“POWER IS NOTHING WITHOUT CONTROL”, Beni read the Pirelli Advert sticker on a tire at the back of the Landcruiser. He held tight at the handlebar along the windows. He did not want tell the speed at which they were traveling. He however got the feeling that at most times the vehicle barely touched the ground. He shifted uncomfortably, trying to maintain his perch on the worn out leather seat. As the vehicle bounced on, moments of discomfort to him increased. He was not one of those people whose bones are far from his skin.
Cold wind rushed in through the hole on the window pane. And this wind bit into his eyeballs. To avoid the disquiet, he turned his face and through the back saw the Kirisia Hills receding in the background. On the hills was a thick forest. But it was the only forest one could see on the eastern side of Maralal. He guessed that either nature or man had wreaked havoc on the rest of the landscape, throwing the once beautiful countryside into near environmental catastrophe.
The indigenous forest was so lonely; so detached. It almost evoked the look of something that was not part of this land. It, in essence, refused to lose the appearance of a small mass of land left hanging in the middle when the wrath of erosion finally eats up everything surrounding it. But what erosion? He wondered. Was it an act of God? Could it be the doing of natural disaster? Or was it a matter of the dangerous prophecy that he had imagined but told nobody. In the making of this prophecy, his rampant imagination had driven him to whisper to himself this: if human beings did not stop destroying nature; nature would finally destroy them alongside itself.
The man sitting next to him must have guessed what was going on in his mind. Beni did not like such people. Either through speculation or art practiced over time, they guessed what he was thinking and then began forcing him into a conversation. A quick glance at the man made him suspect that he was one of those deluded political kinds that attempted to give politics such a simplistic take. Such analyses of politics in ways so facile as if commenting on Vioja Mahakamani did not appeal to his sensibilities.
It was difficult to approximate how old he was. Regardless, it was rather obvious that he had surpassed the then Kenyan life expectancy of 42.3. Nevertheless, at his presumed age he still maintained a bright face. In fact one could say that he was almost handsome. His head sat proudly on his neck; he hair closely shaven. Around his waist was a Samburu Shuka. There was yet another piece of the same attire folded neatly and made to run from back to front on his left shoulder. On the right hip, a leather handle of his sword emerged from a scabbard made of plastic cans of different colours. Within the period of his glance in which he gathered all these details, Beni discovered that the man was also very clean.
The clean man opened the window and let out a neatly evicted jet of saliva. This act made Beni wonder just how long he had practiced to attain such proficiency in that art. In retrospect, it was not actually saliva. Beni decided that if he were to name the substance, he would call it “Saliva of Multilateral Extraction”. Before the man let it out; he did a few other things. He first executed the scouring of his throat and allowed whichever element that came of it to move to his mouth. With expert rolling of his tongue, he seemed to have mixed it with the remnants of the green stick toothbrush he was using. Satisfied with the ratio and gelling of the mixture in his mouth, he let out the jet and then assumed the posture of a man who understands his liberties.
Beni’s eyes moved back to the landscape. Not so far away from the road, scores of tree stumps dotted the land. There were old ones and young ones; the young tree stumps were, without doubt, those of trees that had been recently denied life in their middling years. Among these stumps, little acacia shrubs struggled for the same life that had been snuffed out of other trees in this all-pervading sense of wastefulness. He momentarily glanced at the Pirelli advert sticker and tried to make sense of it in view of what he was seeing. Just as his eyes were moving from the sticker, the clean man took the cue.
“That is what a society gets when it sits back and waits for a non-existent voice to speak for it,” the man said with a determined nodding of his head.
The man paused as if waiting for Beni’s rejoinder and then resumed.
“This is not how it was when I was young. And those days it used to rain frequently too.”
At this point, Beni who had successfully covered his surprise at the man’s fluent English, shook himself from his reverie spoke.
“Sometimes it happens,” he said rather vaguely.
“But it shouldn’t happen, you know! It happens yes, but it shouldn’t!” the man said rather passionately.
Beni did not like the sound of his voice. The man was beginning to get too sure with him. He was beginning to push. Beni did not like it because he thought either the man saw he had found a willing audience, which Beni detested; or he imagined that he could compel him into revealing his opinions in the matter, which was impossible.
Beni knocked at the glass behind the driver’s seat when the sign post YARE CAMEL AND SAFARI CLUB began to emerge from the ground ahead. He would rather walk the rest of the distance than tolerate the discomfort of the clean man’s conversation. After all, he had the mayor’s son to meet.
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