Antonello Proto, To & Eve Hall

Antonello: African baptisms

1971 - 72

I met Tony and Eve at the end of 1971 when I arrived in Nairobi, sent by Philip Jackson, director of OXFAM’s media department, to cover Tony’s articles with my photos.

I had already been in East Africa in ’69 as (terrible) personal assistant of Leslie Kirkley OXFAM’s Director, but that journey was just like throwing a quick glance. The mission very short and all the travelling done by plane.

The plan for my second journey instead was completely different. I had proved to be a good photographer, so Philip decided it was worth trying me with that task. I was asked to stay for about two or three months, travel around East Africa and take as many pictures as I could.

I actually met Tony on an evening of mid December and the next morning we were already heading towards Garissa and the North East of Kenya, to reach MadoGashi and Wajir. Maybe for this reason I don’t have a strong memory of Eve from that first quick encounter, preparing to leave.

For me the trip turned out to be a sort of baptism and Tony was the perfect God Father. On a letter to my wife, then only “super-duper number one”, posted on our return, I have written that Tony was “an exceptional guy: Marxist, intellectual but with a great capacity of perceiving and analyzing reality, a fabulous source of information on African political, economical and ethnological problems”. In the next letter I wrote: “in Nairobi Tony knows everybody is worth while knowing”. I don’t remember if I have also met Eve on the same evening maybe because, as I find on the same letter, during the day I had too much sun at the swimming pool. “The boys” were not there since they were passing Christmas with their grandmother.

We started our trip on a bumpy dirt road with the back of the Land Rover full of bags, cameras, equipment and food supplies to keep us going for a few days. Tony understood I loved to drive and gave me the steering wheel while he thought about not getting lost. It was great and we relaxed and started talking about ourselves. Tony told me what you were all doing in East Africa between Kenya and Tanzania and begun mentioning what he and Eve had gone through in South Africa. They were just the first few facts, but he was the first person I ever met who lived similar experiences and I remember thinking in surprise how he could talk in such a calm way about terrible events. In response I told him haw much I hadn’t done during my life, but how many hopes and aspirations I had.
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"Tony was the perfect God Father. On a letter to my wife, then only “super-duper number one”, posted on our return, I have written that Tony was 'an exceptional guy: Marxist, intellectual but with a great capacity of perceiving and analyzing reality, a fabulous source of information on African political, economical and ethnological problems'"
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The conversation was suddenly interrupted. I hit a bump I hadn’t seen so wildly that bags, equipment, and food came flying on the front seat covering us with film rolls, cans and toilet paper. And sugar, spread all around the ca and over us. I though Tony was going to kill me, but the Land Rover was fine so he told me do be a bit more careful and that was all.

In Garissa we were supposed to visit two projects: one was a FAO experimental plot to obtain the best possible crop for the local conditions, the other a melon plantation funded by an NGO and directed by an American missionary. Both projects had been designed to help the population, the Somalis, to recover from years of civil war, but the risk was that someone else could gain from the projects since the Somalis are nomads. This is exactly what happened: the Kikuyo got all the benefit.

The land cleared from the bush near the Tana River was so fertile that in the FAO experimental plot the maze which received fertilizers the plants was so big that looked like a baobab.
When we arrived in Garissa, we went to meet the missionary: Brother Mario. He happened to be a very strange guy, a priest that had lived all his life in Denver, Colorado and owned an Italian restaurant. He was rich and happy until he had the call, then he sold his restaurant, quickly left Denver, Colorado and the States and buried him self in the nowhere of Garissa. Rumours whispered that the call was a phone call from some mafia guy and he had to vanish somewhere very far, but maybe these were only backbiters telling stories.

What we did witness was that he cleared the bush along the river all by himself just with a saw, a chain and a Land Rover, he started planting melons and in only one season and two harvests he managed to export melons in the UK and in Austria and he was planning to build a swimming pool because he discovered that Somalis had very long legs and could do very well in the Olympic Games. If he had had the possibility, he said, he would have built a skyscraper with a gigantic Coca-Cola sign on top to collect money for his Somalis.

Everything for his Somalis, but it was clear that he hadn’t forgot his old days of Italo-America-spaghetti entrepreneur in Denver, Colorado. And he behaved more like a boss than a preacher. In reality, he was doing everything for the sake of the success of his enterprise as if it was his creature, his baby.

The next day at an official reception he was greeted and treated as a God, as the perfect manager of melons as well as souls. Tony and I smiled all the time to everyone, but we were not very happy with the seen. It was not exactly what, in those days of strict ideology, we thought a development project should have been.

At night we slept on the top of a tower of the mission. There was no electricity, the generator was busted and Brother Mario didn’t give us any food. We opened a few cans and we ate in the brightness of an old, rusted camping light talking about Brother Mario and all the strange people going around Africa. There was no mosquito net and the morning our pillows were grey, covered with dead flying horrible creatures. Actually that was my real baptism of life in the bush.

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"...he was planning to build a swimming pool because he discovered that Somalis had very long legs and could do very well in the Olympic Games. If he had had the possibility, he said, he would have built a skyscraper with a gigantic Coca-Cola sign on top to collect money for his Somalis."
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The morning we left, we hit the road very early as we wanted to reach Wajir for the night and the drive was long and exhausting. I even bought some cat or chat to keep me going. I didn’t know what it was, but, from what I heard from Tony, it sounded good enough for the road. He explained me that it was used by the nomads to keep them walking with out food for the entire day but that it was quite mild, so, to be sure, I bought a full bunch.
We headed for MadoGashi where we arrived a few ours later. The town was not much more than a village. It was hot under a blinding sun, it was dry, sand and dust blowing everywhere, there was hardly any people around, we really felt in the middle of nowhere. Apparently, from what they told us later on, at night you could hear lions going up and down the main road looking for dinner in the small corrals attached to the dwellings.

While we were looking around, we heard the beat of drums and we followed the sound. We found ourselves in the middle of a big feast and practically all the village was there, dancing and singing together. A group of young girls were standing in a circle dancing and clapping their hands following the rhythm of the drums. In the middle, one at the time, a group of boys were dancing moving from one girl to the other. It was a sort of matrimonial ritual where the boys were choosing their fiancé and the girls were expressing their right to accept or refuse. The rhythm was somehow representing a sexual act, starting slowly, raising its intensity as the boy chose his girl to reach a sudden climax as the offer was accepted, to calm down again waiting for another boy to come into the circle. It was great, it was real and we could feel the tension and the joy. Nomads have very few occasions to meet other people and get to find a wife, so that, for them, was maybe a unique opportunity to meet the girl that they would marry. We could feel the excitement and the tension from the drums, the bodies and the expression of the faces. The only problem, someone told us, was that some boys could get a bit too excited and, if accepted by his girl, reach for his knife and cut his arms to show his courage and strength. Some of the them had to be grabbed by the older ones and carried out of the circle to be calmed down. The atmosphere was so real that, for the people dancing and singing, we were just not there, we were transparent. Often newcomers, specially white newcomers, become the centre of the attention disturbing and breaking the natural feeling, but they didn’t pay any attention to us.

Before leaving again, we decided to get something to drink. We had brought with us water and passion fruit squash, but it was boiling hot. We looked around for a place or a shop were to buy something and asked for indications but there was nothing we could buy. No water, no beer, nothing and people were looking at us as if we were a bit strange. Then, in a dark corner of a food shop, we saw a large, bran new, shining red Coca Cola refrigerator. There was no electricity in the village, no generators, but there was a shining red Coca Cola refrigerator full of Cokes. Boiling hot. We bought a few just as a souvenir.

Driving from Mado Gashi to Wajir, the road was often the rain water that flooded the plain. We had to move very carefully to avoid loosing the tracks and sliding into the mud. It was always me driving and naturally we ended in the mud at least twice. Third baptism: pulling out of the mud a Land Rover without the right equipment. The second time we tried and we tried, but the jack was too short and we didn’t have anything else that we could use as support for the jack. We sat next to the car: there was nothing else to do but wait for someone to help us. Tony, for the second time in two days, surprised me remaining calm and peaceful as if nothing had happened. Not knowing him enough I had to decide whether he was a saint or a very good actor. We went on talking, starting from where we had stopped before and that day I learned another thing about Africa. We hadn’t seen any cars passing by for a long time, but the first one which arrived stopped immediately. If it had happened in Italy or any other place in Europe you could have died before someone would have even slowed down to see what was happening. I decided it was much safer to drive around Africa than in Europe. The guy who stopped was a rich African man rushing from somewhere to somewhere else, but he told his driver to stop, patiently smiled to us from the window with a vague expression of superiority and sent his driver to do the job in the mud. After a few minutes we were back on the road.

At Wajir we were welcomed by the Italian Catholic priest running the mission we had to visit. He showed immediately to be very friendly and invited us for dinner. We hadn’t had any lunch so we accepted enthusiastically having heard from him the magic words “spaghetti al ragù”. Besides, all the cat or chat I chewed along the road had made its effect I felt so energetic I could go on jumping up and down without sleeping for days and until dinner I went on talking like a machinegun. I was afraid Tony would start to be a bit doubtful about me, but instead he looked amused.

At dinner there was also an Italian doctor working at the local hospital. It was a fantastic combination of characters. The priest, an open minded catholic, the doctor, an old socialist, godless and deeply anticlerical. They went on quarrelling and teasing each other in a funny confidential way all night long while we could only sit, listen and enjoy. We had wine for dinner, the one he used also for the mass, and whisky after dinner and that helped burning the atmosphere. It was certainly not a show for us and we were sure that it went on every time they met. It was really fantastic to witness, among the jokes and the teasing, the deep respect each one had of the other. They had worked together, fought together against diseases and calamities, helped each other for years and both of them thought that the other one was the best possible human being to work with.

At the end of the evening, going back to our rooms in the guesthouse of the mission we had a strange feeling of harmony and peace. Maybe it was the trip, maybe it was the whisky, but maybe it was just them.

I remember Tony being pleasantly surprised by the fact that a priest would offer whisky and even drink it. For him, from other experiences he had of missionaries, just a catholic priest would have behaved like that. He thought catholic priests were more open, closer to the human beings they were living with and they were not afraid that whisky or spirits, only by them selves, could bring people do hell. The priest we had met was a hard worker and a whisky after a heavy day would do no harm. Most protestant became missionaries because they had to save their own souls by making proselytes, most catholics because they wanted to help people.

The next day we went to visit the mission and the hospital. Tony was looking for stories on the most common diseases and accidents that were effecting the nomads and the local farmers. The doctor told us that the day before, while he was still at home he heard people shouting and desperately calling him. He rushed towards the voices and saw a man, covered in blood, walking along the street pulling behind him a dead lion by its tail. When the man saw him he collapsed, but he was not sighing or complaining, he was just whispering, hardly breathing: I’ve killed it.
Lions were a very serious threat to most of people, nomads and farmers. They would come at night, or before dawn, jump in the corral and grab a cow or a sheep. The only thing a man could do was to jump in the corral and fight the lion. Sometime he succeeded, sometime he died.

Being North Eastern Kenya an Islamic region, we asked the priest if he was free to promote Catholic Religion among the people or carry on pastoral activities. He smiled candidly. As much as he didn’t talk about religion he was free to do anything. For him it was fare enough. He didn’t want to convince people, if people saw he was a good man and he was behaving well, maybe they would start thinking Christians were good people and Christ too.

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"He rushed towards the voices and saw a man, covered in blood, walking along the street pulling behind him a dead lion by its tail. When the man saw him he collapsed, but he was not sighing or complaining, he was just whispering, hardly breathing: I’ve killed it."
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In the region there was the habit to punish minor crimes by flogging. We asked the priest what he thought about it and what was his position towards the local authorities and about the issue. He answered that he was not there to fight against the local juridical power. People were very poor and often, to feed their families, they preferred to be flogged rather than being detained in a filthy prison were their families had to feed them. His role, there, was to assist the population, help them to develop as human beings, help them expand their well being and their consciousness. It was then up to the people, once they had grown, to fight for their own rights and ask the authorities to stop the flogging. Acting in a different way would have been only paternalistic.

We ended up the day playing darts with the doctor in the local “club”, sipping an icy beer. The priest had said it was no good to show up in a pub while the population couldn’t drink.
Of course for dinner at the mission, we had once again very good wine for our meal.

The next morning we woke up very early. We wanted to reach Isiolo where Tony had to visit someone running an OXFAM project. The road was long and we didn’t know it’s conditions. On the way we met many crossroads without a proper sign for directions and we didn’t really know were we were going and if we were going to end up in Isiolo or Mogadishu or Ouagadougou. We stopped to check the map and we asked someone walking by if we were going the right direction. We pointed in front of us and asked Isiolo, Isiolo? An old man came closer, bent on his knees and started drawing lines and circles on the sand, talking to us as if we could understand perfectly well what he was saying in his language. We nodded and we nodded as if we had understood everything he had said, we drank altogether hot water with hot passion fruit squash and we left perfectly happy, sure we were somehow going to reach Isiolo.

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"Suddenly the lights in the square went off, silence broke out and the projection started. It was a film on astronauts, space ships, laser rays and aliens. In the middle of nowhere in 1970 in Isiolo, North Eastern Kenya."

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Along the road, since we were getting in an area full of game, Tony told me a few weird stories about encounters with wild animals while driving in the bush. Stories like people killed crashing against crossing elephants or an unlucky guy who hit a giraffe and got crushed by its neck falling on the top of the car. We both thought that that one was a bit of joke and I’m still trying my best to believe it.

Getting closer to the town, we started seeing a great number of people walking in the same direction we were going. They were all carrying along a great quantity of goods. Vegetables, baskets, chickens, goats. We thought they were going to a market or maybe to a big celebration of some sort. When we arrived in Isiolo, we went straight to the person Tony had to visit and forgot everything about the market or the celebration. We talked drinking a couple of beers and then we decided to go for a ride to look around what was going on in town. The streets were deserted and there was nobody around until we reached the centre. The main square, an enormous dusty esplanade, was packed with people peacefully sitting on the ground, clearly waiting for something they had come for. To the side of the square there was a big truck shaped like gigantic tooth paste with a white screen on the top. At the opposite side there was another truck with a projector and loads of boxes containing tooth pastes and tooth brushes. Suddenly the lights in the square went off, silence broke out and the projection started. It was a film on astronauts, space ships, laser rays and aliens. In the middle of nowhere in 1970 in Isiolo, North Eastern Kenya. Moreover, the film was in English and the sound track was so poor that, even trying our best, we couldn’t understand a single word. Everybody stood perfectly still and silent, watching the screen until the end of the projection, then they slowly rose, cued up to get the tooth paste and tooth brush offered the projectionists and disappeared somewhere in the pitch dark of the night.

For dining and sleeping we decided we deserved a present and we went to the Samburu Game Park Lodge, a very posh accommodation after a few nights of missions’ guesthouses. The dining room was on a terrace overlooking a river. On the other side, along the banks there were a few crocodiles deeply at sleep and on a cliff, day lightened by big projectors, there was a large piece of meet hanging from a branch attracting lions and all the other meet hunters of the wilderness. We ate quite well but no ferocious animal came for the dinner hanging from the branch. Everything looked pretty fake especially considering what we had seen during the previous days. We had seen free game outside game parks and they seemed more real. Here it wasn’t so different from a standard zoo, not exactly understanding if we were looking the animals or the animals were looking at us.
During the dinner Tony and I spoke about what we had seen in the main square of Isiolo, the projection and the magnetic power of attraction of moving images on human beings. We both agreed that it could have been a fantastic way to communicate and share important messages, create awareness, train and teach. From that day on, in my job, working in communication for development, when I have to give a perfect example of the power that moving images have on people, I tell this story of Isiolo. When I realized that often my pictures were misused with wrong captions to serve other purposes and I decided to change way of expressing myself, I remembered the experience Tony and I had in Isiolo and worked hard to become a video producer and use images and sound as a self-expressing message to sensitize people about development, to promote new ideas and train to achieve new potentials.

The next morning, before leaving for Nairobi we went to visit the park. I still have in front of my eyes the image of the gentle elegance of the reticulated giraffes, walking as if they were dancing. A Boran park ranger gave us some interesting information about his own people. Great people the Boranas: they seemed to have fun all their life, specially at the age when all the other people were busy working, fighting or preparing to pass from one age group to the other. The only problem was to keep them away from the Somalis. They hated Somalis and they would kill them at first glance. A vivid self-portrait not very reassuring, but at least not heartbreaking for the sake of tourism.

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"From that day on, in my job, working in communication for development, when I have to give a perfect example of the power that moving images have on people, I tell this story of Isiolo ...I remembered the experience Tony and I had in Isiolo and worked hard to become a video producer..."
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The road to Nairobi was nice and smooth and I don’t remember nothing of any interest apart from an old guy in a bar in one of the villages where we stopped to rest and have a drink. He was sitting at a small round table in a corner of the bar, bent on a creased, smeared copy book. He was a wearing a sort of a borsalino hat and a heavy, grey overcoat. He would continuously pull out of his inside pocket a chewed pen to draw circles on the paper as if he was writing mysterious magic secrets. Then he would put the pen back in the pocket and look around for indiscrete glances ready to repeat the operation over and over again. He was living in a dream, I wonder what sort of a dream it was, if it was a good or a bad dream.

Antonello