No Hurry in Africa (5 page)

One day Kimanze, walking beside me with the new boneshaker bicycle he had just bought, put it to me as follows:

‘The difference between the two tribes is this. A Kikuyu man will see my new bicycle and work even harder to save the money to buy one for himself. Whereas an Akamba man will see my new bicycle and perform a witchcraft spell so that I lose the bicycle.’ At that point, I decided the ‘Irish’ analogy went too far! I remembered hearing Sr. MM explain that the Akamba tribe were, until the late nineteenth century, semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers. I saw traces of this earlier way of life still persisting everywhere. The night watchmen at Nyumbani walked around with bow and arrows. I once saw a watch-man shoot an arrow between the eyes of a snake camouflaged in the ground, just as I was about to step on it. Akambas are all the time knocking birds off a branch with a catapult. One time, I followed Nzoki’s husband when he was out poaching wild dik-dik (miniature deer) for food, expertly shooting the elusive animal dead with an arrow. The sad thing is, a dik-dik mates for life with one partner, so its demise leaves a permanent widow—but the hunters usually catch that one too.

After a few weeks in Kenya, I was getting to know some of the differences between the tribes. If the Kikuyu tended to look down on the Akamba, the Akamba liked to feel superior to the Maasai. As he was clearing up after breakfast one morning, Sr. MM’s Akamba cook told me a story about how his own tribe triumphed over the Maasai in their long territorial disputes, before the arrival of the British.

‘The elders one day sat down for a peace conference. After some time, arrows rained down from the sky and landed at the feet of the Maasai elders. The Maasai complained that they were being attacked. One Akamba elder stood up and gestured. “Look around, can you see anybody?” The Akamba elder proceeded to explain: “These arrows have been fired by our ancestors.” The Maasai were so afraid of the Akambas’ deserved reputation for witchcraft that they withdrew straight away.’

He went on to explain, proudly,

‘We Akambas had hidden our men behind trees half a mile away. They had been able to aim their bows and arrows with such accuracy that they landed at the feet of the Maasai elders.’

The Akamba people are unused to contact with white people nowadays. When I arrived, there were about a dozen Irish in Akambaland, an area greater than the size of Ulster, and there were no other resident white people at all. Wherever I ventured, the children would silently stare at me, mesmerised, until I spoke. Then the cheering would erupt and I would have throngs of barefoot children swarming around me, screaming and following me for several kilometres. Being the first white person they had ever seen, I was just like a celebrity, a pop star that they wanted to touch and shake by the hand. They would pinch my skin to see if it were real; they would stare, cheer, scream and beg me to take a photograph of them as they mobbed me. When I obliged, even the Akamba adults would run into the frame, and then thank me for taking the photo.

The principal way to get around in Kitui District was by walking, as the vast majority of people regularly did over huge distances. About the only real alternative was a 1950s-style bicycle. These were first imported from China decades ago and, as far as I know, are still being imported from that source. Think of a five-barred gate on wheels, with several middle bars missing! Before I acquired my own bicycle, random people used to offer me theirs to take whenever they saw me walking somewhere in the desert; they were confident that one of their neighbours would bring it back to them that evening. The only other form of transport around Nyumbani was the ox and cart. The second time I was on an ox-cart, I managed to fall off the side. Only my pride was bruised. From one weekend until the next, I might not see a single car. At weekends, I would often go to Sr. MM’s. Sr. MM eventually presented me with an old ramshackle boneshaker that had been lying around her girls’ secondary school. It needed fixing up. It was actually supposed to be for her caretaker but he was too lazy to cycle and would always send someone else for provisions. After doing my own temporary repair job on it, I had half a dozen parts replaced by one of the many bicycle-repair men plying their trade underneath a tree, and then added a silver bell for good measure.

It is a four hour cycle from Nyumbani into Kitui, the nearest decent village with electricity and foodstuffs. The smaller villages, like nearby Kwa Vonza, have shops—mere shacks—where all the stock is on or behind the counter, often though amounting to no more than a loaf of bread and a hanging goat carcass. Often too, there would be a cat patrolling the counter; whatever about the hygiene, it would keep the rodents and reptiles at bay. There was always an ancient weighing scales sitting on the clay floor. The bigger villages, like Kitui, have colourful noisy outdoor markets, with stalls made from branches lashed together, or wares simply laid out along the ground. Some of the stallholders physically drag you over to their merchandise; some hawkers walk around carrying their bric-a-brac and push it in your face. In the midday heat, many lie asleep on top of their stalls, unconcerned about whether they sell anything or not.

An odd time, I managed to get a lift on the back of one of the very rare motorbikes, usually travelling at white-knuckle speeds over the undulating dirt tracks, weaving in and out among the wandering donkeys and goats along the way. Other vehicles encountered on the road to Nairobi might be buses filled with hens, buses brightly painted with graffiti and emblazoned with names like ‘Camilla Parker-Bowles,’ ‘Princess Di,’ or, curiously, ‘Fast and Furious—Devil Must Bow.’ Passengers rarely wait for the vehicle to stop before dismounting. Visitors to Kenya are always struck by the anarchy that prevails on the roads.

Until people became acquainted with me around Kitui, I was called either
‘mzungu’;
or ‘Father British’—because the very few white men they meet are priests, and ‘British’ is the Akamba tribe’s generic word for any white person. I heard of one old Irish missionary in Kitui who became so incensed at a small child shouting ‘British’ to him, that he scrambled out of his rusty jeep, lofted the child up in the air and threatened him,

‘Don’t you ever call me British again!’

Sure, the child had not a clue (though one day, he too might become aware of post-colonial sensitivities). I was soon being called
‘Bwana Kyalo,’
an Akamba name meaning ‘born after a journey.’ If not one of these, then it was ‘Mr. Brendan’; or ‘Gentleman’ (I have never had the privilege of being addressed that way before, or indeed since); or that great title of respect in Kenya,
‘Mzee
Brendan’—though I suspect an odd time it was conferred in jest!

In those early days in Kitui District, it took me a bit of time to get used to the toilet arrangements. It was a short while before I was able to master the art of correctly aiming while squatting over a small hole in the ground. Sometimes I just did it outside in the bush like everybody else. Such arrangements were not unknown in rural Ireland in the past. It reminded me of Patrick Kavanagh’s
The Great Hunger
where he muses:
‘And his happiest dream/Was to clean his arse/With perennial grass/On the bank of some summer stream.’

In the absence of perennial grass in these parts, you can get caught out badly—as I did one day in early October, looking for a suitable harmless leaf to clean myself with after a call of nature. It turned out to be as harmless as a nettle! Every animal and plant in Kitui seemed to be either benign or deadly, with no in-between. Nancy, one time, told me rather quaintly,

‘You cannot die from a scorpion sting in Kitui, but you can die from the suffering of the pain it causes.’

Toilet roll is a Western invention that has not yet reached rural Kenya, by and large. It was yet another basic commodity to be acquired after a four-hour bicycle ride from Nyumbani. Cleaning and personal hygiene became a trial all round. When we were lucky enough to have water stored in the house, a shower involved splashing cold water onto myself from a basin. The bike ride from Nyumbani was not undertaken lightly; apart from the effort required in cycling four hours under the African sun, I could not cycle uphill because there were no gears, and I could not cycle downhill because the brakes did not work that well. It made you sort out your priorities, even where hygiene was concerned.

In early October, the day a total eclipse of the sun occurred, when it became strangely darker and cooler for a time during the early afternoon in the middle of the desert, I chanced upon a half dozen naked Akamba washing each other in a small water hole in the dry, sandy, seasonal Tiva River, between Nyumbani and Kitui village. There appeared to be three naked generations of the one family, all enthusiastically waving to me as I cycled by. At the time, I did not even think there was anything strange about this. I was already becoming used to life there.

I
N MID-
O
CTOBER,
L
EO,
K
imanze,
and I endured a very eventful 600km marathon overnight bus journey southeast to Mombasa on the coast. We were to spend a few days there celebrating Leo’s twenty-first birthday. Mombasa is Kenya’s second city, the main port for East Africa, and was the first colonial capital during the 1890s. It had been fought over for centuries, chiefly between the Portuguese on their way to Goa in India, and the Omani Arabs who controlled the ivory and human slave trades. The British wrested it from both. Mombasa is a cross between Bombay and Salthill. It is a bustling third-world city, but it is also the country’s principal beach resort, attracting large numbers of European sun-seekers.

As much as I loved living so remotely at Nyumbani, I was already impatient to see more of Kenya. At times, I was beginning to find Nyumbani rather claustrophobic, working and living with the same people in a confined area every hour of every day. I had been working hard since I arrived, and was looking forward to going a bit wild. I even dared to hope for a few creature comforts, such as relaxing under a long pleasurable warm shower, and the opportunity to ring home. Yes, I needed this long weekend break.

We managed to hit Mombasa right in the middle of Ramadan, the Islamic month of penitential fasting. Hunger and the energy-sapping humidity may have slowed the rest of the population in that overwhelmingly Muslim city, but not Leo’s African Rasta friends. Leo had previously lived in Mombasa for over a month when he first arrived in Kenya looking for volunteer work, and had become friendly with some of the many black Rastas there.

We rented out a simple but comfortable chalet near the beach. Kimanze had to answer a call of nature as soon as we arrived. He rushed into the bathroom, saw the Western-style toilet in it, and rushed back out.

‘How does this work?’ he asked urgently.

Western plumbing was as alien to him as the African ‘arrangements’ had been to Leo and myself.

Joined by about eight of Leo’s friends, we stayed indoors for the afternoon and evening, the roof-fan turning lazily overhead. The Rastas were soon getting high on marijuana all around us. These cosmopolitans were so different to the people of Kitui, that Kimanze felt as much in a different country as I did. It was the British, I suppose, who had brought such diverse peoples together under the common name of Kenyan.

Leo put in an order to one of the Rastas, when the substance was running low.

‘Here, can you get me a few hundred shillings worth, whatever you can buy with that,’ he requested, as he palmed him the notes (about three euros’ worth).

Our eyes popped when, a half hour later, the Rasta returned with a bag full of the stuff for Leo, who nearly had an orgasm looking at it.

Later, we partied well through the night at a giant outdoor session near the beach, where they played reggae versions of songs that were never meant to have the reggae treatment—‘Stuck on you’ and songs like that, the music surfing on a light breeze from the Indian Ocean. There were no tourists, just plenty of African Rastas. Leo, Kimanze, and I were up on a dance floor that was encircled by lights and speakers strung between the palm trees. Leo’s birthday was becoming one terrific and unforgettable night.

A few hangers-on kept trying to sell me useless Rasta trinkets. It is against their principles to be employed in a normal waged job; they must earn money solely by being self-employed. They clearly had no problem, though, with not being teetotal like a true Rastafarian. One of them, whom Leo had indicated was not an acquaintance, tried to steal a few coins from my pocket. I seized his hand, the others threatened him and he scarpered. By now, we were wilting with exhaustion.

After a breezy tuk-tuk ride back to the chalet at around 5am, and just as we were dropping off to sleep, the silence was ripped apart by loud wailing emanating from the minaret of the large nearby mosque.

‘Allah Akbar
… God is great … prayer is better than sleep …