The Man with a Camera

by Michael Schroeder

In June he was traveling on a train in Kenya, carrying a camera from his mother, to photograph his uncle’s wedding. The barefoot children at the station laughed and pointed at him, running with the train until they could run no faster and then they would stop. He took their pictures from an open window. He was friendly and not too young and his uncle sat in the compartment, reading a book. His father looked out the window. The sun was going down and he photographed the Rift valley, flat and spread out below the ridge, where cactus trees and acacias grew in bunches.

He was awed by Kenya. The land was beautiful, but the poverty, he said. The people were kind but knew tourists would pay to take their pictures. The train made many stops, in small towns, and he took many pictures. Nairobi slums, coffee plantations, abandoned train cars left over from colonial days, with Kenya Railways painted in large, now rusted letters. He felt safe on the train.

In Nakuru, the train stopped and he photographed a woman with a bag of cabbage slung on her head, and she cackled Kikuyu at him, foreign and garbled like an angry bird, shaking her finger. He went to the other side. It was late evening and cool and men loitered, women returned from the market, and children were everywhere, dirty, laughing, running, crying. He was American, friendly but unsure of Kenyans. He had never been the only white person before. He was not used to it yet.

“Why is that woman angry with me?” he asked.

“She wants you to buy her cabbage,” his uncle said.

“I don’t want her cabbage,” he said. “I want her picture and she is mad at me.”

“She is saying that since you have her picture you must now buy some of her cabbage in return. She says that is fair.”

He did not say anything.

The train pulled away from the station and the angry woman. It was six hours to Eldoret and it would be dark soon. He photographed two zebras on the plain from the open window. The train did not travel very fast and there were no stations for an hour. His mind was on the sunset and he wanted a picture. He asked a Kenyan soldier on the train if he could take his picture. The soldier waved his hands and said no he must not.

They arrived at the bride's family home in the countryside outside of a village on the outskirts of Eldoret in the middle of the night. He slept until late in the morning. A mosquito net draped his cot and he heard many voices outside the cement walls. At the top of the walls were open spaces where wooden rafters supported the tin roof. Openings covered with bars served as windows but there were no locks on the doors.

He arose and washed his face from the bucket in a room in the back of the house and went outside. It was not too hot in the bright sunlight and his father made gestures with one of the sisters of the bride. He wasn’t sure how many sisters the bride had. They all looked alike, attractive and slender with black skin and yellow dresses. “There he is,” his father said, “the man with the camera!” His father smiled and snapped a picture in the air. She laughed.

Several large older women, other wives of the bride's father, huddled around a kettle hanging over a fire pit. They smiled and extracted peas from pods with great dexterity, their hands following the cadence of simultaneous conversations. Two goats were staked by leashes to the ground, bleating and pacing.

Small groups of people sat or squatted in the yard, talking. The men wore gray or brown suit coats over bright white dress shirts and slacks and the women wore frilly dresses or kangas in bright colors around their waists. He wondered if his shorts and t-shirt were acceptable. He had not seen or felt any mosquitos; they were much worse near Lake Victoria and Uganda he was told. The side effects of the quinine shots were starting to fade, and he dreamed less and less of spiders.

After lunch he and his father walked down the road past the cornfield next to the house. People were arriving mostly on foot or by bicycle the day before the wedding since there were no hotels or places to stay, other than the grounds of the house. The procession was sparse but constant. One small, white and dented Toyota pickup sat driverless in the road in front of the house. It was the only car they could see.

On a hillside not far from the house of the family of the bride a dead cow lay bloating in the sun. There were no fences or other cows.

Later that evening he asked his uncle about the cow.

“It probably got hit by a car and neither the owner of the car or the cow will say anything about it.”

“Why not?”

“So the owner of the car won’t have to pay for the dead cow and the owner of the cow won’t have to pay to repair the car.”

Before he could ask any more questions someone turned on a boom box and people started to sing and clap their hands. He felt uncomfortable singing and did not understand Swahili but he smiled and clapped along anyway.

The next morning he got up early to take a picture of the dead cow. The wives were cutting potatoes at the fire pit. He motioned with his camera and drew a large circle with his arms. They smiled and dropped the potatoes into the kettle and he took a picture. Away from the house men slit the throats of the two goats, whose blood streamed into a large pot.

The wedding ceremony the next day was three hours long in the Catholic church at the edge of the village; three priests had traveled long distances to attend. The weather was again not too hot and the sky blue with puffs of clouds to all horizons. A choir wearing robes in traditional patterns sang outside.

He filmed the ceremony from the back of the sanctuary, shooing children away from his equipment. Outside he took photos of the bride and groom and smiling bridesmaids in pink and purple dresses and lacy hats. Indifferent groomsmen wore navy blue suits with red carnations pinned to the lapels.

A slow drive to the reception in five borrowed cars was accompanied by throngs of children and teenagers running alongside in bare, calloused feet. They smiled and laughed and tapped on the window of his napping father in the front seat of the lead car. Older townspeople watched from a distance and nodded and pointed.

In the reception hall guests sat elbow to elbow and gave speeches and ate goat stew with peas and potatoes. Outside, children who were tall enough came and went, watching wide-eyed from the open windows. Many hours later, long after sunset, western pop music blared from speakers and colored lights flashed. Tables were cleared away for a dance floor.

He stepped outside to avoid having to dance. His beer was warm but he was content in this place and looked forward to the safari and the animals he would see and photograph.

One of the groomsmen came outside and asked him for a light. He set down his beer and opened his palms in an empty gesture. Smoking was a disgusting habit to him.

The groomsman went to a group of young men in street clothes standing in no man's land between the road and not the road and smoked with them.

One of the young men pointed and mimed taking a picture, then waved his arm over his head. A white Mitsubishi van with a crumpled front end, one working headlight, and a cracked windshield pulled up and the young men came over and surrounded him.

He turned to go back inside but they blocked his way. Two of the young men touched his camera and one of them said in fluent English with a British accent, “Give us your camera!”

He thought of the wedding pictures and his uncle and the bride and held tight the camera hanging by its strap around his neck. There was no break in the circle of thieves and they began to shuffle with him away from the hall. He looked at the groomsman, who was not among them, not remembering his name, and said to please get help.

The groomsman shrugged and said, “I cannot prevent this. It is done.”

The thieves were neither aggressive nor brusque in their movements. The human cage approached the van in the dark ochre road.

“I will give you the camera, but let me have the film. Please.”

Several of them started to laugh and they stopped.

“It is the film we want!” said the driver of the van, smiling a large smile with perfect teeth and wearing a black t-shirt with Bob Marley smoking a joint. 

“Why? Who are you?”

“This is my van,” replied Bob Marley, “and you have a picture of the cow that has damaged it.”

His father had not seen the cow on his morning run. He tried to remember the groomsman’s name but nothing came to him. The groomsman was grinding a cigarette butt into the dirt and watching the door of the hall. Music and light spilled out but stopped short of the road, not wanting to get involved.

“It’s not on this roll of film.” Nodding to the groomsman, he said, “You’ve seen me, taking pictures all day. You’re in some of them. I have many rolls. Not here.”

The thieves all looked at the groomsman, who reflected for a moment and said, “He’s speaking the truth, I’m afraid.”

The postures of the young men changed. Bob Marley said something to the groomsman in Kikuyu and got into his van. The heaviness in the air lifted and the light and music seeped back around them. The thieves scattered into the night, fleeing the illumination and noise. The van drove off.

The groomsman looked at him with a finger on the lips and waded back inside.

He was shaken and hesitated returning to the hall. He drank the rest of the beer and, not wanting to create a scene for his uncle and new bride, resolved to speak to his father in the morning about it.

A commotion roused him from a troubled sleep and he did not know where his dreams ended and the morning began.

His father came into the room and said, “There’s been a robbery.”

“What? Where?”

“In the main room, this time,” his father replied, as if robberies occurred often in different parts of the house.

He reached under his cot and took out his camera bag. It was untouched, and, looking around the room, saw nothing else out of place.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” he said. After he was done his father went to the bride’s family and explained what had happened. Everyone agreed it must have been the same group of young men, who were known to the family. Their mothers would be spoken to and they would try to locate the owner of the cow.

“What about the groomsman?” he asked his uncle.

“He left for Nairobi this morning and won’t be coming back here.”

He was relieved but felt guilty for bringing misfortune to the family on an otherwise joyous occasion. His uncle smiled and patted him on the shoulder and said, “They will work it out amongst themselves. You did nothing wrong. We leave for Maasai Mara at one o’clock.”

The road to Maasai Mara was made of potholes and dust. In a white and dark green Nissan safari van with the name of the tour company on the side, the heads of his father, uncle, the bride, and her mother bobbed in unison. They imagined the elephants, hippos, lions, and cheetahs and other animals they could not think of. Travel was made slower due to herds of goats and sheep and cattle and oncoming vehicles. The guide, also their driver, wore an imitation army uniform the color of avocado skin and a burgundy beret and spoke only when spoken to or needed to give direction. The guide’s smile was friendly, eyes alert, and hands sure on the steering wheel.

The red and black striped shukas worn by the Maasai herdsmen reminded him of Scottish kilts, and some wore dress shoes with white socks, which he thought peculiar. They often smiled and waved as they passed by and were happy to let him take their pictures. One section of the road was paved and he took a picture of the speedometer at 135 kilometers per hour. Another section descended and ascended along a deep valley, with baboons lounging on the side of the road waiting for handouts from tourists. A rusty and bent sign on the side of the road announced, “You are now entering the escapment.” One baboon with a large, skinny erect penis the color of dragon fruit caught everyone’s eye and the lens of his camera.

At dusk they came onto a bluff overlooking an endless plain at the edge of the wildlife preserve. The grounds of the resort at the top of the bluff were surrounded by a high chain link fence and guarded by an elephant skull and a man with a rifle at the entrance. Sunset over the acacia dotted hills from the open air dining hall was burnt orange and the bar was open. There was talk of a hot air balloon ride one morning, but he was not an early riser.

From the open top of the safari van on the first day he took pictures of lions, elephants, giraffes, and a secretary bird in the rut of a washed out dirt track.

On the second day a bloodied dead lioness lay on the edge of a Maasai village on the way to the hippo pool in a bend of the Mara River. Park rangers with rifles slung over their shoulders smiled and held up the feline head with its closed eyes for the tourists' cameras. Crocodiles watched the hippos from the banks of the hippo pool in the afternoon. Distracted, he ate an ice cube from the drink cooler and was sick during the night.

The next morning his father went for a jog outside the perimeter of the resort and was escorted back by an armed guard in a Land Rover.

“You are tempting the lions with your rich American meat,” the guard said. “We need your money and the lions have plenty of other animals to eat. Please do not leave the grounds unattended.” The guard’s head bent back with a loud laugh and the hand not holding the gun slapped his father on the back.

Between nervous laughs at breakfast the wedding party looked out over the plains. Two elephants bathed in the creek at the bottom of the bluff. In the distance a great wall of white smoke rose where the Maasai were burning the grasslands.

Their guide informed them that it was not migration season but small herds of wildebeest and zebra could be found if one knew where to look, which the guide certainly did. If they were lucky they would see Cape buffalo, but give them a wide berth.

They watched a mother cheetah feeding on a large impala, the cheetah’s face smeared with blood, growling at the circling hyenas yipping and lunging at the carcass. “Not a good sign when the prey is that big,” said the guide. “It must have been sick.”

Lunch was in a grove of desert date trees and acacias near a creek. They ate antelope sandwiches and potato chips, drank Tusker beers and Cokes (no ice) and sat at the base of a tree. The guide stood at the edge of the shade watching a distant herd of Cape buffalo.  “You see, I know where to find them,” the guide said, pointing and smiling.

“We must keep our distance. I have binoculars and a gun.”  The guide patted and caressed the rifle slung on the shoulder.

“Are they dangerous?” the father asked.

“They will trample you and return to your crushed body and toss it out of spite,” said the guide.

“How close can we get?” asked the man with the camera.

“Once we are in the vehicle, maybe fifty yards, no closer,” replied the guide, who ate his sandwich standing and watching the distant herd. “Some drivers go much closer but I do not trust them.”

After a while his uncle and father dozed against a tree and the bride and her mother retreated to the Nissan for a short nap. The guide yawned.

“Bwana, will you watch the herd while I take a rest?” said the guide. “If you see anything closer than that lone tree you come get me. Don’t let anyone go farther than twenty yards from the van.” 

The guide climbed into the driver seat, rifle on lap, head back.

The door was left open. The only sounds were the breeze whispering through the leaves and the occasional fly lost in the midday heat.

He looked through the viewfinder of the camera. With the telephoto lens he had borrowed from a friend he could make out the curved horns of the magnificent black beasts. Their shape reminded him of hairstyles of the 1920s or the winged look of a 1970s TV star.

A few photos later he noticed the herd was facing them. To an animal, each buffalo was chewing grass and looking at the grove. Was it the unnatural bright colors of human clothing? He paused and lowered his camera. A slight wind rustled the trees, but otherwise there were no other sounds. Even the flies were napping.

He continued taking pictures of zebras and gazelles interspersed with the herd.

Several minutes went by and then, one by one, the buffalo took imperceptible steps forward, towards the grove, then in unison, slowly, they began to march.

He turned and said, “The buffalo are coming this way.”

The guide’s head jerked forward, eyes wide open, gun at the ready. “Please, get in the vehicle now.”

The father and uncle were already climbing into the van.

“Get into the vehicle now,” said the guide sternly at the man with the camera.

He stood, arm braced against his chest for stability, breathing out slowly, carefully aiming the large lens. The autofocus found its mark, and he squeezed the button in a measured cadence, not hearing or seeing outside the contents of the viewfinder.

“Wait!” cried the uncle. “Where are they?” 

The backseat where the bride and her mother had been napping was empty.

“Over there,” said the father, pointing to a small rise one hundred yards from the grove, to the left of the herd in an expanse of tall grass. The bride helped her mother rise from a squatting position, and they waved their arms, the sleeves of their bright red and yellow matching dresses fluttering a beacon.

In a stampede, the buffalo herd veered towards the bride and her mother. “No, put your arms down!” yelled the guide, starting the engine and shifting into gear with a crunch.

They could not hear him. The safari van began to drive away from the grove and between the bride and her mother and the oncoming herd.

The engine roared as the guide’s left foot played the clutch and left hand ground into second gear. The van lurched faster. The guide calculated ten seconds before the herd got to them. They picked up speed and the guide aimed for the space between the oncoming tons of hooves, horns, and muscle, which sounded like thunder.

The guide shifted into neutral and revved the engine as they approached the bride and mother. The father and uncle covered their ears and watched the buffalo start to turn away from them en masse. The vehicle rolled to a stop five feet from the women but the guide kept the engine revving. The women clambered into the side door not gracefully but with much haste. They landed in a heap onto the floor.

The engine died down and no one spoke as they caught their breath. The herd became a quiet rumble and a cloud of dust in the distance. The guide surveyed the savannah where the buffalo had been and pointed. “Look, there.”

A pride of lions trotted in the trampled path of the herd, panting, their yellow hides glistening in the sun. The guide looked back towards the grove. The engine roared again and the wheels spun as the vehicle slid forward.

The lions, five of them, a male, two females, and two older cubs, stopped and turned their heads towards the grove, sniffing the air.

Through the viewfinder, he focused on the male with three exposures remaining on the roll, heart pounding, no fear, mouth dry. He squeezed the button too hard before the image was in focus and the shutter snapped. Deep breath. Exhale.

The lion’s head filled the viewfinder as he shot the second remaining exposure.

In his mind the next picture contained the entire pride and would make a great photo for a magazine.

Far away a high pitched whine and screaming voices, but only one exposure remained, one photo of the most real thing he had ever felt in his life, and those sounds faded into the background. His hand turned the grip on the zoom for a wider field of view as the lions began to saunter towards him.

His finger gently pressed the shutter button to engage the focus and the crosshatch searched the lions for purchase in the equatorial light.

“Come on, come on,” he goaded the camera.

The focus locked and he squeezed the shutter button completely. The mechanical click and whir of the film inside the metal box was the most satisfying sound he had ever heard.

The next sound he heard was the snort of a lioness closing in, followed by the rest of the pride, snarling and baring their teeth. As if waking from a thunderclap, adrenaline coursed through his veins and he turned to see the safari van bounding at him. The lions would reach him first.

The guide realized this, too, and turned the vehicle hard left and slammed on the brakes. The driver door flew open. The guide raised the rifle and yelled, “Duck!”

The bride and her mother wailed and the father and uncle looked on in helpless purgatory.

Crack…Crack…Crack…Crack…Crack.

The camera exploded from his hands up and to his right.

The last thing he saw falling to the ground was the red mist against the white clouds in the blue sky.

The guide had shot at the closest lioness with the rifle as she seemed about to pounce on the man with the camera and had hit his left hand between the wrist and the base of the middle finger.

The pride of lions retreated from the spraying dirt thrown up by the other four shots. Humans can be dangerous.

During the short inquiry the guide insisted he intentionally missed the lions knowing they would disperse, even though it was company and park policy to prioritize human life.

On a July afternoon a package arrived at his mother’s house in St. Paul.

The woman signing for it had red eyes, a clenched jaw, and steely demeanor. The postman  mumbled, “Have a good day,” and retreated to the air-conditioned refuge of the mail truck.

His mother shut the door and had barely turned around when he rushed at her and grabbed at the box. 

The box tumbled to the floor and he dropped to his knees and scooped at the box with the bandaged stump at the end of his left arm, pushing it into his remaining hand.

He winced in pain and looked over his shoulder at the projector screen set up in the living room and couldn’t wait for the sun to go down.