A Primate's Memoir, page 24
Another time-honored scam was the one I had fallen for on my first day in Nairobi, many years before. That was, of course, the earnest Ugandan student, a refugee from Idi Amin, intent on helping drive him from power in order to establish whatever sort of governmental system was most likely to appeal to the tourist he was attempting to rip off. Thus, when addressing an American: “So you see, I must go back to Uganda and fight for freedom, like your people from the British, so that we can establish a two-party state and two legislative houses, so that my people can be free and have electoral primaries years before the actual election and have conventions where cheerleaders in short skirts and rich old men in straw hats sing songs about the winner. We will be free, and then we will make a new national anthem, ‘Uganda the Beautiful.’ Oh beautiful, for spacious skies,” etc.
This scam persisted for years after Amin’s overthrow, reflecting the fact that he was one of the few African leaders whose existence, let alone depredations, ever made it into the consciousness of your average tourist.
Then there was the “Mrs. Mortlake” ruse, which required an astonishing knowledge of the Brits to pull off with verisimilitude. Suppose you are some expatriate, parking your vehicle in the lot of the market in the British colonial suburb. Coming out, you find a Kenyan standing there with a moronic and obsequious grin, the likes of which haven’t been seen since the Brit colonials strutted about in jodhpurs here. Bowing and scraping, he hands you the following note on pink stationery with purple ink:
Dear Mr. Cheever,
I spotted your car in the parking lot and some boy seemed to be trying to break in, so I’ve left my houseboy, Francis, to watch the car. These boys here are really becoming impossible. Could you be a dear—Im a bit short on cash—and give Francis the money for the bus back to Karen [the white bedroom suburb, named for Karen Blixen, author of Out of Africa, whose old house there is now a museum]. Thanks ever so much, and see you at the races Sunday
Mrs. Mortlake (Theodora)
Oh hell, you think, I’m not Mr. Cheever (who you imagine as some age-spotted old colonial fart with knee socks, cigarette holder, and alarmingly red complexion) and ol’ Francis, who’s been watch-dogging your car, is stuck here thanks to the cheap Mrs. Mortlake (Theodora), and you suppose the least you can do is give the bugger the money to get back to the house, where he presumably spends his time serving tea and biscuits. Francis, money in hand, departs, still bowing and scraping, waiting for the next victim.
This, obviously, is not a trivial one to try. It requires the pink paper, purple ink, and the capacity to write like a British matron with flowery loopy handwriting. Also, it obviously takes a lot of eating of shit to pretend to be house-boy Francis. Not for beginners.
This one was going around for a while and appears to have been finally squelched when someone wised up and, rather than give “Francis” the money for the bus, instead forced him into their car and drove him the considerable distance to Karen, leaving him there. Perhaps, to establish his own verisimilitude in return, the driver made a point of confessing his respect, maybe even lust, for Mrs. Mortlake (Theodora).
It was around this time that Laurence of the Hyenas and I were discussing a possible solution to a problem he was having at his campsite, a few miles upriver from mine. The nearby Masai, with whom Laurence was not getting on particularly well, were bringing their zillions of cows to cross the river right next to his camp, of all the endless possible places to cross. Cows would crap up the river water, make a mess of the yard, generally get in the way. No amount of yelling at the kids with the cows was working to get them to move the damn animals away.
The obvious solution would be as follows: Disappear into your tent and, after a dramatic pause, reappear wearing sunglasses and a towel wrapped around your head like Hedda Hopper. Have in your possession one hyena skull, filled with baby powder, plus one marker pen. March up to the biggest cow in the herd, grab it by the horns. With ceremonial menace, begin to sprinkle baby powder out of the foramen magnum and eye sockets of the hyena skull. Sprinkle directly on cow’s head. At the same time, loudly sing the chorus from “Oobla-di, Oobla-da.” That phase of the cow-cursing ceremony completed, write on the cow’s side with the marker pen. I’d personally vote for drawing a heart with an arrow through it and inside, “Vinnie luvs Angela.” At this point, the Masai cowherd boys, off in the bushes, would be shitting bricks—they’ve pushed you too far and you’ve laid some heavy white magic on their cows. We concluded that cows would be removed from the camp within seconds after end of ceremony.
This was never actually done, for the obvious reason that were it to be, you would be visited that evening by a delegation of elders from the village, informing you that your ass is grass if any cow gets sick now for the next month, since you put a hex on them.
Then there was the one that Richard had thought up to get the Masai to leave him alone altogether. While Richard got on great with Soirowa and other individual Masai, there was still a perpetual tension in his living and working along the river. The Masai would never get around the fact that he and Hudson were members of agricultural tribes that were their traditional enemies.
Now, the Masai have established their intimidating reputation by being tall and imposing, and by being known for their fondness for gathering in large terrifying numbers, and for their prowess with spears. But I’m convinced that much of the visceral heebie-jeebies that they give all the agriculturists is from their drinking cow’s blood.
In that regard, it is the typical banquet food of most nomadic pastoralists in Africa. Wander everywhere with your cows and goats, live off their milk and blood. Simple, fun. Grab one cow from your herd each day and, while it bellows like mad, cut its jugular and collect a calabash of warm blood. Press a mud compact on afterward and the cow is little more than anemic for the next week. Drink blood fresh, let it coagulate, or mix it with milk, pour it on your breakfast cereal. It allows you to avoid unpleasantries like having to hunt or grow things, apparendy provides a reasonably balanced diet, is probably ecologically sound. However, it makes the agricultural Kenyans sick to their stomachs.
Oh, now and then, the braver ones decide there must be something to that Masai blood stuff. Hudson’s father, for example, once came home after, no doubt, musing all day in the field, and announced that the family was going to try some cow’s blood, those Masai have been beating the pants off us for years, there must be something to their disgusting habit. Everyone is dismayed—comical background music is heard and the whole thing takes on the pretense of a TV situation comedy—Oh No! Dad’s Turned Masai and It’s Cow Blood for Everyone! 8:00 p.m. tonight on My Father the Bantu. The predictable happens. Amid derision and wonder, Hudson’s dad hauls over the family’s sole (and terrified) moo-cow, comes close to killing her (since he doesn’t quite know how to stop the bleeding), makes a mess of everything. No one else will drink the horrid stuff. Gingerly, he takes a few sips, pronounces it wonderful, and never brings up the subject again, as whimsical theme song for TV show comes up at the end.
Other than these occasional odd forays, pretty much everyone in this part of the country leaves the blood drinking to the Masai, and the latter no doubt take a certain satisfaction at how they disturb everyone else in the process. The secret to this scam of Richard’s was to beat the Masai at their own game, and make them even more disgusted with his own food habits.
This started off inadvertently. I’d darted Nathanial. Later in the day, I gave a Masai woman a lift home from the clinic at the tourist lodge and stopped along the way to release the baboon. I suppose when you do enough of this sort of thing, you forget that everyone else isn’t accustomed to your driving up to a cage hidden in a grove of trees that contains some wild baboon, jumping up on top of it with much hooting and yelling, and letting the guy out. The Masai woman was wild-eyed. To add to it, Nat came out a bit woozy, and was still staggering around a bit, in a placid bovine fashion. In a moment of inspiration, I grabbed a stick from the car and walked along beside the still-disoriented Nat, tapping him lightly on the rump, much as the Masai do when herding their cows. I started whistling like the Masai do when they are herding and led him past the car and the increasingly alarmed mama. After guiding him toward the rest of his pals, I returned to the car and dropped the woman off without any explanation.
Sure enough, by the next day, word was up and down the villages along the river that Richard and I herded baboons like cows and, no doubt, subsisted off them. Richard was soon asked about this by terrified Masai kids. Do you take milk from the baboons and drink it? You bet. Is that all? asked the kids, not willing even to verbalize their worst fears. There’s even more, Richard hinted malevolently, beginning to hatch his plan.
We plotted carefully and picked the right day. We were lounging around camp, having darted the new transfer male, Reuben. Masai kids were lounging with us, especially the girls, who seemed to have a teasing crush on Richard in the way the ten-year-old girls usually torture the lifeguard at summer camp. They watched us take blood from the baboons with the interest that they always had—since Masai have to hit veins and control their bleeding for their daily bread, they know more about bleeding than most phlebotomists. They clustered around, advised which vein to poke, marveled at the butterfly catheters and anticoagulants. They were accustomed to us spinning the blood in the godawful hand-operated centrifuge, pulling off the serum, and freezing it away in the dry ice. But this time, we had a different plan.
Richard and I ostentatiously took the remaining red cells, full rich baboon blood, and poured it into the drinking cup we had decided to sacrifice for the ruse. We walked back to the tent, with the Masai kids watching, transfixed and horrified. Along the way, with backs turned, I switched cups. Bowing to each other with the decorum appropriate to the start of a Japanese tea ceremony, we then took turns drinking from the cup, exclaiming at the superb taste, wiping our mouths, rubbing our bellies contentedly in a hammy fashion.
That was it. Forever after, the Masai believed that we drank baboon blood, and I think that played a major role in Richard’s not getting hassled by the Masai too often. The kids themselves clustered around Richard asking questions. How does it taste? Good, like human blood. They recoiled, spitting and gasping. Does he pay you to do this? they asked, referring to me. No, he is my friend, I ask him if I can drink blood from his baboons. Don’t you have any cows at home? No, my father has no cows, that is why we started drinking baboon blood.
The more charitable of the girls came up to Richard and, in an un-Masai gesture, touched his arm. You must be the poorest man in the world, no cows, she said gently. Her friend had little time for sympathy or understanding. Cannibals! she said huffily, as they departed.
But of course, just when I had decided that all anyone did in Kenya was try to pull something off on someone else, I returned home from a field season and promptly fell victim to the most ornate scam I’ve ever experienced. The whole thing cost me a chunk of my paycheck and, before it was over, I wound up sitting in the backseat of a two-door car in a truly bad neighborhood very late at night. The front seat was occupied by one of the scammers, supposedly a garrulous New York City transit worker who’d seen it all, the backseat next to me by the other scammer, supposedly a sweet, unworldly woman from Guyana, sent here from the plantations to visit her grievously injured brother in the hospital. I never had a clue what was up and made small talk with the fake Guyanese woman, enthusiastically trying to discuss the flora and fauna of her beautiful homeland. As it turned out, she knew nothing about the subject, but, fortunately for her, I turned out to know even less.
When I reported it to the police, I discovered that this was such a time-honored rip-off that they had an entire notebook of grainy mug shots labeled “Guyanese girl/Transit worker,” right next to other books with labels like, “Blind nun with sick Seeing Eye dog,” “Siamese twins who have just won the lottery,” and “Visiting caliph and entourage seeking good Middle Eastern restaurant at any price.” The cops, while filling out the forms, found excuses to ask me repeatedly where I was from—“Now where’d you say your hometown was again, Cornfed, Iowa? Backabeyond, Kansas?” forcing me to fess up, over and over, that I was actually a native New Yorker. They chortled derisively and had a great time.
But that’s another story.
18
When Baboons Were Falling Out of the Trees
Naturally, just when I thought I’d gotten a pretty complete education in the various scams going around, even the ones in New York, I fell for another one. And this one was actually of some consequence, instead of a mere failing to see through some guy who was trying to hustle a watch off of me. It involved a situation where I had two seconds to make a life-and-death decision, and thanks to not having a clue about the nonsense going on around me, I made the wrong one.
It was later in that season of Nathanial’s ascendancy—he had indeed decisively grabbed the alpha position from Daniel the morning that I farted away with my flat tire. Richard and I had been making good progress with darting the baboons, and data were rolling in. A research vet from Nairobi, Muchemi, had come out to hang out in camp for a few weeks in order to get some samples. A euphemism: Muchemi was interested in schistosomiasis in primates and wanted fecal samples from the baboons. We were happy to oblige, even acceded to his request for samples of our own. One excellent day, we darted four animals in a morning, a record, and rode into camp yipping like cowboys. A productive pattern emerged—we darted baboons each morning, ran the experiments smoothly, threw a Frisbee around between blood samples, helped Muchemi stuff turds into his little plastic bags. It was turning into a great season.
Then one day, the warden came to camp. One was always a little bit skittish about such things—wardens visiting usually meant your permits had been revoked, or some favor was requested, or some vacationing Saudi princes were coming soon to shoot animals nearby and nosy researchers were notified to get lost for the duration. This time it was a request. It was actually the assistant warden, as the senior warden had been on leave for a while. No doubt trying to show he was a gung-ho, take-charge kind of guy, he had followed up on news of a problem and was volunteering me to solve it. He had gotten some radio calls from the manager of a tourist camp at the far corner of the other end of the reserve. The man had reported that there was some sort of disease outbreak among the baboons living near his camp. They were dying in droves, “falling out of the trees.” The manager had requested permission to shoot the dying ones.
The warden had said yes, and now wanted me to figure out what the problem was with the baboons, if it was curable, if it was a danger to the tourists. All very commendable, but I had mixed feelings about it. There were lots of reasons to do it. The whole thing had an air of juvenile excitement: a man in a uniform had come and given me a mission. It sounded interesting and challenging. The timing was opportune, with Muchemi and his veterinary skills on hand. Yet I was sulky about it—Muchemi’s time was limited, as was mine.
But of course we would go; the warden was requesting it, and he could shut me down anytime he felt cranky, and it was essential to get some brownie points. And we might do some good. By morning, we had pulled together our supplies, ransacking the storage tent: a cage, blowgun, darts, anesthetics. Vacutainers, needles, syringes. A centrifuge and a backup hand-operated one. A hematology microscope, slides, stains. A powerverter and extra car battery to run the equipment. Tents, sleeping bags. Loads of different kinds of antibiotics, antiseptics, painkillers. Cotton swabs, bacterial culturing kits, gloves, masks, surgical scrub suits, saws for cutting through bone, instruments for doing necropsies, vats of formaldehyde.
We drove off early. Muchemi had done research in this corner of the reserve years before, collecting carnivore shit, and waxed nostalgic for his youth. We all sang. It was a gorgeous day. We were excited, buzzed, anticipatory about tackling this problem, pleased and impressed with ourselves and our preparations. I hoped the powers that be would also be impressed, maybe decide I was useful to have around, stop hassling me about permits. We felt like some sort of veterinary SWAT team, planned strategy, vowed that if things got complicated enough, we would mobilize the whole primate center in Nairobi, have teams of veterinary pathologists parachuting out of the sky dressed in dashing orange jumpsuits. We got giddy until we decided the logical place to start was to have the manager shoot one of the dying ones so that we could carry out a careful necropsy. Jesus, we were off to go kill baboons. The anxiety that had kept me awake half of the night before returned—what would we find, how many would we have to kill before we could figure out something, what if I made a mess of it, what if it was indeed a plague? I wondered if, when it was all over, I would think back on this morning, remembering, It had been a beautiful day, we sang, Muchemi told us about lion turds….
