Kenya
While we were loading two stud bulls and eight hoggets onto a lorry in my ranch’s yard in the African dawn this morning, the farmer buying them saw my bandaged right hand and asked with great concern: ‘Ooh my brother! Did you injure yourself handling your cattle?’ Kenyans are by nature warm and kind. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said standing in an honest expanse of cow shit. ‘It was no accident. Just an operation to straighten out my fingers.’ ‘Do you find it tiresome to drive?’ asked a ranching neighbour at an ebullient lunch overlooking the wilderness towards Mount Kenya this afternoon. ‘No, but it’s tricky if I try to shoot in the general direction of a monkey raiding the garden.’
I have Dupuytren’s contracture, which I prefer to call Viking’s disease as it sounds more exciting
A few days ago at a meeting of the local polytechnic where I sit on the board, in between the metal lathes and sewing machines the students exclaimed: ‘So sorry sir! Did you have a traffic accident?’ ‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘I had to get it seen to because I am old.’ In a teeming Nairobi thoroughfare between stalls selling roasted maize and sparkly Chinese clothes, a market lady said: ‘Weuh Mzungu! Did the gangsters hurt you when they mugged you?’ ‘Oh no, Madam,’ I said. ‘This Mzungu just needed to get fixed.’
A long time ago I was set upon by several fellows in a London pub. After quite a brawl, which I didn’t lose because I had a good woman throwing chairs alongside me, I came away with bruises and a black eye that needed stitches. The eye looked so revolting that when I went out to a smart party in town, I wore a pirate-style black eye patch. I used a shepherd’s crook for a crutch. Wearing the eye patch meant I could not see well and it took me some time to realise that I was attracting a great deal of female attention. As a great beauty chatted me up on the edge of the dance floor, I began to realise that it wasn’t me. Without the eye patch, none of these women would have taken any notice of me at all. (Note to male readers: try wearing a pirate’s eye patch and see what happens.)
Three decades later I’m 60, in a nation of kind young people – the median age here is 19 – who generally show respect to their elders, especially if they’re wearing white bandages. ‘Oh Mzee, sorry you are injured! You are so old! Can I carry your bag?’ In a place where many have such tough lives, they have time for others. Eventually I had to sit down this afternoon with my stockman, a burly Samburu pastoralist called Leshoomo, in order to allay his fears about my health in case I became too crippled to ranch cattle.
A very long time ago, I explained – tens of thousands of years ago – all humans lived in Africa. Then some people migrated north to Europe, where they met another more primitive tribe called Neanderthals. Humans probably massacred them, they might have displaced them – but before these folk became extinct they also interbred with them. Neanderthals had genetic problems and some of these have been passed down to me. ‘I see,’ said Leshoomo, who knows all about genetics, since we deal with these in our cattle and sheep. And that bloodline, I said, apparently gave me a disease that would worsen unless I dealt with it, until one day I might not even be able to hold a cattle stick. I undid the bandage to show the 59 stitches across my hand. The stockman, who sees much worse almost daily and has himself stitched up injuries or cows’ vulvas many times, said all was now clear.
What I have is Dupuytren’s contracture, which I prefer to call Viking’s disease because it sounds more exciting. For years this has been pulling my fingers in towards my palms and forming lumpy scars that make it harder to work with them, to hold a tennis racket, or even to type. It’s a strange thing which is quite common among older northern Europeans. Apparently only five cases have ever been recorded among black Africans. Maggie Thatcher had it and so did Ronald Reagan. ‘It means I have a spooky handshake,’ says the actor Bill Nighy, and in his films you can see he has this affliction. It doesn’t seem to bother him at all, but I have tried to get rid of it in a series of operations that feel like seasonal chores now. The bandage comes off this week and then I will not attract so much attention. I have typed this with my left hand.
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