No Hurry in Africa

by Brendan Clerkin

  Leo told me that, on finishing school, he had arrived in Africa to avoid a year’s conscription in the German army.

  ‘I really want to make a difference here,’ he told me.

  He was innocent, almost naive, in his idealism in my view. I liked to think I was a lot more pragmatic. Yet, we hit it off right away. The Africans liked him too. With his long hair and German nationality, the Africans christened him ‘Jesus Hitler’— apparently without a trace of irony!

  Glad that the excitement of payday was over, I wandered down to the tin offices early the next morning. I was whistling a merry tune and waving to people, when I encountered a group of five women. Despite the early hour, they were dancing and singing as they passed by, each wielding a jemba (African style spade). At the door to one of the offices, I greeted Nzoki, a stout female Akamba clerk with one crossed eye, who was sweeping out the ever-invading red dust with a bunch of dried reeds. She was quite flirtatious.

  ‘How is you, Brendan? … How is your family? … How is Sr. MM? … How is your children?’

  This volley of questions was followed by a personal inspection.

  ‘That’s a nice shirt, Brendan. You need a wash, your feet are dirty; a mzungu should be clean.’

  I thought my feet might have been getting tanned, but it turned out she was correct, they could do with a wash.

  ‘I must begin work, Nzoki, I’ve a lot to do,’ I replied, terminating the conversation, but pleased with the natural curiosity and spontaneous friendship of these Akamba people.

  No sooner had I reached my own tin office than Nancy subjected me to a similar battery of questions and comments.

  I turned on the 1995-model computer, and began tapping away on my calculator and writing up a funding report for Kiragu. I was going hammer and tongs at it for nearly an hour when the computer suddenly conked out. The generator outside had stopped. It often did. I strolled over to see what the problem was. The Akamba will see a problem coming, but invariably decide to do nothing about it until it is too late. Kimanze had seen the generator was low on fuel, but waited until it ran out altogether and, as a result, I lost my work on the computer. Only now did he decide it was time to do something about it—more out of a laid-back attitude than anything else.

  While I was outside, I took the opportunity to greet Nzoki again. She too was outside, organising a group of workers. We shook hands again as one must do every time one says hello to an Akamba, with their elaborate three part handshake. I needed clarification from her.

  ‘Hello, Nzoki, would you be able to help me please? Is this a 1 or a 7?’

  I showed her a page from a battered copybook with figures handwritten in pencil.

  ‘How is you, Brendan?’

  ‘Fine still, thanks.’

  ‘How is your family?’

  ‘Well, I still haven’t spoken to them since I came to Kenya— but fine, I’m presuming again.’

  ‘How is Sr. MM?’

  ‘Ah, probably an hour older by now, I’d imagine!’

  ‘And what about your children?’

  ‘I still haven’t had any children born to me since the last time you were asking.’

  ‘I see you’ve washed your feet.’

  ‘Em, you wouldn’t be able to tell me please if that’s a 1 or a 7?’

  Nzoki puzzled over the piece of paper for a few moments,

  ‘It’s neither, Brendan.’

  ‘So what is it?’

  I nearly rolled my eyes.

  ‘A fraction line, it’s 8/5?’

  ‘Hmm, that changes all my calculations. Oh well, lucky the generator broke down before I went any further with it. Thanks. See you in a while, my calculator calls.’

  I was learning to adjust to the African pace, to accept all their questions, to embrace their ways. Pleasantries always took precedence over productivity.

  One of the first things I had to do was to computerise the recording systems. Everything up to then was in copybooks or on sheets of paper. Nobody could easily retrieve any useful or indeed essential information to improve the workings of the project. It frustrated Leo intensely. Everything, from excavating the raw materials for the blocks to cutting and shaping the tin for the roofs, had to be performed on-site.

  I quickly realised there would be little point in me putting a whole computerised system in place, only for it to collapse once I left. The other staff, barring Kiragu and his secretary, had never used or even seen a computer before. So I also began to train Nancy and a number of other clerks to type and navigate the computer. In time, they could input the data themselves, and later on again they could begin to use Word and Excel to create and access information they themselves required.

  When I finished for the day, I relaxed by dandering down to the dry river and loitering until dusk fell, fascinated by the wildlife. As this was the only place with an abundance of leaves and greenery, all the animals and birds congregated there once the heat seeped out of the day. Whenever I came tramping along, baboons rushed away, monkeys cleared off frightened and chittering, the small deer stared briefly and raced for cover, as did the rock hyraxes, the python, the tiny scampering lizards, the larger monitor-lizard, the pelicans, the birds with shiny white tails two feet long that I did not know the name of, the hyena, the marabou storks, the armadillo type creatures … amongst others.

  One late afternoon, I went exploring alone through the vegetation, further up the course of the dry river than I normally would. For one split second, I froze with fear as I espied in the fading light what looked like two young female lions stretched out on the branches of a tree. They spotted me a second later, staring straight at me for what, at the time, seemed like ages, but could not have been more than a few seconds. Suddenly each of them jumped down from the tree. My heart pounded audibly. Luckily, they turned and ran away in the other direction, and I rushed straight back home. Still breathless, I asked Nancy what they could have been.

  ‘Most likely caracal cats, Bradan, there haven’t been lions seen around Nyumbani in two years.’

  There is something special about catching sight of all these truly wild animals in their natural environment, not protected by any national park, and living so close to humans. I used to hide under cover for a long time, motionless, seeing nothing, but when I began to leave, I startled everything again. It took me weeks to realise that David Attenborough might have got it wrong—the trick is to keep walking around making as much noise as you can to frighten everything into moving and betraying its presence. On occasions, baboons growled and barked at me like dogs. I recalled Nancy’s warnings. They were probably stronger than I was, but they would run away regardless after a few seconds.

  The people of the Akamba tribe take an easy-going, rather Jamaican approach to work and timekeeping. This would have suited me grand! It was people of the Kikuyu and Luo tribes I was working with in management, though. There is a phrase still heard in Northern Ireland—to be ‘grabbed by the Kikuyus’— which means to be grabbed by the testicles. It originated from the time of the Kikuyus’ ill-fated Mau Mau rebellion against the British during the late 1950s. Kikuyus, who are the biggest tribe in Kenya, making up a fifth of the population, are remarkably like the stereotype of the Scottish Presbyterians in their instincts—hardworking and honest, but rather serious and tight with money. The Akambas on the other hand—dare I say it?— can be a bit Irish, with all that that entails.

  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 everywhe
re. 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 u
sed to life there.

  CHAPTER 3

  TO MOMBASA WITH JESUS HITLER

  IN MID-OCTOBER, LEO, Kimanze, 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.