A Day Trip to Lake Nakuru

My day trip to Lake Nakuru began inauspiciously. Right after we left Runda, we drove past a police car whose occupants had apparently detained the passengers of a smaller passenger vehicle. My driver slowed down with undisguised interest and rolled down his window to ask one of the detainees what was going on. In the darkness of the night – it was only half past five when we drove out – they had hit and killed two people crossing the road.

The incident provided fodder for my conversation with the driver, which meandered without pause until we reached the precipice of the Great Rift Valley. Like many Kenyans, the driver, whose name was John, first ventured beyond the usual niceties of by complaining about police corruption. This is a popular theme among drivers, who tend to complain that the police stop drivers for the most minor infractions and line their pockets with hefty bribes. At one point later in the day, I was quite sure that John intentionally ignored a policeman’s raised arm, confident that some other unfortunate soul would make the mistake of slowing down and be forced to atone for a cracked windshield or an extinguished signalling light.

From police corruption, we naturally continued to political corruption. Based on John’s summary of the country’s modern history, I deduced that he must belong to the Kikuyu tribe, for it seemed unlikely to me that all of Kenya’s best presidents were Kikuyu and that the worst of them – the current president – is allegedly their mortal enemy. With the confidence of a man who had always belonged to a country’s dominant social category, John asserted that a president must come from a well-to-do family so that he cannot be swayed by money. The Kikuyu, of course, have generated the most of such families. “Go anywhere in the world,” John said, “and you will find a successful Kikuyu there.” As we passed by some lands owned by the Kenyatta family, he explained that the most popular and best milk brand sold in Kenya’s supermarkets belongs to the Kenyattas, beaming as though he personally held a stake in the company.

Still, John rejected the idea that Kenya’s foreign policy had anything to do with tribal affiliations. Obama’s family may have been Luo – who have allegedly always hated the Kikuyu – but this was not the reason for Kenya’s supposedly bad relations with the USA during the Obama period. Rather, Kenya and the US did not get along during that time because Obama had endorsed gay marriage, and this upset the very religiously minded Kenyans. On the other hand, Kenya and the US got along swimmingly during the first term of Donald Trump because Trump “does not support the gayzee.” William Ruto, John alleged, had supported gay marriage to curry favour with Joe Biden (a claim which I found completely bizarre given Ruto’s fierce evangelical opposition to gay rights), and he does not get along with Donald Trump because “Trump hates corrupt people.”

I did not really intend to engage on the whole gay marriage question, but when John asked my opinion, I tentatively offered that gay marriage doesn’t really hurt anyone, and people should just go about their private business. When he countered that gay marriage is un-godly, I suggested that it was God who created men who love men. John found this idea so bizarre that he had a hearty laugh and had to move on to another conversation topic.

Once we began to descend from Nairobi into the valley stretched out below, John’s mind fixed singularly on overtaking the lumbering trucks ahead. The road was busy in both directions, and passenger cars would dash ahead and dart back into their single lane whenever a short gap emerged in oncoming traffic. In the first town we passed in the valley, one car did not succeed in this manoeuvre, and it remained battered in its lane, forcing other cars to use a detour along a nearby dirt road.

The sun had risen by this time, and I started noticing the signs on the trucks. Many were plastered with quotations of the Bible, but there were more than a few with Latin transcriptions of Arabic phrases, and there were also trucks bearing Indian names and big signs of the letter ohm. My driver did not like my suggestion that Indians might be the richest people in Kenya, as it hurt his Kikuyu pride, but after a few moments he bitterly acknowledged the fact. “These people worship cows and are rich,” he complained, “while we worship the Living God and are poor. How can this be?”

It seemed John’s capacity for disapproval reached its limit with non-Kikuyu politicians and Indian merchants, for he professed himself to harbour no hostility towards the British. He said he used to tell his father, who had been shot in the arm and leg during an anti-colonial uprising, that the past was in the past. When I suggested, however, that European countries were still involved in conflicts around Africa, and that they had a hand in the killing of several pan-African leaders, he readily assented, answering “they never change.” In his view, were Gaddafi still alive, the whole of Africa might be one country.

We arrived at the gates of Lake Nakuru National Park at around nine and were admitted in after our paperwork had been approved. Within a few minutes we came across a herd of zebras and another herd of cape water buffalo, and dotted within them was the occasional warthog running around with its grotesquely oversized head and paintbrush-like tail sticking upwards awkwardly. In addition to the well-known Big Five, John told me, Kenya also has another list of animals known as the Ugly Five: the warthog, the hyena, the wildebeest, the marabou, and the lappet-faced vulture. I had to search up the last of these at home, for – in addition to rolling his r’s – John also turned all his l’s into r’s, turning the lappet-faced vulture into a rabbit-faced voiture, which was rather difficult to imagine.

Contrary to my expectations, we did not begin at the show-stopping Lake Nakuru but spent the first hour and a half looking for the more elusive big game. John had made the shrewd calculation that we would not stand a chance of finding rhinos, lions and other big animals out and about once it got warmer, and he was proved right. During our drive, we came across two groups of rhinos and one lion, and we saw some male impalas fighting each other for control over a nearby harem. In between these scenes, I also witnessed the richness of Lake Nakuru’s avian life: the trees, bushes, and grass were bustling with birds like grouses, lilac-breasted rollers, eagles, falcons, and secretarybirds. It is unclear where the secretarybird got its name, and the leading theory is that the feathers on its head make it look like a scribe with a quill pen behind his ear. John’s theory was more colourful but anachronistic: secretarybirds kill snakes by trampling on them, which makes them look like secretaries on typewriters.

Listening to John’s conversations with other safari drivers as we passed each other, I gleaned that most had not been as lucky as we had been. I only pieced this together once I learned that most of the big animals are not referred to by their Swahili names but by what John called their “jungle names.” The lion is referred to as “kichwa” (head), the giraffe is a “shingo” (neck), and the rhino is a “pembe” (horn). Finding this very amusing, I asked whether the warthog also has a nickname. After some deliberation, John answered that the warthog is also called a “Kasongo:” a name popularised by an old song and also a nickname applied to President William Ruto. The nickname, I have learned, has become so widespread that Ruto has come out to say he does not mind it, noting that Kasongo is a very popular song.

As we spotted various animals, John shared a fact about each of them. The white rhino is also called a square-lipped rhino, according to the physical feature that distinguishes it more reliably than its colour from the hooked-lip black rhino. A giraffe, to add another example, has a gestation period of fifteen months. And a buffalo hates being snorted at, a fact that John demonstrated in practice, startling a big buffalo from underneath a nearby tree. We ended our tour a little after one o’clock in the afternoon with a stop at the bank of Lake Nakuru. The shallow water was beset by a smelly colony of flamingos and pelicans, and groups of pelicans patrolled the deeper waters bobbing their heads under the surface in a synchronised fashion. Wading through the water closer to the land, there were also spoonbills and a pair of grey crowned cranes.

On our way back to Nairobi, we made a stop on the escarpment overlooking the neighbourhood of Lake Naivasha. It was a dusty and hazy day, so the visibility was not great, but the sight was still enough to illustrate the scale of the Great Rift Valley. John seemed exhausted with the day’s drive and I – with much less reason for being so – was as well, so we spoke very little. Our conversation only became lively again towards the end, and I found out on our drive back that we had just passed by the house of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. The author’s relatively recent divorce is the talk of the neighbourhood, though no one seems to know what led to it at such an old age.