Word: boma
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...visitor came first to the enk'ang of Moses' older brother Joseph, who, surrounded by children and dogs and friends, strode out from the boma -- a tall thorn-and-cedar enclosure, the feudal African fortress against lions and leopards -- to meet him. Joseph was smaller and more delicately boned than Moses. He had the fine, intelligent head of a Talmudic scholar, the visitor decided, an Ethiopian head, a fastidious head, given to complex distinctions. Joseph and the visitor set out in the evening light to walk across the hills to Moses' boma. Joseph wore a handsome red blanket hung over...
...night around a fire inside the boma, Moses recounted some of his dreams. In one of them, he runs up a ravine with steep rock walls on three sides, pursued by a rhino. He claws at the rock walls, trying to escape, hanging by his fingertips. He wakes up screaming. In another dream, a lion is dragging Moses through deep grass. Moses desperately clutches at the grass with his fingers, but the grass comes up in clumps, and Moses is dragged...
...afternoon Moses and his guest came to the Morijo Loita Primary School, a windswept arrangement of tin-roofed buildings on a bare hillside a few miles from Moses' boma. Several dozen schoolchildren were gathered in a classroom of the sort that made one think of the places where Abraham Lincoln went to school on the Indiana frontier. The children sat in rows at long crude benches. They were asked about their encounters with the wild animals, in reality and in dreams. A boy named Seketo told of being chased by a lion once while he was herding cows...
...wondered about it, Moses explained, "Leopard comes at night to take the goat." Around every Masai enk'ang is built a sturdy fence of thorn and cedar to keep the lions out. One day, walking in the forest, Moses shouldered an enormous slab of cedar to add to his boma. "The lion makes me do a lot of work," he remarked. Sometimes the barricades do not hold, and the Masai wake to the bawl and crashing of cattle as the lion struggles to carry off his beef...
...each other. One night when Joseph was still a boy, he and his friend dreamed the same dream, about a leopard attacking the calves. "We both woke up at the same time, screaming and fighting the leopard," Joseph said. "We both roared like the leopard, and then the whole boma woke up screaming" -- shouting about the leopard the boys had seen -- but had seen only in their dreams. And in the morning, by the goats' pen, the people found leopard tracks. "You know," said Joseph thoughtfully. "There are scary animals. And they eat people. Sometimes people never learn...