No Hurry in Africa (12 page)

Some of the buses run by the cool dudes in Nairobi even had a Pioneer Total Abstinence Association symbol brightly emblazoned across the side of the bus. It was not necessarily a pledge of Christian abstemiousness! I was in a truck once with Cecil (our Akamba Nyumbani driver), who like every other Kenyan lives by the philosophy of
‘polé, polé’
(slowly, slowly). Except, that is, when he got his hands on any kind of vehicle. Like most Kenyan drivers, he treated the road like an airport runway. Cecil and I were sometimes bombing it down a narrow, gravelly track near Kitui village with a steep embankment on one side. Every time I asked him to slow down he replied, ‘God cares for us.’ I did not share his confidence that God would necessarily keep us alive if we plunged over into the ravine.

Religion and church are so much more relevant to the people of Africa than Ireland. It provides them not just with hope, but also with practical support, education, health, and employment. The larger mainstream churches in Kenya—such as Catholic, Anglican, and Presbyterian—also act as the only honest brokers in a country where the people are rightly suspicious of government, profiteering charities, and some meddling international organisations.

As is typical in any Kenyan village, everybody walks to Mass at the mission house church, some for many kilometres, and they love socialising outside afterwards. The people, many of whom wear tattered clothes for much of the week, dress up in their best second-hand suits or in elegant bright dresses and hats. Masses are so jammed that children sit around the altar and crowds of people listen from outside the church, while looking in the windows. They possess the zeal of new converts. A Mass can turn into a disco of sorts: entire congregations singing loudly and dancing in the uninhibited African fashion. Every Mass is a celebration of music and colour. It lasts for hours, and is nothing like the sober monochrome Sunday mornings in Ireland. Catholicism has a more liturgical focus that is truly African. I always had to look twice each time I saw a black Madonna or a black Christ on the cross. The African priests are often men in their thirties; the African nuns so young I found many attractive! It is a vibrant, relevant Church in Africa, and growing rapidly.

Kitui is perhaps two-thirds nominally Christian at this stage—but almost 100% animist at the same time, at least to the extent that witchcraft appears to be pretty much universally believed in. It is in some respects like rural Ireland right up to the 1950s: Christianity co-existing with ‘pagan’ beliefs and superstitions regarding curses, charms, fairies and so on.

‘In Kitui, Brendan, to pass your own bad luck on to your neighbours, you singe your corn black, and spread it along the path for others to pick up on their feet,’ Mutinda told me. ‘They pick up your bad luck and walk away with it.’

In Donegal, I heard similar tales from older folk of tossing a ram skull backwards over one’s shoulder with a pitchfork into a neighbour’s field, or placing three hen eggs in the neighbour’s haystack, in order to pass on the bad luck. Of course, many Akamba deny witchcraft even exists, and a
mzungu
will only pick up hushed references to some of the practices.

Of the two-thirds nominally Christian, some people might be Pentecostal one month, Anglican the next, Catholic shortly thereafter. Some may set up their own church for a time and practice some witchcraft while they were doing all this—depend-ing on what school their child needs to go to, or simply for the sake of it. Christian zeal in Kenya was also responsible for my lack of sleep on many occasions. Fundamentalists used to roar over loudspeakers in Swahili until 2am opposite the Catholic mission house, where I sometimes stayed at the weekends. When I had finally nodded off, I would be woken up again at 4am by an evangelical call to prayer blaring over a megaphone—in imitation of the Muslims, presumably.

An old Irish priest (the same one who grabbed the boy for calling him British) once furiously left the mission house and pulled the plug out on their equipment to get some sleep. Fr. Frank had a different method. The preachers were roaring abuse and condemnation of Catholic beliefs in Swahili, backed by the obligatory passages from the bible. Fr. Frank calmly strolled over, and in perfect Kikamba, quoted about three times as many bible passages to contradict every single bit of abuse they could come up with. But they started up again a few days later anyway. Kenyan TV is full of these pastors, performing ‘instant miracles’ on members of the congregation by ‘curing’ their HIV or AIDS.

They gesticulate a lot, ask for generous donations, and lay on healing hands with tell-tale fancy gold watches gleaming on their wrists. I could not help contrasting that with the frugality of Fr. Frank and the others.

Sr. MM is an institution around Kitui; she has been there so long. Every single Akamba seems to know her and hold her in high regard. There is a theory that the world has six degrees of separation, but I always maintain Irish people have only one degree of separation. I discovered that Sr. MM knows my uncle in New Zealand well. Fr. Paul, a much younger and very diligent priest from Dublin, was the Diocesan Administrator (acting Bishop) during my time in the District. Like Sr. MM, he too has a high profile locally. He is extremely clued into the bigger picture of the needs of the people of Kenya, and Kitui in particular. He was my initial contact for Kitui.

It was Fr. Paul who suggested to me that we go to a party for an African nun who had just been professed. I pictured a sober gathering of elderly nuns and me sipping water. An Akamba Archbishop had been invited. Fr. Paul drove us in his jeep to a compound a bit outside Kitui village where the convent was situated. I was very quiet and polite walking in, greeting each one of them reverently. Fr. Paul introduced them all individually to me,

‘This is Brendan. He’s just come from Ireland.’

‘You are very welcome, Father Brendan,’ they chorused.

‘Pleased to meet you Sister, but I’m not Father,’ I corrected them.

They giggled at their mistake. There were so many to greet, several dozen African nuns, and none of them appeared to be older than thirty.

There were bowls of snacks laid out on the tables for us to help ourselves. Whilst thus engaged, I spotted two young white faces at the back of the room. Surely this could not be two young white nuns in the heart of Kitui; ‘young,’ ‘white’ and ‘nuns’ not being words that you would normally find in the same sentence.

‘Head over and introduce yourself, Brendan,’ Fr. Paul encouraged me with a wee wink.

‘Ah, actually, I’ve met them already … earlier on today after the nun’s profession Mass outside the Cathedral.’

I gave him a discreet thumbs-up and bounded over to them.

They were two Dutch girls, both twenty-two years old. Like me, both of them were just out of college. We were probably the only young white people between Kitui and Nairobi, 150km to the west. I was delighted they were Dutch. Out of all the nationalities I love to meet when travelling, the Australians and the Dutch have to rank as by far the best companions. One was called Ilsa, the other Yvonne, and both were extremely genial. They had arrived in Kitui three days after I had, and would be spending the next six months volunteering at a centre for street-children in Kitui village that was operated by these nuns. Just for the record, the Dutch girls were not nuns at all; in fact, one was not even Catholic.

It had not been very hard to spot each other earlier that day. We had been throwing quizzical faces towards each other during the Mass that went along the lines of … what are
you
doing in Kitui? … and why on earth are you at a three-hour long profession of a nun? We got talking outside at the end. Both were terrific mimics of Fr. Paul and of some of the nuns, of all their speech and actions and mannerisms. They were living in a cottage on the edge of Kitui village, they told me. Like most Dutch, they spoke perfect English. Yvonne’s long blond hair contributed to her typical ‘Dutch girl’ image. Ilsa, on the other hand, did not look Dutch at all. She was very petite, with brown hair and dark skin. She told me the reason for her colouring.

‘My great-grandparents on both sides settled in Indonesia when it was a Dutch colony. One of my grandparents married locally, but my parents moved back to the Netherlands once I was born.’

I ambled up to the nun who had just been professed and warmly congratulated her. She was all decked out in the bright blue outfit and veil of her order, and was very young and quite bashful. I was very formal.

‘Congratulations sister, I hope your vocation may be extremely rewarding and fruitful.’

She beamed a proud smile at me.

‘Thank you very much, Mr. Brendan. You are very, very welcome here. Thank you, Mr. Brendan.’

We had all started off very reserved that evening, but the real informality of the professed nun and the rest of the convent surfaced once we had finished eating.

The nuns suggested a game of musical chairs—a giant game with over forty people playing. Big Archbishop Lele of Mombasa, Fr. Paul, Ilsa, and Yvonne all joined in too, and I messed with the Dutch girls. Three nuns banged an African rhythm on the drums. Every time the music stopped, half the chairs went crashing as people dived for them or hurtled over the top of them. Archbishop Lele, who for a laugh had decorated himself in a shawl wrapped around his waist, was wriggling his behind just as the Akamba ladies did when they danced. He would invariably end up being the one without a chair, so he always excitedly grabbed a nun off a chair and jumped on the seat.

‘Could you imagine an archbishop in Ireland at that carry-on!’ I shouted over to Fr. Paul.

‘Par for the course out here, Brendan,’ Fr. Paul laughed back, ‘he loves a good time!’

The nuns were just as bad themselves; I have never seen so many ways of cheating at musical chairs. It was hilarious at times. I got knocked out of the game when I slipped onto the floor off the side of my chair; Archbishop Lele snapped it up. The festivities continued with dancing—the Akamba version of the conga, and other eccentric African dances in a circle formation. I joined in. I was showing off for the benefit of Ilsa and Yvonne, of course. I was having great craic, and was in my element right up until Fr. Paul signalled it was time to head on home. I never guessed I would enjoy a party with nuns and an archbishop so much. As I was heading out the door, Ilsa, who at this stage was tired out before the nuns were, whispered to me,

‘My friends in the Netherlands won’t ever believe this if I ever tell them.’

I knew what she meant.

Many times afterwards, I would again find myself in the company of priests and nuns. It was like living in a
Father Ted
series at times, I could not help laughing at some of their stories and antics. One missionary used to tell me before siesta, ‘I am off now for some horizontal exercise.’

I could never bring myself to say that ‘horizontal rest’ would be less ambiguous.

The missionaries are so scattered throughout the District, I might be lucky to bump into one or two of them in Kitui village from time to time. There was only one decent cafe and one decent shop that we all frequented. I could usually spot that one of them was in town; their small jeep would often be the only vehicle on the street.

One late afternoon, a few days after the party, many of us met up again to celebrate the milestone of Sr. MM being forty years in the Ursulines. We occasionally got together at a weekend or evening if there were a special occasion such as this. Fr. Paul, Fr. Frank, Fr. Liam, myself, and a few other missionaries from as far as a few hours away assembled for a proper meal and a party. Sr. MM was the hostess again.

Sr. MM’s convent house had a red corrugated roof and was built with mud walls, but it was the same inside as a middle class house in Ireland that was furnished around the time the convent was constructed, in 1957. For instance, she had a piano, probably the only piano in an area of Kenya half the size of Ireland. An odd key was out of tune from the heat and the complete absence of piano tuners, there not being much demand for their services.

Nonetheless, as always, we loved singing along to it. That was the evening I treated them to my own long rendition of Phil Coulter’s
The Town I Love So Well.
The rest of them could all strike up a good tune and sing along to the likes of Percy French’s
Phil the Fluter’s Ball.
Fr. Frank was a master of the harmonica and Fr. Paul was nifty on the guitar. Two of Sr. MM’s Akamba friends told me bluntly the following morning, ‘Your music sounds boring.’ They never took to the sound of the piano or to our Irish songs at all. Maybe, I thought, I should restrict myself to the short version of Coulter’s iconic song in future!

Surveying the scene that evening—the African cook dressed in a khaki bush-jacket, us drinking on the verandah as the sun set, the sight of white faces enjoying ourselves—it felt to me like we were briefly living as the settlers had done during the colonial days. The early settlers of Kenya were often equally scattered; they would only have seen each other occasionally just as we did.

As a small lizard—known as a gecko—scampered up the wall preying silently on mosquitoes, the conversation at this dinner flowed seamlessly over a variety of topics: from us laughing along to Fr. Liam’s hilarious account of a misadventure that happened to an African we all knew, to Sr. MM relating the seriousness of the plight of a family nearby, to Fr. Frank revealing a secretive part of Akamba culture, to Fr. Paul recounting a lucky escape from a dangerous situation earlier, and back again to laughing at some more of the antics of the Kenyans or my own interactions with them.

The following afternoon, I found myself sitting on a wicker chair on the sunny verandah with a whiskey in my hand (call me
Bwana!),
reading old news from a three week-old
Irish Times
that was doing the rounds. I was really lapping up the grand old-style colonial feel, and remained for ages under the shade of the verandah, admiring the choir of birds performing in glorious harmony until the fiery setting sun turned the red soil of Akambaland a deeper shade of vermillion.