Hello lovely people! Hope everybody is having a wonderful week.
Small request this week. I’ve been doing the Cambridge Non Fiction Creative Writing Course, and thinking of submitting a refined version of the below as my final piece. I would love any feedback (my email is laurenholtlevine@gmail.com), the more savage the better.
Caveats: This is very much draft no.1 and completely open to change. Last paragraph is definitely going to be de-cringeified/ I have to fix the ending, and I need to fact-check some of the myths - so please don’t take any of this as gospel. The aim is to cut c. 200 words - so tell me if there are any things screaming out to be axed.
Update: Submitted! Aaaah! Thank you to everyone who sent feedback - updated version below. Much love xoxo
Some things are just for beauty.
The morning is a bright, bright blue fading to yellow. White light on my eyelash is a similar size to the sun on far-off Lake Baringa, and it is the strangeness of this that I am thinking about as I look out over the savannah of Ol Ari Nyiro. I can see the route we are to travel, the expanse of plains, large enough to see the shadows of clouds overhead. We will walk over the curves of the Mukutan Gorge, down through the Rift Valley and then on to Baringa.
But we begin at Kuti, at the two yellow fever trees.
***
For the first white settlers, the yellow fever tree brought death. Mosquitoes congregate underneath it, spreading malaria, and so they named it for the sickness it brought in its wake. For some tribes in Northern Kenya, the yellow fever tree brings good luck. Boil the bark, drink the resulting liquid, and the sunny tinge produced in your skin will help you stand out in job interviews. Two yellow fever trees are everywhere on this conservancy. On vans, t-shirts, honey jars; embroidered in thread, painted by hand, debated in endless brand meetings.
Those two yellow fever trees, the larger casting a protective branch over the smaller, grow in the garden at Kuti. Beneath them are a dead child and the man who became his father. Long ago, a white woman buried her husband and later her son in this land, planting the trees above them so that the roots would blend with the soil of the bodies, and they would, one day, again reach upwards.
The son was not yet 18.
***
The walk continues. Picking our way through the bush, we come across a small lake, dove grey. Wayne, one of our guides, a high cheek boned, notoriously good-looking man informs us that the water has clouded, become milky from the wax running off the leaves. It is patterned, ripples emerging, a reverse rain, produced by darting insects, and fish gulping a breath of air.
The terrain is steep and unmapped. We are trampling new grasses, scrabbling and stepping our way over rocks bigger than a fist. I stumble, graze my thigh. Thomas, the second guide, cuts me a staff. I peel off the bark and grip the smooth cane underneath to steady me.
We reach a ruin, a burnt-out lodge, formerly the Mukutan Retreat. The floor remains a mess of broken plates, stark white, like bone, against the still-damp soil. Some long-ago plastic is warped and pocked and mouldy. An old tube, shattered glass, a half fractured purple lid, rusted cans. A former water tank, now a square metal hole in the floor. The supports have fallen in and two green plants have sprouted up. They poke up, leafless, strange and alien, long tails with nubs erupting out of them. I move, gently, a plank resting against one of the pillars, and see the stark contrast between the crispy dark charcoal, shiny and bright in the sun, and the muted brown of the protected wood.
It is a relief to leave this behind and return to the bush. To the pale fawn of the grass, the sage of the lelechewa and gentle orange mould speckling rocks on the border. To fall back into the grey spines of the acacia, a smattering of yellow leaves, the blue-black of exposed flint. Above, light on a cloud softens it, humanises it, turns it the off-white of a giarnuc’s belly. Below, dying leaves are littering the floor, cool and grey, curving upwards, the ground coated in dead minnows.
***
We walk under a towering tree, two metres across, covered with slashes and scars. White, large and split like a wishbone growing out of the rock, it is hundreds of years old and still breathing under the grey bloom of lichens and soot. Cut it, and there is fresh bark, amber and brown, and as you move further in, chlorophyll and wet, sticky sap. It is a strangling fig.
The strangling fig is a tree that consumes the one beneath it. On the cliff face, it has formed a great big knot of cacti and branches and vines, and the tree it first devoured is now utterly invisible.
For members of the Pokot tribe, like Wayne, the strangling fig is how the world came to be. At the beginning of time, a strangling fig stretched upwards, connecting the depths and the heavens, until it split down the middle and from this fig, walking on a wood with the nakedness of the newly exposed, came man. Roots in the earth, branches to the stars, and caught between both, us. The tree continues to possess special powers. We go to touch it and Wayne starts laughing. He warns us of the risks of the fig, how it can turn man to woman and woman to man.
We meet his little boy in the thatch boma that he lives in. There are three, two human size and one for the goats. Lil’ Wayne (as he is immediately christened) has inherited his father’s wide, dark eyes, has the squidge that only a three-year-old can possess. We offer him an Oreo. He runs away from this strange chemical not-food, tucking himself into the folds of his mother’s skirt.
Wayne tells us that every day a Pokot man must think of what he can do for himself, do for his family and do for his tribe. There is a long tradition of petty theft, of cattle rustling and small skirmishes that has existed, balanced in the ecosystem, for aeons. The strangling fig speaks to this desire to take a little more, bring back something for those you love and for the group you are a part of.
It was a member of the Pokot who shot the white woman who buried her son. In the hospital in Nairobi, the blood that was meant to save her life was not defrosted correctly. It has left her paralysed on her right side, unblinking, able to cling onto the hands of her grandchildren and occasionally gesture, but little else. The land that we have walked through is littered with bullet casings from the war, the natural ebb and flow of the bush disrupted by ‘No Man’s Lands’, cleared zones to improve visibility.
Ol Ari Nyiro is a stretch of land the size of Palestine. The Pokot and other tribes have been here for centuries. In the 1980’s, the white woman bought the land off another white ranching family, and has built up conservation projects, schools, businesses. When she is flown back from Nairobi, members from all the different tribes and communities agitate for a celebration. I do not think I am imagining the air of warmth and excitement at her return.
But I also can’t stop thinking about the molten brown eyes of Wayne’s young son. I know that many of the Pokot guides and rangers here used to fight in the war, that some have jobs on the conservancy as a way of keeping an eye on them. I do not know if Wayne is one of them, and the peace of this moment - surrounded by his family, drinking chai prepared by his wife out of his enamel mugs - is too fragile to be risked by asking.
***
Onwards. Past volcanic black knobbly rock, like a hide, the thick toughness of a pangolin. Past the tiny white fins of goats making their way over the brown of the mountains. Past spits of water, small purple basking flowers in the heath, the bronchioles of scrub trees. I catch the mottled neck of a heron, liver spotted, slate gray. Occasionally, a waft of wild basil sweeps over, and the savannah is transformed into the kitchen of an Italian nonna. We pass a bosquiat tree, defying nature, seeming to grow out of a boulder, the bottom awkwardly truncated. This is where the leopard put their kills, for no other predator can scrabble up the rock.
Every so often there is a flash of black on the ground. These are small pieces of obsidian, a rock that is not native here, and so must have been carried by a prehistoric hand. When you hold it up you can see the chips and scratches where it has been worked into an arrowhead or a knife. Long ago, these weapons may have been dipped in the liquid produced by the Desert Rose - a bright pink flower, laughably incongruous with the dark, thick, stubby tree trunk it noses out of, the gaudy nail varnish on an elephant’s leg. Dip the obsidian in a liquid formed of snake venom and the Desert Rose, and you increase the potency of your arrows.
Thomas, our second guide, told me this. He grew up here. As we’re walking, I realise that - though I’m seeing what our ancestors saw - Thomas is far closer to their experience than I am. I’m looking with a very shallow eye - marvelling at colours, beauty, birds. Mine is a flat world, one with interesting shapes and patterns and harmonies, but I don’t have any knowledge beneath it. Left alone here, I’d die after a couple of days. Thomas is moving through a far thicker world than me. He is seeing something steeped in sixty years of tribal wisdom, a world anchored down with knowledge, concepts, heft.
Where I see a short, stubby outgrowth, squatting in the scrub, Thomas sees the Naerua Eduls, a plant with a mesh for a root. Strip off the outside, massage water through it and it acts as a filter. The pointy green reed, bunching at the bottom like it’s been gathered by a fist is Santeria Raboosta and builds houses because it weaves well. The Acacia Nubeeja - a spindly, barren tree with a sharp, peppery smell - can be used as cure for coughing or flu if you take the bark and boil it. Chew the Salvador Perstica, and it acts as a toothbrush. We walk and he teaches me, gives me a glimmer into what it is he is seeing, the wisdom that I no longer have access to. It’s a light on another, deeper layer of complexity, a second thing I could marvel at if only I spoke the language to do so.
We pass a violet anenoma, and I ask him ‘What does this do?’.
He stops. It feels as if even the ceaseless, shifting air of Kenya slows down around him, this gentle, wise man.
He looks at me, the two yellow fever trees embroidered on his breast, and responds.
“This? This does nothing. Some things are just for beauty.”
Later on, he will walk with me in a forest and show me the ‘Warburgia Ugandanse’, or ‘Green Heart’. The tree that heals us. Branchless, it is formed of a triptych of tall straight trunks. Some parts are covered in orange-red spots, others flat, and smooth, and planed from the elephants who use their trunks to peel off the bark or pull it off with their tusks when they are sick. There will be a heavy, thick thud, a throwing up of dust as Thomas wrenches off the bark to be boiled into a bitter medicine. The wood below is a blush red. Carefully, he picks up soil and massages it into the skin of the tree to allow it too to heal.
Thomas is part of the Gema or Kikuyu tribe, a tribe that believed the first man (Gĩkũyũ) and woman (Mũmbie) walked from the hills of Mount Kenya, the truth in the myth attested to by the stone tools, the old arrows that we walk by. They were blessed with nine daughters and made sacrifices for each to have sons. Maybe a coincidence, maybe not, but of all the tribes in the local area, domestic life is easiest for the Kikuyu women. They have much more power and freedom than their Pokot counterparts.
It was three hundred Gema women and children who the white woman sheltered for months two decades ago after an attack from the Pokot. She brought them in, fed and housed them for free, and the legacy of this is writ large in the tone that Thomas speaks of her. She is, genuinely, loved.
Thomas shows me the Echinantas Aspera, carefully spelling out each letter of the Latin name for me to tap out into my notes. This short, spiky plant, bristling out of its stalk like a tethered caterpillar is used for witchcraft. The seeds and roots are taken and burnt to become ashes and put in poultices. Take the ash, lick it, spit it, banish it.
I wonder how this can be made to stand against the AK-47’s that can be picked up for less than $60 here.
***
Onwards, and into the heat of Mugi. We are out of Ol Ari Nyiro now, and we pass over the baked cracked hide of murrum soil, the red of an unmade urn, walk over crunches of curled up, dried out, desiccated leaves. A rusted donkey, coated in the African dust. Clustered together over a patch of earth is a judder of butterflies, a wall of thick, vibrating white, trying to dig together to get to water, the winged triangles like small ships sailing.
Seen from above, the line between the Mugi and Ol Ari Nyiro is stark, verdant green on one side, slight, sad tufted emptiness and bare soil on the other. I note how my idea of what is natural has changed. Where before I would have seen untouched scrubland, counted it as a wild space, now I am aware of the patches of over-grazing, the decimation of the natural grasses that the elephants need to live. Thanks to Thomas, my world is a little deeper.
We are walking out of the Rift.
In Maasai culture, it was this walk that took man up and out and into the world. Climbing up a ladder, emerging, born from the Gorge.
For the Samburu, we were first born on Venus, often visible in early afternoon. God – Nkai – built us a ladder, and we descended down here, the guardians or Lokiop, tasked to look after a new planet.
Is it better to have descended down from the stars, or to have walked up from the Earth, and how can we presume to be able to answer the question?
This is a place of false starts and new dawns. Of a body, breathed in by the roots of a tree, of a tree that strangled, and from which walked man, of trees that move man to woman and woman to man. Of mountains that flatten and fall away, of light that collapses the close and the far, of ladders from Venus and up from the Rift, of where man walked from the stars and the trees and the cattle and the apes.
Things will not fall in straight lines here. They balance in a way that we cannot presume to know the how and the what of - a cloud, a sky, a bird, a sun, a tree, a scrub, a bush, an ant, a long slow walk, a darting run, the close, the far away, the all together.
We finish sat on a small boat, and there is light above the lake, and stripes and bands, and mountains fall to flatness like they have been painted, and wood erupts in drags and fall over and there are clouds that are grey and fat and flat, and light falls in mist and makes wraiths.