Kenyans Shut Down Country in a Frantic Rush Home for Easter Rites

No resident with an appreciation for the folkways of Kenya would expect to get much work done in a government office in the week before Easter. Civil servants have mostly disappeared by Wednesday, and those who are left are nonplussed when presented with even the most routine forms to be stamped, signed or filed. The corridors of bureaucracy, normally so teeming with frustration, seem curiously devoid of life.

Life has moved, instead, down to the country bus station, not far from the center of town, where the Easter crush of homeward-bound Kenyans begins at midweek. The downtown streets seem filled with citizens carrying small suitcases and cardboard boxes lashed with twine. A visitor might well conclude that some mysterious evacuation order had been issued.

Easter is a special holiday here, and all in all, one of the nicest of the year. Kenyans celebrate it by going home.

In part, it is of course a religious observance, for the majority of Kenya’s 19 million citizens are Christians. The churches are filled on Good Friday and Easter Sunday, with the faithful turned out in their Easter best, and choirs running through repertoires rehearsed for weeks in advance.

A Seasonal Festival

But it is also a kind of Thanksgiving and an unofficial festival of the turning of the seasons, for Easter, in this latitude, marks the beginning of the rainy season. For some, in this heavily agricultural country, it marks the time between planting and the hope for harvests to come.

Kenya’s last harvest was splendid, a bumper crop of white maize (a staple food here) is already in the larder, and the government is looking for an export market. The Kenyan government has even contacted the U.S. Embassy about whether it can possibly sell the yellow maize it was sent early last year in anticipation of food shortages. All seems well.

In some parts of the country, the rains have already begun. In the highland areas around Nairobi, the weather is glorious. Through the middle of the day, the towering clouds float like galleons across the blue sky, dragging their vast shadows over the still brown plains. Toward late afternoon, the clouds pile up, bruise-blue at the bottom, and lines of rain can be seen slanting to the earth. It is another good omen.

Easter is a four-day holiday for Kenyans. Businesses are closed on Good Friday and on the Monday after Easter, and to the hundreds of thousands of Kenyans who work in the capital but whose roots are firmly in the villages of their childhoods, the idea of remaining in Nairobi over these four days is unthinkable.

“It would be very bad to be in Nairobi this weekend,” said Mwinde Mutua, watching wistfully as a bus named “Jacob the Leader,” packed to overflowing and piled high with freight, pulled out of the country bus station bound for his hometown of Machakos. “You would be here alone, because all your friends would be gone and all your relatives would be home.” Mutua already had been waiting four hours and said he would be willing to wait as long as it took to get aboard a bus.

Since everyone has the same idea, the problem is getting out of Nairobi. Most transportation in the country is provided by private bus companies, some operators with a single vehicle, some with small fleets. They are the terror of the nation’s highways, a source of considerable death and destruction and no small public outrage.

The bus operators were not displaying any unusual sweetness and generosity in observance of the holiday. Complaints of price gouging were widespread. Some bus conductors were taking bribes. On Friday morning, at the height of the crush, they moved through the sweating, shoving crowd like triumphant politicians, pausing now and then to bestow a favor.

At a gas station on the edge of the teeming bus lot--an area roughly the size of two football fields set in the center of a busy open market--five men with long-handled brushes were scrubbing down the bright blue skin of the “Mwamba Shuttle” (virtually all buses here are emblazoned with nicknames), while a line of passengers pressed forward hopefully, pleading for one of the 62 seats on board.

The Mwamba Shuttle was bound for western Kenya--with stops in Nakuru, Kericho, Kisumu and Kakamega, a distance of about 300 miles. Keli Mutisya, 36, one of two drivers on the bus, stood by, smoking a cigarette, while he waited to take the wheel for the outbound leg of the journey.

“We are making two round trips a day,” said Johnston Ogonji, 35, the manager of the bus. “We are moving so much that some people think we have two or three buses, but we are only one.” The bus, he said, pauses only long enough to fill up with gas, take a quick wash (“appearance is important”) and load up with passengers.

Khat ‘Keeps Us Awake’

“Yes, we get tired,” said Mutisya, the driver, “But we eat the miraa, and it keeps us awake.”

Miraa, sometimes called khat, is a leafy plant, a mild narcotic, chewed by bus drivers and long-haul truckers, for its stimulant effect. Some say the headlong reckless driving on Kenyan highways results from drivers hopped up on miraa. “Miraa is good,” Mutisya said. “I’m going to buy some just now.”

Travelers lucky enough to get on a bus (and lucky enough to survive the trip) to principal outlying towns then usually have to find a ride aboard another public conveyance--a matatu, usually a pickup truck with a passenger compartment in back--to get to their homes and villages. Generally, these are even more dangerous than the buses--easily overloaded and of dubious mechanical repair. Notwithstanding breakdowns and accidents, however, most Kenyans will make it home for Easter.

For some, the weekend has another excitement in the annual Kenya Safari Motor Rally, which has turned into what its sponsors say is one of the prestigious international road rallies. The course takes the drivers over about 2,000 miles of Kenyan countryside.

All over the country, people who have never owned a car--and perhaps even some who have never ridden in one--turn out along the curves of remote and truly awful roads to watch the rally drivers roar past, skidding and gunning their engines over a course that is, by design, meant to test the durability of driver and machine, sending them through wallows of mud, powder pots of red Kenya dust and boulder-strewn tracks more appropriate for donkeys than cars.

Children Perch to Watch

In villages along the way, a carnival atmosphere prevails. Children clamber on tree limbs and rooftops, shouting with the noise. Their fathers stand by, warm bottles of beer in hand, while their mothers sit together, wearing their cardigan sweaters hand-knitted out of wool dyed in Day-Glo colors, all in an atmosphere of family reunion and general good times.

It is dangerous sometimes, and Kenyan spectators have been mowed down in the past by speeding rally drivers. The biggest danger, though, probably comes from their imitators, who seem infected at this time of year by the road-racing spirit. No one has taken a body count of chickens during the safari rally, but it must be high.

It is an irony, then, that Easter is probably the one time of the year when it is most advisable to stay off the Kenyan roads. The nation’s president, Daniel Arap Moi, in a Good Friday service, prayed especially for safety on the nation’s roads during the Easter weekend. He might have suggested that his people stay off the roads for the holiday, but that, he must have known, would be too much to ask. After all, he was going home, too, to his farm in Kabarak.