No Hurry in Africa (8 page)

‘I do my volunteer work here, Brendan. It is very worthwhile. Children come here who have lost both parents and are fed by us, and we educate teenagers on the dangers of AIDS.’

I liked that about Kyalo, and the people of Kibera. They seemed to help each other. Maybe I just had not yet witnessed the sinister underbelly where crime was a way of life.

The next day I ventured into Mukuru, Nairobi’s slum of slums, with two local youths from Kevin’s centre as bodyguards. Neither spoke English, so communication was though Swahili and some hand signals. Mukuru is a much more recent slum than Kibera, and a good deal smaller. It is a crammed labyrinth of tiny never-ending passageways between simple corrugated iron shacks, requiring the inhabitants to jump over open sewers and dodge out of the way of the happy children who seem oblivious to their squalid surroundings.

Altogether, Mukuru is a very interesting place. At one point, I saw a man running past in the nip. I found this rather odd. Then another followed him with no clothes on either, and yet again another, a couple of minutes later. A few bystanders were laughing as all this happened. It turned out to be the lighter side to Nairobi crime. Evidently, they had turned a corner and were mugged of everything including all their clothes. With all this serial stripping going on, I was grateful I had my two bodyguards to make me feel a bit more secure. A definite hint of menace clung around Mukuru, though—more so than in Kibera.

Many Kenyans are overly friendly—the rural ones are usually genuine and try to give you stuff you do not even want; whereas the Nairobi people may be setting you up to be mugged. A generalisation, I know, but that was my experience. My favourite conman was a youthful one I encountered that weekend. His head was strangely rectangular; he had hunched shoulders, and he just exuded an aura of shiftiness at fifty paces. He operated on Nairobi’s Kenyatta Avenue, the city’s main street (named after the country’s first president). He sauntered past me furtively, and about three minutes later was briskly trying to keep up beside me, walking in the same direction. As if it was the most casual remark in the world, he asked me,

‘Gentleman, where are you from?’

As he cantered beside me, I just kept looking ahead and striding forward. But after he had asked me a few more times, I answered,

‘Ninatoka Kitui. Unaenda wapi bwana?
’ (I’m from Kitui, now where are you off to, sir?).

This momentarily stumped him. He pointed up the street, and I could sense the permutations of possibility running around his mind. Finally, he piped up,

‘But where are you from before Kitui?’

Continuing at a good pace, and knowing that I could usually handle these people on my travels, I told him,

‘Ireland.’

I imagined that, like the Akamba, he probably would not have a notion where it was. But he became animated.

‘Oh, really, I will be studying medicine at Trinity College in Dublin next year.’

Now it was my turn to be stumped. I asked him a few questions about Trinity, about Dublin, and about medicine courses, all the time looking ahead of me and trying to lose him as I ploughed straight through road crossings. Fair play to him though, he had his homework done and answered every one of them correctly. Then he became fed up with my interest in his supposed studies and he landed the punch line.

‘But I am a refugee from Sudan and I need money to go to Tanzania before I can go to Ireland.’

‘Sorry, but I have only fifty shillings left on me,’ I replied.

This was the truth, and I opened out my pockets to show him, while still galloping onwards to the top of the street.

He seemed to be again momentarily confused, but quickly reverted to what he must say to everyone else when they ignore him or refuse his request. It was an interesting change of tack.

‘But you don’t like to talk to Africans, you don’t like to give to needy Africans, you are a racist perhaps?’

‘I give to the people in Kitui. They need it more than you. I cannot give to everyone.’

‘And what about me? You are in my country, Kenya.’

‘Are you not a refugee from Sudan, sir?’

The two of us grinned widely at this skit into which our encounter had developed.

‘Just some shillings?’ he pleaded, as he held out his hand in front of me to try and slow my pace.

‘
Hapana, kwa heri bwana,
’ I countered.

Hapana
is a great Swahili word that means ‘no, and that’s the very last word on the matter,’ while
kwa heri
when used in a certain tone is a firm but very polite way of saying ‘get lost and good riddance.’

Nearly every weekend that I was in Nairobi after that, I met him again on the main street. I would now be from France or Israel or some such place and he would be studying veterinary in Toulouse or reading theology in Jerusalem. Each time he needed a couple of shillings to go to Tanzania before he could fly to his university. This happened about eleven or twelve times in total, and he never seemed to remember me once.

Much later, Sr. MM told me that a male Irish friend of hers, who was over visiting, was arrested by ‘police’ for talking to ‘a known criminal.’

‘He was taken to a back room of some dingy building. The police were demanding thousands of euros for bail money. He was completely traumatised by the event, poor man. Of course, the “police” and “the known criminal” were all in it together. It was a set-up to scam money from a white person,’ she concluded.

Sr. MM began to describe the ‘known criminal’ towards the end of her tale—and he sounded uncannily like my friend, the Sudanese refugee!

‘Most Nairobi villains take a simple approach,’ said Kevin, after I told him my tale. ‘They threaten to throw their excrement in your face if you decide not to comply with the request to empty your pockets. It happened to me once, in fact, when I was in the back seat of a car stopped at a junction in broad daylight. For some reason, most people faced with this option pay up! To stay relatively safe in Nairobi,’ he continued, ‘you just have to stay close to crowds of people most of the time. Mob justice means the thief will be stoned or burned alive if he tries to mug you in a busy place. Otherwise, thieves go to crammed prisons that are like battery hen-houses—indefinitely—for stealing as little as the equivalent of three euros.’

As a rule in Nairobi, it is inadvisable to engage in conversation when queuing or waiting with others, lest the conmen get useful information from you on your movements. It is best to walk around with just a few hundred shillings and no phone or wristwatch—or even spectacles, which oddly seems to be a favourite of Nairobi’s thieves as well. Kiragu once recounted to me how, one time, he was flagging down a bus when a man just grabbed the glasses off his head and ran away. He knew lots of other people in Nairobi to whom this happened as well.

‘You can’t run after them when you can’t even see them,’ he chuckled.

I got the runs that weekend. By now, I was totally unused to the ‘richness’ of the normal food that I was eating with Kevin in Nairobi, after dining on the rather limited menu around Kitui. I took the opportunity to stock up on a few provisions that were not readily available near Nyumbani, such as toilet roll, a big bottle of drinking water, fruit, ‘nice & good shampoo,’ the
Daily Nation,
and, very importantly, batteries for my torch.

When I returned to Nyumbani after the bright lights of Nairobi that weekend, I began noticing how life revolves around light and darkness in Akamba society. Even the light of a full moon changes habits. For example, people may work at their crop or fetch water under a full moon. Moonlight—and there’s a lot more of it in Africa—extends the Akamba day in the same way as electricity does in Ireland. Many of their tribal ceremonies are guided by the phases of the moon.

Even slight changes in the weather become more noticeable around the phases of the moon. However, when there is no moon (or a ‘black moon’ as some of them refer to it), active life abruptly ceases. There are no lamp-posts to keep the day alive. People tend to rise at dawn and go to sleep once the sun drops, their lives determined by the rhythms of the sun and the moon.

Many of our nights in Nyumbani were spent sitting on rocks around a campfire, just having the craic. There was nothing else to do; we were so remote. Leo, Kimanze, Kiragu, the others in the house, and I would spend hours under the star-filled sky simply chatting, occasionally singing, and indulging in some light-hearted banter in the warm air. The campfire was simply to keep any wildlife at a distance. The night after I returned from Nairobi, I bumped straight into Kimanze by accident outside in the dark. He was standing in a basin—in the middle of washing himself. I was forever bumping into black people at night, walking straight into them because there were no lights about. Quite literally, I could not see them in the dark unless they were smiling! It was a serious problem in a place where there is so little artificial light after the sun sets.

On Halloween night, at my suggestion, we had a bonfire that probably could have been seen half way to Sudan, possibly the only Halloween bonfire in Africa. It was massive, from all the vegetation that had been cleared for the farm and buildings. The wood was so dry it burned out fairly quickly, though. They do things differently in Bavaria, so I briefed Leo on the reasons behind the pagan Halloween bonfire. The irony was not lost to him. Here was I, who spent so much of my time visiting the Christian missionaries, creating a pagan fire supposedly to ward off the evil spirits let loose on that night, deep in the dark heart of Africa.

The watchmen duly arrived with their bows and arrows after the fire burned out. They thought our house had burnt down; we had forgotten to tell them about the bonfire. For all the use they would have been if the house really did burn down! Were they about to dowse the flames with their bows and arrows?

One of the joys of night-time at Nyumbani was watching the cosmic constellations, especially when there was no moon. With no light pollution, the stars actually twinkle, as in the nursery rhyme, and the Milky Way actually looks milky. Venus and Mars are clearly visible and the endless cascade of shooting stars is spectacular. The equator is perhaps the best place in the world to view the constellations, with billions of stars competing for space in the sky. Awe-struck, I used to stand on the highest point in the area, and for miles and miles around, I could see no artificial light from any car or home or streetlight, and hear no sound except the occasional shrill cries of birds. At times, it was the most complete silence imaginable.

Sometimes I would fall asleep up there. (Nyumbani later built a huge concrete water tank on the high spot that had been my observatory, and I would climb up on top of the tank and lie down.) On other occasions, I listened to the sounds of nearby drumming for hours and hours after dark. The rhythmic pounding was an accompaniment to the elders exorcising evil spirits from possessed people in their huts, in an Akamba ceremony that Mwangangi informed me was known as ‘
Kalumi.
’

T
HERE WAS A FAMINE IN
K
ITUI
district when I arrived in September. The situation was becoming more and more desperate, so that by early November it was even beginning to attract the attention of Western media. Officially—and somewhat euphemistically— termed a ‘food shortage,’ many people were going maybe three or four days between meals, and that probably consisted of cornflour. The problem, that many in the West do not realise, is that there is no such thing as social welfare in Kenya. It is left to the missionaries or aid agencies to provide help in times of crisis.

At the height of the famine during November and December, I was always amazed that people, who had no food to feed themselves or their children, would always make sure that I was fed, if I was visiting their home. This is a special trait among the Akamba; they are extremely generous and hospitable. I felt uneasy and slightly guilty eating their precious food, but knew they would be offended if I refused. They took great pride in hosting a white man. They would be the talk of the area for days and their children the talk of the school. I would always bring something simple like shiny stickers as a thank you. These were normally for their children, but the adults found great fascination with such mundane Western objects. It really was another world.

I found out that some people, whom I knew very well, could not even afford bread every day for their families. This included people like Nancy (who was still warning me about baboons); people who I thought were fairly well off for Akambas. I saw Nancy eating paper from a copybook that she said was for her ‘iron,’ and eating soil from a small mound created by ants on the corrugated iron for her ‘calcium.’ Nzoki told me this ant-soil is beneficial for a child in the womb. Nzoki still breastfed her child who was nearly three years old. I even witnessed a baby suckling his grandmother once. I would never know what it is really like to be living with such hunger, or the insecurity of finding the next meal. As a European in Kenya, I could always get to an ATM within a few days, or take the next available flight home.