No Hurry in Africa

by Brendan Clerkin

  As our conversation turned to the subject of AIDS, she told me,

  ‘Some of the people attending this centre contracted AIDS through the custom whereby the brother of a woman’s husband who has died (sometimes from AIDS), still demands his right to marry, or just sleep with, the widow of his recently deceased brother. The tribes who live around Kitale believe it brings bad luck upon them if the deceased husband’s brother does not sleep with the widow.’

  ‘It’s the same with the Akamba people,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Naturally, we missionaries are trying to educate the people out of such customs in an attempt to prevent the spread of AIDS.’

  She also told me something of the history of Kitale. It is an old white settler town built on the site of an Arab slave trading post. It is sited in the north Rift Valley and it is where the South African Boers made their last-ever great trek in ox-carts in the land rush of the early twentieth century. A hundred years ago, over a hundred families with as many wagons and horses set sail from Durban and Mozambique and landed at Mombasa. Their patriarch, J.J. Van Rensburg, had recruited families at public meetings in eastern Transvaal. Some were enticed by the exciting dream of what was said to be wild open land; others like Van Rensburg were being intimidated out for collaborating with the English during the Anglo-Boer war.

  After temporarily setting up a camp in Nairobi, they faced the daunting Rift Valley terrain once they reached the Eldama Ravine. As there were not even dirt roads to follow through the valley back then, it took them seven days to cover just ten kilometres in their wagons, cutting their way through dense forests and trudging through reptile-infested swamps. Individual Boer families continued to arrive after that, despite stricter conditions brought in by the colonial governor regarding the development of land holdings. It was an attempt to discourage further mass treks. These Boer settlers regarded themselves as ‘God’s Pioneers,’ entering the Promised Land in which it was their divine right to settle. I was gaining insights into the colonial mindset.

  ‘There are only handfuls of them left around Kitale nowadays,’ Sr. Mary explained.

  I got speaking with a few in a shop and with others while waiting at the post office. They struck me as an untamed, gung-ho race, or at least happy to portray themselves as such. They boasted about driving broken jeeps off cliffs—but jumping out just before the jeep disappeared into the ravine; and, more ominously, about shooting trespassers on sight on their farms. One African friend of Sr. Mary’s, after she saw me conversing with them in the post office, assured me with a smile,

  ‘Those people, they are crazy!’

  I was able to appreciate their industry and stubborn persistence as I passed by fields rich in ripening crops—flat unending fields, fertile as any in Meath, which they had ploughed and harrowed out of the virgin landscape a century before. They had stuck it out through the turbulent Mau Mau guerrilla uprising, the uncertainty of Independence and what black rule would bring, the anxiety during the President Moi era, and the insecurity of the present day. They are still frontiersmen in a way.

  Kitale is also in many ways the last outpost of civilisation, the last frontier of the modern world. Onwards we drove through the high, narrow, twisty mountain pass beyond Kitale, our journey at times requiring Dukes of Hazzard style manoeuvres. I recall passing over the remnants of a bridge, forty-foot above the riverbed, that on my way back a fortnight later, I found had collapsed entirely. A lot of the concrete had been eroded in places at the edge of the structure leaving a slippery and treacherous mixture of pebbles and dust in the fragile central strip. At one point, the outer half of the wheels on both sides of Fr. Tom’s pick-up were over the edge, as he struggled to get a grip on the pebbly surface. I heard a ‘hmmm’ sound coming from Fr. Tom as the peril of the situation struck him, followed by a resigned ‘oh dear.’

  It was only when we successfully reached the other side and had stepped out for a look that we exhaled a heartfelt ‘phew’ in harmony. Surveying the bridge from this angle, it was clearly in a much worse condition than we had realised. Looking down we noted that a lorry trying to cross the riverbed was well and truly stuck in the water below. After that hair-raising escapade, we had to strike out cross-country, partly through a parched and desolate desert landscape without even a track to follow. By now, I realised why most people choose to fly to Turkana!

  At the pass into Turkana District proper, the police had placed a barrier across the road. Here we sat for a good ten minutes until one of the policemen noticed their only customer of the day had arrived. No hurry hereabouts!

  On our long journey north, Fr. Tom was able to tell me something about the region. Situated in a wider section of the Rift Valley, Turkana District is bordered by the mountains of Uganda to the west, Sudan and Ethiopia to the north, and the 250km long Lake Turkana to the east. Around three million years ago, the lake area was particularly fertile, making it a centre for early humans. Richard Leakey, the famous, white-Kenyan scientist, conducted numerous anthropological digs in the area, leading to many important discoveries. In 1972, a two million year old skull uncovered was originally thought to be Homo habilis, but has since been assigned to a new species, Homo rudolfensis. In 1984, the ‘Turkana Boy,’ a 1.6 million year old complete skeleton of a Homo erectus boy was discovered (the forerunner to Homo sapiens or modern humans). More recently, Maeve Leakey discovered a 3.5 million year old skull there, named Kenyanthropus platyops, meaning ‘The Flat-Faced Man of Kenya.’ During the next fortnight or so that I would spend in this ‘cradle of humanity,’ I could not help thinking at times that the current inhabitants did not seem to have advanced much since then.

  My first encounter with the Turkana people was when Fr. Tom and I were taking a break under a lone, forlorn tree in the vast lunar landscape near where we had been stopped by the police. It appeared as if there was no life at all between the distant horizon and us, save for two far-off camels. Fr. Tom was pretty sure they were wild camels. I could not get over my first sight of these camels; I was pointing like an excited child. Fr. Tom, slightly bemused by my excitement, smiled.

  ‘Sure aren’t wild camels as common a sight around here as sheep are to a Donegal man,’ he quipped.

  At that moment, seemingly out of nowhere (for there were certainly no people within view when we stopped at the tree), there appeared a man dressed in just a red blanket. He strode towards us, carrying an AK-47 behind his head. Behind him came a woman wearing only a goatskin skirt and adorned with multiple decorations, her head painted red. A tall bony man carrying a spear and wearing a cap apparently made from mud with an ostrich feather on top, followed up. With him were two completely naked children. To indicate our friendly intent, I reached one of the young children a banana. He bit straight into it; he did not know it had to be peeled first. He had evidently never seen one before.

  Indicating they wanted a lift, as we made to go after a few minutes, they all hopped into the back of the pick-up for a few kilometres, in what may have been the only vehicle that passed that way the whole day. When they were alighting, I took out my camera to take a photo. I was keen to get a shot of these people in their natural environment, and to capture a scene that was timeless—apart from the AK-47!

  Just then, as I composed the shot in my viewfinder, I had two stones hurled at me. It was the man with the spear. Unsurprised by this and in his unflustered manner, Fr. Tom explained,

  ‘Probably best to put the camera away, Brendan. Some Tur-kana think a photo can hurt them.’

  The words ‘to take a photo’ in Swahili (ninataka kupiga picha tafadali), inconveniently, can also mean ‘to hurt.’

  ‘They have a suspicion going back decades that a camera can also steal part of their soul. Some simply have an inherent suspicion of cameras and will not even let a fellow Turkana take a photo for this reason. At the same time, some don’t mind— watch this, Brendan.’

  Fr. Tom took out ten Kenyan shillings from his pocket for the man with the gun. I took a photo of
them together, no problem. The Turkana were in awe when I showed them the digital image of themselves. Unlike the Akamba who enjoy being snapped, the Turkana often put aside their fear of losing their souls and ask for a few shillings to allow their photo to be taken. Talk about ‘selling your soul!’

  We had to keep on trucking another couple of days towards Fr. Tom’s home in Lokichokio. Bouncing painfully over the hardened ruts and corrugations of the track, our progress was slow, not helped by the fact that we were loaded down with relief food in the back of the vehicle. Every so often, we were grateful for an odd patch of asphalt the Norwegian government had laid down in the 1970’s, but which was never maintained. Violent sandstorms engulfed us periodically. Forty-foot high thin red columns of ant-hills were a common sight.

  As we advanced further into Turkana territory, I noticed that most men seemed to be wandering around aimlessly, holding AK-47s horizontally behind their heads. I was hoping we would not encounter any of the bandits for which this frontier country is famous. Generally, though, they just smiled and waved at us, then just kept on walking to nowhere obvious in the middle of the sweltering desert.

  The Kenyan government has little effective control over this area. Many Turkana people do not even grasp that they belong to a bigger country. One asked me in Swahili, a few days later, ‘Did you come from Kenya, how is Kenya?’ The central authorities seem as unaware of what is going on in Turkana as the locals do about Nairobi. A colleague of Sr. MM was murdered in Turkana some time ago; she told me the court case was stopped because the police genuinely could not trace where the serving policeman at the time of the murder had been transferred.

  In this searing desert landscape, Fr. Tom’s home village of Lo-kichokio is a twenty-first century oasis—for one simple reason; the UN and every aid agency for southern Sudan is based there. Even so, the nearest decent shops for most of Turkana District are two days away by vehicle in Kitale. This is still in many respects a stone-age society. The Turkana tribespeople are mostly nomadic even today, building only a small igloo of thatch called a manyatta for a home.

  ‘A common practice is that if an adult dies in the manyatta, the body is left there, and the whole family set up a new compound of manyattas some distance away,’ according to Fr. Tom.

  The Turkana are a war-like people; they raid the Samburu and Pokot tribes to the south for camels, donkeys, and goats to pay their dowries for marriage, usually killing a few Pokots as they go. A Turkana, who was being translated by Fr. Tom, informed me that the standard Turkana dowry is a hundred camels, fifty donkeys, and fifty goats. It sounded a bit of an exaggeration; maybe something got lost in translation! A number of times in Turkana I saw herdsmen directing herds of over a hundred donkeys. Fr. Tom was a rich source of information.

  ‘The Pokots are afraid of the Turkana; the Turkana in turn are terrified of the Merille tribe to the north from Ethiopia. When the Merille raid, they have to take back proof that it was a male they killed—imagine, Brendan!’

  I preferred not to imagine in any detail. During one particular incident in 2006, over two hundred raiders killed nineteen Turkana herdsmen, and made away with 6,500 animals.

  Even though they are starving, the Turkana will not kill their animals because it lessens their prestige among their own people. Since all their wealth consists of cattle, camels, and donkeys, their livestock act as their bank. Only four percent of all people in Turkana District have a cash income, and even those people are probably, for the most part, the very rare non-Turkana in the District. After his long decades in the region, Fr. Tom was like a social anthropologist with his wealth of local knowledge.

  ‘The Turkana never thought to fish the 250km-long lake on their doorstep during all their famines, until shown how to fish by missionaries four decades ago,’ he said. ‘It had been taboo in Turkana society to fish before the 1960s.’

  The Nile perch, a fish that grows to over six feet, is caught— I was told—by throwing pepper from the shore and making it sneeze when it jumps, so that it conks out on the rocks. I was somewhat sceptical! Away from the lakeside, the Turkana people drink blood from their herds—not uncommon among primitive peoples. Occasionally they drink urine from their cattle in a milk mixture; it is said to lower cholesterol. I did not fancy that, and I also declined the donkey meat offered on one occasion.

  Turkana women are mesmerisingly beautiful. They walk tall with a majestic poise even when carrying thick five-foot long branches on their heads. Dressed in their colourful blankets and lavish adornments, many seemed to enjoy singing under trees, apparently having nothing better to do. They are decorated with extra beads and necklaces at each stage of their lives, such as marriage and child bearing. A Turkana marriage involves the mock kidnapping of the bride for a number of days. Married women have their heads shaved and painted red with ochre. When you meet them, they reveal a shy smile.

  At the opening of a dispensary, I had lunch with Bishop Patrick Harrington of Turkana Diocese. He is a Society of African Missions priest from Cork, and a cousin of the golfer Padraig Harrington. I asked him about his work.

  ‘Keeping busy, Brendan, every day something different. Yesterday I opened a centre for the disabled built by the Diocese on the shore of Lake Turkana. Incidentally, there was a terrible tragedy on the lake very recently. Five Germans had flown to the small island in the middle of the lake to study the estimated 15,000 crocodiles living there. Their plane could not take off again. The rangers who set out in a boat to rescue them drowned in a sudden squall… Today, as you know, was Confirmation day, and now the new dispensary.’

  Earlier, I had watched Bishop Harrington confirm a number of Turkana women and men. Despite the scorching heat, he was in his full ceremonial robes, complete with episcopal mitre and crosier. The Turkana men were dressed in their conventional diagonal blankets; they were bearing wrist knives and carrying a single piece of carved wood (ingeniously used as both a stool and a pillow). Some women had nearly a foot of bright beaded necklaces around their necks. In the hours of dancing and captivating tribal singing that followed, I was overawed at the spectacle of the Turkana with head decorations of feathers, leaping in their distinctive way. Their style of energetic dancing more resembles that of the Samburu or Maasai tribes, and is quite unlike the Akamba style of dancing with which I was familiar.

  At Mass, the Turkana women had presented a very live and very stubborn goat decorated in flowers to Bishop Harrington at the offertory collection. This was the kind of image of the African missionaries that I had in my head before I came to Kenya.

  Whilst in Turkana I had hoped to visit Sudan, but I never made it. One reason was that the road north of Lokichokio had been cut off by flash torrents in the area. Instead of building bridges in Turkana, they lay upside-down concrete ‘bridges’ upon the floor of the dry sandy riverbeds. It is a lot less expensive, but they become covered over when a torrent gushes after heavy rain falls—and the rainfalls are as heavy as they are rare. For some reason, in this godforsaken corner of the world, these are called ‘Irish bridges.’ Fr. Tom speculated that the name might have originated because some smart-aleck thought the concept of an upside-down bridge to be ‘a bit Oirish.’

  As we were crossing over one of them, on our way from the dispensary to meet an Irish lady who would provide me with a lift south, Fr. Tom told me a cautionary story.

  ‘A couple of Irish nuns were driving here when a surging flood came out of nowhere—from your left-hand-side there— on a sunny day like today,’ he said as he gestured with a wave of his hand. ‘It had probably rained up-country in Sudan the day before or such like. Happens occasionally. It swept their Land Rover down river a few kilometres. They survived though. One lives in Lodwar now, the other escaped to Kitale! Sr. Helen is her name; she lives there with Sr. Mary. You might meet her when you are passing through Kitale again.’

  Just before Fr. Tom and I finally parted, he guided me around Kakuma Refugee Camp, situated about 100km south of Loki-chokio. It is a UN
Refugee Camp of some 90,000 Sudanese, Ethiopian, and Somali refugees. I was engrossed by the sight of a vast city of tents, corrugated-iron shacks and stone buildings, with so many people living on top of each other in cramped conditions. It also made me think on how the great work of Fr. Tom and his like in such places is virtually unknown in Ireland, and on how he and Bishop Harrington probably lead a more exhilarating existence than most of us. Theirs is a fulfilling vocation, with a fresh adventure each new day.

  Fr. Tom dropped me off and told me that I could get a lift going south with Deirdre, a medical doctor from Dublin, who was working at the refugee camp. It was dark by the time she arrived out of her surgery.

  ‘Sorry, but it’s too late,’ she apologised. ‘I won’t be going anywhere tonight.’

  So now, I had no way of getting out of the place, and nowhere to stay. An American priest, Fr. Peter, charitably took me in for the night at the refugee camp, where I stayed in his guestroom. Monstrous spiders were spending the night in it as well; it was no place for an arachnophobe. Fr. Peter, who speaks Arabic fluently, had fled Sudan a number of years before, during the fighting. Nowadays, his ministry is entirely for the inhabitants of the refugee camp.

  Kakuma Refugee Camp has been in existence so long that some teenagers regard it as home, having been born and reared in the camp. Ironically, the refugees are better off than most Tur-kana outside the camp because they have food, clothes, and get a primary education. The camp still resembles a slum though, albeit a slightly better-off slum. There are a number of permanent buildings in the camp, and Fr. Peter, Dr. Deirdre, and I went for a meal that night where an entrepreneurial refugee has established an Ethiopian restaurant serving typical dishes from that country.