When clothes did not make a man

When Clive Irvine, the Scottish doctor who founded Chogoria Mission Hospital early in the last century, came to that part of Mt Kenya region, he was dismayed by the morality of the people whose souls he had come to save.

They went about practically naked.

Men of all ages wore nothing but a piece of animal skin thrown about the shoulders, leaving other parts of the anatomy that in his view ought to have been shielded from the public swinging in the breeze, while the women left their breasts bare.

Mothers who were breastfeeding did so in the open openly. For clothing they only had two pieces of cloth with which to cover the front and back.

However, what must have cut the missionary’s soul to the quick was the female genital mutilation which was performed with a rusty instrument.

Dr Irvine, who before travelling to Chogoria had briefly served at Thogoto in Kiambu and Tumutumu in Nyeri, had picked up a smattering of Kikuyu along the way and upon learning about such heathen behaviour must have knelt down and exclaimed, “Ngai baba!”

He was to dedicate much of his energies thereafter to fighting the FGM with varying degrees of success.

When writing about jiggers, lice and related vermin for last week’s column, it occurred to me that many young Kenyans today may be quite unaware of how their forebears lived not very long ago.

I also thought of the people who nowadays blame ‘Western decadence’ for the skimpy dresses and skin-tight trousers worn by our young women, and the disservice they do to the memory of missionaries like Mrs Irvine, who never ventured outdoors without being covered from head to toe — wearing a hat, a long skirt and boots.

SCALY LIKE A RHINO HIDE

Not long ago some older people in the part of Mt Kenya region where I was born and brought up still dressed in much the same way that people did when Dr Irvine arrived to do battle with Satan.

There was, for instance, this old man in the 1960s whose sense of dress, or lack thereof, we found most interesting as young boys.

His only clothing was a blanket with which he covered his shoulders and torso to ward off the cold, leaving everything else blissfully exposed to the elements and our amused stares.

My paternal grandfather also had little time for modesty until my father, who had attended school and church long enough to feel embarrassed on his behalf, went to the Indian shop at Igoji market and bought him a pair of khaki shorts and a shirt.

Imagine his consternation, then, when one day he came home and found his old man harvesting yams while stark naked, his newly-acquired clothes hanging from a tree branch.

When asked why he was not wearing the clothes, he answered that he did not want to get them dirty!

Then there is an uncle whose feet had not known shoes from birth and as a consequence, had grown scaly like a rhino hide and his toes were splayed.

During the ‘coffee boom’ of the late ‘70s, he received such a handsome sum for his coffee deliveries that as a treat, he went to the local Bata shop and bought himself a pair of rubber loafers.

Try as he might, however, they would not fit on account of the unruly toes.

The solution he arrived at was buying a razor blade and cutting out five holes on each shoe for the toes.

He then wore the shoes right there in the shop, and walked about four kilometres from the shopping centre to his home.

That was the longest and the most painful four kilometres he had walked before then or since.

Not surprisingly, he has not worn shoes since.