AS I WRITE MY FINAL SUMMARY OF THIS JOURNEY, EVENTS TAKE OVER…

I’m sitting at my own breakfast table in Harberton. I returned last evening from my 2024 trip. I must update the last few days for those of you reading this remotely. The last day was rather overtaken by events…

Let me start with what I was writing before that, sitting in the Nairobi sunshine…

***

My 2024 safari is coming to a close. I dislike this last day, killing time as I wait to leave to the airport for my one minute to midnight flight. I check out at eleven from my old fashioned room at the gentlemen’s club, the United Kenya Club that provides me with a central, peaceful stay in Nairobi, for an economic £24. Then there’s nothing to do but sit about the gardens reading, take a pointless walk in the streets of central Nairobi – which irritates for its lack of ANY provision for pedestrians. Then the long evening wait, until that car ride to the airport once again.

So, I sit and ruminate on another African journey… There have been almost 40 of them now, the most recent seven in East Africa. Increasingly, the motivations for these latter trips has been Family.

There’s something special about African life, that manages to persist despite the increasing influence of Western family values: it’s that wonder of which I’ve so often written, the extended family, with its admirable flexibility: that allows even a distant foreign visitor to become an integral part of African families. It’s more than friendship, for mutual responsibility is accepted, a two-way trade of affection and care. It’s genuine, deep-felt – and about so much more than the money I inevitably bring to the deal – my resource that’s so much more available to me than to anyone burdened with the unbalanced economies of Africa. Latterly, my ability to reset this balance and assist at least a few good people to a better life has become important to my sense of justice.

***

I’ve spent about 30 days in Kitale, with Adelight, Maria and Rico, and the same in Sipi with Alex, Precious, Keilah and Jonathan. Kessup I have visited four times for my hikes with William. I’ve travelled independently for only about three days! I just returned to Nairobi from three nights with my Kitale ‘niece’, Scovia, her husband Webb, and their two year old son, Deon, a delightful charmer, and Marion, staying with her sister while she patiently awaits employment – something that comes infinitesimally slowly – even for a graduate with a distinction in her Tourism and Hospitality degree… All call me Uncle and Brother. I feel interest in them all and in their successes and challenges.

***

My closest brother, Wechiga, of whom I haven’t written much since his return to Ghana following our safari to introduce him to my East African families, has been going through hard times since he flew home. On arrival, he learned that his firstborn, Romanus, about 40, was sick in Cape Coast, the southern Ghanaian town in which he was posted as a police sergeant. He went directly to Ro and found him gravely ill with Hepatitis B, that went undiagnosed in several hospitals, until diagnosis came too late for poor Ro. I knew Ro from the age of six. Sadly, for Wechiga, the excitement of our time in Kenya and Uganda is likely to be overshadowed by his grief at losing his firstborn son. “But what can we do..?” he asks, now busy arranging the funeral at home in Navrongo. A tragedy to end Wechiga’s adventure in East Africa.

***

Long and involved negotiations have taken place in Sipi, since Alex’s neighbour sounded him out on purchasing the adjoining plot. It seemed, even to me, ‘The Money’, an opportunity too good to miss. Alex assures me, with a photo of an agreement written on the page of a worn school exercise book, that the deal is done, witnessed by the clan elders despite some awkward members of the neighbour’s family – some of whom had to be persuaded (in the usual African manner) to comply with the agreement. So, Alex tells me, I am now (technically) a landowner in Uganda! ‘We will plant coffee, Irish and more matooke,’ he says. ‘A demonstration garden for our ‘Jonathan Bean Speciality Coffee’. We are sooo proud of you!’

***

I talk to my sister Adelight in her chicken house, the squeaking of day-old chicks deafening. She’s bought the new brood that I sponsored to get her back in business after the bird flu epidemic that’s gripped Africa this winter.

Later, Keilah rings me to hear Uncle Jonathan‘s voice. I feel that I am doing my bit for the future of my families, against all the odds that life in Africa throws at them.

Scovia uses my advanced bodging skills to build her a chicken coop in her minute back yard, for 20 birds to provide eggs and perhaps some small extra income. Webb’s a chef in a very upmarket resort in nearby Masai Mara, the famous game reserve. He makes a spectacular curry! I work hard with them for two busy days, the only available tools a hammer, a cheap Chinese handsaw and tape measure I must go and buy

***

And there, as I sat writing on my last afternoon in East Africa, events overtook me.

Approximately half an hour before I was due to order a car to take me on the familiar ride to the airport in Nairobi, Rico died in hospital in Kitale.

I didn’t find it altogether a surprise. On Monday when we said goodbye at Kitale airstrip, I wondered if I’d see him again. His health has been failing badly. Some years ago, an insect bite became infected and his right leg has been swollen for years with serious oedema. It’s been getting worse, to the point that he could not stand for long and frequently had to rest. These past few days, his leg became very swollen and uncomfortable. A couple of years ago, he was hospitalised and severely ill, but lived to fight another day. This time, however, I believe a fatal embolism formed and even as we were arranging funds to get him transferred to a hospital with more ICU facilities, he expired. It was too late.

I knew Rico since 1987, our original meeting being on the very northern edge of the Sahara Desert, me on my motorbike and he in an old Land Rover with his young companions Marti and Liesbeth. We drove south together for the most memorable journey of my life and ALL my travels. The three weeks of my life I would so happily repeat: crossing those empty sandy spaces with my good friends, sharing the best scenery and achievement of life. Rico never really returned to Holland, living the rest of his life in Africa, and I never really travelled the rest of the world again. It’s that time that we shared and a love for Africa that bonded us in these later years. Well, life is a delicate thing, and he’s gone now.

What this means for the family, or my trips to East Africa remains to be seen. Time will tell, but it’s a sombre end to my 2024 safari. I left the family in confusion as I rode off to the airport to head for home.

Now I am here, tired from the journey home, and I have to pick up the story and deal with some of the fallout. As I wrote above, the extended family is so much ‘more than friendship, for mutual responsibility is accepted, a two-way trade of affection and care.’

I accept that…

***

It’s an odd irony that Thursday, the 14th and Saturday 16th of March 2024 will be the day of two funerals in my African families. Romanus Tungwandia Adamba in the family compound in Navrongo, Ghana, on Saturday – and on Thursday, Henricus Simon Johannes Maria van den Hurck in the family compound in Kitale, Kenya…