Dreams from My Father

all part of one tribe. The black tribe. The human tribe. Look what tribalism has done to places like Nigeria or Liberia.”
    And Jane would say, “Ah, those West Africans are all crazy anyway. You know they used to be cannibals, don’t you?”
    And Zeituni would say, “You sound just like your father, Barry. He also had such ideas about people.”
    Meaning he, too, was naive; he, too, liked to argue with history. Look what happened to him….
    The van suddenly came to a stop, shaking me out of my reverie. We were in front of a small
shamba,
and our driver, Francis, asked us all to stay put. A few minutes later, he emerged from the house with a young African girl, maybe twelve or thirteen, who was dressed in jeans and a neatly pressed blouse and carried a small duffel bag. Francis helped her into the back and pointed to the seat next to Auma.
    “Is this your daughter?” Auma asked, scooting over to make room for the girl.
    “No,” Francis said. “My sister’s. She likes to see the animals and is always nagging me to take her along. Nobody minds, I hope.”
    Everyone shook their heads and smiled at the girl, who suffered bravely under the attention.
    “What is your name?” the British woman, Mrs. Wilkerson, asked.
    “Elizabeth,” the girl whispered.
    “Well, Elizabeth, you can share my tent if you like,” Auma said. “My brother, I think he snores.”
    I made a face. “Don’t listen to her,” I said, and held out a package of biscuits. Elizabeth took one and nibbled neatly around its edges. Auma reached for the bag and turned to Mauro.
    “Want some?” she asked.
    The Italian smiled and took one, before Auma passed them around to the others.
    We followed the road into cooler hills, where women walked barefoot carrying firewood and water and small boys switched at donkeys from their rickety carts. Gradually the
shambas
became less frequent, replaced by tangled bush and forest, until the trees on our left dropped away without warning and all we could see was the wide-open sky.
    “The Great Rift Valley,” Francis announced.
    We piled out of the van and stood at the edge of the escarpment looking out toward the western horizon. Hundreds of feet below, stone and savannah grass stretched out in a flat and endless plain, before it met the sky and carried the eye 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