No Hurry in Africa

by Brendan Clerkin

  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.

  ‘I do my volunteer work here, Brendan. It is very worthwhile. Children come here who have lost both parents and are fed by us, and we educate teenagers on the dangers of AIDS.’

  I liked that about Kyalo, and the people of Kibera. They seemed to help each other. Maybe I just had not yet witnessed the sinister underbelly where crime was a way of life.

  The next day I ventured into Mukuru, Nairobi’s slum of slums, with two local youths from Kevin’s centre as bodyguards. Neither spoke English, so communication was though Swahili and some hand signals. Mukuru is a much more recent slum than Kibera, and a good deal smaller. It is a crammed labyrinth of tiny never-ending passageways between simple corrugated iron shacks, requiring the inhabitants to jump over open sewers and dodge out of the way of the happy children who seem oblivious to their squalid surroundings.

  Altogether, Mukuru is a very interesting place. At one point, I saw a man running past in the nip. I found this rather odd. Then another followed him with no clothes on either, and yet again another, a couple of minutes later. A few bystanders were laughing as all this happened. It turned out to be the lighter side to Nairobi crime. Evidently, they had turned a corner and were mugged of everything including all their clothes. With all this serial stripping going on, I was grateful I had my two bodyguards to make me feel a bit more secure. A definite hint of menace clung around Mukuru, though—more so than in Kibera.

  Many Kenyans are overly friendly—the rural ones are usually genuine and try to give you stuff you do not even want; whereas the Nairobi people may be setting you up to be mugged. A generalisation, I know, but that was my experience. My favourite conman was a youthful one I encountered that weekend. His head was strangely rectangular; he had hunched shoulders, and he just exuded an aura of shiftiness at fifty paces. He operated on Nairobi’s Kenyatta Avenue, the city’s main street (named after the country’s first president). He sauntered past me furtively, and about three minutes later was briskly trying to keep up beside me, walking in the same direction. As if it was the most casual remark in the world, he asked me,

  ‘Gentleman, where are you from?’

  As he cantered beside me, I just kept looking ahead and striding forward. But after he had asked me a few more times, I answered,

  ‘Ninatoka Kitui. Unaenda wapi bwana?’ (I’m from Kitui, now where are you off to, sir?).

  This momentarily stumped him. He pointed up the street, and I could sense the permutations of possibility running around his mind. Finally, he piped up,

  ‘But where are you from before Kitui?’

  Continuing at a good pace, and knowing that I could usually handle these people on my travels, I told him,

  ‘Ireland.’

  I imagined that, like the Akamba, he probably would not have a notion where it was. But he became animated.

  ‘Oh, really, I will be studying medicine at Trinity College in Dublin next year.’

  Now it was my turn to be stumped. I asked him a few questions about Trinity, about Dublin, and about medicine courses, all the time looking ahead of me and trying to lose him as I ploughed straight through road crossings. Fair play to him though, he had his homework done and answered every one of them correctly. Then he became fed up with my interest in his supposed studies and he landed the punch line.

  ‘But I am a refugee from Sudan and I need money to go to Tanzania before I can go to Ireland.’

  ‘Sorry, but I have only fifty shillings left on me,’ I replied.

  This was the truth, and I opened out my pockets to show him, while still galloping onwards to the top of the street.

  He seemed to be again momentarily confused, but quickly reverted to what he must say to everyone else when they ignore him or refuse his request. It was an interesting change of tack.

  ‘But you don’t like to talk to Africans, you don’t like to give to needy Africans, you are a racist perhaps?’

  ‘I give to the people in Kitui. They need it more than you. I cannot give to everyone.’

  ‘And what about me? You are in my country, Kenya.’

  ‘Are you not a refugee from Sudan, sir?’

  The two of us grinned widely at this skit into which our encounter had developed.

  ‘Just some shillings?’ he pleaded, as he held out his hand in front of me to try and slow my pace.

  ‘Hapana, kwa heri bwana,’ I countered.

  Hapana is a great Swahili word that means ‘no, and that’s the very last word on the matter,’ while kwa heri when used in a certain tone is a firm but very polite way of saying ‘get lost and good riddance.’

  Nearly every weekend that I was in Nairobi after that, I met him again on the main street. I would now be from France or Israel or some such place and he would be studying veterinary in Toulouse or reading theology in Jerusalem. Each time he needed a couple of shillings to go to Tanzania before he could fly to his university. This happened about eleven or twelve times in total, and he never seemed to remember me
once.

  Much later, Sr. MM told me that a male Irish friend of hers, who was over visiting, was arrested by ‘police’ for talking to ‘a known criminal.’

  ‘He was taken to a back room of some dingy building. The police were demanding thousands of euros for bail money. He was completely traumatised by the event, poor man. Of course, the “police” and “the known criminal” were all in it together. It was a set-up to scam money from a white person,’ she concluded.

  Sr. MM began to describe the ‘known criminal’ towards the end of her tale—and he sounded uncannily like my friend, the Sudanese refugee!

  ‘Most Nairobi villains take a simple approach,’ said Kevin, after I told him my tale. ‘They threaten to throw their excrement in your face if you decide not to comply with the request to empty your pockets. It happened to me once, in fact, when I was in the back seat of a car stopped at a junction in broad daylight. For some reason, most people faced with this option pay up! To stay relatively safe in Nairobi,’ he continued, ‘you just have to stay close to crowds of people most of the time. Mob justice means the thief will be stoned or burned alive if he tries to mug you in a busy place. Otherwise, thieves go to crammed prisons that are like battery hen-houses—indefinitely—for stealing as little as the equivalent of three euros.’

  As a rule in Nairobi, it is inadvisable to engage in conversation when queuing or waiting with others, lest the conmen get useful information from you on your movements. It is best to walk around with just a few hundred shillings and no phone or wristwatch—or even spectacles, which oddly seems to be a favourite of Nairobi’s thieves as well. Kiragu once recounted to me how, one time, he was flagging down a bus when a man just grabbed the glasses off his head and ran away. He knew lots of other people in Nairobi to whom this happened as well.

  ‘You can’t run after them when you can’t even see them,’ he chuckled.

  I got the runs that weekend. By now, I was totally unused to the ‘richness’ of the normal food that I was eating with Kevin in Nairobi, after dining on the rather limited menu around Kitui. I took the opportunity to stock up on a few provisions that were not readily available near Nyumbani, such as toilet roll, a big bottle of drinking water, fruit, ‘nice & good shampoo,’ the Daily Nation, and, very importantly, batteries for my torch.