OF THE DRIVERS AND ROADS IN SAMBURU

The man was not a driver. He could not be a driver. Even if he were in a place so deficient of drivers that anybody could be called upon to move a vehicle, he could not be called a driver. He was not a driver but he was now sitting in the driver’s seat. And the vehicle was moving because of the things he did while in that seat. As Beni struggled to promise himself that he was not going to hate him, he wondered whether he could be called a passenger or an occupant of the vehicle. He thought that one can only be a passenger if the vehicle one was traveling in was being operated by a driver. The absence of a driver turns you into a mere occupant of a moving vehicle however fast such a vehicle moves.

This thought led Beni to yet another thought. He had listened and heard news announcements of traffic accidents with wonderment. “A man has been charged in court with careless driving.” Such announcements always astonished Beni. The news would only make sense if the words CARELESS and DRIVER did not occur in the same sentence. As long as there was the aspect of being careless, then there could be no driving. A driver cannot and should not be careless. Only movers of vehicles are careless. Another intriguing piece of news: “a middle aged man was yesterday taken to court and accused of over speeding.” 

Such statements intrigued Beni because of the reason that his mind created every time he thought about it. Anybody who engaged in over-speeding was unfit to bear the title, DRIVER. In his own considered opinion, Beni thought that such a statement should be replaced by another that is truthful and meaningful: Yesterday, a man was taken to court and accused of moving a vehicle on the ground quickly and recklessly. He again imagined that the words “OVER-SPEEDING and DRIVER were mutually exclusive and should not occur anywhere in the neighbourhood of each other. Anybody who over-speeds cannot be a driver! Maybe such a person should be called something new: a fast and reckless mover of a vehicle on a road.

Even as his mind raced on, condemning and uncondemning people and physical things, he spared room for going back and saying sorry should his ideas be found wrong. Maybe the thing Beni was traveling in could not qualify to be called a vehicle, and therefore, whoever moved it was under license to treat it as such; license to treat it as it deserved. 

The vehicle was not actually a vehicle. In fact, the only thing that made it come to life and be meaningful equipment was the aspect of speed. The mover of this metallic implement might have noticed that people were too willing to write off something he had bought with his hard-earned cash. As a consequence, he resorted to moving it so quickly and so recklessly. As if to spite contemptuous observers. As if to astonish those who doubted that it was a vehicle. 

As this absurdity of a vehicle rattled on, Beni once more promised himself that he was not going to hate one who was moving it. The very affair of moving on the road inside this metallic entrapment afforded him various insights into the nature of Samburu and its people. These people included, but were not limited to the natives. Apart from the natives, these people consisted of the workers who had traveled from far and wide to live and work in Samburu. Depending upon the lengths of time that they had lived in samburu, some of them indeed qualified to be termed natives of this beautiful countryside. 

Traveling on the roads within Samburu was to Beni an attempt at description. It was a chance for one to see both the self, and others unfold before the eyes. As the vehicle you are in rocks you and bumps you from side to side, you see a description of negligence. It is a description of how a region could be so disregarded and left to lie in waste as other regions make huge strides in development. It makes you wonder why people went to the ballot every five years to elect leaders. 

For the first few months of his coming to Samburu, Beni entertained the thought that the people of Samburu did not take part in voting. That was until he saw a man mount to the podium and promise unusually patient residents that the road would soon be made. Beni was later told by his friend that the promise of the road being made had been made for fifteen years with very little success in the offing. So, as occupants in the vehicle swayed their heads aimlessly and knocked their heads with each other because of potholes, Beni saw something else. He witnessed a region and a people so needlessly neglected.

The roads and the drivers of Samburu also allowed workers who lived there to observe their own dreadful condition. These were men and women who mostly were not natives of this land. They had arrived in Maralal with various dreams. Settled and more aware of where they were, they had now to sit back and sometimes watch their dreams fade as they were turned into nightmares. The hardy nature of the vehicle as it was forced to rattle on the rugged road in essence represented the resilient spirit of these men and women who had refused to give up, their degraded circumstances notwithstanding. 

The vehicle was now at Baawa junction and Kisima centre was now visible at a distance. It was a small centre, a collection of shops and non-shops; houses and non-houses. It nestled on a gentle slope. Even now, should you pass by, you will notice the gentle slope slowly giving way to the small Kisima Lake. You will see this just as you pass the gate of Kisima Health Centre, heading for Kisima Girls’ High School. As the buildings at Kisima centre came closer, Beni formed a thought he was going to alight with. In Samburu, the situation forces you to find something to think about as you disembark from a vehicle. This day being Sunday, he recalled an entry in his diary. 

Sunday 21^st April, 1995

Today I giggled in church. It wasn’t funny what amused me. Maybe just a little puzzling. Jesus was not originally the son of Herod after all. That is what my older brother once told me. Worse, last Sunday evening my brother told me that the story of Jesus is in the book of Goliath. Well, I will have to find a more intelligent way of expressing my amusement. My father has this evening promised to break my neck should I ever laugh in church. Still, I will advise my brother to stop carrying the small Gideon’s International Pocket Bible. He simply does not read it. If he ever reads, he has no intention of remembering what he reads. Gotta sleep early tonight. School opens tomorrow. Lugulu A.C. Mixed Secondary School. We call it LACSS.

BENI'S MIND FACES THE RAVAGES OF NATURE

The wind again. It was not even a wind. It was a gust of deadly movement of air; a movement of air lacking creativity in every sense of the word ‘creative’. Creative wind is that which whistles as it breezes by your ear; it brings the scent of distant flowers so that you can have a taste of the essence of the flowers. In this case, it should have brought the tantalizing air full of the wind’s awareness of the environment; it did not carry any awareness this wind. 

It banged the doors, swept the dried leaves under the stems of drying cactus and acacia plants. It fixed dust particles at the corners of your eyes. This made your eyes acquire the grinding feeling when you blinked. Later, when you had tried to blink without succeeding, your eyes took upon themselves to attract some white foam at the corners closer to the nose. As you walked in the baking sun, sweat would trickle down and meet the white substance at the corner of the eyes. And on-lookers would feel like vomiting.

It went to a whole new level this wind. It transported hoards of dust into your eyes. This wind. Beni wished it could do anything else. Any other thing except trying to make him stop thinking. It almost made his mind go blank with desperate musings about why he thought things could be better. The wind almost succeeded in its determined scheme until the heat rushed down. The heat was not like the wind. Where the wind had failed in creativity so that it came in violent and confused brutality, the sun sought a more direct line of action. It did not flatter. The sun. The heat.

Beni remembered his Physics lessons. Light years. He almost got amused by the idea that light from some celestial bodies took eight hundred years to reach the earth’s surface. This heat – he thought - could only be the effect of rays racing from the centre of the sun while still raw. Funny aint it? No it could not be funny. This was because what nature had been running on to save humanity from assured extinction was finally getting consumed. Ravaged. Mere musings. It was neither funny nor tragic. It was tragicomic. Smiling while dying. Thoughts lost in the thin wind. The heat. Sweat. All these were drastic expressions of nature’s disgust with man; nature’s dissatisfaction with prevalent hollowness of action.

The floodgates had been opened.  And from the floodgates, came thoughts. You might have been tempted to think they were thoughts in a hurry to be known.  And as it would one day be said, they were thoughts that could only be described in the superlatives: the worst of thoughts; the most extravagant of thoughts; thoughts of the most tragicomic aspect; thoughts of the most random element. But he was happy. As long as he was thinking he had to be happy. This was eloquent testimony to the assertion that he was a thinking man. With ideas of such magnitude, he reassured himself. With such ideas in his mind, he could lay claim to the belief that he had an intelligence; an IQ he would have liked to believe was in the region of double digits.

His mind was racing with abandon disregard to speed; it may even have reached a speed at which he thought it could not effectively process the information that was getting in and out of it. Talk of mighty data in the range of terabytes being processed on a computer with a mere 256 MB of RAM. He wanted to get a tight grip on his mind and arrest it but he could not. At this rate he was going to stop being rational; he was bound to get unrealistic. In this surrounding where everything was getting ravaged by the fury of climate, you needed to be at the peak of his senses. The wind again! This time dust did not come like a chariot of pharaoh’s soldiers. He began imagining what his diary might have looked like twenty years ago: 

Monday 23^rd February 1991

Mum is not very clever. She did not even know I was not sick when I said  I was. Mr. Paulo the Math teacher saw me running with sugarcane from the church’s farm. Couldn’t go to school today. In our school the teachers punish you even for things you do at home. Like failing to go to church or making noise at the river. I even got punished yesterday for rehearsing a signature at the back of my book. Was thinking of using the signature in KCPE registration three years from now. I had to miss school today. What with the merry-go-round beating?

 Tuesday 24^th February 1991

After five minutes of trying to persuade Achero our cow that she needed to be milked, she let me milk her. Moments later, she induced her most accomplished frustration strategy. I was almost filling the jug when she faithfully lifted her right hoof and silently placed it inside the jug. My bro laughed as if he had been expecting it all along. I hate that! Anyways, I transmitted the contents of the jug to my brother’s face. Next thing? We were rolling in cow dung. But I love my brother. Younger than me but he has a way of driving sense into anybody who attempts to mess with me at school. No hard feelings about him.

He stopped the crap about diaries. Beni was just arriving at the BP Filling Station at the major junction in Maralal. Dust partially covered the polythene bits of paper that lay scattered in trenches by the road side. Cold Pilsner at the BP Cafeteria would soon help mitigate the adult heat in his throat.

BENI'S SLICE OF HEAVEN (PART 2)

He had been young, but certainly Beni had seen these things happen. What he had not seen, he had read in school. He had been born at the time when the lucky ones were just beginning to come to grips with the delight of possessing power. These were the architects of the regime.  It was a regime that could hear none of what you said were you to gather the guts to say it. Either because of its fated non-familiarity with the emerging realities and concerns, or because of its downright ballistic response to criticism, the regime had refused to accept any view coming from those who were outside of it. 

In fact in some cases, it allowed itself to stop being accommodating to some of those within it. This type of insiders may have been baffled by their knowledge of the inside. Lacking the resources within their personality to withstand the political ironies of their time, they opted to leave the regime. However, some of those who found themselves out of favour with the regime were not cowards like the kind previously mentioned. They were men and women who for some reason or the other had discovered the truth – but to their own detriment. They had realized that their ideas were at variance with some of the absurd policies of the regime. With their leaving, they were afforded the infamous luxury of spending days, or even years in detention. 

As he made his way down the bare slope, Beni wondered why it had to be that the unkind things one thought about the regime could be so countless. And he told me he had refused to know some things. It was because while you saw a limit to how far anybody could go in being unjust, the guardians of the regime saw their limitless power to extend their atrocious exploits. He rounded a bend of a fast-drying woodland and dropped on to a dried path heading to Maralal town. As he was just about to reach the road, he saw something that distracted his line of thought.

When he saw it, he stopped and stayed behind a shrub that could barely hide him from view. For this one moment, he was content with being like the mongoose he had known in his childhood. This particular predator had the habit of very creatively tricking chicken.  After accumulating ants in its wide backside, it usually decided to hide the rest of the body in a bush and leave its behind exposed. The unsuspecting chicken coming to peck at the ants would then find themselves in a very uncomfortable arrangement. The mongoose would close its adapted behind, trapping the neck of the chicken before eventually escaping. Hiding without hiding, he saw the complexity of the ecosystem that depended on this pool not just for life, but survival itself. 

It was a small pool about the size of a volley ball field. On one corner, it had dark green cactus growing. On the rest of the edge, only hints of the plant remained, the rest having been devoured by the hooves of the thirsty animals that frequented the pool. At this moment, a small boy, while scolding a disobedient goat, was letting drops of water into his mouth from the polythene bag in his hand. Behind the boy, there was a young moran on the edge of the pool. He was very fearfully splashing water onto his back. From the action, Beni guessed that he might have been bathing. But it was not the rather strange ritual with water that attracted Beni. It was something that he found to be a strange phenomenon. To avoid getting extremely surprised at it, he shifted his eyes from the moran’s waist and silently promised that he was not going to be shocked about the blessings that another man had received.

As he began walking away, he beheld an older man brushing his teeth. He was moving towards an aged log. Before sitting on it, the man lifted his shuka up to the waist and before Beni could wonder, proceeded to place his bare behind on the log. Later Beni would be told that there are many of this kind who after washing their shukas do not imagine seeing them dirty. As Beni turned his curious eyes away, his mind turned with it and he resumed his reflection on the relationship between the regime and the environment.

*                *                      **        **                    *                      *          * 

He wondered why nobody within the confines of the regime had cared to listen to her. Some had thought her mad. Others thought that it was some sort of drunken obsession with academics that sent her weeping and hugging trees. Still, others only saw the figure of a woman determined to bring down the male establishment. Like a prophet who is never appreciated at home, she had been reluctantly accepted as a true heroin after the Nobel Peace Prize. Even then, those who had castigated her and sent the police to descent upon her head with batons were willing to mount the nearest podium and proclaim her greatness. They were even as insolent as to want to bask in her glory.

The heat roughly swayed his mind from these thoughts. He felt as if he was witnessing the systematic degeneration of the environment. Although he could not say that he was really scared, he could not put his bet on the fact that he was pleased with the shape things were taking. Where once green grass had thrived, only a couple of months earlier, hot dust was quickly diffusing into scary heat waves. The fine eloquence of the cold winds that sometimes breezed the Samburu plains had steadily become deadly doses of radiation eating into his very brain. In this setup, Beni could only pray for his sanity. 

One could not even get proud. Actually, it was impossible to feel proud; to put your hands in your pockets and calmly whistle in the sweet evening air as you walked around. Even as you went to talk friends, the heat hung over you and forced you to walk around with it. And lacking options, you had to carry it around like a hawker who must carry his wares.

BENI'S SLICE OF HEAVEN

He thought about heaven. There was no doubt that he, like everybody else, wanted to get there. At that moment, he could only think about it. For some people, heaven is the place where only those who live according to the wishes of the Creator end up. This kind of people tries to live from day to day, deriving hope from the assurances they receive from their Creator through their faith. The level of their digression notwithstanding, they – as such need may arise - fall at the feet of their Creator and plead for the restoration of the cherished relationship between Him and them. 

To them, whatever is conceived out of the controversies that result from the ageless conflict between science and religion matters little. Where the scientist seeks concrete evidence about the existence of heaven, the believer seeks from the Creator an understanding of the mystery of heaven. As Beni thought about these things, he refused to engage in the speculation of finding out who was right between the believer and the scientist. After all, it was not the politics of religion that was the chief issue which had inspired this meditation about heaven in his mind.

For others yet, heaven is but a heartbeat away. For these, heaven lies in the enchanting laughter of their loved ones. It springs from the invaluable words of gratitude flowing from the mouths of those they help; it is felt in the genuine handshakes of honest people; it lights up in the smiles of little children as they begin the journey of their lives; and most of all, it throbs in their blood and the breathing of fresh air which, indeed, is the appreciation of the qualities of their own personalities. These, Beni thought, are the same people for whom heaven lies in the gentleness of their mothers; the steady presence of their fathers; the concerned awareness of their brothers and the understanding embrace of their sisters. This second kind of heaven was closer to Beni than the first one.

It is the third sort of heaven that had sent his mind rocking on the turbulence of thought and drifting atop the silences of his meditation. It was the sublime world that was created to manifest itself in nature. In this, the hand of the presence of God was most evident. It is there in the flow of crystal-clear water on and around stones so patiently smoothened by the water itself. When you splash this water on yourself, you have always felt revitalized. It is this same water that has whetted the thirst in the young children tending goats and sheep in the grazing fields. This water has melted the heat in the feet of many a long distance travelers who have stopped by in their travels which have been occasioned by varying motivations. 

This heaven has been lived by the dwellers of arid and semi-arid areas during the infrequent times they have felt the splatter of rare rain on their skins. At these uncommon times, such residents have not been in a hurry to shelter themselves from the rain. But even as they have savoured such moments, they have not stopped to ask themselves where the rain began beating them. This, Beni thought, was the tragedy resulting from the unfair interaction between human beings and the environment in which they lived. That the mutual sustenance between man and the environment could not be noticed by human beings was a source of a great heaviness in his heart. If anything, it was a fact that while the environment could do without human beings, it was inconceivable that anyone should imagine the existence of human beings without the environment.

As the human being descended on forests and wetlands with fury, Beni only wished people would notice soon enough that in the foreseeable future, only one thing was inevitable: If human beings went on with their abandon destruction, they would in eventual effect destroy themselves alongside the environment. And Beni shuddered to think of the innocence of the environment within this senselessly unnecessary war in which it had been thrust. He could only hope that the heaviness he felt in his heart would take residence within people.

When he had taken in enough of what he wanted to see, he refused to think about certain matters. He did not want to think about the builders and home owners in Maralal, and in Kisima, and in Poro, and in Wamba, and in Baragoi and in Lodokejek, and in Naiborkeju. He could not certainly waste a microsecond of his time to think about why they insisted that their fences be lined by wooden posts adjoined without any rumour of space. He rejected the nagging thought about the overnight loggers he had heard were literally eating up the Kirisia forest. Even the lorries he had met earlier that day fetching timber from Poro to Maralal did not form a fragment of something worthy of consideration in his mind. 

Perhaps the only thing that was relevant at the moment was a simple question: how could a people who were facing the real rage of environmental degradation fail to notice how their survival depended on the survival of the environment? He dismissed this question from his mind when he realized the possibility that the sufferers themselves did not care.

He was standing on the edge of the Malasso Viewpoint, twenty kilometres West of Maralal town. He held upon the steel railing on the edge of the cliff, and as he felt the tantalizing coldness of the metal, he breathed in fresh air that buoyed his soul and held him aloft. Taking in this untouched and undefiled natural phenomenon, he thought, may have been the reason why Safaricom had shot one of their most inspiring adverts at this location. Perhaps the communications company had wanted to give people what it means to appreciate the slices of heaven given to us by nature. 

He had a feeling; something close to what he had read about regarding the art of Yoga. He had viewed both with his eyes and his spirit. He had beheld a sight that made him have the true feeling of preserving his slice of heaven.

LONG WAIT FOR MAYOR'S SON

He still waited. It had been four hours since his coming into the Yare Club Restaurant. The mayor’s son had not arrived yet. This meant that he continued to inflict damage on the already dwindling resources of his pocket. For the first two hours, he had been in the bar with the bartender only. The man had henceforth proceeded to give a strangely weird interpretation of political events in the country. He even went on to suggest, and tragically so, that it was time Kenyans tried inviting Museveni to come and be president. This suggestion had paled to insignificance when he went on to say that he would only vote for president when one of his own stood in the election. At that point, Beni decided that he was going to be a passive participant in that conversation. But he refused to wonder.

He did not wonder. He had good reasons for not wanting to get surprised. He knew he was living in a country in which everyone behaved as though they could put claim to some remarkable knowledge in all matters ranging from politics to Marine Physiotherapy – if ever there was anything of this kind. That knowledge that everyone behaved like a professional in every imaginable field was already bad enough. Not wanting to make it worse, he chose not to argue with the bartender. 

He had learnt things. He could not say that he was old; neither could he say he was very young. He had been born six years before Michael Jackson stopped being black. At his age therefore, he could not enter a plea of ignorance on most contemporary matters. Least of all, he could not allow himself to be clueless on matters political. That is why he had to know things. But knowing things did not to him mean that he walk around the streets pleading with people to see things his way. 

He knew that political discussions were always willing to degenerate into sessions of heckling. They were consistently charged with passions, sometimes of epic proportions. Occasionally, he suspected that these passions would lead to people butchering each other faster than any computer can count. This did not mean that the butchering or something similar to it had not yet begun. These things were already happening, albeit on a limited scale. 

He feared talking politics in the bar. This was one of the most fertile grounds for these irrational passions to transform into bodily injuries or worsening of inter-ethnic tensions. He had seen such things in bars. On one occasion, he had seen a bottle disappear into pieces on a man’s head only for it to be promptly replaced by spurts of blood. 

His mind was beginning to move fast. He was beginning to feel a distant whirlwind take his head in circles. Perhaps it was the beer. But it could not be! He convinced himself with the memory that he had always gone beyond five beers and still retained the feeling that he yet remained with at least double digits on the IQ scale. He had to remain sober. It was not the beer after all, he realized. It was the music. The invisible stereo system in the bar was playing Franco’s Kipakisangameni. He wanted to believe it was this music beginning to spin his head.   

            “Wacha nikununulie kamoja,” said the bar tender.

Then he noticed the mistake he had made. Beni had offered the man a drink. He had known of people who just waited to be incited into buying liquor. Once they began revenging, they left you regretting why you had bothered to involve them on your account in the first place. 

“My friend, the desire for alcohol is just like desire for money, power and women,” spoke the bartender

“How do you mean?” Beni asked wondering when he had become friends with the man.

“You told me you are a teacher? Which university did you go to bwana? You don’t know that?”

“I should like to know,” Beni replied, successfully hiding his growing irritation.

“I almost became a CPA holder,”

“What has that got to do with money, power and women? Well, I studied arts at the university and know nothing about CPA,” Beni said.

“The Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility. Only three things have refused to obey it: money, power and women. The more you get, the more you want. And believe me, alcohol is almost like that.” 

With that, the man rose and tolerably dragged his mass towards the counter. Beni concluded that there was no wisdom in hating the man. He had proven that the bartender had not been given a head to merely separate his ears. There was something intellectually refreshing about dealing with such people. They gave you the almost comforting impression that a bar was not a place where people only went to drown their sorrows before eventually distributing such sorrows and frustrations to various urinal areas and toilets. 

His head started spinning again. This made him dismiss the flowery thoughts about the goodness of the bar. Such thoughts were simply the wanderings of a drunken mind. No he was not drunk! He could swear he was not drunk. He had to remain sober and wait for the mayor’s son. Although it was turning out to be like Waiting for Godot who never showed up in Anton Chekhov’s play, he had to be patient. 

He would not have noticed if it were not for the hair. It was not like the fake horse hair that populates the heads of Nairobi women. He stopped looking at her face and let his gaze drop gently, following the hair up to her waist where it thinned into a tail. For a brief moment, Beni found himself beneath the palm trees on the beach arriving onto her lips with his.

            “Where is Lengai?”

That was the name of the mayor’s son. The bartender had realized that Beni was beginning to have ideas about the lady. Like a caring brother, the decided to give him a clue that the lady was in the company of the man he was waiting for. He was glad and disappointed at the same time. He was glad that Lengai had finally come before his head began spinning faster. He was disappointed because the bartender had related the lady to the mayor’s son. He adjusted himself on the seat and waited. It was already six in the evening.