Equator: a Journey by Thurston Clarke

Author:Thurston Clarke
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497676473
Publisher: Open Road Distribution

12

After Kinshasa and Kampala, I was sick of venal soldiers and crumbling towns. I flew to Nairobi without incident, rented a car with a driver, and doubled back to where the equator first crosses the Kampala-to-Nairobi highway. The car was expensive, but the equator touches so many roads and villages in Kenya that it was the best way to see them.

YOU ARE NOW CROSSING THE EQUATOR, a yellow sign said, depicting it as a white band bisecting a black continent. But here, at nine thousand feet in the former “White Highlands,” with cows, pine forests, thin air, puffy clouds, sharp light, and perfect shadows, I thought of the high-altitude ranches of New Mexico or Colorado. As I photographed the equatorial sign, a shepherd ran from the forest, chasing a cow into the northern hemisphere. He wore a Don Quixote costume: rubber boots, a cloak, and a broad-brimmed plastic rain hat. He was toothless, and his earlobes, once stretched by ornamental tokens, hung like rubber bands without snap. He took an equatorial button and said his name was Kipkeyitanyi Arap Kikui and that he was a Nandi. The farm to the east, intersected by the equator, had belonged to “Europes,” but the government had expropriated it for Nandi farmers. To the west, the equator ran through government forest, and every month he paid a shilling to graze his forty cows there.

My driver, Kibet, whistled. “Forty cows! He is a rich man to have so many.”

“Do you often graze your cows on the equator?” I asked.

Kipkeyitanyi’s eyes darted from equatorial button to equatorial sign, and, surmising I was a partisan of the equator, he nodded so emphatically his earlobes slapped against his cheeks. “Yes! Always he brings his cows to the equator,” Kibet translated, “They love the grass here. They become fat on the equator …” On he went, so fanatical and unstoppable I suspected Kibet of exaggerating his answers.

“Such a nice man,” Kibet said as we left. “We were lucky to find him. If he was a Kikuyu, he would have charged shillings for talking to you.” He laughed, admitting to being prejudiced because he was a Kipsigis, a small tribe of farmers and herders allied with the Nandi. Kibet was also “a nice man,” and I was lucky to have found him. He had a long, Talmudic face and the runner’s physique common among his people. When we stopped at Lake Nakuru, it was he who stared longest through binoculars at the flamingos and said, “This is a pretty place,” and he who pointed out an eagle in a thorn tree, saying with disapproval that it preyed on flamingos and scattered thousands with a flap of its wings. When we stopped at a bookstore in Nakuru, he paid several days’ wages for a book, The Mystery of Flamingos. In free moments he gazed at the photographs, moving one finger along the text, all the while smiling.

Three miles east of the equator sign, we stopped at a town named Equator, a line of wooden stores along a plank sidewalk.

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