AFRICA BECKONS (Chapter 40)

Dark night, pounding rain

(Kipini village, Kenya’s Tana River Delta, 1979) With the help of almost all the Kipini villagers – both men and women, all except the smallest children - our equipment was manhandled over to our storage hut in the center of the village. Alex removed the huge brass padlock from the stout wooden door, and then everything was piled up inside. Remember, this all happened under darkness, illuminated only by a few flashlights and a half-dozen kerosene lamps.

Whenever I hear the term ‘organized chaos’, I think of that night. Can you imagine figures - tall and short, fat and thin - running hither and thither in the darkness and the pounding rain? When Africans work together in a group, it is common for them to sing, and I soon heard singing break out. The strongest voices would set the rhythm and the cadence, with interspersed shouts of Harambee! (Let’s all pull together!).

Being Muslim, the Kipini women wore black burqas with black hijab head-coverings, so that only their faces showed. What they were stealing from us, hidden under their burqas, was anyone’s guess. You will recall that Kipini’s reputation was for thievery, and I felt they would surely not disappoint. By midnight, everything was finally stashed away in our storage hut. Alex locked it up again, and as the villagers gathered around, Alex, Sally and I each took turns thanking them for their help.

Saidi’s brother Abdullah kindly made available his sizable family home to the three of us, while the rest of the staff found lodgings of their own in the village. Abdullah’s wife cooked us a delicious spicy goat stew with rice, and then we turned in for the night.

The following morning, Alex was up before dawn, rudely rousing Sally and I, urging us to get dressed and assist him with inventory over at the storage hut. Wisely, he first called for Saidi, telling him that if anything that had somehow got ‘misplaced’ was brought over to the storage hut before 10:00 a.m. this morning, nothing would be said about it, and the bearer would be rewarded with cigarettes. You should understand that even non-smokers in the village would smoke, if they could get their hands on a cigarette!

Accompanied by our host, Abdullah, we walked over to the storage hut, unlocked it and started taking stock of all the equipment inside, to make sure that everything was accounted for. Within an hour of our work, it became evident that many of the smaller items were missing: a fine brass ship’s compass, folding stools, pots and pans, machetes, kerosene lamps, etc. I asked Alex what he thought we should do about this, but he seemed unconcerned, telling me to expect most of the missing items to turn up here before long. I was puzzled.

Saidi had evidently wasted no time getting the word out, because a line soon began to form outside the storage hut. Abdullah suggested I go and look outside, and I just could not believe what I was seeing. An orderly line of around two dozen men had formed, each one carrying a missing item. I say ‘orderly’ but since no one wanted to stand at the front and be the first to experience Alex’s legendary wrath, there was a certain amount of jostling for position.

I was surprised to spot Saidi himself in the line. Upon being questioned, he said that a woman in the village had handed him the brass ship’s compass, so he wanted to bring it over to us. I didn’t believe that for a moment. What I did know was that Saidi was quite the nicotine addict, so I imagined him wrestling the ship’s compass out of the grasp of some burqa-clad woman villager, just so he could get the free cigarettes. Alex always had a holdall bag full of cigarettes handy – the ubiquitous cheap and unfiltered Ten Cent brand – and so now the pantomime now began.

One after another, each man came forward, proffering the ‘mislaid’ item with one bogus explanation in Swahili after another. “It was dark, Bwana. And it was raining, Bwana, so I don’t know why I have this thing. I found it this morning!” Sally received each mislaid item, and Alex handed over four cigarettes to each man. By the time it was all over, there were some very happy men standing round outside our storage hut, all of them smoking ferociously. In the final reckoning, we got almost everything back, except one canvas folding chair and one large cooking pot. Kipini villagers were certainly incorrigible thieves. But they were our thieves! (to be continued)