There was one exception, a man of the world, an occasional visitor to the islands, who wanted nothing from him but his friendship—one of the few whom Sharkey admired, someone almost unimaginable, a rogue and a pirate, shocking, confrontational, funny, infuriating, probably insane, but kept out of a madhouse by means of his wit and his medication—his drugs, pakalolo, acid, mushrooms, cocaine, whiskey. The drugs worked, they saved him, they were fuel, and finally, combustible, like fuel, they destroyed him.

This was how the friendship began. Sharkey, at a party, had been telling one of his stories. It was the tale of the Somali woman he’d met on a beach in Lamu, Kenya, after a trip to Jeffreys Bay in South Africa. The ludicrous racial rules, the obstacles and stupidities of apartheid, had depressed him and kept him from wandering freely, and apart from people he’d wanted to meet—local women especially. He’d flown first to Nairobi, then to Mombasa and Malindi, looking for waves, and found himself in Lamu, an island he’d reached by dhow, his surfboard lashed to the mast. There were no good waves in Lamu, but there were women, in black gowns they called hijabs, their heads covered by black shawls that wrapped across the lower portion of their face, only their eyes showing in the draping of all that black cloth.

“Her name was Aziza, she was waiting on the beach,” Sharkey said. “But out of the sun, in the shadows beyond the palms. To tease her I said, ‘What are you doing here?’”

“‘Waiting for you,’ she said.

“‘You speak English.’

“‘I was a teacher. They gave me the sack.’”

This was always the way in Africa, he said. You said hello, and they said they’d been waiting for you. Africa was a dream, a place without preliminaries. You were a white man. You’d been introduced long ago by other white men. Africans guessed what white men wanted, and they were seldom wrong.

But the strictures of South Africa had made him cautious, and he knew that Lamu was mostly Muslim, with strictures of its own. He waited until dark before continuing the conversation with the woman. He was staying at the only hotel on the island, an old whitewashed cube of a building called Petley’s—a small bar, and all meals at a long common table of rough planks.

“The word for weed in Swahili is bhangi,” Sharkey told the eager listeners. “A nice word, and a primo product.”