Afterward
Doing field work has its perils. One peril is that ones contact calls you to the other side of the world to satisfy his or her own needs, but not necessarily to further the researcher’s project. A few years ago I began receiving letters from the young man who was my original contact in Wamba, Kenya. I was interested in the milk culture of the Samburu and so had made a couple visits to do research. My contact started writing to me in the spring — the exact year doesn’t matter. I clarified what I wanted to accomplish — and he said — come! Come this summer! Well, when I did come that summer I disovered that there was a drought and so everyone was eating corn and beans from the U.S. supplemented by food oil shipped from Germany. There was no milk. So there was no research.
Yes, I was angry. But fortunately I had a second project. To record stories by the wonderful Babu. Babu means ‘grandfather’ i Swahili and there is nothing grandfatherish about Babu. In fact, the name was given him when he was a child. Babu is one of those adults who has retained his childhood brightness, and so he is as ironically a Babu now as he was when he was six.
I recorded approximately forty stories in thirty days. Babu has a drinking problem, and so his favorite time to tell me stories was early in the morning, around dawn, the only time of day when he was thoroughly sober. Of the stories I recorded on that trip, I selected a group that I then transformed into mp3 files and posted to my ftp site. These were downloaded by a wonderful woman in India who transcribed them. I cleaned up the transcritions — filled in words she didn’t understand — and then returned with them to Kenya to work on the texts with Babu.
Babu, unfortunately, is now suffering even more heavily the burden of too much drink. In the few hours that he was sober enough to concentrate on the stories — a few hours spread over almost a month — he answered questions that I was not able to work out on my own. Returning to Kenya with the stories in hand helped me see what was missing from his original narratives. As Babu tells his stories they are extremely lean — he assumes that you know the setting. Keeping as much as possible to the spirt of Babu’s style I have added what I hope is enough detail to enable readers to imagine the scenes he describes. Babu’s English is excellent, but it is not standard English. He speaks with fluency, but not fluently. What follow, then, are my retellings of a few of his more powerful stories. I have posted Babu telling one of these stories — Babie’s Coach — and so you an listen to his telling and compare it with my text to get a sense of the kind of changes I made to his stories. I made up the ending to the Babies Coach story as it is published here — but when I read it to Babu he said, ‘Yes, that is how it was.’
Babu is not a traditional African storyteller. He is not Samburu, though he was born in Samburu district. He lives in the Village of Wamba, not in the bush. His position is that of an outsider — and I am also sorry to say — too often his position is that of the village drunk. He is known for his stories — and he is known throughout the region. The year I recorded his stories — August and September 2000 — we went on an eighty mile walk. He seemed to be known wherever we were. People of all ages from children to old men and women called out to Babu as we walked through their village. I told him that he ought to run for parliment.
Are the stories true? I have no idea.
William Rubel, March 2004