Word: visitors
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...goat was slaughtered outside the boma just after dusk. The visitor held the flashlight. Young Olentwala did the killing. He threw the goat on its side and seized it by the muzzle with his right hand and placed his knee against the goat's throat and thus strangled it. Joseph said this was the kindest way, but the American doubted it. It was done, anyway, rather tenderly. Joseph and Olentwala chatted easily in Ol' Maa as the goat spasmed and spasmed and spasmed, and at last expired...
...visitor's driver, Davis, was a Luo from Lake Victoria, a hearty man of middle age with smiling open face and the public manner of a gregarious bishop. Davis considered himself a Roman Catholic priest. Into a notebook that he always carried, he had inscribed the text of the Latin Mass, copied from a missal that he had borrowed somewhere in his travels. Davis sometimes donned a long white alb and, all by himself outside the boma, performed services beside his Land Rover, chanting the Latin in a rich bass...
Davis was at his prayers next evening at dusk when the witch doctor came to speak to the visitor. The witch doctor, Ole Loompirai, sat in a dark, dung- walled hut and drank beer with the visitor and explained the work that he did. The laibon, or witch doctor, spoke in a low, murmurous voice in Maa, sucking frequently on an oversize bottle of Tusker, a faintly smoky Kenya beer brought up in the Land Cruiser from Narok. Moses impassively translated...
...Latin poured through the small window of the hut: "Pater noster qui es in coelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum . . ." The laibon explained the uses of animals in his work. He employed the warthog, for example, to cast a spell to keep the government out of Masai business. Good choice, the visitor thought. The warthog is a strutty little beast, a short-legged peasant with a thin tail that stands straight up like a flagpole when it runs. It backs into its hole and pulls dirt on top of itself and, if cornered there, comes out of the hole like a cannonball...
...animals, said the laibon, cows have the greatest power, the greatest importance. "The cow and the Masai came from the same place in the creation, and they have always been together." The visitor thought of the cattle-raiding warriors, and asked the laibon if it is all right to kill a man. The laibon thought, drank, blew his nose onto the dirt floor and replied, "It is not so bad to kill a man. If you do it and are successful, it is not so bad, because God allowed the man to die. God agreed, and so it happened...