back through a series of high white clouds. To the right, a solitary mountain rose like an island in a silent sea; beyond
that, a row of worn and shadowed ridges. Only two signs of man’s presence were visible-a slender road leading west,
and a satellite station, its massive white dish cupped upward toward the sky.
A few miles north, we turned off the main highway onto a road of pulverized tarmac. It was slow going: at certain
points the potholes yawned across the road’s entire width, and every so often trucks would approach from the opposite
direction, forcing Francis to drive onto embankments. Eventually, we arrived at the road we’d seen from above and
began to make our way across the valley floor. The landscape was dry, mostly bush grass and scruffy thorn trees,
gravel and patches of hard dark stone. We began to pass small herds of gazelle; a solitary wildebeest feeding at the base
of a tree; zebra and a giraffe, barely visible in the distance. For almost an hour we saw no other person, until a solitary
Masai herdsman appeared in the distance, his figure as lean and straight as the staff that he carried, leading a herd of
long-horned cattle across an empty flat.
I hadn’t met many Masai in Nairobi, although I’d read quite a bit about them. I knew that their pastoral ways and
fierceness in war had earned them a grudging respect from the British, so that even as treaties had been broken and the
Masai had been restricted to reservations, the tribe had become mythologized in its defeat, like the Cherokee or
Apache, the noble savage of picture postcards and coffee table books. I also knew that this Western infatuation with the
Masai infuriated other Kenyans, who thought their ways something of an embarrassment, and who hankered after
Masai land. The government had tried to impose compulsory education on Masai children, and a system of land title
among the adults. The black man’s burden, officials explained: to civilize our less fortunate brethren.
I wondered, as we drove deeper into their country, how long the Masai could hold out. In Narok, a small trading town
where we stopped for gas and lunch, a group of children dressed in khaki shorts and old T-shirts surrounded our van
with the aggressive enthusiasm of their Nairobi counterparts, peddling cheap jewelry and snacks. Two hours later,
when we arrived at the adobe gate leading into the preserve, a tall Masai man in a Yankees cap and smelling of beer
leaned through the window of our van and suggested we take a tour of a traditional Masai boma.
“Only forty shillings,” the man said with a smile. “Pictures extra.”
While Francis attended to some business in the game warden’s office, the rest of us got out and followed the Masai
man into a large circular compound walled in by thornbrush. Along the perimeter were small mud-and-dung huts; in
the center of the compound, several cattle and a few naked toddlers stood side by side in the dirt. A group of women
waved us over to look at their bead-covered gourds, and one of them, a lovely young mother with a baby slung on her
back, showed me a U.S. quarter that someone had foisted on her. I agreed to exchange it for Kenya shillings, and in
return she invited me into her hut. It was a cramped, pitch-black space with a five-foot-high ceiling. The woman told
me her family cooked, slept, and kept newborn calves in it. The smoke was blinding, and after a minute I had to leave,
fighting the urge to brush away the flies that formed two solid rings around the baby’s puffed eyes.
Francis was waiting for us when we returned to the van. We drove through the gate, following the road up a small,
barren rise. And there, on the other side of the rise, I saw as beautiful a land as I’d ever seen. It swept out forever, flat
plains undulating into gentle hills, dun-colored and as supple as a lion’s back, creased by long gallery forests and dotted
with thorn trees. To our left, a huge herd of zebra, ridiculously symmetrical in their stripes, harvested the wheat-colored
grass; to our right, a troop of gazelle leaped into bush. And in the center, thousands of wildebeest, with mournful heads
barré
(Barré)
#1