A Primate's Memoir, page 36
It is one of the sights that will always be with me. I had just had the nerve to start again on my troop, had darted Isaac, Rachel, then Shem. The first two were negative on days that garbage dump animals were positive, so I trusted the result. That morning, I entered the forest and immediately ran into Shem, sitting with an eyelid completely closed. I had wondered if there could ever be a borderline, disputable test result, but this was not it. He was TB positive.
I gave up on darting that day and spent the day with the baboons, my first quiet observational day with them in too long. I followed them, took distracted, mediocre behavioral data, sang to them, and felt near tears every time I saw Shem interact with someone—greet a male, groom a female, twist around to look at the goings-on in the neighborhood. All for the last time. And I kept passing up opportunities to dart him and slit his throat.
That night I fled to Laurence for advice and solace. I can never overemphasize how, during this insane period of my life, he was a constant source of sanity and big-brotherly stability. He listened and listened and did exactly as he should have—he reworded what I was telling him, and told it back as a command.
“Look, you know as well as I do that these vets don’t know shit about TB out here, no one knows. If they’re right, all of your animals are going to die anyway, so there is nothing gained by killing this guy now. And if they’re wrong, maybe you’ll save a few of the positive ones, maybe there is some resistance. Don’t kill this one.”
The next day, as I drove to the Olemelepo airstrip to meet Ross and Suleman, I spotted that Jesse had just come up positive as well. And I didn’t say a word to the vets about him or Shem.
We went to work, and they were a tremendously positive force. Both Ross and Suleman were sweet, jovial men whom I already liked, and they readily fell into the “gee whiz, lookie what a mess those lungs are” mode of scientists having a good, detached time. I expected that this would infuriate me—my tragedy as their clinical pleasure—but it was surprisingly calming. Our pace increased as I shifted more to darting, something they didn’t know how to do, and they did more of the autopsies, their specialty. We ground through more and more, I avoided questions about my troop, the distant troop continued with a 0 percent rate and the garbage dumpers about 70 percent. I would slip off during the day to do secret dartings and inspections of my own animals, and more positives there popped up—David, Jonathan. I darted Benjamin one day and found I did not have the resolve even to test him with tuberculin.
We worked in a numbing, distracting way, for which I was grateful. There was an analgesic effect to the sheer magnitude of the work, the repetition, the sleep deprivation. Darting, feeding the caged animals, reading test results, anesthetizing, cajoling at the Masai village, killing, dissecting, recording, passing the evenings discussing firebreaks. In some ways, that was academic, at least as far as the garbage dump animals were concerned; whether piecemeal or as a premeditated final solution, we were getting around to killing most of them anyway. The animals passed with exhausting labor, and each day’s work ended with a sight that I now recall with the nostalgia wasted on long-ago nightmares that eventually end—a massive hole we had dug and the burning of baboon bodies doused with gasoline.
The repetitive peace of my death camp and crematorium, the calming sadness of smelling the burning, was suddenly interrupted by a radio-call from Jim Else. The microbiology result was in, and it was a shocker. It was bovine tuberculosis, not human.
TB is actually a hodgepodge of diseases. In all cases, it is due to a bacterium that runs amok in the body. Overwhelmingly, it lodges initially in the lungs, thanks to inhalation, after which it can be carried elsewhere via the bloodstream or lymphatics. You can have secondary TB in essentially any organ—central nervous system, genito-urinary system, bones. But it is usually the lungs. Most of the time, it is due to one type of bacteria, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, or human TB. But there are other, rarer kinds. M. kansasii, M. scrofulaceum, M. fortuitum, M. bovis. Some of them are “avian,” some “bovine,” some “soil” TB. The name does not indicate what it infects exclusively, but rather what species it was first found in or is most readily found in. There is even M. marinum, which is found in infected swimming pools. But mostly, it is M. tuberculosis, and mostly it is in the lungs. But now, we had M. bovis, bovine tuberculosis, and it was primarily in the guts. The baboons weren’t breathing TB from one another. They were eating it.
Work ground to a halt and we sat and scratched our heads. I poked around, asked some questions, had some wild theories that grew more plausible by the day. And then, one afternoon, a friend at Olemelepo suggested that I take him for a ride around the reserve a bit. Once we were away from the lodge, very circumspectly, he confirmed my suspicions.
He was frightened at being an informant, and I will not reveal his name or his identifying profession. He was of a tribe that was an enemy of the Masai and he was delighted to finger some of them. And, an educated man who had once worked as a veterinary assistant long ago, he knew what he was talking about.
It was obvious. The bovine tuberculosis was occurring in the bovids. The Masai could instantly spot when an occasional cow was becoming tubercular. In the old days, cows were never killed. They were kept for blood and milk to drink, were honored, sung to, caressed, pampered. And if they became sick, they were nursed to the very end, at which point they might be eaten, but with great reluctance. But the Masai, pragmatic and adaptable even when it came to their beloved cows, had devised something new. All throughout Masai land surrounding the reserve, whenever a cow would get the first hint of TB, it would be loaded into a pickup truck that day, carted off to Olemelepo, and sold to Timpai, the Masai butcher at the staff quarters. After an appropriate bribe to the Masai meat inspector.
My friend knew what a tubercular cow looked like. He saw Timpai take the sick ones out to the far field, cut out the lungs and other infected organs, and toss them to the garbage dump baboons that would cluster around for scraps. And the remnants would be sold to the staff. Eventually, I would be able to observe the same ritual myself out in the field, take furtive, poor telephoto pictures. I would watch Timpai, a beefy, avuncular man with massive butcher’s forearms, whack away at a carcass, happily elbow deep in blood and gore (and no doubt tubercles and lesions), rummage around inside with the help of his bush Masai helpers, and toss something unsightly to the baboons waiting there. Big males would fight for the major chunks, females would rush in in between for pieces, scrappy infants would lunge for a snippet or two. Ensuring their deaths. And inevitably, now and then, I would spot Shem or Saul or Jesse, freelancing to try to grab a piece in the fray.
I indulged myself in a murderous anger at the Masai. I dropped any thought of going there to warn them about the tubercular knife they had stolen. Coals to Newcastle, they could go to hell. I was simply returning the bovine tuberculosis they had inflicted on my baboons. Mostly, I felt an odd relief. We had an explanation for the odd TB variant, the odd symptomatology. Mostly, we had an answer as to what to do. Get rid of the meat inspector, clean up the operation, and maybe the TB would be stopped, maybe some animals could be saved. I edged on euphoria—an answer, an option, a hope.
Ross and Suleman had to leave, to return to their regular duties. I gave them a letter for Jim. In it, I detailed the butchery connection, outlined the obvious—we, maybe with Leakey, had to go immediately to the head of Safari Hotels, the chain that operated Olemelepo, get them to clean up their act, threaten a little bad publicity if they didn’t, solve the problem.
The letter went off, and I was excited to get a radio-call from Jim by that evening, telling me to come to Nairobi immediately. I departed the next day, ready for us to leap into action, seeing the solution falling into place. And the next day, behind closed doors, Jim told me that nothing of the sort was going to happen.
Tourism is the biggest source of foreign currency in Kenya. It is bigger, proportionately, than the steel, automobile, and gasoline industries are in the United States, put together. Safari Hotels, owned by a prominent British-colonial family, was one of the bigger chains in the country; Olemelepo was one of their flagship hotels. And this was a region of the world where people with power did whatever they wanted. Where the widow of one government official was generally known to run the elephant poaching, where rangers with guns would shake down the hotel staff each payday, where a government minister once used his forecasts of a crop shortfall to buy up the entire crop with his own money and hoard it, engineering a profit-making famine among his own people. And, Jim informed me, neither I, nor he, nor even Richard Leakey, Kenya’s best-known citizen internationally, was going to go see the head of Safari Hotels and tell him to clean up his meat operation. And we were not going to seek publicity about Olemelepo peddling tubercular meat. I pleaded, we went back and forth, and he told me to go back to the reserve, continue doing the TB science there, and he would see what could be done at his end.
Never in my life have I felt closer to drowning in anger, felt more poisoned, more lost in a corrosive sense of betrayal. I returned, as requested, withdrew into my fury, confided in no one except Laurence. I passed each day obsessing over fantasies of vengeance at everyone. I even began to lay the groundwork for some of the fantasies. I was going to protect my baboons, save them, I was going to protect myself, I was going to have my revenge. I went back to darting and methodically documenting the further spread of the disease for the data notebooks that seemed destined to sit in Jim’s desk. But I also began doing other things. I photographed the animals clustering around the butchery, fighting over the refuse at the garbage dump. I spent a furtive morning shooting another roll of film, following one of the sick, terminal-stage baboons as he staggered along the edge of the stream that watered Olemelepo. He eventually passed out, and I photographed him lying there with the lodge in the background. I paid for a lodge lunch, the type of meal I would endlessly maneuver to get invited to by tourists; I sat there, barely eating; finding unlikely instances to spirit away pieces of the reddest beef to put into a small vat of formalin I had in a box with me. I bought meat for the same purposes from Timpai, left vats of formalin with my nervous informant for him to do the same when he spotted a particularly tubercular cow coming through. I was going to prove it, envisioned some headline in the States, “Premiere Kenyan Tourist Lodge Feeding Tubercular Food to Orthodontists from Akron”; I was going to have the information to save my baboons regardless of whatever powers that be, or, if I was going to lose my baboons, I was going to take everything down with them—Olemelepo, Safari Hotels and their owners, Timpai, the Kenyan tourist industry, the whole fucking country and its economy; my baboons were going to be avenged.
I tried a few of the logical things. For one, I went to talk to Timpai. If any one man single-handedly typified some of the stronger, more contradictory traits of Africans, it was he. He was a sweetheart of a man, charming, cherubic, the Tevye of the Masai community at Olemelepo. He was vastly too strong to be called fat. Instead, he had an anomalous, jiggly belly, an impish round face, and a chest and arms made of slabs of pig iron. He conjured up Thomas Hart Bentonesque images of capitalist realist men who carry anvils or railroad sidings or cows on their backs. Rare in the community, he had a full, well-shaped beard already shot through with flecks of white.
He was sweet, giggly, generous, one of the elders of the Masai community, always giving a place to stay to various Masai from the villages stranded at Olemelepo for lack of rides home, always serving tea to everyone. Incongruously, he even hugged people hello, an atypical gesture in those parts. He was the archetypally generous warm village character, the respected and required butcher, sage, and tea dispenser. Also, in a way that ultimately seems very African, he was utterly corrupt in a completely guileless, amoral fashion. His official job at Olemelepo was as the meteorologist, which meant he was supposed to check the rain gauge daily and write down the results. He had not done a stitch of meteorology in years, instead dumping the work on the minions of assistants that he had acquired through tearful letters to the government office. He devoted his working hours to his illegal butchering. He would happily cheat you and, conspiratorially, admit to it later with as much happiness. In one of his most flagrant outbursts of corruption, he came near to poisoning half the lodge staff. Some Masai out somewhere were bringing in an old, senile, near-comatose cow to meet Timpai’s knife. They loaded the cow into the back of the truck they had hired, drove in, and, upon reaching their destination, discovered that said cow had died two hours before. It was already stiff. No problem. The Masai dropped their price for the cow, gave a little cash back to Timpai and the meat inspector, and the stiff was “slaughtered” out in the field. The meat was dutifully sold, everyone became sick. The police came to investigate and it was all straightened out after Timpai and the meat inspector paid the appropriate bribe.
So now I offhandedly asked Timpai, over his tea, whether it was possible that the cows were ever sick when they were slaughtered. Oh no. How do you know? Because the meat inspector tells me when they are good. How does he know? Oh, he knows. Then gesturing toward the glinting, half-naked Masai inspector, who was sitting on the floor in an alcoholic glaze, Timpai said one of the more memorable lines to nurture my black-humored moments. “When the cow comes here, he will look at its heart and stomach and liver and lungs and brain and intestines, and if there is anything wrong, then he will not let me kill the cow.” Timpai gleamed happily. “That inspector is a good man and brings us much business because god is blessing he and the cattle to be so good.”
So Timpai wasn’t about to give up any of his business just to keep from killing some baboons. Perhaps even more logical would have been to make a stink at Olemelepo, to get everyone else to shut down the butchery. Climb up on a soapbox, folks, there’s trouble here in River City, do you know your neighbors Timpai and the meat inspector are giving you TB? Frenzied vengeful crowds would develop, and that would be the last sick batch of meat foisted off on the community. You know what? It wouldn’t work, because no one would give a damn. When Timpai poisoned everyone by slaughtering the dead cow, there was irritation, but little more than that. Nothing remotely resembling outrage. I would ask people, What happened then, aren’t you upset? And they would say, “Well, Timpai and that inspector have learned, now they know that if they do that to us, they must be paying the police a lot of money, so maybe they will not do it again.” Yeah, but he poisoned you, he could have killed you and your kids. “Yes, that is not good,” and then they would say the archetypal resigned Swahili word, “dunia.” “That’s the world, that’s how it is.” Amid my wrestling during that period with the image of Timpai as pure evil and of Timpai as an old, generous acquaintance, I was aided by the insight implied by “dunia.” It is not a notably evil thing to poison your neighbors if they themselves do not consider it to be much more than an irritant. People wouldn’t give a damn if it turned out that Timpai and the inspector were giving them TB; it was almost as if they expected as much from them as part of their job.
At some point during this sickened period, I found something important. One of the healthy-looking lodge females came up positive. I slit her throat, did a dissection, and found nothing. There were no nodules in her gut or stomach. There were no lesions in the lungs. Alert, excited, I went over every inch of the lobes, and in the upper right corner, I found a single dried tubercle. There was no caseation, no liquefication, no adherences. It was a small pocket of rot, encased in a sort of cartilaginous package, sequestered from the rest of the lung. There was nothing else in her. It was possible to be exposed, to have the start of pathology, and to recover—there could be natural resistance in the wild.
I filed it away with all my other pieces, too cautious and soiled by now to feel hopeful about any particular fact. And it was time to go. It was the end of my season, I was due back for another nine months in the lab, everything would now have to run its course without me.
I collected my belongings and my facts:
About 65 percent of the garbage dump troop was infected with the disease, and they were dropping like flies. No baboons were infected in the distant troop. And in my own troop, two thirds of my males either were TB positive or had been spotted by me to fight for a scrap of the meat during a foray over to the lodge for butchery lunches.
In principle, all was not lost. The disease was working differently than in the laboratory. There could be (at least one case of) natural resistance and recovery or at least remission, and, unlike with human TB, there did not appear to be much or any secondary transfer from baboon to baboon by coughing. Among the lodge baboons, there had not been a single case where there was only pulmonary infection and no gut lesions. Furthermore, in my troop, only animals that I had observed to go over to the butchery and fight for scraps were turning up positive—the females, the subadult and aged males all were clean. The baboons weren’t giving TB to each other, at least not as rapidly as in the laboratory. The meat was the vector in all cases. If the source of the TB could be shut down, there would probably be no new infections. And some of those already infected just might survive. The key was to get rid of the meat inspector, to clean up the operation.
There was no point to making a firebreak. If little or no secondary baboon-to-baboon transfer of the disease occurred in the wild, there was no fear of a massive epidemic running through all the baboons in the region. And even if secondary transfer did happen, if we annihilated the garbage dump troop, if we annihilated the adjacent troops, including my own, and still did not get rid of the tubercular meat, it was just a matter of time until the nearest baboon troop moved into the lodge to help Timpai with his irresistible leftovers. Again, we had to get rid of the meat inspector.
But there was no indication that the inspector was going anywhere. Jim would see what he could do, but wouldn’t promise much. He would push again to see if Leakey could do anything, but I was told not to hold my breath. Meanwhile, he gave me the go-ahead to begin writing up our reports about the TB outbreak, subject to Leakey’s censoring for imprudent information. And he told me to keep quiet about the whole thing.
