The Window Seat by Aminatta Forna

Author:Aminatta Forna
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2021-04-20T19:10:57+00:00

How Stories Get Told

Kenya, 2008. I’d been in the country for a literary festival and workshop teaching young Kenyan writers and, by a piece of good fortune, was offered a commission by a glossy magazine that took me into a world I had only ever seen on television. I had a vehicle, driver and guide, Senteu, a knowledgeable and remarkably young Masai. On one of our first game drives we passed an antelope herd crowded in and around a stand of trees. Hundreds of animals. From what I could see they were all fully grown and bore antlers. A short way from the grove several were jousting and locking horns, in a fight that seemed somewhere beyond playful, but short of serious. I pointed them out to my guide, and he waved for the driver to stop.

‘That’s the bachelor herd,’ said Senteu. He explained that these were the males who had failed to attract females, so they formed a separate herd. When I was a child, I loved watching wildlife programmes and I’d sometimes asked myself the question, If one male serviced a herd of females, what happened to the other males? We watched the bachelor herd for a while as they grazed and made dummy charges at each other. Senteu said this was likely a good place to see lions, as the lionesses frequently hunted at the edges of the herd. Occupied with competing with each other, the young bucks tended to be less watchful compared to females with young, who were constantly alert to any danger. ‘That’s not what you see on the wildlife programmes,’ I said.

He smiled: ‘They always show the young being caught, yes?’ And went on to explain how comparatively rare such an event was. ‘So, you’re saying that lionesses feed their cubs on the carcasses of beta males?’ And again, Senteu smiled.

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