Pete sings to the cows

Pete making friends with a Samburu herdsman at the singing wells. Photo by David Lansing.

When we stopped at the Samburu manyatta the other day we had to spend time finding the elder and chatting a bit before we took our photos. You don’t just hop out of the Land Cruiser and start shooting. The same was true at the singing wells.

There were children playing in the shade of the acacias and euphorbia trees along the banks of the sand river. Calvin asked them who the mzee was and three boys, about 10, ran off and soon came back leading a Samburu who looked no more than thirty or so. Unlike the other Samburu here he was dressed mostly in Western clothes—dirty brown pants and a thin plaid shirt that was torn and ragged.

It’s a subtle dance that goes on. There’s a lot of just general chatting and getting to know each other. The mzee wanted to know where we were from and then there’s a lot of head nodding and smiling, as if he too had recently come from London and wasn’t the heat there just dreadful this summer?

Eventually it’s agreed that perhaps we might be able to take a few photos but, of course, the warriors in the wells will have to approve and bakshishi given. This is where it gets delicate: How much bakshishi and who gets it? The problem is that if the bakshishi goes straight into the pocket of the elder, it may never get to the boys in the well who are actually in the photos. Then again, you don’t want to make the mzee look bad by bypassing him and handing the tip directly to the Samburu whose photo you took. Bad form.

While Calvin was working this all out, Pete, the photographer for National Geographic Traveler, was doing his usual thing, which is getting to know the people. He was walking around fist-bumping the warriors and greeting them with a friendly “Habari!” which is the Swahili version of What’s going on?

Then Pete being Pete, he asked one of the Samburu who spoke a little English if he could get in the well and sing to the cows.

“You want to sing to the cows?” asked the incredulous warrior.

“Yeah, if they’ll let me.”

So some words were exchanged between the young warrior in the well and the one who spoke English and then Pete climbed in.

Now here’s the thing: The Samburu aren’t just singing to keep themselves from going crazy while they spend hours in these wells filling buckets with muddy water for their livestock. It’s also the way they communicate with their cows. There are hundreds of cows standing around in this sand river and three or four different singing wells and yet the cows only go to the well where their master is. Because they know his voice. If some other Samburu started singing to those cows, they’d walk away. So what happened when Pete got in there and started singing to the cows?

Watch this short video to see.

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