“The Maasai taught me lots of things. They are very nice people and we had no problems understanding each other. They taught me to shoot the heaviest bow I have ever seen and I taught Dionni how to play baseball. He doesn’t speak any English and I learned 11 words in Swahili.”
Cute photo.
But 1962, a year before independence. A time when tens of thousands of Indigenous Kenyans were in indefinite detention without trial and the British had been executing and torturing people in camps. Kind of chilling.
Interestingly enough, Robert Halmi, the boy’s stepfather, was a journalist who spent a great deal of time in Kenya, which is why they were the guest of the Maasai. Unfortunately, my meagre searching skills can’t dig up what topics he covered in his time there.
That is interesting. Nothing sociopolitical by the looks of it. His genre was adventure travel and as far as I can see was all stuff like this - the full article for Life magazine is online here, and he also wrote on car racing and hunting in Africa. There’s nothing in his later TV career (which has a bigger footprint) that would suggest any time as a hard hitting journalist; he was mainly into adventure tales.
My search skills on the open internet aren’t great either though, and it wasn’t a deep dive.
Bows are higher than clubs in the tech tree.
Americans get a civilization +5 bonus to clubs when targeting small spherical objects though, so it’s still competitive.
Please don’t tell me they taught those villagers about Jesus
Kenya had been colonized for a long time by then. Jesus was the least of their problems.
