No Hurry in Africa (7 page)

I
N THE
M
ONTH OF
O
CTOBER,
I gained an insight into the sometimes bizarre world of Kenyan politics. The talk of everyone that month, whether they were knowledgeable or not, was about the big referendum due in November on the proposed changes to the constitution. The main points of contention centred upon land reform issues and the powers invested in the President. President Kibaki (who was elected in 2002) and the smaller parties of his coalition were urging a Yes vote, while the largest coalition partner had left to join the main KANU opposition party in opposing the proposed constitution.

The symbol for ‘Yes’ was a banana; the symbol for ‘No’ was an orange. They had to have pictures of both on the ballot paper because so many are illiterate, even though some people of the remoter tribes in the northern deserts, like the Turkana tribe for instance, may have never seen either fruit before.

Kitui was ‘No’ country. The Akamba, just like many other tribes, feared that the Kikuyu tribe of President Kibaki was trying to take over the country to benefit themselves at the expense of the others. Bananas were being sold on the streets of Kitui village but nobody was buying. You could not for the life of you be seen eating a banana. I was innocently chomping on one in Kitui village shortly after coming back from Mombasa when a random Akamba passing by challenged me,

‘Why are you supporting the Kikuyus?’

It would be prudent, I decided, to eat local fruits from then on. Of an evening, crowds of ragged men would cram into a bar in Kitui village to watch the news on a small fuzzy TV. They bought nothing, then exited the bar en-masse once the news finished. There was a certain tension in the air.

Because newspapers are only sold in villages that are perhaps sixty kilometres apart, and since most Kenyans outside Nairobi do not have a television in their own home, campaigning for the referendum was done at monster rallies all over the country. I ventured close enough to observe an Orange rally in Kitui village. On stage were colourful politicians dancing and enrapturing cheering crowds, working those assembled into a frenzy of jumping, singing, and waving leafy branches. It resembled a really colourful and noisy carnival. But there was a counter attraction in town. The local MP, the aptly named Charity Ngilu, who was Kenya’s health minister and was supporting the proposed constitution, organised famine relief food to be distributed at the same time as the rally. So, near where the Orange carnival was in full swing, hundreds upon hundreds were queuing up at the home of nearby chiefs to collect their food, courtesy of the Banana faction.

During the era of President Moi, from 1978 until 2002 (for most of it as a corrupt dictator in a one-party state), Akambas sometimes had their individual voting cards exchanged for famine relief. Famine relief food was also being sold openly in some shops in Kitui village during the height of the famine in late 2005. Some government official had evidently been bought. Notoriously, such corruption is endemic in Africa—at all levels.

Over a drink one evening at Sr. MM’s home, I argued the merits of the proposed constitution with the veteran Akamba MP who had organised the Orange rally. Sr. MM knew him well. I decided to agree with him for two reasons; I did not really know the background history to some of the issues; and I remembered I was technically in the country illegally. I was on a tourist visa and should not have been near Nyumbani or Kitui.

At one monster Banana rally in the weeks leading up to the referendum, near Lake Victoria in western Kenya, four schoolchildren were shot dead by Orange supporters. This incident shook the people of Kenya to the core. The country was pregnant with violence. I had travelled the whole way from Ulster, only to find it was ‘Orangemen’ involved in trouble in Kenya as well. The hanging shadow of tribal war weighed upon the population like a Damocles’ sword about to fall. One incident, even an accident, could tip the country over the brink. We held our breath and mostly stayed indoors.

A bank holiday was declared for the day of the vote. Many people in Kitui took the opportunity to be drunk on moonshine by midday. The result of the referendum was duly declared; the proposed new constitution was heavily defeated. Everyone was anxiously awaiting the reaction of President Kibaki. He addressed the country on television in Swahili that evening. Sr. MM, another Irish missionary and I all listened attentively to him for thirty minutes in Sr. MM’s home.

Eventually she piped up in her melodic tones,

‘Sure, you would think we all understood what he was saying!’

President Kibaki accepted the result against him, and everyone had a party. The legacy of the referendum, though, was a polarised country and a weak government that heretofore had been reforming and popular. The extent of tribal polarisation was apparent in the voting patterns; one Kikuyu constituency had a result of 30,417 Yes to 78 No, whereas a constituency in Luo tribal land near Lake Victoria recorded a vote of 163 Yes to 17,866 No.

Around this time, I remember writing a long email home, in which I described the tense build-up to the referendum. I felt it appropriate to finish it off with a verse of Sean McBride’s well-known song:

Now the time has come that I must go, I bid you all adieu, The open highway calls me back to do these things I do, But when I’m travelling far away, your friendship I’ ll recall, And, please God, some day I’ ll return unto the homes of Donegal.

Before I departed for Kenya, my friends in Letterkenny had been joking that I would either be eaten by a lion, speared by a Maasai, die of hunger, be shot by guerrillas, or succumb to some tropical disease. I dismissed it all as nonsense born of stereotypes. They were nearly right, even more so if they had mentioned road accidents. Kenya was indeed more dangerous than I had envisaged. They were also well aware how my cavalier attitude tended to attract trouble’s attention everywhere I had ventured in the world up to then.

The ‘open highway’ of McBride’s song represented one of the greatest threats to a long life in Kenya. A typical journey on a Kenyan main road between cities is heart-stopping. It could involve three vehicles abreast; two overcrowded buses passing on either side of a lorry (on this occasion with me standing on the back), and two other buses coming towards us at breakneck speed. Add in a giant crater or two, a few people walking on the road and some donkeys in the middle of it all, with the bus driver lighting himself another cigarette from the one he is already smoking. The buses were all brightly painted with slogans like ‘In God We Trust’—and I would be thinking to myself, whatever about God, I would not be putting much trust in the driver anyway.

In the second half of October in Kitui, I had the experience of being in a thirty year old Lada taxi, with nine other people somehow squeezed inside, driving up a deeply rutted dirt track towards Sr. MM’s. Suddenly the door was flung open, leaving me hanging out for about thirty seconds—it seemed like an eternity—before the driver even noticed.

Sr. MM was not there, but a blond thirty-year-old man with an almost incomprehensible Cork accent and a pronounced limp opened the door to me.

‘Howya, Kevin’s the name.’

Introductions over, we nicked a few bottles of Tusker beer from Sr. MM’s storeroom, and sat chatting for hours on the wicker chairs under the welcome shade of the verandah. Kevin told me he had been a social worker for the past two years in the slums of Nairobi.

‘Sr. MM is like my Kenyan mother,’ he explained. ‘I come to Sr. MM’s to get away from the hubbub of the city.’

‘I come to Sr. MM’s precisely to get a bit of hubbub,’

I replied.

I was delighted to have met another young Irish person, and the conversation quickly switched to the Premiership, of which I had heard nothing at all. When I asked him what the slums were like, he regaled me with a flurry of stories in the singsong cadences of Cork. He was a volunteer through the V.M.M. organisation in Ireland, and he spoke a lot of sense about what volunteers like us could realistically achieve. The next day, he invited me to stay with him and see the slums for myself. With my curiosity whetted by his stories, I readily accepted his invitation.

The following weekend, the last weekend of October, was my first weekend in the capital, Nairobi,—or ‘Nai-rob-you’ as it is disparagingly known. It is home to nearly three million people and counting, the largest city between Cairo and Cape Town. It is officially the most dangerous city in Africa, and with good reason. On our arrival just after dark, as Kevin and I were opening the door of the taxi outside his building, we witnessed a carjacking at gunpoint about a hundred feet further down the road. The car sped off, its tyres screeching.

More recently, things are improving on that front, but you still need your wits about you. I met one Dutch volunteer in the city centre that weekend who had been slashed in the back with a sword by a random African in broad daylight.

‘A mob nearly stoned my attacker to death before the police escorted him away,’ he told me.

Early the following morning, I was introduced to a friend of Kevin’s named Kyalo, an articulate, well-dressed twenty-five year old Akamba who grew up in Kibera slum but had gone to university and educated himself out of it. He took me on a guided tour on foot through the slum.

‘Kibera is the biggest proper slum in Africa,’ he explained, ‘with over one million people crammed into about one square mile. It was Nairobi’s original slum, beginning around forty years ago. Soweto in Johannesburg was bigger, but it has large tracts of middle class communities nowadays.’

As Kyalo was busy introducing me to some of his childhood friends in Kibera, a black man wearing a 1992 Donegal football jersey from our only All-Ireland winning year ambled by, singing loudly. Africa is full of surprises!

All his friends were eager to meet me, and joking away with Kyalo in Kikamba. What really struck me was how welcoming the people of Kibera were. I felt safer there than I had done in parts of some American cities. Despite the dreadful poverty and dire living conditions all around, I found aspiration, ambition, and energy in these friendly people. Nevertheless, I was always mindful of the opportunists lurking around the place.

I was invited into several homes in Kibera. They had been neighbours of Kyalo, and were clearly elated to see him once again. One hut was only the size of a modest Western bathroom; it was dark, contained no furniture at all, and was home to
nine
people who slept on the uneven surface that was the floor. Another home to which Kyalo brought me seemed fairly well off by the standards of the slum—it was the same size as the others, but had a couch and a tiny television set run off a car battery.

‘This is not entirely uncommon,’ Kyalo explained. ‘People sometimes choose to continue living in the slums even after they can afford to move out. There is a community here. They might even buy up other rooms in Kibera and become landlords.’

It was a pity that I was not fluent enough in Swahili (and that most of the people in Kibera could not speak English), because I was very keen to talk with them.

‘You should become a professional tour guide,’

I praised Kyalo.

He was a class act.

‘Ah Brendan, you could never bring a tour group into Kibera. Well, you could—but you wouldn’t get back out,
bwana,’
he countered, smiling, and continued to enlighten me. ‘The huts consist of walls made from mud and sometimes cow dung over a framework of sticks, with rusty corrugated iron roofs over that. Some homes here are over forty years old. It has really become a permanent slum with a permanent community.’

The foul lingering smells were sometimes overpowering as we strolled together. Children were playing in heaps of rubbish and beside open sewers full of a horrible grey toxic soup. There was delight in their faces all the same. After a good while hopping over sewers and meandering through the one-foot wide alleys in this vast impenetrable warren, we reached the only small piece of open land in the whole of the slum.

‘Moscow has Red Square, New York has Times Square, and Kibera has this,’ laughed Kyalo, waving his arm over the scene. ‘This is the cockpit, the epicentre, the place where everything happens for a million people—football games, political rallies, religious services, celebrations, everything. If anyone attempted to build on that dusty land, they would be burned alive.’

I sensed he was not entirely joking.

Kyalo was anxious to show me another part of the slum. As we walked along, he kept pointing out the various sectors with their invisible but sacrosanct boundaries.

‘Each section of Kibera is dominated by a particular tribe— for example, the Nubian tribe from Sudan, who were left over in Kenya from when the British used them as soldiers before Independence in 1963. A lot of them didn’t, or were unable, to make their way back.’

After a bit, we arrived at a colourfully painted building made of concrete blocks.