No Hurry in Africa (28 page)

A lot of Kenyans believe nobody in Europe knows how to ride a bicycle, simply because they never see a white person riding one. They were astonished at first to see me on the boneshaker. Many Akamba exhausted themselves trying to overtake me at this novel activity—the
mzungu
on the bicycle—just for the thrill of it.

‘Your bicycle, it is too old. You are rich, buy a car,
mzungu!’
one man jokingly shouted when he finally got past me.

This was greeted by roars of laughter from bystanders. If I managed to beat them at draughts, playing on the dust using discarded bottle-tops, they were all genuinely shocked at the outcome.

‘This game is only played in Kenya,’ I was told on numerous occasions by the disbelieving.

There was almost universal curiosity about Europe. Kimanze, like Nzoki and nearly every other Akamba adult, used to ask me regularly about Europe with the innocent wonder of a child. They had an image of Utopia in their heads. They invariably told me they hoped to visit Europe sometime. I could tell them nearly anything and they would believe it, and I sometimes did. Ireland was rarely mentioned in Kenyan newspapers. One story I remember reading in the
Daily Nation
was about a lorry spilling a cargo of hens that ran loose in Cavan; I also read about someone caught crossing the border at Newry with crocodiles in the car boot. The only other stories from Ireland reported in Kenya in my time were about the Rev. Ian Paisley.

‘Why are you always fighting with only two tribes when Kenya has forty-two tribes and we live in peace?’ Mutinda not unreasonably once inquired before he died, and of course before the outbreak of violence in 2008.

Kenyans think
we
are strange. Mwangangi, Nzoki, Kimanze, the lot of them had worked it out too that I was a son of Sr. MM, Sr. MM was a sister of Fr. Liam, Fr. Liam was the father of Fr. Paul, and Fr. Paul was somehow also the son of Fr. Frank—or variations on that theme. They had it figured out in such a way that all the dozen or so Irish around Kitui were from the one family.

‘All you white people look the same,’ Mwangangi told me.

Even though I knew that many did not get the chance of an education, and may not have been that much exposed to the media or visited other regions, I was still taken aback by the limitations of their knowledge. I remember around this time showing our cook, Nyambura, a photo of me nearing the top of Mount Kilimanjaro.

‘And what is this?’ she asked me with childlike curiosity, pointing to the snow I was standing on.

On an exceptionally clear morning, one could just about see Mount Kilimanjaro from Nyumbani. In the far distance, in the opposite direction, Mount Kenya was also sometimes visible. Of these twin peaks, my sights were now set on the latter—but that would have to wait for another day. Incidentally, it was from a high point not far from Nyumbani that the missionary Johann Ludwig Krapf became the first European to set eyes on Mount Kenya, in 1849. A Swahili slave trader, whose descendants still live in Kitui village, escorted him inland from the coast to confirm the hitherto legendary tales of snow on the equator.

At Nyumbani, I was living at an altitude higher than the highest point in Ireland (Carrantuohill being 3,409 feet above sea level). Before Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest I had ever climbed was Mount Washington in the Appalachians at over 6,000 feet— the site of the fastest ever-recorded wind speed on earth. I recall that, after clambering for hours and hours over rocks and boulders through thick cloud, the curtain of rain briefly parted to reveal a tarmac car park, a steam-train chugging along, and a restaurant at the very top. Such memories used to stir me amid the aridity of Kitui. Climbing Kilimanjaro had not entirely assuaged the urge to climb. I was conscious I might never again be as close to another world-renowned mountain as I was to Mount Kenya. I resolved to attempt an ascent in the coming months.

Phase II of Nyumbani was now rescheduled to finish at Easter. It had been a lot of hard work, and for the most part, I had enjoyed it. Now that I was back, I had considered volunteering for an extended period. But as I had largely worked myself out of the job to which I was best suited, I looked into the possibility of volunteering at one or two other places in Kitui instead. I also contemplated working in the slums of Nairobi. I had been informally offered a position as a volunteer with one organisation in the slums, either in an accounting role assisting people trying to start simple businesses, or possibly working with the slum children.

The slums very rarely attract any white people. Only a limited number of missionaries or aid workers venture in. The inhabitants of the slums are more hardened by their harsh living-conditions, and do not treat a white person with the same sense of celebrity as the Akamba do around Kitui. Nevertheless, the slums are amazing places, and I felt I might have something to offer.

An accidental fire had swept through Nairobi’s Mukuru slum one night at the start of April, leaving 30,000 people homeless. Within days, the shacks had been rebuilt, after a fashion, with the charred leftovers of the fire. During a one-day visit to Mukuru shortly afterwards, when I was making further enquiries about volunteering, I saw open filthy sewers flooding through the front doors of the wretched hovels. The second coming of the rainy season had reached as far as Nairobi by then, and that was the immediate cause of the problem.

The rains that had petered out so early in Kitui, on the other hand, had still not returned—to everyone’s great disappointment. It was now officially the worst drought in the region since 1964. The donkeys, which people used to help carry water several kilometres home, were dying from starvation and drought. Their demise would mean it would be impossible for some families to collect enough water to survive. It could mean people, weakened by hunger, having to walk up to a fifteen-kilometre round-trip carrying heavy jerry-cans filled with water.

In times like these, Fr. Frank’s skills as a gifted water-diviner were much in demand. He could unerringly pinpoint nearer sources of water that could be developed by the locals. Some Akamba had trouble coming to terms with his uncanny accuracy for water-divining; it verged on something they viewed to be within the realm of witchcraft.

‘I have seen years when there have been longer spells without rain, but I have never seen it affect the entirety of Akamba-land as disastrously as this year,’ Fr. Frank worriedly remarked. ‘I don’t think I have ever seen the people as demoralised as they are now.’

Government relief measures required thousands of people to walk anything up to fifteen kilometres to the home of the local chief to collect the single kilogram of food. This was the ration allocated to a whole family. There was a terrible uncertainty about when, or if, another delivery would arrive. Hunger and frustration were testing the resilience and patience for which the Akamba were renowned. Desperation, inevitably, led to an increase of crime. A gang of over thirty hungry people took to raiding homes around Kitui during this time. The mission station—or, for that matter, a white man alone on a bicycle—would make a tempting target for attack. Apprehension filled the air, especially when darkness fell.

At Nyumbani, I had often taken out a blanket and slept on the back of an ox-cart under the breathtaking galaxies of stars. I was having second thoughts about it now. I started doing it initially because, apart from the heat, any beds that there were in Akambaland were all too small for me; the Akamba people, from my lanky perspective, were only slightly taller than Pygmies. Western beds have never been part of life in Akambaland. Even if
I
was having second thoughts, I still sometimes saw mothers and children sleeping on the ground at night outside their huts. They had no choice. This left them vulnerable to poisonous snakes.

Kimanze kept a cat around our house to keep such snakes at a safe distance. I once made the mistake of asking him what his pet cat was called.

‘Cat,’ was the bemused response. ‘What else would I call it? It’s just to keep the snakes away.’

It was a very unsentimental, indeed African, attitude to animals. In Kenya, I discovered, the dogs choose their owners; the owners do not usually choose their dog. The only nexus between them is food. All the ‘pets’ are scrawny as cardboard, rib cages showing on nearly every one of them. Kimanze laughed incredulously when I told him people in Ireland buy specially made pet food from a shop. I discovered too that a lot of these dogs have rabies around this time of year.

‘If they are tame and seem friendly, it’s a fairly sure sign they have rabies,’ Kimanze warned me, ominously.

That lethargy could be a stage of rabies was another thing of which I was blissfully ignorant.

Nonetheless, during daylight hours it was still a joy to live in Kitui. Most people kept smiling despite their tribulations. I was still the Pied Piper. Noisy children encircled me and ran after me when I mounted the bicycle. I still had to cycle for hours when I wanted to get to a landline to ring home. I often carried a young passenger perched on the handlebars as I wove my way around colobus monkeys and greeted happy barefoot women slapping their can-carrying donkeys out of my way—happy because they had found some distant source of precious water. I waved to the women; they danced and made shapes in response to my tooting the bicycle horn or ringing the bell.

In early April, Mwangangi and Kimanze installed an ordinary outside tap, drawing water from Nyumbani’s largest tank. This enabled me to strip off and have a proper wash. It was so pleasurable with the cold running water that, on one occasion, I did not notice six or seven women steal up behind me. I was the talk of the place for days afterward.

‘… and he is all white below his neck too!’ they giggled.

The Akamba were often telling me I was dirty, meaning I was usually covered in a filament of dust.

‘A
mzungu
is always clean,’ Nancy, Nyambura, and Nzoki would insist, implying that I was letting the side down.

In truth, I found it impossible to keep clean with the plumes of fine red dust billowing up every time I put my foot to ground. The Akamba, the women in particular, are meticulous about washing when they find water. Often, they are immaculately turned out in the African fashion, radiant in their clothes of primary colours.

I, on the other hand, tended to dress more pragmatically than fashionably: broad-brimmed hat, brown-chequered long-sleeve cotton shirt and long khaki-coloured cotton slacks. The full-length trousers and the long sleeves were to prevent sunburn during the day and to stop the mosquitoes biting me in the evening. Just as important, long trousers helped me blend in among the local adults who would never dream of wearing shorts. They also offered protection against the multitudes of thorns around Kitui and Nyumbani. As well as being supposedly insect-repellent, the khaki colour has a distinct advantage in a dusty region like Kitui: one’s clothes appear cleaner than they may be in reality even if, in my case, they sometimes failed to meet the high standard of cleanliness that eagle-eyed Nancy and her friends expected of a
mzungu.

Cotton had the practical purpose of keeping me cooler during the daytime. I could usually avoid over-heating too, if I took a siesta in the middle of the day and stayed in the shade during much of the rest of the day. The latter was impossible, of course, when I was working on the farm. But, with the passing months, I gradually became more accustomed to the energy-sapping and sometimes-tortuous heat.

Around this time, the heat had been turned up, metaphorically, on the people involved in the fraud. I had suspected something was going on since before Christmas, but it was finally dealt with by the removal of a financial accountant and a secretary. I was extremely disillusioned by this fraudulence, given the amount of hard hours and money I, and so many others, had put into Nyumbani. Many Kenyans do not set out to be dishonest; but if in gainful employment at all, they come under intense family pressure, even from second cousins, to cream off a bit to help make ends meet for the extended family or to help pay school fees. Far too many succumb in the end, at all levels. In some cases, of course, the motivation is just greed—as apparently it was here.

The Nyumbani workers were to be paid late again in April; it was taking time to work the fraud out of the system. This always spelt danger. Discretion being the better part of valour, I cycled off on the boneshaker to the mission house several hours away, just as a riot looked as if it was about to break out. I was half expecting to be hijacked along the way; but there was an even better chance I would be lynched if I stayed put.

P
HASE
II
OF THE
N
YUMBANI
Village Project was officially opened at the start of Easter week. There were great celebrations from early in the morning: hours of jubilant music and colourful tribal dancing by the five hundred or so Akamba workers, as well as a joyfully riotous gala performance by the schoolchildren from the vicinity. The two fattest bulls had been slaughtered especially for the occasion. Rice was simmering in an enormous iron cooking pot outside, on top of a large fire. The feast was shared by all, and hugely appreciated given the famine conditions that prevailed. Under a sunny blue sky, several dignitaries addressed the large and not very attentive crowd from on top of a soapbox. I was so pleased to be a part of this festivity that all the ups and downs of the past months were forgotten. Even Kiragu returned to witness the moment.