No Hurry in Africa

by Brendan Clerkin

  When their mansion was searched, it was found to contain weapons belonging to President Kibaki’s personal security staff. Clear evidence was also uncovered that they were the masked men who had raided the offices of Kenya’s main independent TV station and newspaper at the beginning of 2006. At the time, the raid had sparked mass protests against the government’s crackdown on press freedom. The Arturs were also found to possess a registered government vehicle, had used forged documents identifying one of them as the deputy police commissioner of Kenya, and freely used fake security passes to sensitive places such as the airport. It goes on and on and on.

  And it gets worse. It later transpired that they were not officially deported at all, but were free to return whenever they liked. An official had even given them a return plane ticket! Their exiting documents had been stamped with wrong names and dates. In fact, throughout the year they had operated under at least four different aliases. It is uncertain whether they are really Armenian; there has been some suggestion that they may be Russian, Czech, Ukrainian, or even Indian. They had certainly been using forged Kenyan passports for a year. It is not even clear if they were really brothers either.

  The two Artur brothers appear to have been clever criminals who left huge debts behind them everywhere their highflying lifestyles took them in Kenya. They simply duped everyone around them in a country with more than its fair share of chancers. Nobody is sure why they chose Kenya in the first place. Whatever the reason, one upshot of their high profile was that this mzungu was being asked at border posts and by people on the street, ‘Are you one of the Arturs?’ The Arturs do not know the trouble they caused me!

  The big question remains: who was protecting them? Those in the frame included the police commissioner, some opposition leaders, the security minister, the immigration minister, and even President Kibaki himself. Some, all, or none of the above? Or were the Artur brothers just a pair of extremely audacious confidence tricksters? President Kibaki, while being weak on tackling corruption, had appeared to be relatively clean himself throughout his long career. His government was thought to be moving the country generally in the right direction.

  However, the circumstances of his re-election at the end of 2007 were hotly disputed. The worst street violence in decades erupted over this, and resulted in hideous tribal massacres that left over 1,500 people dead and around 600,000 people displaced. My friend Sr. Cecelia, whom I stayed with in Turkana, fled along with her mother with only the clothes they were wearing when they were burned out of their home near Londiani in the Rift Valley. The Kiltegan missionaries with whom I stayed in Londiani, were attempting to feed and care for at least 3,000 people who sought refuge in their compound. In the process, they were endangering their own lives. At the time of writing, it is unclear how this sorry chapter in Kenya’s history will conclude. A fragile all-party government has been formed, but the longer-term fallout may last decades.

  After Bríd left in the middle of June, I arranged to meet in Nairobi a Dublin student whom I had met in Tanzania. He had suggested the possibility of both of us travelling for the following six weeks in Ethiopia. To explore that ancient land was certainly tempting. But the other option I was considering was to return to the missionaries of Kitui to volunteer with the street-children. In the end, my Dublin friend went back to Tanzania to chase after a woman he had left behind. It was not the first time that I had struck up a friendship with a love-lorn Westerner, only for him to prioritise his love life.

  My decision was effectively made for me. I would be returning to living with candles, fetching water from wells, and eating ugali everyday in dusty Kitui until my return to Ireland. The often-delinquent street-children would be a tough assignment. But after all my travels, I relished another challenge.

  CHAPTER 23

  THE STREET-CHILDREN OF KITUI

  BEFORE I RETURNED FROM NAIROBI to Kitui in the middle of June, I spent the weekend in and around Mukuru slum, at the invitation of a missionary I had met on a previous visit.

  I had not been in Mukuru since April, in the immediate aftermath of the devastating fire that had left about a tenth of the slum’s 300,000 inhabitants homeless. By now most, but not all, of the hovels had been rebuilt from the charred wood and buckled corrugated sheeting which survived the flames. I spotted one elderly man ankle-deep in an open sewer picking out scraps of wood with his bare hands, probably trying to source material to re-build his shack. It was in this unlikely setting that I watched the World Cup, in a small makeshift tin hut described locally as ‘the cinema.’ Regardless of who was playing, every kick and tackle was watched with noisy excitement and intense interest. For ninety minutes, these people were transported far beyond their miserable surroundings.

  Outside there were inescapable foul smells emanating from the rubbish heaps and sewers, blending with the not unpleasant whiff of smoke wafting from the numerous outdoor charcoal fires. The people seem inured to these odours, the inescapable miasma that envelops everything. Theirs is an enclosed world, relatively self-contained; many do not step outside the slum for weeks at a time. The whole of Mukuru is smaller than a square mile, but it is teeming with tiny shops and businesses and is, in its own way, a community throbbing with life.

  Rent in Mukuru equates to about two euro a week for a room for a family of four or five or more, and note how it is one room for a family. In comparison, a home with two or three small rooms (again they are rooms, not bedrooms) in Kwa Vonza village in Akambaland can be rented for less than a euro per week. Neither home has running water nor electricity or anything Europeans would consider essential.

  From what I observed, and from what the missionaries and Africans confirmed for me, the social dynamics of Mukuru are quite different from a longer established slum like Kibera. One cannot, as one might first imagine, consider all slum communities to be the same. As Kibera is much longer established, for instance, there exist extended family networks that are not present in a newer slum like Mukuru. In Kibera, people are also more likely to help themselves, and be more resilient in the face of common tribulations like disease. The people of Mukuru are a bit more dependent on help from outside. It would be farcical to speak of infrastucture, but Kibera is much better organised and, indeed, cleaner than Mukuru.

  Mukuru is home to vast numbers of people from all over Kenya who have been displaced in recent years by famine and drought, and who have come to Nairobi in search of jobs and a new life. I spotted cows and goats wandering the alleys in the middle of the slum, animals that the pastoralists had brought with them. Territorial disputes are common in Mukuru, and sometimes turn murderous. This is partly because of the density of population, and partly owing to cultural and tribal differences in what is a more disparate and less settled community. In both Kibera and Mukuru, however, it is all too often a case of dog eat dog.

  And yet, the sense of menace I had experienced on earlier visits was now lessening as my familiarity with the place and the people increased. Most people living in the slums have great dignity. They are particular about their hygiene and appearance despite the lack of facilities. The women dress in vividly coloured clothes, the children smile shyly at strangers, and the men are rarely less than welcoming. Not once during any of my visits to the Nairobi slums did anyone ever beg off me. This was in marked contrast to so many other places I had been to in East Africa, especially in Tanzania. It is ironic but true that you are more likely to be pestered by beggars in those places where people are relatively better off because of the income generated by tourism.

  My thoughts on beggars and begging were inspired by a man I encountered in the bus station where I went looking for a return bus to Kitui. He was scrounging money off people waiting in the queues, claiming he came from Kakuma UN Refugee Camp. The Akamba people beside me, with little enough money for themselves, were emptying their pockets for him. This simply confirmed my feeling that the very poor and the destitute were more likely to get assistance from the merely poor than they were from the ri
cher elements of society. It also confirmed my sense of the Akamba as a very generous people. I was glad to be back among them.

  On our way back to Kitui, somewhere past Machakos away up in the mountains, an elderly Akamba man somehow managed to pull the door straight off its hinges when he was alighting from the bus. So much for vehicle maintenance, I thought. The conductor immediately shouted that we were stopping to ‘take a short call or a long call’—and he was not referring to phone calls!

  So, as some women on the bus took the opportunity to relieve themselves in the middle of the road, I aimed for a bush by the roadside. Seconds later a police car appeared from around a bend. They targeted only me. They may have been looking for a bribe from the only mzungu on the bus, without ever putting it into words. A second police car followed a couple of minutes later. They stopped to chat to their colleagues. I recognised one of the cops from Kitui; indeed, I had become quite friendly with him, so the charge of indecent exposure was dropped before it had even been properly pressed.

  Once the door of the bus had been re-attached, the man seated next to me began to tell me about how people become victims in the most random of accidents. In Kenya, stories of these accidents were always told in an entertaining manner by people who enjoyed having an audience; I often found myself laughing—until the punchline arrived.

  ‘An oil tanker crashed off this road a while back, near my own village,’ he began. ‘People headed for the scene and began siphoning off the oil into jerry-cans. After some time, one man decided he had collected enough oil and went for a rest under a tree. He lit his cigarette and dropped the match. The match lit a bit of oil that had spilled on his trousers. He danced around, trying to put the fire out, but the fire spread to one of his jerry-cans.’

  I was amused, picturing a Laurel and Hardy situation, or maybe the hapless Mr. Bean.

  ‘The jerry-can exploded, and it spread to the oil tanker. Eleven people who were still siphoning oil were killed. One of them was my cousin.’

  Most accidents in Kenya are the result of human error, negligence, or ignorance—just like everywhere else. But the one area where Kenyans seem to be out-sprinting the rest of the world is death on the roads. I met Mwangangi in Kitui village the day I returned. We greeted each other warmly and, after exchanging stories for a while, he told me matter-of-factly that he needed to go to the market to buy a new shirt.

  ‘Oh, is it for a special occasion?’ I enquired.

  ‘My older sister died in a bus accident coming from Mombasa. I have to be at the funeral in an hour,’ he replied resignedly.

  I felt devastated for him; he was a good friend but I really did not know what to say to him. Painful memories of Mutinda’s death came flooding back to me. Mwangangi’s sister had been on a Kitui-bound bus that crashed near Kwa Vonza when the driver fell asleep. Rumour was that the driver had been awake all night, chewing miraa. Sixteen people were killed. Most people passed off this accident with little more than a shrug of resignation. Carnage on the roads of Kenya is an unending horror story.

  What pleased me though on my return to Kitui was that the horrors of drought and famine had eased, at least for the time being. There was still sporadic rain into the middle of June; it would normally have stopped at the end of April, but there was nothing normal about this season.

  I passed my second day back in Kitui in the shade of a redflowering bougainvillea tree at the mission house. I was reading the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh and enjoying the nearby angelic voices of children singing in unison in the inimitable African style. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the local school principal approach; he was relatively new to the school and did not know me. He was looking for Fr. Frank.

  ‘At last they have sent us a young priest,’ was his parting shot to me. ‘Those Irish are always sending us old priests!’

  By coincidence, and as proof of the second part of the teacher’s statement, an elderly Kiltegan missionary had recently returned to Kitui to fill in for a priest who had gone back to Ireland for a break. Fr. Eamon, a jolly character with a moustache, had served in Kitui during the 1960s. He was one of a group of us who went together into the village to cheer on Ghana against Brazil in the World Cup. We shared the Africans’ disappointment at the result. There was further excitement on our way back. Fr. Eamon nearly crashed our small pick-up into the car of an African priest who lived beside me.

  The Irish threw a party to mourn England’s exit from the World Cup. As we were driving back in the dark that night along the dirt road, Sr. MM frightened me when she revealed,

  ‘Last night about twenty young men attempted to hijack my car. I put the foot down and raced straight through them. They would definitely have robbed me if they had managed to stop the car … and perhaps worse … ’

  Whilst I was thinking about the courage of people like Sr. MM, we came upon a police checkpoint further along the main road. The presence of armed police was indicated only by a paraffin hurricane lamp planted in the middle of the road. We came close to driving over it—which could have been a fatal mistake.

  When we arrived back safely at Sr. MM’s home, she ran up the hall shouting,

  ‘Come quickly, Brendan, there’s a big monitor lizard in one of the bedrooms!’

  It turned out to be a relatively small and perfectly harmless yellow lizard. He was reluctant to leave, though; we had a job finally brushing him out of the house.

  ‘You amaze me,’ I joked, ‘you’re not afraid of twenty African bandits, just scared of a wee lizard.’

  ‘Could have been worse, I suppose,’ she replied. ‘It could have been a spider!’

  In fairness, her home had witnessed its fair share of insect and animal attacks over the years. Scorpions were a perennial problem; they can deliver excruciating stings. There were large black moths that can be very unpleasant indeed if provoked, as Fr. Paul mentioned quite casually one day. Many of the feral cats have rabies, and some pass it on to unlucky humans. A rabid dog viciously attacked one of the boarding students at Sr. MM’s school while I was staying at her home. The student would probably contract rabies from the bites. This meant an emergency trip to Kitui village searching the place for a vaccine, and would also require lengthy follow-up treatment later on. Fortunately, the student made a good recovery. Students and children are particularly vulnerable because they are less alert to potential dangers.

  The most vulnerable children of all, of course, are the street-children. My last six weeks in Africa during June and July were spent volunteering with these orphaned and abandoned children in Kitui village. They are housed in a purpose-built building known as the ‘Saint John Eudes Rehabilitation Centre.’ It is run by several African nuns of the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, and is yet another project of the Diocese of Kitui. Ironically, the Centre is situated in the Muslim quarter of the village. That end of Kitui is dusty, dirty and over-crowded; it is said to be populated by descendants of the nineteenth-century Swahili slave traders.

  The Centre’s principal aim is to return the street-children to mainstream society through care, compassion and education. I was very impressed by the good work going on at the Centre, and wished to lend what assistance I could. Fr. Paul arranged for me to talk with Sr. Florence, the formidable, but very caring, young Akamba nun who was in charge. She and I agreed a teaching role for me at the Centre until I would be returning to Ireland.

  These children, most of them aged from seven to fourteen, had already lived more than I had in some ways. Most were the victims of indifferent, destitute, violent or exploitative adults. Sr. Florence introduced me to some of those who were hanging around the hallway after our meeting.

  ‘Brendan, this is Nduku.’

  A shy girl politely shook my hand, then moved on.

  ‘She arrived here having fled her own Akamba circumcision ceremony,’ Sr. Florence explained. ‘That would have marked her initiation into womanhood in her community. We have to be very sensitive where tribal customs are concerned.’

 
I was told about other girls as young as eight years old who had been working as prostitutes, some employed for that purpose by local bus drivers. The Centre offered them the possibility of a better future.

  I got a vibe from the nuns that they would rather not go into detail about the backgrounds of some of the children who ended up in their care. And indeed, I was happy just to get to know the children for the individuals they were at that very moment. Some were bursting with vitality, while others were timid and withdrawn. Whenever a row broke out amongst the children, which happened frequently enough, I would be given more background information to provide me with some understanding of where the children were coming from. Sr. Concepta, another young Akamba nun working there, was particularly helpful in this respect.

  ‘See these boys, Brendan, their parents died in an accident and they have been very slow to adapt to life without them. They can be difficult,’ she warned me.

  On another occasion, she explained ‘These twins have been physically and sexually abused. Many street-children like them have been forced into sexual intercourse as young as nine or ten years old. Many take to drugs at an equally early age.’

  Indeed, some children were nearly always as high as kites on glue that they bought off the shoemakers in the village. Glue sniffing was a very common problem with street-children in the bigger villages and towns throughout Kenya and, inevitably, in the Nairobi slums. They turned to glue in an attempt to escape briefly the harsher aspects of their lives.

  The Centre was a modest building that accommodated over thirty resident children. They slept in bunks in two dormitories, one for boys and the other for girls. Each morning I was welcomed off my bicycle by a sprightly mob of youngsters who crowded around me and cheered. I was reminded a bit of the people at the orphanage in Lasse Hallstrom’s film The Cider House Rules; there was an almost tangible sense of impoverished togetherness among the children. Most of the time.