Baby goat season continues with people carrying them by the front legs into safe shady places where they can enjoy their first meal of colostrum. Emzungu happily slurps up the placentas. Everyone seems pleased to watch the baby turn from limp and dumb to alert and elastic on its feet. After a couple of hours though the mother is chased into the bush and bouncy baby left to squeak around looking for her before being taken to the little hut inside the animal enclosure to be out of the sun and the mouths of opportunistic dogs or birds.
A visitor arrived! An old man whose carrying of a duffel bag caught my eye. He was David and a gift from the gods because he spoke perfect English. He went to school in 1946 (before 1943 he told me Turkana people had no idea about education) and then became a district agriculture officer, starting a sorghum, millet and maize growing scheme in the 1960s which continues to this day. All the while he combined it with herding (except when on a short and unhappy transfer to Mandera from where he had to send a telegram to head office in Nakuru pleading rescue from a land of wild and fighting Somalis) and he looks very much the traditional mzee (elder). He’ll stay with us for a few days before proceeding to Turkwell and then Lodwar to pick up his state pension, and this was great news since he was immediately a charismatic and insightful mouthpiece on changing Turkana. Waving his hands around and mobilising the lines of influence, career and triumph-over-adversity that were etched all over his face, he spoke of today’s unpredictable rain as the greatest change and risk. His sons are a mix of working people – including a medical officer and a teacher – and herdsmen. Those sons who work in non-herding employment mean the family has access to a more reliable cash (rather than animal) economy, providing a consistency of income which is so vital in today’s callously unpredictable climate.
Sitting on our log we all played with a donkey coloured insect (named after donkey) that was playing dead very convincingly but everyone knew was alive. It reminded one boy of the story of Turkana warriors who’d been caught by Pokot when they went there to raid: all were killed and laid out on the ground but one was just wounded so played dead. He was spotted blinking and finished off… They love warrior stories and I asked if young men are disappointed that today’s peace in the area means they don’t get their call to arms. Iteni, or correct, came the response, many do feel this. Warming to a favourite theme they drew compass points of the enemy fronts that circle the Turkana: Karamojong to the west (Uganda); Merille and Toposa to the north (Ethiopia and Sudan); Borana, Gabra and Somali to the east (Kenya and Somalia) and Pokot and Samburu to the south (Kenya). Only the lake-side brings no threat. The sense of being a fierce island in enemy waters seems key to both men and women here when they talk of Turkana life, a badge of honour and identity.
I helped wife one Elizabeth with thatching her hut, passing up the bundles of eengol reed while she light-footed around the twig skeleton roof tying them down. They think rain is coming, all three wives were on top of their huts at the same time, circling the spike in the middle. The spike that reminds me of a similar house design in southern Ethiopia, which the smart-tongued city boys I travelled with (Merlin and MOH health workers) joked was a pastoralist version of the UN car radio aerial, allowing people inside to transmit messages to and from their cattle… Huts soon looked good and I was advised to put my ‘truck cover’ (tarpaulin piece) on my tent. Certainly not as nice looking, but not the perfect home for scorpions that thatch is either.
Elizabeth had made a paste from the Norwegian-imported tree etirai which is bad for animals’ stomachs but good as a poultice for people’s boils, and she had two of these on her head. I also learnt that the roots of emekwi (tiny rough shrub that grows everywhere and has grown good green shoots for goats in the recent rains) are good in tea to cure diarrhoea. Very useful information! And I now have an impressive list of plant descriptions and applications, fed daily by Erot, which go from mundane stomach cleansing to lifting the curse of indigestion put on you by a hungry person who saw you eat.
We left as some goats on the verge of delivery were tied to a tree so they couldn’t abandon their babies, and stomped off south between the hills to do much the same as we did yesterday. Plenty of sitting around with ants in pants and grasshoppers in shirts while men drank and rested their heads and women busied with children, water and in Lokaleso’s case a whole lot more: measuring out sellable quantities of sugar (110 Ksh for 1kg), beans and oil (10 Ksh for a small pot); building a new goat enclosure; distilling chang’a from busa and supervising my beading. We had a tour of the chang’a factory, a hut where busa was being boiled in a metal drum beneath pots of frequently-changed cool water. Suspended below the top pot on reeds was the pot where the distilled chang’a collected. It was quite a performance and the dark hut was filled with the warm fumes of cooking alcohol which made us all feel light.
Returned to sit with my back against ‘the tree that urinates’, ewoi (acacia) with red sap coming off its trunk and branches, a natural dye used to stain reeds in the mats. After accepting some very welcome black tea with smiles and gratitude, they began a discussion about how white people, when angry, can be really very furious. The reason for this thinking was an episode witnessed at the Merlin dispensary in Turkwell where a white health worker had torn strips off a Turkana mother whose child was not improving despite receiving a weekly ration of 14 Plumpy ‘Nuts (high calorie, nutrient-enriched peanut butter for malnourished children). The white woman suspected the mother was ignoring the acute needs of that one child and distributing the food among the whole family. What she didn’t know was that the woman was selling the Plumpy ‘Nut. Many would say that it’s up to local people to define who is vulnerable, to address that vulnerability with their own welfare systems and to appropriate and distribute outsiders’ aid as they see fit. But in this case the group thought that mother was very wrong to deprive her sick child for profit and not even for the greater good of the family group. These people who don’t like to eat before their children – and especially Lokaleso who told me that people who sell their daughters (for dowry) into marriage before they reach puberty love their own stomachs more than their children – were horrified at the story of the greedy old mama and impressed by the mzungu’s passion. Despite this I assured them that anger is not a trait they should associate with all white people, and promised that I myself rarely get angry. Stupidly I illustrated this with an impression of banshee-style rage which had one baby burst into howls of pure terror that his mother could only stop by shoving a breast into his mouth.
At the Konipad laga (dry riverbed) we discussed engagement and wedding rings in my place and here, and the group we sat with were pleased to not some similarities; a silver ring means engagement and a gold one marriage. But their wedding ‘ring’ is a big metal hoop worn around the neck on top of the other multi-coloured beads. This conversation led to another proposition for me by a slimy old man and Erot dealt with it with his usual iron fist. At this point the busa-selling ladies were getting worried about the lack of male customers and were drinking the busa and chang’a themselves between stints of looking over the laga’s horizon. They shared plenty with their tiny children so that it soon began to resemble a drunk mothers-and-babies group.
Finally a line of proud Turkana men appeared, each with his stick behind his neck like a yoke, hands draped over each end and one holding a headrest. They looked very impressive en masse, a formation of masculinity, and I wondered if their manly swaggers hadn’t been enhanced by the task they’d just been carrying out: castrating the cattle.
Busa, payeiri, chatting, grooming and shopping. I was called over to a group of women to see how they were tying a tall stack of black beads closely round one’s neck, fixing each level on top of the one beneath with string so that it resembled a stiff beaded ruff. Next came other colours – red, yellow, green, blue and pink – and when she married the metal hoop would be added, probably with a little key to her trunk and a purse slung on it. I asked a few tourist questions like how do they sleep and what if you get an itchy neck, which they answered cheerfully with much laughter at my mimes: they sleep on high pillows and if they get an itch they poke a stick down (just as people with plaster casts scratch themselves with knitting needles). They showed how they keep coins tucked inside the beads and demonstrated some neck lurching dances that seemed quite ostrich-like. Apparently men and women deliberately trip each other up in dances here, hooking the backs of ankles with their feet which sounds like fun. They were pretty high voltage, drunk and high on group female energy, and Lokale slipped away intimidated so I didn’t stay too long.
Old man David (who is the son of Erot’s father’s older brother) laughed at the memory of how as a younger man he and his age-set colleagues tried to have dances that the older men couldn’t gatecrash. They’d cross a swollen river with the girls and hold the dance on the other side, but the persistent older men always managed to wade through in pursuit and snatch the girls away. As we walked home he gave a good perspective on how the land has changed in the 60 plus years he’s known it; not only does it rain less but the gullies are bigger because when it does rain it floods. Another voice on what seems to be a grim new world order: yes they are used to the rhythm of drought and hunger followed by rain and plenty, but it’s really not what it used to be, it’s so much harder now.
More happily, Erot spotted an ewoi tree loaded with thousands of juicy ng’itit pods and vowed to bring the baby goats there tomorrow. We fanned out as we reached the ada karin to herd all the goats home. I was so enjoying swinging my stick and cluck-clucking them in as the sun went down and another storm brewed over Mount Loima: I was admiring my thorn-scratched feet and feeling at home there, until the fatal word “Emun!” (snake) rang out. We ran to where Lokale was and found a slim silver snake in the long grass, worryingly well camouflaged to my eye. Erot declared it a friendly snake and poked it with his stick, but then it shot out of its tussock straight for us – everyone scattered and Marta and I screamed loudly and shrilly. Then Gregory stepped forward and sprinkled some water on it, speaking to it where it had stopped, frozen, in the open. He and Marta are apparently ‘of its clan’ and so it was one of their ancestors – probably a grandparent – come to speak to them and ask for water. Both did talking and water-sprinkling, Marta much more reluctantly, then Erot told us all to leave it in peace and barked at a young herdsboy who threw a rock at it.
Felt more respect after the snake incident for tagalong add-no-value Gregory, which was lucky as he then asked me very awkwardly for a hundred shillings for something to do with his dreadful health. Perhaps his ancestor had given him the courage and me the ability to help, so I gave him it and some extra to buy a proper meal and get his strength back. This seemed to please Erot greatly and I was allowed to feel that sickly benevolent feeling…
Got to tent just as enormous dust storm tore through, blowing everyone and especially all the little goats off course.
We shared plenty of different plates of food from the various wife kitchens and I made wishes on the shooting stars I saw as I lay on my back digesting. The children sang a lovely song about a place called ‘Kalongolong’, a word they sang with obvious delight: acha CHA, Kalongolong…”
