Reunion in Barsaloi by Corinne Hofmann

Author:Corinne Hofmann [Corinne Hofmann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908129208
Publisher: Arcadia Books Limited
Published: 2011-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

The longer we talk, the more relaxed everybody gets, and eventually I pluck up the courage to ask Lketinga how he felt when he realized I wasn’t coming back. He looks at me gravely and says: ‘At first I simply didn’t believe it because in the past you had always come back. I soon started having problems with the shop because trade fell off and so I got into difficulties over money. Everybody tried to cheat me. When the car caught fire, I had no money to repair it. So I sold the big car and bought a smaller one. I used it as a taxi until I had an accident and was put in jail. I ended up in a whole lot of problems and I’d really rather not think about it.’

James continued for him: ‘When I heard how things were – three years after you had gone back to Switzerland – I went back down to Mombasa to find him. Lketinga was in a bad way when I found him. I asked him to come home with me, which was what he wanted to do anyway. We agreed to meet up the next morning to get the bus to Maralal. But he didn’t turn up, so I went back on my own as I had to be back at school the next day. But a day later, when I was still waiting in Maralal for a lift to Barsaloi, Lketinga suddenly appeared on his own, and so we came back here together. Obviously he had nowhere to live and nothing else to his name except for a lot of animals. During the years when he hadn’t been here his herd of goats and cattle had grown substantially. Our older brother had looked after them for him. It’s the custom here that no one would sell or slaughter someone else’s animals.

‘So, despite everything, Lketinga was rich when he came home. We decided that the best thing would be for him to find another wife who’d build a house for him and have children. So one month later he married his second wife, Mama Shankayon. After her first child, however, she had a lot of problems: all their other pregnancies miscarried. Now she’s gone home to her parents and we don’t know when she’ll be back.’

Lketinga just nods absently while Mama listens in silence. I feel quite keenly that my ex-husband neither can nor will talk about his past anymore. To change the subject he starts talking about the book and the film and gets James to tell us about the way the success of my book went down in Barsaloi:

‘Well, as you know,’ says James, settling into his stride, ‘we’ve had lots of strangers coming here, mostly Kenyan journalists, asking if we know what’s in the book, that Corinne has written nasty things about the Samburu and got a lot of money for it. But each time we tell them that we know what the book says and we get money from it too and have no problems with it.

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