Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [123]
According to a man I met at our hotel, a major sneaker company once recruited tribesmen like these for one of its national TV ad campaigns. A film crew came to Africa, gave the warriors special promotional sneakers to wear, and asked them to perform their usual leaping routine for the camera, while chanting in a local dialect called Maa. You may even have seen the ad; I'm told it ran in America for a while. Then again, maybe you didn't see it, because it was yanked off our screens rather quickly, after Maa-speaking viewers2 noticed that what the tribesmen were actually singing was something along the lines of “These shoes are too small, these shoes are too small; we hate them.”
There's no vouching for the accuracy of this story, by the way. But the man at the hotel swore it was true, and he was wearing a sports jacket, so I have no reason to doubt his word. Nor do I doubt that the Masai would do something like that. They have a wicked sense of humor. At one point, I ask Wilson what the Swahili word for “European visitor” is, thinking I can use it during my commentary for the show. He tells me it's msengo. Accordingly, throughout the Kenya episode, that's how I refer to myself: as a msengo. Only months later, after the episode has been rerun several times, not only in the United States but across the world, do I find out that msengo is Swahili for “homosexual.”
Well, as you can imagine, I am outraged.
“Oh, dear Lord, he's doing what??”
“Preparing a dinner in your honor.”
“Well, tell him to stop.”
With night closing in and the bushland's broader definitions dissolving into twilight, and as the last few leafless trees turn to black skeletal fists against a pink-and-orange sky, the time is approaching to film me going to sleep in the village, which it's decided will happen inside Wilson's new, and still slightly wet, cow-dung house.
Before that, though, we have to eat, and word right now is that Wilson has gone off somewhere to murder one of his goats.
“You should come and watch the ceremony,” Eric urges. He wants to film it.
“Not a bloody chance! I am not standing by while a poor little animal gets slaughtered on my account. It's barbaric. Tell Wilson I don't want it. I'm not hungry.”
But the deed is already done and within an hour the two-dimensional goat, which didn't have much going for it in the first place, is in pieces. And any hope I might have of quickly reassembling it is reduced further still when I find part of its rib cage roasting over a crackling fire.
“Sit—please,” Wilson says, indicating a log.
Call me paranoid, but I'm acutely aware the whole time, as I settle down to eat under the stars, that hordes of scheming, ravenous eyes are trained on me from afar. Not in a Scooby-Doo way; I don't see pairs of white dots out in the blackness, but I definitely sense something.
Now and then, dogs—the Masai's alarm system—growl, then bark crazily at the thornbush fence. Never a good sign. Something's out there, circling. There's also an indefinable sporadic chatter too, possibly from hyenas casing the joint.
“Thank you very much for showing me around,” I say, chewing on a goat rib. One hundred percent gristle, I was right! “But from everything you've said, it's clear that if I go outside the village now I'll get mauled and eaten.”
According to Jay's plan, this is Wilson's cue to invite me to stay in his lovely new dung hut tonight. And sure enough, the man plays his role like a pro.
“Then you'll have to stay with us,” he volunteers.
Stay overnight? Me? Here? Oh, gosh.
Once again, glancing to one side, I catch the twinkle in Jay's eye.
I have to say, the design of these bun-loaf houses is cleverer than it looks. The doorway isn't just a doorway; it's a mini maze, a tight, low-ceilinged corridor that winds around and back on itself like a paper clip before finally emerging into the room beyond, in the hope that, should the lions make it past the morara and leap the acacia fences into the housing compound, they'll become so utterly baffled by the intricate entrance mechanism to each