Chance encounters
Aidan Hartley
Laikipia There I was, striding down the red-dirt 1 road of Rumuruti under the jacaranda trees in my flip-flops on market day this week, when a Samburu fellow hailed me by name and said he had met me in Serb Krajina during the Balkans war in 1993. Now this is a hell of a thing to pull on a man after he's had a few ales and he's in the back of beyond in Africa, and I was twice as flummoxed because the Samburu had a face so terribly disfigured he was unrecognisable. His nose was crushed, his right eye was missing, his jaw was bent out of shape and ragged scars criss-crossed his face. We shook hands, except that he was missing most of his fingers, and decamped to the Buffalo Village hotel to discuss matters.
'We met in Knin,' the man told me over another beer. I suddenly remembered the exact evening. I was on a reporting assignment to Knin, a nasty town full of bearded murdering chetniks, and I was pretty miserable there until I ran into the Kenyan troops serving with the United Nations in Croatia. I got drunk with them at their battalion headquarters and the next day I left for Bosnia. My friend told me he spent a year with the peacekeeping forces there and then retired from the military when he came home. I wondered if his disfigurement was the result of war wounds, but though some of his comrades had been
killed by mines or come home as paraplegics, he said he had made it back without a scratch.
'Next,' the man said, 'we met in 1996: He told me he was driving four steers across the plains on Laikipia near the ranch where I live when I stopped my car. Again, I recalled the encounter because at the time I was struck by the fact that he was wearing a UN Protection Force T-shirt in the middle of the African nowhere.
'And I think you know about me,' the man said. And suddenly it dawned on me that indeed I did. I had heard a lot about him. He is quite famous on the plains where we live, being the beneficiary of a large payout by the UK's Ministry of Defence in compensation for allegedly being blown up by unexploded ordnance left scattered around the bush of Laikipia by the British Army. In total, the MoD paid out £4.5 million to 228 pastoralists for their various types of disablement. Now, we know that some of the claimants were not telling the whole truth, and I have heard it said that my new friend didn't sustain his terrible injuries due to the neglect of the British Army at all.
The story goes that, in reality, one morning two years ago after watering his livestock, my friend came upon a hyena. The beast, it is said, was in the process of attacking a young girl, and the man intervened to save her with his bare hands. Unfortunately, the girl was disembowelled and she later died, while my friend was savaged. The hyena ripped off several fingers from each of his hands and those scars across his face I estimated were from where it had gnawed and snapped with its powerful jaws, the strongest of any animal. It also took chunks out of his torso and body, causing him to bow slightly and limp.
I didn't want to be rude and confront him about the true story of his injuries. I liked him, and I felt that after our chance encounters on a European battlefield and in the African desert, our destinies are somehow intertwined. I even felt that, whatever the truth, he deserves that MoD money because he's a brave man who has suffered the slings and arrows and it's good that fortune should at last smile upon him. So we just sat there, smiling at each other, talking about the wars in the world, drinking our beers and picking our teeth after consuming a leg of barbequed goat meat garnished with the hot chilli peppers we call pilipili hoho.
When it was time to go he announced that he was setting off on foot to see his cattle in a faraway boma. He could have gone in the lorry he's just bought with all the MoD money but he said he liked the walk. It was a long way and he said that he would probably sleep the night under a tree. 'And aren't you scared of hyenas?' I asked on impulse. And the man looked at me with his one eye, which twinkled, and he said, 'No, my friend, the hyenas are scared of me. I am scared of nothing.'
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