A foiled, circuitous wanderer now
Simon Courtauld
MY KENYA DAYS by Wilfred Thesiger HarperCollins, f20, pp. 224 This book represents the final chapter of Wilfred Thesiger's remarkable nomadic life. He is still, apart from failing eyesight, a notably fit octogenarian, but his journeys now are ended. Over the past 30 years he has travelled on foot, usually with camels, over most of what used to be called the Northern Frontier District of Kenya, also down the length of the Tana river to the coast at Lamu and, with donkeys, in Ngorongoro. He had passed his 60th birth- day when he walked round the top of Mount Kenya in one day. These days, how- ever, he stays put in Maralal, northern Kenya, only making trips to London once or twice a year.
While he has made his home at Maralal, Thesiger makes it clear that the house in which he lives is not his (though he paid for it), nor is the Land Rover in which he gets about (which he also paid for). They belong to members of what Thesiger likes to call his extended family; it is not, he insists, a master-servant relationship. He is more of a patron — the local Samburu address Thesiger as mzee juu (chief elder) — giving his friendship and support to a number of young people. (The patronage which he bestows, as I know from a visit to Maralal last year, can also cost him many thousands of Kenya shillings.) Thesiger's first Samburu companion, Lawi Leboyare, joined him in 1972, at the age of 12. Thesiger taught him to box (he was captain of boxing at Oxford in 1933), to climb and to drive, and took him to England for a month. It was largely thanks to his encour- agement that Lawi became mayor of Maralal.
Wherever he has travelled during his life — Abyssinia, Sudan, Arabia, Kurdistan, the marshes of Iraq — Thesiger has always enjoyed the company of tribal people, and they have been instinctively drawn to him. In 1968, close to Lake Rudolf (he prefers the old name to Lake Turkana), he was joined for a few weeks by a 14-year-old Turkana boy calling himself Erope (`spring rains'). The following year Thesiger was again camping on the south-eastern shore of the lake.
As we neared Loiengalani, Erope popped
out of a bush and said, 'I'm coming with you'. I said at once, 'Good, come with us', which he did and he was to remain with me for nine years.
Years later, Erope was killed while leading a band of outlaws on the Sudan border. When someone spoke disapprovingly of his former protégé, Thesiger commented: 'It's Just what I would probably have done if I'd been Erope. After all, he typifies the Kenyan version of Rob Roy.'
One has the feeling that Thesiger rather regrets he has not had more opportunities, as nomad and honorary tribesman, to take the law into his own hands. Having been beaten up two years ago by intruders with clubs while he was in bed, he now keeps in his bedroom a Samburu spear and a fear- some warrior knife, which he also has beside him while eating dinner. When I stayed at the house Thesiger would enjoy discussing which weapon to use should he be threatened again. While he was working as a temporary game warden east of Mar- alal,
Rodney Elliott had told me that if we did encounter shifta, who were utterly ruthless, we should shoot them on sight. I had been hoping on this journey that we should do so . but we were again disappointed not to find any shifta and only their stale tracks.
During his early years in Kenya, Thesiger spent most of the time sleeping in the open or under canvas. It was not until 1978 that he had a roof (of corrugated tin) over his head, in a house which he built with Lawi. Now he lives in a similar house, its walls plastered with mud and cow-dung, which was built by Laputa (named by Thesiger after the preacher who led the Kaffir up- rising in Prester John). The absence of electricity and running water are no incon- venience, but he is frustrated at his inability to read or write (this book had to be dictat- ed). Nor can he take any more of his excel- lent black-and-white photographs, some of which are published here for the first time.
The disappointment of the book is that Thesiger neglects to give his views on the government of Kenya and the country's future. He writes interestingly about tribal customs and the animals that he has seen on his various travels; but he does not con- sider the problems being caused by popula- tion, unemployment and corruption, all of which are growing at an alarming rate. Thesiger mentions that he has only once met Richard Leakey, the ex-director of the Kenya Wildlife Service; but one would like to know his opinion of Leakey's work and the future for the country's wildlife, now that he has been forced out of his job by government politicians. Thesiger has a healthy distrust of the United States, and makes brief reference to the increased scale of violence since multi- party democracy was introduced in Kenya, at American insistence. But he should have gone on to give his strongly held views which he has expressed to me — on the wrongheadedness of western policy
towards countries such as Kenya. With a multi-party system, parties will inevitably form along tribal lines, and tribal divisions, suppressed in a one-party state, will be reopened and violence will surely follow (vide Yugoslavia).
The veteran nomad knows about both tribal and animal behaviour. He is critical of the Adamsons (of Born Free fame) for having turned the lions which they reared into potential man-eaters, because 'the lions had inevitably lost their instinctive apprehension of human beings due to their close association with them and since as cubs they had never been taught to hunt.'
Thesiger's point was proved when one of George Adamson's lions, having mauled a friend's son, then killed his cook and was shot by Adamson while it was carrying off the corpse. But Thesiger did sympathise with Adamson for having to cope with his appalling wife Joy, who would shout hyster- ically at him in front of their guests. After one such occasion, Thesiger writes, 'I won- dered why he had not taken her out into the bush and shot her.' She was later stabbed to death with a long knife by a Turkana servant, a fate of which Thesiger would no doubt have thoroughly approved.
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