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The Masai are a handsome and arrogant and elegant people, filled with a serene self-satisfaction that amounts to a collective narcissism. Whites in East Africa for generations have been infatuated with the Masai. Yet certain details of their lives, like the flies that sometimes cake their lips and eyelids, can be disgusting. The Masai dwell in the world's most magnificent spaces. Yet to stoop at midday to enter one of their dung-walled huts to share a cup of tea is to be plunged immediately into an impenetrable, claustrophobic gloom, choked with smoke. A laser beam of sunlight fires through the darkness from a window the size of a Kenya five-shilling piece. It takes three minutes for the eyes to adjust and make out the dim outlines of one's friends sitting on short stools, knees near their chins, their eyes fixed dreamily on the coals of the cooking fire, their ruminative conversation interrupted by long silences.
The visitor's driver, Davis, was a Luo from Lake Victoria, a hearty man of middle age with smiling open face and the public manner of a gregarious bishop. Davis considered himself a Roman Catholic priest. Into a notebook that he always carried, he had inscribed the text of the Latin Mass, copied from a missal that he had borrowed somewhere in his travels. Davis sometimes donned a long white alb and, all by himself outside the boma, performed services beside his Land Rover, chanting the Latin in a rich bass.
The collision between Catholic faith and morals on the one hand and Masai tradition on the other is spectacular. Perhaps the flies had come to seem to Davis the outward sign of the devil's presence here in the Masai enk'ang, home of polygamists and breezy pagan fornicators. But the goat was an ancient symbol of the devil. The theology was confusing. Perhaps Davis merely intended to endow one fly-free little life in the dense air of the boma.
Davis was at his prayers next evening at dusk when the witch doctor came to speak to the visitor. The witch doctor, Ole Loompirai, sat in a dark, dung- walled hut and drank beer with the visitor and explained the work that he did. The laibon, or witch doctor, spoke in a low, murmurous voice in Maa, sucking frequently on an oversize bottle of Tusker, a faintly smoky Kenya beer brought up in the Land Cruiser from Narok. Moses impassively translated.
As the witch doctor talked about charms and animal sacrifices, Davis' rich, deep Latin poured through the small window of the hut: "Pater noster qui es in coelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum . . ." The laibon explained the uses of animals in his work. He employed the warthog, for example, to cast a spell to keep the government out of Masai business. Good choice, the visitor thought. The warthog is a strutty little beast, a short-legged peasant with a thin tail that stands straight up like a flagpole when it runs. It backs into its hole and pulls dirt on top of itself and, if cornered there, comes out of the hole like a cannonball. Perfect for ambushing bureaucrats.