No Hurry in Africa (30 page)

‘Father British will give the blessing,’ the driver announced confidently in front of everyone.

‘Sure why not?’ I replied rhetorically.

I stood up and as reverently as I could, started the prayer off; to my great relief, it was taken up by other passengers. The conductor, while hanging precariously out the door, banged the side of the bus noisily as we did three laps of the village. Then, with several extended blasts from the driver of the eight-note melody on the horn, we were off.

The wedding started off fairly sedately by Kenyan standards.

As the ceremony progressed, however, the congregation’s excitement mounted. Soon everybody started jumping up and down, and waving their wooden stools above their heads. Some were scampering and dancing around the church. One reverend, among the several in attendance, appeared to be a few psalms short of a psalter. He was fervently casting out demons from the bride’s womb while bent down shouting at her midriff. It was so surreal that I was falling off my stool with suppressed laughter. What was abundantly clear, though, was that Cecil and his bride were truly head-over-heels in love. Though both were Akamba, they had grown up together in Nairobi.

It was straight after the wedding ceremony that Nyambura proposed to me, while we sat eating a bowl of rice and black beans together on the steps of the church. She was a bright attractive young woman, with high cheeks bones and the round darker-coloured face so characteristic of the Kikuyu. I turned her down. She was not the first woman who had made me a similar proposition since I arrived in Kitui, but no other proposal was as genuine as this one.

‘I am sorry, but I am not allowed to marry outside my tribe,’ I told Nyambura, just as I had told the others in order not to hurt their feelings.

Endogamy was something most of them could understand. They would then carry on with the normal activities of the day as if they had never asked. I think Nyambura was quite disappointed, though. I knew her so well, and sensed that she was good at hiding her feelings.

A few hours later Nyambura told me a story.

‘Gikuyu and Mumbi—they are the Adam and Eve of the Kikuyu tribe, Brendan—lived next to a
mugumo
fig tree at the foot of Mount Kenya. They had nine beautiful daughters. One afternoon, when the daughters were nearly adults, they walked to a lake to fetch water. There they found nine handsome men swimming at the lakeshore. That’s how the nine clans of the Kikuyu tribe began.’

She paused to see if I wished her to continue. I certainly did, as myths of origin I always found interesting. I was reminded of the old Celtic myths.

‘Women ruled the Kikuyu tribe for generations and generations. One night, the men secretly decided to rise up against the women. So they formed a plan. They got all the women pregnant at the same time the next night.’

She hesitated at this revelation, turned away shyly, and then resumed her story.

‘After waiting for eight months, the men seized control, taking advantage of the women’s condition. Ever since that moment among the Kikuyu tribe, two people of the same clan are forbidden to marry each other. It is taboo.’

How this story might apply to our situation was a bit of a puzzle. More than once, I had been asked by Kenyan women to give them a
mzungu
baby. I was just required to do the deed; plant the seed, so to speak. No beating around the bush with them. One particular Akamba woman, as she requested this service, said rather poignantly,

‘I want lots of babies, because I am afraid they will not all survive infancy.’

Around Nairobi, Western influence can be detected in the classifieds of the
Daily Nation,
in the section of the newspaper where people look for love. This was one I spotted (as I searched for a wife!):

I am a 33 year old unattached devout Catholic woman, who would like to meet a devout Catholic man. Should be unattached, never married, passed O level’ exams or above, must be from Nyanza Province, to share love and life with. Should be 32–37 years old and business minded, financially stable, well groomed and good looking, ready for a HIV test, friendship, settle down in marriage soon and have children.

I’m probably too young to apply for an interview, I thought, and I could hardly pretend to be financially stable.

One day when I was drinking at a bar in Nairobi, a red-faced middle-aged man walked in, looking for all the world like a small farmer in rural Ireland. He was wearing a brown flat cap and sported a prominent moustache. Soon he was propping up the bar and being chatted up by the beautiful ‘Nairobi girls’—or prostitutes, as some might call them. Anyway, I had to satisfy my curiosity and walked over to talk to him. Within a few sentences, I was piecing together a picture in my mind.

‘Oh, you were once a priest?’ I speculated.

By way of reply, he mumbled something vaguely negative.

‘You must know Fr. Frank and Fr. Liam in Kitui then.’

It was a long shot, but the few hundred Irish people living in Kenya all seemed to know one another.

‘How do you know them? Sure I used to live with them,’ he responded.

Suddenly he was more forthcoming. It turned out that he had indeed been a priest, and was stationed in Kitui Diocese. He eloped with an Akamba woman, quit the priesthood, and married her. I did not want to pry further.

When I later told Fr. Liam about my encounter with him, Fr. Liam commented,

‘It happens, Brendan. There was another Irish priest in Kitui once, but he stuck it for only a couple of years. He ran off and married a nun.’

There are many pitfalls and hazards for the novice missionary. When I gave Fr. Frank my account of Cecil’s wedding, he told me,

‘One of the Irish missionaries in Kitui, a number of years ago, was not familiar with all the checks needed in Kenya to approve a couple for marriage in the Catholic Church. He had just arrived from Ireland a short time before. The morning after one particular wedding that he performed, an angry Akamba man, a brother of the bride, stormed up to the mission house.

“You have just married a man who already has two wives,” he reprimanded the priest. “This is his third.”’

Easter Sunday was another opportunity for a missionary dinner; the jokes and tales came thick and fast, with punch-lines delivered in Swahili and Kikamba and even in Irish. There was much uncontrollable laughter at the exploits of our Kenyan friends. Yet, we gave our full attention when one of us recounted experiencing an Akamba custom for the first time, for even after over forty years living among them, the missionaries were still discovering new aspects to the people every week. The stories told at these missionary get-togethers were as unbelievable as they were true. Fr. Frank started the ball rolling that evening.

‘I buried a man yesterday. Half-way through the Mass, they were still busy banging away, nailing the wood together for the coffin.’

‘I can top that,’ Fr. Liam boasted. ‘Yesterday I was called out to banish a “genie” from a parishioner’s home. As I was blessing the home, sprinkling holy water on it, I became aware of a witch-doctor—I know the man to see—watching me. He disappeared, then returned a minute later and splashed a bucket of water over me! In retaliation, I suppose.’

As the stories multiplied, a large orange full moon rose dramatically from beneath the horizon, almost as if it were a second sunrise. Just then, the electricity went off at the mission house, immediately followed by the usual loud cheer from the nearby boarding schools. We lit the candles, and pondered once again in the darkness whether it was rain or bandits that had cut the electricity to the whole village. Ah well, I thought as I drifted off to sleep, at least it will stop the fundamentalist preachers roaring their heads off, keeping people awake offering their cures for cancer over their loud-speakers.

Shortly after midnight, I was awakened by blood-chilling screams coming from a home nearby. In all probability, a robbery was in progress. Were we going to be hit next? I lay awake half the night, with mounting fear. Eventually I fell into a fitful sleep; in my troubled dreams, the
panga
—the machete—figured prominently.

A
FTER
E
ASTER,
I
RESOLVED
to seize the opportunity to explore more of Kenya before returning to voluntary work. So I headed off by myself with the intention of spending around a fortnight camping in a number of places in the Great Rift Valley. Camping would be the best option, I imagined; all the cheaper hotels in Kenya seemed to double up as brothels. I always discovered evidence of this dual function throughout the night, when I could clearly hear business being conducted on the other side of the thin walls.

The Rift Valley is the geological fault line that runs from Lebanon, down the Dead Sea, the Red Sea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and as far as Lake Malawi in the southern end of Africa. In millions of years’ time, East Africa will become separated from the rest of the continent, geologists claim. However, when anyone speaks of the Great Rift Valley, the classic image in people’s minds is that part of it that stretches for the 250km or so north of Nairobi.

My first destination was Lake Naivasha, over fifty kilometres to the north of the capital. Lake Naivasha used to be the heart of the ‘Happy Valley’ hedonism, where predominantly upper-class English settlers regularly engaged in interminable drink and drug fuelled, partner-sharing orgies. These decadent colonials launched the reputation of Kenya as being a playground for the privileged, especially in the years between the two world wars. This abruptly ended when Lord Errol was mysteriously gunned down in his Buick late one night in 1941, generating much unwelcome publicity and a medley of conspiracy theories. Lord Errol was the most alluring of them all, a prolific philanderer who happened to be the premier peer of the British Empire at the time.

A sensational court case ended without a conviction. Theories abounded about who could have done it, from any number of jealous husbands, to British agents sent to assassinate the alleged fascist sympathiser. Whoever was responsible, it meant the Rift Valley orgies of self-indulgence were over. Tales of aristocratic debauchery did not go down well in the England of ration books; this was the time when England was at the lowest ebb in World War II. The life and times of the cast of ‘Happy Valley’ are well depicted in the book
White Mischief by
James Fox.

My own interest in this part of the Rift Valley and in its recent high-living history was sparked by a remarkable old boy who had visited Nyumbani one afternoon. A bald, sprightly octogenarian white man introduced himself to me. He told me his name was Rudolf, and was the owner of a company selling medicinal plants to Nyumbani. I suggested that he wait in the shade with me until someone came to look after him. He had eccentric written all over him—and all the more interesting for that. He told me that he grew up at Lake Naivasha during the 1920s and 30s, in the ‘Happy Valley’ period, and had lived his whole life in Kenya. He was softly spoken, with traces of a Germanic accent.

‘My parents, they were descended from Italian and Austrian nobility,’ he asserted with pride. ‘They sailed to Kenya to shoot game on safari and ended up staying for good. Back then, the waters of Lake Naivasha were Kenya’s main airport, for all the hydroplanes on the Imperial Airways route between Southampton and South Africa.’

Once Rudolf had started reminiscing, there was no stopping him. As a young man, he was a witness to the rampant shenanigans among the aristocrats and adventurers of his parents’ generation; the drinking, the drugs, the wife swapping. He had seen it all. I was pretty sure he was not making it up. When I implied that he might have joined in, he denied it—but I was not entirely convinced. Later, when I read Fox’s book on Lord Errol, I became certain he knew what he was talking about.

It was after this encounter that I made up my mind to spend some time in the Rift Valley. Rudolf had persuaded me that there was a lot more to it than the wife swapping of bygone days. Today, Lake Naivasha is one of only a handful of enclaves left in Kenya with a sizable white farming community. Rudolf informed me that the second biggest foreign currency earning industry in Kenya is (would you believe?) flowers. These are all grown on the white-owned farms on the lake’s southern shores, and exported fresh overnight to Europe.

On arrival at the lake in the late afternoon, the bus dropped me off near a campsite on the southern lakeshore. At a checkpoint along the way, the bus conductor had told us in Swahili,

‘I will give a few shillings to the policeman
for tea.’

We all laughed knowingly. It took only a few minutes to pitch my tent beneath a sturdy tree on the smoothest part of ground away from the water’s edge. There were small wavelets soothingly lapping up over the pebbles.

I recalled Yeats’ line about
‘lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore’

It was an inspiring scene. As evening evaporated into night over the vast lake, enclosed by the two imposing escarpments of the Rift Valley on either side, I could hear the call of exotic birds in the growing darkness and the sound of other unidentified creatures all around. I had heard there was a good chance of hippopotamuses wandering around the outside of the campsite at night. At least, I hoped they would remain on the outside. Hippos live under water during the day, and graze on land at night.