Returning to Turkana to show the films
After a couple of months we returned to Turkana to show the three families we'd stayed with their film. It took a few days in Lodwar to ready everything and then we were off with a pick-up heaving with generator, screen, speakers, food, tent and translator Lokale, who we were very happy to be reunited with.
In each place we arrived early in the day to catch up on news with the families (all were very well, if surprised that we had reappeared) and give enough time for the message about an evening screening to spread. Then we set up and waited for the audience to arrive.
First reactions when pictures of themselves, their families and their lives burst through the darkness ranged from shock to terror to hysterical delight. A few babies cried and many went completely silent in unshakeable concentration. We sat with Lokale who eavesdropped on our behalf.
One old woman, on a close-up of her husband's eyes as he began to tell the story of the lake, cried out, "What's that big-eyed animal?!", then as the camera panned out others gleefully told her. Seeing people watch other Turkana families they'd never met was fascinating: Erot's obvious wealth, seen in so many plump goats, was a standard observation; women admired other women at work and picked up new songs they heard sung, putting all the pieces together so that the next morning the whole thing had been memorised perfectly; young herdsboys ogled the pretty young Lolita character in her red wrap while one nasty old woman, on hearing the girl say, "When I am married..." scoffed, "You'll be lucky!" Most seemed proud to see themselves and in each place they agreed the films would make good stories to explain something to the rest of the world about the ways of the Turkana.
Finally, Nachukuli and Etukoit presented us with a goat, which we named Ebob (delicious) and requested be taken care of with the others until we return.
In each place we arrived early in the day to catch up on news with the families (all were very well, if surprised that we had reappeared) and give enough time for the message about an evening screening to spread. Then we set up and waited for the audience to arrive.
First reactions when pictures of themselves, their families and their lives burst through the darkness ranged from shock to terror to hysterical delight. A few babies cried and many went completely silent in unshakeable concentration. We sat with Lokale who eavesdropped on our behalf.
One old woman, on a close-up of her husband's eyes as he began to tell the story of the lake, cried out, "What's that big-eyed animal?!", then as the camera panned out others gleefully told her. Seeing people watch other Turkana families they'd never met was fascinating: Erot's obvious wealth, seen in so many plump goats, was a standard observation; women admired other women at work and picked up new songs they heard sung, putting all the pieces together so that the next morning the whole thing had been memorised perfectly; young herdsboys ogled the pretty young Lolita character in her red wrap while one nasty old woman, on hearing the girl say, "When I am married..." scoffed, "You'll be lucky!" Most seemed proud to see themselves and in each place they agreed the films would make good stories to explain something to the rest of the world about the ways of the Turkana.
Finally, Nachukuli and Etukoit presented us with a goat, which we named Ebob (delicious) and requested be taken care of with the others until we return.
Photos
Some extra photos of living in Turkana. Earlier posts are diary-style accounts describing time spent living with three different families in three different parts of northern Kenya's Turkana district.
Taking notes by a termite mound
Filming a mother and daughter dancing in Kache Imeri
Lokaleso with her brood. The child in the background has his face painted white "so God will see him" - he had symptoms of malaria
Young man in Konipad showing off a wedding hat
A war dance at an ekriam mariam (meeting) in Konipad
Warriors on the march
Getting ready to film goats being released in the early morning
Erot moving a neighbour's newborn goat out of the sun
Erot's second wife, Mary
Trying to reunite a mother goat with her baby, which she'd rejected
Travelling to town
Erot and the family (most of it)
'Camel man' studies his own image
Young herdsboy Lokol has a driving lesson
Happy with our hut
Lokale our translator
Nachukuli checks his picture (and is pleased)
Nachukuli's children all try on the sunglasses and complain that they turn day into night
A night-time photograph
Standing on the hill above Nakapelewoi
Day 27
At breakfast we talked about dreams and especially about who sent them. Etukoit had had no dreams and said her ancestors hadn’t been sending any for a while. Lokale added that while it was usually ancestors who sent dreams, occasional more powerful ones come straight from God. Like one he’d had a few years ago, when he’d been a school boarder living in Lodwar. He dreamt all night about his mother who lived far away in the bush and who he hadn’t seen for a long time; his dreams travelled through all the things he admired about her, all the things she’d done for him, all the reasons why he loved her. The next morning as he walked through town he saw her in the street! She’d done the long journey and reached there the evening before, spent time asking if anyone knew where she could find her son Lokale and then spent an uncomfortable night sleeping outside in the middle of town. As he told the story it was clear he still found it amazing and baffling, but he also asked why God couldn’t have made the dream a more direct reflection of what was happening to her that night so he could have gone and brought her to stay with some people he knew in town, as he did on finding her.
On the road the curse of the accelerator pedal kicked in again: we refused a man with a group of students a lift and no sooner had we done so the pedal broke. Having fixed it we tramped on to Lodwar, a slow journey on a terrible road where all you can do is choose between a pothole and a pothole.
I asked Etukoit how a dream like that could have happened and she smiled her wide matriarch smile and replied,
“Your mother’s blood is the same as yours. She loves you more than a father can, and when good or bad things happen to you she feels it in her stomach.”
It melted me. And she also explained about the dream, saying that Lokale’s mother had journeyed with a vision of her son in her head, and the vision had steered his dream. She’s such a wonderful woman, and I asked if she was curious about our place, if she would want the chance to do there what we are doing here. She asked how cold our place is and we told her (very), after which she said definitively that she feared visiting our place because water would surely pour from every place in her body. This based on the account of a Turkana person who’d gone to “a place called Kitale” (nearest non-Turkana town, south, the frontier with ‘down-Kenya’ and a day’s bumpy drive from Lodwar); that person had reported that it was so cold, this non-desert place that nevertheless grows divine tropical fruit, that water had flowed from his nose.
Inside the deliciously cool huge hut, the floor thick with goat, cow and camel hides, we showed the family the Turkwell film on a laptop. They were entranced by the intimate look inside another Turkana ada karin and jumped at similarities with their own lives by singing along to songs they knew, miming familiar things like the Lokai game, the plucking of fur off the hides and especially the dancing. Etukoit kept them all quiet but was brilliantly enthralled and animated. Everyone eatched intently except for one woman with a long nose who Frederic spotted eyeing up Lokale. We told him afterwards but though he smiled he stuck to his principle on romance and marriage which is that “it would be adding a problem to a problem”.
They agreed that the film was ‘truthful’ although we noticed them switch off a bit during interviews where people spoke of hunger and having to walk 5km to a dispensary. I think they must have been thinking that the river looked envious and the goats plump, and that the 5km walk was nothing compared to their own 20km hike. And some of the interviews about charcoal production or livestock herding must to them have been like us listening to someone describing what it is like to put vegetables on one side of a plate, meat on the other, salt and pepper on top, then pick up a fork in the left hand, a knife in the right hand, etc etc. The dullest of everyday routines in other words.
It was time to leave but we did so in a blaze of generosity, especially since it was our last field stop. The wonderful Etukoit got both our straw mats and a huge khaki canvas/tarpaulin to cover her hut in, a big improvement on the ancient UNHCR sheet, tatty and grey like an old man’s y-fronts. She rejoiced and patted it with both hands saying “Ejok! Ejok! Ejok!” [Thank you / very good]. A sufriya went to the second wife and our remaining food supplies to everyone. The mzee asked for a shirt and got a slightly inappropriate black T-shirt of Frederic’s; Lokale jumped to his aid as he squeezed his oily head and body into it like a porpoise. For a few moments his head and raised arms were trapped inside the shirt and all anyone could see was his round stomach, bisected by the belt-like string of white beads that had been fitted in slimmer days, and of course the familiar view of his private parts uncovered by the loosely-slung blanket. Then he popped into view again and we resumed our goodbyes, thank-yous and promises to return.
Nachhukuli squeezes into his new t-shirt
Day 26
Tried but failed to avoid spilling milk on the fire when the pot boiled over. This is a very bad thing to do, it could decrease the milk yield of the animals, so you have to neutralise the mistake by pouring water on the spill.
It was a grey day and we spoke to the second wife about how this weather was a good thing for the Turkana, about how it might mean rain and more milk from the animals. She talked about predicting rain through clouds, frogs and ngimurok. She introduced the familiar seed of doubt, presenting another Turkana voice that can describe ways of life with absolute certainty and conviction but then confides to you that many of the rules are being broken, that the old patterns – like rain following certain clouds or frog songs, and serious drought coming only every ten years and not every two or three as it seems to now – are being distorted and losing the predictability that survival here depends on. She spoke of rain as a double-edged sword because of the sicknesses it brings, and told a bizarre story about how men used to believe that they could chase away thunder with their spears until one got zapped doing this in a lightning storm on a nearby mountain. Oops.
The mzee wanted to talk to us from his spot rotting at an atabo. He had a friend with him, another old codger used to spitting and farting about while women and children work. They told us about the night sky, the stars that predict raining and raiding, and they wanted us to know the story of ‘Frederic’s grandfather’, a mzungu many years ago who came and took away a Turkana woman. The pair slept three nights on the mountain, sheltered by big stones which you can still see today, then they left and the woman was never seen or heard from again. We promised to send her back if we saw her in our countries, they laughed and said those people are probably not still alive. I found the story inappropriately romantic and tried to excavate for traces of true love, but this was seemed to be an even more ridiculous approach to take and I got nowhere. I’m not sure they consider love to exist much here in the land of dowries, except in the odd runaway scandal, but remember vowing to find ways to get inside the topic and should resume the quest.
God has become a liar, the old man said. This came out of nowhere but was obviously a thought that plagued his incredibly decrepit old age. Last night I saw his hands shaking over his face in the moonlight and I felt sorry for thinking short thoughts about the poor old dog on his last legs, whose reputation and dignity exist only in the past. God lies, he said, because He sends promises of rain in clouds, weather and other signs but then fails to deliver. God has lies in Him just as Turkana men and woman have lies in them, but they didn’t know it before. It’s not clear why God is now lying, but deception has spread to other previously trusted places too, with reliable ngimurok being visited by the devil as they dream so that even their guidance has become polluted and empty. But like the other places we’ve been in, the foul taste in the mouths of older people who remember older days is not shared by the young. From the offensively cocky adult sons to the irrepressibly joyful little ones who sing and squeal with their dog, all the young here live in a bubble of satisfaction and short-term focus, as though their parents haven’t dared to tell them they’ve been disinherited. And with plenty to keep them occupied too, like all the baby goats escaping from their hut as we finished talking to the mzee, who barked floppy orders that the children round them up. The children didn’t, the old man picked up a rock and said he’d stone them, and finally there was a scene of pure chaos as we all hit the dusty soil to catch the very over-excited breakaways.
Lokale shows Nachukuli his picture
We spent the afternoon driving three young girls about, interviewing them about why they love this land. They loved the attention and the camera, grabbing extra beads and earrings before we left and preening themselves seriously in both wing mirrors. One girl complained that the wing mirror was making her look small which was a mysterious and sad dent in her vanity. We ate boiled sweets and bumped around in the heat until it was done and we were home, then all piled into the cool thatched dome full of mothers, babies, remaining children and the happy sleeping dog. The children were tying the dog’s legs together, whispering excitedly as they got away with it; but he was peaceful, he reacts to nothing except the violent bashings he gets from the mzee and the odd shrivelled granny who passes through.
The first wife Etukoit, who is a true inspiration and who delightfully calls us both her friends and her children, told us about the Turkana knowledge of place, the strand which we hope will hold this last Kaaling piece together. We’ve interviewed people on their reading of the sky, the birds, the stars, weather, trees and the myriad of ways they spot and decipher clues in the natural world that tell of threats and opportunities. She was a perfect spokeswoman for this message, sharp and clear as she told us, “You people know about many places in the world, with your mobile phones [called simis after sim cards] and radios. We Turkana know just this one place, it is the only place we know, but what we know keeps us alive – we really live in this place.” As she spoke she had the same forceful, almost defiant tone that I remember in an older Turkana woman last year; on being asked what she could teach people like me, down-country and town people, she replied without a shred of hesitation, “We could teach you survival”.
Me with Etukoit (left) and Nachukuli’s second wife Kwee
Etukoit’s is a pragmatic knowledge of place, tried and tested on the successful upbringing of her many children and now grandchildren. And she still manages to be incredibly sweet to her ailing husband, sitting with him as he spoke to us, gently prompting him sometimes to pause so that Lokale could catch up with the translation, and once telling him not to spit on our feet in his usual way (I think his flying spit landed in one of his children’s plates yesterday as she ate, the disgusting old thing). Her husband, whose own knowledge – or at least what he shares with us – can be a bit bizarre and disconnected from the ins and outs of daily life. Like when he said he knows that our people talk much more to God than his do because we use aeroplanes – or big metal birds as he put it – to pass behind the clouds and get close to Him.
Off up the hill at sunset with some of the young girls who wanted a lift in the truck and their photo taken. They looked beautiful standing on the edge of the high hill, the flat landscape stretching far beneath them until it bumped into mountain ranges. They pointed out their home and even tiny people they recognised, and they giggled with their whole bodies as we lurched over bumps and through ditches, shouting “Haya!” excitedly to warn each other .
At home Etukoit – whose name means zebra after the place she was born where they used to roam – gave me some gum arabic, sap they get from almost all the trees except ekalele. It’s amber looking, a bit sticky, and herders snack on it for energy. We ate a couple of the lumps she’d collected, they weren’t sweet and became thick and not very nice feeling in the mouth. To add to its bad press she explained with sound effects how it makes people ‘pollute’ and said giggling that we three would have to sit together in the evening.
Sitting with the family that evening was an absolute delight, with hindsight it always is but perhaps having completed our work gave us the mental freedom to just sit back in the overwhelming moonlight and enjoy being surrounded by a large, diverse, fascinating and amazingly functional family. Etukoit is of course the rock, but the silent sprawling presence of the mzee plays a big part too, and at the fringes the sons and daughters-in-law, shyer than both children and older adults, add vital parts to the picture.
Etukoit had been wanting to dance all day, and when the moon was up and we were all happily seated around the pot of strange (and stuck to the bottom) rice stew I’d made, she gathered her girls around her and began. They adore her and flocked around like students in a ballet class, mimicking her stamping and straight-backed neck-thrusting. She encouraged them with “kongina!” (just like that!), with laughter and of course plenty of song. Soon they were twirling with the rhythm of one, the little girls had their own momentum and their mother stepped quietly out to finish scrubbing a pot and let them find their own feet. An older girl of about twelve or thirteen took over as leader, a girl with a tiny slim waist and precocious confidence plus infinite grace. She twirled in the middle of the circle and played the man by occasionally leaping between two to break up the ring and even tripping one up by hooking her foot round an ankle. They became so good that a sulky married son objected that they must have been following their older sisters to edunga dances. For us it was a joy to see all those lovely young girls straining to emulate their mother, the ultimate role model, with no trace of a generational gap, of adolescent or rebellious forces working to fray the threads of cultural transmission between one age set and the next.
Their singing included a song about two women having a slanging match; a very pretty sounding song that was adorable sung by the tiny little shaven-headed girls but whose words were not so nice… The women were accusing each other of having the same kind of sexually transmitted infection that makes men’s balls swell hugely: one said the other had the infection so badly that the nurses at the local dispensary were fearing her; the other counter-accused that she had it so badly that even the white nurses at Nakuru hospital were fearing her. And so it went on, one pretty chorus building on another.
High on their energy and beautiful dancing we went for a moonlit walk to drink in the last night in this exciting place that is a mere out-of-focus dot on Google Earth. The resting camels kept an eye on us as we picked a cautious path through them, their huge haunches ready to lock into gear if they needed to spring up and object to the imposition or to my white shirt. As the moon rose to be almost overhead and we followed little dusty goat paths we got a sudden sense of how easy it would be to be hopelessly lost in an instant, with no lights to follow and all features of the landscape – termite mounds, acacia trees, little hillocks, even camels – repeating endlessly and in every permutation. Luckily we made it back to the domed hut.
Day 25
We woke early and listened to the camels and the goat version of a dawn chorus. Like yesterday we were presented with a good sized ilipit container of thick white camel milk which we tasted in cautious sips and then boiled into a much improved tea. In an extension to a conversation yesterday we all had fun discussing and depicting the ‘Turkana kangaroo’ that is seen every so often and is much feared. I did an impression of the Australian version hopping with a joey and a long tail, while they did theirs. Which was a standing animal that walked on two legs until someone was looking at it, then switched to one leg; that could scoop up its shortish tail in its hand to keep it clear off the floor; and that stalked humans hoping to eat one of their eyes. Children were frightened of being got by it at night and a local man had apparently been terrified a month ago when one had come right into his hut as he slept.
We drove to the neighbour’s ada karin by the road, with its bags of charcoal ready for roadside trade. He was to take us to the mountain to see the medicinal herbs but was in town so we met his wife instead and watched her preparing edupal, the green peas we’d eaten yesterday. She was heavily pregnant and surrounded by many children peeling quite a hoard of the fruits. It was a productive little place, with more people in the laga gathering esekon fruits and the famously bitter edung that has to be boiled all day.
A little herdsboy in a bright green sheet took us to the nearby emoru (mountain) to explain the use of herbs. He sat on black rocks under a magenta pink desert rose explaining how he collects echuchukwa (aloe vera) and emus (a spidery looking cactus flat on the floor) for his father’s bad stomach or if someone has a racing heart. They seem preoccupied with heart rate here; so many have scars on their chests and particularly their left pectoral muscle, and apparently when they think someone’s heart has become broken and stopped working they beat it with rolled up cloth until the person coughs to prove the heart is fixed. Just hearing the descriptions made me feel a bit funny, the thought of having my heart beaten makes me squeamish, probably stirring up memories of seeing Mesoamerican cultures or Indiana Jones characters rip pulsing hearts out of opened chests…
Desert Rose
The desert rose had an interesting use: when a wild animal like a hyena or maybe a kangaroo has eaten a goat, you take some of its bark, grind it and leave it where the hyena will return to feed on the goat remains. It acts as a poison apparently, and will even kill that thieving hyena.
We drove to a ridge to see the ada karin from up high and to look across the moonscape with its mountains, rock formations and termite mounds like index fingers pointing at the sky. A little camel herder followed us all the way, keeping behind the lurching landrover as it picked its way like a beetle across the bumpy landscape. Trying to record birdsong was an adventure, not very successful, but we managed to find and film some birds to match the first wife’s stories of lucky and unlucky birds who appear and have to be welcomed or stoned as appropriate.
The family sang songs while everyone ate, songs about the frogs that pre-empt rain or the giraffes that used to be here until they were hunted out because their tails were sought after as hairy wrist ornaments to be flicked during dancing. And in the darkness women traced out the kinship links of the ada karin by carrying burning logs from one hearth to the other, glowing orange flares that were the only light besides the stories.
Day 24
Camels and goats are unbelievably noisy in this place, from before any sign of first light. It’s the first time we’ve slept so close to camels and they really wail, a prehistoric sound that I’m sure the Natural History Museum use in their animated dinosaur display. Their wails get even worse when ticks are being pulled off their faces, as they were this morning.
At our breakfast chai there was an animated discussion about recent beatings, maybe prompted by me asking a little herdsboy of about 11 how he hot the huge slashes across his face – narrowly missing his eye – that looked like they must have been the result of a fight with a large wild cat. He was caned for losing a goat and told us this had happened because he had been drunk and fallen asleep. Pastoralist childhood is never quite what it seems…
The other unlucky people beaten recently were another naughty herdsboy and an unmarried girl who’d had an affair with a man, threatening to deprive her parents of the chance to exchange an uncontaminated daughter for a healthy dowry. Both had been tied to a tree and in the boy’s case the father had been heard screaming for someone to help him make a hole in the boy’s nose to pass a rope through. For both, people threw stones at the tree trunks to attract ants out that would bite them. As well as an effective behaviour regulator it seems to amuse the innocent, or uncaught people, so there was plenty of “That’ll teach him!” and “She won’t be doing that again!”
Frederic joined a big circle of men to explain again what we are doing here. While we’ve been through this many times before and reached what we thought was an understanding they would remember, the men seem not to tire of re-asking and quizzing our potential links to relief food and compensation. The young men – mainly Nachukuli’s sons – turned up with a collective swagger and brought a nastier, greedier tone by saying that we would curse their animals, that maybe we had come to kill them, and that their father should really be careful and ask for money from us. All this went on for what felt like hours, with the men perched on their egcholos in the burning sun. I sat in the huge thatched dome with the women and very delightful, much loved ada karin dog with the important name of Longolengor and a good touch of terrier about him that made him a perfect playmate and chaperone for the children. Sitting with that crowd was definitely a much better option than being among the testosterone-filled ego session of the males, but I did have to explain that I couldn’t help breastfeed the baby, which an old mama made sure everyone understood by pointing at me and then at both her nipples and saying, “Emam ng’akile” – no milk.
They deliberated over the design of a patchwork hide skirt, artistically lining up brown segments next to black segments and incorporating a black stripe that ran down the spine of the brown goat’s hide. We ate some seeds from the ekalele tree, delicious little nutty brown things that you get by smashing the kernel between rocks, and then the men had dispersed, satisfied.
We went to town, Kaaling, in search of network, chai and some relief from the ada karin. No network despite much standing around on piles of stones where locals promised signal could be found; some chai but we thought we got overcharged at 15 shillings a cup, and some relief but we ended up ferrying plenty of Nachakuli’s people to and fro plus picking up townies to guide us to network ‘hot-spots’.
On the way to town we brought a daughter-in-law and her very new baby who was going to the dispensary for vaccinations. She told us no-one uses a health facility to deliver because they are far away, foreign and costly, but if a woman has stayed in labour for two days then she will be taken. Added to this, it is shameful for Turkana men to be present at a birth and so difficult for them to reconcile the presence of male as well as female staff at the facility where a woman is expected to deliver. This information put into my head the image of pre-natal classes in the western world where men practise breathing exercises that will make them good birthing partners… (And I thought how funny it would be to bring a montage of video clips of things like this to our Turkana families: new age men puffing in mock labour on yoga mats, male TV chefs wearing make up and preparing chocolate pots for the camera; people carrying toy dogs in their Tokyo-imported outfits; and maybe the butch female lorry driver in the leather outfit who appears in TV show Gavin and Stacey).
Also on the way the car broke down in a laga, half way between home and town, because whatever links the accelerator pedal to the engine snapped in the heat. Mother and baby got out and found shade to eat oil in – babies dine on breastmilk and oil here – and Frederic toiled with all sorts of boy scout things under the bonnet while I worried that that Nachakuli’s sons had cursed us and the car. With the pedal somehow held together by gimmicks and initiative we got going at last, relieved but reminded of the mortality of vehicles in these parts, and with a taste of the despair you’d have if your car had a serious problem so far from anywhere with a reasonable garage.
The curse of the accelerator pedal: every time we refused someone a lift it disconnected from the engine
Before we left town I spoke to the assistant chief of the neighbouring division, the one right on the border with Ethiopia, and he spoke of the insecurities caused by Merille and Nyangatom tribes from there crossing the border. He did a good impression of how differently Nyangatom men walk, bobbing their heads like camels.
As we drove home – the car still mercifully fine – the little daughters we’d picked up sand high-pitched pretty songs and chewed bubble gum they’d bought with profits from the chang’aa they’d walked to town to sell. They looked like mini women, each with a full set of beads around their neck, bracelets and anklets, Mohawk hairstyle and dramatic earrings from tip to lobe. They don’t go to school and seemed exhilarated by their town visit, their faces shining and their chatter rising and rising at an excited double-speed. Their oiled hair left greasy patches on the canvas roof of the car.
First wife was pleased with the gift of tea and sugar and taught me lots about local birds and their meanings – good or bad, wealth or sickness bringing – while also feeding us delicious green pea-type snacks, edupal fruits, that are bitter when picked from the tree but can boiled all day until they become soft and tasty.
The camels came home, rolling in dust patches as they went and then coming to rest alone, in groups or in one case as a kissing pair whose necks made a heart against the sunset that could have been used by Clinton Cards. Milking began and was a bit chaotic, we always compare families unfavourably to our Turkwell friends at milking time: the three wives and children of Erot were unbelievably ordered, methodical and kind with their goats, everyone else seems to do a fair bit of scruff-grabbing, dragging and general rough manhandling.
I was happy to spot one of my favourite little boys – one who grins and flops around in a hole-covered adult’s singlet that reaches his shins and leaves gaping armpit holes all the way down his sides – helping himself to goats’ milk straight from the udder. He was doing it furtively, looking round nervously as he grabbed the spare teat of a mother feeding her kid and squirted it straight into his mouth.
We cooked lentils with spicy rice, a real power meal that you feel strength from the next morning. A windstorm picked up, promising rain, and scattering loose things into the distance and loose people into their huts. When the sky was clear again we saw a huge and full orange moon pop up over the horizon and its mountains. The mzee, who was spitting profusely on our mat, told us it was good for Turkana when it rose on one sire, and good for the Pokot when it rose on the other (the two fortunes being mutually exclusive of course). We had a shower with a jerry can in the laga and slept in the hut, under a tarpaulin-covered tent, waiting for rain.
Our hut, Kaaling
Day 23
Arrived at Kaaling at last after many false starts. First, a flooded river at Lodwar and then, when we were finally in the area, plenty of “That’s the laga! I’m sure of it” and “No, it’s definitely this one, I remember that termite mound”. Some boys bringing goats back from the shallow well told us where our host, the feared mzee Nachukuli lived with his family and we bumped across country until we recognised the place.
In this area, much further north than any we’ve been in before and almost at the Ethiopia border, there are no eengol trees and houses look very different as a result. Not pointing huts with neat yellow thatching but circular domes clad in fluffy, twiggy dried scrub. Very different looking compared to the houses of further south, a bit like swapping straight blonde crops of hair for a land of close-cut frizzy styles. Quite hobbit-esque, inside and out, but with doors to the cavern that were mercifully much bigger and easier for us to pass through.
The family were smiley and beautiful, especially a first wife who’d been absent when we visited nearly two months before to ask about staying. Women wear thick metal anklets here and men have their hair woven in braids close to the head in a kind of upturned basket look.
As we sat around a pot of tea we quickly made to restore us after a rough journey of over four hours, it became obvious that Nachukuli was not the eminent, revered leader we’d remembered, and that he was certainly past his prime. With a cataract in one eye and his private parts on show under his loose blanket, he said very little, spat plenty of tobacco juice, and as Frederic put it with absolute European disgust, “farted like a donkey”.
They laughed at the relief they’d felt when they realised who we were, or rather who we were not: they’d been brewing chang’aa when the car rolled into view and they’d been sure it meant a visit from the law.
Joined by a neighbour, a more savvy and younger version of the mzee, we had a long chat about life here, its hardships and its changes. Again we seemed to stumble across a case of ‘The Missing Nomad’, for like the other families we’ve stayed with, all loosely referred to by NGOs as ‘nomadic pastoralists’, they don’t move and are quite town-centric. They don’t survive independently on meat and blood in the hard season then milk and wild foods in the good season, but instead depend on relief when they can get it and town-sourced foods like maize, beans and flour when they can get the necessary shillings.
We asked them to trace the shift, to explain the turning point where they left behind ‘the old ways’ which they now have no desire to go back to – despite acknowledging that some Turkana in the interior still live like this. It was ‘Lopiar’, the year of the huge drought that also displaced our Kataboi family from Kakuma, the drought that also brought diseases like Lolipi that swept all their animals. That was the trigger, and the way they live now is a new Turkana way of surviving, of eating, of staying, one they insist they can’t backtrack from.
It’s the sort of conversation that makes you want to push on, unfairly, and ask how they can so easily give up the autonomy and self-sufficiency of the old life that they could have resumed after the worst of Lopiar had been weathered, or ask if they don’t have respect for the strong, dignified men and women of the interior who know nothing of praying to be included in relief food registration lists or begging from strangers for money to buy food they don’t know how to grow themselves. You want to push at issues of self-respect, dignity, pride until you hear the rising strain in your voice and wonder how it must sound to them, these sorts of questions from someone who’s never know true hunger or come close to losing all means of survival. So you drop it, wait for such questions to be answered over time at their own pace and with the people’s trust.
The fact remains that they will always choose to launch into undignified begging speeches for/at you, that displays of strength and culture have to come second to strategic displays of hunger (Akoro!), water shortage, desperation. And such talk is fair enough; I always think that I’d do it, as a family member or family provider faced with an opportunity to gain family resources. And particularly, faced with an opportunity to get a resource cushion for the tougher times inevitably ahead in this fragile land where people’s lives can be on a knife edge’s balance, subject to the whims of a season’s empty clouds or a single night’s torrential rainfall. It must feel natural and instinctive and to hell with dignity if you can get food, money, or other help by suspending it for a while in front of strangers.
What can trouble with this though is the weird disjuncture between rhetoric and reality, the gap that you wouldn’t notice if you were listening to such speeches out of context, on a radio for example. For while Nachukuli and the neighbour gave their eulogy of pastoralism and lamented the loss and lack of everything, the women bustled about crafting, cooking, feeding, and laughing with the usual resilience. So yes the misery speech is understandable, but it can grate, especially when you arrive clearly stating that you’re here to try to understand the culture and way of life, and when you’re sitting cheerfully among plump babies, bubbling cooking pots and dozens of goats. You wish these men – for it’s nearly almost men – would nuance it a little, or factor in a bit of pride for their own sake. These are ramblings, but the mzee was a pitiful mile from his reputation as a feared warrior and pillar of the community; farting, begging and not listening at all…
It was cloudy over the full moon (which the cynical neighbour cheerfully told us they no longer pay any attention to, gone are the days of reading it) and it was windy, but with the help of some donkey dung we built a fire and cooked maize flour porridge over it. We gave them the rest of a big bag which pleased them, and I thought how maybe the new way of living on relief and cereal foods was such a welcome revelation because it meant they could avoid killing their animals for food? Certainly they won’t kill them unless it’s an important ritual, or it’s absolutely necessary, or they’re absolutely desperate. We’ve been careful to insist that even though we are guests we don’t expect them to slaughter a goat for us, even saying that we’re not used to eating much meat. Everywhere we’ve been they seem glad to find alternatives to taking their animals blood or, worse, lives. If we’d wanted to stay with these mythologised nomadic pastoralists who do depend on animals for nutrition then we’d probably have had to go deep into the interior and we’d probably have found it a very hard life indeed…
Nachukuli’s family are certainly a beautiful group of people living in a beautiful environment, 15km away from ant town and a good way from a track road. There are low mountains on all sides of this rocky plain, mountains they get herbs from and which are named after wild animals past and present or natural features and colours. One close to us was named after the hyenas that live on it and another after its purple blue colour (epus, the same as the ‘blue’ grey goats).
One of Nachukuli’s youngest tries on my sunglasses
We sat and ate in the dark, peacefully except for a scorpion scare which made everyone jump up and stamp on what turned out to be a hairy camel spider. They loved it that we too screeched the delicious Turkana exclamation “Oi TOKOI!”, everyone’s favourite and one that was burnt into our brains by arthritic and explosive David. Convinced I would be stung by a scorpion somehow, and perversely thinking that this couldn’t be so bad, that it happens to everyone multiple times here and that it would be a good exercise in empathy, this miserable half-prophecy does not seem to be coming true. I remember the first wife in Turkwell freezing one night because she thought one was walking on her chest and didn’t want to scare it into stinging her; another wife came quickly to see if she could gently remove it but thankfully it turned out to be a cockroach. Lokale had a good story about a woman who was selling busa at an ekriam mariam in his home area; stung by a scorpion where she sat, she “threw down her dress and just ran!” It was obviously a formative memory of home, the naked woman streaking into the distance clutching her stung bottom, the pain so great that she even left her brew behind.
We watched the silhouettes of camels wandering behind the huts, their long dark necks waving along like diplodoci, those long necked vegetarian dinosaurs. We smelt the camels too, a horrible smell apparently caused by their constant burping, and it was this and the sweeter fumes of chang’aa brewing that we slept with in an otherwise lovely hut.
Day 22
At last I did what I’d intended to do all week; got up with the family at five and sat among the goat sorting and breakfast melee. When mother-child goat reunion noises had subsided a little the red sun popped up over the lake, from the same direction as the constant east-to-west breeze and the pinched Borana camel ancestors. Some relatives were staying outside on our mat having come from Kakuma to make an offering to their ancestors since this place was their ere. They set off early towards the lake, a father, mother and tiny daughter walking in a neat line of well-rested silhouettes that made me think of the Laetoli footprints in Olduvai, Tanzania.
Namesek had already headed for the hills searching as ever for his errant camels. Donated recently by Oxfam, this gang of four were still strangers to the area and so prone to remote wanderings that had to be monitored retroactively via their footprints. I never got a satisfactory answer as to why he didn’t want to send a herdsboy with them to guarantee their return and do away with the daily headache of losing them. But I did learn a bit about the household economics of camel keeping. They can be bought for about 15-20 goats, or 22,500-30,000 shillings at the current (expensive) rate of goat value. For many during drought camels are the best bank account for they are the least likely animal to die from lack of water and pasture, they can be therefore exchanged back into goats when the going gets easier, and in the meantime one can provide enough milk for a whole family (milked three times a day, a jug each time). Oxfam seemed to be giving 18 families at a time these generous gifts of four camels and Namasek went to plenty of meetings with other beneficiaries and Oxfam representatives where the scheme was discussed and monitored.
We packed our lovely base up and turned to go, promising to return and not to forget them. Before leaving we called in at the dispensary in town, spotlessly clean (relatively empty) place run by the all-permeating mission with support from Kenya’s Ministry of Health and Merlin. I wanted to cross-check what we’d heard from people in our ada karin, that it was financially out of reach for them, but was keen not to put the wind up anyone working there. As expected we were quickly scooped up by a smooth English-speaking ‘in charge’ who took the three of us to share a thermos of sugary tea with him in his spick-and-span office. The problem was that it was immediately obvious he was a slippery snake with plenty he didn’t want to disclose, and we all squirmed as I did my best to present the warm and non-threatening front that I hoped would elicit some answers to burning but close-to-the-bone questions. The suspicion being that that prohibitively high visit fees (100 shillings for children, 200 for adults) were unlicensed pocket lining for this man and other high position folks in this desert outpost beyond the reach of any serious scrutiny. He spoke about different types of snake bites, something of a penchant of his, and about rising HIV rates exacerbated by alcoholism, poverty and prostitution, polygamy and wife inheritance and lack of information. The top five health complaints were the same as elsewhere in Turkana – malaria, diarrhoea, acute respiratory infections, skin and eye infections – but he determinedly skirted a clear answer on how much treatment costs at the place, no matter how many times and from how many angles I gently broached it. As expected he ranted without prompt or invitation on the evils of corruption and peppered his speeches with God talk. Wistfully but forcefully he told me how he is happy to remain in such a place for so long, even when his family are so far and the conditions so harsh, because it is God’s will that he help these poor people. He threw menacing glances at Lokale, suspecting that his local knowledge and intuitions might undo the charade, until Lokale started to look quite grey and desperate to be anywhere else. It is certainly a form of entrepreneurship, twisting and screwing the system in a place like that, and he is neither alone in doing it nor a particularly nasty type of man, operating probably on the common ‘eat or be eaten’ philosophy. He did make me laugh when he described the terrible infrastructure and how the roads were all just “pot-holes and what what”.
Returning to potholes and what what we made our way to Lodwar. Lokale drifted off with his food money for a weekend with his friends, looking exhausted but promising he had a better system for looking after his belongings than the last one, where his new bag and sheet got stolen as he slept. Around four o’clock we backtracked to Namorotunga to film the stones at twilight. They were magical and we enjoyed them in the changing light as the odd car passed on the road and one contented Turkana man dragged a goat for many kilometres along it. When we had finished and the light was gone we thanked the ancestors in the traditional way, spitting a spray of chang’aa (vodka) at them as an offering and a thanks. Then, a little drunk on alcohol and legends, we wound back along the road to town enjoying the odd camel silhouette rising like a road sign against the bright night sky.
Day 21
Namesek’s first wife spoke to us from her atabo (domestic area outside hut) where she was sitting with the cute egg-headed little boy who is Namesek’s youngest and who was getting a splinter out of her foot with a thorn. We asked her about drought and how it affects health, plus how as a woman she cushions the family from its impact. Such a strong-looking woman did not disappoint in her answers, and spoke also of the traditional ways of reacting against sickness – mostly goat slaughter and then use of blood or other parts in healing – and some of their pitfalls – most alarmingly the bleeding they get when they try to relieve constipation with sticks, something we smiled and nodded to hear (but not comprehend) first hand, then looked shocked at after Lokale’s faithful translation.
For a family so close to town they seem to use the Merlin-supported dispensary there very little but we learnt why through the old neighbour who’d burnt herself badly when her sufriya (cooking pot) tipped boiling water onto her arm. The burn needed dressing but even a simple service like that at the dispensary was unaffordable to her: costs for service, or ‘user fees’ as they are known to those charging them, are 200 shillings for an adult and 100 shillings for a child, exclusive of any medication or other things that need to be bought. It sounded very high indeed – she would need to weave four mats which would take a couple of days of solid work each – to afford it and we decided to check if this was true with a visit to the misson/government/Merlin-run dispensary the next day. Since we had what she needed we disinfected and dressed the burn and gave her the antibiotic powder, gauze and tape she could use to keep it clean for the next few days.
We went back to find Namesek’s fisherman brother at his place near the lake and hear more about the changes he’s witnessed and those he anticipates. He was still weaving the same net and spoke to us from a scenic perch in a beached wooden boat about all this before singing a great song they used to sing as they set off for fishing. Tragically and in further testament to the changes, he couldn’t at first remember it all, but eventually he got the hang of it and he loved it when we joined in by shouting the chorus line of “Anam!” (lake). We liked him a lot so gave him 500 shillings towards his own net, something he was upset not to have at the moment, the one in process being for a richer man. In the sand dunes he pointed out the angry white camel famous for chasing ‘the mamas’ as they return from the lake with water. Frederic did his best to provoke it but must have looked less of a pushover than a small-framed local mama trying to balance a 20 litre jerry can of water on her head and navigate through sandy dunes scattered with the odd thorny scrub.
Happy with having seen, heard and captured everything we had wanted for the documentary we decided to go on a jaunt, just our sturdy gang of three (us and Lokale). Nariokotome is where some pivotal hominid fossils (homo erectus) were found by Richard Leakey and co. in the 1980s, and digging and discoveries have gone on ever since, so we headed there – on the western side of Lake Turkana, north of our Kataboi base – to see what the cradle of humanity looks, smells and feels like. There’s no sign so we just drove to the approximate area, then were surprised to see a small fleet of land cruisers and some mzungus gathered by the side of the road. A very unremarkable spot – just yards from the road, the usual black sandy lava’ish soil and a few cairns as markers – but the very place where a breakthrough homo erectus skull fragment had been found in 1984 by Leakey’s team, 1.6 million years old and the trigger for successive waves of amazing fossil discoveries in the area that have changed what we know about our ancestors.
The people wearing bandannas, sensible shoes and shirts covered in pockets and ventilation flaps were the French archaeologists currently camped in the area for their annual dig, continuing to comb the place’s huge and largely untapped haul of information on our past. We stopped and the team leader, Frenchwoman Helene Roche, marched purposely over with a determination that we later discovered was because she’d heard of two rogue archaeologists digging surreptitiously in the area in a way that could easily undermine their own work, and she thought we were them. After this had been cleared up and we’d struck a more positive rapport, Helene kindly invited us back to their camp for lunch. What serendipity. We followed in a very dusty convoy to their impressive and comfortable tented camp on the sandy banks of the dry Nariokotome river, sturdy green canvas tents under acacia tortilis trees and a central mess area with two very long trestle tables, one for eating at and the other for sorting fossils on. It was a joy to have some varied and interesting conversation, especially of the privileged sort that perfectly complemented the Richard Leakey book (Origins Reconsidered) we’re reading, in which the camp and even the people we sat with are mentioned. Everyone seemed glad to briefly exchange their own Turkana focus for someone else; we heard about their dig and they watched our Turkwell film and gave constructive comments and appreciation. Their food (not the mention the novelty of actually eating lunch) was a delight after our bland diet of dry biscuits and starchy suppers. We had salad, tuna, fresh bread, chocolate and coffee for what felt like the first time in months, and ice cold water from a solar powered freezer, the stuff desert dreams are made of…
They talked of all the mad mzungus they’d crossed paths with and offered lunch to in Turkana, all on crazy missions and some of whom they doubt survived. Like the two emaciated, amoeba-infested forty-something German cyclists living their mid-life crisis but finding it impossible to pedal or even drag their hi-tech bikes through the volcanic sand of the lake shore. Or the American ethnographer with raging malaria who reached his wits’ end living in a Dassanetch village (just north of Lake Turkana in Ethiopia) and hired a motorbike to find the rumoured white archaeologists and speak English to them (only to find they were all French). Hopefully we won’t be added to this list; we swapped details and promised to meet again in Nairobi or Turkana, then hit the road for more dust swallowing all the way to Kataboi.
Looking like we worked in a concrete mixing factory and feeling like we’d eaten a sandpit we went straight to the lake to wash when we arrived back in Kataboi. Some young fishermen had a huge Nile perch, four foot long with an open mouth that a football could have passed through, but it had been in the net for over a day and was rotten so they just cut some inner organ out and ditched the rest. This mystery organ and plenty of smaller fish in bundles were loaded onto the bonnet of Frederic’s car and we gave them a lift to town. The car now blends ripe goat with rotting fish smells, ‘surf and turf’ style.
At home the moon appeared (and then sunk in the west) as a fairy tale golden crescent and as we sat quietly at the car scribbling, downloading material and charging things off its battery I noticed how many shadowy figures pass through the bush with the confidence of people striding along a clear pavement in daytime. Alone, with a goat, in pairs or in groups they march along. One group were singing merrily and headed straight for our compound to ask mzee Namesek to resolve a dowry dispute (some in-laws wanting an extra goat or something). It made me so glad that this is a live-in project, that we have the chance to witness how even in the darkness of night, when people in planes overhead or vehicles passing through might imagine that there must be complete stillness in this vast place legally termed a ‘no man’s land’, there is in fact the constant hum of humanity, walking, talking, eating, dancing and living together.
We added some trade to the mix of night-time activity, asking if they might be willing to sell the beautiful big atabwa (wooden bowl) my heart had landed on when we first arrived. The one hanging on the inside wall of our hut among assorted wifely possessions including an axe, empty fertiliser sacks, empty plastic cooking oil containers, necklaces and that big lump of fat (which turned out to be the coating of a sheep’s stomach and was used to fix all sorts of dried out wooden things, to add flavour to meals and to give women’s beads that distinct smell that they consider alluring). Yes, they would sell it to us, for 2,000 shillings (and I threw in a bag of maize flour for luck) and they explained how for the sake of flavour roasted meat and meat soup can’t be eaten in plastic or metal containers and should only be eaten in a bowl like this. Everyone was happy, especially me with the glorious carved, painted and decorated bowl, chiselled from a single piece of wood. The mama we paid – Namesek’s first wife – studied the two thousand bob bills with the careful scrutiny of a customs official, then stashed them somewhere unseen, patted her kilo of flour with satisfaction and swept off back to her hut.
To sleep with the soft noises of far-off singing being carried across the empty flat landscape between lake and mountains and straight through the thatched walls of our hut.
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