Bush teeth brush

Local people have to clean their teeth often, because if they didn’t, they might lose them. And if they lost their teeth, they couldn’t eat meat. Which would be a tragedy. The same kind of tragedy as when someone back home turns out to be a vegetarian. They don’t have plastic toothbrushes, because, as we all know, plastic is bad for nature. For example, someone might stick it up a tortoise’s nose. The only wild tortoise I saw there was spared this fate. It had no toothbrush in its nose. I’m already looking forward to the day when politicians back home discover this too, announce that toothbrushes are made of plastic, ban them, and order toothbrushes to be made of wood instead. An electric wooden toothbrush. A wooden toothbrush branch. Ultrasonic, of course. You’d be mad not to buy one.

The vast majority of Maasai have beautiful, healthy, large, white teeth. It occurred to me that they use them to scare leopards. A local person walks through the desert—sorry, the bush—and spots a leopard. The leopard bares its teeth at him, the Maasai bares his teeth back. And so they bare teeth at each other, mutually intimidating one another, until it gets dark. Then, when tooth-baring slowly stops making sense, they part peacefully and head home, exhausted after a full day of baring. A perceptive reader blessed with eagle eyes may have noticed that Sekenoi is missing one tooth in his lower row. I didn’t know whether it was the bottom right or bottom left, so I had to ask what the local custom was. Not all men have this tooth, because at around fifteen they become warriors and the tooth is pulled out without anesthesia. Supposedly, it’s beautiful. I don’t know—I got used to it; it mainly serves as decoration, even though it’s a very interesting approach to the idea that if I don’t wear something, if I don’t have something, then that absence itself is decoration. But above all, the gap is used to elegantly spit saliva. They do it very often, and with a loud hiss the spit flies remarkably far.

Maybe if they tried spitting straight up, they’d eventually reach space. Since they spit very often, there would soon be a lot of Maasai saliva in orbit, and it could be used as satellite internet. And since Starlink isn’t allowed in Tanzania, they could have their own Maasai saliva-based internet. So, how do you prepare such a toothbrush branch? You find a suitable bush, esiteti, pull out a machete, and try to look inconspicuous. Then you launch into a short, almost always victorious fight with the bush and walk away smiling with a reasonably thick twig, moving far enough away so the bush can’t take revenge. You strip the bark off the twig with the machete, chop the end off nice and straight, and split it into fibers using your back teeth. Depending on how long you chew, you can define the hardness of the toothbrush bush: soft, medium, or hard. Once the bush has calmed down and the twig is sufficiently chewed, you stick it in your mouth and clean your teeth. You often wander around while doing it, pretending you’re doing some serious work.