No Hurry in Africa

by Brendan Clerkin

  Having filled the tank with petrol in the village, we embarked on an ‘easy rider’ motorbike trip over the high hills the other side of Kitui village, sending up clouds of red dust in our wake, the breeze in our faces, not a care in the world. The weather was perfect. We stopped now and again to admire the dramatic scenery. Our destination was a famous local landmark, a colossal yellow half-mile-wide rock sprouting 300 feet vertically up from the ground. Katuta explained the legend associated with it.

  ‘If you walk around this big rock seven times without blinking, or without looking behind yourself, then you will change sex. You will become a woman, Brendan,’ he chuckled loudly.

  ‘I think I’ll risk going around it fourteen times,’ I declared.

  We clambered up to the top of it. Katuta was out of breath with the effort involved.

  ‘You’re just not fit,’ I teased him.

  The view, however, was truly memorable. I could see for miles, even over to Nyumbani over four hours away. The small buildings of Kitui village seemed almost camouflaged, the ochres and reds mimicking the surrounding landscape. Once he got his breath back, Katuta pointed out something of considerable interest.

  ‘Do you see that orange rock face over there?’

  ‘Aye, what about it?’

  I was straining my eyes, but it seemed a fairly routine rock face to me.

  ‘Look closer,’ he urged. ‘There is a home built into that rock. Can you see? Two people live in it with their two children. Their grandparents first hacked it out of the soft rock years ago. It keeps cool inside all day. I visited them once with a friend who is related to them. It is quite homely inside. What is the word in English for those people?’

  ‘Troglodytes,’ I suggested.

  I could just about make out three miniscule figures milling around the cave entrance. They could have been figures in a Stone Age tableau; Katuta reminded me that East Africa is known as the ‘cradle of humanity.’

  Katuta and I carved our names into the leaf of an aloe vera plant on the summit, and then rode back on the motorbike over dusty dirt tracks, edging through clusters of people and ani-mals—and in the process becoming downright lost. It was long since dark by the time we made it back. Our earlier bluff had been called, unfortunately, and we received a minor telling off from the Akamba priest.

  ‘I suppose boys will be boys,’ he shrugged.

  Katuta wanted to return home for a few days to visit his family in a place called Nuu. That night Fr. Paul, who had been stationed in Nuu when he first arrived in Kenya, suggested that I should go see this place as well. He made it sound very remote and isolated.

  ‘You know Brendan, Nuu translates as “end of the road,” isn’t that right, Katuta?’ said Fr. Paul.

  ‘Yes,’ Katuta agreed. ‘It is situated right at the outer edge of Akambaland, beyond which is a barren desert with nothing for hundreds of kilometres the whole way to Somalia.’

  ‘I really loved it there though. It is my favourite place in Kenya, really special,’ Fr. Paul enthused.

  ‘Yes, a cruel paradise,’ was Katuta’s contradictory verdict. ‘You should come with me Brendan, and experience it for yourself, and meet my family too.’

  Ah, sure I may as well, I thought to myself. I’m not pushed for time, I don’t really have much else planned.

  ‘It’s Nuu or never!’ I punned, and thanked him for the invitation.

  ‘Oh, that was bad,’ laughed Fr. Paul.

  Heading for the village of Nuu the following morning, we made the cardinal mistake of taking the back seat of the bus. We were continuously being bounced up a foot or two off our seats, nearly somersaulting at every bump and pothole as the kamikaze driver flew down the dirt road. After hours driving deep into nowhere, the bus nearly toppled on its side at one point.

  ‘Oh crap!’ (or words to that effect) I screamed to all and sundry as I tightly clenched my fingers around the seat in front.

  Luckily, the bus just managed to right itself after a very long, very hairy moment. At times like this, you might ponder on human mortality. On the roads of Kenya, you have a lot of moments like this. The passengers sitting outside with the luggage on the roof-rack of the bus were even luckier to be alive.

  Nuu proved to be every bit as remote as Katuta had claimed; it is well over eighty kilometres from the nearest post office or newspaper seller. The daily approach of the bus is a big deal in such an isolated village. On arrival, a giddy and curious crowd of people, young and not so young, greeted us. As a white man, I was of special interest to them. Everyone kept energetically shaking my hand and beaming, ‘Hello Father,’ because they so rarely see a lay mzungu. I never let on otherwise, until one came looking for money from ‘the priest.’

  Just then, about twenty women performed a boisterous Akamba dance around us—though it was actually for Katuta rather than me, to welcome him back from South Africa after two years. Later we feasted on the local specialty of goat’s liver and goat’s stomach. The animal was specially slaughtered for the occasion. Not so much the fatted calf as the scrawny goat!

  The whole village appeared to have turned up at the family’s corral of thatched mud-huts, a good walk from Nuu along paths through the bush. Katuta had come home for the celebration of his older brother’s graduation from college. He was the first person from the village ever to graduate. For ages, the afternoon was enlivened with colourful and typically animated dancing. Different people formed themselves into groups and danced in a snake formation which wound its way up to Katuta’s brother; they danced in a circle around him, and then one by one placed a few shillings onto his palm. It is an Akamba custom to donate money to the person at the centre of a celebration.

  The whole place was in a joyous mood. With feet stamping rhythmically and upper bodies shaking vigorously and almost uncontrollably, the dancers burst into brilliant high-pitched singing in the inimitable African manner. There were ecstatic yelps of joy piercing the air. It became one of my favourite memories of Africa. I loved dancing in the tribal fashion. I had picked up a feel for it over the months. Everybody in Kenya loves to start dancing at any time; they do not need an excuse. It is really spontaneous and infectious. Sr. MM claims it is what keeps them going.

  Etiquette at these events requires you to first search out the oldest man present, and then try to greet everyone from oldest to youngest. I imagine I often guessed wrong. I was amused, as I usually was on these occasions, at the inevitable and rather ridiculous speeches—until, unexpectedly, I was called up out of the blue to make my own speech. The first thing I did was to find a translator, then improvise as best as I could. Every third sentence or so, I threw in a few superlatives and invoked God’s blessing upon them—and they loved it.

  ‘Wonderful speech!’ Katuta’s brother assured me. Kenyans always made me make speeches for them, and they really liked them long and drawn out. I was always praised. They also loved saying grace before meals, versions that seemed to last sometimes for over ten minutes. I used to silently laugh when one of them would crank up his neck, turn his head to the sky, close his eyes, and begin praying interminably, thanking God for everything under the sun.

  After my gripping speech, I had to take a siesta in a tiny grass dome-hut normally used as a granary. Four children regularly slept in it at night, Katuta informed me, with their goats tied underneath to the wooden stilts upon which it rested. As I dozed off, I was thinking how fortunate I was to be welcomed into the homes of these kind and hospitable people.

  The following day was market day in Nuu. It was a lively affair, full of hustle and bustle and banter. The place was packed with haggling men weighing grain on their old-style scales, and jammed with colourfully dressed women sitting on the ground selling fruit that was laid out neatly on rugs. The women were continually hitting out at the donkeys, shooing them away from eating their produce. There appeared to be a fair amount of food at the market in this remote place, even though I knew it had been severely hit by the famine. I was wondering how
patchy its effects could have been across the region when it suddenly dawned on me: I was almost certainly the only white person for several hours journey in any direction.

  At the end of market day came the perennial problem for a European running out of hard cash in rural Kenya; there is often zero chance of getting anywhere near a bank. Even if you do make it to one, then the bank often does not have an ATM, but if you are lucky and it does have one, then it is invariably broken. While I was in Nuu, I wanted to call on Sr. Goretti, a lovely Irish nun stationed there whom I had met at Sr. MM’s home one weekend before Christmas. Unfortunately, she happened to be on her annual trip to Kitui village the very days that I was in Nuu.

  CHAPTER 11

  BEYOND THE BEYOND IN TURKANA

  WHEN I ARRIVED BACK in Kitui a number of days later, I passed two days running rings around the street-children at football, and trying my best to sing Akamba songs with them. At this point, I was contemplating not returning to Nyumbani at all, even though it had been my original intention to go back after some weeks. I had set up computing and management accounting procedures that Nancy and the others had shown they would be able to operate. I was pondering my options. One was to volunteer full-time with the Kitui street-children. Through the volunteers’ grapevine, I had also been invited to assist in an accounting role with three other projects in various parts of Kenya. But first, Ilsa, Yvonne, and I were planning to spend a fortnight in Lamu, the historic Swahili island up the coast towards the Somali border. I had long been itching to visit this famous centre of Arabic culture in Africa.

  Before we could go to Lamu however, I had to return to Nairobi once again in early January for two days to sort out my work visa. On the plus side, as ever, a half-palatable dinner was available in Nairobi, and it cost under a hundred shillings (about one euro). Nairobi has many faces—and by now, I was seeing the city in all its rich diversity: from the city centre skyscrapers, to the smelly teeming slums, to the upmarket and gated mansions, to the dickensian cast of characters along River Road.

  It was not uncommon to see the Maasai all dressed up in their traditional red blankets and staffs going about their normal business in the middle of Nairobi. Visitors certainly take a second look at these tribesmen, with the distinctive decorative holes in their elongated earlobes, herding cattle on the roadside in front of the suburban mansions of the wealthy Europeans. You see them too with their livestock in the middle reservation of the dual-carriageway on the way out to the airport.

  The footpaths of Nairobi are crowded with shoe-shiners doing a roaring trade, fire and brimstone preachers, tourist touts, beggars, businessmen in pinstripes, madmen and vagrants. Everywhere there are hawkers walking around with their wares on their heads, badgering people to buy. One has to haggle for absolutely everything; if it was a small amount I never bothered, even though there is always the ‘white premium’; they stick the price up once they see your skin colour. We called it being ‘mzun-guled.’ For bigger items, I would bargain with them. The banter would often be good; I relished the craic of it all, until it went on and on too long and about half an hour later the African was still asking an inflated price. Many times, they started at well over twenty times the normal price.

  The bargaining process could be either enjoyable or frustrating. Sometimes I just paid what I knew was a rip-off price as my way of donating to an obviously struggling person, letting them think they earned it instead of being given a handout. For all the ones ripping me off, many others treated me with a kind of colonial deference simply for being white, treating me better than they treated their own, giving way to me in queues and allowing me endless credit. I hated that.

  Some Europeans, especially Germans, make the mistake of bargaining them too low, so the African hands them a dud or cuts back the service. I took the view that even if I paid way over the odds of what an African would pay, that if I were prepared to pay it, then that was the price of it. There is a lot to be said for price tags though!

  On my second day in Nairobi, just as I was leaving Nyayo House, once again confounded and frustrated by bureaucracy, the Dutch girls phoned to say the Lamu trip was off. I was more than disappointed; it just was not my day. But my luck changed. An exceptionally droll Kiltegan missionary from Limerick named Fr. Tom, whom I had only met the previous day in Nairobi, said to me that evening,

  ‘I’ll be driving up to Turkana on my own tomorrow, why don’t you come along and we’ll keep each other company? You can visit people you’ve met when you are up there.’

  I had intended for sometime now to visit the remote, alien, barren, northern region called Turkana. A couple of friends of Sr. MM had strongly encouraged me to go sometime. However, nearly everyone flies to Turkana in a light aircraft, if they ever need to make the journey; not too many choose to drive there from Nairobi. Carpe diem, I thought—my motto as always; seize the day. I gratefully accepted his invitation.

  ‘Giorraionn beirt bóthar, Tom, nachfior sin? Sure, we’ll go with the flow, sounds class. Thanks a million.’

  For all the inopportune events that catch me on the hop, an incredible amount also just fall straight into my lap.

  Fr. Tom has been living in Turkana since the colonial days before Independence. He was one of Turkana’s original pioneering missionaries in 1961, venturing into uncharted hostile territory far beyond the boundaries of both comfort and Christianity. When I inquired how he ended up in Africa, and living in Turkana of all places, this genial and modest man in his sixties replied,

  ‘There was an inspirational priest who gave us a talk in secondary school about his life in Africa. I had never considered a vocation before then. Eventually I was assigned to Turkana. Four of my class in school are missionaries in Kenya still.’

  ‘Any regrets?’

  ‘Not at all! My enthusiasm for the work is still as strong today.’

  I did not doubt it; he was relentlessly positive about everything.

  Fr. Tom was not one for celebrity. It was left to another Irish priest in Nairobi to show me a passage in Bob Geldof’s book about Africa in which St. Bob sings the praises of Fr. Tom. This was accompanied with a bit of gentle ribbing. Duly embarrassed, Fr. Tom responded.

  ‘Ah yeah, Bob stayed with me in my home in Turkana for a few days. A gentleman while he was there. Sure, maybe you too can write a book and give me a mention when you’re famous,’ he joked.

  Fr. Tom was tall, almost lanky, with tidy grey hair fringing a face that rarely betrayed emotion; he was as laid-back in attitude as any Akamba. He spoke with a lazy brogue, but his mind was flint-sharp and he could keep a conversation eternally fluid without effort or strain.

  The first I ever heard of Turkana and its tribes people was when Mutinda had described a tribe of ‘savages’ (his word) living far north in the Northern Frontier District. Nowadays, this primitive wild region, which is in the extreme northwest of Kenya, is officially called Turkana District. Fr. Liam, Sr. MM, and her visiting friends described Turkana to me as ‘the Donegal of Kenya’—purely for geographical parallels, you understand!

  Five days after we left Nairobi, Fr. Tom and I were almost 1,000 kilometres away in Lokichokio where he lives; it is the last village before the border with Sudan. I did not even have a change of clothes with me because I only intended being in Nairobi for two days. In fact, I really only had my toothbrush with me. With no change of clothes, I used to wash them at siesta time, and by the time I woke up again, they would be dry. Only once did an African woman catch me without my clothes on. It embarrassed me, even if she was not put out at all.

  My journey to Turkana beside Fr. Tom that second week of January was riveting. The rocky road north passes up through the ever-changing panoramas of the Great Rift Valley. This is the Kenyan section of the rift system that stretches 6,000 kilometres from the Dead Sea in the Middle East to Lake Malawi in southern Africa. We were constantly climbing the valley side through a profusion of wildlife in which zebras were predominant; and then dropping back down the e
scarpment, as amazing and dramatic vistas opened up before us. When we crossed the equator on the second day, I spent the obligatory two minutes with a foot on both hemispheres. It was fairly cold, because we were at considerable altitude above sea level. I was really surprised to find myself in a landscape surrounded by pine trees, not the blistering sandy desert I had always imagined the equator to be.

  ‘I actually have a certificate at home in Lokichokio to say I crossed the equator,’ recalled Fr. Tom as he was taking my photo. ‘I had spent well over a month as a passenger on a ship that left London back in 1961, when I first came as a missionary. That’s how long it took to get here back then! The ship docked in Gibraltar and Cairo, and sailed through the Suez Canal before we landed at the port of Mombasa. It was a big deal at the time for anyone to have crossed the equator; everyone was issued with a certificate.’

  On the third day out, when we reached Kitale, a town north of the equator near the Ugandan border, I visited Sr. Mary Dunne of the Medical Missionaries of Mary. Sr. MM had told me about this Donegal nun who lived in Kitale, and I was keen to meet her. Sr. Mary was running an impressive AIDS project there, having spent more than thirty years living in deepest Turkana prior to that. Sr. Mary and I agreed at the time, with a fair degree of certainty, that we were the only Letterkenny people living in the whole of Kenya then—we were the two ‘Letterkenyans.’

  As it happens, I knew her nephew Fr. Paddy well at home; he taught me in school. Just like Fr. Paddy, Sr. Mary was as lean as the Africans among whom she worked. She welcomed me, with a soft high lilting voice, into a modest former colonial home that now housed the Medical Missionaries’ convent. Quite soon, we were doing what all Irish people do far from home; discussing all the acquaintances we had in common—in our case, around Letterkenny. Half way through our cups of tea, an African nurse from her centre interrupted us, and I had to smile when Sr. Mary spoke to her in Swahili with a strong Donegal accent. It was the first time I had heard Swahili spoken in my own accent; how the Kenyans understood a word of either of us I do not know.