No Hurry in Africa (19 page)

‘The Pokots are afraid of the Turkana; the Turkana in turn are terrified of the Merille tribe to the north from Ethiopia. When the Merille raid, they have to take back proof that it was a male they killed—imagine, Brendan!’

I preferred not to imagine in any detail. During one particular incident in 2006, over two hundred raiders killed nineteen Turkana herdsmen, and made away with 6,500 animals.

Even though they are starving, the Turkana will not kill their animals because it lessens their prestige among their own people. Since all their wealth consists of cattle, camels, and donkeys, their livestock act as their bank. Only four percent of all people in Turkana District have a cash income, and even those people are probably, for the most part, the very rare non-Turkana in the District. After his long decades in the region, Fr. Tom was like a social anthropologist with his wealth of local knowledge.

‘The Turkana never thought to fish the 250km-long lake on their doorstep during all their famines, until shown how to fish by missionaries four decades ago,’ he said. ‘It had been taboo in Turkana society to fish before the 1960s.’

The Nile perch, a fish that grows to over six feet, is caught— I was told—by throwing pepper from the shore and making it sneeze when it jumps, so that it conks out on the rocks. I was somewhat sceptical! Away from the lakeside, the Turkana people drink blood from their herds—not uncommon among primitive peoples. Occasionally they drink urine from their cattle in a milk mixture; it is said to lower cholesterol. I did not fancy that, and I also declined the donkey meat offered on one occasion.

Turkana women are mesmerisingly beautiful. They walk tall with a majestic poise even when carrying thick five-foot long branches on their heads. Dressed in their colourful blankets and lavish adornments, many seemed to enjoy singing under trees, apparently having nothing better to do. They are decorated with extra beads and necklaces at each stage of their lives, such as marriage and child bearing. A Turkana marriage involves the mock kidnapping of the bride for a number of days. Married women have their heads shaved and painted red with ochre. When you meet them, they reveal a shy smile.

At the opening of a dispensary, I had lunch with Bishop Patrick Harrington of Turkana Diocese. He is a Society of African Missions priest from Cork, and a cousin of the golfer Padraig Harrington. I asked him about his work.

‘Keeping busy, Brendan, every day something different. Yesterday I opened a centre for the disabled built by the Diocese on the shore of Lake Turkana. Incidentally, there was a terrible tragedy on the lake very recently. Five Germans had flown to the small island in the middle of the lake to study the estimated 15,000 crocodiles living there. Their plane could not take off again. The rangers who set out in a boat to rescue them drowned in a sudden squall… Today, as you know, was Confirmation day, and now the new dispensary.’

Earlier, I had watched Bishop Harrington confirm a number of Turkana women and men. Despite the scorching heat, he was in his full ceremonial robes, complete with episcopal mitre and crosier. The Turkana men were dressed in their conventional diagonal blankets; they were bearing wrist knives and carrying a single piece of carved wood (ingeniously used as both a stool
and
a pillow). Some women had nearly a foot of bright beaded necklaces around their necks. In the hours of dancing and captivating tribal singing that followed, I was overawed at the spectacle of the Turkana with head decorations of feathers, leaping in their distinctive way. Their style of energetic dancing more resembles that of the Samburu or Maasai tribes, and is quite unlike the Akamba style of dancing with which I was familiar.

At Mass, the Turkana women had presented a very live and very stubborn goat decorated in flowers to Bishop Harrington at the offertory collection. This was the kind of image of the African missionaries that I had in my head before I came to Kenya.

Whilst in Turkana I had hoped to visit Sudan, but I never made it. One reason was that the road north of Lokichokio had been cut off by flash torrents in the area. Instead of building bridges in Turkana, they lay upside-down concrete ‘bridges’ upon the floor of the dry sandy riverbeds. It is a lot less expensive, but they become covered over when a torrent gushes after heavy rain falls—and the rainfalls are as heavy as they are rare. For some reason, in this godforsaken corner of the world, these are called ‘Irish bridges.’ Fr. Tom speculated that the name might have originated because some smart-aleck thought the concept of an upside-down bridge to be ‘a bit Oirish.’

As we were crossing over one of them, on our way from the dispensary to meet an Irish lady who would provide me with a lift south, Fr. Tom told me a cautionary story.

‘A couple of Irish nuns were driving here when a surging flood came out of nowhere—from your left-hand-side there— on a sunny day like today,’ he said as he gestured with a wave of his hand. ‘It had probably rained up-country in Sudan the day before or such like. Happens occasionally. It swept their Land Rover down river a few kilometres. They survived though. One lives in Lodwar now, the other escaped to Kitale! Sr. Helen is her name; she lives there with Sr. Mary. You might meet her when you are passing through Kitale again.’

Just before Fr. Tom and I finally parted, he guided me around Kakuma Refugee Camp, situated about 100km south of Loki-chokio. It is a UN Refugee Camp of some 90,000 Sudanese, Ethiopian, and Somali refugees. I was engrossed by the sight of a vast city of tents, corrugated-iron shacks and stone buildings, with so many people living on top of each other in cramped conditions. It also made me think on how the great work of Fr. Tom and his like in such places is virtually unknown in Ireland, and on how he and Bishop Harrington probably lead a more exhilarating existence than most of us. Theirs is a fulfilling vocation, with a fresh adventure each new day.

Fr. Tom dropped me off and told me that I could get a lift going south with Deirdre, a medical doctor from Dublin, who was working at the refugee camp. It was dark by the time she arrived out of her surgery.

‘Sorry, but it’s too late,’ she apologised. ‘I won’t be going anywhere tonight.’

So now, I had no way of getting out of the place, and nowhere to stay. An American priest, Fr. Peter, charitably took me in for the night at the refugee camp, where I stayed in his guestroom. Monstrous spiders were spending the night in it as well; it was no place for an arachnophobe. Fr. Peter, who speaks Arabic fluently, had fled Sudan a number of years before, during the fighting. Nowadays, his ministry is entirely for the inhabitants of the refugee camp.

Kakuma Refugee Camp has been in existence so long that some teenagers regard it as home, having been born and reared in the camp. Ironically, the refugees are better off than most Tur-kana outside the camp because they have food, clothes, and get a primary education. The camp still resembles a slum though, albeit a slightly better-off slum. There are a number of permanent buildings in the camp, and Fr. Peter, Dr. Deirdre, and I went for a meal that night where an entrepreneurial refugee has established an Ethiopian restaurant serving typical dishes from that country.

‘The UN is having trouble getting the refugees to return home to Ethiopia, Sudan, and Somalia,’ Fr. Peter informed me. ‘There is relative peace is south Sudan at the moment. However, the refugees know they are guaranteed food, a small allowance and, most of all, security in the camp.’

I tried to imagine what life must be like for these displaced people. For that matter, what is life really like for the average Turkana? When I had negative thoughts about them—I was not too enamoured by the aggressive attitudes of many of the men in particular—I realised it comes down to the harsh environment in which they struggle to survive. Their problem is that the Turkana landscape in its barrenness resembles the moon; the side of the moon exposed to the merciless sun. I had landed in January, the very hottest time of year there. It tops fifty degrees Celsius in Turkana in daytime and is not a lot cooler at night. Many people, even the whites, sleep outside under the stars because of the heat. Even without a blanket, I found it was still too hot to sleep. I used to lie there at night, sweltering, listening to the shrill calls of unidentified animals, counting the falling stars and glimpsing, perhaps, a lone outdoor fire flickering in the far distance.

After getting a lift with Dr. Deirdre the next morning, I met Sr. Cecelia, a young Kikuyu Ursuline nun who had been recently transferred to Turkana from Kitui. She invited me to stay with her for several days. She lived in a tiny and exceedingly remote settlement deep in Turkana’s interior, a place called Lorugumu. I ended up being stranded in Lorugumu for five days, a couple of days longer than I intended; I had no means of getting back out. But at least I had some time to explore.

Sr. Cecelia showed me the only ‘attraction’ in the featureless landscape around Lorugumu: the river. Wherever I went in Tur-kana, ‘the river’ always featured in conversation. When I would get to the river, it always turned out to be a dried-up sandy, stony bed where the river should be. On one visit to Lorugumu’s river, I encountered a group of Turkana warriors. Some were wandering around, others just sitting under the biggest tree engaging in nothing more energetic than spitting. All were wearing wrist knives and carrying spears or AK-47s. A number of them were decorated with tattoos on their right shoulder, signifying that they had previously killed a man. I must confess that I was feeling a little uneasy.

While we were sitting there, a schoolgirl in obvious distress came along the riverbank to find Sr. Cecelia. The schoolgirl appeared to be very weak. Sr. Cecelia explained to me that she was suffering from the effects of a DIY abortion that had been induced using some concoction that included tea leaves (of all things). Sr. Cecelia arranged to meet me back at the school later, as she hurried away to deal with this potential tragedy—a not uncommon one, apparently.

Up at the school, I got chatting with the principal, who described some of the other problems they encountered. There was one, in particular, that I thought we would not come across at home.

‘A government official visited this school to give out compulsory ID cards to everyone over eighteen,’ he explained. ‘Some students protested they were over eighteen, and admitted that they had lied to us that they were a younger age in order to be allowed attend. “Hard luck,” they were told by the official, “that is the age on your school cert and that is the age that you will stick with the rest of your life.”’

Bureaucracy is bureaucracy, I thought to myself, even beyond the beyond.

Once Sr. Cecelia rejoined us, she complained, ‘Some Turkana people are keen enough on education—but they want me to pay
them
for the privilege of me teaching them at the school.’

I agreed that this did seem a bit upside down.

‘And I am an embroidery teacher,’ she laughed. ‘These people don’t even want to wear clothes!’

At the beginning of a Mass late that afternoon, some of the congregation stood up when I entered from the back because they thought I was the priest. I was amused at the mistake, as I always was. A teenage Turkana boy, two rows in front of me, fainted during the Gospel, either from the heat or hunger, I presumed. Towards the end of the service, a Turkana woman outside began throwing stones onto the tin roof of the church. It made quite a din. She had been refused communion for reasons I was not privy to.

The following day a crowd of children in Lorugumu, half of them absolutely naked, followed me around doing impressions of me walking and talking. All of a sudden, I did a cartwheel on the sand and they fell about laughing. This happened a few times. On one such occasion, a twelve-year-old boy wearing only an AK-47 and nothing else at all warned them to leave me alone. I had been enjoying the fun, but I was not going to argue with a naked twelve-year-old wielding a loaded AK-47.

In amongst the gang of boys was one named Séamus—of all names! I could only attribute it to the Irish missionary influence. Sr. Cecelia knew most in this trailing pack, which by this stage had expanded to over fifty children.

‘The parents of many of them died of hunger,’ she explained. ‘They are now orphans being looked after by cousins.’

It was not only the children who were stark naked. I observed a surprisingly large number of adults just walking around in their pelts at certain times of day. I appeared to be the only one who even seemed to notice.

On my third night in Lorugumu, there was another of those surreal scenes to which I was becoming accustomed. Outside, under a glorious sky full of bright twinkling stars, I was listening to Count John McCormack evocatively singing
Oft in the Stilly Night
on a tape recorder. Suddenly, silently, there appeared out of the darkness five Turkana people, three of them naked, another one wearing skins and a half-foot of colourful beads around her neck, and yet another dressed in a purple blanket and carrying a staff and wooden headrest. All had come to listen rather bemusedly to this strange music. The great Irish tenor can rarely have had such a bizarre audience.

Through Sr. Cecelia, who was translating, they began telling me that they had discovered that morning the footprints of a thief in the sand. They had cupped the footprints in their hands and put a curse on each one so that the thief would writhe in pain until he returned what he had stolen the night before. This I knew well to be true, as I had heard of similar witchcraft practices on many occasions, especially around Kitui.

Perhaps charmed by the music, they had become very talkative. They went on to tell Sr. Cecelia that if they see a snake, a scorpion or a spider at night, then someone has sent it with a vendetta against them. They disclosed that human sacrifice was not unknown among the Turkana up to the recent past. My scepticism kicked in, however, when they suggested that the human who was being sacrificed regarded it as a privilege. An Akamba in Nuu had told me a similar story about human sacrifice before. Thankfully, it seems nowadays to have vanished among the animist tribal religious practices. However, stories do appear in the Kenyan newspapers now and again of humans being sacrificed by devil worshippers in caves.