The story goes that Kenya is the cradle of mankind. This is the place that humanity took its first baby steps, and then went on, in long strides, to cover such great expanses of planet Earth.
I watch the Maasai waking across the plains here, covering with two steps the distance that I need three steps for each time. I can easily imagine how early people not unlike them might have migrated far and wide, taking a rich gene pool with them, and become many times over great grandparents to us all.
After a not-to-be-scoffed-at 22km in the scorching sunshine today, through thickets of bushes with thorns longer than my fingers, up and down hills with grazing antelopes and gnus so wild-looking that even the Maasai dogs will not go near them, I feel like I am back on a pilgrimage trail like the Camino de Santiago. I have seen massive bones from an elephant that did not make it to its herd’s graveyard, a stone burial mound from a famous Maasai chief who died over 50 years ago, termite hills that look like sci-fi cities on the Moon, and locusts that feel like rubber bullets when they accidentally fly into one’s chest.There is a drought in the Maasai Mara at the moment, so many animals have gone elsewhere in search of water. The footsteps I leave on the dusty trails blend into those of lions, cattle, goats, impala, and other hooved and pawed creatures who either passed through many moons ago or stayed behind.
Many Maasai have also moved to greener pastures, so school buildings and whole villages that we pass stand empty. Usually, when a Maasai dies, they are mourned by their community, and the empty vessel of their body is carried to the bush for the animals to feast on. Christian missionaries have tried to change this tradition with the introduction of cemeteries, but the nomadic lifestyle of the Maasai is ill-suited to sedentary existence around the graves of their dead. Hence the tomb of the Maasai chief I saw today is very rare indeed.
From cradle to grave in Kenya, another day draws to an end with a rainbow of birdsong and descending stillness in my being.
