1.
PLACES

2.
The Tana, in Kenya, is a river even most Kenyans have never seen.
And now its ancient way of life is under threat from a super-port.
J.M. Ledgard finds glimpses of paradise in its chocolate waters
Thesecretriver
125
“It seemed to me that I was in a place where a calam-
ity had occurred.” These words, from V.S. Naipaul’s
“The Masque of Africa”, nag at me. The book itself,
published in 2010 as his final word on Africa, was a
meagre offering; for Naipaul, Africa is unspeakably
bland and squalid. The “calamity” was what had hap-
pened to nature in and around Kampala, Uganda’s
capital, where Naipaul spent a formative five months
in 1966 at Makerere University. The Kampala of his
memory was fragrant, but now it was lined with “mor-
aines” of rubbish. Why is it so hard for me to escape
his verdict? Perhaps because he was telling the truth.
Calamity is often staring you in the face in Africa.
Where there was a forest, there is now a bare moun-
tain. Where there was a mountain, there is a quarry. I
am a foreigner, with romantic notions. I love Africa,
and am embarrassed to ask whether its vitality goes
hand in hand with despoilment, or is it carelessness?
Where did Africa go? And what I mean by Africa, if I
am honest, is paradise.Where did paradise go?
I hear elders tell how leopards used to enter the
village when they were children, how the soil was
rich then, the maize plentiful, the trees tall and
thick, and so clouds gathered, rain fell, and streams
were clear-flowing. There was no plastic then, no
acid, no metal. There was also no medicine, no
schooling, no communication, no alternative. I
know that. Yet still I hope for the untouched con- >
CHERYL-SAMANTHAOWEN

3.
PLACES
Rolling on the river
ABOVE A raft of hippos on the Tana.
They need to be treated with extra
care as they are poached for meat
TOP RIGHT A dhow on the delta
TOP Saeed Moro, a Pokomo farmer,
father of two boys and five girls.
The prospect of paying five
dowries troubles him. His other
worries are waterborne: children
overturning their canoes and
drowning, sickness of the gut from
drinking foul water, and hippos
trampling his crops at night
>tinent that existed long before Naipaul shipped up;
verdant, wild, celebratory.
Taking a speedboat up the Tana river delta before
Christmas, I glimpsed it. It was a bright day, with that
tarry heat you get on the Kenyan coast. The waters at
the mouth of the river were turned to chocolate by sed-
iment, and we cut a white trail. The banks were viri-
descent, there was a thickness of life, so many insects,
so many flowers; some of the channels were narrow as
canals, still as pond water, covered with lilies, and all
about was the fulvous flashing of weaver birds leaving
their nests, and gemlike blue kingfishers. I clambered
out on to an uninhabited island and ate under a sau-
sage tree. Squatting on my haunches against the cir-
cling ants and rotting fruit, I felt I was finally in a bit of
Africa which matched my memory of the Tarzan films.
This was a place where a calamity had yet to occur.
FROM SNOW TO SEA
The Tana is the longest river in Kenya. It seeps from
the moors of the Aberdare Mountains, gathers snow-
melt coursing off Mount Ken-
ya, and wends through vast
dry plains inhabited by Somali
herders, before emptying into
the Indian Ocean, about 1,000
kilometres later. It is a mod-
est river, never wide or deep.
Few Kenyans have seen it, or
thought much about it; it flows
through a few hardscrabble
towns. The ranches along it
have been bankrupted, the ele-
phant herds mostly wiped out.
Its short recorded history
has been one of rejection. White men ventured up the
Tana cautiously and unhappily; on its banks Method-
ist missionaries were speared by tribesmen, the Uto-
pian hopes of Austro-Hungarian Freelanders were
shat away by dysentery, and colonial officers turned to
drink and killed themselves. The Germans wanted the
Tana for their own, but in 1890 they traded it for Heli-
goland. Attempts to make the river navigable failed
because it was too serpentine. In 1906 the railway
from Mombasa established a new way into the inte-
rior.TheTana has been largely untouched ever since.
Perhaps not for much longer. Kenya’s population
has grown from 8m at independence in 1963 to 43m
today. Incomes are rising steeply, so Kenyans demand
more fuel, more meat, more sugar. That makes the
Tana delta an enticing prospect. Existing schemes for
industrial farming of jatropha for biofuel and sugar
are just the start. Wherever possible the delta will be
turned to farming and water siphoned off for irriga-
tion; more cattle will be put on the floodplains. Efforts
supported by the Delta Dunes Lodge, a luxury camp,
have allowed locals to present a case for conservation
to the government in Nairobi. They will be supported
by international conservation groups. Still, it is hard
for the poor to fight their corner in a system where
power and avarice are ardent bedfellows.
The biggest industrial project on the Kenyan coast
will be to the north in the Lamu archipelago. At a spot
now occupied by a Kenya-us naval base, a super-port
capable of handling huge container ships is due to be
built. A motorway and railway will move its goods to
Ethiopia, South Sudan and Uganda; oil will flow the
other way. On arid land now inhabited by the hunt-
er-gatherer Boni people, a new city will arise – call
it New Lamu – with 2m people and an international
airport. The reaction of well-heeled residents in the
heritage-protected Lamu Town is predictably nimby-
ish; a more considered view holds that as the develop-
ment is likely to happen anyway, it is better to demand
national-park protection for the Tana delta and its
mangrove forests as the price for the super-port.
PARADISE AND PURGATORY
The line between paradise and purgatory on the Ken-
yan and Somali coast is tissue-thin. When your thirst
is slaked, the birdsong is paradisal. When there is not
enough water, or the water is from a shallow well and
brackish, the intensity of life becomes menacing. On
one trip to Somalia, I swam ashore and spent a night
126
IDS,NEILTHOMAS

4.
and morning without water. Even that was enough to
cause my lips to crack and my kidneys to ache. Income
is usually enough to set you apart: on the Tana I could
afford a boat, fuel and bottled water; the people and
wildlife, the dirt, thorns, torpor and drama of the
pitch-black nights felt like time travel, but with hydra-
tion and torches I was always on the side of paradise.
On my Christmas trip I was met at the seaside vil-
lage of Kipini and taken upriver to a community lodge
called Mulikani. The tide was coming in behind us
like a bow wave. The river was stopped by the sea and
the mudbanks, mangrove tendrils and crab holes were
soon covered with water. We passed groups of hippo.
Anywhere in Africa hippos demand caution, but more
so on the Tana where they are poached for meat. As
we arced around them at a distance, they snorted and
swung towards the boat, agitated, while on the river-
bank flocks of geese, ibises and egrets shot into the air.
A boardwalk of mango-wood planking led
through the swamp from the river. The swamp was
infested with mosquitoes. You had to keep moving.
Sometimes I ran headlong. Yet the black mud floor
was darkly beautiful, enough to make me want to
pause. In some places the mud was smooth as bronze,
in others it had been ploughed up by elephants and
buffalo, or pricked by a leopard, and everywhere it
was littered with baboon turds, studded with bright
seeds and shaped like MrWhippy ice-creams.
The lodge was just a few huts built on top of the
dunes between the Tana and the ocean. I brought food
and water, only to find cooks and porters. In the rainy
season, when I visited, the cost of the astonishing
views to the back, to the river and out to sea, was meas-
ured in blood. The mosquitoes rose from every surface
and shadow. You brushed your teeth and there were
mosquitoes on every vein on the back of your hand.
Below the huts on the ocean side, a path led
through the bush to a deserted beach that curled along
Ungwana Bay. The contrast with the swamp was
extreme – and vitalising. The beach had a breeze, and
no mosquitoes, and it stretched out of sight without
any settlement or sign of any people at all. In its own
way, however, the beach lay gaping, at the mercy of
the human world. The high-water mark was a line of
jetsam from passing ships and pirate vessels, and there
were middens of beer bottles and flip-flops carried all
the way from Thailand. Eels writhed on washed-up
fish, crabs moved uninterrupted in metropolitan num-
bers. There were tracks of turtles, and terns hovered
against a pastel-coloured sky. Nature and garbage,
locked in their endless dance.
people of the delta
There are three peoples in the delta: Orma pastoral-
ists on the floodplains, Bajuni fishermen by the sea,
and Pokomo farmers who belong to the river. The
Orma are Oromo people from Ethiopia. They arrived
after Kenyan independence, tolerated as a buffer
between Kenyans and Somali raiders. They have plen-
ty of cattle, but do not like to sell them. Orma herd-
ers wear Masai-like robes, or else jeans with football
trainers. They guard their cattle from crocodiles with
long knives. The floodplains are flat and exposed. On
overcast days they seemed to resemble somewhere far
away, the Camargue perhaps. The Bajuni are a more
worldly people. They fish for sharks far out to sea and
build dhows by hand from local wood which they sell
to Saudi Arabia. Bajuni sultanates have come and gone
for centuries. Village chiefs and merchants occasion-
ally make enough money to make thehaj to Mecca.
Then there are the Pokomo. They have settled on
the Tana since before recorded time, and there are a
few thousand of them deep inside the delta. They call
themselves “we, the river people”. They work the
river and raise rice with rudimentary tools. In a good
year a Pokomo farmer can feed his family and sell
enough rice to buy sugar, flour, tea, candles, paraffin,
knives, needles, pencils, paper, school uniforms and
sundries. But good years are sporadic, and the Poko-
mo are desperately poor. Some of them supplement
their income by finding work as labourers in towns.
But no matter how hard they work, the Pokomo sel-
dom get promoted. “Too easy-going,” a Bajuni em-
ployer explained. Which may be another way of say-
Orma herders
wear Masai-
like robes, or
jeans with
trainers.They
guard their
cattle from
crocodiles
with long
knives
>

5.
>
128
ing Pokomo have too much of the river about them.
The Tana was always there when I visited the
Pokomo, flowing just outside their shacks, rising and
falling with the tide, in lustrous shades of black and
brown. The Pokomo language, their dances and fertil-
ity rites are entwined with the river. They have words
for certain types of ripple, for the pattern the rain
makes when it falls on the water. All the river crea-
tures have their place in the Pokomo mythology; the
beady stare of the African fish eagle haunts the dreams
of many a Pokomo child. The national anthem of Ken-
ya is sung to the tune of a Pokomo lullaby. In many of
their countrymen’s eyes, it is their only claim to fame.
A failed harvest
We visited Ozi, one of the Pokomo villages in the
delta. The villagers go in and out on dugout canoes.
At low tide the river fell some metres and there was
a muddy climb up the bank. It was a couple of hours
from Kipini by canoe and a similar distance on foot to
the ocean. Ozi looked like most of the villages up and
down the coast: a loose gathering of thatched houses,
chickens, children playing football with packed rags,
sandy paths strewn with thorns and donkey drop-
pings. A few large trees provided shade and in the
centre there was a white square-shaped mosque, like a
mint sweet amid the greenness, with a well outside for
ritual washing before prayers. There was a shop sell-
ing basic provisions, a stall with tomatoes and onions,
no electricity except for solar panels and car batteries.
Nor was there a television signal.
The harvest had failed. There had been a drought,
and the rains had come too early and too heavily. I
headed to the village clinic to find out more – clinic
staff are often a more reliable source than community
elders because they listen to women and are less likely
to boast or cover up failings. The medical officer,
Simon Kariba, was in the middle of delivering a baby.
“Not to worry,” he said, inviting me to sit in an adjoin-
ing room while the mother panted and pushed. “Yes,
the hunger is bad this year.” Famished children were
susceptible to chest infections, he went on, and there
was a lot of bilharzia and other water-borne diseases
from drinking from standing pools in the forest. The
clinic was distributing Plumpy’nut – peanut paste –
to keep infants alive. At least the malaria had abated;
there had been only a handful of cases in Ozi in the last
year (good news for our badly bitten party). There
was a cry from next door. “Excuse me,” Simon said. A
minute later he was at the door. “Come and see.” On a
table was an exhausted mother with a new-born.
Another child for the Tana! According to the last
census, a quarter of the Ozi villagers are under five.
Thanks to the clinic, nearly all of them will reach
adulthood, even if some will be stunted from malnu-
trition. So Ozi is as youthful as it is famished, and even
if the industrial farms fail, even if China, Turkey and
other investors stay away, even if no road is built and
no electricity arrives, life will change radically in Ozi,
as in so many African villages, for the simple fact that
there is not enough land and work to go around.
START WITH THE MANGOES
But this is to frame things the wrong way around, the
morose Western way – neurotic, necrotic, swimming
in debt, as my professional African friends say. There
was much about Ozi that was good and working. The
community was self-reliant. They operated their own
motor launch for emergencies. The diet was clean,
fresh rice and bananas with other fruits and nuts (fish
were too expensive to keep). If the rice harvest was
good and there was some small income from those
working in the towns, Ozi could get by. The mobile-
phone revolution in Africa has shown how change can
be radically good. If there are innovations towards
solar power for irrigation and led lighting for homes,
new building materials, improved sanitation, rain
catchment tanks, and video links at the school for chil-
dren and the community, life in the village may swing
towards the paradisal.
The Pokomo have to start with the mangoes.
Everywhere I went in the delta there were varieties of
mango trees, some localised to saline water, others to
shade, some tall, all fulsome with fruit, overhanging
the river. I was reminded of Andrew Marvell’s “Song
of the Emigrants in Bermuda”, in which the sailors
speak of an Atlantic paradise where the Lord “hangs
in shades the orange bright/Like golden lamps in a
green night.” The mangoes were beyond any weasel
definition of organic. They yielded under the knife
like meat, some sticky and sweet, others tart, all fall-
ing softly to the ground and rotting, with only the
PLACES
Different dangers
ABOVE A snap more like a pop: a
Kenyan crocodile
TOP The too rainy season: residents
prepare to abandon the village of
Korlabe after the Tana burst its
banks in 2010
PANOS,REX

6.
troops of baboons and endemic Tana colobus monkey
snaffling through them. The Pokomo could not afford
to transport the mangoes to market. A new mango-
processing factory is planned close to the Tana, but
the fact that it is being promoted in an election year
makes people sceptical; a factory has been promised
for decades. If there was a factory, or boats to ship
the mangoes direct to Mombasa, the global economy
would surely buy Tana dried mangoes, chutneys, jams
and puréed mangoes for baby food. Properly pack-
aged and marketed, those delicacies would benefit the
Pokomo and protect the forest.
It has to happen soon. Deforestation is pitiless: sat-
ellite data and ground surveys suggest the delta has lost
half its forest since independence. Greenery abounds,
but much of it is new growth, without the density of
the ancient ecosystem, which scientists say is a vestige
of the Congo river-basin rainforest, perhaps dating
back 5m years to the Miocene. Settlements are burst-
ing out at the edges of the floodplains. There are new
fields, some marked with barbed wire. The poaching of
wild animals has reached devastating levels; elephant
numbers have collapsed. The indigent Giriama people
have been brought into the Tana as squatters, allegedly
to shore up support for festering politicians. They are
mindless hunters, killing anything in their path: topi,
kudus and other antelope, right down to the miniature
dik-dik. They are said to work with local officials to
shoot hippos. The Kenya Wildlife Service, which has
a mandate to protect biodiversity with armed force,
seems powerless to stop it.
A NEAR-MISS
When the river is high and slopping, sweeping away
cattle, inundating some smallholdings, there is a sur-
passing weight of crocodiles in it. They slip in from
the submerged mangroves – Nile crocodiles, common
across Africa, but on the Tana they had a different
colour from crocodiles I had seen elsewhere, a col-
our that eludes words – a corpselike white-green on
the bank, unmoving, but in the muddy waters alive,
muscular and greasy as a roiling sickness. They were
most numerous where the channels in the delta met.
You could feel them slapping against the bottom of
the boat. When I absently skimmed my hand on the
water, a crocodile rose and snapped, the snap sound-
ing more like a pop, and it narrowly missed. I hope the
crocodile survives, I hope all of it survives; that the
trees remain, the weaver birds, the swamps. But on
another trip, sitting by the road watching bulldozers
trundle to the edge of the Tana, overseen by Chinese
foremen, I had a dark sense of inevitability; I thought,
I am in a place where a calamity is about to occur. !
Feeling a little off-colour as winter drags on?
Claire Wrathall is ready with a prescription
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