OUT&ABOUT: Enduring lessons from Maasai land

Tranquillity is made of pelican-white. And never is it so ethereal, so vivid than in the gloaming — that interim between the sun’s departure and the coming of night. White on darkening ink is an arresting mural, and it is in this setting that I found him.

Reverend Nahashon Kerantu sat under a shedding tree whose fallen leaves formed a spare carpet in the grass. Leaning back in his chair, his hands on the arm rest, he cut a kingly pose, eyes trained ahead.

He wore a white shirt that competed with the shinier white of his trousers, a serene man made more serene by his wardrobe.

This was in Kilgoris, deep in the heartland of the expansive Narok County and I was fascinated with the land, the hills and depths that had produced David Rudisha and other athletes of note.

Rev Kerantu, an itinerant missionary, had travelled from his home in faraway Narok Town. Since 1971 when he heard the call, distinct as a cowbell, he has traversed the land, carrying in his ancient leather bag a Bible, a change of shirt and vest, his feet shod in tough all-terrain leather, going wherever invited, unburdening the flock of their terrible baggage and life’s many accidents.

Immersed in his work, he wouldn’t ask for a single red cent, but if the people he roomed with were moved they would send him along with something.

Nearly all his teeth were gone, casualties of old age, but that was just about all. While some of his age mates now sat under the eaves of their huts, commanding their grandchildren and chafing at the attendant burdens of dotage, the old missionary couldn’t wait to go where the action needed him.

When I met him, he had climbed into the Book, and was living with people of goodwill here in Kilgoris. The people, he told me, had sent word for him and he had boarded the bus.

“Nilianza wakati wa Kenyatta. Nikatembea nchi nyingi kabisa(When I began my work, Jomo Kenyatta was president. I have been to many countries),” he told me, leaning forward. The countries he talked about turned out to be lands where one didn’t require the passport stamped.

“Mau, and Nai’posha, Nakuru.”

When he mentioned Nai’posha I knew we were on into something. Nai’posha is the original Maasai name for Naivasha. And so as the conversation wove on, it took more colour and texture; the land he had travelled across while preaching bore names that were unfamiliar, and yet I had known their names all along, but only their Anglicised versions, including my own, Nyiro, which I had all along known as Nyeri.

Life, Mzee Kerantu was telling me, is a journey of adoption, of strangers, collision of stars, destiny, gifts, but ultimately, about home.

A PLACE TO CALL HOME

When he was a small boy, Nicholas Nteresian accompanied his friends on a cattle-grazing trip in Ntulele, near Narok Town.

It was in 2003, at the onset of the Free Education Programme introduced by the new government of President Mwai Kibaki.

It happened that on that day the area chief was rounding up school-age children and taking them to school. That is how Nteresian, an orphan found himself sitting in a classroom.

When the bell sounded to end the school day, the young boy, who had no real home to call his own, followed one of the boys he had befriended at school, Saitoti Punyua.

He followed Saitoti home the next day and the next after that. Saitoti’s father, an elderly man named Makeke Punyua, learning of Nteresian’s plight, decided to adopt him as his own.

The land was just stirring from sleep when I visited Mzee Punyua’s home up a rutted dirt road down the road from Ntulele. The farms had been harvested and the air carried in it the smell of drying maize stalks.

Mzee Punyua stood near the cow pen. A tall man with a regal bearing, he nevertheless carried an approachable air about him. A red checkered shawl draped his shoulders. The son he had adopted all those years ago had passed his KCPE exams and there was going to be a celebration.

“You know, everyone belongs somewhere,” he said over the low murmur of cows impatient to be let out to pasture. “When this child came here, I decided to take him in as my son. It was nothing to think about.”

Mzee Punyua and his family lived in a tiny, spare manyatta hut, by no means an opulent place. But there was warmth to the place, a sense of home, a sense of adoption.

ENDURING LEGACY

When the old preacher, Nahashon Kerantu, mentioned Nai’posha and then proceeded to mention other places he had been to in his long life, names now forgotten yet live on, I thought about adoption and enduring influence.

And now as I talked to this old man in Narok who had taken in a boy without a home it all came home: the interconnection of humanity.

In a way, a name is the ultimate adoption, and as I thought about Nai’posha, which translates to ‘the place of rough waters’, in the Maasai language, and Nairobi, which is derived from Engore Nyrobi, Maasai for ‘place of cold waters’; and Subukia, translated from the Maasai word Isipuku meaning ‘hilly land’ and on to Nyeri, which derives its name from Nyiro, the Maasai word that translates to dark loam in reference to the soil.

***

When I rose to leave that day in Kilgoris, I looked at the rolling land beyond the hedge. It was beautiful. Rev Kerantu sat in his white chair and his gaze now burnt like a seer’s; a man sold completely to his mission, asking for nothing in return.

Tomorrow he would pick his bag and travel to whichever village or town that needed him. For a few days, he would be adopted, just like Nteresian; just like all those Maasai names that had been sowed across the land years before the British came and made them lighter for foreign tongues.

We are all adopted, if you think about it.