glanced around the house, an A-frame with high varnished rafters, like a ski chalet: Aspen overlooking the Ngong Hills. Dotted around the CD player perched a predictable display of travel trophies—bone pipes and toothy masks—whose ceremonial purposes their looters wouldn’t comprehend, or care to.
The herd was mixed tonight. A larger than average colony of aid parasites, each of whom was convinced he and he alone really understood the Samburu. The clamour of authority was deafening: “The problem with schools for the pastoralist is they discourage a nomadic life …”
“And you have to wonder,” a proprietary voice chimed, “if teaching herders to read about Boston is in their interests. When you expose them to wider options, you educate them, in effect, to be dissatisfied …”
“Aldous Huxley,” a woman interrupted. “Brave New World argues that the freedom to be unhappy is a fundamental human right …”
From an opposite corner came the distinctive whine of the conservation clique, always indignant that their sensitive, sweet and uncannily clever pet elephants had been entrusted to brutish natives who didn’t appreciate complex pachyderm kinship structures and had the temerity to worry about their own survival instead. “It’s much too early to lift the ivory ban, much too early …”
“On the contrary, I thought Amboseli was bunged with elephants. Turning to a rubbish tip, a dust bowl—”
Wallace shook his head. These interlopers thought Africa belonged to them.
“I don’t see why Kenya should suffer just because South Africa wants to cash in its ivory stockpiles—”
“Why shouldn’t good game management be rewarded?”
“I know culling makes a lot of sense,” a girl in several kilos of Ethiopian silver was moaning. “But I simply can’t bear it—”
Sifting aimlessly between the gaggles, ex-hunters fetched themselves another drink. As masters will come to resemble their dogs, the thick-necked, snouty, lumbering intrepids suggested the animals they’d shot. Hunting had been illegal in Kenya for years now. Grown puffy and cirrhotic with nothing to murder, most of these anachronisms were reduced to trucking pill-rattling geriatrics and shrill, fibre-obsessed Americans around the Mara, or had secured contracts with Zanzibar, where the gruff lion-slayers now picked off over-populated crows.
On its outer edges, the throng was laced with the independently wealthy and the entrepreneurial élite. If they deigned to work, husbands ran light industries and were sure to own at least one aeroplane, a house in Lamu and a camp in the Ngurumans. Not particularly bright, few of these spoiled, soft-handed colonials would have done well in Europe or America, while in Africa they’d little commercial competition. The baby-fat faces beamed with self-satisfaction. Here their dress ran to sports jackets, but out in the wilderness they were given to orange Bermudas and loafers without socks. Their conversation, anywhere, was entirely about cars. “I had my Daihatsu kitted out with … forgot about one of those bloody unmarked speed-bumps and cracked my engine block … found a way to get around the duty on …” Wallace didn’t need to listen very hard.
Their wives, on the other hand, were at least an eyeful. Balanced on legs no thicker than high heels, these emaciated elegants could raise millions on a poster:
SAVE THE ENDANGERED CAUCASIAN FEMALE
Anna has not eaten in three days. She is five foot eight and weighs little over a hundred pounds. Anna requires a full litre of vodka just to survive the cruel leisure of one more back-biting social function. She needs your help. For just a thousand pounds a week, you could adopt a rich white lady in Africa.
As if to torment themselves, Nairobi’s physics-defying two-dimensional were all clustered around the buffet, one licking a surreptitious drip of meat-juice off her finger, another fondling a leaf of lettuce. Wallace disapproved of gluttony, but he had no time for greedy ascetism either. Fasting was for mental purification, not miniskirts. And their ensembles, over-accessoried and keenly co-ordinated, betrayed how long they had spent trying on earlier combinations and taking them off. Most of their mumble was inaudible as they confided in one another who was copulating with whom, for in the week since their last party the couplings would have done a complete musical chairs. With the sexual turnover in this town, gossip was a demanding and challenging career. The remarks from the buffet he could hear, however, regarded the timeless servant problem. “George had his camera disappear, and with nobody coming forward, just looking, like, duh, what’s a camera, I was sorry but I had to sack the lot …”
“You have to draw the line right away. Little by little, they bring their whole families, until the shamba is overrun, mattresses and plastic bowls; it’s hardly your house any more! Cheeky bastards!”
“And when we took her on she said she had one child, can you believe it! Of course she had six, and now she’s pregnant, again—”
“You really have to employ all the same tribe, sweety, or they’re at each other’s throats morning and night.”
Add a few pilots, a sprinkling of journalists waiting for some Africans to starve, for another massacre in Somalia or the rise of another colourful dictator whose quaint cannibalism they could send up in the Daily Mirror, and that, in one room, was mzungu Nairobi—inbred, vain, pampered, presumptive and imminently extinct, thank heavens.
Wallace declined to mingle, and perched on a three-legged stool, rocking on his chaplies with his cane between his legs, rearranging the straggles of his faded kikoi. It was times like these, while around him the bewildered got motherless, that he might have missed his pipe, but Wallace had given it up and regarded himself as beyond desire.
He had noted before that the mentally mangled found the proximity of perfect contentment and inner peace an upsetting experience and so they tended to avoid him. Conversations with Wallace had a habit of dwindling. Why? Just try explaining how we-are-all-one when your companion is fidgeting for a refill of whisky and looks so palpably disheartened at the demise of the banana crisps. So he was surprised when one of the paper dolls tore herself away from ogling the buffet table of forbidden fruit and sidled over to the fire. Perhaps, so tiny, she was cold.
“So what’s your line?” she asked distractedly, no doubt having just learned her husband was bedding her best friend. “KQ? WWF? A & K? I’d guess …” she assessed, “UN, but not with those sandals. NGO. Loads of integrity. SIDEA?”
“I did,” he conceded, “once work in population research.”
“Oh, brilliant! I know this sounds awful, but when I read about a plane crash or an earthquake, I think, well, good. There are too many people already.”
“And what if you were on the plane?”
“I suppose then I shouldn’t have to think anything about it whatsoever.” She giggled.
“I’ve given up population work rather.”
“Well, I don’t blame you. It must be so discouraging. Everyone giving food aid to those poor Ethiopians, who just keep having more babies. And frankly …” Her voice had dropped.
“Sorry?”
“This AIDS palaver. I’ve heard it said, you know, that it’s Nature’s way. Of keeping the balance. Do you think me just too monstrous?”
Wallace
