Dark Star Safari

8. Figawi Safari on the Bandit Road

Only cattle trucks went south, in a straggling convoy of ten vehicles or so. ‘Because of the shifta.’ The name was derived from a raiding, plundering, bloodthirsty Somali clan, the Mshifta; but now shifta meant any roaming bandit in that great desert that extends from Somalia to the Sudan and takes in the whole of northern Kenya. The shifta tended to raid the remote settlements and ambush isolated people and vehicles on the road. There were only a few roads and there were many shifta.

Buses did not operate on this north — south road. There were no place names on my map, just Marsabit in the middle of the Dida Galgalu Desert — Samburu land — a day’s drive south. I was reassured by the fact that the trucks were full of cattle and not people, for in these parts cattle were valuable and people’s lives not worth much at all. Even when tribesmen were shot here on this border no one troubled to file a report. They only said, ‘The Borena are fighting’ or the Oromo, or the Somalis, or the shifta. No one knew the body count. If cattle had been slaughtered or rustled the exact number would have been known and lamented.

Each truck held twenty head of cattle. I paid three dollars to ride in the cab with the driver and three women and two infants and a bronchitic boy, a tubercular child of six or seven whom I caught drinking out of my water bottle. The women, one of whom was nursing a baby, were veiled and, being married, wore henna on their hands and feet. The lovely lacy floral designs seized my attention, even at seven in the morning on this hot day in this stifling cab.

‘Do not leave your seat, bwana — someone will steal it,’ said the tout who had taken my money.

Such a surprise that though we had traveled only half a mile across the border everyone here spoke Swahili.

After a great deal of shouting and a lot of quarrelling and a fight — the man had been thrown off the back for not paying up: he was defending his dignity by slapping at the men who had tossed him aside — we set off down the bad road south, into the heat and dust. The animals shuddered and trembled and on the worst parts of the road some of them fell down and were trampled and trapped by the others. The road deteriorated into a rutted rock-strewn track as soon as we left the border. There were three keepers among the cattle, who attacked the fallen animals, twisting their tails and smashing them in the face with sticks to get them upright. All the cattle were going to the slaughterhouse in Nairobi, and they were a melancholy sight, these animals, for they had rather benign faces and trusting eyes, and dumb and docile they were off to be butchered. In the absence of refrigerated trucks they had to be taken alive to be killed and drained of their blood, through the halal method, stipulated by the Muslim faith.

The driver, Mustafa, was a grumpy chain-smoking young man who apparently spoke only Swahili. ‘Wewe, muzungu,’ he said to me, when he wanted my attention. ‘You, white man.’ This sort of over-familiar word form was extremely rude but he was used to dealing with oafish budget-conscious backpackers. He clearly hated his job and you couldn’t blame him, the cab jammed with people, the truck bed filled with animals, and more men seated on the upper rungs, squatting on the cab roof and hanging from the sides, many of them chewing qât to stay serene.

I had seen poor roads on this trip but this one was spectacularly bad, worse than the no-road route through the Sudanese desert. This was a narrow track of deep, wheel-swallowing potholes and sudden ruts, hard steep waves of them that made the truck jiggle and jump. But the worst of it were the loose boulders. Broken and very sharp, they were so large they sent the truck in a toppling motion as it climbed them and plunged, throwing the cattle to the floor. Still early morning, but the day was very hot, there was no shade, and the land stretched ahead, white and dazzling, like an alkali desert. We were traveling at about ten miles an hour and had 200 miles ahead of us.

African children seldom cry — almost a miracle the way they are as patient as their parents — but the ones in the cab were screaming.

Because of the fighting in the area — yes, as the soldier had said, the Oromo had attacked some police posts — there were frequent checkpoints. Being African checkpoints, each one was a financial opportunity for the armed men who controlled it; so each stop was a shakedown. Mustafa palmed money to the men and drove on, grumbling.

I missed the congenial company of Tadelle and Wolde, I missed the much better roads and greenery of Ethiopia, I missed the Ethiopian courtesies. But I consoled myself with the thought that I had successfully made the transition into Kenyan territory. I was proceeding south, according to plan.

At mid-morning we stopped at a set of tin-roofed sheds by the roadside.

‘Chakula,’ Mustafa said. Food.

Platters of fatty goat meat and lumps of gray coarse porridge the Kenyans call ugali were set on the table in dirty enamel bowls. The Africans, men first, pushed to the food-splashed table and fell on it, snatching food and stuffing their mouths. I bought Mustafa a Coke to ingratiate myself and asked him when we might get to Marsabit.

He shrugged and swigged the Coke and said, ‘Si jui’ — I dunno.

The other Africans were breezy, too, even insolent, lots of Wewe, muzungu, and one man chewing a bone poked his goat-greased finger at me, ‘Wewe, mzee.’

‘Hey, you old man,’ eh? This can be a term of affection or respect, as it was when Jomo Kenyatta’s title was Mzee, emphasizing that he was an elder and leader. But it was pretty clear to me that I was just being mocked as an oldster.

‘Hapana mzee,’ I said, ‘Not old,’ in Kitchen Swahili, but Kitchen Swahili was all these northerners spoke, for they were Borena and Samburu people mainly, desert dwellers, without a common language. Swahili was grammatical and subtle only on the coast and in the few cities.

‘Mimi vijana,’ the man said, asserting his youth.

Another man with no fingers on his right hand, hitting a goat bone with his left fist, was clearly narrating in his language, Borena, that he was eating the best part, the marrow, which he smacked on to the table in a glutinous lump. He smeared it with his fingers and ate it greedily.

Outside, some of the other trucks in the convoy had stopped here, too, and soldiers traveling with them asked me if there was trouble (shauri) there.

‘There is war in Ethiopia? You have seen?’

These ignorant inhabitants, traveling on a hideous road in an overheated desert, in a neglected province of one of the most corrupt and distressed and crime-ridden countries in Africa regarded sunny threadbare but dignified Ethiopia as a war zone.

When we set off again I saw that one of the soldiers climbed on to the back of Mustafa’s truck. I was not sure whether I was concerned or relieved that we were traveling with a soldier carrying a high-caliber rifle.

The settlements visible in the desert were all Borena or else the Borena sub-tribes — the Mbuji people, the Ledile, the Gabra. They were all rather handsome men and attractive women, who lived sparely, among their diminishing flocks of goats. Even though they were herding the creatures over this vast desert there was not much grazing available. No rain had fallen for three years and they were being forced to eat their animals, which were their wealth. At a mission station there were Ledile people, just sitting, looking gaunt.

There was little else to eat, hardly any wildlife survived here. I saw some of the small deer they called dikdiks, and of course there were birds — kites, hawks, pigeons, and where there were thorn trees, some weaver birds darted around their many nests.

The road extended straight ahead — rocky, rubbly, pitted with holes — to the distant horizon, cutting between two lakes. The lakes were magnificent, shimmering in the sunlight, flat expanses of water, mirroring the sky and lending a coolness to the landscape, which invited the traveler and promised relief. But the lakes, of course, were mirages; only the rubbly road was real.

We were going so slowly that when a rear tire blew at two o’clock I heard not only the blow-out like a pistol shot but the hissing as the air streamed out. Mustafa brought the truck to a halt and got out, cursing.

It was the middle tire — there were eight on the rear axles, two sets of four, to support the heavy weight of the cattle. A small rusty jack was dragged out and assembled, and slowly the truck was raised, the wheels taken off, the blown tire examined. It was not just a hole in the tube but a rent in the tire that was so large the African examining it could put his whole arm through it.

That was to be expected here — by me, anyway; apparently not by them, for they had no spare. They shook out rubbish from a burlap sack — tubes, patches, big crowbars, flat pieces of iron, tubes of glue, and something that looked like an antique foot-driven bellows — and began amateurishly to whack the wheel, as though they had never been in this fix before. Their iron tools bent as they tried to prise the tire from the rim.

They took turns fighting the tire and failing, while the rest of us stood in the intense heat of the desert sun. There was no shade, no relief from the blinding light and heat, though several men crawled into the semi-darkness under the jacked-up truck and went to sleep.

Mustafa, who rarely spoke and did so only in Swahili, offered his opinion in English, saying to me, ‘Thees focking bad road.’

I thought: This is not good — a breakdown in the desert, in a place where no one cares whether I live or die; stuck and stranded among the most incompetent and unresourceful mechanics I have ever seen.

An hour of this and then a loaded cattle truck rumbled past us, not stopping, obviously not giving a shit about the fix we were in. But this truck reminded me that we were supposed to be traveling in a convoy. I also thought: I should have bailed out and gone with them. I walked a little distance from our dilemma and searched the horizon for another truck. After twenty minutes or so I saw clouds of rising dust — a truck.

I stood in the road and waved at the approaching truck, another cattle truck, and when it slowed I climbed to the cab, which was crammed with women and children, and asked for a ride.

‘You can come, but you must ride on top.’

I got my bag from Mustafa’s truck and threw it up to the men riding on top, then hurried after it, for the truck had not really stopped but was still rolling past Mustafa’s stranded vehicle and the assembled klutzes who were fiddling with the patches — one slapping an enormous chunk of rubber against the hole in the tire, as a possible fix. It was clear to me that they would still be there tomorrow, among dying cattle, still faffing with the flat tire.

Now I saw them receding into the distance. I was balanced on the frame over the cab, holding on to the pipe frame, in the hot wind and the choking dust. The truck swayed, very unstable because of the high center of gravity and the weight of the cattle.

Yet I was calm, even happy. I wrapped my jacket around me to protect me from the dust and watched the suffering cattle. Weak from thirst, tottering from the movement of the truck, slumping to their knees and now and then knocked to the truck bed, they were getting smacked in the chops and their tails twisted. I could hear their pained mooing over the chunking of the wheels on the road.

Deep in the desert were the camel trains of the Borena, pure panic cloaked in beauty, the yellow robed women walking ahead, the men guiding the camels. It was a lovely sight and yet it was a matter of life or death, illustrating the desperate need for water. No rain, no nearby wells; so the camel train went a great distance and returned laden with jerry cans and drums of water. Each camel was covered in heavy tin containers, slopping the animals’ shanks.

I had to hold tight to stay upright on the truck. The road was not only rocky but here it ceased to go straight — it wound between huge humps, too small to be hills, but obstructions all the same. We went very slowly. I could not see ahead. I was relieved that, as we were moving so slowly, I did not have to cling so tightly.

Then I heard a loud bang, and thought: Oh, no, a blowout. But another bang followed it, and the men on top pushed past me to dive into the mass of groaning cattle.

I got a glimpse of two men in dusty robes, their faces hidden by bands of cloth, standing in the road, with rifles held upright, firing into the air.

Two things happened then. First, and startlingly, the man crouched beside me — a soldier — lifted his rifle and began firing directly at the men, both of whom ducked behind boulders. Second, the truck accelerated, moving so fast that it pitched and rolled down the narrow defile between the humpy hills, like a toppling yacht traveling down the face of a wave.

And at the same time I was diving down from the top bars of the truck with the other men, and dangling behind the metal sides (thinking, Is this steel bulletproof?) and over the staggering cattle. We went from five to twenty-five miles an hour, not great acceleration perhaps but enough to drag us out of range of the armed men and to demonstrate our resolve to get away.

The men were shifta, classic highwaymen positioned in a perfect place. The truck had slowed down to a crawl in a spot that was squeezed between two hiding places, and the men stepped out and fired in the air to get our attention. Perhaps they had not counted on being fired upon; more likely they were surprised by the driver stamping on the gas and getting us out of there.

The soldier clinging to the bars beside me on our truck shook his head and laughed.

I said, ‘Shifta?’

‘Yah.’ He smiled at my grim face.

I said, ‘Sitaki kufa,’ I don’t want to die.

He said in English, ‘They do not want your life, bwana. They want your shoes.’

Many times after that, in my meandering through Africa, I mumbled these words, an epitaph of underdevelopment, desperation in a single sentence. What use is your life to them? It is nothing. But your shoes — ah, they are a different matter, they are worth something, much more than your watch (they had the sun) or your pen (they were illiterate) or your bag (they had nothing to put in it). These were men who needed footwear, for they were forever walking.

When we were underway again the truck moved with greater urgency, the cattle falling faster than ever on top of each other, the ragged cowboys manhandling them. But soon we were at a checkpoint and had to stop. Four soldiers manned this checkpoint, deliberately dawdling, demanding to see my passport (Wewe, muzungu), and being officious.

This checkpoint reassured me, it seemed as though it might serve as a barrier to keep the bandits at bay. The other passengers who had been riding on top appeared to think so too. They resumed their seats, the road improved, we were moving quickly now towards higher ground and the hills ahead, and the setting sun. The greenery was not a mirage but rather the natural foliage of the town of Marsabit.

The truck came to a halt in the market of this small dirty settlement and I lowered myself to the ground and realized that I was trembling, with a hint of that hysterical happiness that takes hold when you have just had a close call, the giddy certainty that you have survived.

I walked around and found a place to stay, the Jey-Jey, a hotel run by a genial Muslim, who also called me mzee. Was it my impending birthday that made this word a particular irritation? Another three-dollar room. I had a shower in the communal wash-house, then walked to the market and drank a Tusker beer and talked to some locals, boasting, ‘I got shot at!’ No one was surprised or impressed. They shrugged. ‘It’s the shifta road.’

Back at the Jey-Jey, I met a man who had just arrived, having been at the rear of the convoy. He was an exhausted-looking Englishman — sweaty, dirty, unshaven, pissed-off, red-eyed, laboring with a heavy duffel bag.

‘How’s it going?’

‘We got shot at!’ he shouted.

‘So did we,’ I said, ‘back where the road winds between those mounds.’

‘We must have been right behind you,’ he said in a strong Lancashire accent. ‘But they got nowt. I fucking floored it, and the soldiers up top were shooting to kill.’

He was Ben Barker, driver of a truck carrying paying passengers on an Africa overland trip. After dinner we found his brother Abel, who was one of his mechanics, and went for a beer in the Marsabit market. Ben described his route. He had fixed up an old diesel truck and started from his home in Grange-over-Sands, heading east via Turkey, then through Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and the Sudan — a barge across Lake Nasser. He too was headed for Cape Town. He had seven backpackers on board and was happy for a small fee to include me as far as Nairobi.

‘I don’t mind the driving,’ Ben said. ‘The worst of this sort of traveling is when the people in the truck get all south-faced and whingey. “And why can’t we see the crocodiles, then?” “Why are we driving today?” “Can’t we bloody stop for a while?” ’

Scruffy though it was, Marsabit was an oasis in the middle of widely scattered villages of pastoralists whose animals were in bad shape because of the successive droughts, or agriculturalists whose gardens were weedy and stunted. Because of this, Marsabit was the haunt of aid workers and agents of virtue, many of whose spiffy white Land-Rovers were parked at the Jey-Jey.

The model had been described by Mr Kurtz in Heart of Darkness: ‘Each station should be like a beacon on the road towards better things, a center for trade of course, but also for humanizing, improving, instructing.’ This was of course before disillusionment set in and Kurtz became a cannibal chieftain.

A similar scheme had been mooted fifty years earlier than Kurtz’s by Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House, who was ‘devoted to the subject of Africa’ and whose obsession, to the utter neglect of her distressed family in London, was an ‘African project’ Her scheme involved ‘the general cultivation of the coffee berry — and the natives — and the happy settlement on the banks of the African rivers, of our superabundant home population … educating the natives of Borrioboola-Gha on the left bank of the Niger.’

Fiona and Rachel worked for a British charity. What Kurtz was trying to accomplish on the Congo, and Mrs Jellyby on the Niger, they were attempting in the region of Marsabit. They were on their weekly trip, up from the south. They were in their mid-twenties, damp-faced from the heat and their long drive. They had a driver, however, and a high-tech vehicle that was worth a fortune. Am I imagining that the logo on the side showed a weeping continent and the slogan, Shed Tears for Africa?

‘We have a wet feeding tomorrow,’ Fiona said.

Rachel said, ‘Ninety underweight children, some of them malnourished — infants up to four-year-olds.’

‘What is a wet feeding?’

‘That’s porridge. Unimix for nutrition — maize, beans, oil, some sugar and fat. Americans call it Corn Soy Blend.’

‘You are going to a village to dump Unimix in a trough for people to eat?’

‘I wouldn’t put it that way,’ Fiona said.

I said, ‘We used to say, “Give people seeds and let them grow their own food.” ’

‘The rains have been unreliable,’ Rachel said.

‘Maybe they should relocate. If they relocated they might find work, and they might plant gardens if you weren’t feeding them.’

‘We save lives, not livelihoods,’ Fiona said, and it sounded like a phrase from a brochure that might have been drafted by Mrs Jellyby.

I said, ‘Or family planning advice — you could give them that.’

‘We don’t discuss family planning,’ Rachel said. ‘We feed children under five and lactating mothers. Why are you looking at me like that?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Something about “supervising a wet feeding.” It sounds like something you’d do in a game park.’

They were insulted and I was sorry I’d said it like that, because they were obviously hard working and earnest, and they had come a long way to dish up porridge for some ashen-faced tots in the north Kenyan desert.

I said, ‘In a game park, in a bad year, the rangers might spread some bales of lucerne near a waterhole to help the hippos make it through the season.’

They just looked at me, unhappy to be challenged.

I said, ‘And what would happen if you just sent the food?’

‘Their parents would steal it and let the kids die.’

In other words, natural selection. It was why the Samburu were so tough. The strongest survived, weak children died; children died all the time in Africa and yet even with AIDS and infant mortality the population growth was the highest in the world. But it had been high in Victorian England, as well. In Thomas Hardy’s novel, Jude the Obscure, the doomed and starving village children leave a note, Because we are too menny.

Fiona and Rachel were good-hearted, and earnest in their mission. But it fascinated me that in order to feed these ‘underweight children’ they had to battle the parents, who wanted (and who could blame them?) to snatch the food from the children’s mouths. Or was this over-dramatizing the situation, for there was often a note of melodrama among relief workers, charity in Africa frequently being a form of theater.

‘How long will you be doing this?’

‘I’m leaving next week,’ Fiona said.

‘I’ve got a month more,’ Rachel said.

‘So it’s possible that these people you’ve been feeding with Unimix will be left in the lurch after you go.’

‘The whole scheme comes up for review in a few months,’ Fiona said, turning bureaucratic.

Just to satisfy myself I visited Marsabit’s secondary school the next morning and met one of the head teachers, Mr Maina, who had lived in Marsabit his whole life, except for the years he had spent getting his education degree. He absolutely denied that anyone in the district was foodless. He emphasized that there was more food than ever because of the government’s indifference to traditional cash crops.

‘The farmers in Kenya are very demoralized, because the government does not support them,’ Mr Maina said. ‘In so many places the farmers have torn up their coffee bushes to grow cabbages and maize for subsistence.’

‘Why doesn’t the government care?’

‘Why should they care? They get money from the World Bank, and the IMF and America and Germany and everyone else.’

In a word, the Kenyan government too was dependent on its own version of Unimix in the form of donor country money. It was a proven fact that this money went into the pockets of politicians. At that moment, Dr Richard Leakey, a white Kenyan, headed a commission to uncover corruption in Kenya. But within weeks of uncovering a great deal of corruption, Dr Leakey was removed from his post and was fighting a corruption charge leveled against him by the Kenyan government.

Besides Ben and Abel, on the Africa overland truck there was Mick, a Yorkshireman, who as chief mechanic quietly boasted of having a complete welding kit on board, a spare engine and a generator. The seven paying passengers were seriously shaken, the effect of having been attacked and shot at by shifta the day before. One, Jade from New Zealand, was asthmatic and the stress was giving her symptoms of suffocation — or was that caused by dust blowing through the open truck? Another, a Canadian of about twenty — an immigrant from the Ukraine — welcomed me on board, then gave me an insane grin.

‘Yeah. This is a good day to die,’ he said, as I swung myself on board. He said this often; he had no other conversation. Not so much a victim of post-traumatic stress as a natural pain in the ass.

And there were two soldiers, a smiling one who never spoke, and a cross talkative one named Andrew, who was grumbling from the moment we left Marsabit. The sight of Samburu tribesmen on the road — in bright togas, with earrings and beads, carrying rifles and walking sticks — roused him to fury.

‘They are all shifta,’ the soldier named Andrew said. ‘Him and him. And over there, all of them. The Kenyan government supplies them with guns because the people demand it. “We want to protect our cattle.” But they use the guns to attack people on this road. Forty people have been killed in the past two months.’

We were in scrubby desert, as desolate and dry and vast as the day before, and the road just as bad. I was sitting in the truck with the shell-shocked backpackers. Gasping Jade; the girls, Rebecca and Laura, with Walkmen on their heads, listening to Tracy Chapman; Mick’s girlfriend, Judy (Mick was in the cab with Ben); Abel stretched out on a bench, and the Canadian grinning at the road ahead, murmuring, ‘This is a good day to die.’

Besides the Samburu, Rendille people also inhabited this area. The Rendille were so ornamented and colorful they often appeared on postcards. Kenyan Warriors in Traditional Costume, the cards would say. They wore stiff beaded visors on their brows and tight braided locks smeared with red ochre shaking at the back of their heads; they bristled with elaborate necklaces and gorgets of red and white beads; armlets, bracelets, anklets. Part of their attire was weapons, throwing clubs shaped like maracas jammed into their beaded belts, and knives with decorative sheaths. They carried spears and wore bright red sarongs. They were the personification of adornment and you could spot one of these Rendille warriors a mile away in the Dida Galgalu Desert, which was perhaps the whole point.

Two of them waved us down on the road in the middle of nowhere. We picked them up but their Swahili was so rudimentary the soldiers could not converse with them. One said, ‘Laisamis’ — the soldiers recognized the name as a mission thirty miles down the road. They sat, saying nothing, but allowed themselves to be photographed by Rebecca.

Laisamis, a Catholic mission, was also a desert settlement of Rendille people. There were no trees, there was no shade, yet it was market day, hundreds of gaily dressed people squatting in the dust among a large church, a small school, a bore hole and many scattered crudely built huts. Rendille ornamentation was limited to the person; the huts were simply rounded masses of twigs and thatch, inhabited by people in colorful plumage. A line from Conrad came to mind: ‘There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine.’

Jade the asthmatic begged to stay a while at Laisamis, saying that she was having trouble breathing. She looked very ill, her eyes sunken and red, her face pale, and in her worst attacks her lips turned blue. The back of the truck in the heat and blowing dust of the Dida Galgalu Desert did not seem to me the happiest place for an asthmatic, and Jade was clearly suffering but did not complain. While Ben tried to get her electric nebulizer working — he said he might be an hour — I went bird-watching in a grove of thorn trees at the edge of the desert. Apart from the hawks and the vultures, there was a grackle-sized bird, red and black and brilliant green, a lovely bird with a lovely name, the Superb Starling.

An off-duty Kenyan policeman named Mark strolled over and said he needed a lift. Ben obliged him, because although he was in street clothes he had his pistol with him and another weapon was useful in this road of ambush-minded shifta. Mark was a Samburu.

‘After you are circumcised you make the choice to go to school or look after the animals. If you look after the animals you dress as these men do. We call them limooli’ — that was how he wrote it, but he pronounced it mowlé. ‘My brother is one. The Rendille copied this from us.’

‘My asthma’s playing up again,’ Jade said. She was fighting for breath and apologetic and looked awful; but she had a support group of sympathetic women in the truck, Sarah, Laura, Judy and Rebecca, who attended her with medicine and atomizers. The shifta ambush had bonded them. Sarah, who was nineteen and about to enter an English university, had sobbed with fear after the gunshots.

In the early afternoon, riding down the road, there was a terrific bang, so sharp, so loud, we all dived to the floor. The two soldiers snatched their rifles and looked for shifta, as Ben drove on. But there were no more bangs. In fact, the truck was slowing down.

‘We blew a tire,’ Mick said, sticking his head out of the cab.

‘Yesterday we thought it was a tire,’ Judy said. ‘But it was shooting.’

No one regretted hitting the deck, It served as emergency drill.

‘Yeah, this is a good day to die,’ the Canadian said.

We limped four miles to a cluster of huts, so few of them they hardly constituted a village. The place was called Serolevi. It existed because there was a barrier in the road, and being a military checkpoint it had a name. This was in the heart of Samburu land, in the desert of scrubby bushes and dead thorn trees and overdressed and overornamented Samburu herdboys. No shade, nowhere to sit, just dust and gravel, a handful of lost-looking people and some indolent policemen.

Mick and Abel jacked up the truck, Ben supervising. The tire was changed in half an hour. This speed was in great contrast to the cackhanded incompetence shown by Mustafa and his men the day before. While they worked I looked around the settlement and thought: God, what an awful place. There was a shop — just a shed with one shelf, and on the shelf raw blocks of soap, rice, maize flour, dry crackers, and Kasuku Brand fat. Kasuku is Swahili for parrot, so I made a predictable joke about parrot fat and the woman shop owner sighed with boredom.

‘Those mountains ahead,’ Ben said as we were loading the tools. ‘Isiolo is behind them’

Isiolo was our objective, the edge of the desert, a decent-sized town with food and water.

‘Archer’s Post is before that,’ Andrew the soldier said. ‘That is the worst place for shifta.’

It was the thing I hated hearing from an African: There are bad people ahead.

I asked if I could ride in the cab. Ben said, ‘Fine,’ and we set off again, Mick at the side window, me in the middle. The road was so bumpy, with long deep holes that made the truck thump and roll, that both Mick and I braced ourselves, our feet against the dashboard.

On an especially bad stretch of road the truck rose and fell heavily, the chassis banging hard with the sound of a hammer on an anvil. Ben came alert at the wheel, his head cocked, and said, ‘Shit.’

Mick said, ‘What?’

‘She’s listing. Fuck.’ He rolled to a halt and got out to examine the undercarriage, then delivered the news. ‘We knackered a spring. Three big leaves. Chassis’s resting on the axle. Shit. Fuck. I was afraid of that. Shit.’ He put the truck into gear and began making a U-turn. ‘I was dreading this road ever since we left Cairo.’

‘So was I,’ I said.

‘Why didn’t you take the flipping plane?’

‘Because I wanted to see what was on this dreaded road.’

‘A thousand miles of hassle,’ Ben said.

But Mick was thinking about the broken spring. He said, ‘Got to weld the leaves. Maybe chain her up, or summat.’

We drove back very slowly to Serolevi, the settlement that had made my heart sink. Our escort soldiers became agitated, even the one who was usually calm. ‘We fix and go,’ the irritable one said. But Ben did not even bother replying. The damage to the truck was serious. Even I could see the smashed spring and the body of the heavy truck threatening to snap the axle.

Mick jacked the truck up and set out the tools — generator, welding gear, steel boxes, basins of socket wrenches and spares, spare spring leaves. And as the sun descended towards the desert horizon, he and Abel took turns trying to dislodge the broken springs. As dusk fell, they had still made little headway.

Ben said to me, ‘Fancy spending a night in the desert?’

‘We must leave right now,’ the soldier said. ‘These people will take advantage of us.’

Yanking on a broken spring leaf with a crowbar, Ben said, unper-turbed, ‘Oh, aye.’

Counting the soldiers, there were twelve of us, and darkness would soon be upon us — hunger, too. Bored already with sitting, I said I would put myself in charge of the evening meal. There were chickens running around, there was rice in the shop. The friendliest woman in the village was a Kikuyu woman named Helen, who wore a green dress and said, ‘I am a missionary of the Full Gospel Church. I am bringing Jesus here.’

‘Are these your chickens?’

She said they were and that for 1700 shillings, about $20, she would kill three chickens and make potato stew and chapatis to feed the twelve of us and some of her family.

Darkness had fallen but Helen began to stoke three cooking fires, and over by the truck the welding had begun, Mick squinting through a small piece of smoked glass because his welding mask was broken. The bright sparks of the welding attracted people from huts at the edge of Serolevi, who sat and watched the action.

I helped Helen peel potatoes. I was impressed by her cooking skill and appalled by the disorder, for she squatted in a mass of chicken feathers and eviscerated birds and potato peels, hot coals and pots of sloshing water. But this was the Serolevi method: smoky fires, dented stew pots, scorched meat.

I sent a small boy to the shop for a bottle of beer and then sat on a log, peeling potatoes and swigging beer, and feeling an obscure sense of contentment.

‘Beer is bad,’ Helen said, giggling.

‘Beer is not mentioned in the Bible,’ I said. ‘Jesus drank wine. He also made wine. Preferred it to water. Changed water into wine at the wedding feast at Cana. His own mother requested it. Where does it say that alcohol is bad?’

‘In Galatians.’

‘Where Paul condemns drunkenness and reveling?’ I said, ‘Helen, I wouldn’t have thought a warm bottle of Tusker outside a mud hut in Samburu land constituted drunken reveling. What?’

She saw the joke, she was laughing, but she said, ‘You will not be saved.’

‘A man asked Jesus, “Good master, how shall I find the Kingdom of Heaven?” Jesus said, “Love thy neighbor. Obey the Commandments.” ’

‘Johns says you must be born again. You’re a good peeler,’ she said, hoisting the potatoes.

She was good-natured and quick, just thirty-two — the average life expectancy in Kenya was just over forty. She was not married.

‘You haven’t met Mister Right.’

‘Jesus is Mister Right.’ She was slapping dough now, clapping it between her hands, making chapattis.

Feeling fortunate, I laughed and drank another Tusker and thought: I love this place, I love sitting in the pink afterglow of the sunset, peeling spuds and talking about salvation. The heat of the day had gone, the air was mild, there were children everywhere, fooling, fussing, teasing each other, among the flaring fires and the aromatic steam of chicken and potatoes.

Darkness lay around us; the only points of light were the cooking fires and the blinding blue arc of the welding torch. Then the welding torch died: the generator was out of gasoline, and the welding could not be completed until more gasoline was brought from Archer’s Post. We might be stuck for a few more days. I did not care. Others found it appalling.

This dire news seemed to bring on Jade’s serious asthma attack. She said she could not breathe. She was made comfortable by the helpful backpackers and soon a Land-Rover full of robed Somalis arrived at the checkpoint. Jade begged them to take her. ‘I need to get to a hospital.’ They stuffed her in the back of their vehicle with Laura and sped south, into the darkness.

The rest of us had dinner. The local headman, a young man named Chief George, joined us, and so did some others who had been hanging around, looking hungry. There were fifteen of us altogether. I helped Helen dish up the food.

Scooping with a bent spoon, I said, ‘This may be one of the few occasions when you’ve been waited on by a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.’

Hearing ‘American,’ Chief George said, ‘I hear some American people are poor. We do not think of whites as poor. Also, that some cannot speak English. How can this be in America?’

He claimed that Samburu herdsmen could walk forty miles a day, and that women could walk faster and farther than men.

He said, ‘Women have a better rhythm. Men walk fast then have to rest. Women don’t rest.’

On a padded shelf of the open jacked-up truck that night I lay and drowsed. The dry air was dead still and odorless. No water meant no insects. Silence and darkness and no one stirring. The almost full moon, deep orange from the risen dust, appeared late, casting a glow upon the desert around us.

In the morning, the Canadian backpacker saw me and said, ‘This is a good day to die.’ He looked around Serolevi, the dead thorn trees, the scattered children, our damaged truck. ‘Yeah.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Do I get the prize for being the craziest guy on the truck?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Know where we are? Figawi. For where the fuck are we?’

‘The Figawi safari.’

‘Yeah. Looks like we’re stuck today, too. Want to smoke some herb?’

All he did was gabble. Meanwhile, Abel had hitched a ride to Archer’s Post to buy some more gasoline for the generator. The night had been benign but daylight was a reminder that there was no shade here, nowhere to sit except on the log in front of Helen’s hut. By mid-morning no vehicles has passed in either direction and the temperature was back in the nineties.

What I had taken to be an improvised squatter settlement near an army checkpoint was in fact a village of several hundred Samburus. It was the army checkpoint that was improvised. The schoolhouse was empty, unused — ‘no money for teachers’ — but there was a bar, a tin-roofed shack, where men drank beer throughout the day, starting at eight in the morning and fighting over space at the small pool table. On the side of the bar was a sign in Swahili and English: Ministry of Health, UNFPA — UN Population fund. Protect yourself and your friends. Use a condom (tumi mpira). Help yourself below. But the tin dispenser was empty.

Boys ornamented in the traditional limooli fashion — spears, skirts, beads — tended goats in nearby fields, and now and then children appeared with buckets of water. I borrowed a plastic basin from Helen and followed some of these water carriers down to the borehole, which was a standpipe past the abandoned schoolhouse. A trickle of water dribbled out of the pipe. I put down my basin and watched it slowly piddling and calculated that it would take the best part of an hour to fill a bucket.

When I had a few quarts I went into a field and washed my face and dumped the rest on my head, marveling at the heat of the sun beating on my wet hair. Then I found another log to sit on and went on reading. I felt only mildly inconvenienced, because I had no deadline to meet: no one was expecting me. Most of all I felt privileged that I was now in a Samburu village in the middle of the northern Kenyan desert, living in perfect safety, talking to local people, and observing a way of life that was not discernable from the road.

That day, few vehicles went past the checkpoint. The Bishop of Marsabit, a voluble Italian named Father Ravisi, sailed through, stopping briefly to hug the villagers and joke with them in Swahili.

‘I had a parish in New Jersey for twenty years!’ And now his parish was one of the biggest and wildest in Africa.

The welding seemed to be going very slowly, though Mick was still kneeling, pinching a small piece of smoked glass in front of one eye, and torching a leaf. The only person who seriously minded the delay was the grumpier of the two soldiers. I realized that his complaining had its origins in fear: fear of a late start, fear of being ambushed, fear of the darkness that allowed shifta to approach.

I was chatting to a policeman at the checkpoint when a white Land-Rover — aid workers’ vehicle, a medical charity logo on the side — came to a halt. The man and woman inside showed their passports — Americans.

Are you going south?’ I asked.

They said they were, and had begun to inch forward, as the barrier was lifted.

‘I’m with that big truck,’ I said quickly. ‘We have a broken spring. Could you give me a lift to Archer’s Post or Isiolo?’

‘We don’t have space,’ the man said, not making eye contact.

‘Yes, you do — the whole back seat.’

‘Sorry.’

He was moving but I was walking beside him, my hand on his open window.

I said, ‘All right, don’t help me. We’ll get the truck fixed. But it’s a long empty road to Isiolo and if we see you broken down or in trouble by the side of the road — fuck you, we’re going right past you.’

This propelled him faster and so I let go. After the dust settled I could hear the zapping of Mick’s welding torch, and men shouting drunkenly in the bar, and children playing. I found a book about the IRA in the truck, Killing Rage, by Eamon Collins, a former IRA hitman. The book was a memoir but confessional in its truthfulness, full of killing motivated by the sort of tribalism that would have not been out of place in Samburu land. After assisting in many murders, some of them of innocent victims — the wrong man, or unlucky bystanders — Collins dropped out and went into hiding, where remorsefully he wrote this account of his homicidal pettiness.

Mark, the Samburu policeman who was hitching a ride with us, told me that he wasn’t happy traveling with soldiers.

‘Because if the shifta see them they know they have to fight,’ he said. ‘They will shoot our tires, or the radiator. They might shoot the driver. They shot one last week. If they are really hungry, they will shoot us.’

‘They do not want your life, they want your shoes. That’s what I was told.’

‘If you don’t give them your shoes they will take your life.’

This was all unsettling, because being stranded here at Serolevi, we had been left behind by the convoy that was headed to Nairobi. When we finally did set off we would be going alone, a big lumbering target on an empty road.

Under a tree, with nothing to do, I asked Mark about female circumcision among the Samburu.

‘Yes, it is the tradition, everyone does it — the Borena, the Rendille, the Meru. But I have never seen it, because women circumcise women and men circumcise men,’ he said. ‘The clitoris is cut off. Completely off.’

‘Painful,’ I said.

‘Of course painful — she gets no medicine. But she must not show pain. She lies here. She says nothing. It is done so she will not feel pleasure with sex. Otherwise she will need men. But this way her husband can go away and she will remain faithful always.’

‘At what age?’

‘Can be any age. It must be before she is married. If she is to be married at sixteen it is done then. Or at twenty.’

‘But she might be having sex before then.’

‘Of course she is having sex before then. She is having sex from an early age. But’ — he gestured for my attention to make sure I understood — ‘only with her age group.’

He explained that there was no sanction against a boy or girl of twelve having sex, or a pair of fourteen-year-olds playing at it, or two fifteen-year-olds. But an older man was forbidden to engage in sex with a young girl unless he had marriage in mind. Within the same age group almost anything was permitted.

‘There are risks, though,’ Mark said. ‘If the girl becomes pregnant and has a child she will not find anyone to marry her. A man wants someone fresh, and his own child. The father of the child will deny he is the father if he does not want to marry. She might become a man’s second wife, or else not get married at all, just raise her child alone.’

‘Will she be conspicuous in the village?’

‘Yes, because when a woman is circumcised and married she wears different clothes — to show everyone she is a married woman.’

This folklore and the IRA book were so depressing, I went to Helen’s house and planned another meal. This time I did not argue about the Bible. Instead, I let Helen teach me some gospel hymns in Samburu. Helen clapped her hands and sang in a joyous way:

Marango pa nana!

Shumata tengopai!

Na ti lytorian — ni!

(This world is not my home!

My home is in heaven!

Where God is!)

With that promise you were conditioned to brush off the years of drought, the poor harvests, the abandoned schoolhouse, the damaged borehole with its trickle of water, the awful bar with drunken men, the clitorectomy, and Kenya’s horrible AIDS statistics: they were just blips in the vale of tears on the way to heaven.

The welding was done, but there comes a point in all African journeys, usually late in the day, when it is wiser to hunker down with the other prey than stir and tempt the predators, virtually all of whom roam at night. This is as true in the bush as it is in any African city. And so we had another night in Serolevi, another meal, more starlight, and early the following morning set offfor Isiolo, at the edge of the desert.

We did not make it. On a particularly bad stretch of road, where we were expecting shifta, there was a loud bang, and we fell to the floor again. But again it was a blown tire. This did not stop us, but it slowed us, and from the way the vehicle listed it was obvious the welded spring had lost its bounce and was settling on to the axle. We crept along, the chassis banging.

Letting go of the anxiety from the fix we were in — it was clear we would be stranded again soon: why worry? — I looked at the scenery. No landscape since I had left Cairo had been as beautiful as this desert land of northern Kenya. It had hardly been settled, it was nominally Kenya but it was off the map, its unearthly appearance making it seem enchanted.

We were on a high plain, and although the land was mostly flat and gravelly, there were sudden and stupendous erupted mountains all over it, at a distance. Some of them were huge, five- or six-thousand-foot-high bread loaves — tall steep mountains of stone, beautifully smooth, with rounded summits and very little vegetation, not like anything I had ever seen before, but suggesting the surface of another planet, the dark star of Africa.

Several hours passed as we rolled along slowly, the bruised vehicle on the bad road. The road was famous for bandits yet it was noon and so hot that nothing stirred — not even dikdiks or camels. For much of that day we had traveled through a land without people. The Canadian man was gabbling. I knew what he was saying, and so I turned away and lifted my eyes to the hills.

Archer’s Post was a small smudge far away. Seeing it, I reassured myself that if we broke down right here in this wadi I would grab my bag and hike the rest of the way: the distance was walkable. But that was not necessary. The truck was lopsided from the cracked spring and the blown tire flapped, but we made it to the main street — the only street — in Archer’s Post. There, with Ben’s news that it might be another night of repair, and that asthmatic Jade had to be rescued from the hospital, and the Canadian grinning — a self-appointed bore with one remark — I made a decision to bail out. I would abandon the congeniality of this Africa overland trip and take my chances with the next bus to Isiolo, if there was a bus. Group tours were not for me.

‘Cheerio, mate,’ Ben called out, waving symbolically with a monkey-wrench.

I said goodbye to them all, and hoisted my bag on to my shoulder and walked away from the truck. I had seen items in travel magazines all the time advertising ‘Overland Africa — Experience the Adventure.’ And now I knew what this adventure entailed. If you are on such a group tour, you are the human cargo, one of a truckload of young people, many of them good-hearted, some of them very silly, sitting on a bench on the truck bed, earphones clamped tight, eating dust, listening to your Enya tape. You might get held up by shifta, you will certainly be held up by flat tires, you will seldom wash. No one calls out ‘Are we there yet?’ because no one except the driver has the slightest idea of the route or the difficulty. We had crossed the wide Dida Galgalu Desert, and north of Marsabit the Ngaso Plain. We had climbed to the Kaisut Plateau and been stranded for two days in Serolevi on the Losai Reserve, and had traversed the foot of the desert mountain, Olkanjo. If you had asked any of them where we had traveled the answer would have been, ‘Was that where Kevin barfed?’ or ‘Was that where jade gagged?’ or ‘Was that where the road sucked?’ After months of trucking in Africa everyone on board has the dull torpid smile and brain-damaged look of a cultist.

‘Aren’t you a little old for this, Dad?’ my children say, when I relate a travel experience that involves the back of a truck. My answer is: Not relly. It is not the truck that makes me feel old — big efficient trucks overcome obstacles that baffle little cars. It is the passengers who make me feel — not old, not fogeyish, but out of place. I had been grateful for the ride, grateful to Ben and Mick for their ingenuity and patience; I was also grateful to leave, even if leaving meant wandering down the main street of Archer’s Post, a tiny dust-blown town in the middle of nowhere.

Teenaged boys left their perches at the shops and followed me, pestering me, asking me where I was going, where I was from. They were used to foreigners in Archer’s Post — the Samburu Game Reserve was west of here, and I saw game lodges advertised on signposts at the edge of town. Tourists were sped here in minibuses, fresh from the plane, dressed in very expensive safari clothes, with pith helmets and khaki jackets. Their trousers had eleven pockets, their sleeves were trimmed in leather and amply gusseted.

When the pestering boys had surrounded me and were making a nuisance of themselves (‘Wewe, muzungu’) and I was on the point of shouting at them, a Jeep approached. I raised my hand for it to stop. It did so: a miracle.

Saved again by another nun, Sister Matilda, with a familiar accent.

‘Yes, I am from Sardinia! Get in — we can talk!’

And, recalling Italy, we traveled south to Isiolo. It was only an hour away by this fast car, but we had not gone far down the road when the unfamiliar smell of rain-soaked fields rose to cool the air. The fields were green, the road muddy in places. I had not seen mud since Addis Ababa. There were pastures, cornfields, smallholdings and wooded valleys, and hills scored with the furrows of cultivation. Tufted green copses graced the banks of little creeks.

‘Did you have any trouble on the road?’ Sister Matilda asked.

‘We were shot at by shifta around Marsabit. Several trucks were attacked. Was it in the newspaper?’

‘No!’ She laughed. ‘ “Shot at.” That is not news in Kenya!’

Obviously not, for that day’s Nairobi Nation was for sale in Isiolo, and near dusk, traveling to Nanyuki in a matatu — a speeding minivan with bald tires, jammed to capacity with ripe perspiring Kenyans — I read the day’s news: ‘47 Shot Dead in Village Attack’ — 600 members of the Pokot tribe taking revenge on a village in western Kenya, torching 300 huts, stealing hundreds of cattle, and killing teachers, students, women and children as young as three months. There was a story about a fourteen-year-old boy who was killed in crossfire between cops and robbers in the town of Kisii. Yet another story related the theft of four million shillings in an armed robbery: ‘The police collected AK-47 cartridges at the scene.’ There was a vivid and grisly account of a riot at a soccer match, and an update on Kenya’s AIDS epidemic.

Compared to this, pot shots at south-bound trucks on the Marsabit road was not news at all, and anyway, the desert between the Ethiopian border and Nanyuki did not exist in the minds of most Kenyans.

‘The north is not Kenya,’ an African told me in Nanyuki. ‘It is not Somalia or Ethiopia. It is another country. The Kenyan government does nothing for it. It is a place run by foreigners — they manage everything, the schools, hospitals, churches. They are run by charities and aid agencies and NGOs, not by us.’

He was not angry or cynical, nor even grateful; just speaking the plain truth.

The Sportsman’s Arms Hotel in Nanyuki was hosting a conference on camel health. British soldiers from the army post nearby were playing pool and howling at each other in the upstairs lounge bar, while Africans were chuckling into cell phones in the lobby. Chuckling was all I ever saw African cell phone users do. On the road near the hotel prostitutes in tight dresses were walking up and down in stiletto heels — the wrong footwear for a muddy road, but what the hell: this was civilization.