‘And how is Kiragu?’ Mutinda asked.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘He is still coming up with new ideas all the time, and ways to improvise and improve.’
‘That sounds like Kiragu,’ he chuckled.
That night, Mwangangi and I got a lift to Kwa Vonza on the back of a rattling old truck. Kimanze could not join us; Leo wanted his help with something. We spent hours drinking warm bottles of Tusker beer at The Paradise Hotel. The pub could only hold about thirty people, but I knew most of those streaming in and out. They worked in Nyumbani or were neighbours (and suspiciously often ‘relations’) of Mwangangi. Most of them came over to us for a chat. I was pleased at how much Swahili I had picked up at this stage. I think it is known as ‘deep immersion’ in language circles.
Well after midnight, Mwangangi staggered outside into the dark to relieve himself, then stepped back in and, to my amusement, tripped over the dog lying on the ground just inside the bar. We were the only two left by now. I ordered another round. The barwoman brought it over and I paid. Then she took off the bottle-tops and poured a bottle straight over each of our heads.
‘You have had enough, time for you both to go home,’ she roared as she threw us out.
Her methods were surprisingly effective.
It was a moonless night. So, standing in the darkness (and I could not see Mwangangi even though he was only a foot or two away), Mwangangi pondered how could we get back to Nyumbani. He was not keen on walking.
‘Too many snakes, Brendan,’ he pointed out.
‘Oh for a Toyota,’ I cried.
‘Or even a Corolla,’ he laughed.
Then he had a eureka moment.
‘It would be best if we could find a motorbike.’
So, at about three in the morning, we knocked on the door of his cousin’s wife’s uncle, or something along those lines. A large man wearing pyjamas opened the door. I did not think it was a good idea to be knocking at this time.
I could not have been more mistaken. The man even called his wife out (appearing topless before she spotted us) to make chapatti for us. His small children appeared too, and stared sleepily at the strange mzungu who had appeared in their home in the middle of the night. Next, he fished out a bottle of homemade hooch from his bedroom, one he had been specially saving for just such an occasion when a stranded mzungu would call to his house at 3am on a moonless November night. A bewildered expression met my decline of his offer. I had shipped too much Tusker already. Then he brought out the motorbike from the back, and after a good few attempts managed to start it.
‘OK, Brendan, you will drive,’ ordered Mwangangi.
I was not convinced that that was a good idea.
After the disappearance of the rains, it became too hot to cycle on the boneshaker to Kitui, so I had borrowed a motorbike from some of the priests a few times. You rarely met anything on the dirt tracks other than a few wild animals and some people herding goats or donkeys. But, in truth, I was still a novice biker at this point. I hesitated, but Mwangangi cajoled me into agreeing. Confident we would not meet anyone, we headed back over the dirt track at a steady pace in a happy Tusker-induced daze.
Mwangangi was seated behind me with his arms out like wings, looking up towards the stars, which thankfully had now appeared. Caracal cats and other unidentified creatures were jumping out in front of me as I drove. The road from Letterkenny town out towards home was never like this, I kept thinking. One kilometre before reaching Nyumbani, we ran out of fuel. It was quite an effort to push the bike the rest of the way over a sandy track.
I woke up the next morning realising how dangerous it had been; never in a hundred years would I even dream of contemplating such a journey in Ireland. It was like the time Leo and I staggered the fifteen kilometres back one other starry night without the benefit of a lamp.
Kimanze told us a cautionary tale the following morning.
‘One of the Nyumbani workers was walking home one night full drunk. He fell asleep, out cold on the side of the road before he could make it home. He woke up to find a hyena eating off his left buttock.’
Kimanze was not joking.
CHAPTER 7
THE MISSIONARIES OF AFRICA
ARCHBISHOP TUTU OF SOUTH AFRICA once famously declared, ‘The missionaries came with their bibles, and taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened our eyes, we had the bibles and they had the land.’ That happened in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; it is a bit different now.
I always had a childhood picture in my head of missionaries walking around, throwing holy water over naked spear-wielding black people. The reality proved very different. The Catholic missionaries in Africa are remarkable people: priests wearing colourful shorts fluently conversing in an African tribal language with a Kerry accent, perhaps; or elderly white nuns riding motorbikes over treacherous dirt tracks. As well as spreading Christianity, they do a tremendous amount of practical work to improve the lives of Africans; setting up schools, health centres, water projects, and creating employment opportunities. They are outstanding people whose extraordinary efforts are rarely acknowledged at home.
The Irish Catholic missionaries in Kenya install the infrastructure for entire communities, for Catholics and everyone else indiscriminately; infrastructure the government would not or could not establish. For example, Fr. Liam introduced me to a nun from Leitrim who was largely responsible for eradicating leprosy from Kitui District in the 1980s. The disappearing old-style missionary, who has lived amongst the community for decades in much the same basic conditions as the people themselves, does great work, albeit affecting the cultures of entire tribes in the process.
This has always been a prominent topic for African writers, such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o in The River Between, and Chinua Achebe in his novel Things Fall Apart. These two authors brilliantly narrate the life stories of fictional African characters against the background of the arrival of missionaries, and chart the growing tensions within the tribe, the village, and even within families between those who embrace the culture of the white people in matters such as religion, schooling or medicine, and those who continue to affirm their indigenous tribal traditions.
What cannot be denied, however, is that all of the Irish missionaries in Kitui are doing tremendous work for the poor. I became acquainted with many of them fairly soon after arriving. OK, I had mixed motives; in remote places, they are the only people with a few Western comforts—like a functioning shower, albeit a cold one from their tank of rainwater. All of them, without exception, immediately welcomed me as one of their own, and we instantly became friends. It was the Kiltegan Fathers (Saint Patrick’s Missionary Society), with whom I had stayed on my first night in Kenya, who brought Catholicism to Kitui in the 1950s. Around a fifth of Kitui District is now Catholic, and the Diocese celebrated its golden jubilee in 2006; there was an Irishman at its helm even then. These ageing missionaries may vanish over the next decade from Kenya, to become a part of Ireland’s, as well as Africa’s, history.
I used to have an uncle working amongst the Zulu tribe in South Africa and an aunt living alongside the Ibo tribe in Nigeria, working as missionaries for many decades. As a child, I would listen, mesmerised, to their tales of life in Africa, and be fascinated by the exotic carvings they would carry as gifts whenever they came home for the summer on a break every three or four years or so. I never pictured their lives properly until I came to Kenya. There is a character in Brian Friel’s play Dancing at Lughnasa who arrives back to live in Ireland after spending decades working as a missionary priest in Uganda. After a while, it becomes obvious that he had gone native and is suffering from malaria-induced delusions. He feels more at home in Africa.
Many of the missionaries I met would feel perfectly at home in both Ireland and Africa, but a great number of them soon discover they have a greater commitment to Africa. They have adapted well to life in Africa, and feel they belong more in Africa than in Ireland. These missionaries seem to stay
exceptionally active and nimble as they grow older, tirelessly working long after people of their age would retire in Ireland.
The newer-style missionaries, mainly from America, might stay for a few weeks and, arguably, not do a whole lot of good. They often hand out a load of money to some local and hastily recruited African pastor to build a church. The money may be the conscience money of some televangelist. These local pastors are sometimes reported as embezzling money; many spout an intolerant ‘saved’ brand of Christianity. This may sound a bit cynical, and they are not all like this, by any means, but I saw evidence of harm done by a few of these fly-by-night operators, however well intentioned they might have been.
Indeed, one could argue that there is too much ‘religion’ in Kenya. In Ireland, most people talk down their personal religious commitment, whereas in Kenya they talk up how religious they are all the time, like when applying for a job, for instance. On occasions, I became frustrated when some people would not help themselves, lazily using religion as a crutch. ‘God will help us,’ they would tell me, when they should have been giving God a hand. Sometimes, admittedly, they told me this in sheer desperation.
Some of the buses run by the cool dudes in Nairobi even had a Pioneer Total Abstinence Association symbol brightly emblazoned across the side of the bus. It was not necessarily a pledge of Christian abstemiousness! I was in a truck once with Cecil (our Akamba Nyumbani driver), who like every other Kenyan lives by the philosophy of ‘polé, polé’ (slowly, slowly). Except, that is, when he got his hands on any kind of vehicle. Like most Kenyan drivers, he treated the road like an airport runway. Cecil and I were sometimes bombing it down a narrow, gravelly track near Kitui village with a steep embankment on one side. Every time I asked him to slow down he replied, ‘God cares for us.’ I did not share his confidence that God would necessarily keep us alive if we plunged over into the ravine.
Religion and church are so much more relevant to the people of Africa than Ireland. It provides them not just with hope, but also with practical support, education, health, and employment. The larger mainstream churches in Kenya—such as Catholic, Anglican, and Presbyterian—also act as the only honest brokers in a country where the people are rightly suspicious of government, profiteering charities, and some meddling international organisations.
As is typical in any Kenyan village, everybody walks to Mass at the mission house church, some for many kilometres, and they love socialising outside afterwards. The people, many of whom wear tattered clothes for much of the week, dress up in their best second-hand suits or in elegant bright dresses and hats. Masses are so jammed that children sit around the altar and crowds of people listen from outside the church, while looking in the windows. They possess the zeal of new converts. A Mass can turn into a disco of sorts: entire congregations singing loudly and dancing in the uninhibited African fashion. Every Mass is a celebration of music and colour. It lasts for hours, and is nothing like the sober monochrome Sunday mornings in Ireland. Catholicism has a more liturgical focus that is truly African. I always had to look twice each time I saw a black Madonna or a black Christ on the cross. The African priests are often men in their thirties; the African nuns so young I found many attractive! It is a vibrant, relevant Church in Africa, and growing rapidly.
Kitui is perhaps two-thirds nominally Christian at this stage—but almost 100% animist at the same time, at least to the extent that witchcraft appears to be pretty much universally believed in. It is in some respects like rural Ireland right up to the 1950s: Christianity co-existing with ‘pagan’ beliefs and superstitions regarding curses, charms, fairies and so on.
‘In Kitui, Brendan, to pass your own bad luck on to your neighbours, you singe your corn black, and spread it along the path for others to pick up on their feet,’ Mutinda told me. ‘They pick up your bad luck and walk away with it.’
In Donegal, I heard similar tales from older folk of tossing a ram skull backwards over one’s shoulder with a pitchfork into a neighbour’s field, or placing three hen eggs in the neighbour’s haystack, in order to pass on the bad luck. Of course, many Akamba deny witchcraft even exists, and a mzungu will only pick up hushed references to some of the practices.
Of the two-thirds nominally Christian, some people might be Pentecostal one month, Anglican the next, Catholic shortly thereafter. Some may set up their own church for a time and practice some witchcraft while they were doing all this—depend-ing on what school their child needs to go to, or simply for the sake of it. Christian zeal in Kenya was also responsible for my lack of sleep on many occasions. Fundamentalists used to roar over loudspeakers in Swahili until 2am opposite the Catholic mission house, where I sometimes stayed at the weekends. When I had finally nodded off, I would be woken up again at 4am by an evangelical call to prayer blaring over a megaphone—in imitation of the Muslims, presumably.
An old Irish priest (the same one who grabbed the boy for calling him British) once furiously left the mission house and pulled the plug out on their equipment to get some sleep. Fr. Frank had a different method. The preachers were roaring abuse and condemnation of Catholic beliefs in Swahili, backed by the obligatory passages from the bible. Fr. Frank calmly strolled over, and in perfect Kikamba, quoted about three times as many bible passages to contradict every single bit of abuse they could come up with. But they started up again a few days later anyway. Kenyan TV is full of these pastors, performing ‘instant miracles’ on members of the congregation by ‘curing’ their HIV or AIDS.
They gesticulate a lot, ask for generous donations, and lay on healing hands with tell-tale fancy gold watches gleaming on their wrists. I could not help contrasting that with the frugality of Fr. Frank and the others.
Sr. MM is an institution around Kitui; she has been there so long. Every single Akamba seems to know her and hold her in high regard. There is a theory that the world has six degrees of separation, but I always maintain Irish people have only one degree of separation. I discovered that Sr. MM knows my uncle in New Zealand well. Fr. Paul, a much younger and very diligent priest from Dublin, was the Diocesan Administrator (acting Bishop) during my time in the District. Like Sr. MM, he too has a high profile locally. He is extremely clued into the bigger picture of the needs of the people of Kenya, and Kitui in particular. He was my initial contact for Kitui.
It was Fr. Paul who suggested to me that we go to a party for an African nun who had just been professed. I pictured a sober gathering of elderly nuns and me sipping water. An Akamba Archbishop had been invited. Fr. Paul drove us in his jeep to a compound a bit outside Kitui village where the convent was situated. I was very quiet and polite walking in, greeting each one of them reverently. Fr. Paul introduced them all individually to me,
‘This is Brendan. He’s just come from Ireland.’
‘You are very welcome, Father Brendan,’ they chorused.
‘Pleased to meet you Sister, but I’m not Father,’ I corrected them.
They giggled at their mistake. There were so many to greet, several dozen African nuns, and none of them appeared to be older than thirty.
There were bowls of snacks laid out on the tables for us to help ourselves. Whilst thus engaged, I spotted two young white faces at the back of the room. Surely this could not be two young white nuns in the heart of Kitui; ‘young,’ ‘white’ and ‘nuns’ not being words that you would normally find in the same sentence.
‘Head over and introduce yourself, Brendan,’ Fr. Paul encouraged me with a wee wink.
‘Ah, actually, I’ve met them already … earlier on today after the nun’s profession Mass outside the Cathedral.’
I gave him a discreet thumbs-up and bounded over to them.
They were two Dutch girls, both twenty-two years old. Like me, both of them were just out of college. We were probably the only young white people between Kitui and Nairobi, 150km to the west. I was delighted they were Dutch. Out of all the nationalities I love to meet when travelling, the Australians and the Dutch have to rank as by far
the best companions. One was called Ilsa, the other Yvonne, and both were extremely genial. They had arrived in Kitui three days after I had, and would be spending the next six months volunteering at a centre for street-children in Kitui village that was operated by these nuns. Just for the record, the Dutch girls were not nuns at all; in fact, one was not even Catholic.
It had not been very hard to spot each other earlier that day. We had been throwing quizzical faces towards each other during the Mass that went along the lines of … what are you doing in Kitui? … and why on earth are you at a three-hour long profession of a nun? We got talking outside at the end. Both were terrific mimics of Fr. Paul and of some of the nuns, of all their speech and actions and mannerisms. They were living in a cottage on the edge of Kitui village, they told me. Like most Dutch, they spoke perfect English. Yvonne’s long blond hair contributed to her typical ‘Dutch girl’ image. Ilsa, on the other hand, did not look Dutch at all. She was very petite, with brown hair and dark skin. She told me the reason for her colouring.
‘My great-grandparents on both sides settled in Indonesia when it was a Dutch colony. One of my grandparents married locally, but my parents moved back to the Netherlands once I was born.’
I ambled up to the nun who had just been professed and warmly congratulated her. She was all decked out in the bright blue outfit and veil of her order, and was very young and quite bashful. I was very formal.
‘Congratulations sister, I hope your vocation may be extremely rewarding and fruitful.’
She beamed a proud smile at me.
‘Thank you very much, Mr. Brendan. You are very, very welcome here. Thank you, Mr. Brendan.’
No Hurry in Africa Page 8