by Chris Froome
And, being kids, they would all look at me and keep fishing in the fridge for the more expensive ones. I was in knots of dread. Mum always came up with the money but I can still feel the tension when I think of those afternoons when ice-cream time fell on my mother’s turn to do the car run.
It’s a quaint thing to say, but in Karen we made our own fun. There were good times, and my memories of those are still light and clear.
On a weekend, as soon as we had time to ourselves, one of my mother’s favourite things was to go down to the Rift Valley. We would point the car south for forty-five minutes or an hour of driving away from Nairobi, open the door and step into another world. The Rift Valley is Masai land. The Masai are nomads, cattle drovers, but you can see how they worship this strange, arid, rocky terrain. It has an almost desert stillness, watched over by the extinct volcano Longonot.
When we got there we would take a dirt road off into the hills and the bush. Mimosa trees grew beside little rivers and the more we climbed and wandered, the more interesting the landscape around us became.
Mum loved the bush and the animals concealed there, the different sounds and the many different trees. As soon as I had sunburn, for instance, she would cover me in aloe, from the thick fleshy leaves of the little plants which thrive in arid places with low rainfall. She would break the leaves off and run the edges over my skin. Another discovery she showed me was the toothbrush tree, which has all sorts of beneficial properties and which people used for centuries as a natural toothbrush. The elephant pepper, whose fruit sticks upward out of the ground like so many red elephant trunks, was also a great find. I would play practical jokes on people that didn’t know what it was, convincing them to chew it and laughing at the reaction as their mouth began to burn. Mum never tired of teaching me about the bush. She loved the nature of that place.
We would abandon the car and walk and walk and walk, often following tiny animal footprints and tracks. Finally we would find somewhere to stop and light a fire. We brought meat with us to cook on the fire and we would sit and eat and talk.
The bike became a part of it too. The road from Nairobi stretches out towards the Rift Valley and on down, down, to the great saline drink that is Lake Magadi, with its flamingos and its crust of salt, which in some places is thirty or forty metres thick.
It’s a relatively quiet road, populated with big hills that roll all the way down to Magadi which rests at sea level. A descent of maybe 1,800 metres. Mum would put my bike in the back of the car and once we were out of the sprawl of Nairobi, leaving behind the traffic and the chaos, I would get on my bike and cycle down the long forever hill.
I loved it. The whirr of the wheels. The jolts of the road shooting up through the bike frame and through my body. The warm Kenyan air in my face and the road slipping under me as I chased the car through Masai country. Straight roads and steep drops. I’d pedal hard and get up to frightening speeds.
Those days, those places, those people, live with me always. Geography, maybe, is destiny.
3
Bikes were freedom. By the time I was twelve years old, I would often travel from Nairobi, where I lived with my mother, to South Africa, to see Noz, and on one visit I bought myself a mountain bike. It was bog standard really and came from a supermarket, but it had gears. I had never had a bike with gears before. I brought the bike back home with me to Kenya.
I loved that bike. I loved doing tricks and jumping with it, getting air under myself and my wheels. However, it wasn’t long before all the jumping and all the landing caused the front fork to weaken. Kenyan roads are pitted like a face with acne scars and they are rough on bikes at the best of times. Some of the local bikes had springs above the forks to absorb shock. I had nothing but me and the handlebars above my fork, and it had bent all the way out. I had basically ruined the bike. My pride and joy.
I took the stricken bike down to the village market area. I wanted to find the local mechanics that operated on the bikes for the villagers. They could straighten my fork. Now, I was a white kid, the only white face in the village. This was before I had met Kinjah and before I had started racing. I was skinny and geeky, light years from the athlete that I was to become. My kind usually replaced their busted bikes with shiny new ones, from proper bike shops in Karen or Langata. I couldn’t afford that so I pushed mine through the teeming market looking for my men. My supermarket bike wasn’t too shabby for kids in the village but I was oblivious to anybody coveting my wheels.
I found the guys I was looking for. Mostly they mended punctures and fixed wheels and chains. I was their only white customer, a splintery little ghost with his supermarket bike. Big ears and a bike with gears, a great novelty to them.
We negotiated. They set to work. To their surprise I spent the next few hours just sitting there watching them as they welded pieces of metal on to the bike to reinforce the metal I had bent. I was fascinated. I loved watching them.
After that I would take my bike there as often as I could. I longed to have an excuse to bring it in for surgery. Kimani was the first guy I got to know. I don’t think I can claim that I was his friend, but he saw me as the young mzungu (white man) who would pay to have his bike fixed, the kid who would try to negotiate the best price before work started. He tolerated me. I was a mzungu who wanted to pay the same price as a local. I’d say that amused him.
I didn’t care. I was obsessed. I would sit there and observe, trying to learn from what they were doing. I liked it when Kimani or one of the mechanics worked on other bikes. It broadened my education. Bikes were almost another language, a form of expression. The parts worked together like the grammar of a perfect sentence. I wanted to master that tongue, to be able to parse a bike, to be part of their world.
It wasn’t uncomfortable. They were into bicycles; I was into bicycles. That rubbed out much of the difference between us. I absorbed everything. They would talk about races, and I sponged up every word until my imagination was brimming. There was a race in Nairobi which they told me about called the Trust, sponsored by Trust Condoms. It sounded glamorous. I picked up on the idea and decided that I was going to start riding my bike in preparation for that. The Trust! Less jumping, more riding. I’d quiz them about the Trust because they were bigger and more knowing and they had ridden it before. I wanted to join them. I wanted to be like them.
But I wasn’t them and I’d find myself in difficult situations down there sometimes. People might stop me and say, ‘Right, give me your bike.’
I must have looked like a soft touch but with one bound I was always free.
‘Why should I give you my bike?’ I would reply. In Swahili.
So I was the skinny Swahili-speaking mzungu with the bike. They got used to me, eventually.
The legend of David Kinjah. First take.
He was an odd sight, David Kinjah, the sort of man you won’t meet every day. A tall, dreadlocked Kenyan cyclist with a 100-watt grin, no sense of time and a generous soul married to a rebel heart. I remember the first time I ever saw him. I was at the Uvunbuzi Charity Ride with Mum. I was thirteen, on the road to fourteen.
This was my second event, having ridden the Trust race* a few months before. In Kenyan terms, it was a big event, maybe a hundred or so riders, including a few locals along on their sturdy Black Mambas (a roadster common in East Africa). I was on my Raleigh mountain bike. I even got a free T-shirt for my participation. Mum knew some amateur cyclists, predominantly white guys, in their forties and fifties. I went along with them for two or three rides. This was one of those days.
The riders in the Kenyan team jerseys and the road racers were so far ahead that I didn’t see them at all during that ride.
Suddenly, though, in the steaming aftermath of the race, Kinjah was visible. Radiant and luminous in his bright Lycra kit, on his slender road bike. There were a few other guys with him. All of them were wearing Kenya national team kit. I could see that they were different. Made men. Serious bike people. Professionals. They look
ed like they were the centre of the world, masters of the universe.
The story goes that Mum went across to Kinjah and asked him quietly if he would teach me a little about bikes and cycling. I was hyperactive, with more energy than sense. She worried that one of my freewheeling adventures through life would end badly.
Kinjah said yes. He would.
I don’t think Kinjah was pointed out to me in those terms, not as a cycling ayah or babysitter. More like, ‘That guy is the captain of the Kenyan cycling team, you should have a chat with him.’
When I went over to talk to him, I said I was looking for a road bike, and asked if he knew of anything available at a low price. I secretly hoped he had an old bike I could use, but equipment was scarce, even for the captain of the national cycling team.
I remember him being so approachable and friendly, asking me questions. How long had I been riding? Which routes did I enjoy? I must have spoken to him for about ten minutes and at the end he said, ‘Listen, you’re not that far away from where I live – if you want to come up on a weekend, come for a ride.’
I took his phone number. I would be seeing him soon. And often.
I don’t know what was said or what was planned for me between Kinjah and Mum, but from the moment I met Kinjah, learning the rules of the road or the best way to fix a puncture were things of secondary interest. I wanted to be like him. I wanted to spend so much time on the bike that my molecules and the bike’s molecules became fused together. I wanted quads like a proper rider. Quads set like gleaming pistons beneath a slender torso and a narrow upper body. I wanted to sit on my bike and look as if I had been born for it. I wanted to race. And I wanted to win. I wanted a Kenya national team jersey. I wanted a road bike. I might even have considered dreadlocks.
I was both pupil and enchanted audience. Kinjah was fourteen years my senior. I loved hearing about the races he had gone to, the guys he had ridden with, and how he had ridden. The constant battles with the sprinters – ‘dropping’ them on the climbs before being caught again on the flat – these were epic thrillers to me. It was 2002 before I even saw the Tour de France on the television for myself. This world of Kinjah’s, I could scarcely imagine anything beyond it.
Kinjah was a Commonwealth Games rider. Twice. He had once said goodbye to Kenya and left his village behind for a pro career in Italy. He was signed up with a small team called Index-Alexia Alluminio, which was a Trade 2 team at the time (the equivalent to Pro Continental, one level down from the top level at World Tour). They had some impressive riders on the roster. He spent the winter training with them, and on their training camp before their first race of the season Kinjah was killing everyone on the climbs. He was really showing them he was a climber cropped from the altitude of our beloved Ngong Hills. But come the first race, for some reason the sponsor decided to shut down the team. There was a free-for-all; everyone grabbed the bikes and the equipment, trying to compensate themselves however they could. Kinjah was left in Italy with no team, no support and no money.
The other half of Kinjah’s life has been fixing bikes and tinkering with them. At the training camp he cleaned everyone’s bikes for them. He was repairing the bikes and even showed the mechanics a few new tricks. So, after the team disintegrated, he got work building bikes in a factory for several months.
He stayed on for another six months, doing work out there, but eventually he was forced to come back with nothing. Not the triumph he had dreamed about, but at least he had been there. He had seized the day. He had followed his bliss. In Italy he was known as the Black Lion.
He came home with stories to Mai-a-Ihii, his tiny village some twenty kilometres outside Nairobi in the Kikuyu township.
Mum first took me to Mai-a-Ihii to visit Kinjah. With people, she was colour-blind and she passed that on to me. She wanted to have a look around. She somehow knew that this would become a second home for me.
Kinjah invited us in for a cup of tea. He made that sweet milky tea that Mum wasn’t too fond of, black tea with cinnamon, milk and about twelve scoops of sugar. Very Kenyan.
At the time Kinjah’s place was one big room partitioned in half. A sitting room on one side; a bed and a cooker and the bikes on the other. There was no electricity. Water came from a big round drum that held 100 litres. You opened the top and there was a jug to scoop water into a plastic basin. Water from the basin was for washing yourself with. That same water, with your dust and soap, was then used to wash your bike.
Going to the bathroom was another story. There was a line of small tin huts at the end of the alley closest to Kinjah’s place with about four toilets in. You opened the door and there was a piece of concrete on the wall for stability, so that you wouldn’t fall in. This was a good idea because there was no seat or structure, just a hole in the floor. He had a torch for guests to take along on these trips. You sorted your own paper before you left. The open sewer smell was something it took a few trips to get used to.
Kinjah’s place was an open house. He had a gang of cycling friends and disciples who came and went. He was a professor of cycling to the local kids and they formed a loose team known as the Safari Simbaz. They stayed with Kinjah when they needed to or wanted to, and went away when they had to.
There was nothing elaborate there and nothing threatening. Mum could sense the goodness in Kinjah and its hold over the others. No danger. As I was going backwards and forwards to Kinjah’s place in the years afterwards she would always slip me a few hundred shillings (just over a pound) to cover communal supplies at the market as my contribution towards staying there.
That first day, full of sweet tea and proximity to a man who had raced in Italy, I just knew that every time I came to this place it would be a different adventure. I wouldn’t know where we would be going. I wouldn’t know who we would be going to see. Or what. I knew that sometimes they wouldn’t even speak Swahili, let alone English. They’d fall into their own tongue and what was being said would just go straight over my head.
‘Well?’ he said as we got ready to leave.
‘Count me in,’ I said.
A legacy left to us by Flamingo Tours was a knowledge of all the camps that Noz had used for tourists and their safaris. The Masai Mara became a favourite place for Mum and me. Life had changed for us but that wasn’t something we would complain about with the Masai.
‘You lost your house? Well, they took our lands.’
The Masai are nomads who wander with their cattle but governments in Tanzania and Kenya have for a long time been trying to fence them in, cutting back on their historic homelands and making National Parks out of the world they used to travel through. The Masai are an interesting, welcoming people though, and on our trips to the Mara, Mum and I often encountered tribespeople who would stop and talk to us.
That’s where Rocky and Shandy came from. One half-term break from school, when I was thirteen, I was with Mum in a camp in the Mara. There were a few other people staying there who Mum knew.
Some Masai came by claiming that a large python had eaten one of their goats. If we didn’t go and collect the snake the Masai were going to kill it. Fortunately, the Masai had come to the right place. Mum had a big heart and I had a hankering for a snake.
Off we went with a large sack searching for the python that ate the goat. A couple of men from the camp came along too. A python that has eaten a goat will lose her girlish figure while metabolizing it, and won’t be inclined to slither far in the open. The Masai had given us a rough idea where we might find the python and there, at the base of a bush, was a hole in which the python had set up its nest. The hole was just a short commute of ten minutes or so from the Masai manyatta, the village.
The python that had eaten the goat wasn’t at home but it had given birth not long ago. There were hundreds of little pythons squirming about both outside and inside the hole. A few slithered away to hide but we were quick and we got at least a hundred into the sack. They may not have been happy about it but the Masai didn’t l
ike them. They would thank us in later life.
We took the baby pythons away in a car, off to a forest area, and released them there where there was more natural protection and fewer snacking opportunities for birds of prey, including secretary birds and tawny eagles, and mongooses. A few days later some of the other people from the camp caught the mother python and released her into the forest too. Meanwhile, I kept two of the baby snakes.
I brought them home and christened one of them Rocky and the other one Shandy. They were the cleverest names I could think of for two rock pythons. They were both a brown and black camouflage colour, but I could tell them apart because Rocky had dots on his eyes while Shandy had the dots lower down. This information didn’t really fascinate Mum too much but she was happy for me to be happy. She never reminded me that I met Rocky and Shandy while their mum was away digesting an entire goat. Or that Rocky and Shandy might later acquire an appetite for skinny teenage boys.
Rocky and Shandy were each a foot long and their first home from home was in one of my brother’s abandoned aquariums. They lived there to begin with on a carpet of newspaper, with a few rocks and some branches thrown in for good measure, but eventually we got somebody to build them their own place. This enclosure was a bit more roomy, being maybe five or six feet long, four feet wide and four feet high. It was a solid wooden construction with mesh on the top and one wall of glass at the front.
Their house was outside on the veranda, perched on a few rocks so it didn’t lie on the ground or soak up water. We were living in Langata at the time in a cottage in the grounds of a much bigger house that we were house-sitting. The main residence had a large, well-kept garden with peacocks roaming around in it. I’m not sure if I ever thought of the complications involved if Rocky or Shandy escaped. It wouldn’t have been a good thing for either of them to be found digesting a peacock.
We had our own piece of garden that was separate from the big house. Rocky and Shandy were pampered. I had a plastic cover which I slid over the mesh so that if it was raining they wouldn’t get wet. I found some handsome pieces of driftwood in a dried-up river basin in the Ngong Hills while exploring with Mum and placed them in the cage so they could slither over them. They had a large water basin too. Pythons like water so they enjoyed swimming in it or just soaking in there. They had every amenity, and generally a better lifestyle than Mum and I had.