A Primate's Memoir, page 23
We escalate our scary stories. I tell about Cropsey, the wildman in the Catskills who ax-murders little boys, which is told to every Brooklyn Boy Scout, Cub Scout, summer camper, on his first camping trip. It seems that old Cropsey lived in the woods with his daughter. Boy Scouts were nearby, chopping wood, and because of carelessness, an ax went flying off and killed Cropsey’s daughter. And Cropsey went mad and ran off into the forest and he spends forever and ever creeping around waiting for Boy Scouts to murder with the very same ax and maybe tonight he is even somewhere around here, getting closer and closer, looking—quick, shine the flashlight in the listener’s face—for you! Samwelly is impressed, keeps saying, “Looking for you,” and shining the flashlight in his face. How old is Cropsey? he asks. One hundred twenty years old and he has iron teeth and glowing eyes. Where are the Catskills, near here? No, upstate New York.
Then Soirowa tells the story of the Masai who becomes unhinged and goes to live with the hyenas, living like one of them. He does not wear clothes and forgets the language of people, runs away from humans, and can be seen at a distance at dawn, eating with the hyenas on a kill.
This time we shudder for real, because this story is true. And then Soirowa reveals a recent piece of news about the man, something I suspect that Masai found profoundly disturbing and shameful, something probably most of them would just as soon not have had being told outside the members of the village—he had recently snuck into the village at night, and the smell of this hyena-man in their midst set the dogs to barking. By the time the men had gotten to him, he had killed a goat with his teeth and was tearing at its underbelly. He was covered with hyena shit from rolling in it, and his toenails had gotten so long that they curled up. Just like Howard Hughes when he became a hermit.
It was around the time that the river was haunted by the man who thought he was a hyena that I heard the story of the man who thought he was the king of Nubian-Judea. It could be directly traced as an unforeseen consequence of the aborted coup attempt of a few years before. It was told to me by a wonderfully animated Scotsman, sitting on the porch of Mrs. R’s boardinghouse in Nairobi that I frequented.
It seems that the Scotsman was accompanying a fellow countryman who worked at an aid project up at the edge of the desert. They had to deliver some piece of machinery to a colleague way the hell further north, about forty kilometers past the checkpoint that marks the beginning of the desert.
They’re in the middle of nowhere, empty, desolate, stinking hot, nothing but heat-crazed nomads now and then staggering around with their animals. They approach the checkpoint, which is a small hamlet. On their side is the last of the provincial districts that are governmental units. Ahead is the other half of the country, the Northern Frontier District, howling empty boiling desert full of nomads and cutthroat desert bandits who control everything except the occasional government outposts and the convoys that everyone must travel in to be safe. They’re hoping to get a pass to travel without waiting for a convoy, given that they just have to scoot the short distance past the border and quickly return.
Checkpoint. Some mud huts, comatose-looking Samburu tribesmen slouching in the scattered shade. Palm trees, sand, gravel, one lighter-painted hut with a tin roof and a flag. The government quarters. Normally, at these outposts in the middle of nowhere, the government man manning it is half-naked, forgotten, starved, wasting away. Many a governmental outposter I’ve met has nearly fallen upon me with a spray of gibberish, crazed sunstroke look in his eyes, delighted to talk to anyone who’s not Samburu, yammering and begging for news of the outside world, seeking to pull himself together in the tatters and rags of his uniform. Instead, the two Scotsmen enter the office and are confronted with a man with gelled, brushed-back 1950s American “Negro” pomaded hair, crisp white shirt, tie, pinstripe three-piece suit, and walking stick. This is the government man. They are led, with great formality and silence, to seats in front of his desk, at which he sits. Above his head is a photograph of the president. It is the obligatory official photograph; the president sits at his desk, pen in hand, glancing up from his busy affairs of state. Our government man assumes the precise same posture with his pen, glances up, and announces in superb English that he is ready to hear the nature of their petitioning.
The Scots explain where they are going and how they’d like a permit to just head on, without having to wait to go in a convoy. The government man asks a few perfunctory questions as to where they started off from today, how long they’ve been in the country, what do they think of the weather here. They answer, and suddenly, with stern finality, our government man announces to them that they are from the south of Scotland. He is correct. He looks at them keenly and identifies correctly the subregion of Scotland that they come from. You see, he explains, I knew many men from Scotland when I was training with the Royal Air Force. This explains a great deal—as a general rule, one only works for the government and gets assigned to a hellhole like this in the middle of nowhere if you’ve screwed up badly—the Northern Frontier District is full of border outposts manned by men being punished for getting a little too drunk on the job, or for blowing the whistle on some corruption or some such indiscretion. Following the coup attempt of a few years before, led by the air force, everyone who wasn’t hung was exiled out to godawful assignments. Thus, our ex-air force government man.
Without warning, he stands, looks skyward, makes some flourishing gestures with his arms, and shouts something in what turns out to be almost, but not quite, correct Gaelic for an old battle cry. This, it seems, is the announcement of the beginning of his inspection. He aggressively demands that they pull up their hair and expose their foreheads, so that he can take the full measure of them; specifically, he says, so that he can determine whether they have a criminal mentality. They comply, feeling nervous and irrationally criminal, as he ponders their foreheads, making humming noises to himself. They are forced to stand and grasp his wrist with their full strength, as part of some test that he refuses to explain. In the heat and the incongruity, it doesn’t seem to occur to them to object to any of this. They simply feel alarmed that they might fail his test.
He settles down for a complete interrogation. He looks at the Scots’ passports (which are irrelevant to the issue of his letting them go unescorted) and grows excited at one of them having been to Egypt from Kenya. He incorrectly identifies the flight number of the Egypt Air Nairobi-Cairo flight, apparently missing the number and time by only a digit or two. He then gives a short spirited lecture about the ethnic diversity of Alexandria, the type of fish found there, and, he claims, the abnormally late closing of the skull sutures in the children there, allowing the people sufficiently large brains to have built the pyramids.
He grows even more excited when he discovers that the same Scot had also been to Greece, saying that he will now read the passport stamp in proper Greek, will identify the town from which it was issued, and will then tell them about the people of that village. They await this feat. He correctly reads off the word stamped there, his pronunciation apparently being perfect. He proclaims it to be the name of a small town in the islands; in actuality, it is the Greek word for “entry.” He says the town has many ruins, healthy goats but small-skulled people, and says that he knows so much about the Mediterranean because in his former life, he was the governor general of Tiberius.
Ah-ha. At last, he has shown his hand; we’ve arrived at the core of his looniness. He says that there are two Italian missionaries in town whom he is keeping under house arrest because they say it is not possible that he was the governor general of Tiberius. (Later, after departing, the Scots run into these two Italians, who are on their way north to deliver a carburetor to their archrivals, three bearded Coptic missionary colleagues who every now and then manage to actually convert one of the animist nomads, only for the new acolyte invariably to be killed by outraged tribesmen. Their planned outing to the Coptics belies their being under house arrest. They claim no knowledge about the man’s claims regarding Tiberius, but say they have not gotten along with him since they corrected his near-correct proclamation regarding the year of the Vatican’s founding.)
Emboldened, perhaps taken to assume that the Scots’ silent wonder is supplication and loyalty, our government man suddenly stands majestically behind his desk and announces that he, in fact, is still the governor general of Tiberius, that he is raising an army of the faithful here in the desert, that soon they will march upon Nairobi in the south, that the president will flee and “run and eat grass like a zebra in the Serengeti,” that Nairobi will be burned and razed so utterly that even the wild animals will not venture there, and that he will then return to his outpost, declare the revival of his empire, and become the king of all Nubian-Judea.
He’s going like a banshee by then, breathing heavily and looking off into a far distance. He sits, spent, and extracts a pass from one of the desk drawers, allowing them to travel on alone. He rouses his energies again, with a flourish signs his name in phonetic Greek, stating that his signature is known and feared by bandits throughout the northern desert. The Scots depart, he once more lost in his president’s pose, consumed with the affairs of Nubian-Judea. When they return through the checkpoint later that day, he waves them through with a distracted, unrecognizing air.
17
The Penguins of Guyana
I was in a real crappy mood. It had started off as a fabulous morning with the baboons. Young Daniel, prematurely in the alpha position because of the ongoing instability in the troops hierarchy, was being pushed around badly by huge Nathanial, and I thought this was the morning that their ranks were going to switch, that Nathanial would finally make his decisive move. This is a big deal to a primatologist, actually seeing the transition from one alpha male to another—witness to history. Daniel had spent the morning ostentatiously repositioning himself each time Nathanial came near, so as not to have to see him, presumably trying to will him out of existence. Nat, meanwhile, was inching in closer and closer, threat-yawning all over the place. Showdown was in the air, and I was avidly waiting to see if Daniel was going to fold and simply give a subordinate gesture, signaling the transition, or if it was going to take a decisive fight in which he’d be trashed.
Right when things were getting pretty exciting I had to leave. It was time to drive to the tourist lodge, to meet the supply lorry from Nairobi, as it was carrying an essential shipment of the dry ice that I needed to keep my blood samples frozen. So I had to miss all the fun.
Arriving at the lodge, I discover that, naturally, the ice has not actually been sent from Nairobi—an hour’s work later, I finally get through to the ice guy in Nairobi over radiophone. Sorry, he says, we forgot. Forgot? They’ve been sending it once a week for months, and somehow it’s suddenly forgotten. I’m down to my last day of ice before samples start defrosting, and I depart with the less-than-convincing promise from him that there’ll be ice tomorrow.
Driving out of the lodge through thorn bushes, I get my third puncture of the week. This is always a misery. First you go to the guy who repairs punctures. Instead of being on the job at the lodge’s gas station, he is back in the staff quarters somewhere, sleeping. Head back there, go through the same interchange with the twenty different people you run into, namely first exchanging news with each about the health of their parents and my then reiterating that, no, actually I can’t give you my hiking shoes, as I need them. Tire repair guy is located, and after ninety minutes of easily distracted labor, he has fixed the puncture. He gives me a stub, which I take to the cashier at the other end of the lodge, who fills out a note saying “1 puncture, 40 shillings,” which the other man signs, which allows me to pay the cashier—all a procedure to keep the mechanic from repairing things under the table and pocketing the money. The cashier goes on a search for scrap paper to calculate that I get 10 shillings back from my 50 shilling note, and I’m ready for the next step: taking the tire to the other end of camp, to find the man who operates the air hose. He, naturally, is drunk in the bar at 11:00 a.m. and, with some effort, explains that he would be happy to fill the tire, but his brother has the key to the shed in which the hose is kept, and he is on leave this week. Bad luck. I express profound regret at the apparent need for me to now live in the lodge’s gas station for the next week, and the man, seeing his cue, says maybe, just maybe, he could find another key, but why don’t I sell him my watch at the good American price? We settle for his receiving a button that says “Hollywood Bowl,” and, satisfied, he turns his prodigious energies toward filling my tire, completing the task in a mere half hour. The man with the pressure gauge to determine whether the tire is filled properly is found easily, and quickly does the job, making me feel as if there might be some hope. The tire is underfilled, however. Fed up, I decide to go with that, rather than track down Bwana Airhose again, he no doubt back at the bar trying to flog his Hollywood Bowl button for a drink.
Task completed, I encounter the depressed Richard—yesterday, the end of the month, payday, meant that the rangers showed up from the gate to shake down the staff for protection payoffs, swaggering around the staff quarters drunk and armed, and Richard had been taken for more than usual, plus half his ulcer medicine that I had brought from the U.S. and had done cartwheels to get through customs. What the hell does some ranger want with an unknown medicine, other than just to be a prick? Richard announces he is going to sleep.
Grouchy and fed up with the whole mess, I do something egregious. I drive a great distance to another tourist lodge where, blessedly, no one knows me, and I spend an obscene amount of money on their all-you-can-eat lunch. I gorge till I am ill and concentrate on red meat. That’s how bad it’s become.
I sit there and smile at the tourists, hope to be taken for one, speak only English with the waiters. I look for an American to strike up a conversation with. Maybe to talk about the Yankees, or recent movies, or just how goddamn terrific it would be to have a Big Mac right now (a food item that I have, in fact, never eaten in my life).
That out of my system, I drive back guiltily. Somewhere in transit, I usually begin to wonder what the African guys here do when I and my godforsaken culture begin to drive them mad.
Okay, we’re all doing a great job learning about each other and exploring the world and being cultural relativists, but this whole place is pretty alien, and I must be pretty alien to all of them, and the charm must wear off for everyone after a while. It constantly amazes me that there isn’t more overt hostility between the different cultures and tribes and races here that rub elbows all the time, elbows already pretty scarred and tender from a lot of pretty nasty history. One arena where the hostility is in full flower has been a number of scams I’ve noted over the years. They all take advantage of the folks from the other culture and are predicated on a robust hostility toward them. Some prime examples:
One particularly well-honed scam has been worked over and over at the airport by African officials against the hated wealthy Indians. Some Nairobi Indian family is returning from abroad, visiting relatives in London or Toronto. Invariably, they arrive at customs with a mountain of boxes, usually highly desirable electronics items bought overseas at far lower prices than in Kenya. The stern customs inspector queries as to whether, prior to their trip, they filled out some imaginary customs declaration form he concocts out of air. Greatly dismayed to discover that they have not, he makes plans to impound all their possessions until hell freezes over. The family, now equally dismayed, wonders in an exploratory tone whether there isn’t something that could be worked out that would solve this unfortunate impasse. An appropriate bribe is subtly paid, and perhaps one small trifle among the electronics gifts is left as a token of gratitude and fondness for the customs inspector. Thus, the family is able to clear customs …
… only to be nabbed by a policeman as they leave the room. He, it turns out, is on a special detail investigating corruption among customs officials, and has just observed them, shockingly, to have bribed a government official. Fines, jail, floggings are threatened, along with the impounding of all the electronics goods until hell freezes over and people are cross-country skiing in the streets of Nairobi. The family, now more than a little panicked, wonders whether there isn’t something that could be worked out to solve this unfortunate misunderstanding. Another bribe is paid, another electronics offering is made as a symbol of the love and mutual respect that has been established. Family clears the waiting room …
… only to be nabbed by an army official in the lobby who is investigating corruption among police officials ….
Naturally, I fell for this one too. One of the security guards at a lodge begged me to bring him an American watch, cash to be paid on delivery. I wasn’t enthused, as he wasn’t someone I particularly knew or liked the looks of, but I decided to be a nice guy. Watch is brought in undeclared through customs, so as to avoid the manyfold import tax, in order to pass on to him the discount that prompted his begging me in the first place. Watch is received, immediate brotherhood is proclaimed, payment is promised the next day. The next day, instead, brings great dismay—bad luck, he recounts, a park ranger just happened to notice his new watch and demanded to see Form IV-7b, or some such thing, which attests to the watch’s legal entry into the nation. In the absence of it, ranger is now threatening jail, beatings, impounding of all the Serengeti’s baboons until hell freezes over, if he happens to find out who brought this soiled watch into this park, but, good news, the stalwart security guard has refused to name names and has instead arranged a cash gift for the ranger the next day, do I happen to have some money handy? Idiotically, I pay up, only to be told the next day, with even more dismay, bad luck, he and the ranger were caught mid-act in the process of bribing by a cop who, should he find out who started this all by bringing this tainted watch into his land, will … It was around this point that I finally told the guy to screw off.
