After
six months of living in a remote location north of Nanyuki, I at last made a
friend. This was a Masai elder called
Letai. He was one of a handful of local people who stopped short of ignoring
the couple of Mzungu (white people)
who had come to live in the empty house of a teacher of a school that never got
built.
I had
got into the habit of sitting on a log in front of the house during the
afternoon, learning to do nothing in particular. If you’ve never tried this, I
recommend it. Almost everyone in the world knows how to do it better than we do.
You don’t read, look at your wristwatch or fiddle with your keys. You just
sit. If you sit long enough, and
earnestly enough, someone will come and sit down next to you.
Letai
sat down one day. After the obligatory
greeting, we just sat. An hour or two of nothing much happening will teach you
a lot. I used to sneak looks at his left earlobe, which had been pierced and
stretched to receive an aluminium film can which held his tobacco, matches and
cigarette papers. He carried an orinkaa, a knobbed club, wore a red
plaid sarong and sandals made of old tyres.
For
some weeks we just sat. Sometimes I would bring him some tobacco from the
trading post at Dol Dol, some 14 km away on my motorbike. My Swahili improved
enough so that we could talk if we wanted to. One day he told me that he wanted
to become my goat brother, and that I was to appear with any wives I had at his
nkang (log stockade) the following
afternoon.
I was
delighted. I didn’t know what a goat brother was, but I didn’t care. I ran
inside and told the only wife I had the good news. She gave me her customary
sceptical look. I should have paid attention.
When
we arrived the next day, I was carrying a small gift of tobacco, which Letai
accepted without comment. He gestured for me to follow, and I set out behind
his lean, imposing frame along a path through a patch of woods. Barbara was
captured by the women and taken elsewhere. We emerged into a large clearing,
where ten or twelve goats were clustered suspiciously together. Letai told me
to choose one.
I didn’t
happen to need any livestock, but I pointed to a reddish animal. Letai’s eldest
son called out a name and the goat came forward, just as a dog would when
called. We all stroked him for a moment until I felt a prodding at my back. I
turned to find a Masai man, who shoved a knife into my hands. It was a big,
chunky knife, made from the leaf springs of a car. It dawned on me that I was
not going to take a live goat back to the teacher’s house; I was to be its
executioner.
For
the squeamish reader, I will leave out some of the gorier details. I’ll just
point out that the gesture of running a finger across one’s throat in pantomime
of slaughter doesn’t tell it like it is. In the end, I had to be thrust aside
so that the animal didn’t suffer needlessly. Some of the Masai grimaced in
dismay at my efforts, but Letai was unruffled. He knew I was a Mzungu, and what can you expect?
Feeling
like I wanted to find a church and pray for forgiveness, I followed the men
back to the nkang. This was cedar
posts, cut from the forests of Mt Kenya, driven into the ground and sharpened
at the top to deter leopards, the main local predator. We walked across a
spongy yard, which was years of animal manure compacted into a mattress-like
surface, and ducked into the home of Letai’s eldest wife. Two other houses were
in evidence, belonging to wives two and three. I guessed that one of them
contained Barbara.
A
Masai house is like a beehive. It is too low for a man to stand up in, which is
fair, because they belong to the women.
A Masai elder has to ask permission to sleep in any one of them, which
is sometimes denied. Letai had been known to sleep with the cattle and goats on
the bare ground when all of them were angry at the same time.
The
houses are made of bent branches, covered with woven matting and smeared with
cow manure. They have the shape of a
conch shell, curving toward the hearth at the centre. There are no windows, just holes poked
through the wall that allow small beams of sunlight to enter. A single bed
space is filled with a leather sheet attached to four stakes. This can be
occupied by the woman and any man she invites to share her bed. If a troop of warriors asks, they will be
given priority over everyone and all pile onto the bed. That is one of the
reasons that of Letai’s 28 children, very few were genetically related to him.
We sat
in front of the hearth, a fire of sticks burning between cooking stones. A beam of light from a window hole made
patterns in the smoke. There was another man already there. He looked different
from the Masai, and was introduced as the Doctor of Boys. He wore face paint
and an elaborate necklace of shells. He
was utterly terrifying. He was the only one who could perform the ritual
circumcision of young men about to become warriors. This was done with a metal
disc which he showed me, grinning and demonstrating how it worked. You can’t
have any sort of ceremony without the Doctor of Boys, even if you wanted to,
say, become someone’s goat brother.
A wife
appeared carrying chucks of the murdered goat.
She set them to boil in an aluminium pot and withdrew. After a few
minutes, the Doctor began to chant. It wasn’t Swahili he was speaking, nor Ol-Maa, the Masai language. I later
learned that he was a member of the Dorobo, a tribe of hunter-gatherers who had
been in this place longer than the Masai. The goat boiled. My eyes were burning from smoke and I coughed
a lot. That’s probably why I didn’t realise it when the Doctor spoke to me.
I
grasped none of what he was saying, so he addressed himself to my host. Letai,
said, “My name is Letai, son of Letai. I
was born in 1938 and circumcised in 1952.” The Doctor turned to me. I hesitated, then said, “My name is Arthur,
son of Hugh. I was born in 1943 and circumcised…”
I hesitated, then said, “…in 1943.”
There
was a gasp from someone. I think it was
one of Letai’s sons. Later I was told that I had either uttered a complete nonsense
(best case), or a fact that, if true, would embarrass me forever. After a
period of silence in which I resisted running for the exit only by praying for
cross-cultural tolerance, the Doctor resumed the proceedings. He spat copiously
onto a hot stone in the fire, reached into the bubbling saliva with his index
finger, and smeared the spit on Letai’s forehead. He did the same for me. He shouted something in his language and
everyone laughed, except me. Then he lay
back and unscrewed a pint of Kenyan whisky, which he nearly knocked off with a
single gulp.
We had
been blessed. We sat and waited. The goat meat bubbled. A wife appeared with some mismatched plastic
bowls and shovelled the meat into them. Letai opened a sack and sprinkled salt
onto the chunks, which appeared to have bits of goat hide still attached.
If you’ve
never eaten golfball-sized hunks of tough goat meat with your fingers, you may
not understand why I’d rather live un-brothered by a Masai elder forever than
do it again. My teeth weren’t up to the task, so I resorted to swallowing
pieces whole, like big pills. There was enough water in the plastic bowl to
wash them down with, but I knew that the experience was going to live with me
for many days. When my first bowl was within about 12 ounces of being dealt
with, Letail fished out some more chunks, put them in my bowl and smiled.
I
reckon that I consumed something like three pounds of goat meat by myself that
night. I later learned that Barbara was
being similarly force-fed in another house, while also being required to drink
soured milk from a gourd. I refused a third helping by upending the bowl on a
stone. The Masai were enjoying it. They
were chatting and laughing, but my peristaltic struggles blanked out my
language centres, and I couldn’t understand a word. I finally managed the
equivalent of, “Gosh—is that the time?” And got to my feet.
Barbara
was waiting for me in the manure outside. I knew she would never be rude, but I
realised that she had basically gotten up and run from the house. Just then, Letai
joined us. It seems that the goat must be eaten entirely on the day of the
ceremony. Every last chunk. Even the couple of dozen children and wives hadn’t
quite managed it. So Letai produced a
leg and handed it to me with a generous smile. I took it, being careful not to
let the blood drip on my shoes and thanked him effusively. In a few minutes we
were outside the nkang and heading
for the teacher’s house.
Like
people who have survived a disaster, we could hardly speak, but I could tell by
Barbara’s gait that her ordeal had matched, if not exceeded mine. We walked
through the darkness by memory with a bit of moonlight to help. A few hundred
yards from the nkang, I had a
thought. The Masai built high walls to keep out leopards, nocturnal predators. And here we were, carrying the dripping leg
of a goat right through their hunting ground. As the thought occurred to me, I
heard branches swishing and small twigs cracking. I didn’t have to say
anything, I could tell by Barbara’s round eyes that the thought had seized her
at the same moment.
We
were far enough away from the nkang to risk it. I shouted out, “My name is
Arthur, son of Hugh. I was circumcised in 1943, so come and get it!” I chucked
the leg into a stand of trees, and we staggered home. There wasn’t going to be
any evidence the following morning.
So
Letai, goat brother, if you’re reading this, I apologise. You’re welcome to turn
up and become a Caesar salad brother of mine anytime.
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