No Hurry in Africa

by Brendan Clerkin

  When I returned to Nyumbani after the bright lights of Nairobi that weekend, I began noticing how life revolves around light and darkness in Akamba society. Even the light of a full moon changes habits. For example, people may work at their crop or fetch water under a full moon. Moonlight—and there’s a lot more of it in Africa—extends the Akamba day in the same way as electricity does in Ireland. Many of their tribal ceremonies are guided by the phases of the moon.

  Even slight changes in the weather become more noticeable around the phases of the moon. However, when there is no moon (or a ‘black moon’ as some of them refer to it), active life abruptly ceases. There are no lamp-posts to keep the day alive. People tend to rise at dawn and go to sleep once the sun drops, their lives determined by the rhythms of the sun and the moon.

  Many of our nights in Nyumbani were spent sitting on rocks around a campfire, just having the craic. There was nothing else to do; we were so remote. Leo, Kimanze, Kiragu, the others in the house, and I would spend hours under the star-filled sky simply chatting, occasionally singing, and indulging in some light-hearted banter in the warm air. The campfire was simply to keep any wildlife at a distance. The night after I returned from Nairobi, I bumped straight into Kimanze by accident outside in the dark. He was standing in a basin—in the middle of washing himself. I was forever bumping into black people at night, walking straight into them because there were no lights about. Quite literally, I could not see them in the dark unless they were smiling! It was a serious problem in a place where there is so little artificial light after the sun sets.

  On Halloween night, at my suggestion, we had a bonfire that probably could have been seen half way to Sudan, possibly the only Halloween bonfire in Africa. It was massive, from all the vegetation that had been cleared for the farm and buildings. The wood was so dry it burned out fairly quickly, though. They do things differently in Bavaria, so I briefed Leo on the reasons behind the pagan Halloween bonfire. The irony was not lost to him. Here was I, who spent so much of my time visiting the Christian missionaries, creating a pagan fire supposedly to ward off the evil spirits let loose on that night, deep in the dark heart of Africa.

  The watchmen duly arrived with their bows and arrows after the fire burned out. They thought our house had burnt down; we had forgotten to tell them about the bonfire. For all the use they would have been if the house really did burn down! Were they about to dowse the flames with their bows and arrows?

  One of the joys of night-time at Nyumbani was watching the cosmic constellations, especially when there was no moon. With no light pollution, the stars actually twinkle, as in the nursery rhyme, and the Milky Way actually looks milky. Venus and Mars are clearly visible and the endless cascade of shooting stars is spectacular. The equator is perhaps the best place in the world to view the constellations, with billions of stars competing for space in the sky. Awe-struck, I used to stand on the highest point in the area, and for miles and miles around, I could see no artificial light from any car or home or streetlight, and hear no sound except the occasional shrill cries of birds. At times, it was the most complete silence imaginable.

  Sometimes I would fall asleep up there. (Nyumbani later built a huge concrete water tank on the high spot that had been my observatory, and I would climb up on top of the tank and lie down.) On other occasions, I listened to the sounds of nearby drumming for hours and hours after dark. The rhythmic pounding was an accompaniment to the elders exorcising evil spirits from possessed people in their huts, in an Akamba ceremony that Mwangangi informed me was known as ‘Kalumi.’

  CHAPTER 5

  SURVIVING THE FAMINE

  THERE WAS A FAMINE IN KITUI district when I arrived in September. The situation was becoming more and more desperate, so that by early November it was even beginning to attract the attention of Western media. Officially—and somewhat euphemistically— termed a ‘food shortage,’ many people were going maybe three or four days between meals, and that probably consisted of cornflour. The problem, that many in the West do not realise, is that there is no such thing as social welfare in Kenya. It is left to the missionaries or aid agencies to provide help in times of crisis.

  At the height of the famine during November and December, I was always amazed that people, who had no food to feed themselves or their children, would always make sure that I was fed, if I was visiting their home. This is a special trait among the Akamba; they are extremely generous and hospitable. I felt uneasy and slightly guilty eating their precious food, but knew they would be offended if I refused. They took great pride in hosting a white man. They would be the talk of the area for days and their children the talk of the school. I would always bring something simple like shiny stickers as a thank you. These were normally for their children, but the adults found great fascination with such mundane Western objects. It really was another world.

  I found out that some people, whom I knew very well, could not even afford bread every day for their families. This included people like Nancy (who was still warning me about baboons); people who I thought were fairly well off for Akambas. I saw Nancy eating paper from a copybook that she said was for her ‘iron,’ and eating soil from a small mound created by ants on the corrugated iron for her ‘calcium.’ Nzoki told me this ant-soil is beneficial for a child in the womb. Nzoki still breastfed her child who was nearly three years old. I even witnessed a baby suckling his grandmother once. I would never know what it is really like to be living with such hunger, or the insecurity of finding the next meal. As a European in Kenya, I could always get to an ATM within a few days, or take the next available flight home.

  People in Ireland sometimes ask did the famine affect me. It did not, insofar as I had the money to go to a shop and buy food, but it did, in that the nearest shop with any variety of supplies was four hours away, or necessitated a trip to Nairobi. I sometimes walked into a rural shop which was open (it was often only a ten foot square mud-hut), but had no stock save for Kenya’s leading brand of biscuits ‘Dotcom Biscuits,’ and cigarettes sold singly for two shillings each (two cent). The people had no money to buy anything in the shops anyway because their subsistence farming lifestyle had failed without the rains.

  For most of Kenya, the long rainy season lasts roughly from March until May, with a ‘short’ rainy season from late October until early December. In Kitui, for some reason, more rain normally falls during the November rainy season than the April rainy season. The temperature never falls below the high twenties Celsius at any time of year. By the time I arrived, every rainy season had largely failed since 1998. When the rains do come, as long as it is not part of a violent storm that washes away the soil, it generally makes life considerably easier for the people. The seasonal rivers flow and people can wash, fetch water, and bring their animals to drink.

  Vegetation that is used to withstanding prolonged parched spells, amazingly quickly becomes green with leaves and flowers, allowing the animals to feed and fatten up. Right throughout the rainy season, people are up before dawn and work until sunset— ploughing, planting, weeding and, if they are lucky, harvesting. It is still dry and sunny during the afternoon, but the dirt roads, now muddy, become troublesome to navigate and it is harder to get around, with routes cut off by the newly flowing rivers.

  Many days at Nyumbani, I ate a slice of bread in the morning and a bowl of rice on its own later in the day—and that was it. If the rice ran out, we ate nothing. I was not too bothered; we Westerners sometimes eat too much anyway. Sr. MM often gave me a pot of her homemade marmalade if I saw her at the weekend. This was like dessert to me; I ate it straight out of the pot. If I were in Kitui village at certain times of year when sugarcane was in season, I would buy freshly cut sugar-cane stalks and chew them.

  ‘That’ll make you go deaf and impotent,’ warned Mwangangi.

  Not the kind of warning to take lightly! I was not too concerned, though; it was really the only way to get something sweet. I remember reading in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath how t
he ‘Okies’ from the 1930s dustbowls ate fried dough when times were really hard. Well, in Nyumbani, fried dough was our treat, known as chapatti.

  Incredibly, I actually managed to put on weight during the height of the famine. This was despite hardly eating anything and despite cycling or walking everywhere. My friends at home jumped to the conclusion that it was really my eating which must have caused the famine! I eventually figured out that it was probably because the main staple, called ugali and which is made from corn flour, was pure carbohydrates. I had arrived fairly trim, and now, somewhat ironically, a potbelly was beginning to swell. I simply was not getting a balanced diet. Ugali is completely tasteless. It is like eating three-day-old porridge for lunch, supper, and snacking. I had managed to settle amongst one of the few peoples to have invented tasteless food.

  Because of the famine and because we were so remote, we did not have any fruit or vegetables during the week; they were only available in Kitui village. That meant I had to cycle the forty kilometres from Nyumbani to Kitui, risking ‘highway’ bandits along the way. Eating native Kenyan fruits, I soon discovered, left me with either constipation or diarrhoea until I became used to them. Young people in Ireland have often heard their parents tell them how tastier the fruits used to be in their youth. I finally understood what they meant. The fruits are fresh off the tree that very day, have no chemicals or preservatives, cost two shillings each (about two cent), and are overflowing with juicy succulence and vitamins.

  For a special treat, we might have had a bit of fat on bone, which was supposed to be goat meat. There tended to be no meat on the goats and hens since, because of the drought, they had nothing to eat or drink either, while beef or fish were unheard of.

  I bought a few black hens to have eggs each day; black hens especially, because I had never seen a hen that colour before in Ireland. Over time, I built up the brood until I would say I owned one of the largest hen broods in Kitui District. I had to stop my hens from their habit of laying their eggs under my bed and on top of my bed. One night I entered the bedroom in the dark (as there was no electricity), laid down my head on the pillow and found I had just squashed an egg into my ear and hair. The hens started laying indoors because their eggs kept being taken—anything from dogs to monkeys to rainbow-coloured lizards were blamed. Probably a few humans too, I suspect. They were welcome to them. I used to give away plenty of eggs to the Akambas—and occasionally some hens as well—as gifts.

  If I wanted milk, I sometimes had to rise at dawn to milk the cows by hand, after being woken by Fog-Horn-Leg-Horn cock-a-doodling before the sun even rose. The cows produced hardly any milk anyway, because there was virtually no grass for them to feed on. I used to let someone else boil the milk, went back to bed, and drank what little there was at breakfast. Cooking was done outside over an open fire of sticks on a base of stones. The problem was that I could never start a fire. Luckily for me, we hired a striking twenty-three year old Kikuyu cook named Nyambura to do that for us. Like Kiragu, she was typical of the Kikuyu, assiduous and scrupulous, and always brightly and impeccably turned out. She spoke some English, and was really talkative.

  On a number of occasions, our house went for a day or two without water, and being practically in the desert, Leo and I found it quite worrying. I usually stored one emergency bottle of water I never told anyone about. One time, to get a cup of drinking water involved Leo, Kimanze, and me loading jerry-cans onto the donkeys, herding them down to the dried-up river, (an alternative was a more inaccessible well), digging a hole in the riverbed, filling the cans with water, loading the heavy cans onto the donkeys, herding them two kilometres back up the dirt track, searching around for sticks for the fire, spending ages trying to ignite the fire, boiling the water (which was essential to destroy the germs), and waiting a long while for it to cool down … and hey presto, we had a cup of drinking water!

  Eventually Kimanze, Mwangangi, Leo, and the others made good progress in trying to develop a water system to reach the focal points of Nyumbani. Construction of homesteads was also continuing at a good pace; community buildings were springing up where there had been 1,000 acres of wild bush only a few months before. Everyone was busy. Plans were afoot for further development in the next phase. About this time, I was preoccupied with proposals to find extra funding for the project. Kiragu was very encouraging. At the end of one of his lengthy monologues—we were still working close to midnight next to a tilly-lamp—he summed up the situation.

  ‘We have all this money going out; now let’s get some coming in.’

  Our fame was beginning to spread. People were coming from as far away as southern Sudan to copy the novel block-making techniques we used, marvelling how the walls could be made without cement. The blocks were all manufactured on-site from materials sourced within Nyumbani. As a volunteer, I found it an exciting project to be working on; it felt like we were pushing the frontiers of ingenuity and improvisation. The whole concept of this village was an experiment in itself—one that, to our knowledge, had not been tried before.

  There were many unanswered questions. We would be bringing orphans and their carers into a new environment in order to create a community for themselves with all the facilities already in place. What would happen to their existing possessions and homes? Would the people coming in get along together? How would they interact with the existing community around Nyumbani? How would we prevent the village from becoming an ‘AIDS ghetto’? Would the existing community be allowed to have use of the facilities as well? What would happen to the children when they finished school, would there be still be a place for them here? Who exactly would own the produce of the farms, like new calves? How would the villagers govern themselves, and how much input would the existing Nyumbani management structures retain? Kiragu and the others were forever debating issues like these, making plans and revising them again and again. I also regularly contributed my views, my doubts and my ideas.

  Nancy, Nzoki, and some other clerks were becoming adept at the computer by now. Nancy, in particular, was making very good progress. At the start, she was like a hen pecking the keyboard every ten seconds with her right-hand index finger. Now she could turn on the computer, type up something on Microsoft Excel or Word, and just have me polish it up for her. For Nzoki, I made a complicated spreadsheet that she was able to upkeep herself without my help, to show how much materials went into each batch of blocks, how many blocks were in each batch, where they were used, and how it all compared to averages. It would soon be time to begin teaching them the more complicated aspects of these software programmes.

  I could see that modern technology could bring great benefits to these people who had so little of anything, including food. But I could not help wondering how they would adjust to our Western notions of progress. Would there be a price to be paid, in terms of them too hastily abandoning a way of life that had changed so little over centuries?

  CHAPTER 6

  THE MAGIC OF RAIN

  DUST DEVILS—which are like mini tornadoes—kept sweeping through Nyumbani in the first half of November, often appearing suddenly out of thin air. Nzoki, Mutinda, Kimanze, pretty much everyone said it was a sign of rain coming. Then again, they always said everything was a sign of rain. Anything from a particular bird singing at a certain time of day, to the meandering trickle of a stream was a sign that rain was on its way. These dust devils, harbingers of rain or not, always stole my khaki hat.

  In the end, the predictions of rain were proved right. Kitui’s long rainy season belatedly got going in the middle of November. The whole place changed from dusty red to verdant green within a few days. I was amazed by this miraculous transformation. Wild seedlings suddenly punched through the crusty ground. Crops began to shoot and sprout. Leaves appeared all over plants that had seemed long dead. Families were busy ploughing their fields with oxen. My tentative weekend travel plans to other parts of Kenya were put on hold, because the rains made many of the dirt roads impassable at times. Some of th
ese roads now had three-foot-deep gorges running down the middle of them. Each night there were apocalyptic lightning storms that illuminated the entire sky for hours on end, accompanied by monsoon force rains drumming menacingly on the tin roof of our house.

  The rainy season in Kitui means there are heavy showers at night, with thirty degrees Celsius in the sunny daytime. I have never seen faces of people so happy to see a drop of rain when it finally did arrive; workers in Nyumbani started dancing elatedly outside under the monsoon showers, thrilled that finally it was raining.

  But the rains always bring tragedy as well as joy in Kitui; they are simultaneously a blessing and a curse. Disease increases, Kitui village loses its electricity, and phone lines are down for weeks; roads are impassable whether you are driving, cycling or even walking. Several bridges in the district were washed away. Mwangangi and Kimanze told me of several incidents of locals perishing while attempting to ford the torrents that the dry rivers had developed into in that particular rainy season. It was later reported that over sixty people had drowned around Kitui. Some incidents were heartbreaking. Some children near Kwa Vonza drowned after wading out to rescue other children coming back from school.

  ‘Many drownings are simply put down to witchcraft and curses,’ Nancy informed me one day at our desk.

  Then, after a week, the rainy season ended abruptly, stopping as early as it started late. It was followed by what I can only describe as a biblical plague of insects. Fortunately, all expired after about two days. Children would sit after dark on the roadsides with paraffin lamps catching ‘sausage flies,’ which they fried as a tasty protein-filled treat. However, with the early cessation of the rains, the long-term problem of drought and famine would remain a problem for the foreseeable future.