Light at the Edge of the World (16 page)

The first fatal skirmish occurred in December 1987, as Boran warriors came to Songa to water their cattle. The four dead, three Boran and one Rendille, were just a beginning. Within months, the blood feud had taken the lives of infants and women, old men and children. Retaliation became random, with the innocent dying on both sides. Within a year, Rendille and Boran were killing each other on sight. Automatic weapons increased the carnage. A Russian AK-47 could be had for the price of four bulls, a German G-3 for less. By December 1998, when I visited the region, it was no longer safe to travel from Songa to the market centre at Marsabit. Three times a week, armed convoys set out on foot, a dozen escorts guarding three hundred
or more women and donkeys carrying mangos and kale, papayas, oranges and avocados in a wary procession that moved slowly along the dirt track that ran through the dense forest.

One day, I walked with them, along with my friend Daniel Lemoille, whose father had been among the first Rendille to settle at Songa. We set out at dawn, with low clouds clinging to the mountain, the women all around us brilliant in their scarves and blouses of bright reds and purples and yellows. Many in the convoy had been victims of the troubles. Nachapungai Lekupes's husband had been shot dead in 1996, leaving her with five children and pregnant. One of the armed escort turned out to be Sekwa Lesuyai, whose wedding I had attended but a week before. Dressed in black army boots and camouflage mufti, sunglasses in place of ochre, a rifle on his shoulder instead of a spear, he was hardly recognizable. Sekwa had lost a sister to the violence, one of seven killed in a massacre at Kukituruni in 1992 . An elder named Paul Masokonte showed me the scar on his shoulder where he had been wounded; his friend, shot in the chest, had not survived the ambush. Only six days before, while I had been at Lewogoso watching camels being bled, an ambush had left three wounded: a policeman shot in the shoulder, an old woman in the thigh, and a young boy who lost two fingers to a bullet.
“We will kill ten of them, for every one of us who dies,” Daniel assured me.

Fortunately, it was a day without incident, and, as we approached the outskirts of Marsabit, the irrepressible spirit of the people burst forth in laughter and song, and a madcap rush to the town centre as each woman secured her place in the market. In an instant, all tensions dissipated, and a cloak of normalcy enveloped the moment. War, famine, killing, the suffering and humiliations resulting from the ill-conceived schemes of foreigners: these things were forgotten, if only for a time. As I followed the women into Marsabit town, I had a profound sense that if only they had been left alone, if the opposing sides in the Cold War had not flooded a continent with guns, if all the missionaries and aid workers had kept their good intentions to themselves, then these ancient pastoral peoples might have had the opportunity to change at their own pace and in their own ways. Conflicts there may have been, but almost certainly they would have been less bloody.

Still, despite the violence and the lingering impact of development initiatives, the future of the nomadic peoples of northern Kenya remains far brighter than that of other peoples who have been overwhelmed by outsiders. The Chinese entered Tibet with the promise of liberation and the purported goal of transforming the lives of the Tibetan
peasants for the better. What transpired, in fact, was a nightmare, as dark as any recorded in the bitter annals of human endeavour.

LATE ONE AFTERNOON IN LHASA, AT THE END OF a long winter journey, a Tibetan friend led me through a warren of whitewashed houses, along a narrow frozen track that led eventually to the door of his mother's house. Content to be back in the ancient city, he sang as he walked, scattering coins to young boys wrapped in wool, faces black with soot, who followed in his wake, calling out his name. Upon reaching his home, we stepped beneath a pleated awning of red, blue and yellow cloth, and entered a dark room scented with incense and illuminated by the faint glow of candles and butter lamps.

Along two walls ran low benches cushioned with thick rugs. Painted chests served as tables. An iron brazier,
glowing with burning juniper and yak dung, drew us to the middle of the room where we stood, hands to the flames, stooped beneath the low roof beams, ornately carved and stained a fiery red. In one corner of the room, beside an antique armoire, was a butter urn, its wood darkened and brass burnished from years of use. Above the urn hung a portrait of Mao Zedong and a photograph of the Potola Palace, the architectural wonder that was home to the Dalai Lamas and the seat of Tibetan political power until the Chinese invasion of 1950 and the crushing events that unfolded over the ensuing years.

My friend's niece squealed with delight to see him. She was a lovely girl, perhaps twenty, with walnut skin and black, finely braided hair that shone with oil. His mother was even more beautiful, a diminutive woman, hair streaked with grey, whose deeply lined face glowed with timid delight as she politely touched my hand and then embraced her son. Around her neck she wore necklaces of silver coins and coral, amber and turquoise, all that remained of the wealth that had once positioned the family at the highest level of Tibetan society.

As we drank butter tea, telling stories of our journey, laughing as we recalled moments of folly, my friend's mother sat close by his side, her weathered hands resting in his. In her long life, she had seen many things, endured
unspeakable hardships. Her husband had been a confidant of the Pachen Lama, Tibet's second-most prominent religious leader, and thus had been murdered by the Chinese following the revolt of 1959 . Her brother, a high lama, had fled to India with His Holiness, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, during the tragic diaspora. And she herself, condemned by association as a counterrevolutionary, a “stubborn running dog of imperialism” as the indictment had read, had been taken from her children and jailed. As an infant, my friend had been smuggled by an older sister into the prison, where for many months he lived hidden in the shadows beneath his mother's skirt. The brave sister was later sent to a re-education camp, where one day she inadvertently stepped on an armband, painted with characters extolling the virtues of Mao, that had slipped off the sleeve of an adjacent worker. For this transgression, she was condemned to seven years of hard labour.

Today, things are said to be somewhat better in Tibet, though the darkness of those years, a time when the sky fell to the earth, still haunts the land. When I mentioned that I had met the Dalai Lama and heard him speak, as have so many of my compatriots, my friend's mother began to cry. She reached to touch my hand, drawing my face close to hers, until her tears ran down my cheeks and I could taste the salt in the corners of my mouth. With a
glance toward her children, she beckoned me to follow her into a small room, where a wall, responding to her pressure, opened to reveal a hidden devotional chamber. On the altar were brass urns, offerings of fruit and money, small piles of yak butter and sticks of incense. There was a figure of the Dharma Chakra, the Wheel of Religion, supported by sacred deer represented in copper and gold, the symbol of the Buddhist path, life constantly in motion.

At the centre of the shrine, a ceremonial scarf of blessing, a white silk
khata
, was draped around another photograph of the Potola. In this picture, there is a rainbow above the palace, and within the rainbow floats the face of the Dalai Lama, whose image is today banned by law throughout Tibet. At the risk of her freedom, this small and resolute woman continues to contemplate the Buddha mind and the great lessons of her faith. In better times, Milerepa, Tibet's beloved mystic saint, advised his students to “regard as one this life and the next and the one in between, and become accustomed to them all.” Everything changes. Tibet was free, and then overwhelmed by the Chinese. The weak became strong. The ancient became youthful. Peace gave way to war, violence yielded to submission. This, too, will change. It is only a question of time.

 

IN A BLOODSTAINED century, Mao Zedong bears the dark distinction of being the political leader most successful
in killing his own people. In 1959, the year his army crushed the Lhasa uprising, Mao set in motion the Great Leap Forward. In order to decentralize and increase the production of steel, every farmer in China was ordered to construct a backyard furnace and obliged to meet imposed quotas. To do so, they melted their ploughs, reducing farm implements to ingots. For a year, China was statistically the top producer in the world. But then came the spring, and the fields lay fallow. In the fall, there was nothing to harvest. By winter, hunger stalked the land, and a famine unprecedented in this century took the lives of more than 40 million Chinese. Such was the wisdom and logic that marched into Tibet, intent on the destruction of a civilization.

Though often portrayed as an isolated land, a cosmic meritocracy sitting astride the heights of Asia, Tibet in truth was always a crossroads of trade and empire, a nation of great contradictions and inequalities. In the beginning, it was Tibet that had threatened China. For two hundred years, from the seventh century, Tibet's armies dominated Central Asia, controlling much of the Silk Road and absorbing into her empire large swaths of Chinese territory. In the ninth century, as political power in Tibet fragmented, the Buddhist religion, carried into the mountains from the lowland plains of India, emerged from the chaos as the pre-eminent esoteric vehicle for transformation and
empowerment. As a spiritual force, Tibetan Buddhism moved far beyond the frontiers of the old empire, and wandering lamas, wizards in the realms of the spirit, found a place in the courts of kings. Within forty years of Genghis Khan's conquest of Tibet in 1207, Buddhist monks were providing religious instruction to the invaders.

China's modern claim to the land of snows, the coveted “treasure house of the west,” is rooted in a questionable interpretation of this early history. In 1279 , the Mongols, already in possession of Tibet, advanced under Kubla Khan into China, expanding their empire and founding the Yuan dynasty. The Chinese today trace their territorial rights to this moment when both nations succumbed to the Mongols. The Tibetans, by contrast, remember that distant era as a time when two sovereign nations fell in succession to a single enemy. When the Yuan dynasty collapsed, Tibet reclaimed its independence. Though political and religious ties remained, their strength ebbed and flowed. At no point during the subsequent years did Tibet become an integral part of Han China.

The Tibet that emerged over the centuries was not a perfect society, but its failures were its own. Looking south and east, fending off invasions, struggling with civil strife and intrigue from within, Tibetans engaged in the sordid realities of nationhood. When the Nepalese invaded
in 1788, reaching Shigatse and looting the sacred monastery of Tashilhunpo, Tibet forged an alliance with China. The Qing emperor dispatched an army that vanquished the Nepalese and then, in the wake of victory, refused to leave. The Chinese maintained a modest presence in Lhasa until Qing influence faded in the late nineteenth century. By then, China faced its own enemies, European powers descending on Asia from the eastern sea. In the early years of the twentieth century, Chinese authority in Tibet was symbolic, marginal at best. Whatever claim they had ended in 1911 , with the overthrow of the Qing dynasty. From 1913 until the invasion of the People's Liberation Army in 1949 , Tibet was again an independent nation, albeit a complex land on the cusp of change. The very idea of China today claiming Tibet, a land and people unique by any ethnographic or historical definition, is as anachronistic as England laying claim to the United States simply because it was once a British colony.

Within a year of the establishment of the People's Republic of China, Mao's armies had swept through the eastern Tibetan provinces of Amdo and Kham, taking control of all regions outside the direct and historic jurisdiction of the Dalai Lama. Communist cadres sparked class struggle and instituted thought reform. In the name of liberation, communities were shattered, traditional ways
forcibly abandoned, and the economy transformed through the collectivization of land and the seizure and redistribution of private property. Those who tried to resist, who tried to defend their families, fields and temples, were imprisoned, tortured and, in many instances, killed.

By the fall of 1950 , thirty thousand battle-hardened Chinese troops—soldiers who had beaten the Japanese, defeated the Nationalists, and ridden a wave of victories that had placed all of China in Mao's hands—stood poised on the frontiers of inner Tibet. In a gesture emblematic of the contrast between the two worlds about to clash, the Regent and religious authorities in Lhasa turned to the State Oracles to ascertain the proper course of action. Asked whether resistance should be violent or non-violent, the Gadung oracle equivocated. Only by offering prayers and propitiating the deities, read the pronouncement, could the Dharma be protected. In the circumstances, the answer was clearly inadequate. Within days, Tibet's modest forces, equipped with limited arms and obliged to defend the entire frontier, were shredded by the Chinese.

When, in the spring of 1951, the United Nations, preoccupied with the conflict in Korea, rejected Tibet's appeal for intervention, the Dalai Lama had little choice but to resign himself to the 17 Point Agreement, a negotiated settlement signed in Beijing, calling for the “peaceful liberation”
of his country. On the face of it, the document was moderate. In exchange for the return of all Tibetan people to the family of the motherland, the Chinese promised to respect religious and economic traditions and to grant complete regional autonomy to the heartland of Tibet. Hoping to spare at least some of his people the fate that had befallen the eastern regions of Amdo and Kham, the Dalai Lama acquiesced. Even as troops of the People's Liberation Army marched into Lhasa, doubling the population and precipitating massive shortages of food and fuel, he still sought an accommodation with the Chinese. In 1954 , he travelled to Beijing to meet Mao and expressed a willingness to become a party member in order to work out, as he wrote, “a synthesis of Buddhist and Marxist doctrines.” Such hopes of reconciliation proved illusory. To the communists, Tibet was a land of serfdom and exploitation, theocratic parasites and decadent aristocrats. The sooner they were gone, the better. The ultimate goal was to rid the nation of its backwardness. At his last meeting with the Dalai Lama, Mao dismissed a thousand years of Tibetan history in a chilling phrase. “Religion is poison,” he told His Holiness. “It neglects material progress.”