some beer. They sang out as well as at Owino, in a manner that struck me as companionable, but also derisive. His status as government officer won him little respect with this gang. They hailed Barnabas, but he maintained a scholar’s distance from the rowdies. As for Stephen, who had joined us, he too kept his distance. The young men seemed openly scornful of him.
We passed the newest Toyota, bright red and newly waxed. A once-dented front fender, now repaired, had paint of a different, more orange hue. I asked Barnabas about the young men’s taunts. “They say Stephen cannot drink beer,” he explained. “It is not for children. Beer can be drunk only by circumcised men.”
The compound was no more than a collection of mud and wattle huts and granaries with a platform upon which grasses for thatching had been piled. There were also a small, roofed enclosure for calves and a larger cattle corral of thickly packed tree branches and stumps. Edgar led us through it with the measured, imperial pace that I supposed he had used during his tenure as a District Commissioner and had picked up from movie versions of “King Solomon’s Mines.” We moved forward to greet the patriarch – obviously Jeremiah – who sat on a contraption of bent tree branches shaped into a chair and covered with a cowhide. He had gray bristles for a beard and watched us through half-closed but intelligent and suspicious eyes. As Edgar reached him, he lurched to his feet. They bowed to one another and shook hands. Owino bowed as well, taking the old man’s hand deferentially, holding it in both of his. I was introduced and bowed deeply.
Edgar congratulated the old man on his acquisition of yet another Toyota. He accepted beer and waited while Bentley, one of Jeremiah’s sons, brought him a chair. He said to me in a low voice, “Have Owino give you a shamba tour. He’s worked with Bentley. I’m going to give the old boy what-for about the glass in the garage.”
I collected Owino who had gotten himself some beer and asked to see the shamba. He called to Bentley who ignored him until Edgar intervened and in his best DC** manner instructed him to show me around. Barnabas and Stephen tagged along.
As we headed toward the fields, a figure flashed past. Stephen called out, “Anas!” and ran after him. A youth Stephen’s age poked his head around the back of a hut. Barnabas called out to him, a friendly taunting in Mbere. The youth – Anastasio was his name – appeared. He was introduced to me and carefully wiped his hands against his shirt. He gazed at me as if beholding a ghost or some figure of wonder, then offered one of the still-wet hands for me to shake.
“He has never seen an American before,” Barnabas said.
Stephen explained that we were old friends; he had rescued me from mud. “Anas” was impressed. Stephen grinned and asked, “Were you carrying water?”
Anas seemed uncertain what to say. But since his shoes and pants legs were splattered, the answer was clear.
“It is all right!” said Stephen with a laugh. “I won’t tell. Barnabas doesn’t care. And Bentley won’t notice.”
Anas looked up ahead where Owino was walking with Bentley. “It is so much easier for me to carry it than for her to,” he said. “And anyway we are in higher school now and they are telling us things must change.”
“I am going to build my house,” Stephen told Anas. “Will you help me? Or do you have to stay and drink beer in those dead cars?”
“I can help you,” Anas replied softly. “You helped me.”
Barnabas looked concerned at hearing this declaration. He slowed his pace to separate himself from the others and since I was walking with him, I slowed as well. I asked about the shamba’s crops. He pointed out those in a five-acre plot: cow peas, finger millet, sorghum and maize, subsistence crops all laid out in precisely straight rows. A three-acre section was devoted to cotton, Jeremiah’s cash crop. “Owino has made quite a good shamba here for Jeremiah and Bentley,” he said. He added, “It could do with a bit of weeding.”
“What was all that about the water?” I asked. Barnabas glanced at me with a look of either confusion or defensiveness, I was not sure which. I persisted, “Is there something about Anas carrying water that is…” I let my voice trail off.
Barnabas said nothing for a moment, then decided to speak. “Anas is a man now. He has been circumcised.”
“And carrying water: that’s women’s work?” On the drive up from Nairobi I had seen women struggling with large drums of water on their backs. They supported the drums, their necks straining, on tumplines that stretched across their foreheads. In Kikuyu villages I had seen women who had carried water this way for so long that tumplines had formed depressions across their foreheads.
“Traditionally carrying water is the work of women,” Barnabas said. I made no reply. After a moment he continued, “Anas does not like to see his mother carrying water. He is much stronger than she is. But the other men here say that it is her job. So he does it when he hopes they will not see.”
We walked on and I thought of the men drinking beer in the derelict Toyotas. After a moment I said lightly, “Sometimes my women readers ask me exactly what it is that African men do.”
Barnabas smiled, but said nothing.

When we caught up with the others, Bentley was bending over a mesh trap he had built to cover a hole in the ground. Caught in the trap were hundreds of flying ants. They resembled large-bodied balls of fat the size of a little finger to the first joint; to these succulent blobs Nature had attached long, transparent wings. On these the fattened ants flew out of the ground, venturing forth to start a new colony. I had encountered such ants in my own yard. I had even felt terrorized by the fluttering of their wings for the entire experience was like an eco-horror movie come true. But I had learned not to step on the ants. Wherever I squished them, they left grease spots that lasted for months and I could not wear the shoes indoors.
Now Bentley stuck his hands beneath the mesh and extracted a handful of the ants. Some were motionless; the wings of others still fluttered. He closed the trap and transferred the ants into a woven basket he carried. He withdrew his hand with one of the insects held between his fingers. He closed the basket, ripped the wings from the specimen he held and plopped it into his mouth. He closed his eyes. He smiled as a child might with candy. The other Africans gathered around him, begging him to open the basket. When he did, they each reached in, withdrew insects, removed their wings and ate them, chattering and laughing at the pleasure of the delicacy.
After a while Stephen came over to me, carrying several ants in a nest made of his hands. Barnabas and Anas tagged behind him. “Please,” he said. “Would you like?”
I smiled. “No, thank you,” I replied.
“They are delicious,” Anas assured me.
“I’m sure they are.”
“You will not have?” Stephen asked again.
When I declined, Stephen and Anas watched me with fascination, grinning, smacking and licking their lips as they plucked wings from the ants and tossed them into their mouths. Barnabas stood several paces away and watched me as well, eating ants as one might eat popcorn one kernel at a time.
“You think we are barbarians, don’t you?” he challenged. “For eating ants.”
“No,” I said.
“Then why not have one?” he asked.
“Not my thing,” I said. “I couldn’t eat snails in France. Or greasy meat pies in England. I don’t like tofu in Nigeria. Or in California.”
Stephen and Anas watched me, grinning and eating. Barnabas studied me, unsure what to make of me. I realized that trotting out the places I’d been only exaggerated the differences between us.
Before I could think of a way to close the gap, we heard Owino and Bentley arguing. “But you must weed if you want good crops,” Owino declared. Bentley shrugged off this advice, fiddling with the trap which he had now completely cleaned out. “If you don’t weed, the worms will eat them, not your family.” Bentley shook his head. He checked the trap again and moved off.
As we followed him back to the compound, Owino said: “He won’t weed.”
“It is women’s work,” said Anas.
“Well, where is his wife? Why doesn’t she weed? They will lose their crops.”
“She is eating right now at her father’s shamba,” said Anas.
“And he is surly to me because he’s sleeping alone?” Owino dusted off his trousers and tightened the knot of his tie. “It is not my fault he’s sleeping alone.” We walked for a moment in silence. “Bentley has a good garden there, thanks to my advice,” Owino said. “But he won’t even do weeding for his own good. What ignorance!”
“It is not ignorance!” Anas said, obviously annoyed with Owino. “It is tradition.”
I was surprised he spoke so forthrightly to a man so much older.
“Traditions are holding you back,” replied Owino. “Time to abandon them.”
“If we abandon our traditions,” Anas replied, “we stop being Mbere.”
“Is that a loss?” Owino asked. “What have the Mbere ever achieved?”
“Why do you say that?” Barnabas retorted. “You are not superior to us.”
“No,” Owino agreed, “I am not superior to you. But education is better than ignorance. Doing a little work is better than being lazy and drunk all the time.”
“Let’s not argue,” Stephen said. “We are all friends.”
“If education makes you superior to us,” Barnabas asked, “why do you make yourself unclean with one of our women.”
“I am not looking for an argument. We are all Kenyans now. We must all work for a more productive Kenya. You know that’s all I meant.”
We walked the rest of the way back to the compound in silence. We found Edgar at the Landrover, showing a rifle to Jeremiah and the drunken young men who watched in confused silence from the hulks of the abandoned Toyotas. I took it that Edgar had told Jeremiah about the glass positioned in his garage to do injury to someone. Now, by displaying the rifle, he was emphasizing that he would take action against anyone caught setting traps at his house. Perhaps this was the way a District Commissioner would handle matters in what, to me, was clearly a bygone era. Glancing at the sullen expressions of the men listening to Edgar, I wondered what their reactions would be to his treating them this way.

When we left, Owino stayed at Jeremiah’s compound. He insisted that Stephen remain as well despite the taunts the drunken layabouts still directed toward him. No one urged the pair to remain, I noticed. I was not certain why Owino insisted. Perhaps it was the availability of free beer. Or perhaps he thought that he and Stephen should try to firm up relations with the locals.
Edgar wanted to give his two informants, Barnabas and Anas, new assignments and took the four of us to a village shop where he bought us chai, local tea brewed as dark and thick as a soup. As Edgar rattled on about the new material he wanted, the two young men studied me. The presence of an American seemed to make it impossible for them to concentrate on Edgar’s instructions. Once we were alone I would apologize for spinning such webs of fascination.
After a time Barnabas asked me, “Will you write a story about us for your newspaper?”
“I’ve been wondering about that,” I acknowledged. I asked what they considered newsworthy about Mbere. What in the Division might interest my readers? They seemed stumped at first, but finally settled on the fact that the situation of their lives was gradually improving. I did not tell them that such a report would baffle my editors, men who thought news should emphasize problems and prophesy crises. I told them I was glad to learn about improvements. But I admitted that some things mystified me. “For example,” I said, “will Stephen ever be accepted in Mbere?”
The two young men looked at one another as if each hoped the other would deal with the question.
“Or is he accepted?” I went on. “His father keeps saying that all of you are Kenyans now. Is that true? Is the problem that I just don’t see it?”
They shrugged. They glanced at one another and then at Edgar. He smiled encouragingly, interested to see how they would handle this test.
Barnabas offered, “Well, we are all Kenyans now. That’s true.”
“So it doesn’t matter that Stephen is old enough to be a man and yet he is not circumcised?”
They were silent. Then Anas said, “Owino is not circumcised and everyone accepts that he is a man.” He added, “Stephen is my friend. I accept him as a man.”
I said I had the impression that the layabouts at Jeremiah’s did not.
“What exactly is the problem?” asked Edgar. “Is it circumcision or tribalism?”
The young men seemed uneasy at the mention of tribalism. It was a subject that must be discussed very discreetly.
“Things are changing,” Barnabas said. “But it takes time. Twenty years ago when it came time for my oldest sister to be circumcised, my father announced that he would not allow this ritual to be performed on any of his daughters. And he had eight of them.”
“Why was this?” I asked.
“Because it’s painful. It hurts women. In male circumcision the body is not really damaged. The pain lasts only a few days. With women it is different.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Quite a famous story hereabouts,” Edgar said.
“My father made his declaration and everyone opposed him. His parents. His brothers and their wives. My grandmother insisted that no Mbere girl achieved full womanhood unless she passed through this test. But my father held firm. When his parents and other villagers insisted it must be done, he moved away.”
“And he’s come back now?” I asked.
Barnabas nodded. “His mother lives with us now in the compound. Some of my uncles live there, too. My father has made things change. Maybe it is not so important about Stephen.”
“What do you say?” I asked Anas.
He seemed unwilling at first to reply. When no one else spoke, he finally said, “My father is a chief. He upholds tradition.”
“Owino claimed you should abandon tradition,” I said.
“How can we do that?” Anas asked. “I think my father is right. If we abandon our traditions, we will stop being Mbere.” He paused for a moment. Then he added, “But Stephen is my friend. I don’t know what to say. I accept him as a man whether he has a foreskin or not.”

Edgar and I found enough tins in the pantry to make ourselves some chak. While eating it, I asked how Jeremiah had reacted to receiving “what for.” “His dignity is offended, of course,” Edgar acknowledged. “But he’ll get the word out. That’s the important thing.”
We talked about his informants and I tried out some of my impressions on Edgar. I said that Barnabas struck me as being one of the new men of Mbere, of Kenya. Whereas, while Stephen and Anas were standing poised on the threshold of manhood, thrilled by the wider world opening before them, Barnabas had already crossed that threshold. He had taken a look at the world beyond it and had seen an alien culture with alien values, Western culture, white man’s modernity. “Going to university,” I said, “he’s about to step out of the tribal culture into the modern one, right? Must be a scary prospect.”
“Yes and no,” Edgar replied. “Barnabas will spend much of his life traveling between the two cultures. He’ll live with two sets of values, two styles of living.”
“Will he study medicine?” I asked.
Edgar thought that unlikely. “The government will tell him what to study and what they need are people trained in agriculture. If Mbere Division is fortunate, Barnabas will practice what he’s learned here. But most agriculture officials gravitate to the high-income areas. He may do that.”
“Will he turn out to be Owino then?”
“I hope not,” Edgar said. “Quentin’s been shunted off to a backwater where he can do little good and little harm. Why, I’m not sure. Must have crossed someone. Or infuriated someone by trying to be a white man.” Edgar assumed that upward mobility for Barnabas, who had an intellectual bent, would come through teaching and advanced degrees. “He might provide the brains for a successful agri-business – if he can partner himself with a man who has contacts. Probably a Kikuyu. Tough getting ahead when you’re from a minor tribe.”
“What about Anas? Always a peasant?”
“He’ll finish school here. Maybe even manage a decent pass for his school certificate. Then he’ll dash off to Nairobi. What happens then is anyone’s guess.”
“And Stephen?”
“A complicated question,” Edgar said. “Barnabas is stuck being forever an Mbere. And there are times when that will seem a real prison. Stephen is going to be what his father has in mind when he says: ‘We are Kenyans.’ We won’t know for a while whether that means he’ll be nothing or a new kind of–”
There was a sharp knocking at the door. Then suddenly Barnabas was standing in the kitchen, panting hard, a look of terror on his face. “Could you come?” he asked Edgar. “Stephen’s been hurt.”
“What’s happened?”
Barnabas looked at Edgar, then at me as if in my presence he could not speak. “You can tell us,” Edgar said. “What’s happened?”
Finally he managed to say, “They circumcised him.”
Edgar and I did not understand. We frowned at one another.
“Please come,” Barnabas pleaded. “They circumcised him. And the knife–”
“Where is he?” Edgar stood. He shoved his plate aside and nodded to me.
“He’s at Jeremiah’s,” Barnabas said. “They slit the top of–”
“Can you drive?” Edgar asked me. “I’m low on petrol.”
We hurried outside to the car. Edgar sat beside me in the passenger seat and Barnabas crawled into the back. I raced over unfamiliar roads in the dark. Edgar gave me directions and questioned Barnabas.
He reported that several hours after we left the compound Jeremiah and Owino argued about the bridewealth payment Jeremiah insisted Owino owed him. The young men drinking in the Toyotas had sided with Jeremiah. They had eventually gone to Owino’s house to fetch his wife and bring her home, intending to keep her at Jeremiah’s until the bridewealth debt was paid. At Owino’s they discovered Stephen and Anas who had begun to build Stephen’s house. The young men objected to this: Stephen was acting like a man, but he was not yet circumcised. They taunted and baited Stephen. A fight broke out. They seized both young men and took them back to the compound. There Jeremiah as chief would rule on whether or not Stephen could build the house. But Jeremiah wasn’t there. The young men had more beer. Eventually they decided to settle the matter themselves. They stripped Stephen. When Anas tried to stop them, they tied him up. Five men held Stephen down, one on each of his arms and three on his legs. The man who wielded the knife sliced through most of the foreskin. Then his hand slipped. The knife had cut into the tip of Stephen’s penis.

When we got to Jeremiah’s place no one was around except the old man. He was dead drunk on too much beer – or pretending to be – sitting in his newest Toyota. Barnabas shouted repeatedly for Stephen. At last we heard whimpering and found him cowering in bushes in a fetal ball. He was holding a cloth to his groin and bleeding. He would not let us see the bleeding. I got a blanket I kept in the trunk of the car and cloaked him in it. When he would not stand, remaining coiled into himself, whimpering, Barnabas, Edgar and I lifted him and carried him to the car. We placed him on the rear seat. We had to leave Barnabas behind; there was no room for him in the car. Edgar held Stephen’s hand. Once we hit the Nairobi road, he climbed into the rear seat. He held the boy like a father while I drove as fast as I dared through the black night.

When we got to Nairobi Hospital, nurses put Stephen on a gurney and rolled him into a surgery. Edgar in high DC** dudgeon insisted on accompanying him. The head nurse telephoned a surgeon. When he arrived and saw me, he waved. He was an American I had met socially. I knew he would do the best he could.
The doctor insisted that Edgar leave the surgery. He joined me outside where the air was cool and the darkness peaceful. “Those infernal Africans,” he said. “Drunken louts. How could they!”
I said nothing.
“I’m fed up with Kenya,” Edgar went on. “This has been an intolerable year. I can’t wait to get back to teaching people who want to learn.”
I moved off and paced. Eventually I found another entrance to the hospital. I went inside and waited near the surgery.
Finally the doctor emerged. Stephen was going to be all right, he said. He had removed the foreskin and repaired the wound to the tip of the penis. “His equipment won’t win any beauty contests,” the surgeon said. “But he’ll be able to father children.”
“That’s a relief,” I replied.
“He may not have as much pleasure doing it as most men,” he continued, “but he’ll be able to do it.”
I thanked the surgeon and went to find Edgar. I told him the news and we went to the car. As we drove to my house through the darkness, neither of us spoke.

When we were living in Nairobi, Donanne and I got together occasionally with David, an anthropologist acquaintance from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He was a neighbor of Donanne’s parents. He was conducting a field study in Mbere District in Kenya’s Kikuyu heartland and invited us to visit him.

One Saturday afternoon in May we drove out of Nairobi, headed for Mbere. After recent rains dark clouds hung above us. But the road north was in good repair. Once out of town we sped past Kikuyu farmers working in their shambas. The air smelled fresh after the rains. We watched women carrying water on their backs in huge oil cans. Tumplines stretching across their foreheads supported the weight of the cans and eventually formed depressions across them. Kids in villages with Harambee schools built by local volunteers waved to us and we waved back.

This, it seemed to me, was how the real life of Africa was lived, in the countryside. But the coverage most reporters provided from Africa rarely dealt with rural happenings. They weren’t considered news. The Monitor, however, might devote some space to reportage from Mbere. I was thinking like most journalists do, hoping to get something usable out of our visit with David.

When we turned off the highway at Embu, the paving gave way to murram. In places the murram gave way to mud. We saw stretches where our little Datsun might get stuck, places ascending to a ridge line and dotted with potholes where tires had dug in for traction. Fortunately, we had no trouble. We found the house where David was staying – very splendid for Mbere! – the former home of the overseer of a now defunct British-American Tobacco Co. operation. He had other guests: a government economist and his wife, both Brits, and an American with the Special Rural Development Program that David was studying. Once we got settled, we all had tea and expat chat: where we’d been, what we’d seen, David reminiscing about the Ghanaian community outside Accra where he’d lived while writing his dissertation. The others left to get back to the paved road before rain began to fall.

David’s house servant was of fragile health, his condition varying in direct proportion to the number of guests, the greater the number of guests the more fragile his health. Although three of the guests had left, the servant proved unable to face dinner. David asked Donanne to officiate and declared himself unembarrassed to make this request. (I was pleased that this strangely pre-women’s lib act did not embarrass David for it rather embarrassed me. David, former District Commissioner, knew how to get people to do things for him. Donanne’s dinner was undoubtedly better than David’s would have been.) While the three of us ate, rain started pounding on the roof.

David said that he usually spent Sundays, greeting people he’d gotten to know and checking in with his informants. He’d be happy to have us tag along. I hoped such an excursion would produce interesting stories of rural Kenya.

David had already told stories that intrigued me. One concerned a rare event in Mbere. A man, husband to four wives, had recently received cattle as bridewealth for a daughter. He decided to use the cattle to pay for a new wife for himself, his fifth. And, in fact, he did this. But, by custom, these new cattle were supposed to be used as bridewealth for his recently married daughter’s brother, the offspring of the same mother. Eventually there was a reaction in the community. By using his daughter’s bridewealth, he was seen, according to Mbere reckoning, as having married his own daughter, thereby violating the incest taboo. The man attempted to retrieve the cattle used as bridewealth for the fifth wife. This proved to be impossible; the fifth wife’s family would not return the cattle. Out of options, the man committed suicide, a rare act in Mbere.

Another story dealt with problems between Mbere/Kikuyu initiation practices and those of outsider Luos. A Luo had been sent to Mbere as a government official. The national ideology proclaimed everyone to be Kenyan now; that was the new identity. But some Mbere did not like a Luo official living among them.

At initiation the Mbere/Kikuyu circumcise; no male Mbere/Kikuyu could be considered an adult unless circumcision had occurred. Luos do not circumcise. The Luo official had a post-initiation teenage son. Some Mbere objected to this young man acting as an adult. Probably to express their hostility toward his father, whom they considered arrogant, Mbere ruffians seized the teenaged son. They forcibly circumcised him.

I hoped The Monitor would not feel itself too strait-laced to print this material. An earlier piece I had written about the spread of venereal disease causing young men of a Tanzanian tribe to seek brides outside the tribe, an unusual step, had challenged the editors, though a version of it did run.

The next day, David promised us, we would meet local people as he made his rounds of the area, checking in with informants. We looked forward to meeting them!

Anastasio and his mother whom you meet next post

Next post: Meet Anastasio, one of David’s Mbere informants.

This visit to Mbere served as the basic material for Fred’s story North of Nairobi in the collection Africa, Africa! Fifteen Stories. Check AA out at www.FredericHunter.com.

Sometimes a man catches sight of a woman, maybe only fleetingly, just a shared glance, not even a word exchanged. And the woman makes a captive of him. Months, even years go by, then unbidden she’s moving around inside his head. She’ll tiptoe through his memory. She becomes a kind of friend. He finds that he’s rather pleased when he stumbles upon her in his thoughts.

For a long time I did not know that such women exist for some men. If I had, I would never have thought one could exist for me. I would never have expected to spot her in Ouagadougou, the strange-sounding capital city of the strange-sounding country of Burkina Faso in the strange-sounding region of the Sahel. Certainly not there!

But I did. The country was called Upper Volta then and having stumbled on the entry in my daily diary for August 4, 1970, I see that I was on my way to interview a local politician called Joseph Ki-Zerbo at his home. He ate his lunch while I questioned him. The woman did not rate a mention in my diary. But while I have little recollection of Ki-Zerbo, my mind’s eye still has an image of her. It’s not that she excited my virility. She struck something different – and awakened in me a sense of what it was to be African.

I was in a downtown street. Not the main street because there were no cars. I was walking in the center of it. Sweating probably because it was shortly after noon and the sun was glaring overhead. All around me vibrated the cacophony of African life. Kids were playing. Trucks were honking. The air carried the laughter of market women.

Then something magical happened. Ahead of me I noticed a large, tall, amply rounded Ouaga woman dressed in a bodice and cloth. She wore a pink, diaphanous headcloth of some faux silk material, tied in a manner that was all the mode in town just then. The pink was perfect against the lustrous dark-chocolate of her skin and inside an over-garment of the same material she floated along. She was barefoot in sandals and she really did float. The heat did not oppress her even though I noticed on her brow beads of perspiration catching the light. Her hands waved delicately a little out from her sides.

As I drew parallel to her, I caught a sweet, womanly scent – not at all what I would have expected in that heat. She glanced at me. I nodded. She smiled. Smiled in a way that was like a shining in her face. She was a large, sweating woman, walking in the noontime sun. But she moved with absolute grace. She was serene; she was beautiful. She knew who she was. She was happy to be that person and was happy to have someone friendly walking beside her.

I think of her now and then. So many Americans want to be somebody else: a fashion model, a movie star, a CEO. This woman was happy to be who she was. Much to my surprise I’ll find her sometimes walking with me in the road. Whenever I nod at her, she smiles.

Burkinabe girl at a village outside Ouagadougou

Next post: Visiting an anthropologist in rural Kenya

This woman appears in Fred’s story “Doctor Kleckner” in the collection Africa, Africa! Fifteen Stories. Check out Africa, Africa! at FredericHunter.com.

A romantic mystery novel by Frederic Hunter
[Order it at www.JossNovel.com in paper or e-book]

Synopsis: An American journalist based in South Africa, Tom Craig, journeys to the small country of Malawi, ostensibly to cover a string of murders purportedly committed by a leopard. In fact, he wants to reconnect with the newly appointed American ambassador’s wife, Jocelyn (Joss) Hazen. He had a passionate affair with her eight years before and has never quite gotten over it. That’s something he does not bother to mention to Maggie, a free-lance pilot with whom he’s living in Johannesburg.
What’s so special about Joss? Here’s how Tom describes her. “If Jocelyn is consummately beautiful, she is also consummately perverse, the most difficult, the most damnably vexing woman I have ever met. But she gets away with it.”
It will not be easy to be alone with Joss in a place where an American ambassador’s wife is a celebrity. Especially when, having suffered an accident, she’s in a fragile state. When they meet at a party, Tom realizes she doesn’t recognize him. But hold on! Is she really Joss? Or an impostor who resembles her?
Tom has to know. And if she’s an impostor, what happened to Joss?

Attention Santa Barbarans:
Fred will do a book reading and signing at Chaucer’s Bookstore Thursday, April 26, at 7:00 pm. Save the date!

Free sample complete Chapter One

Joss: The Ambassador’s Wife
by Frederic Hunter

Nebbadoon Press
Santa Barbara

© 2012 Frederic Hunter

CHAPTER ONE

Malawi is green and unspeakably beautiful. Its small mountains rise unexpectedly off the plains. Its sunsets grab the breath right out of your lungs. Its length stretches more than five hundred miles in the deep trough of Africa’s Rift Valley, but at no point is it more than one hundred miles wide. The country nestles against a long, narrow body of water, the southernmost of the Rift Valley lakes, achingly lovely, known in colonial times as Lake Nyasa, but more commonly now as Lake Malawi. On maps the country and the lake look like longtime lovers snuggling spoons in an embrace that never ends.

If that image seems tender, what is happening right now in Malawi is not: a string of twenty-plus murders. They will intrigue readers of mine in California who do not even know that Malawi exists. Foreign correspondents like to believe that they do serious journalism. But they know that a good murder story garners more readers than reports of diplomatic negotiations or summit meetings. And this murder story is a good one because the murders are committed by a leopard. Yes, a leopard. Or perhaps a leopard-man. That ambiguity makes the story worth a visit, especially since, afterwards, I am headed north to Kenya to do the wildlife situationers that my editors ask for every year or so.

A story that will fascinate readers is not my only reason for going to Malawi. Another reason is a woman: Jocelyn—known to me as Joss—the wife of the American ambassador.

On the flight up to Blantyre, Malawi’s commercial hub, I spend almost the entire trip thinking about Joss. I take out photos I’ve slipped into an envelope in my typewriter case. There is one, taken two years before, of the two of us standing before a bookstall on the Left Bank of the Seine. It was a turbulent time in Paris—students were rioting—and not only there. America appeared to be tearing itself apart. Opposition to the Vietnam War had caused Lyndon Johnson to declare that he would not run for re-election. Assassins had killed both Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. But that was not our business. We were two people who wanted to shut out the world and be together. Joss succeeded in concocting some reason for a trip away from her family and we spent a week together, moving inside a cocoon of passionate self-absorption. That trip caused me trouble with my editors at the Big Guy—I have always thought of my paper as the Big Guy in California—because they did not want me on vacation just then and I went anyway. Looking at the photos—there were others of us when we were first together in East Africa—I have no regrets, even if we ended that week in Paris agreeing never to meet again.

I’ve also brought the latest of the family photos that Joss and Max send out at Christmas. Joss has scissored Max out of the pictures and so I see only her and Pepper, their daughter. These photos arrive folded into a note that never says more than “Miss you—Merry Christmas!” And if Joss seems never to change, Pepper, who looks to be a great, bright, grinning kid, gets a little bigger each year.

Putting the photos away, I wonder how I go about contacting Joss once I arrive in Blantyre. I muse about simply calling the ambassador’s residence. In my ruminatings, Joss answers the phone. The minute I hear her voice, I break into smiles. “Joss,” I say, “is that you?”

In my mind’s eye I see her shiny dark hair falling across the earpiece of the phone and her lips at the mouthpiece. She says, “Tommy! You in town?”

“When can I see you?”

“Darling, when we last said goodbye, you claimed you’d never—”

“A man can change his mind. I have to see you.”

“I heard you were living with someone in Joburg. Not burning the candle at both ends, are you?”

“I hear you’re living with an ambassador. Pretty pleased with yourself, huh?”

“You at the Mount Soche?” she asks. “I could probably slip away for an afternoon.”

So we set up something for tomorrow afternoon—which means a couple of hours of the best lovemaking I’ve ever had—and I think about how beautiful every part of her is. But she rings off; someone is coming who may overhear us. Part of the pleasure of this game we play is that it has to be clandestine, furtive, our passion a secret we share.

Once this fantasy passes, I know our meeting can be nothing so simple. Joss is now the newly arrived American ambassador’s wife. Everywhere she goes in Blantyre, her identity will be known. No slipping into a hotel for an afternoon of love. I wonder if this predicament amuses Maxwell Hazen. Joss, so it is said, has had many lovers. As has Max. They make each other aware of these indiscretions. Private misbehavior seems to provide them a way to keep in touch. Joss has told me that she and Max argue ferociously about these affairs. The unique aspect of our involvement, Joss assures me, is that our off-and-on affair is a secret we’ve kept to ourselves. Joss swears she has let Max know nothing about it. That means we have a singular attachment, a special love. Despite my journalist’s skepticism, I hope this is true. But in a place like Blantyre, the American ambassador and his wife have a kind of celebrity status. I wonder how they’re bearing the scrutiny. It will be a matter of crucial importance to Max, now that he has achieved an ambassadorship, that their reputations not be tarnished. So Joss cannot come to the hotel to see me. I’ll have to find some way to gain access to the residence.

By great good luck I have a pal in Malawi to help me with tips and contacts. The first thing I do, once I’ve rented a Land Cruiser at the airport and checked into the Mount Soche Hotel, is to seek out a run-down section of Blantyre. Here the Land Cruiser jounces over potholes. Urchins and bystanders watch the vehicle pass, the urchins wondering if they will ever ride in so fine a chariot. I park on a commercial street full of shops run by East Asians, where buildings, some wood, some stucco, badly need paint. There are decaying office blocks with dark hallways and the stairwells smelling always of piss and rooms with dirty windows sparsely furnished where little work is done. I lock the vehicle and check all the doors. I greet the urchins, some who hang back, others who approach me for handouts, and give two of the biggest of them coins and instructions to keep my property safe. Then I head toward a storefront over which hangs a sign: BLANTYRE STAR Your Eye on Malawi – Subscribe Today.

The dimly lit newsroom contains half a dozen desks. Most are piled with newspapers. There are two phones and three ancient typewriters. Two men work at layout sheets. They wave in greeting as I enter. I make my way to the dark back of the room where an African sits at a stool pulled up to a desk in a slouch I know well. He hunts-and-pecks at a standard-model typewriter. I sneak up and cork him on the shoulder. “All lies!” I tell him.

He turns to look at me, then brings a hand up to protect his eyes. “Oh, the whiteness! The whiteness! It hurts my eyes to look at you, my friend.” He stands to cork me with the hand not shielding his eyes and we clasp our right hands, grab each other’s thumbs and give one another friendly shoves.

This man is Bakili with whom I worked for a time on Nairobi’s Daily Nation—and for African wages. In those days Bakili hoped to parlay his presence in Nairobi into some kind of overseas training in America, Britain, or even Germany. We often ate dinner together—there was a curry place called the Three Bells where the food was good and cheap—and Bakili would try out on me his stratagems for going overseas. As a young man with a job and some money, Bakili was a magnet for girls. He introduced me to those who were daring enough to be seen with an American paleface. We would go on excursions in a beat-up Volkswagen bug I rented from a place called Odd Jobs in Muindi Mbingu Street. We took girls out to watch animals at the Nairobi Game Park and up to Lake Nakuru to see the flamingoes, to visit Karen Blixen’s house at Ngong, to watch the planes take off and land at Embakasi. One weekend we rented a small house in Mombasa and took two nurses-in-training down to the Indian Ocean coast. Since neither girl wanted to be stuck all weekend with the white guy, in the middle of the night they switched beds. Bakili and I had three joyful nights going to bed holding onto one nurse and waking up holding onto the other.

Alas! all of Bakili’s overseas plans failed. Eventually his father called him home, wanting him present at Malawi’s independence celebrations. In addition, he announced it was time for Bakili to marry and perpetuate the clan. Furthermore, his father said, he had found just the woman for him. So Bakili left Nairobi. He married the woman his father had chosen. She lives up-country—there is a lot of up-country in Malawi—tending his farm and raising their two children while he holds down a money-economy job in Blantyre.

Bakili gazes at me and shakes his head. “You hear there’s a leopard-man on the loose,” he accuses, “and you run up here to write that we are savages.”

“But you are savages!” I tell him. “To show you what a generous albino I am, I’ll buy you dinner.”

“To pick my brain!”

“That takes ten seconds.”

I take him out for a quick beer and ask his assessment of the stories I may pursue. Bakili reports on President Hastings Kamuzu Banda’s plottings to become president for life and hints that the leopard-man killings are a reaction to his putting a stranglehold on access to the presidency. “This,” he says, “is not the way the so-called democratic forms we inherited from the Brits are supposed to work.”

When I urge him to tell me more, he laughs. “Would I deprive you of the opportunity to ply your trade, to chat up bigwigs in interviews? Not a chance of it.” He does, however, give me the name of an African anthropologist who teaches at the country’s best secondary school. Despite the risk in talking to me, this man may be able to provide an anthropological perspective on the leopard-man killings.

When I ask about possible American government aid to the President’s project to move the national capital from the south to Lilongwe in the Central Province, Bakili, who is no admirer of Banda, claims a national capital at Lilongwe is simply the latest scheme to put money into the old man’s pockets. He checks to see if anyone overhears our conversation. Even when no one seems to, he lowers his voice when he says the word “Kamuzu.”

I ask if the new American ambassador is pushing the development scheme. Bakili’s info—from what sources I have no idea—is that the American dollars are designed to wean Malawi from the orbit of South Africa’s apartheid regime while keeping it firmly anti-communist. “My hunch,” he says, “is that American capital is positioning itself to take over the South African mines if there’s a race war down there.”

Then he grins at me. “Feed me dinner some other night,” he says. “There’s a party tonight at my place. Want a girl while you’re here?”

“I might if your taste in women were bett—”

“My taste in women,” he interrupts, “is superb.” When I shake my head at this, he says, “I have a town wife now as well as the one up-country. You’ll see my taste in women.”

“Insatiable!” I exclaim. “That’s what your taste in women is.” We laugh together and he tells me he has to get back. Believe it or not, he’s on deadline. He writes down the name of the anthropologist and his address on a sheet in the notebook he always carries, tears it out and gives it to me.

I ask him, “How’s the new American ambassador?”

“Manipulates the”—he lowers his voice—“dictator like a puppet.” He adds in a normal tone, “He doesn’t talk to folks like me.”

“And his wife,” I ask. “What’s she like?”

“They keep her under wraps. The kid, too. They think we’ll contaminate them.” He grins and shoves me in the chest. “I am ready to party! See you tonight! Bring a bottle.”

If anyone might know that I’ve had a relationship with the new American ambassador’s wife, it would be Bakili. Because I met Joss on the terrace of Nairobi’s Norfolk Hotel, a place where we used to drink at night after work. But she walked into my life after Bakili returned to Malawi.

The Norfolk is a famous hostlery from the colonial days, just across the road from what is now the University of Nairobi. Wild tales hold that colonials used to ride their horses onto the bar terrace and even into the dining room. But when I was at the Daily Nation, the clientele was generally young professionals, maybe some students and professors and the predictable clusters of tourists. That particular night in 1962, eight years ago, we were drinking and munching the hamburgers that were necessary to lure tourists. We were a mixed group of riff-raff: some African students, playing at doing homework, two of us from the Nation and a couple of Brits, born in Kenya, one bearded, the clean-shaven one with an African girlfriend. Out of nowhere a slim young woman in a tee shirt and shorts, backpack and hiking boots, entered the terrace from the road. She stood looking around. Her black hair was cut short then and she wore no make-up, not even lipstick. She glanced around the terrace, swung the pack off her back and, grabbing it, walked over to us. “Mind if I join you?” she asked. “You’re the only crowd out here who looks as disreputable as I do.”

“What do you say, chaps?” asked the bearded Brit. “Do we really look as disreputable as all that?” But he quickly stood—as did I and the other Kenya-born Brit—because of course we wanted this plainly beautiful woman to glorify our table. We opened up space and reached for chairs. Since I was closest to her, I took the backpack, grabbed her wrist and ushered her into a chair beside me.

“Glad to have you join us,” I told her. “I’m Tom.”

She said, “You’re an American. I can hear it in your voice.”

“I am,” I said. “But I’ve been here long enough to feel Kenyan.”

She put her hand on my arm and smiled and leaned forward to kiss my cheek. The others applauded. “Kiss us all, lassie!” cried the bearded Brit.

“She only kisses fellow-countrymen,” I shouted as we sat down. I signaled a waiter and ordered a beer and a burger for her.

She leaned close to me. “I’ve been in West Africa, speaking French,” she told me. “I haven’t heard American English in I-don’t-know-how-long.” She reached out her hand and we shook. “I’m Jocelyn,” she said. “Joss.”

I assumed she was a student. Possibly an anthropology grad student as I had been not long before. I felt a kinship with her. We stayed with the others for a couple of hours, talking and drinking. When the circle broke up, it was after midnight. As we left the terrace, the pack on her back again, she asked me, “Do you know a cheap place where I could stay? I can’t afford the tab here.

I was surprised. “You have no place to stay?” I asked.

She shook her head and grinned. And I grinned back at her.

In those days my lodgings were a single room at the back of an Asian store in Bazaar Street. I entered from the rear. The room had a washbasin in one corner and a small refrigerator in another. My clothes hung on nails and hangers beneath a shelf where I’d stacked underwear and books. The double bed was unmade and, as I brought Joss into the room and looked at it, I wondered how long it had been since I’d washed the sheets.

I’d gotten a straight-back chair—a towel was hanging over it to dry—and a cheap but sturdy wooden table I used as a desk. On it were a lamp and piles of reference books and newspapers next to my two most valuable possessions: my Olivetti portable typewriter and Grundig short-wave radio. Stacks of books stood like mini-Stonehenges on the floor throughout the room. The door was ajar to a small compartment attached to the room. It was almost large enough—but not quite—to house the toilet and the telephone-shower that were in it. There was a drain in the floor and I sometimes showered standing on the toilet. I always left the door open, hoping to dry the place out.

“Will I knock over books if I set this down?” Joss asked.

I took the backpack from her and set it on the chair. “Now you know what the room of a freelance journalist looks like.”

“I’ve always wondered,” she said.

“You’re welcome to stay.”

She looked at me gratefully. It was a kind of magical moment that went on and on without really taking any time at all. Then she kissed me, very fully. “Do you mind if I take a shower?” she asked.

“I may even have a second towel,” I said, pulling a dry towel from the shelf next to the underwear. Giving it to her, I took hold of her hand. I wanted to kiss her again. “I won’t be long,” she promised.

While she showered, I turned off the overhead light and got into bed, wondering what would happen. The lamp on the table was the only illumination. When she left the shower, she came into the room to dry off. I pretended to be asleep—she must have known I wasn’t—and narrowly opened my eyes to watch her polish her body. After a moment I sat up. “You’re incredibly beautiful,” I said. I watched her buff herself dry. She smiled at me, without a trace of self-consciousness. Then she folded the towel over the chair, turned off the lamp and came to bed. We kissed again and she asked, “Why are you wearing shorts?”

We were together for more than a month, making love with the frequency of honeymooners. I could not quite believe what was happening to me: that a woman of intelligence and loveliness would walk out of the night in a tie-dyed tee shirt, shorts and hiking boots and expand my existence, enhance my emotions, in a way I had never dreamed possible.

At the end of our time together we went camping on the Serengeti plains. That was like being Adam and Eve at the beginning of the world. Adam and Eve lived in the moment. They did not worry about the past or future and neither did we. I knew, of course, that Joss had a life – probably a grad student’s life – before she appeared on the Norfolk Hotel terrace that night. But I did not ask her about it. We lived with an immediacy that did not worry about tomorrow. I went to work during the days. I picked up free-lance stories when they floated by. At night I was with Joss. We did Nairobi and we made love. On the weekends we went camping.

Sometimes I would watch her. I would think she might be – or had been – three or four different women. I wondered if I would recognize any of them if I bumped into them on the road up ahead. Would I meet her at a party somewhere in the future and wonder who she was? If I came on to her and we connected again, would we realize we’d been lovers?

When we camped, we slept on plains so abundant with wildlife that we had no fear of being attacked by predators. Who would want to eat us when a juicy little Thompson’s gazelle was so easy to catch? We slept, wound about each other, in the same sleeping bag. We woke at dawn to watch zebras and gnus, gazelles and waterbuck, topi and kudu, Cape buffalo, lions and elephants come to a water hole to drink. When they had drunk their fill, we would wriggle out of our bag and bathe in the cool morning air, as naked and as unconscious of our nakedness, as the animals themselves.

Eventually I got a request from a paper for which I served as a stringer. It asked me to provide dispatches from southern Africa. This was an opportunity I longed for. It might lead to a staff position and end my hand-to-mouth existence as a stringer. One night while we were camping on an enormous plain dotted with kopjes, rock hillocks, I told Joss about it. Our campfire was the only man-made illumination for hundreds of square miles. Having eaten, we sat close to one another, our backs against a log, sipping wine, watching the stars. I said, “One of my papers wants some coverage from South Africa. I have to go down there for a while next week.”

“What is it?” she asked. “An audition?”

“Maybe.” I held my breath, then plunged ahead. “Want to come along?” She looked at me as if I were joking. “Why not?” I said.

For what seemed forever she did not speak. Finally she said, “You should know: I’m married.”

The words stunned me. I did not move. I sipped my wine and finally said, “Come anyway. I’m not prejudiced against married women.”

In the silence that followed I could not believe what we were discussing. She was married? I had been making love daily to another man’s wife? I had been feeling my emotions expanding, growing toward a possible commitment… And she was married! Finally I looked over at her. Joss said nothing, staring sadly into her glass of wine.

Finally I asked, “Does he know you’re here?”

Joss shook her head.

“Does he know you—?”

“He plays around all the time,” she said. “He knows I hate it. That’s why he does it.” Then she added, “And I do it to him because he hates it.”

I nodded. But I had never heard of such a relationship.

“It’s strange,” she said. “We love each other too much to divorce. And hate each other too much to be happy.”

I felt like railing at her, giving her hellfire-and-damnation. But in Kenya such things were not done by the people I knew. In Nairobi no one ever took a high moral tone with a friend.

“We think a baby will make a difference,” Joss said. “So that’s the plan.”

I smiled at this and looked at her a long moment. I put my arm about her and kissed her sweetly as if kissing her goodbye. In the morning we drove back to Nairobi and I got her a room at the Norfolk.

After leaving Bakili, I drive into the center of town and stop at the American Cultural Center to see the Public Affairs Officer, the Embassy’s public face. He’s Bill Sykes, a fellow Californian by origin, maybe forty-five, tall, with the ready smile of a man who wants to be liked. He invites me into his office and pours two cups of coffee from a burbling coffee maker. It sits on a bookshelf below one of several large National Parks posters with the logo “See America!” written across them. Scanning the posters, I realize that, beating around Africa for ten years, I’ve seen more of it than I have of my own country. Sykes hands me a cup of coffee. “Ever been to Malawi before?” he asks, gesturing to a chair and settling in behind his desk. “Can’t be much here to interest a newsman.”

“I’ll do a situationer,” I tell him, “and they’ll bury it next to ads for panty hose.”

“Can I make that sweeter?” Sykes asks. He opens his bottom desk drawer and pulls from it a bottle of whiskey. He sweetens both coffees. “The Assistant Secretary of State for Africa’s arriving in about ten days.”

“Lilongwe project?” I ask.

He nods. “Anything for you in that?”

I shrug, reluctant to tell him that while the Assistant Secretary’s visit is an-all-hands-to-battle-stations deal for him, it’s a yawner for my readers. I pass it off and Sykes shrugs. He replaces the bottle and relaxes into his desk chair, his feet on a drawer. “Any chance of my seeing the Ambassador today?” I ask.

“He’s tied up this afternoon,” Sykes tells me. I wonder if it’s true or if every interview has to be negotiated. Probably I should have set up the appointment from Joburg, but I didn’t want Joss to hear from her husband I was arriving.

Sykes asks, “Wandering Africa the way you do, you ever run into Hazen?”

“Once in Morocco. Rabat. You’re sure he couldn’t fit me in today?”

“A doctor’s seeing his daughter,” Sykes explains. “He wants to be there.”

“What’s wrong with his daughter?”

“Acute depression.”

I think: What? The kid I met a bit over two years ago in Morocco seemed well adjusted. In any case, children tend to adjust easily.

Sykes adds, “I guess the flight down here from Europe really got to her. She had to fly down unaccompanied. She’s been under a doctor’s care ever since. Malawi can do that to you.”

“The kid flew down here alone?”

“Hazen hated to have that happen. But there was no other choice.” Sykes continues, “The Hazens have really had a rough go. Mrs. Hazen was in an auto accident in Europe. She’s had extensive reconstructive surgery.”

Joss!

I am stunned. An image of her face swims into my mind. Such a beauty! I wonder how reconstructive surgery has altered her face. Then out of nowhere my mind sees the image of a car wreck I came upon in southern France some years ago: a small sports car mangled beside a road lined with poplars. I see the body I saw then: a young man lying beside the car, face cut, bloody. Oh, Joss!

Then I hear Sykes saying, “We all admire the way Hazen attends to her. But it’s put the kid in a tailspin.” I ask about the care she’s getting. “An African doctor’s treating her,” says Sykes.

“Mrs. Hazen’s under the care of an African doctor?”

“No, the child. He’s a guy who trained in the States.” My expression telegraphs what I’m thinking. Sykes shrugs as if he agrees. “Hazen says we oughtn’t to be out here if we scorn the people we serve,” Sykes explains. “Well, maybe. But if she were my kid, I’d get her the hell of out here.” Then he adds, “But I’m not bucking to be Secretary of State. That’s off the record, of course.”

Sykes walks me to the Land Cruiser and I ask what my chances are of seeing the President. “Let us handle that for you,” he says. That’s a surprise. Usually I set that sort of thing up directly with the President’s office. Why would I go through Hazen? That way I’m beholden to him. Sykes explains, “Hazen can probably get you in. You won’t see the President otherwise.”

Well, well, I think. I wonder if I believe that.

“Old Kamuzu admires the fact that Hazen really knows Africa,” Sykes says. “He understands that they’re good for each other. If Malawi progresses so will Hazen. And vice versa. So the President trusts him.”

“And to see the President,” I ask, “I have to see Hazen first? Is that the game?”

“Hazen’s walking on eggs,” Sykes says. “He wants to do good—as well as make good. This Lilongwe involvement is just being finalized. First American money in ages. President doesn’t want any bad press.”

I have the feeling that Sykes is offering me a deal that I don’t think I like. He and I take each other’s measure.

“If we got you in to see Kamuzu,” says Sykes, “would you do a piece on U.S. money helping Malawi? Africa moving forward? That sort of thing?”

I shrug. There’s no use telling him I don’t work that way—because I may have to. “The leopard-man murders will get a lot more play in my paper,” I tell him.

“How about laying off that? It just reinforces stereotypes about Africa.”

“You know, you won’t get positive foreign press out of here as long as a leopard-man keeps killing government ministers.”

Sykes nods ruefully. “Then maybe no coverage is the best kind,” he says. “Malawi needs that Lilongwe project.” Then he promises to set up something with Hazen and says he’ll call the hotel.

He watches me drive off. I turn the corner and pull off the road. I lean against the steering wheel and put my head in my hands. I ask, Joss, Joss! My beauty! What in God’s name has happened to you?

Or this.

Or this.

This is what they call the “rien de rien,” the nothing of nothingness.

Do you really want to go to Timbuktu?

It’s out here in the deep Sahara.

Do you really want to discover its secrets? Unlock its mysteries?

If you do, you won’t be alone. Donanne and I wanted to go there – and did – in 1970. The town-life pictures that follow are from that time. Since I had neglected to cross the Sahara when covering Africa for The Christian Science Monitor, Donanne and I took a look at it in 2001. The desert photos are from that trip.

Two hundred years ago hundreds of young romantics wanted to visit Timbuktu. It was a fabled city of gold. No one in Europe knew where it was: out there somewhere in the Sahara. To be the first European to find the place? That would bring you instant fame, riches probably and the eternal gratitude of your countrymen since there was an intense rivalry among European nations to be the first to find it, the first to establish trade relations with it. Finding it was bound to be difficult. Tuaregs guarded the desert. They haunted the caravan routes.

And Mohammedans – as they were called then – were thought to kill all infidels. Sometimes they did.

Here, by the way, is what Timbuktu looked like in 1970. The young lady carries a bottle on her head. Cool, hunh?

Despite the challenges two centuries ago, plenty of people rose to meet them. Scores of them set off: explorers, restless adventurers dressed in disguise, unknowns hungry for fame, officers eager for glory and wealth. Eccentrics and fools went, too. There was even an unrequited lover, a wealthy Dutch woman who assembled a party and marched into the sea of sand.

They started off pluckily. They gathered information, recruited guides, many of them unreliable, some treacherous. Then they slogged into the Sahara’s inferno. They fought off thirst, trusted mirages, survived on unfamiliar food, trudged past the bones of failed caravans. They crossed country that looked like this…

and tore open the veil of mystery with which the desert covers itself. With only two or three exceptions, they were never seen again.

You’ll be better off than they were. You’ll survive.

But you will almost certainly not unlock the secrets of Timbuktu. Within a matter of hours, however, you’ll discover facts which decades of valiant effort failed to unmask. In a sense the main fact which eluded detection was this: man’s enormous capacity for self-deception, for disregarding information contrary to what he wishes to believe.

Before the New World’s discovery, Africa was Europe’s prime supplier of gold. It came from somewhere in or beyond the Sahara. Most knowledgeable Europeans thought its source was a city of fabulous wealth, the seat of a university, a center of sophistication and Muslim culture, the hub of caravan traffic. Timbuktu!

The most determined of its explorers was Major Gordon Laing, a Scot fired with ambition to be the first white man to enter Timbuktu. Major Laing had led some inland explorations while serving in Sierra Leone, and the idea of Timbuktu obsessed him. He persistently sought permission for the journey. He prepared himself for its rigors by sleeping on the floor and writing with his left hand. As things turned out, the latter exercise was not a bad idea.

Major Laing arrived in Tripoli to undertake the Timbuktu mission in May, 1825. By early July he had asked the British consul’s daughter to marry him. She accepted but her father denied him. As a result Laing and the horrified consul broke off speaking relations; the suitor camped outside the city. Ultimately the consul granted the couple permission to marry. But since he doubted his authority to perform legal marriages, he insisted that the major pledge – in writing – that he would not consummate the marriage until he returned from Timbuktu. The major agreed. (We hope he had the sense to break the agreement. Probably he didn’t.)

Two days after the ceremony he marched into the desert.

Circling around a local civil war, Laing got to Ghadames. He spent days negotiating the onward journey with guides who demanded more money. He received inquisitive stares, doctored local inhabitants, was pestered for handouts, hungered for mail and burned with love for his bride.

He pushed on. He reached an oasis called In Salah. There he was such a curiosity that he had to nail up his door. He also feared for his life. Besides being a Christian among Muslims, he was also thought to be the leader of an earlier expedition which had shot and wounded a local resident.

After weeks at In Salah the Laing party joined a larger caravan and re-entered the desert. News of the major’s presumed wealth preceded the caravan as it ventured nervously through country known for civil wars, feuds and marauders. Ultimately Tuaregs followed the expedition for five days. Before dawn on the sixth day they attacked the explorer’s party. Laing sustained multiple wounds, the loss of several subordinates and the theft of virtually all his funds.

The caravan continued, leaving the wounded leader to follow as best he could. Some 400 miles later he reached the village of Sidi el Muktar. There the village chief befriended the explorer, fed and sheltered him. He advised him not to enter Timbuktu due to local unrest.

Laing was determined to go on. Before he could do so, a plague struck the village. It killed the chief and all surviving members of the Timbuktu mission except Laing himself.

Finally the chief’s son agreed to take the scarred and impoverished explorer to his destination – in exchange for all his possessions. The major entered the fabled city thirteen months after he left Tripoli. The only surviving account of his findings and impressions is a short letter – written with his left hand. It tells almost nothing.

Due to personal danger, Laing is thought to have sent his journal back to Tripoli by messenger. Speculation exists that it fell into the hands of the French consul in Tripoli, who destroyed or suppressed it for reasons of nationalistic pride. The major himself joined a small caravan headed for Morocco. Three nights out the caravan’s leader murdered him.

The es-Saheli Mosque at Timbuktu, 1970

At the time of this treachery, an enterprising young Frenchman named René Caillié was preparing himself to enter Timbuktu in disguise. He had lived among Arabs, had studied their Koran and their customs, and spoke some of their language. He had also concocted an improbable story: that he was an Arab carried away to France as an infant who now wished to return to his home in Egypt.

In March, 1826, he converted his savings into gold, silk handkerchiefs, knives, beads, and tobacco and started inland – on foot – along the Rio Nunez in present-day Guinea. At the end of thirteen months, five of them spent in an African village recovering from an illness, Caillié reached his destination.

“I looked around and found that the sight before me did not answer my expectations,” he wrote. “The city presented, at first view, nothing but a mass of ill-looking houses built of earth.”

Caillié stayed in Timbuktu for two weeks. He gathered information, then joined a caravan headed for Morocco. He was particularly anxious not to return west, fearing accusations that he had never reached Timbuktu.

The journey across the desert took almost three months. Spinning pillars of whirlwinded sand attacked the column of 1,400 camels. Thirst and mirages tormented Caillié. Suspecting he was a Christian, members of the caravan taunted and threw stones at him.

He survived the crossing only to find that a Frenchman disguised as a Muslim could expect little help even from his country’s diplomats.

The French consul in Rabat, a Jewish merchant, offered him no help. He begged for food and slept in a cemetery. The consul in Tangier repeatedly refused him entry, on one occasion shouting: “Turn out this dog of a beggar!” Ultimately he relented, however, and arranged passage for Caillié to France. There he was greeted as a hero.

Barth stayed in this house in Agadez. The plaque beside the
door commemorates the event.

Twenty-five years later Timbuktu received a six-month visit from Heinrich Barth, a German who spent five years exploring the central Sudan. Barth brought eminent qualifications to his role of explorer; he was inquisitive, imperturbable, somewhat humorless, a scholar, an Arabist, an authority on the desert, and a physical culture buff.

In Timbuktu Barth located the Tarikh es Sudan, a 17th-century history of the Songhai people. He quoted extensively from it in his five-volume report on his explorations.

Barth found that Timbuktu and its commerce had declined since the height of the Songhai Empire. The major cause had been the conquest of Songhai in 1591 by a Moroccan force of 5,000 cavalry and 2,000 infantry. These troops made a four-month trek across the desert, defeated the Songhai warriors, who had never seen firearms, and caused permanent disruption of trade. Thus, 200 years after the invasion Timbuktu was no longer the golden city of European legends – if in fact it ever had been.

It is still there for you to visit. You needn’t slog across desert wastes to reach it. And you won’t suffer the explorers’ hardships when you get there.

You’ll find it a dusty, baked-yellow town on the edge of the desert, a small place of broad vistas and narrow alleyways, a place which clings to its secrets, a place which is both the end of the world and the center of one. To reach it you’ll have flown over enormous sand-hued plains, an endless wasteland through which the broad, flat Niger inches slowly, like an unmotivated snake about to nap in the sun. Some travelers reach it by boats, not unlike this one.  I do not advise such a trip. It’s several days from Mopti and the benches have no backs.

The sun will shine relentlessly. With seeming hammer blows it will chisel your dark shadow into the ground. Heat will thicken the air; you will move through it as if through endless layers of invisible curtain. They will part for you reluctantly.

You’ll find the hotel rude or luxurious, depending on your expectations, depending on your experience of Africa and where you’ve been before. Your room will be dark, the heat even thicker than outside, the walls of a rough-finished mud-cement. Your bed will be hard. Like the market in Bamako your pillow and towels will smell of spices; the scents may enthrall you or make you retch. With luck you will happen to get the electric fan. Its cord may still lack a plug. A little ingenuity will solve that problem, enabling you to sleep in a warm wind.

The bathroom through the open archway will be basic, but private. The toilet may need a seat. The shower will offer water at a single temperature: available. Best not to drink it.

When thirst hits, you’ll sit out on the terrace, under a sagging and ripped stretch of canvas and try to slake the longing with African beer or tiny quarter-pint tins of chilled Algerian grapefruit juice. You quaff them in utter stillness. Your eyes will fall on the green oasis to the left, on the water hole to the right. Tuaregs will bring their camels to drink there, then shed their clothes and bathe.

At night a dark, diminished heat will surround you. You will dine on the terrace. Naked light bulbs will attract insects; these in turn will lure frogs up out of the oasis to feed. They will croak as music squeaks from a phonograph and, miraculously, the waiters will not step on them.

Your bread will taste of sand, your couscous will taste of sand, your pudding will taste of sand, your tea will taste of sand. You will never forgive yourself if you left your toothbrush behind.

During school vacations your companions will be Peace Corpsmen. They will complain about the cost of the lodging and drone an endless monotony of African tales. Like war stories in a barracks they will drive you from the hotel, out for a pre-bed stroll through the town. In the marketplace the soccer games – sometimes played with oranges – will still be in progress. You will wander to the main square, stare at the stars, gaze at the Beau Geste fort and return. You will not enter the tangle of alleyways; you might not find your way out.

By daylight you will wander through them, visit the covered market, see where Laing and Caillié stayed, sip mint tea with a qadi, and inspect the es-Saheli mosque designed by a Spanish architect of the mid-1300s.

Children will pester you for sweets, for coins, and attention. You will photograph them and notice that some are light-skinned and well-clothed while their playmates are black and naked. You will also remark that some people live in well-built houses of stone while others live in tents, that dark-skinned men trudge back and forth with animal skins full of water while light-skinned men talk business in the twilight.

You will wonder how these people relate to each other, ask yourself if slavery still exists here as it did in 1960. You will see that Timbuktu really is a world of subtle, highly structured and hidden relationships. And you will suspect correctly that it will not yield up its secrets to a transient like you.

Even so, a certain moment will come. There will be no sound. Colors will sparkle with absolute clarity. The air will lay cool on your skin. Your nostrils will carry a memory of spices. In that moment you will watch some silent, age-old movement: women carrying water, Tuaregs leading camels, children playing. And in that moment Timbuktu will put its hold on you.

You will wonder: Was it worth the effort to come? Laing asked himself that. So did Caillié and Barth.

You will know how to answer when you’ve been there.

Note: On Monday, April 2, 2012, the New York Times reported “Tuareg rebels overran the ancient desert crossroads of Timbuktu over the weekend.” These rebels are now said to control the vast, empty north of Mali. Army officers recently overthrew the elected Malian government as a result of military reverses. These developments are consequences of the downfall of the Ghadafi regime in Libya.

Next post: One of those women a man never forgets.

Sunday at one of the sunken churches at Lalibela

Donanne and I flew north from Kenya to do some reporting in Ethiopia about its ancient cities: Lalibela, Gondar, Axum. When we flew over Haile Selassie’s kingdom, the gorges below us dwarfed that of the Grand Canyon. An explorer of Ethiopia – James Bruce, I believe – wrote that he had been told the country was tableland. This was true, he discovered, but the table was upside down. Venturing into the ancient kingdom meant climbing up and down the legs.

On the plateaus above some of the canyons, farmers had carefully laid out fields; they were green with crops. But the fields were edged with chasms. You could not help wondering how farmers ever got their produce to market. Perhaps they were subsistence farmers and ate what they grew.

Ancient palaces at Gondar, Ethiopia, here and below

We stopped first in Gondar, a city of ancient palaces. Before the 16th century the rulers of Ethiopia and their followers moved around the realm, living in temporary royal camps, feeding off the surplus crops of farmers who, for that reason, did not need to worry about marketing their produce. By the mid-1500s they began regularly to spend the rainy season near Lake Tana. In 1635 Emperor Fasilides founded Gondar which was nearby. Palaces were built there over the next century, scenic and quite unexpected by the traveler.

There was no story there for me, but I made the mistake – you only make it once – of wising off to an airport guard. He was searching my luggage for small arms. Donanne and I were both whisked away, sequestered, body-searched and separated. Separated concerned me. Donanne was searched again, but we made our flight. And then discovered that a similar plane had been hijacked the week before, putting Ethiopian security services on high alert. As I say, you make that mistake only once.

Our flight to Lalibela – sheep and goats flew with us in the baggage compartment – landed in a wide opening at the end of a canyon, a wash through which water would surge if rainfall were ever torrential. But it was dry now. The sun had baked the canyon walls a parched yellow. It sucked the moisture from our skin. We breathed dust. A man sat beneath a tree at one side of the runway. His donkey grazed nearby. Goats pulled at grass further along. Close by a jeep awaited debarking passengers. Lalibela itself was a good ways off.

We jounced the miles to it and got settled at the Seven Olives Hotel, a single-story structure, maybe five rooms.

We had come to Lalibela to see African cathedrals built about the same time as the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe, in the 12th and 13th centuries. But these Ethiopian churches were remarkably different for the Gothic cathedrals soar upward, over the surrounding countryside. The structures in Lalibela do not soar at all. In fact, they are hardly visible on the horizon.

Still, a visitor to Lalibela feels a similar reverence for the dedication and workmanship that gave– No, not “rise.” For in Lalibela the impulses, religious and architectural, gave “rise” to nothing. The churches were not built at all. Rather workmen carved them, hewed them out of granite rock.

As we walked along the path, the ground ahead of us suddenly fell away. At our feet, across a trench of perhaps fifteen yards, we saw a church. We descended to the terraceway outside the church and entered. A dozen churches existed at the site.

Cut out of solid rock, the interiors of the churches were dark – despite the windows carved into the walls. Some of these had cross motifs. We had visited European cathedrals. The craftsmanship and deep devotion that created them awed us. We felt the same awe here – and asked the same questions: Why? How? How long?

We visited one church after the other. Coptic priests tended them, light-colored woolen cloths draped about their bodies. They reckoned time by the Julian calendar. The year might have been 1470. They seemed receptacles of tradition, purveyors of superstition. They watched us; we nodded.

Coptic priests seemed to live in the 13th century

In the late afternoon we had tea on the terrace of the Seven Olives. We watched shadows inch up the canyon walls and had dinner with three Americans, Department of the Army civilians stationed in Korea.

The next morning we went back to the churches. It was Sunday. Worshippers wrapped in white cloths walked at the edges of the trenches. They filled the terraces outside the churches. They propelled our imaginations back through time, to New Testament days. It seemed perfectly plausible that Jesus had healed and preached to people that looked and thought very much like these.

Sunday at one of the sunken churches in Lalibela

Next post:  The nitty-gritty mysteries of Timbuktu

Enstoolment? Whuzzzat? The kings of England are enthroned. The kings of the Ashanti are enstooled. The Golden Stool – which, legend says, descended from the sky in the 17th century – symbolizes kingship. The English kings, those rubes, actually place their posteriors on the English throne. The Asantehenes do NOT place theirs on the Golden Stool. It has been hidden for at least 175 years to prevent the brutish British from stealing the gold.

We caught the morning flight to Kumasi. It arrived late. A mad chase through a town full of celebrants into the city centre. There I checked in with the information officer and got us into our hotel. Then out to Pampaso for the ceremonies. An absolute crush of people there: the heat of their bodies, the smell of their joy and their sweat, the taste of anticipation in the air, the sound of drumming so insistent that everyone moved to its rhythm. Hundreds of men awaited the new king, dancing, swaying, moving their arms. Most were wrapped in swirls of fabric, often kente cloth, their chests naked, many with headdresses – peaked hats adorned with gold, ringed with emblems fastened to them – some with necklaces and regalia of gold, others blowing into the tapered ends of cow horns. Many wore bracelets and anklets of gold, others of cowrie shells. Many of them held gilded staffs crowned with carved figures or emblems that resembled the famous gold-weights.

Opoku Ware II, the new Asantehene, arrived. He wore traditional cloth, rather like a toga, and a wristwatch on his arm. Attendants eager for the honor bore him on a palanquin, a splendid cloth-draped litter, carried shoulder high, sheltered by an enormous umbrella. Attendants waved large raffia fans to cool him. Escorting the new king were middle-aged courtiers, carrying gilded staffs and enormous twirling umbrellas of brocade skirted with red flannel, some of them ten feet tall. Frenzied chanting and shouting greeted him. An Ashanti chief stepped forward to meet the king and “gave” him, as the Ashantis say, to the Amanhene, a select group of chiefs. They were assembled in a small closed building attended by ritual functionaries.

The retinue of retainers arrives

Outside the building, chiefs and their retinues waited in tense excitement. Porters of ritual regalia – staffs, swords and gilded symbols of chieftaincy – laughed and chatted and raised their arms in gestures of allegiance, watching carefully those who entered and left the small building.

Suddenly the Asantehene himself burst from it.

The man himself! The Asantehene!

Aprede drums struck up. Holding a sword and shield, the Asantehene danced in a tight circle of men. They shouted, swirled and danced with him. From a collection of individual bodies the crowd fused into a single mass of dancing flesh. It surged forth, jumping, pushing. A Rolls Royce awaited the new king. He danced toward it. Eventually he reached it. As an attendant wiped sweat from his neck, the new Asantehene entered the car’s sanctuary and drove off.

We returned to the hotel for showers and a lunch of orange juice. Donanne began to feel unwell and wondered if she should stay at the hotel. But she would come with me. In the hotel lobby we ran into Mary whom we had met at church in Accra. She was bright, young and English, working in Sierra Leone with Volunteer Service Overseas, an English version of the Peace Corps. She had driven up with one of the Ghanaian church members, a family man whom we had also met.

As we had orange juice together, she asked, “Would you mind terribly if I spent tonight in your room?”

The request surprised me. “Actually Donanne’s not feeling all that well.”

“I could sleep on the floor.”

“You have no place to stay?”

“Well— I could stay in the room of Mr.–” She mentioned the name of the church member. “But if I do that,” she said, “he’ll expect me to sleep with him.”

I laughed, puzzled. “But we all know each other from church.”

“Really, he will,” she said. She began to laugh, too.

I recalled my conversation the night before with my journalist colleague about Cameron Duodu’s several wives. “You’re in Africa, right?” he had asked.

“I suppose you could,” I said, wondering if D were up to having a guest. “Why don’t you check with us later? We’ve got to get out to the enstoolment.”

Blow those horns! The man is here!

As expected, an even larger crowd swelled the sports stadium. Down on the playing field Ashanti chiefs were assembling for a durbar or reception of the new king. They arrived borne on palanquins, dancing from their seated positions – heads swaying, shoulders moving, hands brandishing swords and ancient pistols. Drums, trumpets and chants heralded their arrival. The giant umbrellas sheltered the chiefs from an overcast sky. Everyone seemed to be wearing kente cloth and carrying gold regalia.

At last the Asantehene himself appeared. He had donned his traditional battle dress. After inspecting bodyguards and greeting dignitaries, he demonstrated his ability to lead the Ashanti in war. He was to do this by firing a rifle into the air three times. On each occasion more than 100 men at arms were to answer his shot with salvos from ancient muzzle-loading rifles.

By this time Donanne really was feeling unwell. We found a taxi in which several Ghanaians were sitting. We entered the cab and I asked the driver to take us immediately to the hotel; I would pay double the price. The men already in the cab looked annoyed. But if they did not understand our need to return quickly, they understood a taximan’s following the money.

Once we got Donanne settled in the hotel – a nap might prove restorative – I hurried back to the sports stadium. I arrived in time to see the Asantehene walk about greeting his chiefs. As he moved, drums and twirling umbrellas followed him.

Crowds rushed onto the playing field to dance alongside him. I watched a colleague, a Life/Time photographer, dive into the crowd to get pictures of the participants’ excitement. All in a day’s work for him, I supposed, but I wondered if he’d get trampled.

Returning to the hotel, I found D feeling better. We had some dinner and I left again to go to the Asantehene’s palace for the final ceremonies. There, outside the palace walls, in the early morning hours, the Ashanti stalwarts cried out: “Long live the King of Ashanti! May the Asantehene’s reign be happy, long and prosperous!” And there this possibly final paroxysm of African tribal assertion ended.

We slept late. We had breakfast with Mary who had found a place to stay. Returning to the room I wrote a “color piece” about the previous day’s events, the first of three stories I wrote about the enstoolment. (My editors in Boston must have concluded that ethnic splendor deranged me!) I finished just in time for us to race to the airport for the plane back to Accra.

The enstoolment welcoming committee

We had dinner with Jeannie at the Black Pot, a new restaurant enjoying a vogue. In her Ghanaian way she was scornful of the place and its local cuisine. “What did you pay for this dinner?” she demanded. I refused to tell her; I was certain she would chastise me for allowing myself to be bilked. We finished up the evening at Dan’s Milk Bar where once again Jeannie had coffee ice cream.

Next post: The sunken churches of Ethiopia

Attendants await the Asantehene

Enstoolment preparations made, there were other stories to write. With our Ghanaian friend Jeannie, whose house we used as a mail drop when we were in West Africa, Donanne and I went to Koforidua. There the three of us toured a cocoa plantation. Cocoa, the source of chocolate, was one of Ghana’s main exports. I thought I should know what cocoa pods and their seeds looked like. We drove on to Akosombo, had lunch and inspected the country’s premier development project, the earthen dam athwart the Volta River.

Returning to Accra, we went to Dan’s Milk Bar to feast on ice cream. Donanne and I had hot fudge sundaes. Jeannie was partial to the coffee ice cream.

The day before we expected to go to Kumasi we had lunch at the home of Cameron, the tall, slender and very good-looking Ghanaian journalist who acted as a Monitor stringer. I envied the fact that he had published a novel – The Gab Boys – in London. His wife Beryl was a dancer. She moved with grace; her skin had a burnished quality and a café au lait color. Also at lunch was Cameron’s son, perhaps ten years old. He was very dark, so richly dark that I wondered how mixed-race Beryl could have borne a son his color. We ate African and tossed around ideas about the enstoolment. I asked Cameron if he thought that ritual murder still went on. He laughed. “Impossible to know,” he said. “When you come back from Kumasi, maybe you can tell me.”

The next day at the airport after we waited several hours, our flight was canceled. The most important of enstoolment ceremonies would take place early the next afternoon. “If I don’t get to Kumasi tomorrow,” I told a journalist colleague who lived in Accra, “I’ll have some explaining to do.”

“I guess I’ll drive up,” he told me.

“I’ll take a chance on the plane,” I replied. The airlines people had assured me that the flight would take off early the next day.

“Good luck, chappie,” he said.

I told him about lunching with Cameron, Beryl and their son.

“They have no children,” he said. “That boy’s the kid of one of Cameron’s wives up country.” The journalist laughed at the expression of surprise on my face. “I believe he has two wives up there. They tend farms for him.”

“Oh,” I said.

The journalist corked my shoulder. “You’re in Africa, right?”

“Last time I checked.”

“Better check again.”

Going back to the house I kept pondering: Three wives! I’d thought that Cameron and I were very much the same sort of person. But he had three wives.

Despite all the warnings, the bafflements and the uncertainties of getting there, we were determined to see Opoku Ware II enstooled. Would we actually get there?

Next post: The great tribal rite takes place! Opoku Ware enstooled!