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Many of the paved roads in Kenya are crumbling. They look as if a large tar-eating animal had been chewing at them from the shoulders, inward toward the center line. A vehicle therefore speeds demonically down the dead center of a two-lane road, like a rhino charging. The driver waits until the last instant to flick the steering wheel to the left (British rules, drive on the left -- Did Moses derive the left-handed theory from that?) to swerve around the onrushing bus. The wildest animal on the road is the matatu, a jitney designed to carry about eight passengers. Instead, it customarily holds 20 Africans or more, some spilling out the back door, hanging on with one arm. The matatu is a hurtling metal beast with people in its belly, an event of nature on the highways. "Aieee! Aieee! Matatu!" Matatu owners have a witty taste for apocalypse. One of them named his matatu the Enola Gay. Another proclaims itself the Stairway to Heaven. Not reassuring.
Dreaming: Shirley Strum says that there came a time when the baboons spoke to her in English. They came to her in her dreams and asked for her help. For twelve years Strum, an anthropologist from California, had been studying a baboon troop at a ranch called Kekopey, near Gilgil. Then the ranch was turned into an agricultural collective, and the new farmers menaced the baboons and tried to kill them off.
The baboons were Strum's friends. She had given all of them names, and she sat among them every day. They were accustomed to her and accepted her. She came among them like a ghostly premonition of their evolutionary future, a benevolent spirit out of the time warp, another civilization. She came from space. She sat among them holding her clipboard, and made silent notes.
Strum understood the dangers of anthropomorphism, of coming to love the animals too much and to hate the people endangering them. Strum, the least violent of creatures, said that if she had had a gun, she might have shot the farmers who were threatening her baboons. Now, in Shirley Strum's dreams, the baboons asked her for help, and she searched for a ranch that would accept them. The ranchers mostly thought she was insane. Baboons raid crops. Importing baboons to a ranch made as much sense as transplanting cockroaches to a New York City apartment. But at last Strum made an arrangement with the Chololo Ranch on the edge of the Laikipia Plateau north of Nairobi. She had the baboons trapped and sedated and brought to a new home where they would be safe, and she went on silently studying them.
"Watching the baboons is like watching a soap opera," Strum says, "except that the baboons are much nicer people than you see on Dallas or Dynasty." A visitor walks out with Strum among the baboons at 8 a.m. in Laikipia. They are feeding on the buds of an acacia tree not far from the granite kopje where they sleep. Strum knows all the baboons. "That is C.J. and Ron," she begins. "The female is Zilla. C.J. and Ron have a conflict of emotions." Ron is new to the troop, and so is Ndofu.