A Primate's Memoir, page 10
The problem began when the government cut back even more on the money to Kipkoi’s unit. Eventually, even Kipkoi’s veiled haunted line to Palmer about how a hungry man makes mistakes could not get more money from Palmer; he was giving all he could. The months went by with the government salaries late or nonexistent. There were not enough bullets, not enough petrol to operate the vehicles. There was not enough food. They began to be as hungry as the unpaid Tanzanian army units across the border, and to think the same thoughts. The Somali men had few compunctions about anything, but they feared Kipkoi, even had a grudging respect for him, knew his opinions and did him the honor of confronting him. They were hungry. They could start shakedowns of the local people. That wouldn’t bother them, these were Kipkoi’s tribesmen, not theirs. Or they could shoot something, something with meat. We are hungry, Kipkoi, this is bullshit, not getting paid. Get us some food, or we will get it ourselves.
Kipkoi, who was just as hungry as they, who had been foreseeing this crisis emerging for months, already knew what he had decided. They would start shooting animals for meat. Adult males, zebras or giraffes or wildebeests, something with meat, something not endangered. Somewhere quiet. And he, Kipkoi, would do the shooting. His men had to eat.
That night he didn’t sleep, the same fitfulness that had not been there since the night before the first hunt with the bwana, forty years earlier. Kipkoi used an old .458, a huge elephant gun, instead of the automatic weapons they used in the battles with the poachers. And at the first shot, he trembled, something he never did. And missed the giraffe. One of the younger Somali men snickered, continued to do so even after Kipkoi took down another giraffe while it was further away and running. That night, the men, satisfied with the meat and the promise of an animal a week from Kipkoi, indulged themselves in mockery behind his back—“The old man is finally slowing down, did you see him tremble?”
A week later, when Wilson came to deliver some money and instructions from Palmer to Kipkoi, his father was out on patrol. Wilson lounged with the men, although he had never been particularly comfortable with them. The men, who still regarded Wilson as an anomaly, a coolly off-putting kid, nevertheless recognized his growing status at Palmer’s and knew Palmer’s power over them. It occurred to them to try to curry favor with Wilson, or at least try to get on friendlier terms. The youngest ranger, the one who had snickered and could recognize Wilson’s smoldering anger at Kipkoi, told Wilson the story about how Kipkoi trembled when he shot at a giraffe at only 100 meters. Wilson, your old man’s losing it.
Wilson didn’t respond to the ranger, left shortly after that, without waiting for his father. That evening, he was unusually quiet around Palmer and could not even be drawn into an argument about the recent shutting of the university and the government beating of students. Instead, Wilson surprised Palmer with a rare request—a few days off. He wanted to go see his wife for a bit. Palmer found this odd, given Wilson’s usual apathy about her. He agreed readily, since Wilson rarely took any time off.
Wilson departed the next morning. But instead of heading toward the small plot of land in the hamlet straddling Masai and Kipsigi country where his wife lived forgotten, he went to Nairobi. In the streets of Nairobi, where every sort of illegal or illicit thing could be obtained, Wilson paid for a service that shamed him. He had come this far, although he could have obtained the same in the town near Palmer’s farm, for fear of being recognized. He went to a writer, one of the educated men who sat at a booth and wrote letters for the illiterate, read important documents for them. Wilson was, of course, anything but illiterate, and was shamed at being mistaken for some wild bush kid. But he needed a letter written in a handwriting that was not his own. Carefully dictating to the ex-student, a few years older than he, he detailed the poaching activities of one Kipkoi wa Kimutai, the places and dates, the rangers who could verify the facts. He mailed it, unsigned, from the general post office in Nairobi to Palmer. And Palmer, who knew and could prove that half the game park men in the country were poaching, who could do the same concerning the poaching activities by government ministers, who accepted it as part of the rot in the system and did not bother to do anything about it, Palmer decided to go after Kipkoi.
It did not take him long. The young rangers, scared for their hides, were more than happy to cooperate, even with something as unorthodox as being interrogated by a white man with no government connections, while their guns sat at their feet, unconsidered. Whether Palmer understood that Kipkoi poached in order to feed his hungry men is not clear, as he did not care to pursue that part of the story. Instead, he went to confront Kipkoi in his tent.
On the wall of Kipkoi’s tent was a picture that he took with him everywhere. It was a famous photograph, shown in the National Museum, known to schoolchildren, one of the few images that were part of the hagiography of Kenya’s history, part of its fragile, just-emerging sense of national identity. It was a photograph of the dead General Lenin.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Kikuyus rose up in a peasant rebellion against the British colonial rule. It was motivated by the British seizing of the Kikuyu traditional lands and by the disenfranchisement and second-class citizenship in their ancestral homes. Most immediately, it was motivated by the British attempts to outlaw some of the more alien elements of Kikuyu customs, such as female circumcision or infanticide. The Kikuyu rose up, and the world learned of it as the Mau Mau rebellion. Young men took to the forests to fight, raid, plunder, sabotage. To the extent that there was any driving ideology beyond tribal outrage, the orientation was vaguely leftist, and many of the Mau Mau fighters took noms de guerre reflecting this. General Lenin was the name taken by one young man who emerged as a charismatic leader and moderately effective fighter. He led a large band that roamed through the thick Aberdare mountains of Kikuyuland, and he was among the most wanted by the British army trying to suppress the rebellion.
On September 23, 1954, General Lenin was caught in an ambush on the lower slopes of the Aberdares, while he was attempting to shoot a forest buck with a bow and arrow. He was killed by a single bullet to the chest. The famed photograph shows him a few minutes after his death, with his beard and Mau Mau dreadlocks and traditional clothing made of animal skins. He is on his side, the chest wound visible. Standing, with his foot perched on General Lenin’s rib cage, is the British soldier who tracked and shot him. He is a young man, with a jutting beard and a tough bush-hardened face, but not a displeased one. He has affected the traditional hunter’s pose upon a downed lion, and his face, intelligent and wry, shows how aware he is of the statement he is making. At the time, its cynical, reassuring message to the British public for which it was meant was “Just another prey, just another day’s work.” To the Kenyan public, when it is reprinted in the papers each Independence Day, it still says, “Look how they treated us, look at what they considered us.” The soldier in the picture, of course, was Palmer.
It was an accomplishment that the young Captain Palmer was proud of, although, to his credit, the pride did not last for long. Palmer aged with his shame, lost his hair, shaved his beard, lost the cocky wryness, until he was no longer recognizable. There were endless Palmers in the vestiges of the empire and of British East Africa who would claim to be that Palmer over a drink, but the real Palmer spent less time with the other Brits and never drank with them. He was delighted for someone else to take the credit, and he disappeared into the new nation. The British soldier who seconded Palmer, Arden, the one whose shooting reflexes were far slower, was pensioned off somewhere in the UK, a forgotten drunk. Arden’s hunting boy had been killed in a road accident sometime after independence. And Palmer’s boy was Kipkoi.
In the photograph of the keen Captain Palmer and the deceased General Lenin, there is a shadow on the leftmost field of vision. Naturally, Kipkoi was not allowed to share in the photographic moment of glory of his bwana, but he stood just off-camera. The strategy of the hunt had been his, as Palmer readily admitted. “A hungry man makes mistakes,” Kipkoi had said, and they had deployed men to find and destroy the traditional Kikuyu snares in the forest, depriving the Mau Mau fighters of meat. It had been hard tedious work, spotting snares that were not meant to be spotted. But it awakened in both Kipkoi and Palmer an appetite for the strategies needed to fight poachers. They had destroyed enough of the snares, controlled enough of the farms below that might smuggle maize up to the fighters, that the Mau Mau began to starve. And spent their time going after forest buck with bows and arrows, instead of fighting the British.
On that cold September morning, when the rainy season had come early and made the forest paths difficult but telltale, Kipkoi had led the way and picked up General Lenin’s track. They had taken an unorthodox strategy, climbing high, into the near moor lands, and then dropping down, until Kipkoi found the tracks. Lenin, as he had guessed, was moving downward, despite the British proximity below, in order to hunt for the plentiful game on the lower slopes. Kipkoi led, Palmer followed, and the other two covered the rear. They were tense with excitement and caution, although no more so than on any other hunt. Kipkoi spotted him first, Palmer shot merely the one time that was necessary. Kipkoi felt the same pride that Palmer did, appreciated the extra pay for Mau Mau patrol. And as a Kipsigi, the Kikuyu grievances made little sense, and he welcomed the chance to set back the fortunes of the other tribe.
The first time Palmer came into Kipkoi’s tent in one of the antipoaching camps and saw the photograph pinned up, he asked Kipkoi in some annoyance why that was up there. “Someday, I will receive a great deal of money from the newspapers to tell where that captain is now, and then I will drive a car like yours,” answered Kipkoi, sardonically. He was a bit surprised, hurt, that Palmer would even ask. He thought the answer was obvious as to why he commemorated that moment. Because in their long years together, that September morning was the time that Kipkoi’s feelings of respect, rage, gratitude, fear, and emulation for Palmer converged into something resembling love.
It is not clear what transpired in Kipkoi’s tent when Palmer came to confront him about the poaching. Perhaps Kipkoi made threats about the photograph, or perhaps he would have died of shame before doing such a thing. Perhaps he explained himself, perhaps Palmer relented, perhaps Palmer got exacdy the punishment for Kipkoi that he wanted. Kipkoi was not charged, but took retirement. He returned to his home, the two surviving wives and nine remaining children. Palmer returned to his farm work and soon told the government that he could no longer afford his disproportionate half of the antipoaching unit, which was disbanded soon after that. And in that period, Wilson’s angers at Palmer were finally realized. It was in fury at Palmer for attacking his father, and for doing an incomplete job of it. Wilson became more withdrawn, inconsistent in his work, eventually dangerous. He drank for the first time, began to smoke bhang. He fought with the workers and, one day, even assaulted Palmer, who gave him one more chance. And shortly after that, Wilson disappeared with the farm’s cash box (although conspicuously leaving the cash behind). He lives now in the shantytowns of Nairobi, with the other young men who flock from the bush to the city to look for nonexistent jobs. Drinking, occasionally stealing, wearing his hair in dreadlocks.
AT THE KIOSK
The Mau Mau lost. East Africa was going to have to be given its independence; even British statesmen were making noises about winds of change. But they were certainly not going to turn the colony over to forest fighters in dreadlocks and monkey skins who took names like General China. The Mau Mau were rather effectively crushed, and when the British made it clear that they were in charge and could damn well hold on to the colony as long as they wished, they turned it over to the Kenyans. But to the Kenyans who had been hand-groomed and coached—British-educated, latent Anglophiles who, decades later, would still have their Kenyan judges wear powdered wigs.
But the new government had the problem of what to do with the ex-Mau Mau. During that first year as I pieced together the story of Wilson and Kipkoi and Palmer, I also learned the unexpected fate of the fighters. It was convenient for the national mythology to claim that the Mau Mau had won, that independence was a direct outgrowth of their rebellion. It was convenient to say that Jomo Kenyatta had led the Mau Mau. Kenyatta, a consummately urbane man, an author who had traveled the world, had been accused by the British in the early ’50s of being the mastermind behind Mau Mau as a means to put him away. Most evidence suggested that this was a frame-up. Now, it was convenient for the new nation to say it was really true. Mau Mau led the rebellion, won the war, and their leader now sat in the president’s office.
The problem, of course, was what to do with the real Mau Mau fighters. Some were trotted out for public ceremonies. Dazed men in matted dreadlocks and animal skins soon bound for the Independence Museum, looking more than a little bit suspicious of the new government Kikuyus in their pinstripes and ties and government Mercedeses. But after that, what to do with them? The new pinstripe guys were more scared of them than the Brits were; angry, uneducated guerrillas named Commander Moscow. No thank you.
In a surprising success for the new government, the fighters were quietly dispersed into the national mythology. A few did wind up in the government, one notably running special security forces for Kenyatta. By some quirk, many of them were given licenses to operate food kiosks in town, a plum of a reward. The kiosks are all over the place in Nairobi, on the outskirts. Large, airy wooden shacks, with wood benches and tables. A booth for the proprietor, huge cooking cauldrons sitting on fires that have probably burned continuously for years. Smoky Kenyan tea, bowls of maize and beans (a traditional Kikuyu dish), occasionally a goat or chicken stew. Ubiquitous, cheap, convenient, good food. It was apparently decided that the kiosks would be the reward for the fighters.
I learned of this during that first season. Whenever I was in Nairobi, I frequented the same kiosk. Maize and beans each day, loud, raucous Kikuyu dance music, men sitting and eating and shouting, cats and chickens underfoot. It was run by Kimani, an older middle-aged Kikuyu who dripped avuncularity. Big, round, battered Kikuyu face, patches of white stubble on his face and head, a habitual heavy greatcoat and wool cap, as he stood behind the counter, shouted, made change, handed out tea, joshed the regulars. I, happily, had become one myself, and he would greet me each day with handshakes and bows and tea. I practiced my Swahili with him, and he seemed to consider my every gesture to be amusing and commendable.
One day I asked him if it was true that many of the kiosk guys were Mau Mau. Yes, of course, he said, even me. You, Kimani? Aw, come on. He roared with laughter and delight at my surprise. Yes, I was Mau Mau, I ran away to the forest and fought, after they took my father’s land. We were fierce, we wore long hair and did not wear the clothes of Europeans. Did you kill anyone, Kimani? Oh yes, many times. Really? Well, once we were in a battle with the British and I shot an arrow at someone, but I missed.
He seemed so jolly, the whole story sounded rather implausible. I wondered if claiming you were ex-Mau Mau was a pleasing innocent scam for Kikuyu men that age. But then he said, Aii, we had a terrible battle with those British, and they captured us, and they sent me to the desert for eight years in prison. And look—holding up his hands—those British pulled out my fingernails. He found this uproarious and seemed to melt with nostalgia. I had never noticed his fingers before. There was something on the end of each finger that might have been a fingernail or some distorted remnant of a fingernail; his fingers had the definition of turnips.
But, Kimani, aren’t you angry at the British, don’t you hate them? This he found even more amusing—“No, no, because we won!”
He chuckled awhile, but then quieted and considered his fingers. He said, Well, I did not like them when they pulled out my fingernails, and I did not like that prison in the desert. I do not hate the British, but I do not like those people either. They are not good people.
Suddenly, he remembered his manners and felt vulnerable in the way that Kenyans feel in not being able to discern the nationality of white English speakers. “Uh, you are not British, are you?” he asked.
No, American.
He was delighted, roared, Then what am I telling you for? You Americans have fought the British also, you know about those people.
He served up more tea, this graceful man with no fingernails.
THE SOURCE OF THE NILE
The transition from the reign of Solomon to that of Uriah had come and passed. Joshua was learning how to take care of young Obadiah, and crazy tense Ruthie was even calming down a bit in Joshua’s presence. It had been a few weeks since Benjamin had stumbled into a beehive, and Rachel and her family seemed to have things under control with poor, beleaguered Job.
My first year was drawing to a close, and I was due back in the lab soon. To celebrate a successful and safe period, I decided to do the most impetuous thing in my life. I went to Uganda.
