Burness Global: Stories

Ostrich in Kenya (credit: Julian Mason, cc license)

At the start of the story-telling festival at L’Alliance Française, a cultural center in the heart of Nairobi, the host imposed a condition on the audience: we must promise to share the stories we hear.  “Deal?” he asked.  “Deal” we answered. “Sawa sawa,” he said, and the storytelling began, the first from Kenya.

The storyteller was a tall anglo woman, her British accent rounded with African inflections.  She had a neck like a Maasai, long and regal, and cropped white hair.  She began, and she was the hunter.  Three drummers and a flautist seated on the stage articulated the story with beats, rattles, and high flowing notes:

This hunter held a spear as he searched the savannah for an ostrich.  The ostrich he found did not run, but rose, leaving him a single egg, which he wrapped in a blanket and took home.  He placed it in a pot, whose bottom was lined with a thin layer of fat.  The egg grew in size, the fat disappeared, the man added more fat, the egg grew larger.  The hunter transferred it to another pot, and the egg grew until one day it cracked, and from it emerged a baby girl.

The man and his wife were childless and they raised the girl.  She became the hunter’s pride and joy.  The girl could run almost as fast as a cheetah, and dance graceful intricate dances, and leap like a leopard.  So enamored was the father of his daughter that he ordered his wife to let the girl do as she liked.  Left to her own devices, the hunter believed his daughter would find a path to greatness.  The wife could get no help from their daughter -no help to gather firewood or water, to plant and weed and harvest the crops, or cook the food.  And the woman realized that her husband loved their daughter, more than he loved her.

The storyteller addressed the audience: “What does a woman feel like,” she asked, “when she thinks her husband loves someone else more than he loves her?” The man sitting next to me answered “She feels smashed.”  “She feels like smacking herself,” someone else in the audience offered.  The storyteller continued:

Year after year, jealousy grew in the wife’s chest.  It grew from a small dark seed, until it consumed her being.  Then, one day as she was cooking porridge, the wife found that the porridge was hardening in the pot.  She needed water.  She could not leave the pot for the porridge would spoil.  And so she called her daughter to go and fetch some water:

Now, the storyteller became the daughter and the lead drummer became the mother.  They spoke in the local language. The mother/drummer called for help.  The daughter/storyteller turned her back and admired her fingernails.  The mother demanded help. The daughter scoffed.

“You are nothing but an egg,” the drummer/mother yelled. (The man sitting next to me translated.) “What, me, an egg?”  “You are an egg, an ostrich egg, deserted in the grass!” The mother/drummer bellowed.

The girl could not stand to hear those words, she tore out of the house.  The hunter saw her run, and at once knew what had happened.  He pursued his daughter, across the savannah, past the trees dotting the grassland, toward the river.  He had almost reached her, when she jumped into the river and began to swim, stroke after stroke, across the river.  He wanted to pursue her, but something stayed him.  He froze there on the river bank.  As she emerged on the other side, her legs, her strong and beautiful legs, were changing, the thighs thickening.  Her neck, her long and elegant neck, grew longer still, her head grew smaller, and feathers sprouted from her chest and back, until, she stood there, an ostrich.  The ostrich turned and looked at the hunter.  For one moment, their eyes locked.  And then she turned and galloped across the savannah, almost as fleet as a cheetah, never to be seen again.

The audience was silent.  The school girls in their green sweaters and black skirts, the ex-pats and their children, the orphans from a nearby home, and the story-tellers in queue, preparing to speak.