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around Kitui, I was called either ‘mzungu’; or ‘Father British’—because the very few white men they meet are priests, and ‘British’ is the Akamba tribe’s generic word for any white person. I heard of one old Irish missionary in Kitui who became so incensed at a small child shouting ‘British’ to him, that he scrambled out of his rusty jeep, lofted the child up in the air and threatened him,
    ‘Don’t you ever call me British again!’
    Sure, the child had not a clue (though one day, he too might become aware of post-colonial sensitivities). I was soon being called ‘Bwana Kyalo,’ an Akamba name meaning ‘born after a journey.’ If not one of these, then it was ‘Mr. Brendan’; or ‘Gentleman’ (I have never had the privilege of being addressed that way before, or indeed since); or that great title of respect in Kenya, ‘Mzee Brendan’—though I suspect an odd time it was conferred in jest!
    In those early days in Kitui District, it took me a bit of time to get used to the toilet arrangements. It was a short while before I was able to master the art of correctly aiming while squatting over a small hole in the ground. Sometimes I just did it outside in the bush like everybody else. Such arrangements were not unknown in rural Ireland in the past. It reminded me of Patrick Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger where he muses: ‘And his happiest dream/Was to clean his arse/With perennial grass/On the bank of some summer stream.’
    In the absence of perennial grass in these parts, you can get caught out badly—as I did one day in early October, looking for a suitable harmless leaf to clean myself with after a call of nature. It turned out to be as harmless as a nettle! Every animal and plant in Kitui seemed to be either benign or deadly, with no in-between. Nancy, one time, told me rather quaintly,
    ‘You cannot die from a scorpion sting in Kitui, but you can die from the suffering of the pain it causes.’
    Toilet roll is a Western invention that has not yet reached rural Kenya, by and large. It was yet another basic commodity to be acquired after a four-hour bicycle ride from Nyumbani. Cleaning and personal hygiene became a trial all round. When we were lucky enough to have water stored in the house, a shower involved splashing cold water onto myself from a basin. The bike ride from Nyumbani was not undertaken lightly; apart from the effort required in cycling four hours under the African sun, I could not cycle uphill because there were no gears, and I could not cycle downhill because the brakes did not work that well. It made you sort out your priorities, even where hygiene was concerned.
    In early October, the day a total eclipse of the sun occurred, when it became strangely darker and cooler for a time during the early afternoon in the middle of the desert, I chanced upon a half dozen naked Akamba washing each other in a small water hole in the dry, sandy, seasonal Tiva River, between Nyumbani and Kitui village. There appeared to be three naked generations of the one family, all enthusiastically waving to me as I cycled by. At the time, I did not even think there was anything strange about this. I was already becoming used to life there.

C HAPTER 3
T O M OMBASA WITH J ESUS H ITLER
    I N MID- O CTOBER, L EO, K imanze, and I endured a very eventful 600km marathon overnight bus journey southeast to Mombasa on the coast. We were to spend a few days there celebrating Leo’s twenty-first birthday. Mombasa is Kenya’s second city, the main port for East Africa, and was the first colonial capital during the 1890s. It had been fought over for centuries, chiefly between the Portuguese on their way to Goa in India, and the Omani Arabs who controlled the ivory and human slave trades. The British wrested it from both. Mombasa is a cross between Bombay and Salthill. It is a bustling third-world city, but it is also the country’s principal beach resort, attracting large numbers of European sun-seekers.
    As