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.
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