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.
