A Primate's Memoir, page 9
Harun and I sat with the very old men who drank and chortled and belched and reminisced. I asked them about the time the German colonials and the British colonials fought each other. They remembered well.
“The white people had a fight among themselves for some reason, so they started fighting here. They would come in clothes like the policemen wear now, and they would shoot at each other. Dead white people, imagine. Once, an airplane came over. We did not know then what it was and we were terribly frightened; we ran to our mothers and hid ourselves.
“One day, the British came and said that we should go and fight also. We could not believe it—they would give us guns to shoot white people. They always said that guns had a magic so that an African man could not use it to shoot a white man, but they said that these Germans were different white men and the guns would work.
“Then they said a crazy thing. They said we should also go fight the Masai, that they would give us guns to do that. Yes, we said, we will fight them with your guns, but they said we could only fight the Masai to the south, the Masai to the east we must never fight. We thought that was crazy. So we refused. They beat some of us, but we still refused.”
The old men thought it puzzling and basically funny. The Masai were delighted to fight, however. Units of British East African Masai from the east and Tanganyikan Masai from the south had several pitched battles in makeshift uniforms. No one remembered the outcome.
Harun’s father had a different encounter with white men’s wars, I learned during that visit. In 1930, at the age of twenty, he decided on the woman he wanted to marry. She was a young girl from the next mountain, whom he saw at the well when he went there with the cows. They had looked furtively at each other a few times, and once had said hello. When he asked her her name, she laughed and hid her face and ran back up the mountain with the goats, and thus he had decided to marry her.
He went to his father, Harun’s grandfather, to inform him that there was a girl on the next mountain he wanted to marry. Could he now receive his inheritance of cows so that he could purchase the girl from her parents, pay their bride price? Harun’s grandfather told him he would have to wait a year because he, the grandfather, then in his forties, was going to use the cows to purchase a third wife for himself that year. Somewhat disgruntled but obedient he waited, only to discover a week later that the third wife had been purchased and she was … the girl from the well.
Distraught, Harun’s father, for the first time in his life, fled down the mountain with all his colonial money, went to the bar at the trading post, and drank himself into a stupor. Staggering out drunk, lamenting and yelling in Kisii, he was arrested by the colonial police. Who shipped him off to military service in India. For fifteen years. Harun’s father disappeared, spending fifteen years fighting for the British in India and Burma, fighting in World War II, fighting the Japanese alongside conscripts from Sudan, Nigeria, Gambia, Rhodesia, the whole empire of natives. He returned in 1945, age thirty-five, and married the girl who was to become Harun’s mother, then fifteen. And, according to Harun, he never said a word again to the grandfather, or to the third wife of the grandfather, and never mentioned his fifteen years fighting, except to say that he didn’t like the food.
When I met him that visit, he was near seventy and, I think, more than a bit demented. He sat in a chair in the corner, peering about and mumbling, while Harun’s mother hurried about preparing food and tea. When Harun introduced me, his father pulled back anxiously. He stared at me for the rest of the afternoon and would not join us eating. Eventually, he called Harun over and, gesturing to me, said in Kisii, “If that white man is from the army, tell him I’m not going again.”
DREADLOCKS
It was during this time that I was also able to piece together this tale of East Africa’s next war:
Wilson Kipkoi was probably the only person in the bush for a hundred miles in any direction who was angry about Hitler. Or angry about the role of the Arabs in the slave trade, or the American genocide of Indians, or Israeli treatment of Palestinians. He was probably the only person around who had even heard of any of that, let alone developed a simmering, bitter anger over the injustices. And his anger was not just limited to history and politics afar. He was angry that his own country was a one-party state, that the press was muzzled, that people disappeared, that the army was bribed with half the budget to stay in their barracks and not take over the government. And he said so, a very dangerous thing to do.
Wilson Kipkoi was raised in the bush, got next to no schooling. Somewhere along the way, he developed a feverish need to learn. He taught himself excellent English, spent every shilling and moment on books. And found that everything he learned made his anger grow. He didn’t yell, never even spoke loudly, and he wasn’t the type that brawled in an explosion of self-depleting anger. His anger simmered and grew, barely fit in his lanky, taut frame, his triangular head. It powered the constant rhythmic throbbing of the vein in the side of his jaw. When the rangers or police came around to shake down people for some of their salaries, Wilson would confront them and tell them they were worse than the white South Africans. And get beaten. When whites would call some black a “boy,” Wilson would call them colonial pigs. And often lose his job. He talked in a dispassionate way about killing people, something occasionally done but never spoken about with pensive premeditation. His friends regarded him with awe and fear, and mostly worried for him.
Perhaps the greatest measure of Wilson’s oddity, the uniqueness of where his twenty years had brought him, was an activity he kept secret—in the evenings, when alone, Wilson wrote short stories and poetry, in English, in Swahili, in the language of his tribe, the Kipsigi. They were in the style of the pulp spy adventure novels popular with the Kenyan intelligentsia; tales of betrayal and political repression and of the right side losing. None of his friends knew he wrote them; he certainly never mentioned them to his wife. She was an uneducated Masai, the traditional enemy of Wilson’s people. He had gotten her pregnant and refused to do the simple act expected of him, which was to pay the father off with a nominal sum. Instead, he married her without hesitation, and thereafter paid her less attention than if she were a zebra.
The person who most dominated Wilson’s anger and mutterings, his jaw-throbbing threats of murder, was his father. Wilson’s father went by the old-style name Kipkoi wa Kimutai—Kipkoi, son of Kimutai—and was known to all as Kipkoi. He wore his ears in the old tribal manner—with holes in them, the earlobes elongated down to his shoulders. He had a battered face, looked and dressed like hell, and couldn’t care less what anyone thought. Unlike Wilson, with his angry talk, Kipkoi had actually killed people, dozens of them. He worked for the game department and headed the antipoaching unit that patrolled that part of Kenya. Long before independence, as a young man, he had been trained to be a “boy,” to assist a British “bwana,” one of the great white hunters. He accompanied the hunter on his commercial safaris, or when elephants were destroying crops and had to be shot, and when near-toothless, starving old lions were desperate enough to pick off villagers. He was the boy who oiled the rifles, held them over his head when the rivers were waded, stood by the bwana’s side and never flinched when a buffalo came straight at them—handing the proper gun at the proper instant. He learned to stalk, he learned to track; he could remember a path through bush country years after he had last been there, could smell when a rhino had last brushed by a tree. And he learned how to shoot exceedingly well, although he had had to learn furtively; the boy never did the shooting, so there was no need to teach him.
Around the time of independence in 1963, the game was thinning out—the human population was booming, more and more bush and forest was being burned for agriculture. And unexpectedly, the rich whites were no longer coming to hunt, but to watch the animals, to take pictures. Just at the time that they gained back their own country, Africans were being told that their animals should not be shot anymore, instead should be maintained. And Kipkoi became part of the new trend, this strange concept of watching, protecting the animals, establishing and preserving parks. The old British bwanas became wardens for a while; then as the last of the hunting was phased out, it also became politically untenable to have white faces running African parks, and the first black wardens emerged. By all logic, Kipkoi should have been one of them. He was the right age, he had been in the game service from the beginning. But his heart was not in organizing animal counts or assuring that the rangers at park gates didn’t pocket too much of the entrance fee or making sure the campsites had proper garbage pits. He still wanted to hunt. So he hunted humans. He rose up in the antipoaching wing of the department, serving on every frontier where people would slip over the border to machine-gun a rhino or elephant and slip away with the horn or tusk. When he patrolled near the Somali border, he filled his unit with tough, near-criminal southern Bantu Kenyans who wanted nothing more than to kill a Somali, the traditional desert raider from the north. When he was assigned to the southern Tanzanian border, he formed a patrol of nothing but cold, silent Somali Kenyans, who itched to ambush the round, water-soft Bantu poachers. He had an explosive anger, raged at his men, knocked them over and beat them if they failed to follow his instructions, was loud and abusive and supremely competent. He was long past the point of being eligible to retire, but in his late fifties, Kipkoi led every skirmish, every trap, every gun battle, with poachers. More and more, he was fighting Tanzanian army units, as the hunger south of the border got worse and the ones with the arms thought of zebra meat. Kipkoi wouldn’t retire. He liked to hunt, he was afraid to go home to his farm to sit and age and die. And most bizarre of all, he had a desire that no African ever had, something absolutely inexplicable and alien to the traditional life of battling with the difficult, demanding world. He had bought the nonsense that the whites had started spouting around independence: Kipkoi had come to love the animals and really wanted to protect them.
Kipkoi had fourteen children; he would typically depart from each leave home with one of his three wives pregnant. Of the fourteen, he could barely recognize or be recognized by thirteen. But Wilson, the first son, was raised with him. Wilson had grown up in his father’s camps, in the northern desert, in the western rain forest where the Ugandan forest people would slip over to snare bush buck, at the isolated, besieged outposts along the Tanzanian border. As a boy, he would hear the gun battles at night, see the men, including his father, come back wounded. Or, with some of them, not come back at all. He grew up frightened and isolated, bush-wise, bush-crazy, tense, vigilant. Life seemed like an ambush, and half the time it was Kipkoi who seemed to be the one to ambush Wilson. He kept him by his side, taught him what he knew about the bush (although he never taught him to use a gun). The cutthroat men in Kipkoi’s units would find the boy’s presence puzzling, but they’d leave him alone. Later, when Wilson was old enough to start to work in the tourist camps, when Kipkoi and his unit were assigned to the part of the country that encompassed that camp, no local ranger would dare come and try a shakedown of Wilson on payday. Kipkoi and his unit were too well known, and too feared. What no one knew, what Wilson would never mention to anyone out of shame, was that on those same paydays, Kipkoi himself would show up to beat Wilson and take much of his pay.
The taking of the pay was a mere formality. Kipkoi had been beating Wilson since he was a boy. First he would beat him in a rage, and then lecture him in a rage. On how the whites had taken the country and demeaned the people and killed the animals. On how the whites would set tribe against tribe so that Africans would always fight. On how the whites kept the place poor so that soldiers had to shoot pregnant animals for food. On how Wilson must become tough and ready and mean and angry so that no one would ever rule him, so that he would always make his father proud of his first son. And then Kipkoi would beat him again.
Faced with these contradictions and humiliations, the cyclonic ragings and danger of Kipkoi, Wilson responded with the only way open to someone smaller, less well armed in every respect. He became the antithesis of rage, his anger was ice. He was silent, taut, watchful. He developed traits very rare among bushmen—causticness, irony, cynicism, bitterness. Against Kipkoi, he used the best weapon that had evolved in his mind—open contempt. Contempt for Kipkoi’s bush ways and bush education, bush values. Wilson began to read voraciously, in order to hold himself up to the mirror of Kipkoi’s near illiteracy. He learned about the world and history, to show how small Kipkoi and his men were within it. He developed strong political opinions that highlighted the repressiveness of men who wore uniforms and carried guns, men who were trained only to hunt other men. He began to think of Kipkoi, and eventually to speak of him, in odd colonial pejoratives—my father, the bush monkey; my father, the bush nigger.
That was around the time that Wilson went to work for Palmer. Wilson had just been fired from yet another tourist lodge job, was back in Kipkoi’s camp, his corner of the tent crammed with incongruous books and papers. One day, Palmer roared into camp in his old Land Rover for a periodic inspection.
“Where is Kipkoi!?” he hollered at the shocked Somalis. “Where is he, off drunk someplace? I’m going to eat Kipkoi today, roast him up, good bush monkey meat. Where the bloody hell is Kipkoi?”
Kipkoi would eventually emerge from his tent.
“Hello, white man. I’ve been cleaning my gun to shoot you with, you colonial piece of shit.”
Palmer beamed at this.
“Save your bullets and what aim you have left in you for the Tanzanians, bush boy. You need all the help you can get.”
And in front of the gasping Somali men, they would go into Kipkoi’s tent to talk.
Palmer was one of the white men in Kenya with no official position, yet with power that defies definition. In that strange financial netherworld of poor African governments with many animals, and wealthy whites who cared about the animals, Palmer paid for a large percentage of the salaries, uniforms, petrol, and bullets for Kipkoi and his men. He was a Brit, raised in Kenya, who had come into a large inheritance and owned an immense wheat farm on the edge of the southern grasslands. But mere wheat profits and charitable acts did not earn Palmer the right to inspect Kipkoi’s unit. Long before, Palmer had been one of the last British wardens, and a ferociously effective one with a penchant for antipoaching operations. When his white face had to be retired, he took it well, recognized it as the political necessity it was, and urged that the antipoaching duties be made a separate division, with Kipkoi as his replacement. Palmer knew Kipkoi and his skills well, because before he was a warden, before independence, Palmer was one of the white hunters. And from the time they were both in their early twenties, Kipkoi was Palmer’s boy.
Once inside the tent, Kipkoi and Palmer would drop the chest-thumping that each reflexively fell into when the two were in front of others. Instead, they discussed the unit’s situation. Which men Kipkoi thought were in with the poachers. Where the Tanzanians were likely to hit next. What could be done about the powerful member of Parliament who was running most of the ivory smuggling north of there. And more and more frequently in the conversations, what to do about money. According to the agreement Palmer had worked out with the government, the ministry funded half the unit, and Palmer half. But with each month, as the economic crisis worsened, the government’s half shrank, and the men were getting hungry. Palmer would complain and threaten in response to Kipkoi’s demand for more money for his unit. He would curse the government people, insist that Kipkoi’s men were embezzling funds, insist that Kipkoi himself was doing so. But it would all be show. Because at the end, Kipkoi would cite a truism that he and Palmer had learned and that haunted them both. Kipkoi would say, “A hungry man makes mistakes,” and Palmer would come up with more money, more than even he could really afford.
Such was the gist of one of those conversations, which Wilson sat and listened to while pretending to read. They ignored him. Afterward, in front of the men, Kipkoi and Palmer insulted and pretended to aggress each other again. As Palmer was about to leave, Kipkoi asked him the question he had been preparing all visit.
“Palmer, you farmer, why don’t you give my son a job? He is a piece of shit who cannot even keep a job in a camp for tourists, but it should be easy for even him to do farmer’s work.”
“Sure, Kipkoi. And if he’s anything like you, I’ll probably have him back here in a month.”
“Just watch your cash box. He’ll steal it first chance.”
Thus, Wilson went to work for Palmer. He got trained in a variety of jobs. He worked on the machinery, learned to tally the books. He supervised the workers, negotiated with the local Masai about curtailing raiding, acted as a liaison between Kipkoi’s unit and Palmer. He excelled at all of it, but he never got to do one of the things that secretly excited him. Palmer never taught him to shoot. Palmer, ex-great white hunter, ex-warden, ex-antipoaching commando, was an anomaly to begin with, having wound up with the contemptible profession of farmer. But not only that, he was one of the only farmers who didn’t shoot wild game that came to eat his crops. He would put up miles of ineffectual electric fences, hire game beaters, even tried experiments with taste aversion conditioning to get the animals to avoid the crops. But he would not shoot the animals. Palmer, as incongruously as Kipkoi, had come to really love the animals—the reason why he funded the antipoaching unit—and he even loved the animals that ate his crops.
But other than that disappointment of not learning to use a gun, Wilson liked the work and the life there. Palmer fell naturally into treating him as he had treated Kipkoi years before—teaching him, berating him, mocking him, promoting him. Wilson, already accustomed to the shifts of mood from his own father, fell naturally into his role: anger at Palmer, condemnations of his colonial ways, all the while coupled with superb, loyal work. Together, they would argue constandy. Wilson, dispassionately, would accuse Palmer and all his ilk of ruining the Kenyan lands by introducing cash cropping, of assuring the Indian-Pakistani wars by exploiting the religious differences there during the Raj, of suppressing Northern Ireland, the whole gamut of his Anglo angers. Palmer would rail against Wilson’s politics, his economic ideas, warn him, more explicitly, that Wilson was spouting Bolshevik crap and he’d better not start trying to organize the workers on the farm. And Palmer would promote Wilson, give him more responsibility, and leave more books of all persuasions for him to read. And Wilson began to take on many of Palmer’s rough assertive mannerisms, even while telling his friends how he was going to kill that old colonial.
