No Hurry in Africa (11 page)

‘That’s right,’ Kimanze recalled. ‘He said, “I am cutting down my banana tree because it is producing too much fruit. I’m afraid a genie will come in a few years and ask for something big from me in return … Like my son.” ’

Where would you start with a man like that? I thought.

As we approached Mutinda’s home, the conversation turned back from superstitious beliefs to traditional customs, specifically to naming children. I explained that in Ireland many people tend to name children after relatives or after Christian saints. Mwangangi told us his sister had named her newborn baby ‘Mothune’ because it had been a difficult childbirth; the Akamba name simply means ‘a problem.’ I thought the American psychologists would have a field day with that one! I was often surprised, though, at how some Kenyans possess rather un-African names, and I am not talking about the missionary influence. I was used to meeting people with names like Boniface, Hamish, or Innocent (the latter I thought was a good name for a Nairobi child who can turn to the police when caught and go ‘I’m Innocent’).

I told the two lads a story that Sr. MM had told me recently about twins born in Kitui that year called ‘Toyota’ and ‘Corolla.’ Sr. MM had driven her banger of a Toyota Corolla to hospital with their mother once she started contractions, and the mother named the children after the car, of all things! Even Kimanze and Mwangangi thought that one was silly, and were still laughing when we reached Mutinda’s home.

As a medicine man, the ‘magic’ that Mutinda practiced was of a different order from what we had been discussing earlier. I was certainly prepared to give him the credit for curing my ladybird headaches. We found him sitting on a small wooden stool in front of his hut when we arrived. He stood up to shake hands with each of us. He was delighted that I had had no recurrence of the headaches. Mwangangi shared a joke with him in Kikamba inspired by the conversation about names that we just had. Mutinda looked at me and chuckled, and then continued in the same vein, for he loved telling me about this type of thing. He had a wealth of knowledge on tribal lore.

‘A more tribal custom, Brendan, is to name the infant after an ancestor who made a sign they wanted to return to earth in that infant,’ he explained. ‘Even a deceased child can make a sign in a dream, and the next child is named after the deceased child because it has the same spirit. Sometimes they believe the spirit of the deceased child is good; if evil, the elders must rid the spirit in order to avoid recurring child mortalities.’

Mutinda went on to describe how the Akamba believe the spirits of these ancestors to be the intercessors between them and their one transcendent God.

‘Normally though, Brendan,’ he continued, ‘Akamba children are named after an event surrounding their birth. You know Nzoki’s son “Wambua” his name means “born during rain,” or Wambua’s friend “Muthoki” his name translates as “long awaited one.” That would explain why we now have a little Toyota and a little Corolla in our community!’

We listened with fascination to the tales of this gentle and good-natured man for an hour or more.

Before we left, Mutinda insisted on being updated on the Village project. I told him that Nancy and Nzoki were picking up computer skills remarkably quickly. Kimanze described the progress that he and Leo were making with the water supply. They now had a system of delivering water to a central point, but as yet did not possess a really reliable source of water. So the well-digging continued apace. Mwangangi explained that enough bush had been cleared to have the outlines of a farm, and that many of the community buildings, such as the police station and health centre, were beginning to take shape.

‘And how is Kiragu?’ Mutinda asked.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘He is still coming up with new ideas all the time, and ways to improvise and improve.’

‘That sounds like Kiragu,’ he chuckled.

That night, Mwangangi and I got a lift to Kwa Vonza on the back of a rattling old truck. Kimanze could not join us; Leo wanted his help with something. We spent hours drinking warm bottles of Tusker beer at The Paradise Hotel. The pub could only hold about thirty people, but I knew most of those streaming in and out. They worked in Nyumbani or were neighbours (and suspiciously often ‘relations’) of Mwangangi. Most of them came over to us for a chat. I was pleased at how much Swahili I had picked up at this stage. I think it is known as ‘deep immersion’ in language circles.

Well after midnight, Mwangangi staggered outside into the dark to relieve himself, then stepped back in and, to my amusement, tripped over the dog lying on the ground just inside the bar. We were the only two left by now. I ordered another round. The barwoman brought it over and I paid. Then she took off the bottle-tops and poured a bottle straight over each of our heads.

‘You have had enough, time for you both to go home,’ she roared as she threw us out.

Her methods were surprisingly effective.

It was a moonless night. So, standing in the darkness (and I could not see Mwangangi even though he was only a foot or two away), Mwangangi pondered how could we get back to Nyumbani. He was not keen on walking.

‘Too many snakes, Brendan,’ he pointed out.

‘Oh for a Toyota,’ I cried.

‘Or even a Corolla,’ he laughed.

Then he had a
eureka
moment.

‘It would be best if we could find a motorbike.’

So, at about three in the morning, we knocked on the door of his cousin’s wife’s uncle, or something along those lines. A large man wearing pyjamas opened the door. I did not think it was a good idea to be knocking at this time.

I could not have been more mistaken. The man even called his wife out (appearing topless before she spotted us) to make
chapatti
for us. His small children appeared too, and stared sleepily at the strange
mzungu
who had appeared in their home in the middle of the night. Next, he fished out a bottle of homemade hooch from his bedroom, one he had been specially saving for just such an occasion when a stranded
mzungu
would call to his house at 3am on a moonless November night. A bewildered expression met my decline of his offer. I had shipped too much Tusker already. Then he brought out the motorbike from the back, and after a good few attempts managed to start it.

‘OK, Brendan, you will drive,’ ordered Mwangangi.

I was not convinced that that was a good idea.

After the disappearance of the rains, it became too hot to cycle on the boneshaker to Kitui, so I had borrowed a motorbike from some of the priests a few times. You rarely met anything on the dirt tracks other than a few wild animals and some people herding goats or donkeys. But, in truth, I was still a novice biker at this point. I hesitated, but Mwangangi cajoled me into agreeing. Confident we would not meet anyone, we headed back over the dirt track at a steady pace in a happy Tusker-induced daze.

Mwangangi was seated behind me with his arms out like wings, looking up towards the stars, which thankfully had now appeared. Caracal cats and other unidentified creatures were jumping out in front of me as I drove. The road from Letterkenny town out towards home was never like this, I kept thinking. One kilometre before reaching Nyumbani, we ran out of fuel. It was quite an effort to push the bike the rest of the way over a sandy track.

I woke up the next morning realising how dangerous it had been; never in a hundred years would I even dream of contemplating such a journey in Ireland. It was like the time Leo and I staggered the fifteen kilometres back one other starry night without the benefit of a lamp.

Kimanze told us a cautionary tale the following morning.

‘One of the Nyumbani workers was walking home one night full drunk. He fell asleep, out cold on the side of the road before he could make it home. He woke up to find a hyena eating off his left buttock.’

Kimanze was not joking.

A
RCHBISHOP
T
UTU OF
S
OUTH
A
FRICA
once famously declared, ‘The missionaries came with their bibles, and taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened our eyes, we had the bibles and they had the land.’ That happened in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; it is a bit different now.

I always had a childhood picture in my head of missionaries walking around, throwing holy water over naked spear-wielding black people. The reality proved very different. The Catholic missionaries in Africa are remarkable people: priests wearing colourful shorts fluently conversing in an African tribal language with a Kerry accent, perhaps; or elderly white nuns riding motorbikes over treacherous dirt tracks. As well as spreading Christianity, they do a tremendous amount of practical work to improve the lives of Africans; setting up schools, health centres, water projects, and creating employment opportunities. They are outstanding people whose extraordinary efforts are rarely acknowledged at home.

The Irish Catholic missionaries in Kenya install the infrastructure for entire communities, for Catholics and everyone else indiscriminately; infrastructure the government would not or could not establish. For example, Fr. Liam introduced me to a nun from Leitrim who was largely responsible for eradicating leprosy from Kitui District in the 1980s. The disappearing old-style missionary, who has lived amongst the community for decades in much the same basic conditions as the people themselves, does great work, albeit affecting the cultures of entire tribes in the process.

This has always been a prominent topic for African writers, such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o in
The River Between,
and Chinua Achebe in his novel
Things Fall Apart.
These two authors brilliantly narrate the life stories of fictional African characters against the background of the arrival of missionaries, and chart the growing tensions within the tribe, the village, and even within families between those who embrace the culture of the white people in matters such as religion, schooling or medicine, and those who continue to affirm their indigenous tribal traditions.

What cannot be denied, however, is that all of the Irish missionaries in Kitui are doing tremendous work for the poor. I became acquainted with many of them fairly soon after arriving. OK, I had mixed motives; in remote places, they are the only people with a few Western comforts—like a functioning shower, albeit a cold one from their tank of rainwater. All of them, without exception, immediately welcomed me as one of their own, and we instantly became friends. It was the Kiltegan Fathers (Saint Patrick’s Missionary Society), with whom I had stayed on my first night in Kenya, who brought Catholicism to Kitui in the 1950s. Around a fifth of Kitui District is now Catholic, and the Diocese celebrated its golden jubilee in 2006; there was an Irishman at its helm even then. These ageing missionaries may vanish over the next decade from Kenya, to become a part of Ireland’s, as well as Africa’s, history.

I used to have an uncle working amongst the Zulu tribe in South Africa and an aunt living alongside the Ibo tribe in Nigeria, working as missionaries for many decades. As a child, I would listen, mesmerised, to their tales of life in Africa, and be fascinated by the exotic carvings they would carry as gifts whenever they came home for the summer on a break every three or four years or so. I never pictured their lives properly until I came to Kenya. There is a character in Brian Friel’s play
Dancing at Lughnasa
who arrives back to live in Ireland after spending decades working as a missionary priest in Uganda. After a while, it becomes obvious that he had gone native and is suffering from malaria-induced delusions. He feels more at home in Africa.

Many of the missionaries I met would feel perfectly at home in both Ireland and Africa, but a great number of them soon discover they have a greater commitment to Africa. They have adapted well to life in Africa, and feel they belong more in Africa than in Ireland. These missionaries seem to stay exceptionally active and nimble as they grow older, tirelessly working long after people of their age would retire in Ireland.

The newer-style missionaries, mainly from America, might stay for a few weeks and, arguably, not do a whole lot of good. They often hand out a load of money to some local and hastily recruited African pastor to build a church. The money may be the conscience money of some televangelist. These local pastors are sometimes reported as embezzling money; many spout an intolerant ‘saved’ brand of Christianity. This may sound a bit cynical, and they are not all like this, by any means, but I saw evidence of harm done by a few of these fly-by-night operators, however well intentioned they might have been.

Indeed, one could argue that there is too much ‘religion’ in Kenya. In Ireland, most people talk down their personal religious commitment, whereas in Kenya they talk up how religious they are all the time, like when applying for a job, for instance. On occasions, I became frustrated when some people would not help themselves, lazily using religion as a crutch. ‘God will help us,’ they would tell me, when they should have been giving God a hand. Sometimes, admittedly, they told me this in sheer desperation.