The Gunny Sack (32 page)

We would see them sometimes, Alu Poni, Sona and I, as we trekked to school on Viongozi Street. Three girls would appear across the street from us, in complete uniforms, green and white skirt-blouse, black shoes and white socks. One Arab and two Coast Africans, all with short little pigtails, walking selfconsciously in close formation, giggling and talking, keeping eyes averted from lecherous bystanders. Before the three of us
reached Jogo’s block, these three had disappeared into a side-street, a short cut to the girls’ school.

How many times must I have seen her, for how many years I cannot recall. She was part of my scenery as I was part of hers, one of the many people on the road, walking or cycling to work, sitting outside a house on the step or on a stone bench. At some point I stopped taking notice when I saw them, but I recognized her instantly when I saw her again, fully grown, a student servicewoman, witnessing my ritual humiliation as I reported for duty at Camp Uhuru.

The National Service grew up on the ashes of the King’s African Rifles, in the wake of Tanganyika’s “day of shame,” when the navy of the former rulers had to be called in to disarm the mutinous guardians of the country, which it did in a trice. The National Service was set up, with the aid of the Israelis, to provide military training, political awareness and literacy for motivated youth with a right head on their shoulders, from whose ranks the Tanganyika People’s Defence Forces were to be recruited. Young men volunteered in the hundreds. So far, so good.

When the Government announced compulsory national service for high school and university leavers, the students were up in arms. After having gone through the territorial high school entrance exams, the Cambridge School Certificate Exams, the Cambridge Higher School Certificate Exams, O levels and A levels, Alternative N and Alternative T syllabuses, having taken three exams every year for fourteen years, all to be successful in life, and now to be subjected to the ignominy of tilling the fields and chanting slogans and marching for six months, and after that to go to work in uniform and give sixty percent of your salary to the government for eighteen months! The students marched in protest. “Colonialism was better!” they chanted. “Student power!” Dar was humming with excitement. Student power! The crème de la crème
standing up to Mwalimu himself! First it had been the army in revolt. Now it was the students—not so easy to extricate from this one—who would he call for assistance this time? Expatriate teachers nodded wisely to themselves: this was something they all knew at least a little about. This was something governments in the West all dreaded—student mobilization. The President invited the protesters to come and meet him at State House. In the grounds outside, seated with his ministers, patiently he heard them speak and saw them wave their fists in the air. Then he spoke. Colonialism is better, you say? Go home. Yes, go home, the lot of you, to your towns and villages. The University is not for you. The University was closed, the unions banned, including our Boyschool’s own parliamentary-style COPS, the Council of Pupils.

When the President said go home, he was meaning business. The students, in the State House grounds, saw themselves surrounded by the army. The new army. Every student there had his name taken, every student, boy or girl, was escorted to their residence at the University where they meekly packed their belongings and left for their hometown to report to the local authorities.

To say that colonialism was better! Eti. They had no sympathizers in the streets, these boys and girls who went to school and university free of charge and were given pocket money and travel expenses on top of that!

Every year Asian students, after completing school or university, joined their African counterparts to go and build the nation at camp, to learn to defend its borders. Every year at Camp Ruvu, each Sunday Indian mothers would arrive with servants bearing sufuriyas and tins, laden with curries and mithais and chevdo to last their daughters until the following Sunday, and leave the camp gates tearfully with their empty vessels, as if returning from the very gates of Hades. “Your girls are treated well,” said a minister to a meeting of concerned
women, but who would listen? It was all right if you gave them ugali and beans day in, day out; but when they had to bite rocks when they chewed rice, when they got bones the size of their heads to gnaw, when maggots floated in the stews … it was all too much, said the mothers.

It was because of these concerns, expressed a little too loudly, that the Asian boys and girls were not selected for the most out-of-the-way places. But if you have a name like Salim Juma Huseni …

When I turned the front page of the
Herald
to find out which camp I had been selected for, and who was coming with me, I found my name not at nearby Ruvu, or at Makutopora near Dodoma or Mafinga near Iringa or at Oljoro near Arusha. It was a new camp called “Uhuru” some distance north from Bukoba, near the town of Kaboya on Lake Victoria: in other words, the furthest possible place, along with Tamim, Umbulla, Mbogo, Raphael, but no Manji, Samji, Bhimji, Kanji—no other Asian.

“A mistake!”

“Definitely a mistake!”

“I tell you, you will not survive! People die of malaria there!”

“What if something happens to you out there in the jungle?”

“Do something, yar!”

“Baboo!”

This last was whispered by someone in Kulsum’s ear. Baboo was then one of the richest men in Dar. He drove a Mercedes and lived in Salamat Villa, a luxurious home in Upanga that made the nearby embassies look like hostels, with an exquisite garden full of pink, yellow and red roses, bougainvillaea, hibiscus, champeli, jasmines and immaculate hedges, all tended by a resident gardener. Baboo was known for his charity. So was his father, who at his deathbed had had his life extended by ten years by a holy man, so it was widely rumoured. This much-publicized private event earned the old man his nickname of Baboo ben Adhem. The ten years had expired recently.

Like a little boy I accompanied Kulsum to Baboo’s scrap and hardware store Downtown, where he sat, humble and soft-spoken, in his blue Kaunda suit.

“I have never been parted from him,” said Kulsum emotionally. “I have brought him up without a father, I’ve given my all to him, and I don’t want anything to happen to him.” Just the right touch. If Baboo had the power to change my fate, he couldn’t refuse.

“None of my friends is going to this camp,” I added for good measure.

Baboo looked at me sceptically, but picked up the phone. Such is the power of wealth, I thought. He spoke straight to the Police Commissioner.

“Baboo here. Jambo, Commissioner, how are you? Al hamdulillah, I don’t have a problem. But I have a boy here, perhaps you can help. Do you know anyone in National Service? … He’s from your tribe? Good. I’ll send the boy over.”

It is my day to see the great, I thought. How easy it was … And how fortunate that the Baboos and the Punjas and the Premjis were there to serve you, to ease life through its difficult passages. Kulsum went on her errands, I went to Police Headquarters. Once I notified the desk who was expecting me, I was escorted straight to the personage.

How humble are the great, I thought. First Baboo, now him. The Commissioner was a short thick man also in a Kaunda suit, sweating profusely behind a desk loaded with papers and large ring binders, pencils, pens and an ink bottle … An old upright fan whirred from a stand in a corner. No uniform and cap, no belt or gun, not even a moustache!

“Yes? What can I do for you?”

“Mr. Baboo sent me.”

“Then what can I do for you?”

“It is about National Service. I have been sent far—Camp Uhuru, near Kaboya … Lake Victoria. You see, recently I had an infection of the knee. The doctor said it was tuberculosis of
the knee … the whole knee was swollen, I couldn’t walk … I have to come for checkup …”

The Commissioner looked at me as if he had something bitter in his mouth but had to pretend it was not there. But his voice was kind when he spoke. “Here,” he said, writing me a chit. “Do you know where National Service headquarters are? Ask for Lieutenant Colonel Henry.”

Lieutenant Colonel Henry was in dark green army fatigues and a brown feathered hat of the type officers of the King’s African Rifles used to wear at the march past at Government House on Queen’s Birthday. He was looking out of the window at the garden being watered, and I could have been watching a film, so striking, so out-of-the-world he looked. His uniform was impeccable, gleaming with starchy stiffness, his trouser legs jutted out in two knife-edged creases and were stuffed in at the spotless boots. The man was almost white, slim and not very tall, with sharp grey eyes.

“Yes?” he said, going to his desk.

I knew the game was up. “Police Commissioner Shabani has given this,” I almost stammered and extended the note. Halfway through my account about my sick knee, he got up and I stopped. “Go,” he said curtly, pointing to the door. I took a step back. Then he blew his top. “Do you think we are running a kitchen? Don’t you think we have doctors here? Who told you to come here? Out!”

The Lieutenant Colonel’s last question was repeated to me by Alu Poni that afternoon. “Fool! You should have gone to Bhatia. He arranges such things. Baboo—,” he gave me a look of contempt that could have come straight from the face of Hassan Uncle.

“His children don’t do National Service!” I protested, defending my choice.

“They go to Bhatia.”

I see this somewhat silly episode (an example of shirking civic responsibility—but let’s not judge it out of context: the chain of
influence from Baboo to Commissioner to Lieutenant Colonel was real: and neither the kindly Baboo nor the phlegmatic Commissioner did after all decline assistance)—I see this comedy now as an attempt to foil the workings of fate: how else to explain, what else to call, the irrevocable relentless chain of events that unfolded … how else to recall the overwhelming logic of what actually happened, compare it with the flighty fancifulness of what might have been. Somewhere in the government bureaucracy a moving finger wrote, the
Herald
’s presses rolled in assent, and nothing could change the destiny that was sealed.

You were told (by those, and there were many, who claimed to be in the know) before embarking on your journey to camp to take with you a large, iron trunk. In it to put away some of life’s exigencies that could come in handy: a suit and some decent clothes for the times when you would go to town, canned food, such as corned beef and beans, not to forget chevdo and gathia and ladoos … and, oh yes, toilet paper: a must—what they gave you was more like sandpaper. You were told to lock the contents inside this trunk with a heavy-duty steel padlock. And it should be so heavy, this trunk, it should not be easy to walk away with.

I took the big, black trunk that lay under Kulsum’s bed all these years, my father Juma’s trunk constructed by some long-forgotten Bohra tinsmith in Mombasa at the turn of the century, that had travelled with him from Kibwezi to Nairobi and later carried his bride Kulsum’s belongings from Mombasa … then loaned to Ali Chacha for his home-leave to India on the SS
Amra
, for which service my father received the three Kashmiri daggers. Under Kulsum’s bed it contained all sorts of knickknacks: a corset we would sometimes open without saying a word, a brassière pad, soft and spongy we would put our cheeks and nose to, a compact, a moth-eaten velvet clutch purse, a Taj Mahal with its columns broken, the sword, a piece
of tarpaulin, a khaki cap probably a police officer’s, not unlike the one Inspector Kumar had worn. All these were hastily poured into a suitcase and room made for my safari inland.

To go to Camp Uhuru you first took the crawling Central Railway Line to Mwanza. Peace Corps teachers would joke that the train was so slow you could step off it and go out for a stroll, and when you had finished you had to wait for the train to catch up. You saw the blackest of black nights, cooler than the nights of Dar, fought mosquitoes, and looked out of the windows at those sparse dots of light in the jungle, sparser than the stars in the sky, and you wondered what they were doing, these people in their small huts in the jungle with their kerosene lamps … who they were, what they did, what they thought … and when the morning came, the sweetest and clearest of mornings with its yet tender warmth and an ever so slight caress of a breeze, you saw them squatting, chewing on their mswakis, wondering who you were and where you were going … You reach Mwanza and are sent to the bus station, where you wait all night for the next bus to Kaboya. All day the next day, the bus groans and whines and breaks down, is pushed by the passengers, and starts again as it climbs up protesting towards Kaboya.

In forty-eight hours I saw the vegetation change from the coastal coconut palms and sisal to the grassland and shrubbery of the plains and into the thick, tropical forest at the lake. I saw Lake Victoria, vast, tranquil and mysterious … for in the background lurked the Nile and Sudan and Cairo. History reflected from that shimmering vastness: what matter if the mind cautioned you to take that history, its white man’s romance, with a grain of salt? … the mind has many sides that do not talk to each other … meanwhile how can I help thinking of Speke and Burton, Livingstone and Stanley, catching the excitement and missing my breath at seeing Lake Victoria for the first time and seeing in my mind’s eye the
River Nile pouring out from it in a great gush and flowing all the way to the land of the pyramids and pharaohs and Cairo the northernmost tip of Africa … In pitch darkness, after two breakdowns, the bus stopped on the road at the top of a hill. Passengers were woken up by commotion at the door and the sounds of feet on the roof. A few young men speaking the high school lingo of Swahili mixed with English were getting off. The word “camp” was mentioned incessantly and I looked around nervously.

“Do you have a lot of luggage?” asked my neighbour, an African padre.

“Yes. Iron. It’s on the roof.”

“Better wait till we get into town. You can come back in the morning.”

Camp Uhuru was a good three miles from the road. One of the boys outside produced a torch and they disappeared into the jungle, their torchlight flitting to and fro like a firefly. The bus engine, reeking of gasoline, roared and spluttered into life, an existence that violated the purity and mystery of the forest all the way to Kaboya and left behind a trail of exhaust.