No Hurry in Africa (21 page)

‘I’m feeling better now though, thanks,’ I assured Sr. Mary. ‘It was just a slight shock.’

Sr. Mary was letting out several little yelps of laughter throughout this story as I was telling it. The conversation took a more serious turn when she added,

‘As it happens, the train in Kitale killed one
boda-boda
rider crossing the tracks a few days ago.’

‘Sure they probably stoned the train,’ quipped another Irish nun named Sr. Helen who had joined us, as lynching is the custom whenever a car knocks someone down.

I told them about witnessing a near lynching in Kwa Vonza when we were waiting for Mutinda’s coffin. Sr. Helen too had witnessed something similar; indeed she had had a close shave herself only recently when a
boda-boda
rider had cycled out in front of her.

‘I’m a white woman; anything could have happened. It’s very frightening,’ she concluded.

Sr. Mary offered me a lift from Kitale to Eldoret about a hundred kilometres to the south, when I mentioned I was heading that way; she had some business to attend to there. Sr. Helen came with us in the car. The latter was a well-spoken Munster woman in her sixties who had been working in Kenya as a nurse for decades. The two of them took turns regaling me with stories of their adventures when they used to fly a light aircraft around Turkana treating sick patients.

‘We sometimes had to land the plane in the dry sandy riverbeds,’ Sr. Helen recalled. ‘It was the only safe place to land a lot of the time. In all the years though, there was only one time I crashed it, trying to land it at night. Mary here and Fr. Tom— you know him, don’t you, Brendan?—had their two jeeps on the ground at either end with the headlights on to show up our makeshift runway in the dark. But there were about ten camels in the way that none of us could see. To avoid them I hit a tree and broke the wing off.’

‘We still saved the lives of that woman and her baby though, do you remember Helen?’ Sr. Mary recounted with pride. ‘She was giving birth, and we were supposed to airlift her to Lodwar. We treated her successfully in her home instead, with the few medicines and instruments we had to hand.’

‘We didn’t save the plane. It was a write-off,’ Sr. Helen reminded her.

‘Aye, but it was due retirement anyway. Sure that plane must have been older than us,’ Sr. Mary chuckled. ‘You know, Brendan, you think Turkana is like the Stone Age, and it probably is in some of the parts you were in. But you should have seen it forty years ago before they had ever encountered a person from the outside world. You would really have been amazed. The place could be reached only with the greatest difficulty. It took weeks on camels even to get there. Every single one of the Turkana people was in animal skins—or wore nothing at all. They only had spears back then, though; there were none of the guns around. Even Lodwar… Kitale was London by comparison. But Turkana was so special in its own unique way.’

I could hardly begin to imagine. I had nothing but the greatest respect for these spirited women, on life-saving missions for so many years landing a light aircraft at night in the desolation that is Turkana. As we finally parted, I knew I had been fortunate to share the company of two extraordinary women. I thanked them for the lift, they wished me well, and with fond goodbyes, I set foot in the metropolis (comparatively speaking) of Eldoret.

Eldoret is Kenya’s fifth biggest town. It is in mainly Kalenjin tribal lands. The town was founded on that particular site simply because one particular white settler did not take up his allotted land. As the settlement expanded, it became the urban centre for the white colonists of its hinterland, a fair number of whom remained on scattered farms after Independence.

There is an elderly Irish missionary in Eldoret, Fr. Brennan, who is still working hard in Kenya since he landed off the boat in Mombasa way back in 1951. When I was introduced to him, he jocularly lamented,

‘I would have been the very first Kiltegan missionary in Kenya, but for the fact that my only comrade on the boat managed to race off the gangplank in front of me!’

That was over half a century ago. A lot of rival missionaries in Eldoret have been very busy in the meantime, however. I noted the following establishments in town; there was ‘The Growth Church,’ ‘The Friends Church,’ ‘The Happy Church’—and my favourite, ‘The Winners Church.’ I suspect I know who the real winners could be, I thought, before banishing such a cynical thought from my mind.

Since I started touring at the end of December, I had been discovering vital facts about life in Kenya. All sorts of facts. I was to learn more in Eldoret. For instance, the prostitutes are Kenya’s best pool players. And an extraordinary number of them seem to be called Brenda! Some of them had great difficulty accepting that my name was Brendan.

‘Stop trying to make fun of me,
mzungu,
’ one Brenda scowled one night in a bar in Eldoret.

I was having the craic that evening with three American Peace Corps volunteers. Every girl in the bar seemed to be moonlighting as a prostitute. In reality, as I knew from Mombasa, nearly all of these women are opportunistic ‘good-time girls’ who spot the chance for a bit of extra money, and are not full-time ‘professionals’ at all. They can be very demanding and very persistent, though. Noticing that the ‘Brendas’ were put off by my revealing my name, one of the Peace Corps commented light-heartedly,

‘If only it was that easy to lose the attention of all the rest of them!’

He went by the nickname Top Cat, a slightly geeky lad with many piercings. Not one of the four of us actually beat any of the girls at pool the entire evening, no matter how hard we tried to rig the rules in our favour.

A weighing scales in Eldoret revealed a further, somewhat ironic fact: somehow, unbeknownst to me, I was still getting heavier! Contrary to what my friends at home claimed later, this fact was in no way related to the famine. One of the Peace Corps named Amy, a blonde girl from Alabama who was ‘All-American’ in looks and personality, was surprised to hear I was gaining weight.

‘Have you been at the dog food?’ she asked, enigmatically, and then explained. ‘In Kapsabet village, where I am normally based—it’s about twenty kilometres west of Eldoret—the people recently fed their dogs instead of their children,’ she told us. ‘You see, Chinese workers were coming to build a road in Kapsabet, which was being paid for by the Chinese government. The Kenyans heard that the Chinese loved eating dog meat, and they thought they would make good money from selling their plump dogs. The Chinese when they came did not buy a single one. The Kenyans were left with fat dogs and bony children!’

I met up with her and the other Peace Corps in Eldoret more or less by arrangement; I had met them previously when they stayed for a few days in Kitui before Christmas as part of their training for their two years of service. They had invited me to stay with them if ever I was passing through Eldoret. It was great to have the company now and again of young white people; they were such a rarity in these parts.

The third Peace Corps volunteer, a gangly, shaven-headed drifter from Chicago by the name of Matt, immediately took up Amy’s story about the dogs.

‘It’s ironic, but around the same time in early January,’ and here he showed me a cutting from the
Daily Nation,
‘a New Zealand pet-food factory owner sent over a plane full of dog food to this same region as a contribution to famine relief. The people were eating away at the dog food until the government told them to stop.’

I spent the first fortnight of February in the Eldoret region, touring around the scenic Highlands region of the west. They use donkey-and-cart in this region instead of ox-and-cart as in Kitui, and a number of times I was coaxed into taking a lift on one when I was walking around. I was always delighted to accept, and I would find myself leaning back against the heavy ricks of hay overflowing from the carts. On the subject of donkeys, Matt made me read another one of his rich collection of outlandish newspaper cuttings. I read about an organisation in London that, in their wisdom, had decided to donate £100,000stg in January to stop cruelty to donkeys in Kenya, right at the very height of the famine.

‘The English are great animal lovers, yeah?’ was Matt’s comment.

Top Cat warmed to the theme of injustice and complained, ‘Fields of sugar-cane and other crops were lying un harvested in the Highlands because there was no market for the cane, while other drought-stricken regions like Kitui could not grow a thing and people starved.’

In fact, throughout the famine, there was food and money in the country, but it was all centred on Nairobi. I was able to draw parallels with the situation in Ireland during the Great Famine of the 1840s.

This region of Kenya became known as the ‘White Highlands’ during the colonial era. No Africans or Indians were allowed own land there—only Europeans could. The ‘White Highlands’ roughly stretched from Kitale in the north, to Kisumu in the west, Naivasha in the south and Mount Kenya in the east. It straddled both sides of the Great Rift Valley. At the beginning of the twentieth century British aristocrats, adventurers, speculators, fugitives, and former soldiers flooded into this region as settlers, because of its agreeable mild climate and fertile soil. The best part, from the settlers’ perspective, was that they often found it empty of human habitation—and dense with relatively tame game animals for hunting. Unfortunately, what the Europeans did not know—or perhaps chose not to find out—was that the African pastoralists used the land on a seasonal basis; the pas-toralists’ livestock was their only wealth and without animal dowries, they could not marry. Moreover, the game animals were quickly being exterminated as well.

The settlers peaked at over 80,000 in the 1950s, and were led by the eccentric Lord Delamere. Princess Elizabeth awakened one morning in a safari lodge in these highlands back in 1952 to be informed that her father had passed away, and that she was now Queen Elizabeth II of the British Empire (what was left of it). The current Lord Delamere is still one of the biggest landowners in Kenya with an estate of 100,000 acres in the Rift Valley. Only the former President Moi, a native of the Eldoret area, owns more land than Lord Delamere.

There are only around 25,000 whites in the whole country today. There was a voluntary mass exodus in the years immediately after Independence in 1963. However, President Kenyatta had the foresight to appoint a white Minister for Agriculture in his first cabinet, thus avoiding an economic meltdown as happened in Zimbabwe in recent years, when Robert Mugabe commandeered the white-owned farms by force.

Matt, Amy, Top Cat, and I took a trip by bus to Iten, about an hour north-east of Eldoret. Iten is a rather nondescript one-street Highland village that just happens to be the centre of Kenyan long-distance running. The athletes have the advantage of growing-up at high altitude and of training there as well. This area is home to the Kalenjin tribes who account for nearly all of the famous Olympic long-distance runners from Kenya. Up in Iten, a small Kenyan girl kept running after us with a dirty battered Barbie doll.

‘Amy, she thinks you are the Barbie doll!’ Matt laughed. ‘She is trying to give it back to you.’

The village’s other claim to fame is that it sits on a precipice, with a 2,000-foot drop straight down to the floor of the Kerio Valley below.

While we were up there, one of the locals told me about an Irish missionary who trains some of the elite Kenyan athletes. Cork-born Brother Colm O’Connell is a world celebrity in athletic circles. He is headmaster of St Patrick’s High School where several Olympic athletes have had their talent spotted and nurtured; he has given them the opportunity to excel on the world stage. Among his many protégés are Peter Rono (Olympic 1500m champion, 1988), Wilson Kipketer (800m world record holder), and Boit Kipketer (former world steeplechase record holder).

I called at Brother O’Connell’s home but, unfortunately, he was not there that day. I could not help but notice that he had made his garden to be almost identical to a rural Irish garden— except that his hydrangea bushes and chrysanthemums and other plants were in full bloom in February. An African priest gave me a cup of tea. Later that afternoon, he also offered the four of us a lift back down to Eldoret in his thirty-year-old Peugeot.

The Peace Corps were working on various projects around Eldoret. Accompanying them gave me a feel for the town. Eldoret town centre is alive, dirty, chaotic, and exciting—if one hits the right places. It is a town where pigs meander randomly around the shoe-shiners in the town centre, and where men sit outside sharpening knives on foot-powered stone-wheels.

‘Anyone fancy camping in Kakamega Rainforest for the weekend?’ Matt enquired as we sauntered through the streets. ‘It’s only a few hours west of Eldoret. It is the only piece of rainforest left in Kenya today.’

We all immediately jumped at the idea; the rainforest sounded exotic.

‘I’ll call a few others and see if they’re interested. I’ve been dying to go there,’ Matt enthused.

There were seven of us who went in the end. The first day we went trekking with an African ranger from Eldoret that Matt knew, who pointed out different kinds of monkey that apparently live nowhere else in Kenya. A lot of them looked the same to me, but my favourites were the black and white ones with the feathery tails. There was such a profusion of wildlife. There were elaborately festooned birds and a snowfall of thousands of white butterflies dancing in the sunlight. When the forest birds and animals spotted us, they tended to scamper, making any photography difficult.

We were all supposed to cram into the single tent we were sharing. But we stayed up all night; no one was ever going to get to sleep in our tiny two-person tent. Matt strummed songs on his guitar to the backdrop of laughter at Top Cat’s amusingly un amusing one-liners. A different ranger, who had more chips on his shoulder than a chip shop could muster, silenced us just before dawn. Matt could not wait for dawn; and persuaded us to follow him through the rainforest in the pitch dark. He promised us ‘a surprise.’