21 July, 2009
This is that year. This is that year that the long rains failed and all the cattle died.
But the rain gauges have not been bone dry. Baboons sip from puddles and pools while grass shoots form scanty patches of unearthly green. Looks like someone found an old photograph of Amboseli from the era of the hand-tinted photograph, from back when cheeks were rosy and grass was green. Or maybe God is bored and got his hands on a bottle of antifreeze.
I ask my friend John to define failed rains. This is it, he says. They have failed miserably and completely. The season for long rains has passed and the short rains won't begin until November.
I live in a camp with one woman and five men inside a camp with one woman and countless men. I have learned the expression "ndugu yangu." My brother. Just like real brothers, Nkii and Moonyoi aim sling shots in my direction and pretend they will beat me. Unlike real kin, we have almost no shared experiences. We surprise each other.
They are going to walk their cattle from here to Nairobi?
They are not impressed by my father's four wives. What they cannot believe is that he had
them one at a time!
I am as surprised when they ask as they are when I answer that, yes, white people tell lies
too.
They cock their heads toward the radio, listening to KBC-Maasai. What is the news? Maasai from all over Kenya are calling in to say their cattle are dying. Moonyoi tells me, "after ng'ombe, watu." After cattle, people. These cattle are Maasai currency and now they are also canaries in the mineshaft. I find Nkii alone in the kitchen, head bowed with one hand on the radio, and I know he is praying for rain. Moonyoi suspects that the drought is God's punishment for Kenya's political misdeeds and wonders if it rains in the US.
The landscape is dotted with cattle carcasses in various stages of decomposition and the volume of the stench is increasing. Every time the baboons turn around there are cattle. Big lumbering herds of the tired and hungry walking dead. God put down his antifreeze, picked up the corners of this dusty picnic blanket, and all the world's cows came tumbling down.
I walk with the baboons for over an hour this morning. Pressed from behind by a wall hundreds of cattle wide, they cannot stop to groom or to forage. My work depends on still images of still baboons, but they are not still. So I give up. I stop walking and watch the wave of baboons recede as another bigger, stronger wave of cattle rolls in from behind.
I sit down, peel a banana, and wonder how that bull has the strength to hold up his horns.
