Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph (17 page)

'Is it better,' one of them burst out in English, 'to make the wrong decision at the right time, or the right decision at the wrong time?'

I feel some sympathy and kinship. I too am playing this white man's game, pretending it is important.

My host, the Lucas agent in Nairobi, rises above pretence. He is the real thing, a huge florid man with a big appetite who loves the life, the business, the whole ridiculous mixture.

'We've just bought a plane,' he tells me. 'Brand new. Arrived yesterday. £34,000. Where do you want to go?'

'Well, there's this Irish doctor who invited me to Lodwar?'

'Fine. No problem. We'll take you there on Tuesday, fetch you back on Thursday. Suit you?'

Lodwar, in the north-west corner of Kenya, hundreds of miles from Nairobi, at the edge of nowhere. Desert to the north, desert to the west, desert to the south'. To the east, Lake Rudolf and beyond that, desert. The Turkana tribe lives here, alongside a river bed, now dry; long thin black bodies swaying indolently against a backdrop of hot sand and bleached grass. They have goats, grow some millet, live off the desert, help to make the desert. At night they dance, in a big circle, men and women, stamping feet, chanting a d
escending fifth, Homm-hommmmm, T
he man in the middle jumps and sings, look I'm a giraffe, I'm a lion, I'm an antelope, and so he is, they all recognize him, see how he sets his shoulders, cocks his head, higher and higher he jumps, our brother, our prey. The Turkana were hunters, but hunting is illegal and there is almost nothing left to hunt. At night they dance, and wear ostrich feathers and ostrich eggshell ornaments, and ankle bells, and brightly coloured tablecloths from India, and the girls wear long goatskins painstakingly sewn all over with beads, and collars like bridles, and red mud in their hair. And sometimes, secretly the men take their spears over the edge into nowhere, and raid somebody else's livestock.

During the day a blacksmith in a grass hut makes spears out of car springs for sale to tourists in Nairobi. I am the only white visitor here but I am made to feel like a tourist. The girls come, arms outstretched, begging

and selling. For a few shillings I could strip any one of them bare of the little she wears. Who are the Turkana?

'The Turkana are very treacherous . . . conceited and idle.'

H. Johnston, 1902

'The Turkana is a careless and cruel herdsman and a most efficient liar.' E. D. Emley, 1927

'A feature of social life ... is the continual begging ... the only limits I am aware of are that a man may not beg another man's wife. Savage and wild as the country he lives in, so he will remain, in my opinion, to the end of time.' P. K. Gulliver, 1963

Time came to an end abruptly a few years after those last words were written, with the bad drought and cholera of the sixties. Until then the Turkana had been free of aid or interference. There had been no schools, no clinics, no administration. Only an occasional punitive expedition to control tribal warfare. But famine and disease persuaded the Government to open up the Northern Frontier Province to the missionaries and aid societies.

Today there are flying doctors from Nairobi, mission clinics, schools. There are tin roofs, and souvenirs, and the self-conscious assumption of haughty pride in front of the camera, followed by the outstretched hand for a posing fee. Life seems to go along much the same as before, the dancing and laughing and begging and lying, except that now there is more to beg for, you don't die so easily, and there are white people fussing around in pants and dresses. Not like the old days under District Commissioner Whitehouse who made native dress
de rigueur
for everyone, but everyone.

And the Turkana still think nothing has changed. They actually believe they are the centre of the universe. Listen to the old headman, the M'zee, talking:

'With one spear we can kill a lion or an elephant or a giraffe. Accurate at twenty feet. The Turkana will never change their customs. If any other tribe tries to overcome us we will beat them.'

Savage and wild until the end of time? But the M'zee is wearing corduroy trousers, for heaven's sake, and a striped shirt. Old man, can't you see, you were bought and sold for a handful of white medicine and some ruled exercise paper. Your children will not kill a lion, not with twenty spears, not at twenty inches. Why did you want schools?

'So that children can get good jobs in the city and send money back to their parents. But they will never forget their tribe - only the bad ones.'

Oh, there will be many bad ones in the shanties of Nairobi, where other tribes won the war long ago, and most of the good jobs.

In the District Hospital, Doctor Gerry Byrne from Dublin looks up from a patient's bedside and I diagnose astonishment all over his cherubic countenance. Six months earlier he had written to the
Sunday Times
: 'Dear Mr Simon, If on your journey round the world you happen to be passing near Lodwar . . .' but he never for a moment
believed.

He is really chuffed, his big spectacles gleam with pleasure. Black bodies lie all about with modest green cotton wraps round their middles. It's the women's ward; wrinkled paps flapping, dust on the soles of their feet. There are lots of bright new bandages where they've been cut open, a batch of post-ops left to heal by the monthly flying doctors from Nairobi. Mostly they have had hydatid cysts removed, the local menace; they grow to enormous size, often in the liver or spleen, like clusters of grapes in syrup, and when they burst you die. It is thought the dogs carry it about.

There is a pretty girl with spindly legs dying of a malignant tumour, but no one can be told, certainly not the family, because their rage, says Gerry, would be uncontrollable. Also, he says, when the grief is all burned out, there is nothing left. When Turkana parents know their child is dying, they leave it to starve. There never was too much food around. They don't bury the corpses. They put them out for the hyenas, to keep the meat in circulation, as it were.

It is hot in Lodwar, excessively hot. At times you can see the heat waving in the air.

Outside the hospital are many more patients lying on the ground with their families, not through shortage of beds so much as because they like it there and their families come and cook for them. Hygiene? So what? The rate of recovery is high. The pain threshold is high too.

'The men like having their feet cut off,' says Gerry.

What? I almost shout.

'There's a thing they get that swells their feet up. We can stop it, but the foot stays big. But they prefer to have it cut off.'

White Medicine is Amazing, says Gerry, full of wonder and misgivings. I mean, it was never like this back in Dublin. Out here a miracle drug still does miracles. Penicillin is like it was in the days of Fleming; a shot cures just about anybody instantly, especially children. Trouble is, you ask yourself sometimes, what am I saving them for? Almost everybody in Kenya is under sixteen already. There's nothing for them to do, not much for them to eat, even in the prosperous parts of the country. To multiply the population out here, in the desert, seems crazy. Oh, my Hippocratic Oath, says Doctor Gerry, I don't know. Why don't you ask the Bishop?

The doctor's expenses and modest wage are paid for by the Medical Missionaries of St. Mary, and there really is a bishop in Lodwar, Bishop Mahon. Does he have the answers? Not on your life.

'I've given up thinking,' he says. T never did very much of it and now I don't bother at all. Just get on with it. Let the future take care of itself.'

Spoken with humour, vigorous humility. He's got my number alright. If he did have the answers I wouldn't believe them.

He is quite ready to accept that he might be creating more problems than he solves. 'What can you do? You can't let people die. Can you?' I'm not brave enough to say: Yes, it's being done all the time. We are sitting in a house the Bishop built. He knows exactly where to sit, with his back to an open lattice cement wall that he designed himself from easily moulded units. The breeze comes through to him, but fails to reach me, and I am abuzz with thirsty flies swarming fanatically into my lips and my eyes. I am uncomfortably aware that there are no flies on the Bishop.

He's a strong, lean tough man with tobacco-coloured teeth and straight silver hair, in shorts and a tea-stained shirt. Nine years in Nigeria, six in Turkana, and an occasional whirl around the States raising money. He has small hospitals in various outlying villages, staffed by Danish volunteers as well as his own home-grown Irish pastors and sisters.

He can't explain what motivates the Danes (it is certainly not religion) but says they are much better suited to the work, and less demanding than his own church folk. His nuns, he fears, are too often doctrinaire and officious, and their inflexibility makes it hard for them to withstand the pressures. All these naked breasts, for example, although they don't, any more, go around persuading natives to cover up. The Bishop smiles faintly at remembered scenes of outrage at the Norwegian-donated swimming pool where inflexible nuns in uptight swimsuits are exposed to the unselfconscious naturalism of supple Danes.

The Bishop's 'action man' stance has not blinded him to his responsibilities. Having wrought the miracles of modern medicine he felt obliged to try for the fishes and the loaves as well. An FAO man reported that Lake Rudolf was capable of breeding and delivering between fifty and one hundred and fifty thousand tons of Nile perch a year, so the Bishop got that one going. Ambitious Asian businessmen smashed an aeroplane and a lorry bringing in the refrigeration. There was already an iron trawler in the lake, brought and assembled there by the British in more spacious times. They had good early catches, but then yields dropped and the scheme failed to fulfil itself. So he turned to loaves, with an irrigation scheme up-river.

'At next rains, in April, we should get about fifty acres under cultivation. We're aiming for several hundred, but it's hard going. They aren't all industrious.

'Without us there to direct them I don't think they could manage it on their own. I'm afraid the channels would soon choke up.'

But that's worrying about the future, and we don't do that, do we.

Mahon relates the ups and downs of his missionary life in the way older men describe their hopes and disappointments in their sons, with wistful fondness and faith in the goodness of their essential life and intentions, whatever the outcome. He would not willingly return to Western life (nor would any of the volunteers - its selfish, indulgent nature is too blatant viewed from here), but he has few expectations. He is resigned to criticism of his 'meddling' in non-medical matters. It seems that the technocrats of Oxfam and the specialist relief agencies have often snubbed his people, and he feels they are all vulnerable.

'We project a terrible image on these people, going round in Land-rovers, living in concrete buildings, but if we build in mud the termites work their way up the walls and eat the door jambs and attack the roof. We've tried most things. There's a chap out there now living in a tent. He's happy enough, but I think he's doing harm because when he goes I can find nobody to replace him who would put up with those conditions.'

He warns his people always about imposing their standards on the Turkana. 'My only hope is that after a few years we can overcome the bad effects by showing them that we care as people.'

Truly a pious hope.

My people are a treacherous, conceited, idle, careless, cruel, lying and begging people. Have you come to preserve us or to change us? Ha! My people are a tall, beautiful, vigorous, savage and wild people; our men can move like the lion, the antelope and the giraffe, and our women can move as your women have forgotten to move. Do you want us to care, as well?

Still, I like the Bishop a lot, and I even prefer his nuns to the pop-eyed UN girls I saw Rovering around in Ethiopia in their solar topees and pretty safari suits.

And I really like the horrible Turkana. As well as all the other things they are, I find them very sexy. I should know; we danced together. Homm-hommmmm I went, and stamped my feet. They were determined to make a tourist out of me. Alright, I said, I'll
be
a fucking tourist, and I bargained for everything in sight. At night I went to the stamping ground down beyond the grass huts, where the fire was lit, and watched them doing their magical leaping zoo numbers. Oh boy, I said. Pictures, I gotta have pictures.

The Chief's son and heir apparent and prospective Member of Parliament for Lodwar whispers gently to me through the hole they all have knocked in their front teeth in case of lockjaw. 'Two goats and some corn beer, and I think we could fix something,' he says.

'Okay,' I say. 'Get the goats.' Two sleek little black goats and enough

corn for eight gallons of overnight beer cost ninety shillings, deductible on expenses. Emmanuel, the Chief's son, is being nice to me. It's a knock-down price for a rave-up. His adjutant, the Minderbender of Lodwar, in khaki shorts and sandals, has a whole intrigue going already. Two goats, he says, will not feed a tribe, so we will choose only the best and bravest dancers, and the choicest and most nubile maidens, and we will make a secret rendezvous away over there.

Even I know there's not a chance of keeping it quiet. This fellow just loves to plot, and everybody's very happy to join in the mischief. Next afternoon the chosen few assemble. The men gather inside one of the compounds, where they pretend to be unobserved as they bring out their best warrior headgear and their finest table linen to wrap round their waists. The girls are already on their way, twittering excitedly like all girls everywhere going to a ball, the long goatskins polished and weighted with red, white and blue beads swinging dramatically from side to side, stretched and moulded over each tourist-tantalizing buttock, so girlish and prominent that I can't help making the incongruous comparison with bustles in a Regency ballroom. As well as their finest beads they are slung with necklaces and bracelets and ornamental aprons to indicate their wealth and marriageability, and they have fresh, glistening red mud on their partly shaven heads. The newly-fermented corn beer is in two square and shiny four-gallon cans called 'debbies', and two girls carry them on their heads with breath-taking ease and grace, making the cans dance with their bodies, investing those blunt tin cans with the elegance of the richest amphorae, leaving their arms free to trail enticingly through the air as they plunge forward, almost rushing but beautifully controlled, to the dance. While the men stalk along in a separate group wearing their ostrich feather crowns and brilliant cloaks like lords, and at this stage I don't care whether the table cloths were made in Birmingham.