The Dogs Of Ortum

Friday, August 18th 2006

In Ortum – a green village set in a valley between bare hills, I stopped. A gurgling river ran through it. The villagers farmed along the banks, and upon the pleats of the hills which later climbed into mountains. They lived in fear of the Lord, and of Illat the Lord of Death. The Lord of Death often appeared as a shadowy apparition on the riverbanks at dawn, but vanished when you waved to him. A blurring haze of grey dust clung low like ground fog over the hamlets, and on the hills, the clouds stood leaden, supported by pillars of rain.

Cherangani --Rain on the Cheranganis The river flooded often, and the local Anglicans noticed that onions did well in the narrow alluvial plains, and so, a miniature Nile valley of onions had cropped up in Ortum. At the bridge, which had collapsed, men with cracked faces, and mouths full of profanities were forever getting in and out of trucks. They waited in line to suffer across the boulder strewn river bed.

I walked to the fuel station.
In the sparse shadows along the river, I thought I saw Illat, but the apparition was human: an old man, stumbling through the shallows, panning for gold. When I spoke to him, he scrambled and disappeared into the scrub.

The delay didn't worry me, it was a luxury I could afford. The previous day had been one of boredom and indifference, spent under a squeaking ceiling fan, in a grubby hotel room. Outside the hotel, the landscape had been one of identical slab-sided buildings -- an aspirational apartment culture trucked in from big city Nairobi -- but it just made the place look improper and grungy. There is a certain progress to be discovered in oddness, which is not to be found among obvious familiarities. As long as there is the unknown, there is hope. And so I had left, north-west, away from intimacy.

At the only fuel station in Ortum, blue faces fluttered behind the milky window of a pre-fabricated building. At the foot of the window was a patch of wild oleanders, a billy goat slept next to it. A group of squat women stepped out, and warbled in a sing-song about not having any diesel. A gust whistled in tearing into their clothes, flattening the oleanders. The goat stood up, and shook itself down like a dog.

I said – Petrol is fine. The pump was an ancient model -- one of the women put her back into cranking a handle, while the other filled up the jerry-can.

Ortum appeared on the map when a great arterial highway into the South Turkana desert was made in the 80s. The highway stretched itself towards a massive dam built across one of the region's rivers. It was earnestly believed that the dam would provide electricity, irrigation and turn all the pastorals into devoted farmers. The river had never streamed enough water to satisfy the lofty ambitions of the dam – and when the gates were opened, only a mere trickle issued forth.

petrol station--fuel pump The women spoke of the dam in a homeric past tense. The dam was distant, a relic from some long forgotten time which lay beyond the broken highway.

The raindrops came, smacking and exploding in the dust, turning the earth red. We ran and sheltered in the zinc overhang of the shed, where it smelt of diesel and goat's milk. There was a small girl with calloused hands, boiling water on a stove – she looked up sensing my stare, and pouted through cracked lips.

Six months ago, an Englishman driving a big Land Rover had appeared in Ortum . With him, in the back, were his passengers - twelve dogs.

The man had blotchy skin, was overweight and balding, and by popular description bore a strong resemblance to the famous wrestler – 'The Undertaker'. The canines were of different colors and sizes, at least two of them had were covered with spots, and one of them even resembled a pig – the likes of these the locals had never seen.

At dusk, the man stealthily drove across the river, stopped, looked around, and set all the dogs free. Unbeknownst to him, a watchful resident saw this, and immediately alerted the people. As the white man, turned around and prepared to drive back across the river, the villagers surrounded him and began to stone him.

Who was he? Why was he releasing all these animals here?
‘I am coming from Tanzania . Is this how you treat foreigners?' he said trying to beseech the crowd.
But, it only served to enrage them, and the stones flew in thick and fast.
The man pulled a hand-gun, waved it about, fired a warning shot, and said: the person throwing the next stone would be shot.
The local law enforcement soon arrived, and they clapped the man in chains.
‘For his, and your own safety' they told the crowd.

The prison cell of Ortum was a hot airless room, with rancid green walls, and past memories of unhappy men – in winter, it also served as a store room for out-of-season onions. The room was stacked to the roof with stitched sacks, the floor littered with dried onion shucks, and high on its walls was the tyrannical photograph of a past president. But the giant stuffed thing placed upon the chair only resembled a sack.
It was the manacled Englishman, eating mouthfuls of jail food -- a vile plate of beans and onions. It was meal enough to break him down.

He was an expatriate from Tanzania . During his tenure, his wife of many years had left him. Caught up in work and travel, he had no time for her – so she spent all her time with their dogs – she collected a dozen of them. And then one day her patience finally ran out, and she called it quits.
“Good bye”, she wrote, “I am going away, and I am not coming back...” in a brief parting letter. Sadenned, but undeterred, the man had carried on for a while putting his energies into his work, for he had been brought up in a family of staunch Calvinists – which meant there was going to be salvation in hard work.

But work was only an interim distraction -- a bitter stream of correspondence soon arrived from England , and along with it, official looking notices from some hoity-toity London barrister.

The woman wanted his money and half the dogs. He fretted and fumed for a while, and then his hair began to fall out – great clumps of it.

‘Well…' he thought, 'I am losing everything…..she could get my money…..' – for all his bank accounts were in London – '…but she will never get any of the dogs…'
So, he drove far, across the border, as far as Ortum, a place he did not know, and could easily forget, and decided to release the dogs there. "Go..!! Go....!" he had shouted, clapping his hands, urging them never to come back. And that's when he was caught.

The police inspector – an ex-athlete with a drooping stomach which told a tale of immobility and impending retirement, and the local Chief were both sympathetic and reasonable men. They had been through numerous tribulations with women and wives. The Englishman's story brought a tear to their eyes. The crowd shuffled outside, bristling with stones and sticks. The Chief, an old man who looked 50 but was actually nearer to 70, stepped out and proclaimed in an authoritative voice: ‘The man has agreed to go away, and take away all his dogs. Let us forgive him' . The mob grumbled, but reluctantly conceded – a good stoning was not something that came by often.

The man sped away in a cloud of dust and the dwindling sound of barks.

During the latter part of the 70s Idi Amin Dada, the erstwhile dictator of Uganda – and self proclaimed King of Scotland (and Lord of all beasts of the earth and fishes of the sea and the conqueror of the British empire in Africa in general and Uganda in particular) engaged in a border war with Tanzania. The Tanzanians to their own surprise, easily routed the Ugandans, and then proceeded to invade Uganda with the intention of toppling Amin. Every scheme was employed to weaken the retreating Ugandan army – and a bizarre kind of biological warfare was to come into play. Partly inspired by extant Chinese military doctrine, a Corp of rabid dogs was parachuted into Uganda – in the hope that they would bite and infect the retreating Ugandan troops – turning the soldiers into mindless, frothing lunatics. Unfortunately one of the planes had strayed, and off loaded its cargo rather close to the Kenyan border – some of these dogs had bounded across the border into Kenya and bitten many people in Ortum.

'Since that day we remember Tanzania and dogs as very bad things….', the woman said, counting the change for the fuel, '....but you are okay, you are not from Tanzania and I can't see any dogs'

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