No Hurry in Africa (42 page)

At my going away party at the Centre in late July, the children and I were dancing for ages to the hypnotic beat of the African drums. As I was leaving, Nduku, Mumo, and Kilonzo came up and shook my hand. In their broken English they murmured shyly,

‘Bwana
Kyalo (my Akamba name), thank you … tell your father thank you … we love you … don’t tell your people at home we take glue.’

Then Mutua tugged my shirt. I turned around to him.

‘Are you cycling back to Ireland?’ he whispered in Swahili.

Maybe I was not such a good geography teacher after all.

O
NE WEEKEND IN THE FIRST HALF
of July, I cycled towards Sr. MM’s home having bought a small henhouse from a young skinny lad I happened to meet walking down the dirt track. It was an impulse buy, but it would make a good present. The henhouse was skilfully made from branches and woven ferns. I tied it on to the back of the bicycle, and was pedalling very awkwardly as a result. I did not get too far, however; the combined weight of the henhouse and me was too much for the ancient bicycle. I ended up throwing the bike and the henhouse on the back of a cart pulled by two oxen and two donkeys, as I grabbed a lift up to Sr. MM’s house.

I found Sr. MM in the dining room with Nzinzi, an elderly silver-haired barefoot man whose gummy smile revealed that he was about twenty-eight teeth short of a full set. The Ursuline Sisters have been looking after him since their arrival in 1957, long before Sr. MM came to Kitui. Like many elderly Kenyans, he does not even know the year he was born. He was a product of the last decades of colonialism, a link with a largely forgotten past. While Sr. MM was still busy with Nzinzi, I took a wicker chair outside under a purple-flowering jacaranda tree on the lawn, and began reading
A Grain of Wheat
by the Kenyan nationalist writer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o.

This historical novel tells a vivid story of
Mau Mau
resistance to British rule in the period before Kenyan independence in 1963. This would have been the world of Nzinzi’s youth, I reminded myself; he would have been around the age I was at this point. He would probably not think of it as ‘history,’ though. In the novel, a departing colonial laments at one point, that if he ever returned to Kenya in the future, he would never again see that way of life he had known. It set me thinking—about time, history, memory, things moving on.

I knew if I happened to return in ten years, and certainly in twenty years, a new chapter of Kenya’s history will have been written. The country I had visited in 2005 and 2006 will have changed for me in at least one significant respect: I will feel less at home! From the Kitui desert to the Nairobi slums and on to distant Turkana, I had availed of an extensive network of Irish missionaries. They had welcomed, housed and fed me and provided me with contacts on my travels. These were the nuns and priests, now mostly elderly, who had played such a large part in the development of Kenya, post-Independence—and not just in the religious field. As I have witnessed myself, their contribution to the health and educational infrastructure of the young country has been immense.

Now in their sixties and seventies, they and their way of life will soon disappear. As the Kitui headmaster pointed out, the old priests are never replaced by younger men. The Africans themselves will have taken over—which is as it should be and, indeed, was always the plan from decades ago. It is just a pity that the herculean efforts of the Irish missionaries have not received more recognition at home. They surely merit more than the footnote that they will be lucky to get in the histories of their native Ireland. In the modern world of celebrity, these for me are the anonymous heroes and heroines.

In Africa, you are not allowed to be solemn for long. That weekend in July, Sr. MM was throwing a party. There were three Irish missionaries from different parts of Kenya staying with her. They were women of considerable experience and long service, and very good company. That evening, we all sat down to another one of Sr. MM’s meals that I looked forward to so much. The table was perfectly laid out, as if it were for a black-tie function. The food, as always, was much more basic than in Ireland, but, as on every occasion, she surpassed herself with the delicious sauces she conjured up from local ingredients. There was even a small drop of alcohol that she had hunted down in Nairobi; she had been saving it for visitors.

All present were curious to hear what I had made of my time in Kitui District, now that I would be leaving soon. I had to think about it. I told them that I had been somewhat overwhelmed at first by my experiences of Kitui, but that I had quickly been won over by the warmth, decency and joviality of the Akamba people. It was a place full of character and of characters; even the crazies, and there were plenty of them, were mostly entertaining.

As they knew themselves, I kept coming back to Kitui. I had had a vague notion at one point of moving on to the Middle East, and beyond. But of course, I never really left for long. Kitui always exercised its gravitational pull—I had caught the ‘African bug.’ Everything happens for a reason, as the Africans often say. I had enjoyed my months in Nyumbani, but working with the street-children in Kitui village was probably my most rewarding experience in Africa.

Over dinner, I recounted stories about recent encounters and events, a kaleidoscope of memories I would take home with me: getting a take-away ‘dip fried chicken’ wrapped in the café owner’s bank statement; regretfully declining when being asked by a waiter if I wanted margarine with my beer; laughing at the dance moves to the
macarena
being performed to an Akamba hymn at Mass; seeing a father and his four small children all perched on one moving bicycle, two of them gripping hens in their hands; encountering young men flying downhill with a hand-pulled cart stacked to the clouds, all looking at
me
incredulously; feeling like a zoo animal as some Akambas queued up to stare at me reading on the verandah as I listened blissfully to nearby children singing their African songs; watching men running after and jumping onto the moving ‘Lucky Escape’ bus (whose slogan was brightly emblazoned ‘Network Search’—whatever that meant); attempting to repel cats jumping on top of my dinner in a café; being amazed at people selling everything and anything, from hillocks of second-hand tights, to piles of old plastic bottles from higgledy-piggledy stalls by the roadside; enjoying banter with the women stitching garments on the foot-powered sewing machines along the footpaths; frequenting such establishments as ‘The Misplaced Saloon,’ ‘The Precious Iceland Hotel’ and the ‘Mogadishu Complex Shop’; dodging the wide metre-deep pot holes in the footpaths along Kitui main street in the darkness; meeting a black Brendan and several black Brendas …

I would remember too the sinister side of life in Kitui. I would long recall the unsettling sound of gunfire in the night. In late June, locals burned to death some of the bandits (the ‘hole-in-the-wall gang’ we had nicknamed them) who had been terrifying the district for months with raids and hijackings—the very same gang, indeed, who had attempted to stop Sr. MM that night in her car. The police simply informed their families they had been lynched. There would be no question of the mob ever being charged with murder. There was the pitiful sight, too, of convicts in black and white stripes being marched off in chains to prisons where conditions are reputedly horrendous.

I recalled the time I saw an excitable mob rushing towards women brawling on the street. The raucous crowd let them fight it out for a while, and then took sides and joined in the fight themselves. But my abiding memories of Akamba women are favourable ones. Like women everywhere in Kenya, they work hard and are not always shown the respect and gratitude they deserve. I was always greatly impressed everywhere I travelled by the resourcefulness and resilience of African women, and I would remember them too.

A very common sight around Kitui was of children and women carrying heavy bundles of sticks on their backs, held by a rope tied around their foreheads. This is the Akamba method, as distinct from other tribes who carry bundles on top of their heads. An odd time, I would see someone with a second-hand Western style bag, but with the straps around their foreheads instead of over their shoulders or in their hands. If a woman has a baby on her back, though, she will carry a bundle on her head. I often watched women laden with fruit ambling to market in this way, with the mother also holding an umbrella to shelter the baby from the sun.

At the outdoor fruit market in Kitui, I used to ask for twenty shillings (twenty cent) worth of oranges from Mumbua, a wizened old lady who spoke only Kikamba. She would first throw five into the cardboard box on the back of my bicycle, then ten, then fifteen, then hand me twenty succulent fresh oranges—all for twenty shillings. I always threw a few extra shillings to her, though she often tried to refuse it. Twenty shillings for twenty oranges was the going price for locals, so she was being exceedingly generous to the
mzungu.
It wouldn’t happen in Nairobi, I thought. With men, I might have been offered ten or fifteen for twenty shillings.

I will always remember the primary colours, the healthy smells and the organised chaos of these markets. What pleased me most of all now was to see that fruit was plentiful in Kitui again, following the rainy season that began in March. Prices had dropped substantially from what they had been during the drought. In Kenya, prices of basic commodities such as grain and vegetables vary wildly from district to district and from month to month, largely depending on the timing of the rains, or lack thereof.

At the outdoor markets, if I handed over a one hundred shilling note (about one euro), I was nearly always asked, ‘Have you something smaller?’ No one seemed to have a float big enough to give me change. Sometimes the ladies eventually reached into their bras in order to locate their coins, chatting to me all the while in Swahili, and end the transaction with a friendly smile.

The small number of fruit sellers who could speak English were quite fond of quoting Akamba proverbs in their conversations with me.

‘Freedan, a stranger’s excrement smells nicer than your neighbour’s,’ one once advised me.

They tended not to use the word ‘excrement,’ though. There were other vulgar proverbs of that ilk that did not make a lot of sense to me. Many could not manage to pronounce my name correctly. I quickly gave up telling them it was not ‘Freedan,’ or ‘Bradan.’

I loved the comical banter with the street hawkers selling their wares. I was partial to just sitting down in the shade and watching them—and life—pass by. At such times, I was a disciple of the ‘no hurry’ philosophy that I so admired in the Kenyans. The hawkers used to stroll up to me and offer some trinket for a ridiculous price; I would offer them a lot less than what they asked for, and then the fun would start. I soon got to know most of them, and they me. Once they made their sale, most usually started a conversation on any random topic of interest to them.

I had been told many times that I was famous throughout Kitui District for my Akamba nicknames, one of which translated as ‘tired white man who can ride a bicycle with the horn.’ I had gained notoriety in July when flying down a dusty street of Kitui village; my front wheel fell off the boneshaker and sent me flying over the handlebars. A crate of eggs tied on at the back landed right on top of me. It was my own
Mr. Bean
moment, enjoyed by all who witnessed it.

There were more formal entertainments to remember too. The
‘Fleadh Ceoil
’ of Akambaland took place in Kitui in mid-July. It was a truly memorable affair. All the performers were flamboyantly decorated; some in hay skirts and wearing feathers on their heads, others had painted bodies and sported bells on the arms and legs. A number of them used long straight sticks as part of their routine. There was much spontaneous dancing, singing and drumming in the rural way, and a really lively atmosphere. Old men sauntering by on the track would suddenly erupt into limbflailing dances on hearing the drums and music. The whole week was electrifying, captivating, and wonderfully African. As was so often the case, I was the only white person present, and felt lucky to be there.

The competitions were of an extremely high standard, especially the traditional Akamba, Meru, Embu, and Maasai tribal dances. These are the dances normally performed throughout the year at weddings, harvests festivals, circumcision ceremonies and so on. The Akamba style of dancing is said to closely resemble that of the Tutsi tribe of Rwanda. It is quite distinct from the ‘jump-up-and-down’ dancing of the Maasai tribe, for example.

There were long rambling speeches at the end of each competition. Two themes seemed to be common to these orations: how very important the speaker thought himself; and how ‘fervent drumming is needed to call God down upon us,’ or words to that effect. I really wish I had taped a few of them.