No Hurry in Africa (18 page)

Five days after we left Nairobi, Fr. Tom and I were almost 1,000 kilometres away in Lokichokio where he lives; it is the last village before the border with Sudan. I did not even have a change of clothes with me because I only intended being in Nairobi for two days. In fact, I really only had my toothbrush with me. With no change of clothes, I used to wash them at siesta time, and by the time I woke up again, they would be dry. Only once did an African woman catch me without my clothes on. It embarrassed me, even if she was not put out at all.

My journey to Turkana beside Fr. Tom that second week of January was riveting. The rocky road north passes up through the ever-changing panoramas of the Great Rift Valley. This is the Kenyan section of the rift system that stretches 6,000 kilometres from the Dead Sea in the Middle East to Lake Malawi in southern Africa. We were constantly climbing the valley side through a profusion of wildlife in which zebras were predominant; and then dropping back down the escarpment, as amazing and dramatic vistas opened up before us. When we crossed the equator on the second day, I spent the obligatory two minutes with a foot on both hemispheres. It was fairly cold, because we were at considerable altitude above sea level. I was really surprised to find myself in a landscape surrounded by pine trees, not the blistering sandy desert I had always imagined the equator to be.

‘I actually have a certificate at home in Lokichokio to say I crossed the equator,’ recalled Fr. Tom as he was taking my photo. ‘I had spent well over a month as a passenger on a ship that left London back in 1961, when I first came as a missionary. That’s how long it took to get here back then! The ship docked in Gibraltar and Cairo, and sailed through the Suez Canal before we landed at the port of Mombasa. It was a big deal at the time for anyone to have crossed the equator; everyone was issued with a certificate.’

On the third day out, when we reached Kitale, a town north of the equator near the Ugandan border, I visited Sr. Mary Dunne of the Medical Missionaries of Mary. Sr. MM had told me about this Donegal nun who lived in Kitale, and I was keen to meet her. Sr. Mary was running an impressive AIDS project there, having spent more than thirty years living in deepest Turkana prior to that. Sr. Mary and I agreed at the time, with a fair degree of certainty, that we were the only Letterkenny people living in the whole of Kenya then—we were the two ‘Letterkenyans.’

As it happens, I knew her nephew Fr. Paddy well at home; he taught me in school. Just like Fr. Paddy, Sr. Mary was as lean as the Africans among whom she worked. She welcomed me, with a soft high lilting voice, into a modest former colonial home that now housed the Medical Missionaries’ convent. Quite soon, we were doing what all Irish people do far from home; discussing all the acquaintances we had in common—in our case, around Letterkenny. Half way through our cups of tea, an African nurse from her centre interrupted us, and I had to smile when Sr. Mary spoke to her in Swahili with a strong Donegal accent. It was the first time I had heard Swahili spoken in my own accent; how the Kenyans understood a word of either of us I do not know.

As our conversation turned to the subject of AIDS, she told me,

‘Some of the people attending this centre contracted AIDS through the custom whereby the brother of a woman’s husband who has died (sometimes from AIDS), still demands his right to marry, or just sleep with, the widow of his recently deceased brother. The tribes who live around Kitale believe it brings bad luck upon them if the deceased husband’s brother does not sleep with the widow.’

‘It’s the same with the Akamba people,’ I pointed out.

‘Naturally, we missionaries are trying to educate the people out of such customs in an attempt to prevent the spread of AIDS.’

She also told me something of the history of Kitale. It is an old white settler town built on the site of an Arab slave trading post. It is sited in the north Rift Valley and it is where the South African Boers made their last-ever great trek in ox-carts in the land rush of the early twentieth century. A hundred years ago, over a hundred families with as many wagons and horses set sail from Durban and Mozambique and landed at Mombasa. Their patriarch, J.J. Van Rensburg, had recruited families at public meetings in eastern Transvaal. Some were enticed by the exciting dream of what was said to be wild open land; others like Van Rensburg were being intimidated out for collaborating with the English during the Anglo-Boer war.

After temporarily setting up a camp in Nairobi, they faced the daunting Rift Valley terrain once they reached the Eldama Ravine. As there were not even dirt roads to follow through the valley back then, it took them seven days to cover just ten kilometres in their wagons, cutting their way through dense forests and trudging through reptile-infested swamps. Individual Boer families continued to arrive after that, despite stricter conditions brought in by the colonial governor regarding the development of land holdings. It was an attempt to discourage further mass treks. These Boer settlers regarded themselves as ‘God’s Pioneers,’ entering the Promised Land in which it was their divine right to settle. I was gaining insights into the colonial mindset.

‘There are only handfuls of them left around Kitale nowadays,’ Sr. Mary explained.

I got speaking with a few in a shop and with others while waiting at the post office. They struck me as an untamed, gung-ho race, or at least happy to portray themselves as such. They boasted about driving broken jeeps off cliffs—but jumping out just before the jeep disappeared into the ravine; and, more ominously, about shooting trespassers on sight on their farms. One African friend of Sr. Mary’s, after she saw me conversing with them in the post office, assured me with a smile,

‘Those people, they are crazy!’

I was able to appreciate their industry and stubborn persistence as I passed by fields rich in ripening crops—flat unending fields, fertile as any in Meath, which they had ploughed and harrowed out of the virgin landscape a century before. They had stuck it out through the turbulent
Mau Mau
guerrilla uprising, the uncertainty of Independence and what black rule would bring, the anxiety during the President Moi era, and the insecurity of the present day. They are still frontiersmen in a way.

Kitale is also in many ways the last outpost of civilisation, the last frontier of the modern world. Onwards we drove through the high, narrow, twisty mountain pass beyond Kitale, our journey at times requiring
Dukes of Hazzard
style manoeuvres. I recall passing over the remnants of a bridge, forty-foot above the riverbed, that on my way back a fortnight later, I found had collapsed entirely. A lot of the concrete had been eroded in places at the edge of the structure leaving a slippery and treacherous mixture of pebbles and dust in the fragile central strip. At one point, the outer half of the wheels on both sides of Fr. Tom’s pick-up were over the edge, as he struggled to get a grip on the pebbly surface. I heard a ‘hmmm’ sound coming from Fr. Tom as the peril of the situation struck him, followed by a resigned ‘oh dear.’

It was only when we successfully reached the other side and had stepped out for a look that we exhaled a heartfelt ‘phew’ in harmony. Surveying the bridge from this angle, it was clearly in a much worse condition than we had realised. Looking down we noted that a lorry trying to cross the riverbed was well and truly stuck in the water below. After that hair-raising escapade, we had to strike out cross-country, partly through a parched and desolate desert landscape without even a track to follow. By now, I realised why most people choose to fly to Turkana!

At the pass into Turkana District proper, the police had placed a barrier across the road. Here we sat for a good ten minutes until one of the policemen noticed their only customer of the day had arrived. No hurry hereabouts!

On our long journey north, Fr. Tom was able to tell me something about the region. Situated in a wider section of the Rift Valley, Turkana District is bordered by the mountains of Uganda to the west, Sudan and Ethiopia to the north, and the 250km long Lake Turkana to the east. Around three million years ago, the lake area was particularly fertile, making it a centre for early humans. Richard Leakey, the famous, white-Kenyan scientist, conducted numerous anthropological digs in the area, leading to many important discoveries. In 1972, a two million year old skull uncovered was originally thought to be
Homo habilis,
but has since been assigned to a new species,
Homo rudolfensis.
In 1984, the ‘Turkana Boy,’ a 1.6 million year old complete skeleton of a
Homo erectus
boy was discovered (the forerunner to
Homo sapiens
or modern humans). More recently, Maeve Leakey discovered a 3.5 million year old skull there, named
Kenyanthropus platyops,
meaning ‘The Flat-Faced Man of Kenya.’ During the next fortnight or so that I would spend in this ‘cradle of humanity,’ I could not help thinking at times that the current inhabitants did not seem to have advanced much since then.

My first encounter with the Turkana people was when Fr. Tom and I were taking a break under a lone, forlorn tree in the vast lunar landscape near where we had been stopped by the police. It appeared as if there was no life at all between the distant horizon and us, save for two far-off camels. Fr. Tom was pretty sure they were wild camels. I could not get over my first sight of these camels; I was pointing like an excited child. Fr. Tom, slightly bemused by my excitement, smiled.

‘Sure aren’t wild camels as common a sight around here as sheep are to a Donegal man,’ he quipped.

At that moment, seemingly out of nowhere (for there were certainly no people within view when we stopped at the tree), there appeared a man dressed in just a red blanket. He strode towards us, carrying an AK-47 behind his head. Behind him came a woman wearing only a goatskin skirt and adorned with multiple decorations, her head painted red. A tall bony man carrying a spear and wearing a cap apparently made from mud with an ostrich feather on top, followed up. With him were two completely naked children. To indicate our friendly intent, I reached one of the young children a banana. He bit straight into it; he did not know it had to be peeled first. He had evidently never seen one before.

Indicating they wanted a lift, as we made to go after a few minutes, they all hopped into the back of the pick-up for a few kilometres, in what may have been the only vehicle that passed that way the whole day. When they were alighting, I took out my camera to take a photo. I was keen to get a shot of these people in their natural environment, and to capture a scene that was timeless—apart from the AK-47!

Just then, as I composed the shot in my viewfinder, I had two stones hurled at me. It was the man with the spear. Unsurprised by this and in his unflustered manner, Fr. Tom explained,

‘Probably best to put the camera away, Brendan. Some Tur-kana think a photo can hurt them.’

The words ‘to take a photo’ in Swahili
(ninataka kupiga picha tafadali),
inconveniently, can also mean ‘to hurt.’

‘They have a suspicion going back decades that a camera can also steal part of their soul. Some simply have an inherent suspicion of cameras and will not even let a fellow Turkana take a photo for this reason. At the same time, some don’t mind— watch this, Brendan.’

Fr. Tom took out ten Kenyan shillings from his pocket for the man with the gun. I took a photo of them together, no problem. The Turkana were in awe when I showed them the digital image of themselves. Unlike the Akamba who enjoy being snapped, the Turkana often put aside their fear of losing their souls and ask for a few shillings to allow their photo to be taken. Talk about ‘selling your soul!’

We had to keep on trucking another couple of days towards Fr. Tom’s home in Lokichokio. Bouncing painfully over the hardened ruts and corrugations of the track, our progress was slow, not helped by the fact that we were loaded down with relief food in the back of the vehicle. Every so often, we were grateful for an odd patch of asphalt the Norwegian government had laid down in the 1970’s, but which was never maintained. Violent sandstorms engulfed us periodically. Forty-foot high thin red columns of ant-hills were a common sight.

As we advanced further into Turkana territory, I noticed that most men seemed to be wandering around aimlessly, holding AK-47s horizontally behind their heads. I was hoping we would not encounter any of the bandits for which this frontier country is famous. Generally, though, they just smiled and waved at us, then just kept on walking to nowhere obvious in the middle of the sweltering desert.

The Kenyan government has little effective control over this area. Many Turkana people do not even grasp that they belong to a bigger country. One asked me in Swahili, a few days later, ‘Did you come from Kenya, how is Kenya?’ The central authorities seem as unaware of what is going on in Turkana as the locals do about Nairobi. A colleague of Sr. MM was murdered in Turkana some time ago; she told me the court case was stopped because the police genuinely could not trace where the serving policeman at the time of the murder had been transferred.

In this searing desert landscape, Fr. Tom’s home village of Lo-kichokio is a twenty-first century oasis—for one simple reason; the UN and every aid agency for southern Sudan is based there. Even so, the nearest decent shops for most of Turkana District are two days away by vehicle in Kitale. This is still in many respects a stone-age society. The Turkana tribespeople are mostly nomadic even today, building only a small igloo of thatch called a
manyatta
for a home.

‘A common practice is that if an adult dies in the
manyatta,
the body is left there, and the whole family set up a new compound of
manyattas
some distance away,’ according to Fr. Tom.

The Turkana are a war-like people; they raid the Samburu and Pokot tribes to the south for camels, donkeys, and goats to pay their dowries for marriage, usually killing a few Pokots as they go. A Turkana, who was being translated by Fr. Tom, informed me that the standard Turkana dowry is a hundred camels, fifty donkeys, and fifty goats. It sounded a bit of an exaggeration; maybe something got lost in translation! A number of times in Turkana I saw herdsmen directing herds of over a hundred donkeys. Fr. Tom was a rich source of information.