Introduction to Babu Stories
The stories included here by Babu were recorded between 1995 and 2004. Babu is a great storyteller. Whether he is an African storyteller in the sense of someone who fits into a traditional storytelling setting, I cannot say. I think not. While he was born in Wamba he is not Samburu. His family are from Meru. He is an outsider. I think it probably best to think of Babu as the natural raconteur. His role in Wamba and environs is to be the party entertainer. Many people love his stories, and he fills the role of community entertainer. Being honest, though, Babu drinks too much, a lot too much. The drinking and storytelling are intertwined, though I hope that he will one day succeed in separating them.
Babu’s stories, particularly those about real people and events, tend to have a lean narrative line. The stories are spare, with little ornamentation. Of the several languages Babu speaks on a daily basis, English is his least proficient. Telling his stories in a language he speaks with fluency, but not fluently, he simplifies descriptions, sticking close to each story’s core. Many of the stories are personal experiences, but many are also stories that others have told Babu. Taken together, if I manage to get a large body of these works online, you will see that they paint a complex portrait of one place in Africa. A few of the stories depict extreme violence. I am thinking in particular of Adultary, The Theif’s Hand, and The Fortieth Day.
In these recordings, Babu is telling the stories to us, outsiders, and so he makes an effort to provide background information when some deeper knowledge of the place is required to understand the story. Samburu country is primary the land of pastoralists—semi-nomadic people who live off of animals, not agriculture, although modern life and stressed grazing lands means that many Samburu, particularly men, may earn cash from jobs, a common one being as watchmen in Nairobi or Mombassa.
Samburu towns are mostly commercial centers, places the nomads come to to buy supplies, not to live. The smaller towns—Lomoque, Lododeque, even Wamba—have few obvious residences. Only the biggest town, like Marlal and Isiolo, have electricity. Most of the characters in these stories live in the bush in huts made of sticks and cow dung that are dismantled and rebuilt in a new location every few years. These settlements are surrounded by a fence of branches cut from the thorny acacia tree. In the bush men and women are both elaborately decorated with beads and many young men and women also with red ochre. Every young man who follows the traditional Samburu life is a warrior, a moran or murran. While every warrior is not wildely handsome, however, there are many extraordinarily handsome warriors and some figure into these stories. All warriors, which is to say all young men, are armed with a short sword, a small club, and a spear.