The Lioness(9)

CHAPTER FOUR


    Benjamin Kikwete





The “honeymoon” safari will be led by the great white hunter, Charlie Patton, and his team. Patton and his staff used to cater to the likes of Ernest Hemingway, and Katie and her guests will be cared for by the sons of some of the very same men who would skin “Papa” Hemingway’s trophies.

—The Hollywood Reporter, November 9, 1964



He was down in the dirt on his stomach beside Muema, the second guide, neither of them wounded, watching as the tallest of the intruders—a man so thin and lanky, his Adam’s apple looked like a small jackfruit on his neck—shot out a couple of windows and one of the wheels of the Land Rover. He was an expert marksman. So far, Benjamin had counted seven men, all white, who’d appeared out of nowhere from the brush behind the dining tent, but he knew there were more. He tried to account for the guests, but it was happening quickly and he didn’t know who was in the retreating Rover and who wasn’t. He tried to find his boss, Charlie Patton, but he had no idea now where he was, either.

Benjamin respected Patton, but he didn’t revere him the way his father did: his father had worked for the man, too, as a gun bearer when Patton was still running hunting safaris exclusively. Patton was almost four times Benjamin’s age: Benjamin’s father had told him the man was sixty-eight.

Now the porter put his head up, scanning the horror that was unfolding, raising up on his elbows to survey the whole of the camp, and instantly he felt Muema’s hand on his back, pressing him back into the ground. They were beside a tire track: a groove. Benjamin noticed a dung beetle trying to roll a piece of elephant shit it had meticulously shaped into a marble up and out of the rut, but the rut was like a canal to the insect. Twice the beetle had almost pushed the excrement over the side and onto the flat dirt beyond, and each time the weight of the dung had been too much and it rolled back over the creature to the bottom of the track.



* * *



.?.?.

Earlier that week, Benjamin hadn’t expected a movie star among the clients. When Patton was briefing his team and they were gathering in the street outside the hotel in Nairobi, he had known there would be nine wealthy Americans, six men and three women. There were three married couples and three single men, and six tents for the guests. That was all he was focused upon: the catering needs of nine people who had never before been to the Serengeti. He understood, more or less, the type and what to expect: he’d accompanied his father perhaps two dozen times since he’d been barely a teenager, and Patton’s groups would arrive in Kenya and start south into Tanganyika. His father had watched as Patton transitioned his business from escorting hunters who wanted to bring home trophies to tourists who expected only to bring back photographs. Patton still carried himself with the bravado and élan of one of the great white hunters, but most of the times that Benjamin had been among Patton’s porters, the groups had been photo safaris and his boss hadn’t even bothered with gun bearers and skinners.

Or the gun bearers and the skinners, if they were able (and willing) to cook, would be along to prepare for the guests their grilled meats and vegetables and rice. But this work was too demeaning for some of the men. They already felt invisible among these white people from Europe and America. To be reduced from gun bearers to cooks? That sort of degradation made it feel even worse.

This was only the second time that Benjamin had joined Patton without his father, and when he was waiting outside the hotel that first morning and discovered that the woman leading the safari—and it was a woman leading the party, that was evident—was a movie star, he was disappointed that his father wasn’t with him. His father would have loved to have been a part of this group. Moreover, one of the American actors with her was Black, another surprise that was at once a gift and a validation. Benjamin’s father used to take his brothers and sisters and him to the cinema, one child at a time, on their birthdays once they turned eight, mature enough in his opinion to appreciate the experience. And now his father was missing precisely the sort of people who he might once have seen on the screen. Benjamin thought he had even heard of Katie Barstow, though he couldn’t name one of her pictures off the top of his head and the odds that he had seen one were slim. Altogether, he had had six brothers and three sisters, four of whom were alive even now. They were a small, tightly knit band that had managed to survive the litany of illnesses that cratered so many families: the sleeping sickness carried by the tsetse flies and the malaria brought on by the mosquitoes and the malnutrition gifted East Africa by the endless cycles of drought and flood, and the way Europeans had wrested control long ago of the food chain. Each sibling saw exactly one movie a year.

The movie theater that he and his father would visit had about fifty folding chairs, and the ceiling was four meters above the floor. Originally it had been a brick factory on the outskirts of town, but it hadn’t been one in years, and so an entrepreneur had painted a wall white and brought in a projector. One day Benjamin had peered inside the movie palace in the center of the city: the real theater. The Embassy. That cinema had a screen that had seemed, when he’d been a boy, as wide as the sky, and it boasted pillowed seats—easily two hundred of them—and red velvet drapes. Colonials attended the Embassy. White people. Unlike at the old brick factory, the floor at the Embassy was sloped so that the audience there wasn’t constantly craning their necks to see around the heads in the rows ahead of them, the way that Benjamin and his father had to. When a movie had finished its run at the Embassy, the print would be brought to the old brick factory for a couple of days.