No Hurry in Africa (35 page)

In due course, I reached the mission station of Fr. Frank and Fr. Liam, exhausted after all the delays and an eight-hour journey from Nairobi. It had taken me thirty-six hours in total to get back from Lamu. I found Kitui refreshingly green after the recent rains there.

Fr. Liam up-dated me.

‘You remember the first crops failed when the early rains petered out? Well, when the rains returned, there was a great crop growing until a plague of caterpillars came and ate most of the young tender maize plants. The people were philosophical, as only the Akamba can be—“sure it happens”—and those who could find seed planted yet again. For the third time this rainy season!’

I spent a couple of days resting at the mission house. While I was there, the electricity supply failed yet again. It was back to living with candles, and playing chess, chatting or reading by the gas lamp in the evenings.

The reason I had left Lamu was because Mount Kenya was still calling me. It was partly the Kilimanjaro bug, and partly the fact that I had just finished reading
No Picnic on Mount Kenya
by Felice Benuzzi. The book tells the true story of an Italian PoW in Kenya during World War II. He could see the mountain from his prison camp and was determined to escape captivity by the British, specifically in order to climb to the top. He became one of the first men ever to reach the summit. Then, as was always his intention, he returned to the PoW camp in Nanyuki. It is a gripping read.

I reached the town of Nanyuki one rainy day in early May, a bustling white settler town lying right on the equator line. About 200km north of Nairobi, it is situated below the western face of Mount Kenya. The cafés and shops were all abuzz with gossip that afternoon. One of the white settlers in the town informed me that Tom Cholmondeley, who is the heir to Baron Delamere, allegedly knocked off his second native within a year that very morning. He claimed the victim was a poacher. This news was huge. Just before my arrival in Kenya, Cholmondeley had had murder charges dropped after admitting to having killed a Maasai game warden in self-defence on his estate in 2005. In the days that followed, the Kenyan people cried foul, alleging a conspiracy, and that hidden powers were secretly influencing the prosecution service behind the scenes.

This time, Tom Cholmondeley claimed he was carrying his Winchester hunting rifle only because a white friend had been gored to death by a buffalo the previous year; and that he only shot at the dogs of the poachers. The latter had emerged from a thicket brandishing spears. He claimed they had killed and skinned an antelope. He argued that he was being targeted by the authorities because he is the only heir to the Rift Valley estate of 100,000 acres. He had tried to save his victim by treating him with first aid and bringing him to hospital.

The victim’s wife, however, maintained her husband only hunted antelope very rarely to source food for their four hungry children. There was a groundswell of anger among Kenyans over the incident. It developed into the most talked-about and controversial trial in Kenya since the murder of Lord Errol in 1941. Co-incidentally, Baron Delamere’s stepmother had been the central female figure in the Lord Errol scandal.

The original Lord Delamere was a charismatic character who first arrived in Kenya in 1897, having crossed the northern deserts from Somalia with a caravan of 200 camels. He was a gambler, who bankrupted his estate in Cheshire for what ultimately turned out to be successful experiments at mixed agriculture in the Rift Valley. He managed to breed cattle in Kenya that were better at withstanding disease and drought. His family dominated the social scene, arguably until the present. The news bulletin on the small television in the café that evening showed the 6“6’ heir, wearing a trilby-shaped straw hat and beige coloured suit, being escorted away by police through a scrum of photographers.

In the café, I had been conversing with a middle-aged white lady named Victoria. She later generously provided me with a lift in her rattling old Land Rover.

‘Tom is the godfather to my best friend’s child, you know … The unfortunate family of the deceased man … it is such a tragedy,’ she told me. ‘It is such a terrible pity for Tom, of course.’

She paused to reflect and then said, rather enigmatically,

‘But I am not at all surprised in a way that it has happened to him.’

Victoria was third-generation Kenyan herself. Her only period away from Africa was attending secondary school and university in England.

‘My parents’ generation, and their parents—they were absolutely mad! We are more sensible these days. We have to be.’

The white settlers who were born and reared in Kenya are easy to spot from a distance. They tend to drive huge jeeps that are often as old as themselves; they still dress like English country gentry of the 1950s, in browns or khaki with the obligatory hunter’s hat (though no longer sporting two wide-brimmed hats as the colonials did, in case the sun could penetrate the first one). The settlers talk with posh Eton accents, and refer to ‘Keeenya.’ They frequent their own shops, hotels and bars, and play upper middle-class sports at their country clubs. They look thoroughly out of place in today’s Kenya, yet at the same time are a quintessential part of it. It struck me as I was talking to Victoria that they must be one of the most misplaced peoples in the entire world. Just for the record, the Highlands west of Mount Kenya were mooted as a Jewish homeland long before Israel was founded. A tiny community of Jews lives in Nairobi to this day.

My curiosity about the white-Kenyans led me once to visit Baroness Blixen’s former home outside Nairobi. She was the Danish aristocrat and coffee planter who immortalised colonial life in her classic book
Out of Africa.
The Nairobi suburb of Karen is named after her. Her house and gardens can now be visited. I had been expecting something like Stormont, but it is a lot smaller, though still preserved inside exactly as it was in the 1920s.

The settlement around Karen is one of a handful of well-heeled white communities left in Kenya. Karen’s inhabitants are the diplomats, rich expatriates, and white-Kenyan professionals who work in Nairobi. These people live in gated mansions. Karen is only a few kilometres from the slums of Nairobi; economically and socially, it is a world away from the rest of Kenya.

Not all of the white-Kenyans lived in luxury, however. A lot of the early colonists, even some titled gentry, actually lived initially in mud-huts—rectangular ones where the native huts were round. Many lived isolated lives in remote places; life was a physical and emotional struggle in a harsh environment; some faced financial ruin as well. Good times followed for others, to be sure, as the country’s natural resources were exploited. But with Independence, life has become a struggle again for a lot of those who remain. Victoria admitted as much.

‘I love Keeenya to bits, but I am just about making ends meet each week,’ she told me, dropping me off at the end of ‘Go-Down Road,’ near where my cheap hotel was located.

Early the following morning, I hired a Kikuyu guide, named Alfred, in Nanyuki. Alfred was about thirty years old, had a lean and hungry look, but was very experienced. I also hired a porter who would carry all the food and the cooking equipment for the climb. Compared to the organised assault on Kilimanjaro in early March, this would be a solo run, as it were. I could call upon the experience gained on the earlier climb, so I was fairly confident I could reach the summit which, that morning, was wearing its grey hat of clouds. It is Africa’s second highest mountain at 17,058 feet, with the peak only a few kilometres from the equator.

The three of us boarded the ‘CanniBus’ out of Nanyuki to the base of Mount Kenya, below its northern face. Our conductor was an African albino whom I first mistook for a
mzungu.
He was hanging out the door of the bus taunting the driver of the ‘Princess Diana’ as we flew past it.

As the two bus drivers raced each other, and the passengers egged them on to greater speeds, the bus was transformed into a mobile disco, with people dancing in the aisles to the catchy Kikuyu tunes on the radio.

When viewed from a distance, the dark rocks and gleaming glaciers on the peaks of Mount Kenya can resemble the black and white plumage of a male ostrich. From this, the Kikuyu people named the mountain
‘Kirinyaga,’
meaning ‘the area of the ostrich.’ Their God, whom they believed lived on the top of Mount Kenya, was called
‘Mwene Nyaga,’
or ‘the owner of the ostrich.’ He was also known as
‘Ngai,’
and Mount Kenya was and is sacred land. The missionaries, incidentally, exploited the fact that the Kikuyu had one supreme Deity; they simply told them he was actually their God from the Bible.

The Akamba people, who speak a language related to the Kikuyu language, pronounce
‘Kirinyaga’
as
‘Kinyaa’
So, when the first European explorers like Johann Ludwig Krapf were shown Mount Kenya from Kitui, they heard it pronounced
‘Kinyaa’
(as in ‘Keenya’). The whole colony was later named after the mountain.

It was actually Kenya’s first president,
Mzee
Jomo Kenyatta, who was responsible for the modern pronunciation. He ruled from 1963 until his death in 1978. In a clever piece of spin doctoring, he exploited the likeness of his own name to that of his country. Thus, people gradually began pronouncing the country as Kenya (i.e. ken, not keen), which is closer to the pronunciation of his name.

The Kikuyu God,
Ngai,
who lives on the peaks of Mount Kenya, must have arranged favourable weather for us that week. We enjoyed perfect clear skies for practically the entire climb over the next five days. The exception was an hour or so of a deluge just as we were trekking across the equator to the southern hemisphere. Luckily, I was prepared for all conditions, having retained all-weather gear from my ascent of Kilimanjaro. Normally, a lot of rain can be expected in these parts during early May. August and September are really the ideal months to climb Mount Kenya from the north side. In May, we had the mountain virtually to ourselves.

I ventured up the harder, less used, but more scenic Sirimon route.

‘The trek passes through Kikuyu farms up into the rainforest, then through a bamboo zone, before we reach bog and alpine terrain,’ Alfred told me in his husky voice. ‘After that, you face the higher snow-covered reaches of the mountain. All in all, we will walk eighty kilometres.’

In reality, there was hardly even a trail to speak of for a lot of the way; I was very dependent on Alfred’s familiarity with the climb.

We got off to an inauspicious start. After eight months of refusing to countenance it (except for a policeman near Kwa Vonza the first week), I was finally forced to pay a bribe. As we entered Mount Kenya National Park, the female park ranger saw that my Kenya resident’s card was out of date. She demanded 500 shillings (five euro) from me to ignore the date. For her, that could amount to two days’ wages. Even so, paying the resident’s fee rather than the tourist charge ended up saving me a small fortune.

Alfred sympathised with me for having to bribe the ranger. There followed a slight tirade against non-Kikuyu tribes. It was the sort of anti-immigrant rant you could hear anywhere.

‘The white farmers around Mount Kenya employ people from the fringe tribes, uneducated people like the Turkana. They end up working mostly for food only,’ he complained.

That first crisp, starry, moonlit night, a hyena was laughing outside my tent at Old Moses Camp. I did not find it at all funny! I lay very still for an age, recalling all the Akamba stories about the viciousness of the hyena. Back in 2003, a plane crashed near the summit of Mount Kenya. Hyenas took the bodies. This, it is said, is why the beasts can now be seen patrolling up to a height of 14,000 feet. When I peeped out to see if the hyena had gone, I caught a breath-taking glimpse of Mount Kenya’s distinctive white peaks, gloriously reflected in the light of a full moon. I fell asleep eventually, and woke to a chilly sunrise and the sight of buffaloes and zebras grazing a few hundred yards away.

The second day involved ten hours trekking through moorlands, climbing over rocks, sliding down mucky slopes, and jumping across mountain streams. Now and again, I began to feel some of the effects of altitude and had to stop for a breather.

‘Polé,polé’
urged Alfred.

After several tiring hours, I experienced a truly revelatory moment. Puffing, panting and sweating, I climbed over a steep rocky ridge and there before me, all of a sudden, lay Makinder’s Valley. This long high-sided valley, bathed in brilliant sunshine, swept spectacularly upwards, framing exquisitely the mountain’s distinctively jagged and snowy peaks in all their grandeur. Truly, a home fit for a god! Makinder’s Valley is named after Sir Halford Makinder, the first successful climber of Mount Kenya. That feat was first achieved just over one hundred years ago, in 1899.

On the second night, when I popped the tent up in exposed terrain at 14,000 feet high, I watched it simply blow away like a balloon. My heart leapt. Fortunately, the tent lodged in rocks some distance away and I was able to retrieve it. The strong winds abated, thankfully, and an eerily calm night ensued at Shipton’s Camp. I had a slight headache and got no sleep due to the altitude. But, in all other respects, I felt good. Rock hyraxes invaded my tent searching for food. They look like a cross between a rabbit and a small tailless beaver. They were easily frightened off. Despite the difference in size, they are the closest living relative to the elephant, according to Alfred, though I would often be sceptical about such stories.

We were forced to change completely our planned route for the summit.

‘There is not enough snow on the glaciers,’ Alfred informed me. ‘There would be insufficient grip on the surface for climbing.’

I saw a certain irony in this situation. I could not help contrasting this dearth of snow with the blizzard conditions on Kilimanjaro, where it was the fresh snow that was treacherously slippy. The change of plan meant I had to abandon a day meant for acclimatisation at Shipton’s Camp. I had been looking forward to having the time to explore the tarns and glacial valleys beneath the summit; and having time just to admire the fabulous views of much of Kenya from this high altitude.