I worried in the night that sleeping with my head on a first aid kit (makeshift pillow) that contained sharp metal things like scissors and safety pins would be bad for my sleep, or at least my dreams. I’m becoming more superstitious here in the land of sandal-throwing and sacrifice. But I slept fine, so deeply that when Erot and Lokale came to my tent during the rain to wake me and move me to the big hut I slept straight through it. And I was slow to get up too, despite the goats screaming in my ears.
No black tea this morning, we set off straight for town to catch this white man meeting. En route we skirted around the notorious angry camel, well branded and with a big snorty nose; it took a long hard look at me in my white shirt. Erot stamped out his beat, picking up people and news along the way despite saying his bones were itching and he was tired by what he thought must be malaria. A woman’s house in town (Turkwell) had been robbed of nearly 300 US dollars that UNICEF had given her – in cash (?!) – to pay secondary school fees, so she joined Erot who agreed as headman to present the case to Turkwell police. There was another mention of NGOs yesterday when a young man came to the meeting with a sort of ‘count the white-tops’ mission: Oxfam were apparently distributing relief food to locals with white hair, so he was sent out with a notebook to record them. There was naturally plenty of discussion and hair tugging as people selected themselves and others for this group.
On we walked, stopping only to discuss Erot’s brother’s lost cow with him. It’s meditative to walk in a group over the soft sand but I missed watching the busy bustle of the goats in front, swinging a stick at the stragglers and enjoying the rustle of all their legs, hips and shoulders brushing each other. As we got close to town two fat people with bad body odour appeared and stopped to talk. Questioned by me, Lokale confirmed that all town people smell; I stupidly asked if I did too and he said yes, I smell different to them. This topic was hastily dropped by both sides but I would love to find out what I smell of, remembering the myth that Chinese people say all whites smell of off milk.
It was four or five kilometres to the Merlin dispensary, a small scraggle of people were outside but no Merliners within so I left a note. On to the chief’s office, also empty, but a group of indolent policemen idling under a tree gave me a sour-faced quizzing. I fought down my disgust and urge to ask them what duties they were hoping to achieve while sat on their bottoms under that tree; instead I showed the firm politeness that I thought was expected from Erot’s daughter before leaving gladly in search of chai.
I suggested chai for the family as a way of satisfying my own craving and we piled into a shack with rickety benches, a kitten and some strapping youth downing big plastic bowls of githeri. The chai was delicious and the smart town-dressed landlady brought three plates of mandazi, deep fried lumps of dough which I was glad to see Erot eat an amazing six of. Gregory was not so lucky and began to shiver and look terrible. He’s had malaria since he arrived but now really needed treatment. Poor sod was dragged first to the house of a confident English-speaking boy Jerry who wanted to show me some sort of turtle he’d caught while fishing in the river and was now keeping in a muddy plastic bucket. (Sadly for him I definitely did not want to buy it). Then to the dispensary where a Merlin nurse Mary had arrived and greeted me like a long-lost daughter, exclaiming that not only was she surprised to see me alive but that I actually looked well. Thank goodness noble Erot didn’t understand her rudeness. He and Gregory both requested Coartem from the dispensary and were given it despite not being tested for malaria.
The mysterious mzungu meeting had been mysteriously cancelled; I wondered how many people had trotted into town on a wasted journey for it. So back to yesterday’s meeting place to rest. Erot’s coquettish daughter-in-law was one of the first to arrive, selling her busa and playing adorably with her baby girl. As dowry-bringers, baby girls are particularly welcome, with women who attend the birth doing extra ululations to celebrate their arrival.
Another idle afternoon in the tree root, taught more useful words and phrases by Lokale and just generally absorbing the scene. I watched the babies and a woman chiselling a wooden bowl and everyone drank busa as usual. They brought me a blue plastic mug of local honey (ao), sweet and smoky, and I dropped it on my palm as I was shown and ate it all up (as my stomach was immediately and ominously aware, probably because they mix water with it). Shown a bundle of twigs good for curing boils and remembered somewhere reading the flowery phrase “extensive pharmacopoeia” in reference to Turkana herbal remedies. Thoughts are gathering for the report on health I must write (jotted down in a notebook for more useful and less flippant observations than these).
A mad herdsboy was presented to us; he had burned down his father’s hut and been taken to Turkwell police, but they shooed him away and told those who brought him not to waste police time with mad people. So he was back at the local justice system of Erot and his henchmen under the ewoi (acacia tree). He looked big-eyed and forlorn and was dressed in a ripped shirt under his purple sheet. I thought how the only people who’d actually disturbed me since arriving have been those gainfully employed outside the local pastoralist ways of life – teacher Areki and the hideous forestry ranger Jacob. They were both drunk with the toxic anger of the dispossessed, nothing like the more manageable and humane spectrum of drunkenness and insanity seen in the more traditional men. I came trying hard not to romanticise this way of life but it can seem really to be a very complete system.
As one group got drunker they sang a jolly song about a goat, the only one a person owned, tied under a tree. They fought a little, or “abused each other without shame, just like matatu men” as prudish Lokale put it, although he wouldn’t tell me exactly what was said no matter how hard I pushed. My grubby little friend/teacher (the toddler) was so charming to the adults that he managed to drink a lot of their busa – someone explained that adults can’t eat or drink in from of their children without sharing, even if it is alcohol, and that without food until dinner busa is good energy for children. He started to slur and stagger like a drunk dwarf, my romantic ideas were knocked off course and it was almost enough to bring out the missionary in me.
Erot asked whether there are headmen and chiefs where I’m from and I said not as such – there are bosses and authorities but not community leaders, at least not in most city-based set-ups – and some people think that’s what’s wrong with city life. On the way back, after the jolly afternoon in the riverbed was over, we continued a fairly deep conversation about Turkana life. We walked through the huge stretch of land that had once all belonged to his father, a man who’d owned twice as many goats as Erot plus four enclosures of camels and cattle. The wealth, now lost, was possible because the climate was so much better, it could even rain once a month. Erot had been forced to give family land to others, outsiders, instead of being able to make sure his brothers could stay there with their animals. He now believes that only education can protect his children from the precariousness of this life, and wishes his father had made him complete school so he could have left it all behind and built proper iron-roofed houses. I pleaded that most people in tall buildings in big places like Nairobi and London can only dream about the togetherness and happiness which he and his extended family have daily in shady spots in dry riverbeds, and that there must be ways to safeguard herding without swapping it completely for school-bred drop-outs. Very judgemental, but surely they’re doomed if they think salvation for their children comes in the shape of the useless Areki, perched on a chair on a hill, picking his nose and tossing the odd dog-eaten Swahili book at his flock of bored Turkana children. They seem to get nothing more useful than a hot meal out of each day spent in school. It makes my stomach sink, and I probably need rehydration for this conundrum. Erot seemed to agree though that the education might need a shake-up, and to be hinting at a backlash it’s experiencing when, embarrassingly, he described Lokale as evidence that people are becoming discouraged from sending all their children to school: able to speak English, read and write, poor Lokale still spends his days idling unemployed in Turkwell unless something like this job appears. Worse, Erot knows that young school-leavers might get so frustrated with unemployment that they’ll become thieves. We pondered as we trekked over the thousands of animal footprints and I fell in step with his serene and very short second wife, sticking to her as another tedious lesson in ethnobotany began and lasted all the way home.
A bad night for me and insects. Such a nasty-looking big spider was sitting on my tent door that I took delight in sneaking around it to be inside the tent and then whacking it off into the distance. I then felt bad for it, being flung so fast and far without warning, and wondered if it would rush back to get revenge. The next thing that happened was my tent’s already temperamental zip became completely broken from start to finish and I was left at the mercy of whatever the desert or Akuj (God) wanted to throw at me. Seeing a scorpion at my feet as I cooked felt like a further reminder. Everyone here has been stung many times by scorpions but I don’t fancy it at all (and wonder if I’d cry in front of them?).
Cooked epocho as they suggested, with salt, sugar and some oil, and it was delicious. The new system is to cook at least twice as much as Lokale and I need and then give the pot to the family; it works a treat. It was a windy night with a near-full moon. I shared a hide mat with the first wife and chatted for ages about all manner of things (everyone much more relaxed without patriarch Erot around): fat people and full moons, weddings, dowries and children… There’s a wonderful word for a fat person, tatoom, said with a long and deep emphasis on the ‘oo’ and an accompanying gesture of wide arms, clenched fists and no neck. Fat is of course great here and they’re amazed that thin is considered beautiful where I’m from.
Turkana have so many words for the moon in its various phases, but they also believe there’s more craziness and theft (of their best animals) when it’s full. They told me that when the moon ‘dies’ (in a lunar eclipse) they beat drums to bring it back, and the mama asked if we do that too, brushing off Lokale’s earth-moon-rotations-eclipse explanation. Without Erot she talked on and on about weddings, initiations, what makes a good family size and what determines fertility. Her own courtship and wedding to him were splendid, marked by her being given many beaded necklaces by her family to appear beautiful to him, then him giving the family a huge dowry of livestock including a big bull he had to spear himself at the wedding. Like Maasai met last year, they’re outraged at the thought of girls being given in marriage without a dowry being paid, and they scoffed at my idea of a woman having just two or three children as ridiculously modest.
Ngimurok seem to be present in everything they mention: rituals like initiations and weddings; prayers to ancestors for rain and children; and bull sacrifices done for barren women who need to appease the man, wounded by their abuse or rough words, who cursed them with infertility. My head spins with things I hope to see and things I fear I won’t remember. And I feel irrationally afraid of what might be sheltering from the wind with me in my gaping tent. There’s never been so much scratching and scuffling and I’m waiting for a long slithering. I remember Lolepo in Lodwar telling me that snakes are attracted by scented soaps; I’ve got one of course and although I haven’t used it I expect Hissing Sid will know it’s there.
