No Hurry in Africa by Brendan Clerkin Read Free Book Online

have married me straight away if I had answered yes. They mistakenly assumed I was loaded, like the rich tourists.
    Just as we approached the bus depot to return to Kitui, Leo pointed approvingly to the road,
    ‘This is the very first pedestrian crossing I have seen in Kenya,’ he announced.
    Such orderliness appealed to the Teutonic half of his personality. Assuming he had the right of way, he stepped out and was almost killed by a bus. A policeman who had witnessed the incident came over.
    ‘They will only stop at zebra crossings if they see zebras crossing!’ he joked.
    Very droll, I thought to myself. If Leo and I were Akamba, we would have blamed it all on a curse having been placed upon him, instead of pure carelessness on his part. Luckily, he was more ‘shook’ than physically injured.
    A few days after we had returned to Kitui on the overnight bus, we were rather astounded when Kimanze’s best friend, Mwangangi, quite casually informed us that he had married his neighbour at the weekend while we were away. Mwangangi, a twenty-two year old mechanic at Nyumbani, was abnormally laid-back, even for an Akamba, and looked rather like a black version of Inspector Clouseau. He told Kimanze and me—and everyone else at Nyumbani—about his marriage only a couple of days after the event, which was the norm apparently. He was present for work on Monday morning as usual, not an iota of difference to his routine did it seem to make. We had not even known he was seeing his wife beforehand, or was even interested in her at all.
    An Akamba marriage becomes official when the father of the bride drives home the cattle that constitute the bride price. The minimum Akamba bride price involves giving the parents of the bride a goat, honey, sugar, and flour. Everything above that is negotiable. An educated girl may, for example, fetch a bride price of a concrete water tank. An Akamba bride price, I was told, can be as much as twenty-eight cattle, forty-five goats and twelve types of homemade alcohol. A working daughter, after all, is a valuable asset and the bride price is a kind of compensation for the family’s loss. Inevitably, marriage often has more to do with economics than with romance. I used to think I could have bought myself a wife or three with the bride price I would be able to pay out there.
    Often in Akambaland, if the rains fail, money earmarked in families for school fees has to go on food. If a choice needs to be made between which children can stay in school, it will always be in favour of the son, and the daughter must drop out. Once the daughter leaves in these circumstances, she is pushed into marriage so that the parents can obtain a bride price for her. She often has no choice in her husband, who may be years older than her.
    ‘Bush weddings’ among teenagers are common, where they elope together, but rarely live happily ever after. The husband usually runs away again after a couple of years of marriage. Nearly everyone in Akambaland is married by twenty years of age. If an Akamba man is not married by then, there is something wrong either up above or down below.
    Speaking of sex! On one occasion, Nzoki asked me,
    ‘What time is it, Brendan?’
    ‘Half six,’ I answered.
    She stared at me for a moment, ‘Did you just say it’s time to “have sex”?’
    I was eighteen years old before I realised I had an accent. When I went to college in Dublin, nobody seemed to understand a word I spoke in my dulcet Donegal brogue. And yet, for some odd reason, non-native English speakers around the world seem to grasp my meaning better than native English speakers. In Kenya, most people who had any English could understand the rhythms and idioms of east Donegal.
    Many Kenyans can speak four or five languages or even more—the two tribal languages of their parents, the language of the neighbouring tribe, as well as Swahili and English. Swahili is used as a common language between the tribes in East Africa, with