No Hurry in Africa

by Brendan Clerkin

  ‘The UN is having trouble getting the refugees to return home to Ethiopia, Sudan, and Somalia,’ Fr. Peter informed me. ‘There is relative peace is south Sudan at the moment. However, the refugees know they are guaranteed food, a small allowance and, most of all, security in the camp.’

  I tried to imagine what life must be like for these displaced people. For that matter, what is life really like for the average Turkana? When I had negative thoughts about them—I was not too enamoured by the aggressive attitudes of many of the men in particular—I realised it comes down to the harsh environment in which they struggle to survive. Their problem is that the Turkana landscape in its barrenness resembles the moon; the side of the moon exposed to the merciless sun. I had landed in January, the very hottest time of year there. It tops fifty degrees Celsius in Turkana in daytime and is not a lot cooler at night. Many people, even the whites, sleep outside under the stars because of the heat. Even without a blanket, I found it was still too hot to sleep. I used to lie there at night, sweltering, listening to the shrill calls of unidentified animals, counting the falling stars and glimpsing, perhaps, a lone outdoor fire flickering in the far distance.

  After getting a lift with Dr. Deirdre the next morning, I met Sr. Cecelia, a young Kikuyu Ursuline nun who had been recently transferred to Turkana from Kitui. She invited me to stay with her for several days. She lived in a tiny and exceedingly remote settlement deep in Turkana’s interior, a place called Lorugumu. I ended up being stranded in Lorugumu for five days, a couple of days longer than I intended; I had no means of getting back out. But at least I had some time to explore.

  Sr. Cecelia showed me the only ‘attraction’ in the featureless landscape around Lorugumu: the river. Wherever I went in Tur-kana, ‘the river’ always featured in conversation. When I would get to the river, it always turned out to be a dried-up sandy, stony bed where the river should be. On one visit to Lorugumu’s river, I encountered a group of Turkana warriors. Some were wandering around, others just sitting under the biggest tree engaging in nothing more energetic than spitting. All were wearing wrist knives and carrying spears or AK-47s. A number of them were decorated with tattoos on their right shoulder, signifying that they had previously killed a man. I must confess that I was feeling a little uneasy.

  While we were sitting there, a schoolgirl in obvious distress came along the riverbank to find Sr. Cecelia. The schoolgirl appeared to be very weak. Sr. Cecelia explained to me that she was suffering from the effects of a DIY abortion that had been induced using some concoction that included tea leaves (of all things). Sr. Cecelia arranged to meet me back at the school later, as she hurried away to deal with this potential tragedy—a not uncommon one, apparently.

  Up at the school, I got chatting with the principal, who described some of the other problems they encountered. There was one, in particular, that I thought we would not come across at home.

  ‘A government official visited this school to give out compulsory ID cards to everyone over eighteen,’ he explained. ‘Some students protested they were over eighteen, and admitted that they had lied to us that they were a younger age in order to be allowed attend. “Hard luck,” they were told by the official, “that is the age on your school cert and that is the age that you will stick with the rest of your life.”’

  Bureaucracy is bureaucracy, I thought to myself, even beyond the beyond.

  Once Sr. Cecelia rejoined us, she complained, ‘Some Turkana people are keen enough on education—but they want me to pay them for the privilege of me teaching them at the school.’

  I agreed that this did seem a bit upside down.

  ‘And I am an embroidery teacher,’ she laughed. ‘These people don’t even want to wear clothes!’

  At the beginning of a Mass late that afternoon, some of the congregation stood up when I entered from the back because they thought I was the priest. I was amused at the mistake, as I always was. A teenage Turkana boy, two rows in front of me, fainted during the Gospel, either from the heat or hunger, I presumed. Towards the end of the service, a Turkana woman outside began throwing stones onto the tin roof of the church. It made quite a din. She had been refused communion for reasons I was not privy to.

  The following day a crowd of children in Lorugumu, half of them absolutely naked, followed me around doing impressions of me walking and talking. All of a sudden, I did a cartwheel on the sand and they fell about laughing. This happened a few times. On one such occasion, a twelve-year-old boy wearing only an AK-47 and nothing else at all warned them to leave me alone. I had been enjoying the fun, but I was not going to argue with a naked twelve-year-old wielding a loaded AK-47.

  In amongst the gang of boys was one named Séamus—of all names! I could only attribute it to the Irish missionary influence. Sr. Cecelia knew most in this trailing pack, which by this stage had expanded to over fifty children.

  ‘The parents of many of them died of hunger,’ she explained. ‘They are now orphans being looked after by cousins.’

  It was not only the children who were stark naked. I observed a surprisingly large number of adults just walking around in their pelts at certain times of day. I appeared to be the only one who even seemed to notice.

  On my third night in Lorugumu, there was another of those surreal scenes to which I was becoming accustomed. Outside, under a glorious sky full of bright twinkling stars, I was listening to Count John McCormack evocatively singing Oft in the Stilly Night on a tape recorder. Suddenly, silently, there appeared out of the darkness five Turkana people, three of them naked, another one wearing skins and a half-foot of colourful beads around her neck, and yet another dressed in a purple blanket and carrying a staff and wooden headrest. All had come to listen rather bemusedly to this strange music. The great Irish tenor can rarely have had such a bizarre audience.

  Through Sr. Cecelia, who was translating, they began telling me that they had discovered that morning the footprints of a thief in the sand. They had cupped the footprints in their hands and put a curse on each one so that the thief would writhe in pain until he returned what he had stolen the night before. This I knew well to be true, as I had heard of similar witchcraft practices on many occasions, especially around Kitui.

  Perhaps charmed by the music, they had become very talkative. They went on to tell Sr. Cecelia that if they see a snake, a scorpion or a spider at night, then someone has sent it with a vendetta against them. They disclosed that human sacrifice was not unknown among the Turkana up to the recent past. My scepticism kicked in, however, when they suggested that the human who was being sacrificed regarded it as a privilege. An Akamba in Nuu had told me a similar story about human sacrifice before. Thankfully, it seems nowadays to have vanished among the animist tribal religious practices. However, stories do appear in the Kenyan newspapers now and again of humans being sacrificed by devil worshippers in caves.

  I met some real characters among the missionaries in Turkana—like the gigantic German priest who famously tamed a wild camel and now follows the nomadic people on it, as they in turn follow their animals; or the Irish nuns who pilot light aircraft full of sick patients. The Irish missionaries are nearly the second biggest tribe in Turkana. Some nationalities, such as the Germans or Americans, often like to ‘go native,’ and attempt to live in the exact same manner as the Africans. The Irish on the other hand will always act and dress as the Irish always did, sometimes sporting a pipe and flat cap; but arguably, they go native more genuinely by being long-term residents who learn the tribal languages and understand their customs. I could risk a generalisation: some other nationalities act African for a while; the Irish missionaries interact with the Africans over decades.

  The Irish missionaries in Kenya have nearly all developed a peculiar but gentle humour at the expense of the Kenyans, because Kenyans would always take our irony seriously. I heard Fr. Tom teasing the Kenyan accountant of the cash-strapped mission-hospital in Kakuma,

  ‘Is the hospital still running at full capacity… are the
re people still getting sick?’

  The rhetorical question, God knows, did not require a literal answer. But the accountant in all seriousness began telling us about cholera and the like, instead of twigging he was really being asked if there would ever be enough money to run all the services.

  The accountant led us to another room in the hospital where three people were having tea, and as I shook hands with them, the accountant introduced me to each one.

  ‘This is the manager… and this man is the director… and he is the administrator.’

  ‘Ah, it’s the holy trinity. Who’s actually in charge here?’ Fr. Tom wondered mischievously.

  ‘I am,’ came the affirmation in unison from all three.

  We both smiled.

  I indulged myself with a bit of irony on occasions. Kenyans cannot grasp that people might want to go walking for leisure, something I often liked to do in Kenya, especially to wander in the relative cool of dusk. So when they asked in Swahili,

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I’m walking to Nairobi,’ I used to reply for amusement.

  ‘And what time will you arrive?’ they would then ask.

  Nairobi is close to 1,000km away from Turkana. The light in Turkana, incidentally, played tricks on my walks at dusk, making the desert appear cloaked white with snow. That was pretty surreal, given the temperature at the time.

  Despite this tendency to make fun, the Irish missionaries command genuine respect in Kenya. In this remote northern region, they are often the only people helping the Turkana for hundreds of miles around. One of the exceptions was a gung-ho Dutch priest who drove me to Lodwar, the capital of Turkana. After five days in Lorugumu, I had finally managed to arrange a lift in his pick-up. Before setting out, Sr. Cecelia had entrusted me with a letter to deliver to Sr. MM when I returned to Kitui, whenever that would be, as there is not really a postal service in Kenya worth speaking of. I promised I would, thanked her for her superb hospitality, and we bade farewell to each other. Sr. Cecelia was a remarkable young woman who manifested many of the best qualities of her Kikuyu tribe: industry, ingenuity, resoluteness and a can-do attitude.

  With what seemed like half the population of Lorugumu in the back of the pick-up, we headed east across the sands with hardly any track to follow. Lodwar is a few hours east of Lorugu-mu. It is also, I concluded, at the centre of the end of the earth.

  I planned to stay only one more day in Turkana. Considering it was only bright between 6am and 6pm, and I could only move around before 8am and after 5pm because of the heat, and considering that I never woke up before 8am, you could say that Turkana forced me out. The heat was utterly debilitating. It felt like the hottest place north of the South Pole. At times, it was so hot you could not think straight. I briefly became confused with the date when I bought a Daily Nation in Lodwar, before being reminded that whatever date is on the newspaper in remote places, it is never today’s!

  I managed to get locked in the post office that day in Lodwar. I had been writing away on an aerogramme at the back of the building and was unnoticed when they locked up. Nor did I notice they were locking up. But I figured someone would be along presently.

  ‘Unafanya nini hapa?’ (what are you doing in here?), was the shocked reaction of the postmaster when he returned from a long break.

  He shook his head; I waved the aerogramme at him with a grin. At this prompt, he remembered me coming in. He apologised, laughing loudly. My imprisonment had been as much my fault as his.

  Upon my release from the post-office, I hired the rusty taxi parked beside Lodwar’s only petrol station.

  ‘Twende bwana,’ I urged the driver (let’s go, sir).

  He took my fare before we started out so he could fill up with enough petrol to see him through until his next fare, even though it was only a five-minute ride. On the way, I enquired about the bus out of Turkana back to the twentieth century in Kitale (the twenty-first century would have to wait until I reached Nairobi).

  ‘And at what time does the bus leave?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘Six in the morning… well by midday anyway!’ came the reply.

  On my way back down to Kitale, on the rickety bus heading south through the Rift Valley and over the tight mountain passes, I had time to reflect on my Turkana experience. I did not fully understand all the stories I had heard about Turkana until I ventured there myself. The place is indeed enthralling. But the land is harsh, the lifestyle primitive, the character of the people savage—the product of a truly savage environment. The Turkana, albeit in my limited experience, were not a pleasant people at all.

  There were too many Kalashnikovs. Some were aggressive to me, as they are to their own and to neighbouring tribes. If someone is too weak to keep moving in the desert, they are said to abandon that person rather too hastily for the sake of their own survival. There is, reportedly, no word for ‘thank you’ in their language, and nearly every one of them greeted me with ‘accaro’ (‘hungry’ in the Turkana language), while holding out their hand. I became fed up with this constant begging; so when I was convinced they said it automatically, I would shake their hand and reply ‘accaro’ back, as if it meant hello. That really confused them.

  Now, heading south again on the bus towards a more civilised world, I could turn my thoughts to other, more pleasant things. I was always intrigued by the unusual names on the shops in Kenya. I had to wonder about the gender of the owner of the shop named ‘Mama Harry’ that we stopped at. We ate lunch at the ‘Coastal Dot Com Shop,’ an establishment without electricity right in the middle of a remote inland desert. It was serving ‘Bosnia Chips.’ Whatever else these people lack, I thought, not for the first time, imagination is not one of them!

  CHAPTER 12

  WAKING UP IN THE ‘WHITE HIGHLANDS’

  IT WAS NOW LATE JANUARY. Returning from Turkana, my mobile phone picked up a signal near Kitale; I received a call from Ki-ragu. He enquired how I was getting on.

  ‘Will you be returning to Nyumbani?’ he asked, and then, inevitably, ‘Your services are still needed.’

  ‘Yes, of course. I’m on my way back to Kitui,’ I explained. ‘My travels are going well, the perfect remedy for the way I was feeling. So how is Nyumbani?’

  ‘We are still progressing on many aspects of it. An American engineer joined us yesterday as a volunteer. You will get on well with him, Brendan.’

  He was being persuasive, but I did not commit myself to a date for returning just yet. He wished me well for my travels in Swahili.

  ‘Nenda salama.’

  ‘Asante, tuonana (thanks, see you again),’ I gave the stock reply.

  I had allowed myself time for a bit more touring before returning to Kitui. Maybe another couple of weeks or so—it was up to me really. I wanted to travel and see more of this remarkable country, but I was also eager to volunteer again. I had no definite plans as such, and was taking it easy, one day at a time.

  There was so much variety to Kenya; everywhere I chanced upon was different. It was like several countries in one, a rich mosaic of very diverse cultures and landscapes. I was always inquisitive, eager to explore and to venture further. I wanted to grasp every opportunity on offer.

  I stopped for a couple of nights in Kitale again on my way back down south. There I met Bishop Maurice Crowley of Kitale Diocese, an impressive, heavily built, Irish Kiltegan priest, a man with obvious leadership qualities. He spoke to me enthusiastically about developments in Kitale, despite the chronic lack of resources in the Diocese. He was proud of the number of schools and health centres and other projects they had managed to develop and operate to meet the pressing needs of the people. He was not just proud of their achievements to date, but full of ambitious plans for the future as well.

  Bishop Crowley’s cathedral in Kitale, a very modest structure with makeshift benches, must compete strongly for the title of the smallest cathedral in the entire world. Another Irish priest, Fr. Gabriel Dolan, was celebrating Mass that day. When it
came to the collection, I saw people handing up everything from pineapples, to a sharp knife, to old golf balls, to a bicycle bell.

  I got talking to Fr. Dolan, a feisty young Kiltegan from Fermanagh, who had narrowly avoided prison and deportation on several occasions for speaking out on behalf of Kitale’s poor. Just before I departed for Kenya, my parents had pointed out an article about him in the Irish Times. Having protested courageously on behalf of some of his deprived parishioners, he had to leave Kenya for his own safety and lie low in Ireland until the fuss died down.

  At an impromptu dinner that evening to celebrate the birthday of one of the other missionary priests, Bishop Crowley recalled the incident.

  ‘An MP for Kitale sent in the army in an attempt to grab land for himself that a slum had been built on. Gabriel led a protest, which developed into a riot. He had to dodge tear gas and bullets and be hidden in people’s homes in the slums for a few days while the police searched for him. He handed himself in at the end.’

  ‘Sure I was let out after a couple of days,’ Fr. Dolan interjected, slightly embarrassed by being cast in a heroic role.

  But it was pointed out that white priests have been ‘bumped off’ before in Kenya, allegedly in government sponsored ‘accidents,’ after remonstrating too loudly for the poor.

  ‘That was during the governments of President Moi in the 1980s and 1990s. It wouldn’t happen now, I think,’ said Fr. Dolan.

  He paused for a moment.

  ‘Do you know, though, the most bizarre bumping off in Kenya probably occurred in 2005, when the white Bishop of Isiolo was murdered,’ he recalled, at the prompt of Bishop Crowley. ‘Two of his own African priests have since been brought to court charged with his murder.’