Sons Of The Wind

From Nairobi you head northwest over the Ngong Hills and into the Great Rift Valley. Near Lake Naivasha the roadside impalas shine as if groomed and oiled. Zebras standing out among the green acacias don't look natural. They look published. Pink dust drifting over one end of the distant lake turns out to be a cloud of flamingos.

In the car, Kibor takes out his chemistry and geography books—good, demanding texts—from Sambirir Secondary School. He rides along doing problems on his palm with a ballpoint pen. "I am trying very hard in school," he says. "I would like a scholarship to an American college." A couple of hundred Kenyan runners have had such scholarships, but Kibor is not ready. It's an effort for an American ear to process his (and much other) Kalenjin-accented English, and this will need work.

But Kibor is a patient communicator, and gradually it comes out that when, with the encouragement of a coach who has since left his school, he vowed to become a runner, it was an eccentric thing for a Marakwet to do. "Other boys opposed me," he says. "They would say, 'You are chasing air.' But this year I have got my courage. I have been trying hard."

Trying, in Kibor's mind, is very close to succeeding. He began running and immediately won at district, provincial and national levels. Yet his training is astonishingly light. He runs a couple of miles to school in the mornings, and three more after classes. He runs fast, he says, "only in competition, because alone, one person can do nothing. There are no others to push."

Past Nakuru, the land begins to rise and cool. At an elevation of 9,000 feet, amid stands of rushing eucalyptus, you cross the equator. Heading west, you drop through pine woods and maize fields into the Nandi Hills, beautiful for their tea plantations. The pickers seem to wade in verdant foam, their red and violet sweaters fire against the green.

Here, in the hamlet of Kilibwoni, were born the three most distinguished Nandi runners: Keino, Henry Rono (world records at 3,000, 5,000 and 10,000 meters and in the 3,000-meter steeplechase) and Mike Boit (a 3:49.45 mile and a 15-year international career). Boit, up from teaching at Kenyatta University in Nairobi to inspect his family's tea acreage, takes you to a low hill from which you can see the birthplaces of all three. Last summer, Peter Koech broke Rono's 11-year-old record in the steeplechase. Koech, too, is a Nandi from Kilibwoni.

Here is how the Nandi came to be. About 2000 B.C., Cushites from southern Ethiopia began arriving in these highlands. Pastoralists, they displaced or absorbed the region's original hunter-gatherers. Then, during the first 1,000 years A.D., Nilotic people pressed in, again from the north. They intermarried with the Cushites, and the groups combined customs. From the Cushites came circumcision as a rite of passage. The Nilotes contributed the extraction of the lower incisors of adolescents (so they may be fed if they contract lockjaw) and a boundless passion for the milking, bleeding and worship of cattle.

The result of this union, the Kalenjin and related groups such as the Masai and Turkana, spread down the hills and across the plains, reaching their peak about 500 years ago. Then, as the Bantu expanded eastward from Central West Africa, the Kalenjin retreated to their highland strongholds, warred with their neighbors and split into half a dozen subgroups, including the Nandi, who have felt themselves a distinct tribe since the 17th century.

The fixation of all Kalenjin tribes was the cow. The tribes understood themselves to be the chosen of God and therefore the rightful owners of all cattle on earth. They had but to go forth and repossess. This they did, rejoicing. The Kalenjin's—and many other tribes'—incessant raids for cattle and women created a culture in which reputation, wealth and progeny came to the fighting men who could cover long distances quickly.

In the late 19th century, the British colonialists found Nandi raiding parties ranging more than 100 miles from their highlands, striking at night and driving cattle miles toward home before enemy warriors could regroup. Nandi ferocity was such that it took the British five military campaigns over 10 years to subdue the tribe, which they finally did in 1906.