Some of my relatives hated soap and water

As a young reporter, I once met a spindly middle-aged man who, though nominally white, had been turned a walnut brown by long exposure to the African sun. Theodore, or Theo as everyone called him, was managing a bunch of bandas that was aspiring to become a beach hotel at Ngomeni, 40 kilometres north of Malindi.

The dream became a cropper and Theo disappeared from my life as suddenly as he came into it.

But the stories he told in the evening beside a log fire on a lonely beach, some hard to believe, still linger in my mind.

Theo came to Kenya from Britain as a young man. He was straight out of Cambridge University and was coming to take up a job as a District Officer during the Emergency, at the height of the Mau Mau insurgency.

He was posted to Meru.

It was from him that I first heard the term “soap smell” as applied to humans.

The way he explained it, some of the Mau Mau fighters operating and living deep in Mt Kenya forest had been away from “civilisation” for so long they could detect an intruder by the smell of soap that he used.

That is how they were able to evade government trackers.

A group of Mau Mau fighters. The way Theo explained it, some of the Mau Mau fighters operating and living deep in Mt Kenya forest had been away from “civilisation” for so long they could detect an intruder by the smell of soap that he used. (PHOTO: FILE/STANDARD)

Long after the Mau Mau laid down their arms and Kenya gained independence, many of their younger relatives in my village also found it hard to come to terms with soap and water. We have many people who were averse to contact with water and, one supposes, the smell of soap that they grew old and even died without taking a bath or cleaning the clothes they had first worn as young men. They never changed clothes and it is doubtful that they removed them even to go to bed.

By this time, the clothes could hardly be recognised and the shirt was reduced to a collar holding together a few strands of fabric and which was so layered with grime its original texture or colour were uncertain.

To ward off the cold and cover the gaps left by the tattered shirts and pants, there was usually a great coat from an ancestor, dating back to World War Two still bearing the dirt gathered in the trenches and jungles of Burma.

I write in the past tense because many of these fellows have died while the rest, surprise, surprise, have embraced the old enemy and today they are fairly decent chaps.

In one case involving a distant relative, death came as a result of a misguided sense of civic duty by family members who insisted on giving him a forcible bath.

A man who had never complained of a common cold in his life went down with flu and died.

Others were converted to water and soap when in the 1980s the Kanu administration turned social order on its head by recruiting village layabouts and never-do-wells into the dreaded Kanu Youth and made them village headmen, or “sub-areas” as they were known.

Thus, men whose previous occupation was crushing sugarcane to extract the juice used to make karubu, a traditional brew and fetching water from the river to mix with the juice suddenly became the local face of an all-powerful government.

Nobody was surprised when one of them, on a wager that he could down without pause two whole litres of a particularly potent alcoholic concoction when the so-called second generation spirits first appeared in Meru in the ‘80s, went into a deep slumber never to wake up again.

A curious thing is that some of these men boast of pretty smart church-going wives with whom they have sired many children.

Lately I have noted a marked change in those who have belatedly embraced water and soap.

They look quite decent and one even sported not only shoes but even a suit and tie during a recent event, reportedly part of a daughter’s bride price.

Wonders will never cease.