I don't give a damn about politics, the Kenyan government, Kenyatta and Odinga.
I care about my cows, especially.
Then also about my children, but those die even if you keep up with them, even if you follow them on sight.
They whine and die, before they have borne you fruit.
Their mothers as fruit have given you those little beasts, and if they have not borne fruit you feel you have lived for nothing.
You can't keep them on the string, the children.
So get yourself a younger wife, have your father or older brother fuck her, and if she is good and hardy, you fuck her for as long as you want.
If you're lucky in five years she doesn't make you more than three children and they are born alive.
Wives are not essential for fucking.
In Kitale there are Ugandans, but they want a lot of money.
Also in Tororo there are Ugandans and they cost less, but what you save in money you spend in time and effort: three hours by truck (twenty shillings for passage) and then crossing the border, through the Walanga gorges. Then two more hours of rock climbing with bleeding feet wrapped in antelope skin, to the road to wait for another truck. This one costs only 10 shillings, if you have Ugandan currency.
A one-day safari to find you a blacker woman than me who smells of city grasses and moves slowly, not like your wife who always looks like a hunted animal.
Five minutes and it's all over.
Almost better to fuck a goat.
I've only done it twice. The first time I was a kid, the second time I had decided to run away and stop and work in Tororo.
The Ugandan police sent me back and for a year I didn't have the courage to look my elders in the face.
Since then I thought cows are better.
With cows you drink milk with them, you raise your children with them that one in four will bear fruit.
With cows you can fuck with them, in the sense that the more cows you have, the more wives you can buy.
If the cow gets sick you can eat it and sell the meat.
You can even eat the calf if you are hungry enough not to wait for it to become an ox.
All the cows need is grass, and if you have the strength and patience to go up to the Big Mountain, you also find the good one and smoke the one that grows wild.
The best one is in the hills of Kaptaleria. If you make it that far and you like the risk, you can go to Eldoret once a month and sell it.
You can earn as much as 150 shillings. That's money for five kilos of porridge.
You can't live on cows alone, but without them I wouldn't have found out how to earn money.
I don't give a damn about Kenyatta and Odinga.
Now they have made peace, before they had waged war.
But here in Endebess, war has always been waged. People have been dying and killing each other since there has been the word for things.
We kill each other for cows, for land and for the best grass.
We are all from one tribe, but there are some who feel different because they come from Kimilili and say we are not Kalenjin, but half Luhya.
They say that many years ago we were in Kapchorwa, on the other side of Big Mt. Uganda.
They always killed us if we were in their parts with our cows, marked the pasture land and destroyed our temporary huts. They know our ways and wait for us. Some of them don't buy cows, they wait for ours.
And if one of ours meets one of theirs alone, because he is marking land or following the footprints of a new trail, he should kill him.
My brother did it, I am afraid and it never happened to me, but I know I should do it.
When we went to vote we knew something was not going to go right. It was two of them who were picking up our ballots, in Endebess Elementary School. They had come all the way from Kitale escorted by a police Land Rover.
Only on these occasions do you see a Land Rover, in this very high desert of rock and bush. Or when the white man comes and gives us rags and pills that take away our yellow fever.

Two days after the election someone left for Eldoret and never came back. At the new moon twenty of them came and stole five cows from us. They had a beat-up truck that didn't run any more than my cousin Kapketirir, the one who went to Nairobi when he was fifteen and sends us five hundred shillings every now and then because he won a marathon. So we chased them trying to get into the truck and free the cows, but a fat man in a military uniform came up and shot wildly. Two of us died and one today has a leg that doesn't work.

Since that day Endebess has turned into a nightmare. We tie up our cows and sleep together with them in the hut at night, organize ourselves into patrols around the village and take turns standing guard. Sometimes we set fires to obstruct the passage and view to those from outside.
We killed two of them, but I am not sure if they wanted the cows; to me they were just poor homeless people looking for food. Some even celebrated by getting drunk on Chang'a.
Then, after another moon, came the off-road white people.

There were other blacks with them, even two Indians. Such white Indians I had seen only in Kitale, in a nail store. The whites always come later, sometimes they say that when they stop in your village, nothing will happen for a while, but as soon as they leave, you better run away too. So we didn't, because the whites and the Swahili-speaking Indians, they promised us they would come back and said Kenyatta and Odinga signed peace and the whole world was watching them from television.

Television also came to Kitale, and to Eldoret. It showed the world their dead, their burned houses, their screaming faces. Those of the Luo and the Kikuyu. To them it's all Luo and Kikuyu, they don't know that there are also Kalenjin of one kind and those of another, those with lots of cows and the best land to graze on and those who would like it.
So we are still killing ourselves now, that there is peace and there is no more television.
And a matter of cows, those we had before, those we try to keep now and increase.
Cows, and the land to graze.

Fictional story from news reports.

(Reuters) - Kitale - Communities in Mount Elgon have officially asked the government to stop the crackdown by local police forces in the villages. The military's interventions were reportedly necessary to quell new feuds between clans over territory and livestock and have caused more deaths and injuries.

(Agi) - Baringo - Twenty-two people died, including herding families and bandits, during a raid in the Rift Valley after a dispute over cattle ownership. Seven members of one family had their throats slit, neighbors in the village engaged in a battle with the thugs who had seized the cows, ten people died and five others were killed by police who arrived on the scene later.