How the Zebra got its stripes

When I first moved out to Kenya, a friend gave me a vintage book with Swahili myths and stories. It had many interesting and fun tales to tell, but regardless of those, the stories I have been told by our guides and staff are far more interesting as I recon those are stories told by their Grandmothers around the fireplace as entertainment and education. So they are a living record of a tribal understanding of the world…

Most stories include God. Or Laibon, as they call him here. Laibon created all the animals as well as the different peoples. When he had done so he had them coming to him with requests for things they wanted or needed (which is of course asking for trouble…). The maasai asked for cows and was given them – meaning all the cows in the world belongs to the Maasai and therefore they only take back what was originally given to them when they go for cattle raids… The white man asked for knowledge (and until recently the Maasai thought very little of it, but now they have started to change their minds a bit an elder told us. It must be the cellphones…).But I am sidetracking myself.  This morning it was the story of the Zebra I wanted to share. It came naturally to my mind as I went out to put on my coffee this morning.

The pyjamaman is here! Funfun!  It always makes me smile! But. What is this thing with the stripes?

Well, you see, it happened like this. The animals had been on Earth for a while and was getting used to it. And they were getting bored. Everyone looked the same! grey brown grey brown everywhere. Blah! So they went to God to complain…

By now Laibon was getting a bit fed up by these constant demands for attention and needs and wants from the creatures he had created so he told them: ok ok, I will do it. But you have to find out among yourself how to distribute it: I will place a variety of materials in a cave and it should be suficcient for all of you but I refuse to be involved in the designs…

All the animals were very happy when they heard this, and so they started the journey to the cave with all the materials. The zebras, saw the migration, and, being a bit greedy, they said to eachother: wow! look at this! everyone is gone, the plains are all ours! lets eat! and they ate and ate… as the different animals started to come back looking really sazzy and smart they said to each other: wow! look! The lion! cool! I want a mane like that! and the Peacock! What feathers! I want those too! But they continued to eat as much as they could…

Finally they realized that everyone had returned so they went to the cave… but, alas! the only thing left was a small piece of black cloth… that would had been just enough if the zebra had not kindof put on somewhat after his bingeing earlier on the plain with all the others gone. …so… after much huffing and puffing and pulling and squeezing it finally had his new suit on. But! as it started to move a big Crack! Riiip!!! was heard, and the suit snapped in all its seams!

And so it was that the zebra came to get its stripes.

Sarikoki the eland;)

Recently I wrote about Ariel the bushbuck (Living with the wild in the wild). She was one of many orphaned animals, and unfortunately she did not make it… But not all projects to raise abandoned wildlife ends like that. There are also success stories.

And one of them is living with us right here at the lodge.

Meet Sarikoki….

The common eland - Tragelapus Taurotragus oryx - is the largest African bovid. The bulky males can reach a weight close up to a ton! With a shoulder height up to 183 cm and long spiraled sharp horns up to 67 cm long they can most definitely fend for themselves. But first they have to grow up…

A Maasai shepherd out with his cows on the Plains found him abandoned the day he was born. He brought him back to the village where his wife fed it with cow’s milk, and as soon as he had regained strength and had grown up a bit he took him with him on his daily walks with his herd of cows, goats and sheep to search for fresh pasture and water.

He grew fast, and being a wild animal, and a male, he was soon engaged in competitive behavior with the other animals, trying to assess his status in the herd. That, obviously, was not a very easy situation to deal with for the sheperd, so one day he came to us asking if we would like to have him at the camp.

Sarikoki aged abt 7 months in may 2005

We said of course yes to that request! He was feeding by himself by then, but he was still small so he needed protection. With Kenya Wildlife service duly and all oks given informed we built a stable for him to spend the nights so to be safe from predators….

Sarikoki at a year and a half in our garden

After a few years he was fully grown and it was not so easy any longer to lure him into his boma. We were also worried that he would not get enough food as they spend most of the night grazing and when the temperatures are lower than in the heat of the day.

More than five years later he is still with us… Having survived several attacks from lions – running away from them – he spend his time around camp, seeking out company with people as well as the zebras nearby and he seems to have a jolly good time…

Sarikoki at two and a half looking for attention

He comes around for cuddles every day and of course he believe that everything I put into the ground is for his personal culinary pleasure and entertainment… 

sarikoki at 3 years interfering in my gardening…

of which I have a slightly different opinion…

So the staff has become really good at building fences… and I compensate by giving him access to the compost heap as well as feeding him the leftover fruitpeels from breakfast…

Sarikoki a few months back REALLY looking for attention (and getting it) playing with the waterhose and getting entangled on purpose outside my studio

…and of course, being a male, where else to hang out for some quality time than in the Workshop…!

Needless to say he is the source of endless entertainment and sometimes frustrations, but it would be impossible to imagine not having him around! and the guests LOVE him!

The latest news is that we have been asked to take in yet another two elands… a male and a female… lets see how that goes… we will certainly give it a try!

Embrace your inner Pippi Longstocking;)

I took an Astrid Lindgren quiz today and ended up – not surprisingly – as Pippi Longstocking… a great honour to resemble my greatest childhood heroine (still is…)!

(Illustration of point: Me participating enthusiastically in a Maasai Wedding dance in my local community wearing my beloved overbleached, cutoff-sleeved kanga dress that I made myself. I am not entirely sure I had bothered to put on shoes that day… Needless to sayI had Great Fun;)

Later today I stumbeled upon this lovely poem that kind of embrace a lot of the things I believe in… and somehow seem to live by… and I always have a LOT of fun in my life when I embrace its principles. Hmmm. Did it stumble itself into my path for me to share, I wonder? Anyhow, I want to share it here. For the fun of it. Enjoy! And Please Please Please Be Inspired! The World need NEED more women – and men!! – to bring out their Inner Pippis into the World for it and you! to shine just a little bit (or a LOT) brighter!

Love, Mariane

Warning

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick flowers in other people's gardens
And learn to spit.
You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.
But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.
But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

Jenny Joseph

http://www.poemhunter.com/

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Fatal Attraction

My great-grandmother, Olga, studied Fine Arts in Berlin when she met my great-grandfather, Hjalmar. A writer, journalist and critic, he was on a research-trip covering the conflict zones in Europe (which falls along more or less the same lines as today.) A classical - THE classical theme unfolds. They fell passionately in love. The second classical theme: He was already married. The third complication; And she was his sister-in law. Aouch., ... and also: they were both from very promonent families. Aiai.

I can not know their real feelings except that it seemed to have been a real passion. Possibly both were forced by his and her family, And he did what he had to do, divorced his first wife, an actress with whom he had a som, Thomas, and married her. And so my grandmother, Elen, was not born out of a wedlock.

Their marriage was turbulent and ended in divorce some years later. Why we can only guess; his writing about it suggest differece in character. He married a third time, with his best friends widow. That marriage lasted.

These two conflicting lovebirds continued to meet in a most modern fashion for rendevouz a long time after the divorce. The setting was extravagant: in the most fashionable hotels and places of the day they would meet for weekends of passionate indulgence. In true Bohemian fashion he drank Champagne out of her shoes and they had wild sex until dawn.

Later she married a priest – a single mother with a child! it is almost unheard of even today!

She must obviously been Quite a Lady. And rather complex. Which I find interesting.

My mother grew up with her and her steph-grandfather the priest. She always told stories about her grandmothers unbending love and affection for her. She could be very firm, but always fair. I like that. But she was not very happy. That is sad. She really loved Hjalmar and although her second husband was a good man he was not really a match for her strong personality.

I have been thinking of her today. Olga Helberg. She was a gifted artist but never came to take it up as a profession. Her daughter, Elen Elster Christensen, my grandmother, went on to be an acclaimed sculptor. There are quite a few monuments made by her in towns all around Norway. Unfortunately she died when I was only two years old, the same year as my maternal grandfather aslo passed away, so I never got to know her properly. Of course also she married repeatedly, but that is another story.

I own several pieces of Elens beautiful sculptures and would like to write more about her one day, to get to know her better. But today, as said, I am thinking of my great-grandmother, Olga.

Perhaps it is because I am trying to learn how to paint roses. As I was working I came to think of the delicate mocca-cups inherited from her, the ones with 24k gold in ornamented pattern on the edges and delicatelly rendered lush pink roses all around the cups. She painted them in 1956, and they always held place of pride in my mothers kitchen.

So, here I am. painting flowers. Thinking of the past, the present and the future.

This one is for you, Great-grandmother. You might have wished for something else for your life. But you did what you could,

Thank you for your legacy. For being You.

Ariel dreams in Never-Everland

Working in the studio the last days has made me realize how many options of vision there are looking at a subject. And how many, but not all, that are appealing to me. I have been working on some landscapes, trying to utilize some industrial manufactured paint I bought some time back in order to overcome some problems related to getting hold of paint in this beautiful but not entirely well-organized and –stocked country consumer-wise, and it has opened some more doors that will be explored in more depth later on. But I am getting ahead of myself. The visions.

What comes out of these exercises is a genuinely felt reluctance to … I am not sure I can call it naturalism, but it might have to do for now. I am not sure why, exactly, but the idea of rendering something as faithfully as one can is in one way deeply appealing and on another hand revolting. Should one not be more than a monitor? I feel a deep need to understand my subject as well as I can, unclutter confusion, looking deeper – but it has all to do with the underlying structure and not surface. Because surface always changes. You see? Surface tells you the quality of the outer layer of things, it being hard and shiny, soft and flurry and shiny and whatever. And sure, it might tell you a lot of stuff. But it is the underlying structure that tells the story that interests me. And then there is light. Colour is never what it appears to be. It is all about light. So, when I am working on a painting portraying Ariel it seems natural to me that her shadowed areas should be in this amazing Ultramarine blue coming from one of those delicious little expensive glass jars bought in a shop in Breschia some time back updated with another found in an equally wonderful artists material shop in Trastevere, Rome, where I used to live and study among other things art history and classical Mythology because this material and the fascinating hue of this particular blue holds a fascination to me beyond colour. You see? But then again, since I feel her so ethereally beautiful and since I try to move beyond my emblematic or symbolic rendering of her features I am for once looking at a picture (my own) to get some details right and I feel I am slipping into this realistic mode which moves me away from what I want to do which is indeed symbolical as I would like to portray her vigilante stance as a young creature of the wild alert, awake, forever vigilant. But, alas. The more I look at that image the more I see the marks of death approaching. And it makes me sad, that I did not see that that day. Not that it might have done some difference. How do you communicate with the inner organs of a sick antelope? Well, that it exactly what I thought I should had been able to do, isn’t it?

Running away from the point again, sorry. So, I work on this portrait which is supposed to be and most certainly is going to end up being an emblematic thing blabla mariane style. And the reality disturbs me. Because it has meaning, it is there, was there, is, in its own way a monument to something in the past. The allure of the photo is that strong. And I do not want to take it in entirely. I want to distance myself from it, using the esthetical elements to get at some kind of understanding of underlying form, shape, structure. But by doing so, and by working using a picture of a small creature I spent time with, waking up in the middle of the night to go feeding and warming and looking after seeing the marks of death but being unable to beat it, this time, makes it different than it being an image of a creature that came to live. It is not guilt. But it is surely sadness there, grief, as well, I suppose. So, I distance myself. Not going in the direction of finding the right streak of grey matching the stripe of long hair coming down her neck as she turns her head towards me from under the drawing table where I have propped her up against my Moroccan cushions and carpets for greater comfort and company as I work. I want to make her eternal. And that means to look beyond. And with what I have. Which these days has as a foundation this industrial paint bought in Karen hardware store in Nairobi. Choosing colours hastily from a chart while a queuing was building up behind me remembering the words spoken by somebody I know to another person I had just met – you must choose the Silk Vinyl! Doing so finding the weight of the pigments lacking making the work a repetitive one which in someways was liberating albeit frustrating after a while when the intended flickering effect did not materialize itself due to the poorness of essence in the pigments chosen for this brand (another story) anyhow, she keeps following me, as I fluctuate between these different modes of relation to her as an image and a soul and I want to make her stronger, braver, healthier, stranger, more familiar, more different, more real, more surreal, more symbol, less cliché, something of meaning. I want her to be a survivor.

I do not know why this is affecting me so much. It is not the death– or is it? I focus on the technical side of it. I guess I could go blue-yellow or green-red or rather purple - cadium. More burnt siena and paynes gray. But it is not right, you see. It is there as I look at it but it is not what I feel. So I struggle. It is like I must always move the things I see one step beyond what is there to see it, to own it as mine or rather it is by moving it that I become intimate with it and it becomes me or I become it.

And when that happens I feel peace. So, perhaps that is what I seek. Peace with it. To have digested it. To have let it become part of me or having given a part of me to it loosing and gaining something at the same time.

So, today, I finished it. It is a time for reflection and a time to let go. There are surely many and better ways to solve the different aspect of it. But, it is what I had in me, now. So I made the choices. And I signed it. And then I posted it. And then I pulled forward another piece that I have not been able to move forward it to make that one another stepping stone on the path that I am making for myself. Because I am going somewhere, see? So I cannot be too fuzzy about delivering up to my own expectations every time. I must allow the process to unfurl. So, here it is. Sure. I could have made the blue more radiant. I could have added more value to the yellows and the pinks. Perhaps I will, one day.

but not today.

Impressions from the wild

Last night I woke up early feeling something was going on.


it was.

a large group of impalas merged with an equally large group of Waterbucks intersped with bushbucks and zebras. Together they tried out my new gardening devices - fences.

unfortunately I did not have my camera but I can tell you this much; they loved it.



squatting in our bathtube behind the shadenet I watched as one after the other of the zebras and waterbucks leaned and then, finding a perfectly off-nodded metal piece stearing its body to scrzatch its head, neck and tummy.



wow.



I feel like a wildlife coozymummy now.....

Living with the wild in the wild

Occasionally mothers will abandon their young ones for one reason or another; the mother might be unexperienced and abandons its calf or she has fallen prey to some predator making the baby an orphan.

It is never easy to know what to do in such a situation as often you do not know the correct circumstances regarding it being alone. What if the mother is somewhere close but hiding out of fear of humans? Or it might be away feeding telling the baby to "stay put!" So to leave it, hope for its mother to return is one option. But if in reasonable doubt, do you take it with you, knowing it might not be able to fend for itself in the wild as it grows up, "dooming"it to be semi domesticated? There are pros and cons depending on the specie involved so each situation must be evaluated in an individual way.

The other day we were faced with such a situation in camp. As the guides returned from their evening game drive they found a small Bush buck calf in the workshop. Being after dark, and a busy mecanical workshop not being a likely hidingplace for the shy antelope the staff decided to bring her to me.I called her Ariel, and as you can see I made my best to make her feel comfortable: a hot water bottle, pillows, shade and leaves to hide behind...

Ariel was weak and easy to handle and after some initial confusion she accepted the diluted cows milk I fed her with a pipette. The next day she seemed stronger and even came along for a short walk!

Young bucks need company so I took her with me to the studio where she seemed to have picked up strength from the previous day...


She had met with the dogs the day before and did not seem to mind them - she even tried to suckle Embe! (here seen in the background).

Unfortunately later that evening she all of a sudden seemed weaker. She made calling sounds, and even if I tried to figure out what to do she just grew weaker, so I let her into her box again hoping she just needed to rest. Alas. when I came back from dinner she had gone.

It was a blessing to have her for the few days she lived. It made me realize how prescious these little lives are, and how hard work it is for creatures of the wild to rear their young ones. It made me admire and respect even more those fortunate creatures that make it into adulthood. And it also reminds me how important it is to make sure we make space for our wildlife in our lives.