KENYAN MEDICINE MAN AND THE DRUG ADDICT FROM DEVON

Down in the Maasai Mara, two skinny men are conferring over a goatskin, a
pile of stones and liberal gobbets of spit. Kasaine ole Musanga, the
shorter by a foot, is an oloiboni - a Maasai medicine man. Cameron Kirk, a
heroin addict from Devon, is his patient.

Musanga chuckles as he turns the prophetic stones with his forefinger.
There are 400 of them: yellow, blue and black, the size of broad beans, all
polished by the swirl of the Mara river. But it is not clear whether it is
the stones that have pleased him, or something the younger of his two wives
has said. She is pointing at the middle-aged white couple, Cameron's
parents, John and Sue. They are staring fixedly at Musanga, though their
hands are in constant motion; wiping away sweat, flicking at flies.

Musanga is sitting in the shade of his manyatta, a squat one-room house of
woven branches stuccoed with cow dung. His guests are crouching in the
manure that is everywhere, under a fierce, midmorning sun.

Knowledge of natural medicines runs deep in Maasai culture. Fathers teach
sons how to treat their cattle and themselves with the barks and leaves of
Kenya's southern plains. The oloiboni, separate from but not inferior to
the clan chief, is a sort of consultant to this tribe of general practitioners.

Before battle or a lion hunt, Maasai warriors go to the oloiboni for a
stimulant - for medicine to make them brave. When their cows die suddenly -
or when anything unexpected happens - the oloiboni finds an explanation in
the stones.

Musanga scoops up the pebbles into a gourd, spits into it, and mutters
something. Then he pours them out again and makes his diagnosis. Cameron
has forgotten the bad medicine; but he needs to get stronger.

Cameron, 25, puffs nonchalantly on a cigarette, happy to believe him.
Musanga's combination of mysticism and herbalism has achieved what years of
methadone, rehab and psychiatric treatment could not. Cameron has been
clean for three months; ever since his father, John, a retired RAF
sergeant, bundled him off to the Mara. The needle marks peppering his
forearms and feet have healed and they show pink through his tan. He no
longer believes he will die a junkie.

Two years ago, the Kirks flew Cameron out to Nairobi, where Sue was working
with the Foreign Office, to straighten him out. It was a disastrous move -
Cameron was soon injecting up to a gramme a day of heroin, purer than he
had dreamed possible in England. Nairobi's rehabs said he was a hopeless
case and the police had started using his nickname, "kiketi [heroin] man",
when they stopped him in the street.

It could not have been long before Cameron was charged and given a
mandatory seven to 10-year sentence for heroin possession. Even the
healthiest foreigner finds it difficult to survive Kenya's violent, typhus
jails. And Cameron, who is 6ft 5in, weighed less than nine stone.

Reasoning that prison in England - to which Cameron was no stranger, let
alone foreign - was a healthier option, John decided to send him back.
Meanwhile, he kept Cameron in heroin to keep him from crime.

"They were the worst weeks of my life," he says. "I was watching my son
killing himself and I was assisting him. If a dog was in that condition,
you'd put it down."

But even as John was driving to pick up Cameron's ticket, he was hailed by
two Maasai friends. "I told them what I was doing - they knew all about
Cam," he says. "But they said, 'Don't bother. We'll take him.'"

"I wasn't thinking about an oloiboni. The idea was just to take him where
escape would be impossible, let him live with the Maasai, and reinvent
himself as a man - because they wouldn't put up with any shit from him."

High as a kite, Cameron was easily deceived. John drove him down to Narok,
the last dusty town before the great plains. There he left him with the
Maasai pair, and with seven vials of pethadin to see him through the worst
of withdrawal. When Cameron realised what was happening, he reached into
his sock for a wrap of heroin and a syringe.

Unfortunately, John's friends were not the noble warriors he had thought
them to be. They dumped Cameron in a budget safari camp and went off to
drink the money for his upkeep. For Rosemary Ngigi, who helps run the
safari camp, his cold turkey was something else. "He couldn't walk, he
couldn't talk, he couldn't eat, he couldn't sleep. Oh, he looked horrible!"
she says.

"At first we were scared because we thought he had Aids. Then we saw he was
out of his mind. He'd forget his cigarette until you could smell it burning
his fingers. We thought he was about to die - that's what he was saying too."

In his six years as a heroin addict, Cameron had never experienced
withdrawal for more than a day. In rehab, he had been given powerful
opiates and sedatives, methadone, largactol, rohypnol, pethadin and
mogadon, to mask the symptoms. Otherwise, the closest he had come was when
accidentally locked into his second floor King's Cross flat, terrified by
the rising nausea, he jumped out of the window, breaking his pelvis.

But for four days, and despite the pethadin he was jabbing frantically into
his backside, Cameron experienced a full heroin withdrawal.

"I woke up in a tent, sweating, feeling very sick," he says, apologising
for his jumbled thoughts: he is not used to remembering things, he says.
"By evening, the goose-bumps had come up. And the next three days were just
horrible. I was retching all the time, and shivering, sweating, lying there
with this horrible smell inside my nose, like there was shit up my nostrils."

Musanga gave Cameron a basin of water, sprinkled with herbs, to wash with
and powdered herbs to lick off his hand. "Within 15 minutes I felt totally
different," says Cameron. "I still couldn't sleep, but I was relaxed. The
sweats had halved, I'd stopped retching and after an hour I realised I was
starving. I got up and ate till I thought I'd explode."

For the Maasai, the power of the oloiboni is beyond question. "I'm not
surprised Musanga helped Cameron because I have seen it many times," says
Salash Lealo, a local warrior. "The oloiboni can tell when the dry season
is coming and when the rains are coming. I have seen him cure people who
were so crazy we had to tie them up to stop them running off into the wild."

Cameron awoke from the worst of his cold turkey without any such faith:
"But I thought, 'I've come here, and this bloke, whether he's legitimate or
not legitimate, has washed me with something and given me something, and I
feel better. Let's see what he can do.'"

Besides which, Cameron had no choice. There are no heroin pushers among the
Maasai. And the lions prowling around the camp ruled out a hitch-hike back
to Nairobi.

Musanga has been treating Cameron almost every day since. For a fortnight,
Cameron moved into the smoky manyatta to live under the oloiboni's eye.
Twice, Musanga took his patient into the bush, slaughtered a lamb, and
forced quarts of soup mixed thickly with herbs into him.

But generally, the treatment remains the same: a shamanistic diagnosis
followed by a draught of herbal medicine. The Kirks say it has given them
back their son. "When he used to come out of rehab, he looked wild, still
full of drugs; now he looks like the boy I had."

Watching Cameron charming his way around the camp, chatting up backpackers,
trying his Maasai out on the cooks, it is hard to believe that a few weeks
ago a coherent sentence was beyond him. Watching his turn of speed running
the hyena gauntlet between two campsites, it is hard to remember that,
because of overdoses, over the past two years his heart has stopped a dozen
times.

But Musanga is not surprised at all. Whittling away at his moustache with
his new Swiss army knife, a present from the Kirks, he says simply,
"Cameron came here with white man's medicine. It didn't work, so I helped him."

Musanga says he could do the same for other addicts - but they would not be
Maasai. "Young Maasai don't do these things," he says. "How could they?
They have to respect their parents; they could not fight with them as
Cameron does."

And what are the herbs Musanga prescribes? What does he see in the stones?
"These things are secret because you do not need to know," he says, with a
thoroughly mischievous grin.

John Kirk, an embittered man who has watched his finances shrink and his
marriage suffer under the strain of his son's addiction, has transferred
all his disappointments into something close to adoration for the Maasai.
"The oloiboni has done for Cameron what western medicine could not, the
Maasai have what the west has not," he says. "If I had the choice again of
sending my boy to an English public school or to the Maasai, I'd send him
straight here."

Cameron has a more balanced view. Looking out over the endless horizons of
the Mara plain, he says his environment must have played a part: it is hard
to make sense of mainlining in earshot of a lion's roar.

But that would not be enough for long, says Cameron. "If I'd wanted to, I
could have stolen a car and got back to Nairobi. I don't know what the
stones are about, but I know he's not pulling a fast one - rehab just doped
me; but Musanga has changed the way I think. "

Understandably, Cameron is reluctant to leave the Mara for the temptation
of Nairobi's bars. But his three weekends back in town so far have given
cause for hope.

"It took them a while, but the taxi drivers recognised me," he says. "They
were saying, 'Hey, kiketi man, come with us, we'll get you high.'

"I thought about it - I had money in my pocket. But I told them: 'No,
that's not me any more.' To be honest, I just wasn't fucking interested."