Hold the Enlightenment (37 page)

The children were eating
ugali
, which is boiled cornmeal, white
as Styrofoam and of about the same consistency. They drank milk as well, enormous quantities of it while the cows bellowed away in the inner corral. As the sun rose higher in the sky, we were assaulted by wave upon wave of flies, great, hateful clouds of them crawling about on our arms and legs and faces.

The flies were particularly attracted to milk, and they covered the mouths of the children and infants in heaving black masses. It looked like a late-night TV commercial urging viewers to save the children, except that these kids were laughing merrily and were as roly-poly as any well-fed American infant. Still, conditioned by commercials, and repelled by the flies, I felt an urge to reach into my pocket and save the children.

That changed about the time John’s teenage brother, Hamisi, let the cows out to graze for the day. There were just over four hundred of them, and I knew an average cow would fetch $150 at the market, with the best animals selling for over $200. John also had several donkeys, some sheep, and a herd of goats. He told us he owned more livestock up north. I didn’t ask how many more cows he had—this is aggressively impolite, as it is in Montana—but it seemed to me that John and his family had a net worth of somewhere near $100,000. They were well-to-do by almost anyone’s standards, and they lived in close proximity to their wealth, which is to say, in the barnyard. The flies were one measure of their affluence.

Hamisi let the cows out of the
boma
to graze and I strolled along with him. The boy was thinking about marriage, and wondered what Americans paid in terms of a bride price.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Her father gets nothing?”

“We make the deal with the girl. What do you guys pay?”

Hamisi said that the typical Barabaig gave the father two large rounds of chewing tobacco, four four-gallon cans of honey worth about $40 apiece, and one cow. When the wife becomes pregnant, it cost another cow. It used to be a lot more, as many as ten cows, for instance, but these days women were becoming very undependable, and quite reluctant to follow the unwritten rules. Sometimes—
this was hardly thinkable—if they didn’t like you, they’d just go away.

“That’s when we pay,” I said, out of sad experience.

“When they go away, you pay the father?”

“The woman.”

Hamisi shook his head in wonder at the infinite imbecility of the white tribe.

We strolled through the sandy soil under the acacias taking care to avoid the piles of cowflop. It occurred to me that Tanzania’s tribes, with their teasing relationships, had a droll and entirely indigenous sense of humor. I meant to explore it.

“So what’s the funniest thing that happens out here?” I asked.

“Well,” Hamisi replied thoughtfully, “sometimes someone tries to steal the cows.”

This did not seem a matter of great hilarity to me. “No,” I said, “I mean something even funnier than that.”

“Sometimes a calf gets stuck in the birth canal,” Hamisi said. “Then you have to call a person who can get it out.”

I admitted that must be a real knee-slapper when it happened. “But what I mean,” I said, “is something that really makes you laugh every time you think about it. Something so hilarious you can hardly stand it.”

Hamisi thought for a long time, then said, “Every once in a while, something scares the cows, and they all run away.”

So that was the funniest thing that ever happened out in the fields: a stampede.

We climbed out of the valley into a deciduous woodland at about 4,500 feet. Some local Sandawe hunters took us up to high granite promontories where all kinds of art had been drawn on the rock over the centuries, over the millennium. There were wildebeests, humans, elephants, rhinos, and giraffes pictured in three different sites. One giraffe was brilliantly done—anatomically perfect, from the notch in its lower chest to the hock high up on the back legs. The sites were, Peter thought, anywhere from twenty thousand to forty thousand years old: a major archaeological find, undocumented
and perfectly preserved. Peter took a GPS reading. He would come back later, study the art, and perhaps someone would write a scientific paper.

As Peter sketched the ancient giraffe in his notebook, the Sandawe built a smoky fire under a tree. Bees were moving in and out of a large hole in one of the branches and there was honey for the taking. Gele climbed the tree with a smoking branch, thrust it into the hole, and there was the disconcerting sound of angry buzzing bees, the sound of something awful about to happen in a horror film. Gele worked in complete silence, pulling comb after comb out of the hive.

“Are you getting stung?” Peter called.

“Yes, very much,” Gele said.

Later, we sat under the giraffe and ate honey, while Ali pulled a dozen white stingers out of Gele’s arm.

“Can’t those bees kill you?” I asked Ali.

“We try not to let that happen,” he said.

Later that day, we trudged through a high marsh beside an actual running river, and the path led down to the dry and dusty town of Kwa Mtoro, where we went to the monthly market. Sandawe people sold millet and honey beer, called scud; cows were auctioned off; batteries and caps and T-shirts and single cigarettes were for sale.

A few days later, we partied with the Barabaig, who had brewed up about sixty gallons of honey beer, made from honey we bought for the tribe from the Sandawe. Barabaig from all over arrived. The women greeted one another fiercely: they stood four steps apart, then came together in a thudding hug. I could hear the cowhide slapping fifty yards away.

Outside the
boma
of a respected elder named Kalish, young men stood together in a group while a like number of women in cowhide dresses stood half a football field away. The men sang and banged their sticks on cowhide shields. Occasionally, one would step in front and leap straight up in the air, sometimes a dozen times or more. It was bad form to bend the knees. The leap came only from the feet and calves, so when two or three men jumped
together, in unison, it looked as if gravity had no dominion over them.

The women, for their part, came out jumping in the same manner. The dancing went on for several hours—the young men and women staring at one another, assessing athletic prowess, and deciding, I imagined, who might make for a hot sex partner.

We weren’t called on to jump, but Kalish invited me into a hut inside the
boma
, where we drank honey beer out of cow horns and discussed the important matters of the day, as elders and white men who can’t jump are wont to do. Sunlight fell in shafts through the poles in the hut, and Peter said that the ceremony was significantly different from Masai dances. It was, he thought, pretty much an anthropologist’s wet dream. I drank another horn full of the foaming, yeasty beer: it tasted like a sweet, liquid form of dirt.

“Drink,” Kalish said, and I did, spilling plenty a polite quantity down my shirt. The cow horn came around many times, and while I drank, I reflected on what was surely the high point of my trip: the great donkey conference.

Early on, we’d encountered three heavily armed Masai crossing the sand river. They said they were going to a meeting with the Barabaig about some stolen donkeys. We could come and watch, they said, as long as we kept our distance and our mouths shut. Which is how we found ourselves sitting under the spreading acacia tree observing African politics in action. Since the Masai were the complaining party, they got to start. A man stood and said, “We know sometimes a Masai’s livestock is stolen by his own son, but we have investigated, and this has not happened. We have also searched the bush, and there are no bones. The donkeys must be in someone else’s hands.”

A Barabaig man stood to reply: “Either you know who took the donkeys or you don’t. You can’t just make vague accusations.”

Though the Barabaig and Masai each have their own language, everyone was speaking Swahili, which Peter quietly translated. Speakers were polite; tones were reasonable.

“The livestock,” a Masai man said, “is in Barabaig hands. There is
no point in pretending otherwise. Please, let’s work this out. There are no long roads without twists and turns, without sharp corners. Together, we can straighten out this road.” The discussion continued apace for four or five hours until the Barabaig asked for time to confer among themselves. They went off down a slope, out of sight. Gobre, our Barabaig pal, wandered after them to eavesdrop. He was dressed in Western clothes, and none of the locals knew he spoke Barabaig.

The men conferred until well after dark. We wandered back to our own camp, where Gobre filled us in on the Barabaig conference. They were going to meet with the Masai again tomorrow. And yes, two of the young men had stolen the damn donkeys. They had already sold them, so they couldn’t just give them back. That left only three alternatives, the way the Barabaig saw it: they could rush in and spear as many Masai as possible; they could pack up and move out in the middle of the night, as they had done before in similar situations; or they could find some way to pay the Masai for their donkeys.

“You think there could be violence?” I asked.

Nobody thought so, but then Gobre began telling the infamous story about a small massacre his people had suffered at the hands of the Warangi under similar circumstances about fifteen years ago. The parlay was about—what else?—stolen livestock, with accusations on both sides. Gobre had been at the meeting. There were only about fifty Barabaig, he said, all sitting, waiting for the meeting to begin. In contrast, more than two hundred Warangi showed, and they didn’t sit, but rather positioned themselves in such a way that the Barabaig suddenly found themselves surrounded. Gobre had a gift for comic understatement. Everyone was laughing. It finally dawned on me that this was considered an amusing story. It was even funnier than a stampede.

“We were sitting there like a pack of goats,” he said, as the other Africans in our party doubled over in laughter. Gobre said the sight of the advancing Warangi made him “uneasy,” and so he excused himself to go “dig for medicine,” an African euphemism for relieving oneself. More laughter. He was walking through a nearby cornfield
when the Warangi began firing their arrows into the sitting Barabaig. “I could hear the screams,” Gobre said, “and I ran. Five people died, including my son-in-law.”

And then the laughter stopped. Abruptly. East Africans, it seemed, can laugh at death and pay it solemn homage in the space of a single breath. Or maybe the body count just brought home the parallels with a certain other livestock parlay due to commence about a mile away at nine o’clock the next morning.

So it was with a degree of trepidation that we attended the second day of the great donkey dispute. We took a position some distance away from the great acacia tree, so that we could slip away into the bush at the first sign of trouble. The Barabaig, however, did not rush in immediately and spear the Masai. They hadn’t left in the night, so perhaps they were going to pay. We moved closer to monitor the debate.

About two-thirty that afternoon, an older Barabaig in a purple
shouka
finally admitted that his son had stolen the donkeys, and the aggrieved Masai said he would be willing to accept the donkeys back, along with two cows in payment for the emotional pain and aggravation he had suffered in searching for his animals. After many eloquent speeches, the thief’s father agreed to the payment of two cows only (worth about $300), since the donkeys themselves were, of course, long gone. The Masai thought that was fair if the father threw in 30,000 shillings (about $36), a figure that was negotiated down to about $12.

So, after seventeen hours, the great donkey contretemps was settled without bloodshed. A Masai said, “We knew you Barabaig had the donkeys, but we chose not to steal back from you, because we respect you.” The Masai left, but the Barabaig stayed for another several hours. The father had just lost two cows out of a total of ten in his herd. It was suggested that his son pay him back. The son refused, but under intense community pressure changed his mind ten minutes later—a virtual split second in Barabaig political time. Still, he was only going to pay one cow. He hadn’t stolen the donkeys alone, and his rustling buddy should pay the other. The second thief stood and declared that he had no cows and no money to
boot. An hour of argument ensued, and the second thief was given four days to come up with a cow.

Later I discussed the matter with Gobre. “They gave him four days because …?”

“He has to go somewhere where they don’t know him …”

“And?”

“Steal one.”

I
t was somewhere near three in the morning when Chilero’s screams began echoing off the canyon walls. “Oyyyyy-yoy-yoy-yoy-yoy!”

Make that first “Oyyyyy” enormously loud; be sure it’s filled with pain and terror and fear.

“Oyyyyy-yoy-yoy-yoy-yoy,” Chilero howled again. “Where are you?” he screamed in Spanish. From my position on the ground, I could see his shadow slipping against the starry night sky. Chilero was gliding over the ice, lurching, but never actually falling. He was a graceful man, drunk or sober.

He’d been sleeping in the front seat of my truck, and now, at three in the morning, he was skating over the ice sheet in his slick-soled cowboy boots, looking for his friends. He couldn’t see us lying at the base of the canyon wall. We were all trying to sleep, bundled up together in a cocoon of blankets and sleeping bags. The ice below was slowly melting under the heat of our bodies.

“Hace demasiado frío,”
he screamed in Spanish.
It’s too cold
. “Focking cold.”

And then it occurred to him that, in this dark night, he was surrounded by the souls and shadows of the Indian people who had populated this river canyon nearly one thousand years ago. He felt their spirits, and he sensed animosity, or so it seemed.

“Indios,”
he screamed in fear and defiance, “listen to me,
indios
, I am not afraid of you.” Chilero had Indian blood. He was proud of it. He just didn’t trust people who’d been dead for a thousand years.