A Primate's Memoir by Robert M. Sapolsky

Author:Robert M. Sapolsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

Dum de dum … Torit!

Dum de dum … Juba!

Dum de dum … Khartoum!

Dum de dum … Sudan!!

Tremendously animated, couldn’t keep still while singing. The second time, I sang along, both of us crooning together as if this were a song from our youth together. We bowed again, and he pranced away.

Certainly a good way to start off. I headed over to the police post to report in. The cop was a grizzled old man in a striking green-and-black striped outfit that could have been pajamas, or a leisure suit, or stolen from a prisoner. No one else was there except for an ageless crone sitting outside. I entered, presented the man with my passport and travel permit obtained in Juba. He grunted, squinted at the passport, held it sideways and upside-down, seemed not to know what to do with it. Finally, he spoke.

“Do you have your passport with you?”

It was a delicious African moment that I could not pass up.

“No, I do not have my passport,” I answered with deathly seriousness.

“That is very bad, very bad. Where is your passport?” Oh, perfect. I looked him in the eyes.

“You are holding my passport.” The balls in your court, copper. Could he save face? He turned out to be a polished professional—he glanced at the passport now seriously, actually flipped open the pages, looked at my picture, compared it with my face. Finally, he had his comeback line.

“You are right. This one is your passport. Now you can stay.”

We relaxed, his job over. Suddenly, he lunged at me, said, “We must go now.” Wha, wha, what did I do? It was time for dinner. The old woman outside, his wife, fed us beans and cabbage, and there was all the water one could dream of. I thanked him, and he said, “You are our guest. You do not say thank you. Would you thank your mother?”

The cop’s son, Joseph, about twenty years old, appeared. He was a schoolteacher here, just out of high school in Juba, and thus quite qualified. He was wearing a fine white shirt. I had been noticing other young guys in white shirts passing on the road by the light of our fire, women in white blouses. “You are lucky,” he says. “Tonight is a dance.” What’s the occasion? “No occasion, we dance every night, so you are always lucky when you come here.” Suddenly, I realize that I had heard music, drums, when I first walked through the village.

After eating, more water, Joseph and I departed for the dance. We walked through a stretch of forest, meeting more and more white-shirted people. The music got louder until we came to a large clearing, teeming with hundreds of dancers in white. Instantly I understood it—it was desert altitude euphoria. Scattered throughout the northern Kenyan desert, insane stinking hot shimmering desert, are occasional mountains, plateaus. On top, higher, cooler, there might be bush. On the larger ones, there are hints of forest. And always, somehow, there is water—a borehole, a spring.

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