Man of All Races
In his early twenties, after two undistinguished and troubled years
at university, Fitzhugh Martin had achieved a modest celebrity as
center forward for the Harambe Stars, which are to Kenyan soccer as
the New York Yankees are to baseball. A sportswriter had nicknamed
him “The Ambler,” because he never seemed to run very fast, his
leisurely movements caused not by slow feet but by a quick tactical
eye that allowed him to read the field in a glance and be where he
needed to be with economy of motion.
He traveled with the club throughout Africa, to Europe, and once to
the United States. He saw something of the world, and what he
saw-namely the shocking contrast between the West and his
continent-convinced him to do something more with himself than chase
a checkered ball up and down a field. He’d heard a kind of
missionary call, quit soccer, and became a United Nations relief
worker, first in Somalia and then in Sudan.
That was the story he told, but it wasn’t entirely true: a serious
knee injury that required two operations was as responsible for his
leaving the sport as a Pauline epiphany. Or maybe the injury was the
mother of the epiphany; sitting on the bench with his taped knee, he
knew his career was as good as over and wondered what to do with the
rest of his life. Of course, if he hadn’t had a social conscience to
begin with, he would not have made the choice he did, and that
conscience was formed by his ancestry. He had come to Kenya from the
Seychelles Islands when he was eight years old, the eldest of three
children born to a French, Irish, and Indian father and a mother who
was black, Arab, and Chinese. The emigration took Fitzhugh from a
place where tribalism was unknown and race counted for little to a
land where tribe and race counted for everything. His family wasn’t
poor-his father managed a coastal resort near Mombasa-but he came to
identify with the poor, the oppressed, the marginalized, because he
grew up on the margins of Kenyan society, a boy without a tribal
allegiance or a claim to any one race, for all the races of the
earth were in him. He was the eternal outsider who was never allowed
to forget that he was an alien, even at the height of his athletic
fame. His skin was brown, yet the white Kenyans, children and
grandchildren of colonial settlers, were more accepted than he, a
tribe unto themselves.
After he worked for a year in Somalia, the UN promoted him to field
monitor and assigned him to its operations in Sudan. Now a corporal
in the army of international beneficence, he wandered in southern
Sudan for weeks at a time, stalking the beast of hunger and devising
strategies to hold the numbers of its victims to some acceptable
minimum. That vast unhappy region captured him body and soul; it
became the stage where Fitzhugh Martin played the role he believed
destiny had assigned him. “The goddamned, bleeding, fucked-up
Sudan,” he would say. “I don’t know what it is about that place. It
sucks you in. You see some eighteen-year-old who’s been fighting
since he was fourteen and can tell you war stories that will give
you nightmares, but drop a piece of ice in his hands and he’s
amazed. Never seen or felt ice before, never seen water turned to
stone, and you get sucked in.” He meant to do all in his power to
save the southern Sudanese from the curses of the apocalypse and a
few the author of Revelation hadn’t thought of, like the tribalism
that caused the southerners to inflict miseries on themselves. That
was where his cosmopolitan blood became an advantage. He moved with
ease among Dinka, Nuer, Didinga, Tuposa, Boya; the tribes trusted
the tribeless man who had no ethnic axes to grind.
He loved being in the bush and hated returning to the UN base at
Loki. It had the look of a military installation, ringed by coils of
barbed wire. The field managers and flight coordinators and
logistics officers-to his eyes a mob of ambitious bureaucrats or
risk-lovers seeking respectable adventure-drove around like
conquerors in white Land Rovers sprouting tall radio antennae; they
lived and worked in tidy blue and white bungalows, drank their gins
and cold beers at bars that looked like beach resort tiki bars, and
ate imported meats washed down with imported wines. When Loki’s
heat, dust, and isolation got to be too much, they went to Europe on
R&R, or to rented villas in the cool highland suburbs of Nairobi,
where they were waited on, driven, and guarded by servants whose
grandparents probably had waited on, driven, and guarded the British
sahibs and memsahibs of bygone days. They were the new colonials,
and Fitzhugh grew to loathe them as much as he loathed the old-time
imperialists who had pillaged Africa in the name of the white man’s
burden and the mission civilisatrice.
When he wasn’t in Sudan, he who had grown up on the edge of things
dwelled on the edge of the compound, in a mud-walled hut with a
makuti roof and two windows lacking glass and screens; it wasn’t
much better than the squalid twig-and-branch tukuls of the Turkana
settlement that sprawled outside the wire, along the old
Nairobi-Juba road. Inside were a hard bed under a mosquito net, a
chair, and a desk knocked together out of scrap lumber. Fitzhugh’s
only concession to modern comfort was electricity, supplied by a
generator; his only bow to interior decoration, the posters of his
heroes, Bob Marley, Malcolm X, and Nelson Mandela. Asceticism did
not come naturally to him. Self-denial is easy for people with
attenuated desires and appetites; Fitzhugh’s were in proportion to
his size. He could down a sixteen-ounce Tusker in two or three
swallows and inhaled meals the way he did cigarettes. He loved
women, and when he came out of the bush, he would sweep through the
compound, scooping up Irish girls and American girls and Canadian
girls. (He stayed away from the local females, fearing AIDS or the
swifter retribution of a Turkana father’s rifle or spear.)
Inevitably, he would feel guilty about indulging himself and go on a
binge of monkish abstinence.
He met Douglas Braithwaite exactly two months and eighteen days
after the UN fired him, an encounter whose date he would come to
recall with as much bitterness as precision. Years later he tried to
persuade himself that he and the American had come together for
reasons he couldn’t fathom but hoped to discover, hidden somewhere
in the machinery of destiny or in the designs of an inscrutable
providence. Who among us, when an apparently chance meeting or some
other random occurrence changes us profoundly, can swallow the idea
that it was purely accidental?
Over and over Fitzhugh would trace the succession of seeming
coincidences that caused the path of his life to converge with
Douglas’s. He never would have laid eyes on the man if he hadn’t
lost his job; he would not have lost it if … well, you get the
idea. If he could map how it happened, he would find out why.
Eventually Fitzhugh’s mental wanderings led him back to the day he
was born, but he was no closer to uncovering the secret design. So
he was forced to abandon his quest for the why and settle for the
how, a narrative whose beginning he fixed on the day a bonfire
burned in the desert.
The High Commissioners of World Largesse, as he called his
employers, occasionally overestimated the amount of food they would
need to avert mass starvation in Sudan. Blind screw-ups were
sometimes to blame; sometimes field monitors deliberately
exaggerated the severity of conditions, figuring it was better to
err on that side than on the other; and sometimes nature did not
cooperate, failing to produce an expected catastrophe. Surpluses
would then pile up in the great brown tents pitched alongside the
Loki airstrip, tins of cooking oil and concentrated milk, sacks of
flour, sorghum, and high-protein cereal stacked on pallets. Once in
a while the stuff sat around beyond the expiration dates stamped on
the containers. It then was burned. That was standard procedure, and
it was followed rigorously, even if the oil had not gone rancid or
the flour mealy or the grain rotten.
Mindful that cremating tons of food would make for bad press, the
High Commissioners had the dirty work done under cover of darkness
at a remote dump site, far out in the sere, scrub-covered plateaus
beyond Loki. Truck convoys would leave the UN base before dawn with
armed escorts, their loads covered by plastic tarps; for the
Turkana, men as lean as the leaf-bladed spears they carried, knew
scarcity in the best of times and were consequently skilled and
enthusiastic bandits.
And it was the Turkana who blew the whistle. One morning a band of
them looking for stray livestock in the Songot mountains, near the
Ugandan border, spotted a convoy moving across the plain below and
smoke and flames rising from a pit in the distance. The herdsmen
went to have a look. That year had been a particularly hard one for
the Turkana-sparse rains, the bones of goats and cows chalking the
stricken land, shamans crying out to Akuj Apei to let the heavens
open. The bush telegraph flashed the news of what the herdsmen had
seen from settlement to settlement: The wazungu were burning food!
More than all the Turkana put together had ever seen, much less
eaten.
The word soon reached Malachy Delaney, a friend of Fitzhugh’s who
had been a missionary among the Turkana for so long that they
considered him a brother whose skin happened to be white. Apoloreng,
they called him, Father of the Red Ox, because his hair had been red
when he first came to them. He spoke their dialects as well as they
and was always welcome at their rituals and ceremonies. In fact, he
was sometimes asked to preside, and anyone who saw him, clapping his
hands to tribal songs, leading chants of call and response, had to
wonder who had converted whom. Malachy had been reprimanded by the
archbishop in Nairobi and once by the Vatican itself for his
unorthodox methods.
A frequent topic, when Malachy and Fitzhugh got together over
whiskey in one of the expat bars, was Fitzhugh’s employer. Although
Malachy was a man of the Left, he once told Fitzhugh that he admired
the American senator Jesse Helms, probably the only man on earth who
despised the United Nations as much as he. It had encamped in the
heart of Turkana land to lavish aid on the Sudanese while doing
nothing for his parishioners. Hadn’t helped them dig so much as a
single well.
When he learned that the UN was destroying food that could have
filled Turkana bellies, he lived up to his nickname. His hair was
gray now, but his broad, blocky face, scholarly and pugnacious at
the same time, was scarlet when he appeared at Fitzhugh’s tukul to
vent his outrage. Destroying it! And it looks like they’ve been
making a practice of it, did you know that? Fitzhugh answered that
he’d heard as much, but of course he’d never seen it and couldn’t
prove it. Proof, if it’s proof you’re needing, here it is, Malachy
fumed, producing a charred can of powdered milk from his daypack.
The herdsmen had scavenged it from the ashes, he added, and sat down
under the eave, on one of the crates that served as Fitzhugh’s
veranda furniture.
“More in there if you care to see it. It won’t surprise me if some
of the lads ambush a convoy one of these days and take the bloody
stuff for themselves, and if they kill somebody in the process, I’ll
by God give them absolution in advance.” Malachy looked out across
the asphalt meadow of the landing field, toward the huts beyond the
barbed-wire fence, their domed roofs leakproofed with green, white,
and blue sheets of plastic. “Ah, Fitz, I just might nick a rifle and
lead them to it myself.” Malachy had a martial streak; Fitzhugh
thought that a part of him regretted joining the priesthood instead
of the IRA.
After he’d cooled off, he came up with a sounder plan. He had
friends on the staff of the Nation, Nairobi’s most influential
paper, and at the Kenya Television Network. If he got advance word
about where and when the next burn was going to be, he would see to
it that reporters and cameramen were there to record it. A few of
his Turkana lads could show them where to hide-it would be a kind of
bloodless ambush. The whole sorry scene would be captured on film,
and then the UN scoundrels would be shamed into stopping their
unconscionable practice. Accurate intelligence would, of course, be
critical to success.
Fitzhugh gave him his full attention. He’d returned the week before
from the Sudanese province of Bahr el Ghazal, where he’d been sent
to conduct a “needs assessment” after Khartoum mounted an offensive
against the SPLA. The rebel army didn’t suffer much, but the people
did. Villages leveled by Antonov bombers, fields set afire,
livestock slaughtered. They were mostly Dinka tribesmen out there, a
very tall people with little flesh and fat to spare. Thousands
filled the dusty roads: dead men, dead women, and dead children who
did not realize they were dead and so struggled on through the heat,
past the prostrate forms of those who had acknowledged their doom;
struggled on seeking the brief clemency of an acacia’s shade, the
small mercy of a cup of water, a handful of sorghum. Each one of
those dark, lofty figures looked as insubstantial as a pillar of
smoke. My goodness, he thought, listening to Malachy, a tenth of the
surplus that had been put to the match could have saved them all.
To abbreviate, his espionage was successful. So was Malachy’s media
ambush. The story made the front page and led the nightly news on
KTN. Images of sacks, tins, boxes-forty tons of food!-consigned to
the flames. The Father of the Red Ox went on the air to condemn the
UN in the most florid terms, and to plead for the surpluses to be
distributed among his beloved Turkana if they could not be used in
Sudan. The foreign press was quick to pick up on the story.
Detachments of journalists assaulted Loki. UN officials, feverishly
trying to control the damage, issued denials and half-truths. Things
were quite exciting for a while, but predictably the scandal died
down, the journalists left, and nothing was done. The only actions
the High Commissioners took were to bar Malachy from the UN compound
and to launch a quiet internal investigation to find out who had
tipped him off.
Fitzhugh’s friendship with Malachy was common knowledge. He soon
found himself undergoing a cordial but persistent interrogation in
the security office. He told a few lies, thought better of it, and
confessed, showing no contrition whatever. His supervisor, a
Canadian woman, told him he was through. Naturally he did not merely
nod and leave. He made a speech, detailing the UN’s sins. She heard
him out and, when he was done, told him that he possessed an
“insufferably Hebraic soul,” a reference not to his religious
affiliation but to his judgmentalism. He expected too much of people
and human institutions, she said. Not everyone could be a saint; nor
was relief work a religion.
Fitzhugh had been in the bush for so long that he’d forgotten the
pleasant emotions the sea aroused in him.
Continues…
Excerpted from Acts of Faith
by Philip Caputo
Copyright © 2005 by Philip Caputo.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Knopf
Copyright © 2005
Philip Caputo
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-375-41166-6
