we live in a smaller area in the north. There are several thousand Ariaals. I don’t know the exact number because we don’t count people. It’s taboo; it’s considered greedy. Even when the government census takers come, we don’t give them a number. My mom looks the other way and gives them names. She says, “My kids are so, so, and so…”—but she doesn’t give them a number. She lets them figure it out.
I was born at the end of the rainy season, so everything was green. People were happy. They didn’t have to work too hard. The kids didn’t have to take the cattle too far to graze. No one had to go too far to get water; the water was everywhere. This was in the Marsabit district, just south of the border with Ethiopia. It’s an area of low rolling hills. The lowlands are dry—almost a desert—but the hills are cooler and wetter, especially during the rainy season. At that time, my village was on the side of a small hill called Kamboe.
Before I was born, my family was made up of my father, my father’s two wives—my other mother and my mother—a much older brother named Paraikon, who was my other mother’s son and who became a father to me when my father died, and my two older brothers, Ngoliong and Lmatarion, who were eight and five years old. Ngoliong and Lmatarion used to help my mother a lot. Most families have girls, and the girls will go get water or go get firewood. But there were no girls in my family, so my brothers would do that, and people would laugh at them. The girls in the village would laugh and say, “Look at them. They’re doing the work of a woman.” But my whole family, we just love our mom so much, so my brothers sacrificed their pride and brought water and wood and did other chores. But you can be sure of one thing: Both of them wanted a girl to be born next time. Not my father. He wanted a boy because boys take care of the cattle—he’d have another herder. But my brothers and my mother wanted a girl.
Our hut was under an acacia tree that still stands today. When my mother was pregnant, right up until the time of labor, she would go out and do chores. The evening I was born, she was part of the group of women who went to get firewood. Some of the midwives told her not to, but she likes to work so she went anyway.
That same evening a bull separated itself from the herd and came up to my mother’s hut. It was a bull from a cattle family we still have today. He never came to my mother’s hut, never. But that day he showed up and rubbed himself on the hut. And one of the elders said: “A baby boy is coming, whether you like it or not.”
About midnight—when the night is equal, as the elders say—my mom started to go into labor. Women came with herbs and other things. And when I was born, someone ran outside and said to my father, “Hey, Lekuton! Ti wa lashe!” “Baby bull!” In my language, when a child is born, we don’t say “boy” or “girl,” but lashe, which means “male cow,” or ngache, which means “female cow.”
My father made his signature sound: Hhehh! Every man has a signature, a sound he makes when he wants to be known. Right now, if I came to my mother’s hut in the middle of the night and I wanted my mom to identify me, I would make this sound: Harumph. And my mom would say, “That is my son.” Even if it’s after ten years. So my father made his Hhehh! and he said, “Yes, another herder is coming.” And my mother and my brothers? They were mad, because they knew that now they’d have to work a little harder to bring a little more wood and water.
My mom thanked the Creator all the same, and all these women came and started singing. When a baby is born in the village, it’s a big celebration. But there was a complication. Although it was the rainy season and everything was green, there was disease in the area, and people were worried about the cattle. A few days before I was born, the village had held a meeting and agreed that, with grass and water everywhere, it would be a good time to move. Now, the village can’t move the day after a baby is born, so they had to call another meeting of the elders.
“Hey, you know Lekuton’s wife has given birth to a baby boy,” they said. “It’s a blessing, and we must postpone a day or two. And then we have to move.” They talked and decided that in two days they’d move.
Another problem was that I refused to breast-feed. I didn’t want anything to do with it. For us, as in America, it’s known to be healthy to breast-feed. But I just couldn’t do it. So one woman said, “Oh! Lemasolai!” “Proud one.” That’s how I got my name: Lemasolai. He’s proud, he refused to breast-feed.
They tried every trick. They tried offering me cows: Our people believe even an infant understands about the cattle. “Take that cow!” my father said. “I’ll give you that cow! And I’ll give you that other one, too, if you breast-feed!” But I didn’t listen.
At the time, there was a little cow that had lost its mom. It slept in the hut with us and some of the little goats. My father had made a leather bottle to feed the calf with, and one woman said, “Hey, why can’t he share with the calf?” So I grew up drinking from the same bottle as that little cow. A lot of kids made fun of me, and I put on a lot of weight because I got a lot of cream from the cow instead of getting milk from my mom. But my family gave me that cow. It was the first one I owned.
Two or three days later, the village moved. I was put in a special carrying case made of cowhide and bamboo and placed on top of a donkey. My mother walked beside me. We traveled for a whole day to another area. So really, my life as a nomadic child started when I was three days old.
Chapter 3
Cows
My roar is like thunder.
My cows have nothing to fear.
Fear rests with the cowards,
The cowards of the enemy camp.
MY EARLIEST MEMORY is of sitting outside our hut. I was probably three and a half or four. It was a sunny day, and around me the women were busy breaking camp. My mom was taking down our hut, getting ready to move. I was playing with rocks. I was just starting to learn the names of our cows, and I was lining the rocks up and calling them in, the way my father and brothers did with the real cows. There was a knife lying on the ground. I picked it up to play with, and all of a sudden—blood! It didn’t bother me—there was no pain, just lots of blood. Then someone saw me. “Hey, look at Lekuton’s son!” My mother came running over. She started crying, and then of course I started crying, too. The wound healed—my mother treated it with some herbs—but I still have the scar, under my right eye.
Cows are our way of life. They give us milk and blood and sometimes meat to eat and hides to wear. They’re our wealth. We don’t have money; we have cows. The more cows somebody has, the wealthier he is. My mother has lived her whole life in a hut made of sticks and cow dung, and you could put everything she owns on the seat of a chair. She lives entirely on the cow. For her, there’s something wrong with someone who doesn’t have cows. It’s just not civilized.
With cows comes respect. The more cows a man has, the more respect he gets. A man with a big herd will be listened to by the others in the village. But if that man loses his cows because he doesn’t care for them properly, or is too lazy to take them to better pastures, no one will pay attention. The respect goes with the cows; a poor man does not have a voice. The reason? We know someone with a lot of cows has worked hard, taken risks, brought his cows to where there is grass and water.
We have three criteria for judging a cow. Number one is the color. The best color is white with a lot of black spots, like an Appaloosa horse. To us, that is the most beautiful cow. Number two is the horn. We like a male cow to have big, even horns. And number three is the personality of a cow. A good cow is always at the front of the herd. If the cow is always late, if he’s always behind all the other cows, he’s not considered a good cow. We do not care about how heavy a cow is. Never. Just the beauty of its color, the size of its horns, and how active it is.
We name our cows. Each cow has a name, like a person, almost. My brother knows the names of all his cows, all of them. At night when he walks home after taking care of his cows, he will stand on raised ground and look down at them.
The cows all belong to different cattle families, and those in the same family look alike. My brother knows how many cows are in each family, and he’ll