Samburu Man

In Northern Kenya's Loroghi Hills the sky is a torpid white cauldron that stretches to world's edge, and it feels as if we and the spent land are suspended upside-down above this mass of torched emptiness, prey to an absurd and terrible inversion that will send us plummeting upward to scorch and boil. Walking, we come across an aged Samburu man standing forlorn in scrappy shrub a few feet off the trail. When he shifts his weight a vague, ambiguous greyness invades the space where his body once was, as if the land requires a few moments to replace the form of itself that has become absent.

He is as gaunt as drought foliage, skin a taught sheath through which one can read the famine inscription of bone, joint, cartilage. A precisely etched gallery of lines traces back from his eyes and mouth toward gently trembling stretched earlobes, awkward and sensual, a brief feminine intrusion of Baroque finery on an otherwise implacable shield of war. The absence of lower incisors marks his tribal affiliation, as does the garland of earth-toned beads he wears over a limp double-breasted dinner jacket and plaid dress-shirt he has tucked carefully into a skirt of scarlet and amber. He sighs into a five-foot length of flaking rebar, favouring his left foot, which is seeping and foul, swollen hard into a sandal of recycled tire rubber.

Or greeting: "Sopa Apame!" (Hello, Respected Father), fails to elicit the usual grin, and we falter. He swings a long arm Northward, expectantly, and murmurs faltering vowels to our guide. Samburu is a hill language that carries well on wind, lilting and hopeful, a rain shower on bleached mud. Later, we learn the man is searching for a lost goat, hobbling club-footed over the thirsty ruins of riverbeds, through Acacia groves where tufts of torn goat hair hang like offerings in the undergrowth, searching.

The Samburu are pastoralists: semi-nomadic herders of goat (and for the wealthy, cattle). Like many Kenyans they survive on a two-meal-a-day diet of ugali, a thick porridge of maize flour and water. Occasionally they will slaughter one of their herd to prevent starvation. Samburu are born hungry, grow into proud adulthood hungry, and die in familial hunger. What does it feel like, to fold yourself softly around your hunger every evening? Samburu dead are not buried (what a stupid waste of vital energy, to dig for a dead man), but are laid unadorned in bush a short distance from their village, to fed what passes in night

Two years now without the verdant rains. Patches of maize stutter new growth a few timid inches into seething air and fall back, brittle and exhausted. A middle-class Samburu man may have twenty goats. In drought he will slaughter one per month, which means he and his will starve in just under two years without enough rain to cultivate maize. A poor Samburu may have only a few goats; he and his will die much sooner. Life here is still like that; the rural mathematics of starvation are forever serene and inviolable: you cast filmy eyes skyward for assistance, and if it doesn't arrive the old equation settles around you, an impossibly dark rumour.

Or, perhaps, you are forced to enter the cash economy through the back door, by buying a sack of tasteless fortified wheat flour from the local vendor, who bought it from the money-licking politician, who had the foresight to commandeer the entire shipment when it was donated in goodwill for free distribution. But where to get the cash for that sack of flour? Well, you and your young son can beg and steal in the highway town a few miles away. You can sell your daughters, and finally your wife, to the oily long-fingered pimps who serve the jolly-drunk tourists, pretentious pink aid workers, ridiculous bureaucrats and businessmen with leaky smiles in Nairobi - a city like most in Africa, where those blessed with the blind luck of being born on a different continent, and those blessed with the fortitude necessary to tenderly cultivate their greed can co-mingle in fulfillment of appetites far more luxurious than the need for lumpy flour paste.

The club-footed Samburu man, limping regal in desperation, ceases speaking and leans back into the land. Respected Father -

is this all of you? your life now nothing
but a battered tin pot for me to fill
with the seasonal cadence of sufferings
I imagine upon you?
Shallow furrow of foot-path, saline earth crease,
brackish scum of lip, the myth of joy
and unbroken skin?
Is it all the long thirst, the long wait?
Respected father, will you find your skin-ribbed goat
bleating lone in bony hillside?
Will your success delay decisions that cling to your neck
like bloated insects? Will the chanting rains arrive,
a gift from some equally waning and precarious divinity?