[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Now it’s my turn, and I tell them that when we were living in a village in Switzerland shortly after we arrived all the other children ran away from Napirai because she was the first mixed race child in the village and they weren’t used to seeing a baby with a dark-coloured skin.But now there are lots of dark-skinned people even in the smallest villages and over time people have got used to it.Mama nods and says, ‘There we are then, and it’s just like here!’James tells us that over the past few years there have been more white women turning up in the area around Maralal and living with Samburus, even though they haven’t gone as far as living in a manyatta like this one.Lketinga gets a laugh again by saying in his rough voice: ‘But these are mostly old ladies and not as good as you.I wouldn’t have married one of them.’ James has to agree and says: ‘It’s true, Corinne went everywhere with you.She went with my brother to visit relatives who live in places with no water or where the cattle live inside the corral, like in Sitedi, and she had no problems.’ Well, I think to myself, it’s not exactly true that I had no problems.Mama is still cradling the little baby and says: ‘I was so happy that you gave me a grandchild, and I was proud that you trusted me with Napirai when you had to go away for a bit.That was the greatest proof of your love.After that I had no problem accepting you and couldn’t see any difference between black and white.We were all the same.’Suddenly Mama’s face stiffens and becomes expressionless and I realize that what she’s doing is concealing her emotions.Then she quickly brushes her free hand across her eyes.I had always felt there was a deep bond between us, but it’s only now, fourteen years later, that I have the proof.For a few seconds we all go silent, the only sound the buzzing of flies around our head, and outside the cackling of hens and bleating of a few goats.Then we hear Albert talking to the children outside the hut; it seems he’s drawing something for them in the dirt.James turns the conversation back to the little boss-man, the ‘Mini-Chief’ who’s a sort of village policeman: ‘All he wanted from you was almost certainly money.People here think all mzungus have loads of money, live in big houses, have cars, lots to eat all the time and nothing to worry about.They think they all live like presidents.I keep trying to explain to them that white people have worries too but just don’t tell everyone else about them.It’s a Samburu tradition to spend a couple of hours talking to everybody you meet.The older person always begins by saying where he comes from, who he is, how his family and his animals are, who’s sick, what’s wrong with them and what’s been going on in the corral or village where he lives.And then he’ll finish up by saying where he’s going and why.The one who’s doing the talking goes into every detail and it can easily last an hour.Then it’s the turn of the other one and it all starts over again.’James acts out one of these meetings with an imaginary dialogue and has us all in tears of laughter with an act worthy of a cabaret.‘It’s perfectly normal here,’ he goes on, when we’ve all recovered from laughing, ‘because sometimes people walk for hours on end and see nobody.So they’re happy when they run into someone to talk to, even if it’s someone they don’t know.When they get to their destination, they tell people there who they met on the way and what he had to say.And so the conversations get longer and longer but in a few hours news can spread like wildfire over great distances.And then they see white people who chat to one another for only a couple of seconds before going on and think these people obviously have no problems as they’ve got nothing to talk about.The thing is the whites just don’t talk about all their problems.’It just goes to show how differently people see things.Our society is losing the art of talking to one another because there is increasingly little direct communication between us.It’s something that’s harming our society but these people here, on the contrary, see our inability to talk to one another as proof we don’t have any problems [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]