No Hurry in Africa (33 page)

‘Isn’t he so brave to be travelling all alone,’ the teacher remarked to me as he helped him into his bunk.

The next morning, the boy handed me a page on which was written,

‘Hello, my name is Josh. I am an American Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya. I am thirty-one years old. I have also served with the Peace Corps in Indonesia and Peru for six years. What is your name?’

In amazement, I handed the note to the teacher.

‘Sure, who was to know?’ he shrugged jovially. To while away the hours, I read an account of the tribulations of the pioneers who built the railway in these inhospitable parts at the end of the nineteenth century. The British imported thousands of Indian labourers to lay the tracks. It is estimated that around ninety percent of them died from disease and other hazards, including lions. In the Tsavo region, the lions are large and maneless, and have a fearsome reputation. It is a matter of record that two lions killed and ate 140 of those Indian workers over a period of months in 1898. This occurred at the construction of a bridge across the Tsavo River, about halfway between Nairobi and Mombasa.

The lions became known as ‘The Man-Eaters of Tsavo’ and were the subject of a book written by Colonel J.H. Patterson, the chief engineer on the project. The tale was later turned into a movie starring Michael Douglas. The two lions possessed an uncanny knack of avoiding every ingenious trap laid for them. It was Patterson who finally shot them. Eventually their pelts were acquired by the Chicago Field Museum where, by some coincidence, I happened to view them in 2004. Little did I realise then that I would, within a couple of years, pass through Tsavo.

The ten percent of Indians who survived the construction of the East Africa Railway were allowed to remain in Kenya after its completion. They flourished economically, being very enterprising, and still today control the retail trade of much of Kenya. From time to time, an African would complain bitterly to me that the Indian shopkeepers never gave discounts, or that they would not bargain with them, like the Africans do.

The railways played an important part in opening up East Africa in the colonial period. They also featured in tribal mythology. The Maasai and Kikuyu tribes each had separate legends of ‘a snake’(i.e. train) heralding the end of the power of their tribe. (Similarly, some people in Donegal thought the first journey of the train through Barnesmore Gap, in 1882, was the coming of the ‘Black Pig,’ that Saint Colmcille prophesised would mean that the end of the world was imminent). Masaku, the father figure of the Akamba tribe—after whom the Akamba capital Machakos is named—also prophesised the coming of ‘a long snake.’ The Kikuyu legend foretold that this event would be linked with the coming of a white tribe. The white tribe quickly made themselves at home. Back when Kenya was an infant colony, there were special cages with chairs on the front of the train engines where adventurers, who had landed off the boat at Mombasa, could fire at game animals on their way inland to Nairobi.

We were only an hour late arriving in Mombasa in the morning, though of course I did not mind in the least; seasoned travellers might allow a window of three hours for delays on the line. I was reminded of Percy French’s song,
Are you right there, Michael, are you right?
The West Clare and East Africa railways had much in common, mainly uncertainty. But, at least, it is relatively safer than travelling to Mombasa by road. And I had managed a few hours of restful sleep.

I caught the ‘Hitler’ bus (you could not make it up!) heading north along the coast. There was a ‘relief’ stop after a while, involving mass urination by the roadside. I alighted at Gede, near Malindi, about 100km north of Mombasa.

Gede, which today consists of extensive ruins in a good state of preservation, was an important Swahili city-state six hundred years ago. Mystery surrounds this historic city. There is no written record of its existence; yet archaeologists have discovered elaborate tombs, mosques, and an impressive palace. It was inexplicably abandoned in the 1700s, and swallowed by the forest; it was re-discovered less than ninety years ago.

I explored the ruins with an English girl I had met on the ‘Hitler’ bus. Among the ruins, Amanda’s eagle eye lit on a fine fragment of what was surely an ancient Chinese glazed bowl. It is known that the coastal Swahili people traded with the Chinese as well as the Arabs, the Persians, the Indians and, later, the Portuguese. The reason Gede was left untouched and reasonably intact, apparently, was because the local Swahili population feared the ghosts that are reputed to haunt the ruins.

Standing in the annex of the ancient palace, I had a sense of the diversity of cultures in East Africa. The coastal Swahili people are undoubtedly African (one of the Bantu peoples), but their blood and culture is heavily infused with influences from the Arab and Eastern civilisations they traded with over the centuries. The Sultan of Oman ruled the Kenyan coast for a long time. Swahili music around Malindi and Mombasa (known as
Taarab)
sounded very Indian to my admittedly untrained ear.

Giant baobab trees dominated the forest around Gede. The monumental trunk of the baobab is sometimes so thick that it takes more than half a dozen people with arms fully extended to stretch around the circumference. These ‘upside-down’ trees interested me, not just because of their outlandish appearance but also because of the legends attached to them.

‘The baobab was very late for a meeting of all the trees in the world,’ my friend Mutinda, the medicine man, once told me. ‘He kept them all waiting. The other trees were so annoyed with him that they uprooted him and stuck him in the ground upside down. That is why it has no leaves and its branches look like roots.’

In another version, Nzoki claimed,

‘The baobab became too big and greedy, blocking God’s view of his other trees. God was furious. He ripped up the baobab and planted him upside down to punish him.’

In yet another version, God permitted the devil to choose and plant a tree. Being the perverse type, Lucifer planted a tree with its roots in the air—the baobab.

In the nearby coastal town of Malindi, I found lodgings in a cheap hotel. In the bedroom stood a wonderful, ornately carved, four-poster bed in dark wood that would not have looked out of place in the Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi. It was one of those pleasant surprises one finds from time to time when travelling in Africa. Despite the fact that the lock on the door was broken and the tap lifted off the dirty sink, I was looking forward to a good night’s sleep. But, as so often with the cheapest accommodation, I soon discovered that the establishment doubled as a doss-house. I fell asleep to the sounds of the prostitutes at work next door. This hotel had signs for ‘badrooms’ instead of ‘bedrooms.’ It definitely was not an intentional joke on the part of the owners, anymore so than the sign that insisted, ‘No
miraa
(a popular drug) and no unmarried women allowed.’

The following day, I was part of a convoy of buses protected by the Kenyan army as we passed through Somali tribal bandit country. This part of the coast is close to the Somali border and has a reputation for lawlessness, and not just on land. In recent times, Somali pirates have ambushed cruise ships and freight vessels out to sea. Any confidence I had in the protection of the Kenyan soldiers was somewhat weakened by the observation that the broken door on my bus had been repaired with cardboard!

The Swahili passenger sitting next to me did nothing to increase my confidence.

‘Somali bandits came inside Kenya and snatched two lion cubs off their mother,’ he told me in slow English. ‘The lioness went on the rampage to recover them. She killed three innocent humans before being captured by rangers.’

The 200km journey north from Malindi along untarred gravel roads was slow and challenging. It meant that it was dark by the time I boarded the over-crowded wooden Arab dhow bound for the fabled Swahili island of Lamu.

Lamu town sits on an island that is part of an archipelago, several kilometres from the Kenyan coast near Somalia. We sailed out in the dark without lifejackets or lights, guided to port by the glistening lanterns of Lamu’s seafront. I knew I had arrived somewhere different when, upon stepping off the pier, I read the sign, ‘No parking of donkeys here.’ My first impressions were of a town caught in a time warp. It was dirty, smelly, medieval and vibrant, and untainted by tourism and modernity. It was like what Marrakech must have been long ago, or an Arab version of the old-towns of the cities of Europe hundreds of years ago.

I had been told that the pace of life among the narrow alleyways of Lamu was slow. That was very true for most of the day. Lethargic is too animated an adjective to describe it. But I had arrived, purely by chance, right in the middle of the exciting annual
Maulidi
festival—hence the over-crowded dhow—and the place was buzzing. The festival takes place every year towards the end of April to celebrate the birth of the prophet Mohammed. The people are overwhelmingly Muslim, and Lamu society deeply traditional.

The festival was in full swing for several days after I arrived. The narrow streets were jammed with men dressed neck-to-toe in pristine white
khanzu
robes and the occasional green turban. The women were a lot less flamboyant in their black
bui-bui
robes, with only their faces on show. Some were in full
purdah.
But enjoyment was the order of the day. Colourful parades snaked through the tight alleys, with drumming, dancing, singing, pushing and shoving. I pushed and shoved with the rest to get a better view. Flags and swords were being waved in the air. It reminded me of a frenetic disorganised version of a large Orange Order parade I had witnessed in east Donegal, just before I arrived in Kenya.

On the morning of my second day there, I was reminded more of the Galway Races than Raphoe. There was a donkey race that generated impassioned shouting and cheering which echoed through the lanes and alleyways. The balconies along the seafront were thronged with people watching one of the last great dhow sailing races anywhere in the world. From upstairs windows with shutters thrown back, spectators were waving bright scarves, and giddy crowds on the ground below were cheering on their favourite competitors. One of the dhows was manned by a Rasta wearing only Y-fronts. Another one was captained by a huge overweight Swahili man who was wearing only what looked like a sarong around his lower half. No, definitely not something you would witness at an Orange parade.

Life around the archipelago, and indeed along the coast, revolves around these wooden sailing dhows; they are used for fishing, ferrying, and transporting freight. The dhows are still used for trading to as far away as Zanzibar, and even Arabia on rare occasions. Lamu is one of the very few places remaining where dhows are built. They were still being constructed by hand using age-old methods and skills; indeed, as I saw myself, even the nails that hold them together are crafted locally in simple forges.

Life in Lamu, inevitably, is beholden to the timing of the tides; the keening from the many mosques also gives structure to the day. There are no vehicles or proper roads on the island (only sandy paths), and no ‘new-town’ district has developed. No roads, no cars—no hurry. Men ride on donkeys, steering them through clusters of children who are playing marbles in the six-foot wide passageways between the ornate three-story stone tenement buildings. Many of the latter have elaborately carved and decorated doorways. Amongst the maze of unpaved alleyways other men sit, totally absorbed in African board games (mainly boa). There are animated exchanges with the passers-by on donkeys over the next move. It is medieval, but the place throbs with life. The markets are particularly noisy. I passed one man as he placed the decapitated head of a cow on the ground beside the antique weighing scales he had just lifted it from. He wanted to sell me the head; it was an offer I could easily refuse!

One late afternoon, I spotted small boys trapping a rat near the pier. They tried to drown it in the sea by throwing the cage they had captured it in into the water. The rat escaped and started swimming. The boys, all six of them, jumped in and swam after it. They were having great craic. It was an unusual little drama and I found it amusing. It was high tide, and the water was overflowing onto the promenade. Men were urging their donkeys through the deepening water.

The women may be largely hidden under their black
bui-bui,
but if you look closer, you will see young smiling faces giggling as they size up and comment on the men passing by. If you look closer still, you will sometimes see fleeting evidence of brightly coloured lingerie underneath the dark robes. Many girls have intricate
henna
tattoos painted on their feet and on their hands. They are out to make an impression, to the extent that they are allowed. The
Maulidi
is not just a religious occasion; it doubles as a matchmaking festival among the islanders of the Lamu archipelago. A majority of Swahili marriages are arranged by the families, in accordance with Muslim practice. Interestingly, in these parts, the would-be wife can refuse to marry, but the would-be husband cannot. It seems a little unfair to me!

Near Lamu, a 15km-long white sandy beach stretches out invitingly. Hardly anybody was there in late April, except for a number of women covered in full
purdah.
I introduced myself to the only Westerners present, two blond English girls taking a break after volunteer work in South Africa, and a young Frenchman who was on time-out from teaching in Ethiopia. Much as I enjoyed mixing with local people on my travels, it was always good to meet fellow Europeans from time to time.

Together we headed for the ‘Seafood Restaurant’ beside Lamu pier. The waiter presented us with a menu of twenty different kinds of fish. Having studied the menu, we ordered our food.

The waiter returned much later.

‘Sorry, we don’t have any fish today,’ he apologised.

He did, however, create a pint of fresh fruit juice for each of us before our eyes from a choice of any tropical fruit imaginable; and it only cost forty shillings (roughly forty cent). For that taste and those prices, we had more than one.