No Hurry in Africa

by Brendan Clerkin

‘Yes, it’s all about timing, and you have timed it very well,’ Robert said. ‘You want to catch the movement of the animals like we are seeing now, and you have avoided the rainy season when the tracks are impassable. But you have also to avoid the tourists who come in great numbers in the later dry summer months.’

  ‘Of course,’ Brian quipped, ‘the annual migration of tourists.’

  ‘Yes, and I’ve met some of their predators and scavengers,’ Leonie added. ‘From what I’ve seen of northern Tanzania, it appears to be richer and more full of pickpockets in comparison to Kenya.’

  ‘Maybe there’s a connection between the two?’ I suggested.

  Brian’s eyesight was quite bad.

  ‘Look, quick, what’s that animal moving beyond the trees?’ he yelped on one occasion later that day.

  It turned out to be a distant jeep. So, we did not have the Serengeti to ourselves after all. We trained our binoculars on some rich Americans in their over-the-top safari costumes; they were wielding cameras with huge telescopic lenses and taking endless photos of a very ordinary acacia tree.

  ‘I spot a smaller specimen of this tourist animal,’ Brian remarked. ‘But it has got an even longer lens. It’s the Japanese variety.’

  At times, we travelled for ages without spotting anything interesting, especially in the heat of the day. Occasionally we played host to swarms of flies.

  ‘God made the fly, he just didn’t tell us why,’ Robert announced, in his wisdom.

  We spent some time observing a male gazelle continually trying to mount a female who kept hopping away. Thereafter, he tried it on with all the other females who also kept skipping away from his amorous approaches. At this point Leonie started humming the jaunty tune at the end of The Benny Hill Show. We all joined in, getting faster and faster until we were convulsed with laughter.

  At our campsite in the evening, I watched in a state of near paralysis as a gargantuan bull elephant sauntered past our tent in search of water. It was only a matter of feet away. Before I drifted off to sleep, I heard lions roaring quite close by, their pronouncements echoing regally over the star-covered savannah. Bríd was petrified on hearing something scratching at the tent, and gave me a dig to wake me up.

  ‘Probably a rodent of some sort,’ I suggested.

  She did not find that very reassuring, for some reason.

  Sometime in the middle of the night, I had to step out to relieve myself. Now it was my turn to be paranoid. I was imagining a hungry lioness jumping on me from behind in the pitch darkness. And now it was Bríd’s turn to mock me. On my way back in, I stamped and galloped around the tent a few times in an attempt to frighten her.

  ‘I knew it was you all along,’ she claimed, calm as you like.

  As we neared the Ngorongoro Crater next day, we passed numerous Maasai boys wearing their distinctive red blankets and begging by the rocky track. Their dark faces were painted white.

  ‘This is part of the preparations for their circumcision ceremony to become a Maasai warrior,’ explained Robert. ‘Another part of the preparations is that each one of them has to catch and kill a wild animal. Yet another common custom is the removal of one front tooth. This is to enable a sharp whistle for controlling their cattle.’

  Brian speculated about which to choose if you really had to: being circumcised or having a front tooth removed. Both would be without benefit of anaesthetic!

  A Maasai in the city can easily be identified by his great height, his slender frame, his distended earlobes and, sometimes by his missing front tooth. Being semi-nomadic, his is the only tribe freely allowed to cross the Kenyan-Tanzanian border. Maasai territory straddles the border. Nowadays, the tribe is sidelined in the politics of both countries. They are constantly under government pressure to move out of the country’s many game parks.

  The Maasai have already been removed from the Serengeti. They still have grazing rights around the Ngorongoro Crater, but the blanket-clad herdsmen that we saw rounding up cattle right beside four huge elephants on the very rim of the Crater, may be forced to evacuate in the near future. It seems unfair to me. It was Lord Delamere, over a century ago, who was among the first people to recognise that the nomadic pastoral lifestyle of the Maasai can exist quite harmoniously with the African wildlife.

  Our campsite, high on the crater rim, was freezing cold at night. As I made my way from the tent to the toilet, I could identify buffalo and zebra cantering nearby in the moonlight. Early the following morning, descending into the basin through the thick shroud of mist that had formed around the crater rim, was like entering a lost world.

  ‘I think we are in Jurassic Park,’ Bríd commented.

  Ngorongoro Crater is truly one of the wonders of the natural world. A mere twenty kilometres wide, it has perhaps the greatest concentration of wildlife on earth. As we drove down and out under the cloud, an entire ecosystem trapped in a bowl stretched out before us. Biodiversity takes on a new meaning here.

  Rich in vegetation, the Crater attracts most of the big beasts of the plains as well as a great variety of herbivores such as wildebeest; there are even flamingos in the soda lake at the bottom of the crater. A freshwater lake guarantees an amazing variety of bird life. Exotic birds compete in colour with a profusion of plants and flowers of every hue. Unlike the wild, endless, open, and largely featureless landscape of the Serengeti, you have a sense here of concentration, distillation, essence—the ultimate zoo. The creatures here are encaged by the crater, but naturally so, and that makes all the difference. I was so glad we had kept Ngorongoro Crater to the end of our safari. It made for a perfect climax to our trip. Safari njema sana!

  Returning to Arusha and the noise and bedlam of humdrum urban life was anti-climactic, a shock to the system. Back in the hotel, many visitors to the major game parks were griping about their safari experiences: their jeep broke down; there were no lions to be seen; there were too many jeeps around one lion; there were too many Americans; their guide was not fluent in English; their meals were of poor quality; they did not get on with their companions in their jeep; their jeep kept getting stuck in the mud because of recent rain—and so on and so on. As Brian, Leonie, Bríd, and I got together for a meal that night, Brian spoke for all of us.

  ‘Maybe we just got lucky, but I’d say we have just had the perfect safari.’

  Over drinks, I told them some stories of horror safaris, some of them probably the savannah equivalent of urban myths. The Daily Nation in Nairobi was full of these stories. One of the best known concerns a group of Japanese tourists in the Masai Mara game park, the northern extension of the Serengeti in Kenya.

  ‘Apparently,’ I continued, ‘several Japanese stepped out of their jeeps to take pictures of themselves in front of a pride of lions. Days later, they had not returned. The park rangers eventually called out a helicopter to help search for them. Anyway, there was no sign of the Japanese, but their jeep was found with a camera on the bonnet set to automatic mode. When the photos were viewed, the last ones showed the pride of lions sneaking up behind the group, getting closer and closer and closer … ’

  ‘I hope you make it back into Kenya alright,’ Leonie wished me luck at the end of the night, as we parted company.

  They were heading for Rwanda the following day. Bríd and I were still unsure exactly where we were going, and chose to sleep on it.

  My first thought when I woke up the next morning was figuring out how to make it back into Kenya. There are only four border crossings between Kenya and Tanzania. One is Namanga, which was obviously no-go. The one near Lake Victoria would take many days to reach because there is hardly any public transport, or indeed roads, from Arusha. One is near Mombasa, but it is always busy, with long delays. So we settled on Taveta, a no-horse border post east of Mount Kilimanjaro.

  Our first attempt to reach Taveta failed, when the police outside Arusha impounded our bus for having people hanging off the sides. We had to walk back to town and get another one. That is how we found ourselv
es travelling through the savannah aboard the ‘Snowbuster’! Sitting beside us on the Snowbuster was one of those African geniuses that I came across now and again. When Bríd mentioned that we were from Ireland, he launched into a critique, long and loud, of seemingly nearly every novel and short story that James Joyce had composed. He claimed to have never been to school. Having encountered his like before, I was inclined to believe him.

  When we eventually reached the border post at Taveta, I nervously spun a yarn for the benefit of the solitary bored immigration official.

  ‘I have to escort my wife to Nairobi Airport, sir, and I will be travelling on to Ethiopia once I leave her there,’ I assured him.

  He stamped me in for another three-month stay … with the correct date. I checked!

  ‘Told you it would be all right,’ I said to Bríd, not entirely convincingly, when we were out of earshot.

  Just like that, the Border Foxes were back in Kenya. I would say that there were probably only half a dozen people who passed through that border post the entire day. A few days later, I read in the Daily Nation that fifty-four people died when a bus crashed over a precipice into a river between Arusha and Moshi, just one day after we rode the Snowbuster on the very same route on our way to Taveta. Such are the vagaries of life—and death—in Africa.

  CHAPTER 22

  A BIZARRE TALE OF ARMENIAN ROYALTY

  TRAVELLING ALONG THE BUMPY dirt road from Taveta to the town of Voi in early June, our slow bus encountered so many elephants at one point that even the Africans hollered to the driver to stop so they could look. There must have been forty or more in the herd. In Africa, you can never predict what will slow your progress. We were late in reaching Voi—not that anyone seemed bothered. Over 100km east of Taveta and about six hours from Nairobi, Voi is a busy but unremarkable town. Except, surprisingly, there are street bins, and people actually seemed to be using them—uniquely for Kenya, in my experience.

  Bríd and I got off the bus in Voi and ordered ugali and black beans at a café. There was a tree trunk growing through the café roof, but at least it was convenient to the railway station. Voi is another East African town, like Nairobi itself, which has grown around the station. When we went to book tickets for our onward journey to Nairobi, we found the station itself to be a living museum of the early twentieth century. The stationmaster, dressed in a white bushjacket, was stopping the trains by holding up a red hurricane lamp; he was changing the tracks manually by yanking big levers, and ringing hand bells prior to shouting announcements on the platform while his assistant was using the wind-up phone in his office. The entire station interior was made of dark unstable wood panelling. There were notices on the walls that had been there since before Independence; a few words had been updated in pencil. Barefoot children were rolling an old bicycle wheel along the platform while we sat waiting for our train to arrive.

  Fr. Liam told me one time about an Irish missionary from Kitui (the same one who hoisted the boy in the air for calling him British) who went to collect an important parcel in Voi railway station in 2003. He began to protest loudly when he discovered his parcel had been lost. Unimpressed by the priest’s belligerent attitude the stationmaster told him,

  ‘You are late.’

  On hearing this, the missionary raised his voice again,

  ‘What do you mean I am late! It should have arrived here last week.’

  ‘You are forty years too late!’ came the loaded reply from the stationmaster, implying that since Independence, he deserved more respect.

  Upon boarding the train late that night for the 350km journey northwest to Nairobi, we discovered that someone was occupying our pre-booked compartment. After several minutes banging on the door, out stepped two men in uniform, a yawning soldier and a hefty policeman who was rubbing his eyes. Each of them was wielding a Kalashnikov. I was momentarily silenced. But they both apologised to us, and vacated the carriage. The train went clickety-clickety all night long.

  I poked my head out the window at dawn to relish the breeze on my face, waved to the Maasai who were waving back, and pointed out the zebras, giraffes, and ostriches to Bríd as we approached Nairobi. The thrill of spotting game animals never ended for me. The train was soon trundling through the slums into the awakening city. The makeshift shacks of the slums are built literally just inches from the track. The Kibera slum market stalls are also strung along both sides of the railway track; because of the pressures of population, every square inch of land is at a premium. There are no fences between the hovels and the railway line.

  Bríd and I had allowed ourselves a day to spend together in Nairobi. I wanted her to get a feel for the place and some of its colourful characters before she returned to Ireland. The touts on Nairobi’s streets were familiar with me by now. In some instances, we were on first name terms, but not yet with that ‘Sudanese refugee’ conman. When I identified myself as Italian this time, he was about to complete his doctorate in theology at the Gregorian University in Rome, but first he needed a lot of shillings to reach Tanzania. Once again, he appeared not to remember me.

  When not fending off touts and hawkers, we spent a lot of time wandering around and dodging the maniacal Nairobi traffic. We observed a man with the words:

  Corruption Is Evil

  Parking Attendant

  inscribed on the back of his coat. Since the departure of President Moi, the anti-corruption message is everywhere, but sadly is more honoured in the breach than the observance. As we sat on a wall enjoying an ice-cream, we saw the righteous parking attendant being slipped a bribe by a driver who was allowed to park where clearly he should not have been.

  For our last night together in Nairobi, we enjoyed a meal in the all-you-can-eat ‘Carnivore’ restaurant; on the menu were crocodile, camel, and ostrich. For conservation reasons, the government had banned them serving the meat of other game animals in 2004. It is somewhat incongruous that such a place exists only 100km from Kitui District where the people had been suffering food shortages for the previous five years. At the same time, the ‘Carnivore’ is vital for entertaining tourists and financial investors who pour money into the local and national economy.

  Bríd and I very nearly did not have enough cash to pay for the meal, just about scraping it together with a mixture of three currencies. Bríd flew out early the next morning after a long goodbye. It had been a fabulous few weeks. I had been able to introduce her to a world far removed from her own experience—in Zanzibar, on safari, and on our extensive travels through two countries. Our time together had further cemented our relationship. It had also made me think seriously, for the first time, about returning home to Ireland.

  Bríd’s departure was not without complications. There were lengthy delays because of heightened security. The previous evening, the now infamous ‘Artur brothers’ had briefly seized control of Nairobi Airport. I did not seem to be able to avoid these ruritanian conmen. Every time I had tried to renew my visa or cross a border, these two youthful characters were high profile in the media and seemed, indirectly, to cause me bother at critical moments. Their quite incredible story is also worth telling because it may shed some light into the murkier corners of Kenyan politics.

  The brothers had entered Kenya around the same time as I did in September 2005, claiming to be members of the Armenian royal family. The Armenian people, incidentally, have not had a royal family since 1375. Anyway, their claim to be serious business investors meant they found ready acceptance, and they were very publicly paraded around Nairobi for weeks.

  The Arturs first came to national prominence during the constitutional referendum campaign. Somewhat melodramatically, the then opposition Orange leader, Raila Odinga (now the Prime Minister), claimed they were mercenaries hired by the government to assassinate him. Shortly after that, they were chased down Nairobi’s Kenyatta Avenue in the city centre by a ‘spontaneous’ lynch mob one afternoon.

  Having escaped the mob, they then staged a major press conference at N
airobi Airport. At it, they took the media by surprise by producing a photo of themselves with Raila’s main rival for the leadership of the Orange movement, the Akamba politician Kalonzo Musyoka (who is now the Vice-President—incidentally, his science teacher throughout secondary school was my friend, Fr. Liam). They went on to claim that both Raila and Kalonzo owed them over a million dollars—all this in a press room that is normally reserved solely for the use of the President. Clearly, things were not as they seemed.

  In the months that followed, the Arturs went on to reinvent themselves as celebrities. They appeared frequently on TV shows, opening shopping centres and sporting events, and being guests of honour at fancy award ceremonies among Nairobi’s elite. One of the Artur brothers was also supposedly having a romance with a woman who was rumoured to be President Kibaki’s illegitimate daughter. The other brother boasted he was spending over one million shillings (€11,000) a day on his girlfriend. On live TV, they taunted a cabinet minister and the country’s police commissioner, hinting strongly that they would unleash their ferocious alsatian dogs and crocodiles on them if either ever dared call to their plush mansion to investigate them. Was the confrontation staged? The plot was certainly thickening by the day. Someone will surely write the book.

  It was obvious someone was protecting the brothers. The wheels came off, however, the evening before Bríd left. They stormed Nairobi Airport with high-calibre weapons to free some comrades, who had been arrested for using fake documents and importing a private arsenal. This incident forced the US embassy to demand action against them for a serious breach of international airport security. The Americans were jittery ever since Al-Qaeda killed over two hundred people with a bomb at their Nairobi embassy in 1998, and one of the 9/11 twin towers plane hijackers had come from Akambaland.

  Incredibly, the Arturs even made it back to their suburban mansion, unimpeded, after the airport incident. That night, however, instead of being arrested to stand trial for a catalogue of extremely serious crimes, they were quietly and quickly deported to Dubai.