Forty goats. That's what they had to deal with, forty goats, half wearing yellow ropes around their necks, the other half wearing red.  The task at hand was to herd them from a communal lower pen to their respective upper pens. Ringing all those little goat bells. Tom should have been a natural at this, but then again, he probably has big, fancy pens with fenced in runs and electric goat prods. Back in Virginia.  All that not withstanding, it should not have been all that difficult.

Well, difficult or no, it was one of the better TV/Africa moments I have seen.

I have watched, in my long running, completely obsessive love affair with Kenya, every minute of  every video or movie ever shot in, written about, set in or even vaguely related to something that has anything, no mater how obscure, to do with East Africa. In the history of film making. I actually own every video or DVD of all of the above and watch them whenever I get "homesick" for Africa. Before I even moved to Kenya I had watched "Out Of Africa" probably twenty times, memorizing all the good lines, and I had Meryl Streep's accent down pat.

"I had a fah-rm in Ah-frica."

Given that impressive résumé, I feel pretty safe in saying that the heralded switcheroo of S3/Ep 5 made for interesting TV, but the goat herding sequence was truly great.

The expressions on the faces of the Africans, the real Samburus, were priceless. They were, for Samburus, falling all over themselves laughing. Granted, they looked a bit anxious as they hovered  on the edges of the playing field, but those goats are their currency, after all, and they were not about to watch one of those bumbling fools harm any of their bank rolls.  But that is probably the only thing that kept them from doubling over.

This struck me because Africans don't really laugh that much, probably because their lives are not all that hilarious. And the Morani are a particularly straight-faced bunch. They are proud, they take their lives and their jobs very seriously, and as we are seeing, the conditions they live in are extremely harsh.  Not too much to chuckle about. And when they do smile they tend to cover their mouths. I have no idea why that is, but it is the case.

The real Samburu don't have to herd their goats and cows, either. At least not in the traditional "round 'em up, cowboy" kind of way. The Samburu people grow up tending goats and cows. It's what they do, often all day. It's as natural as breathing.  Their goats know their voices and their whistles and follow them about like puppy dogs. I have seen small boys line dozens of cows up on the banks of the river, in an orderly fashion, and then call them down to drink, one at a time. Controlling them with different whistles.

Watching those strapping Americans (compare Tom, Silas, and Clarence to the very thin and elongated frames of the native Samburu,) running around, bumping into each other, grabbing the goats by the tails and then, as a last resort, picking them up, must have all but fractured them.

The reward for winning that challenge should have been being allowed to go back to the Moran's manyatta that night and to hear, and watch, them recount this unbelievable spectacle to their fellow warriors.

And so, once again, I raise my pith helmet to MB. (I did so want to find fault with everything he did in Africa, joining the ranks of his very vocal, Internet critics, but he is making that very difficult.) Not only did the whole goat sequence give me a great laugh, but, once again, he brought some of the African culture into this show in an appropriate fashion. He showed a slice of the Africans' lives without either demeaning or overly romanticizing them. I have to applaud, so far anyway, the way he is depicting Kenya, the land, it's people, their customs and their lives. Well done, Mark.

Now if only he had chosen some contestants who were less totally irritating, stereotypical and utterly grating to watch, I could add this video to my vast stock pile to be replayed whenever I need another fix of Ah-frica

Na sasa...iko wabuzi  = And now.......here are the goats.

More or less.