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Bonfire shot flames up into the clear skies filled with stars, sparks flying to the beat of drums, strums of nyatiti, and deep bellow of abu. In concentric three circles around the pyre, black people danced in a rhythm set by the instruments. Row closest to the heat composed of children male and female dressed in brown short togas tied over one arm with strings of rope adorned with small seashells, they held hands and pulled each other around, kicking their bare feet to the beat.
Behind them, women in blue dresses with embroidered motley patterns, on their necks rows upon rows of beads arranged according to the wearer's own aesthetic circled all the way from their collarbones up to the earlobes. In their hands they held fly whisks made of animal tails held by a wooden handle, their dance routine coordinated, the movement of one leg in the opposite direction with the waist in step with the syncopated beats of the music and the vigorous shaking of the shoulders rattled their jewelry, adding a backdrop to all the noise going on. Their smiling faces and delicate brown skin had red clay rubbed into it in traditional patterns, the tribe's 'makeup artist' responsible for that.
Men in the last circle, with oval cowhide shields passed from only as far as their grand-grand fathers, out of use for less than a hundred years, feathered or made out of long tied together furs headdresses, collars of seashells and beads, jumped in place barechested, shaking their spears and shields. Their bodies marked with white clay representing spirituality were uncoordinated with the rest of the dancers, steps up to the individual. Sweat dripped off their muscles, skin shined with an oily glare.
Outside the dancefloor on one side were musicians in colourful dashiki, a garment that covers the top half of the body, and intensely dyed wide pants, their instruments crudely but with a sense of beauty and history crafted according to the ancestral way using materials available in the tribe, hides, horns, bee wax, and bones. In other quarter of the space around, remaining black members of the tribe clapped and cheered for the performance, the last half occupied by a dense crowd of yellow and white people, climbing each others' shoulders for a better angle to get the scene on their expensive cameras, blinding flashes illuminating the night as lightning, the dancers thankfully long used to such interruptions didn't miss their moves, kids gripping their hands tighter and closing their eyes whenever facing that angle.
After the activity ended, everyone went in the direction of lit torches, their campfire placed amidst the plain covered in silvery shadows, illuminated by faint starlight and a moon that shrunk to its thinnest crescent. Inside a grove of trees, circular houses made out of clay and mud walls with a cone straw roof over them stood, comfortable tents on the side of the small village awaiting the yellow people to go inside, tables of local specialties prepared for them meant to be eaten while drinking mursik, a fermented milk delicacy popular in Kenya.
"Are you very tired, Kipkoech? Could Chepkirui manage?" two dressed dancers entered their home, one a fully grown man, one a boy developed well to a hundred and thirty centimeters from the compacted earth under his soles to the tip of his bald head, to see their wife and mother feeding the newest member of the family while cooking porridge containing beans and cuts of meat, the number of people it had to feed eight - excluding the toddler, she asked her son in crisp Swahili.
"It was fine, she can come next time holding my hand." Kipkoech replied taking off his dress to put carefully inside a wicker chest, his father undressing beside him hung the shield and spear on prepared stands inserted into the wall.
"Okay, I will take her to buy the outfit before the next show, she can start earning dowry." the man acquiesced, the family then sat and complained about those tourists littering everywhere, and went over a plan for tomorrow's labour, their cattle and fields had to be taken care of regardless the pitiful amount of money the two males received for entertaining foreign guests.
Dawn the next day, Kipkoech woke up on his straw mattress to an aroma of milk and bread his mother baked on a flat stone over their fireplace in the middle of a hut. Sunshine passing by the hide full of cracks that served as their door, he overlooked his still sleeping siblings with warmth in his gaze, five of them girls, one boy born as the third of them, now six years old. His work started with dressing up in the usual cloth held in place by strings over a naked body, he led his two oldest siblings out to plow the field, borrowing three hoes on the way from a communal tool shed. Going out of the groove village was located at, he overlooked the scenery - yellow, green, and brown savanna typical of arid but well-watered equator plains in the dry season, sporadic trees towering over it, a zebra in the distance. Crops they cultivated here centered on maize and beans, herding Boran cows for their meat and Fresian ones for milk, plentitude of goats, and sheep, cattle the most important wealth a Luo tribe member could own, his father tending to it.
Working only until the relatively cooler hours passed, Kipkoech had to endure sights and cameras pointing at him and his siblings from the white and yellow onlookers that wore sunglasses and straw hats women in the village woven for them, apparently the way hoe swings extremely novel and interesting in their opinion. Next job going out to fetch water from the well on the outskirts of the village into their house in preparation for dinner, the trio returned and this time took six buckets on a stick intended to be slung over their shoulders, as they came back, tents were already gone.
"Finally went away?" Kipkoech asked his mother that nodded from over a needlework she was busy with. "Great!" the boy was relieved and led his siblings deeper into the hut, taking out normal comfortable t-shirts, shorts, and shoes from a solid wardrobe there. In the afternoon, the group went to play with their siblings busy learning how to write and count in a rectangular building made of cement, courtesy of charitable donations the tribe received, climbing trees and spotting animals loitering around the village. As Kipkoech hung on the top of the crown of a huge tree, boasting in front of his younger siblings, a large owl flew to sit in front of him. Taken aback by the bird's lack of fear, the boy stabilized his hold over the branches and gazed into the owl's unblinking blind eyes covered in cataracts, the animal was clearly blind, yet the boy had a feeling of being scrutinized harder than under dozens of camera lenses. Uneasy for a while, the owl was the first to fly away eliciting a sigh of relief from the boy. Thinking nothing more of the incident, he led his four siblings, two youngest left with mother, in singing some popular amongst the tribe songs before slowly going back home. To his surprise, a gathering was held in front of his hut, his parents, chief, and an unknown man that turning revealed had completely white eyes a mere hour ago placed on an owl, the bald African, eight-years-old boy with large earthy-brown iris, wide forehead, and big ears, froze in place out of fear.
"John Kipkoech Saomei arap Kiprono, I come to announce your identity as whisperer and take you to Uagadou School of Magic." the 'blind' man spoke in somehow accented Swahili.
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