No Hurry in Africa

by Brendan Clerkin

  PHASE II OF THE NYUMBANI Village Project was officially opened at the start of Easter week. There were great celebrations from early in the morning: hours of jubilant music and colourful tribal dancing by the five hundred or so Akamba workers, as well as a joyfully riotous gala performance by the schoolchildren from the vicinity. The two fattest bulls had been slaughtered especially for the occasion. Rice was simmering in an enormous iron cooking pot outside, on top of a large fire. The feast was shared by all, and hugely appreciated given the famine conditions that prevailed. Under a sunny blue sky, several dignitaries addressed the large and not very attentive crowd from on top of a soapbox. I was so pleased to be a part of this festivity that all the ups and downs of the past months were forgotten. Even Kiragu returned to witness the moment.

  Everyone was glowing with satisfaction, radiant in his or her Sunday best, and revelling in a sense of accomplishment. I had bought a dark beige suit especially for the event. I was looking like a real colonial, a white gentleman settler in Africa. The suit cost me 200 shillings (two euro) at the outdoor second-hand clothes market in Kitui village—but who would have guessed!

  For a good part of the day I was pleasantly tormented by a crowd of local children; they scrummaged around me, jockeying for position to ask questions of the exotic mzungu. Some of them claimed to know me from my visits to Nancy’s and other outings. I even remembered several of them. As usual, the more audacious ones were pinching the hairs on my skin.

  ‘You are a monkey with your hairy arms!’ one boy exclaimed in Kikamba, to general fits of giggling.

  A flash of irony crossed my mind; the crude slur of Dr. Shane’s a couple of months earlier had unwittingly been turned on me.

  The few children who spoke English well were being urged to ask me the questions that were troubling the others.

  ‘Gentleman, is your blood red?’

  ‘Aye. Why, what colour did you imagine it to be?’

  ‘I thought your blood was white. I thought that is why your skin is white. Tell us, what are your glasses for?’(No Akamba around Nyumbani wore glasses.)

  ‘So I can see in the dark,’ I revealed.

  ‘Well, why have you them on now?’

  Children can be relentlessly logical.

  ‘So I can see far away,’ I answered.

  ‘Can you see my mother on that hill?’

  A cheeky boy was pointing to a group of huts on a hill a few kilometres away.

  ‘Yes, she is outside scrubbing your clothes in a basin right now,’ I replied.

  A collective murmur of amazement rippled through the audience. I had their full attention and was enjoying it.

  ‘I want to see her. Can I try them on?’

  ‘No,’ I refused, for I knew I would never get them back in one piece.

  ‘They look ugly. They don’t go with your suit, gentleman.’

  This was very observant; since I had broken them in Uganda, they were being temporarily held together by tape. The cross-examination continued.

  ‘Tell us, have you elephants in your country?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What!’

  There were gasps of incredulity as the word went round.

  ‘You mean you have no elephants in your country—and what about giraffes?’

  ‘Just a few, they don’t like the cold. We use them to pull our carts,’ I explained.

  Very impressed at this novel use of giraffes, they grilled me further.

  ‘Do you get rain?’

  ‘Every day. We have as many rainy days as you have sunny days.’

  ‘Do you grow bananas on your farm with the rain, and what about your snakes?’

  ‘We grow bananas under water so the snakes can’t eat them.’

  My tall tales thereafter became more and more far-fetched, though I tried to make them credible with authentic details.

  In the middle of it all, I was taken aback when one young boy suddenly piped up,

  ‘Most thankful we are for the blessings of God.’

  He must have been echoing what he had heard at home or in church. He probably did not know the meaning of the words. And yet it was true; on the face of it, so little had been bestowed on these children, who many days went hungry, yet they were so appreciative of what little they had, the very simplest of things.

  They were hanging on my every word for well over an hour, until I was innocently asked,

  ‘And who is your president?’

  ‘Mary McAleese,’ I answered, correctly this time.

  There was the usual simultaneous translation, then a momentary silence. They turned to each other with looks of disbelief on their faces. I thought they did not like the sound of a female president. It turned out they did not like the thought that they had all of a sudden been lied to.

  ‘No! A woman president! You are cheating us,’ one older boy brazenly complained.

  If I lied about that, from their perspective, had I been lying all along? I sensed their suspicions.

  Soon after, Mwangangi and Kimanze trotted over to rescue me, and we divided ourselves into two sides for a mammoth game of football. My ‘cheating’ story was soon forgotten in the shrill excitement of the game.

  In the afternoon, I got to talk with several of the dignitaries present. For them the celebrations were somewhat dampened by a plane crash the night before, in which several ministers and MPs from Eastern Province (of which Kitui is a part) had been killed. Among the dead were also several district commissioners and a bishop. Our local district commissioner and several chiefs were present, however. I noticed that district commissioners tended to dress in khaki uniforms, the ensemble topped off with a bowl-shaped colonial-style hat. Evidently they were following the fashion set by white British colonial administrators a century before, when shorts were worn with socks pulled up to the knees.

  I marvelled that no one had thought to change the uniform after Independence.

  An English MP named Jeremy Hunt was present as the representative of significant fundraisers in the UK. It was he who officially opened Nyumbani school, though of course there were no children in Nyumbani to be educated as yet. He and I discussed how the education system of Kenya seems to have inherited many traits of the Victorian school system introduced when the British first arrived. Schools are mostly single sex, while all secondary schools and some primary schools have boarding facilities. Uniforms are considered very important; they are often a child’s only decent clothes, so they are commonly worn at weekends too. Pupils seem to be overloaded with homework. Beatings are not unknown, despite corporal punishment being banned in 2003.

  Jeremy, an up-and-coming member of the Tory front bench at the time, was curious to discover how I had ended up in Kitui, what I was doing there, and how I fitted into the local community. He came across as deeply interested in Africa and its people. He explained to me how he had come to be involved in the fundraising for Nyumbani. I was impressed by the fact that his commitment to Africa was practical, not just theoretical, which I suspect may be the case with some politicians. He was acquiring first-hand experience of Africa’s needs, and he appreciated that education is the key.

  In rural regions and in the slums, many children go to school just to be fed. Most pupils take education very seriously though, and many are highly intelligent. Even as children, they realise it is their only way to a better future. Sr. Nora, an Irish Mercy nun who taught near the mission house of Fr. Frank and Fr. Liam, had a classroom with over seventy pupils. There was never a peep out of them. The students also realise the sacrifice their parents make to pay their school fees, even to the point of selling off their cattle.

  Free primary education was only introduced in 2002, the first major reform by the new Kibaki government. Up to then, huge swathes of the population received no education at all. One ninety-seven year old Kenyan man got himself photographed in the papers for being the oldest primary school pupil in the entire world when free education came in. The schools are desperately under-resourced
, but their aspirations are high. Each school has its own motto, some of which can be unintentionally amusing. One of my favourites was the Kitui school whose motto was ‘Educating next generation.’ The absence of the definite article made it sound as if the present generation was being neglected, which was far from the case.

  Even the names given to schools in Kenya sometimes can have amusing consequences. For instance, an order of nuns outside Nairobi runs the ‘Precious Blood Secondary School.’ An enterprising man beside the school opened a shop called the ‘Precious Blood Butcher.’ He had no idea at all what it meant, nor did he understand why the nuns would become very angry over the perceived blasphemy!

  Towards the end of Nyumbani’s great day of celebrations, the rain began to pour like in the time of the Ark, turning the fine dust to cloying mud in minutes. I was trudging home bare-foot when I found myself having to wade through a torrent that came up to my waist, which had suddenly materialised from nowhere. I had experienced this before with dried-up riverbeds, but the suddenness of it always frightened me. Once I was across, I shook my head when I realised how my new suit was ruined from the muddy water. But a second later, I turned and spotted some of the children I had been joking with earlier in the day stranded on the other bank. I shouted at them to stay where they were and not to attempt to wade through the rushing torrent. Children often panic and drown in these situations. They would have no choice but to spend the night on the other side of the river from where their homes were. Eventually I reached my own house and alerted Mwangangi, Kimanze, and the others to the children’s predicament.

  Later on, when the monsoon subsided a bit, Mwangangi and I arranged for the stranded children and some adults to be transported in the back of a lorry to Kwa Vonza where they would stay the night with any relatives they had in the area. People were very accommodating and we found each of them a home. News of our rescue operation spread rapidly via the ever-reliable bush telegraph.

  When things were sorted out, Mwangangi suggested we retire to a café in Kwa Vonza village for some chapatti and chai. It was a tiny room built with unplastered concrete blocks and dimly lit with a paraffin hurricane lamp. The inevitable scrawny dog was reclining on the café’s only bench. The sole item on the menu was fried dough. Outside, the rain was becoming torrential again after a brief respite. There was the rather odd sensation of bolts of lightning seemingly striking the exact same spot, over and over and over again, but without any sound of thunder accompanying them. Presently, the café started to flood. It had been an eventful day.

  The following night, our Kikuyu cook, Nyambura, and I were sitting in silence next to a hurricane lamp. My time at Nyumbani was coming to an end. The radio had run out of batteries and we had run out of conversation. A solitary mouse scuttled past. A good few times in that house, I had awoken in the middle of the night to the unmistakable sound of a mouse rummaging, or one scurrying past my bed. We spent the next hour chasing down all the mice in the house; it was pure Tom and Jerry. Nyambura was convulsed with laughter.

  Having banished the mice, we continued our vermin hunt by tackling the bats resident under the high tin roof. The scorpions were a tougher proposition. Hidden deep in crevices, we only knew of their presence when they fell out, dead, after we had sprayed poison in their general direction. Ants were a perennial problem; they mounted frequent invasions of the house. The Akamba have a novel solution to this problem; they get everyone to urinate on the ant mounds in order to poison the ants inside. Curiously, the local monkeys tended to bury their dead in the anthills.

  A couple of days later, I moved out of our house and took up residence in Kitui. There was no longer any need for me to stay at Nyumbani. The day I was leaving, I found myself reminiscing over my time there. It was the place where I had come closest to living the authentic African life. Some Africans used to joke to me that I was living more Kenyan than some Kenyans (such as the ones in Nairobi who tried too hard to act European). Most of the time, I loved the fact that Nyumbani was so remote and without any modern comfort. Above all, I got to love the Akamba people, their outgoingness and their spontaneity. Their dancing, whether impromptu or on special occasions, was always a pure celebration of the joy of living.

  Nyumbani had been the place where the local Akamba workers loved to welcome me to their humble homes and to entertain me, with the whole neighbourhood invited to join in. It had been a pleasure working amongst these people who are generally regarded as the friendliest tribe in Kenya. I had experienced the seasonal rhythms of life among them in the long dry seasons and the short rainy seasons. I had really enjoyed living in our house in Nyumbani—most of the time anyway. Just as important, I had found most of the work fulfilling. I nearly always felt it was exactly where I should be at that point in my life.

  Easter week was a big deal in Kitui. There were crowded religious processions outside the church on Palm Sunday; people were waving large palm leaves and carrying crosses woven from palm reeds. On Good Friday, even larger crowds processed through Kitui village bearing giant crucifixes and holding up umbrellas to shade them from the sun. Rather incongruously for Good Friday, people turned the evangelical churches into something resembling a disco, and worshippers danced merrily around the street preachers. On the other hand, the Catholic ceremony in the Cathedral was solemn and atmospheric. It was celebrated by Fr. Paul, in Swahili.

  I bumped into Leo (‘Jesus Hitler’) by chance on the night of Good Friday in Kwa Vonza village. We exchanged news and views. He was planning to begin a roundabout overland journey back to Germany the next day. He wrote to me later. He had made it as far as Shashemene, the Vatican of the Rastafarians near Addis Abiba in Ethiopia. There he was refused an onward visa for Sudan, so he flew back out of Nairobi to Germany a couple of months later. Well, the best laid plans of mice, of men, of Rastas …

  Another highlight of Easter week, for me, was the wedding of Cecil, the Nyumbani driver, on Easter Saturday. He was getting married to an evangelical Christian woman in Nairobi. As usual, getting there by bus was half the entertainment. At Kitui’s chaotic bus station, the drivers, touting for business, were sitting in the back of the buses and paying a bunch of hawkers to sit there too. This was to make the bus look nearly full, and so fool people into thinking it was about to leave shortly—as buses in Kenya generally do not run on timetables, but rather they leave only when full. While the bus was waiting to fill up, the hawkers tried every trick in the book to make me buy a sharp dagger, then a lampshade, and ultimately a picture-frame. I did not really require any of these things on my way to a wedding.

  Having off-loaded the hawkers, we finally started moving about an hour later, after a ten-minute prayer for a safe journey. I had the honour of leading the prayer!

  ‘Father British will give the blessing,’ the driver announced confidently in front of everyone.

  ‘Sure why not?’ I replied rhetorically.

  I stood up and as reverently as I could, started the prayer off; to my great relief, it was taken up by other passengers. The conductor, while hanging precariously out the door, banged the side of the bus noisily as we did three laps of the village. Then, with several extended blasts from the driver of the eight-note melody on the horn, we were off.

  The wedding started off fairly sedately by Kenyan standards.

  As the ceremony progressed, however, the congregation’s excitement mounted. Soon everybody started jumping up and down, and waving their wooden stools above their heads. Some were scampering and dancing around the church. One reverend, among the several in attendance, appeared to be a few psalms short of a psalter. He was fervently casting out demons from the bride’s womb while bent down shouting at her midriff. It was so surreal that I was falling off my stool with suppressed laughter. What was abundantly clear, though, was that Cecil and his bride were truly head-over-heels in love. Though both were Akamba, they had grown up together in Nairobi.

  It was straight after the wedding ceremony that Nyambura proposed to me, while we
sat eating a bowl of rice and black beans together on the steps of the church. She was a bright attractive young woman, with high cheeks bones and the round darker-coloured face so characteristic of the Kikuyu. I turned her down. She was not the first woman who had made me a similar proposition since I arrived in Kitui, but no other proposal was as genuine as this one.

  ‘I am sorry, but I am not allowed to marry outside my tribe,’ I told Nyambura, just as I had told the others in order not to hurt their feelings.

  Endogamy was something most of them could understand. They would then carry on with the normal activities of the day as if they had never asked. I think Nyambura was quite disappointed, though. I knew her so well, and sensed that she was good at hiding her feelings.

  A few hours later Nyambura told me a story.

  ‘Gikuyu and Mumbi—they are the Adam and Eve of the Kikuyu tribe, Brendan—lived next to a mugumo fig tree at the foot of Mount Kenya. They had nine beautiful daughters. One afternoon, when the daughters were nearly adults, they walked to a lake to fetch water. There they found nine handsome men swimming at the lakeshore. That’s how the nine clans of the Kikuyu tribe began.’

  She paused to see if I wished her to continue. I certainly did, as myths of origin I always found interesting. I was reminded of the old Celtic myths.

  ‘Women ruled the Kikuyu tribe for generations and generations. One night, the men secretly decided to rise up against the women. So they formed a plan. They got all the women pregnant at the same time the next night.’

  She hesitated at this revelation, turned away shyly, and then resumed her story.

  ‘After waiting for eight months, the men seized control, taking advantage of the women’s condition. Ever since that moment among the Kikuyu tribe, two people of the same clan are forbidden to marry each other. It is taboo.’

  How this story might apply to our situation was a bit of a puzzle. More than once, I had been asked by Kenyan women to give them a mzungu baby. I was just required to do the deed; plant the seed, so to speak. No beating around the bush with them. One particular Akamba woman, as she requested this service, said rather poignantly,