There was yet another Muslim festival on Paté Island while I was there; each island celebrates the prophet’s birthday on separate dates. I was invited to attend the celebration by an elder of the village (one of the few villagers who could speak English). I was declared to be the only outsider on the entire island. The elder made one condition, though.
‘You will have to wear our gowns. Abdullah, find some spare robes for him, won’t you.’
And that is how I became ‘Omar Al-Jazzera,’ dressed in a purple single-piece Muslim robe and a white kofia hat provided by Abdullah. I thought it ironic that I, a Christian, was allowed to attend their Maulidi celebrations, while the Muslim women of Paté were excluded.
The form of Islam observed along the Kenyan coast is, by and large, tolerant and inclusive. Their acceptance of the Rastas was evidence of that. Shortly after my visit to the Lamu archipelago, on the fifth of June 2006, Islamic extremists stormed Mogadishu and seized control of Somalia. The puritanical Taliban style of Islam imposed on Somalia is completely at odds with that practiced across the border in Kenya. Paté’s religious festival was both solemn in parts, but joyous too—albeit in the absence of alcohol and women. After the tuneful chanting, and the rising and falling of the assembled on their mats to the rhythms of prayer, it erupted into a climax of genuine celebration. The faithful seemed to get the same buzz from it as Westerners might from a boozy weekend disco. Abdullah gladly partook of the ceremonies with all his friends and relations, even though he could best be described as a lapsed Muslim.
After the religious celebrations, we all sat on the ground in the middle of the sandy unpaved laneway, and ate rice and coconut beans with our bare hands out of the same wide communal dish.
‘It saves on the washing up afterwards at any rate,’ I joked with Abdullah.
At a hint from him earlier, I had bought several lobsters for the crowd. I had paid the full asking price of forty shillings for each lobster off a fisherman who had just landed his catch. That equated to less than fifty cent for a full adult lobster, and the naive mzungu may well have paid over the odds.
It was all washed down with delicious, spicy, Swahili-style tea with a hint of sugar. Gradually as the evening wore on, the numbers dispersed. I stared up at a perfect star-filled night sky as a few stray children played in the alleys lit by paraffin-lanterns, before their parents rounded them up for bed. I lay down to sleep on a bed of reeds upon the uneven stony floor of Abdullah’s home, having been fussed over by his mother—as he had predicted. I drifted off to sleep thinking of the many diverse things that make humans happy.
The following day, Abdullah and some of his friends escorted me through the bush to the even smaller and more remote villages of Paté. We travelled on the back of donkeys. The scene was almost biblical. It seemed to me as if the whole island had gone for a day-long siesta—it was the same every day. Languid does not begin to describe the lifestyle. The only movement was of children playing football with a hollow coconut, or youngsters raiding the mango and coconut orchards before being chased away by Abdullah and his comrades. Just as in Kitui, children would run away from me, scared, and hide from the mzungu. I thought about getting back to Lamu.
‘No hurry,’ said Abdullah.
We called on ‘the mayor’ for a couple of hours on our way back. A reclusive old mzee, his three-sided home of coconut-leaf walls was surely unique: one side was entirely open to the elements. He quizzed Abdullah about his life in Lamu. As darkness approached, we rode back through the coconut trees, being tortured by mosquitoes along the way. Back at Abdullah’s place, I showered from a bucket at an ancient stone well.
A fisherman friend of Abdullah offered to take me out on his sailing dhow. He even suggested that I spend several days fishing with him, using methods that had remained unchanged for centuries. No wonder the anthropologists love this place, I thought. I was forced to decline, though. Time was pressing for me even if the locals were in no hurry. But truthfully, I was also a bit concerned. I could not be sure the dhow would be safe in a storm. Also, few enough people even knew my current whereabouts to chance venturing onwards. All in all, as much as I would have loved to, I could not take the time or the risk.
I ended up on Paté Island a day more than I had intended. I was stranded because the dhows are not allowed to sail on Muslim holy days. When I eventually got around to leaving, several of us set out in a dug-out canoe to make contact at sea with a dhow crossing back over to Lamu. When a large rotund man tried to climb aboard the dhow, the canoe tipped over and sent Abdullah and another man flying into the water. Luckily, I had just clambered out of the canoe onto the dhow seconds before.
‘There are many sharks around here,’ Abdullah commented, still breathless as he dried himself.
Fortunately, he saw the humour in the situation. The passengers on the dhow were in stitches.
The dhow was overcrowded as usual. For the next few hours, Abdullah and I had to perch on top of a pyramidal mountain of luggage, the only space available.
‘Here, look, do you see the dolphins, Brendan?’ Abdullah pointed excitedly.
As he gestured, he lost his balance on the pile of luggage and ended up smothered in bags and cases. Everybody was in stitches again. I made my way to the side of the dhow, and sat down with my legs dangling over the water. A large school of cartwheeling dolphins escorted us the whole way back to Lamu.
The Lamu archipelago did hold one last surprise. On what I assumed to be my last day in Lamu, I was having a drink at one of only two bars in the whole archipelago. There I met Stephen, an unshaven Englishman in his late thirties. A small ring dangled from his pierced ear. He was drowning his sorrows.
‘Mate, my girlfriend’s just left me. She’s been paired off at the Maulidi matchmaking festival.’
He went on to tell me that he would be sailing out to his home at a seasonal hippie commune on one of the islands. He had been living there for ten years, on and off.
‘You should see it mate, you’d love it there,’ he assured me.
How could I turn down an invitation like that? I spent a day and night there.
It was nearly straight out of Alex Garland’s novel The Beach. Young people were skinny-dipping on the paradise beach, playing volleyball, and smoking dope around a campfire on the sand at night. The commune declines to be in any of the guidebooks, and they just bribe the authorities to turn a blind eye to their activities. I wanted to stay longer. Maybe forever! But I had to leave.
CHAPTER 19
THE ASSAULT ON MOUNT KENYA
THE MUEZZIN IN THE MOSQUE roaring over a loudspeaker at 5am outside my bedroom window (I just could not seem to escape these religious loudspeakers anywhere in Kenya) woke me just in time to catch the dhow from Lamu back to the mainland. I had to catch the only bus going south to Mombasa that day. If I am ever lucky enough to return, Lamu may be irrevocably altered in its way of life. I noted, somewhat regretfully, that building is due to begin soon on a new super-port that will rival the port of Mombasa. I know progress should be welcomed, but it is a pity that such a unique place has to change, especially as it has avoided modern ways until now.
My bus south was having a race with three other buses for the first part of the journey. The crammed passengers, caught up in the excitement of the race, were speculating communally and noisily in Swahili on the likely outcome. As we attempted to overtake on a hill, I had a feeling that one of the juggernauts thundering towards us might well determine the outcome for us. It was almost a relief when, after an adrenalin-fuelled hour, our bus broke down. Further on, it broke down again, and again. I was wondering now about whether I would arrive in time to catch the night-train to Nairobi. The communal conversation had turned to the possibility of pushing the bus to Mombasa. When we finally neared the city and the police checkpoints on the outskirts, the passengers standing in the aisles dived for the floor in unison.
After a good night’s sleep on the train, it was Nairobi again, and ugali for breakfast.
On my way back to Kitui later that day, it was déjà vu, as they say, all over again. This time I did have to get out with the other male passengers and push our minibus; it too kept breaking down. Finally, away out in the open countryside, it spluttered to what sounded like a terminal standstill. In quite a stroke of luck, the Nyumbani truck approached. Cecil recognised me, stopped, and gave me a lift. After a bit of banter about married life, he filled me in on developments in the Village project. Phase III of construction was still on hold.
‘In fact,’ he said, ‘there is not even a sign of a firm starting-date. The organic farm is the only part of the project that is continuing. Now, Brendan, tell me all about Lamu, please. I have never been there.’
In due course, I reached the mission station of Fr. Frank and Fr. Liam, exhausted after all the delays and an eight-hour journey from Nairobi. It had taken me thirty-six hours in total to get back from Lamu. I found Kitui refreshingly green after the recent rains there.
Fr. Liam up-dated me.
‘You remember the first crops failed when the early rains petered out? Well, when the rains returned, there was a great crop growing until a plague of caterpillars came and ate most of the young tender maize plants. The people were philosophical, as only the Akamba can be—“sure it happens”—and those who could find seed planted yet again. For the third time this rainy season!’
I spent a couple of days resting at the mission house. While I was there, the electricity supply failed yet again. It was back to living with candles, and playing chess, chatting or reading by the gas lamp in the evenings.
The reason I had left Lamu was because Mount Kenya was still calling me. It was partly the Kilimanjaro bug, and partly the fact that I had just finished reading No Picnic on Mount Kenya by Felice Benuzzi. The book tells the true story of an Italian PoW in Kenya during World War II. He could see the mountain from his prison camp and was determined to escape captivity by the British, specifically in order to climb to the top. He became one of the first men ever to reach the summit. Then, as was always his intention, he returned to the PoW camp in Nanyuki. It is a gripping read.
I reached the town of Nanyuki one rainy day in early May, a bustling white settler town lying right on the equator line. About 200km north of Nairobi, it is situated below the western face of Mount Kenya. The cafés and shops were all abuzz with gossip that afternoon. One of the white settlers in the town informed me that Tom Cholmondeley, who is the heir to Baron Delamere, allegedly knocked off his second native within a year that very morning. He claimed the victim was a poacher. This news was huge. Just before my arrival in Kenya, Cholmondeley had had murder charges dropped after admitting to having killed a Maasai game warden in self-defence on his estate in 2005. In the days that followed, the Kenyan people cried foul, alleging a conspiracy, and that hidden powers were secretly influencing the prosecution service behind the scenes.
This time, Tom Cholmondeley claimed he was carrying his Winchester hunting rifle only because a white friend had been gored to death by a buffalo the previous year; and that he only shot at the dogs of the poachers. The latter had emerged from a thicket brandishing spears. He claimed they had killed and skinned an antelope. He argued that he was being targeted by the authorities because he is the only heir to the Rift Valley estate of 100,000 acres. He had tried to save his victim by treating him with first aid and bringing him to hospital.
The victim’s wife, however, maintained her husband only hunted antelope very rarely to source food for their four hungry children. There was a groundswell of anger among Kenyans over the incident. It developed into the most talked-about and controversial trial in Kenya since the murder of Lord Errol in 1941. Co-incidentally, Baron Delamere’s stepmother had been the central female figure in the Lord Errol scandal.
The original Lord Delamere was a charismatic character who first arrived in Kenya in 1897, having crossed the northern deserts from Somalia with a caravan of 200 camels. He was a gambler, who bankrupted his estate in Cheshire for what ultimately turned out to be successful experiments at mixed agriculture in the Rift Valley. He managed to breed cattle in Kenya that were better at withstanding disease and drought. His family dominated the social scene, arguably until the present. The news bulletin on the small television in the café that evening showed the 6“6’ heir, wearing a trilby-shaped straw hat and beige coloured suit, being escorted away by police through a scrum of photographers.
In the café, I had been conversing with a middle-aged white lady named Victoria. She later generously provided me with a lift in her rattling old Land Rover.
‘Tom is the godfather to my best friend’s child, you know … The unfortunate family of the deceased man … it is such a tragedy,’ she told me. ‘It is such a terrible pity for Tom, of course.’
She paused to reflect and then said, rather enigmatically,
‘But I am not at all surprised in a way that it has happened to him.’
Victoria was third-generation Kenyan herself. Her only period away from Africa was attending secondary school and university in England.
‘My parents’ generation, and their parents—they were absolutely mad! We are more sensible these days. We have to be.’
The white settlers who were born and reared in Kenya are easy to spot from a distance. They tend to drive huge jeeps that are often as old as themselves; they still dress like English country gentry of the 1950s, in browns or khaki with the obligatory hunter’s hat (though no longer sporting two wide-brimmed hats as the colonials did, in case the sun could penetrate the first one). The settlers talk with posh Eton accents, and refer to ‘Keeenya.’ They frequent their own shops, hotels and bars, and play upper middle-class sports at their country clubs. They look thoroughly out of place in today’s Kenya, yet at the same time are a quintessential part of it. It struck me as I was talking to Victoria that they must be one of the most misplaced peoples in the entire world. Just for the record, the Highlands west of Mount Kenya were mooted as a Jewish homeland long before Israel was founded. A tiny community of Jews lives in Nairobi to this day.
My curiosity about the white-Kenyans led me once to visit Baroness Blixen’s former home outside Nairobi. She was the Danish aristocrat and coffee planter who immortalised colonial life in her classic book Out of Africa. The Nairobi suburb of Karen is named after her. Her house and gardens can now be visited. I had been expecting something like Stormont, but it is a lot smaller, though still preserved inside exactly as it was in the 1920s.
The settlement around Karen is one of a handful of well-heeled white communities left in Kenya. Karen’s inhabitants are the diplomats, rich expatriates, and white-Kenyan professionals who work in Nairobi. These people live in gated mansions. Karen is only a few kilometres from the slums of Nairobi; economically and socially, it is a world away from the rest of Kenya.
Not all of the white-Kenyans lived in luxury, however. A lot of the early colonists, even some titled gentry, actually lived initially in mud-huts—rectangular ones where the native huts were round. Many lived isolated lives in remote places; life was a physical and emotional struggle in a harsh environment; some faced financial ruin as well. Good times followed for others, to be sure, as the country’s natural resources were exploited. But with Independence, life has become a struggle again for a lot of those who remain. Victoria admitted as much.
‘I love Keeenya to bits, but I am just about making ends meet each week,’ she told me, dropping me off at the end of ‘Go-Down Road,’ near where my cheap hotel was located.
Early the following morning, I hired a Kikuyu guide, named Alfred, in Nanyuki. Alfred was about thirty years old, had a lean and hungry look, but was very experienced. I also hired a porter who would carry all the food and the cooking equipment for the climb. Compared to the organised assault on Kilimanjaro in early March, this would be a solo run, as it were. I could call upon the experience gained on the earlier climb, so I was fairly confident I could reach the summit which, that morning, was wearing its grey hat of clou
ds. It is Africa’s second highest mountain at 17,058 feet, with the peak only a few kilometres from the equator.
The three of us boarded the ‘CanniBus’ out of Nanyuki to the base of Mount Kenya, below its northern face. Our conductor was an African albino whom I first mistook for a mzungu. He was hanging out the door of the bus taunting the driver of the ‘Princess Diana’ as we flew past it.
As the two bus drivers raced each other, and the passengers egged them on to greater speeds, the bus was transformed into a mobile disco, with people dancing in the aisles to the catchy Kikuyu tunes on the radio.
When viewed from a distance, the dark rocks and gleaming glaciers on the peaks of Mount Kenya can resemble the black and white plumage of a male ostrich. From this, the Kikuyu people named the mountain ‘Kirinyaga,’ meaning ‘the area of the ostrich.’ Their God, whom they believed lived on the top of Mount Kenya, was called ‘Mwene Nyaga,’ or ‘the owner of the ostrich.’ He was also known as ‘Ngai,’ and Mount Kenya was and is sacred land. The missionaries, incidentally, exploited the fact that the Kikuyu had one supreme Deity; they simply told them he was actually their God from the Bible.
The Akamba people, who speak a language related to the Kikuyu language, pronounce ‘Kirinyaga’ as ‘Kinyaa’ So, when the first European explorers like Johann Ludwig Krapf were shown Mount Kenya from Kitui, they heard it pronounced ‘Kinyaa’ (as in ‘Keenya’). The whole colony was later named after the mountain.
It was actually Kenya’s first president, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, who was responsible for the modern pronunciation. He ruled from 1963 until his death in 1978. In a clever piece of spin doctoring, he exploited the likeness of his own name to that of his country. Thus, people gradually began pronouncing the country as Kenya (i.e. ken, not keen), which is closer to the pronunciation of his name.
The Kikuyu God, Ngai, who lives on the peaks of Mount Kenya, must have arranged favourable weather for us that week. We enjoyed perfect clear skies for practically the entire climb over the next five days. The exception was an hour or so of a deluge just as we were trekking across the equator to the southern hemisphere. Luckily, I was prepared for all conditions, having retained all-weather gear from my ascent of Kilimanjaro. Normally, a lot of rain can be expected in these parts during early May. August and September are really the ideal months to climb Mount Kenya from the north side. In May, we had the mountain virtually to ourselves.
No Hurry in Africa Page 25