Across the Great Rift (Cont.)

Outside Magazine March 2002

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OUR EXPLORATION OF THE LOITAS began the next morning when we drove Mokope and his infant son—who had a giant fungus growing out of his ear—to a medical clinic in Olorte, 20 miles and two hours away. The following day, Mokope, warming to the role of tour guide, led us to the top of the Hill of the Tick, which overlooked the Orng'Arua Valley. At the end of the valley the forest began—the famously disputed Naimina Enkiyio. It ran all the way to the eastern edge of the Loitas, then down the escarpment to the floor of the Rift. Mokope didn't know how many miles across it was, only that a man could walk it, in the dry season, in 12 or 14 hours.

A few days later we drove to the northeast corner of the Loitas, then hiked to a pass where cattle are driven up the ridge and then down to the market town of Narosura. It was called enaeni'inkujit, "the place where grass is bound." "This is the middle of nowhere," Mokope said, through Mike, as we looked it over. "There are no bomas around, and no one to come to your rescue, even if you yelled." He bent down, grabbed a handful of grass, and tied it in an overhand knot. "If you're going north, you bind the evil of the buffalo-infested forest that lies below. If you're going the other way, toward the grasslands, you bind the evil of lions."

We climbed a hill above the pass; there was a huge north-south view. The wind blew softly, carrying the sound of cowbells. We sat in the shade of a lalechwa tree, and Mike showed off a trick he'd learned as a kid, crushing the downy leaves until they emitted a soft perfume. Warriors used it as deodorant, he said, stuffing it under their armpits.

Mike could get pretty wistful when he talked about his childhood. The second of three sons, he'd been picked by his father to become the family herdsman, while his older brother was tapped for secondary school. Mike hadn't objected. A bright but stammering child, he loved animals and loved playing in the bush. It wasn't all idyllic, though. One day when he was five, he and a playmate jabbed a stick in a beehive to see what would happen. The bees swarmed, caught up with the other boy, and stung him to death. Another time, when Mike was eight and playing hooky, he and a friend followed the blood trail of a buffalo into a thicket. The next thing he knew he was spinning through the air. The buffalo—which had been shot by a ranger the night before—had gored him in the stomach and broken his collarbone, and Mike just managed to climb a tree before it finished him off. He was so scared that his brother had to cut the tree down to get to him. He was in the hospital three months. "When I came out, I had a different attitude about school," Mike said. "I started to work like crazy."

Mike turned out to be a better student than his older brother. So good, in fact, that he wound up second in the entire district in his primary exams. With his mother's encouragement he applied to Alliance, a prep school in Nairobi with an English headmaster. His father didn't want him to go. He had to sell five cows worth $100 to $150 each, a huge sacrifice that marked the beginning of Mike's alienation from his disapproving father.

The first year was total culture shock. His classmates were the sons of cabinet ministers. "These kids have already been to Europe and America, and I'm learning how to switch on a light," Mike said. Still, bit by bit, he learned how to swim, how to use a library, how to trust his teachers. Mike sighed and leaned back in the grass. "I was a star with a bright future when I was a kid," he said. "Every neighbor wanted me to befriend his daughter."

At 16, Mike returned home for the most important Masai ritual of all: circumcision. He went through it in the traditional style, sitting on a cowhide with a dash of cold milk for an anesthetic, as the oldoboro, or rustic surgeon, swiftly made the cuts. Mike's father timed the whole operation on a stopwatch. It took 47 seconds. Mike said the main thing was not to flinch. The slightest show of pain would disgrace not only the circumcisee but his entire family.



	Zebras browse north of the Serengeti

In the grass beside us, Mokope and Lulunken grunted their approval. Despite their limited English, they seemed to know what Mike was talking about. They were eager to share tales of their moran days—a sort of golden farewell to adolescence that starts right after circumcision and traditionally involves an extended period of wandering, cattle rustling, potentially fatal lion hunting, and all-out partying. "No one would tell you what to do, and you would always be offered milk as you went from village to village," Mokope told me. "There were always girls available, and we could lie in with them in the morning. I didn't go on many cattle raids. We would just steal one or two to eat, and if we were caught we had to pay."

Mokope laughed mischievously. "But I was never caught. I was blessed by the laibon."

Lulunken had taken his moran stint more seriously. In seven years, he'd amassed a herd of 50 cattle, the beginnings of real wealth. And he'd been on several lion hunts, some of them successful. They were officially illegal, of course, but if lions attacked livestock, they were considered fair game.

Mike listened attentively. He'd been a moran for just three months, during the school holiday. "It was fun, but I didn't go on any lion raids. You can get thrown in jail for that."

He reconsidered. "OK, I joined a raid, but thank God we didn't get it. I wasn't going to be the one to throw the spear or to grab the tail. Those are the two dangerous jobs, and there are so many casualties." Mike glanced at his in-laws and smirked. All in all, he confided, he'd had a better time as a Boy Scout in Nairobi. "We'd camp in the forest behind Karen, and my job was to spy on the other patrols and steal their techniques, how they pitched tents, dug their latrines. Then I would write it all down." He laughed. "That's really where I learned to camp."

In the early 1990s, a three-year drought struck Masailand. Mike's father refused to sell any cows, and one by one they died. Mike said his father was obsessed with not being seen by friends and neighbors as selling out to modernity. There was a lot of pressure that way in Masailand—a kind of fundamentalism that scorned all things new. By the end of Mike's third year at Alliance, in 1993, the family had only five cows left. There was no money to send him back, so he had to prepare for his secondary exams at the regional high school near his hometown of Narragie Enkare. His score was one point less than the threshold for law school.

Sitting here now, none of that seemed to matter. Mokope clearly loved his brother-in-law and even stern Lulunken seemed to respect Mike as a full age-mate. In Narragie Enkare, where we later spent an afternoon on the way back to Nairobi, I would get a slightly different impression. A market town surrounded by rich fields, it was not nearly as remote or traditional a place as the Loitas, and I was surprised to find that while Mike's old classmates had herds and family grazing lands they were a clean-cut, upwardly mobile bunch also making their living in more modern ways—one a doctor, one a lawyer, one a flight attendant on Kenya Airways. They were glad to see Mike, the prodigy of their primary school, but once or twice I caught them looking at him skeptically. Mike hadn't exactly made it in Nairobi, at least not yet. And when he did manage to set money aside, his plans never seemed to pan out. One of the first things he wanted to do was build his mother a new house. He'd bought the most expensive materials—40 cedar posts, dear commodities in a country largely stripped of timber. But six months later, he'd come home to find that his father had sold half of them and spent the proceeds on alcohol.

Mike freely admitted that he didn't know what he was going to do with his life. He didn't regret leaving Masailand behind; he preferred the teeming streets of Nairobi. It was just that in the big city the way forward simply wasn't as clear as it had been when he was a bright kid in a top boarding school. "Those were good days," he said, gazing across the Rift. "We were young and had no problems, and thought only about today. Tomorrow we were going to college and then to get a job. It was all going to take care of itself. But it didn't work out that way."

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