GRADUATION

THE LAND OF ZINJ

I was convinced that neither pilot knew where the landing strip was. Each was looking out his corner of the windshield, probably because the wipers were leaving broad streaks, and the ground was getting closer as the ceiling above it got lower. It was encouraging to hear the landing gear go down; my Norwegian highway-engineer companion on the taxi from Emerson’s House to the Zanzibar terminal and then on the first leg of the flight to Dar had reminded me of times when the pilot couldn’t or had forgotten to lower the wheels. He had also confirmed that this airline and its pilots were Polish and had informed me that the plane was Czech, reliable, and required eight passengers to break even; nine were on board today.

This was to be my fifth landing in the plane, but only the second with this pair of pilots in the cockpit. Whichever one was in charge today came in high, fast, and without trying to hit the very end of the runway; with the other pair the approach was low and slow, and I always worried that the wheels would first touch the puddle of water a meter or two in front of the tarmac. I wasn’t a bit reassured when the young Swedish pilot who had been reclining on the two front seats suddenly sat up and started looking intently over the shoulder of the pilot in front of him; the plane’s attitude was such that even from the third row–a young woman who continually brushed her long blond hair in my face had taken my customary second-row seat, number four–I could look out and see what lay ahead of us. And then, there it was, just a little to the side and a very few meters down. But my travail was not yet ended; we had to do a one-eighty, which took us too far to the other side of the landing strip, so next we did a pair of steep banks, and then I was looking down at the ridiculously short piece of tarmac that is the working side of Arusha’s municipal airport, on which we soon came to a comfortable stop without any trouble. Most of the passengers and all of the crew and ground staff rode to town together, and the pilots were totally relaxed and nonchalant. Clearly the landing had been routine the whole way.

Zata, the airline company’s name, is an obvious combination of two abbreviations, and I suppose the origin of “Tanzania” is equally apparent, although I don’t recall thinking about that until the Peace Corps scheduled our completion-of-service (COS) conference for that fabled island. That an Omani sultan was still in power until the revolution of 1964 is barely credible to me, and the reason for the island’s union three months later with Tanganyika has not yet been explained satisfactorily; opinions offered range from, “Our leaders got together and thought it was a good idea,” to “An American submarine entered the harbor and forced the unification to prevent the Soviets from occupying Zanzibar.”

It is an exotic port of call, especially when one has not ridden the bus from Arusha to Dar to get there, and it remains very much a foreign country, even requiring a passport for entry by a mainland Tanzanian citizen or resident. Worse yet, immigration officials have the quaint practice of sometimes requiring evidence of vaccination for prevention of cholera, a shot generally conceded elsewhere to be worthless at best. Still, one or another of our God-fearing Peace Corps nurses will happily add an official but fraudulent stamp to one’s yellow card; I now have three, each from a different source. No one has ever asked to look at any of them.

The initial flight from Arusha to Zanzibar was pleasant and routine. We caught good views of both Kilimanjaro and Mawenzi poking through the clouds, but I was more interested in looking at the ground and enjoyed the transitions from the lush, dark green forests near the mountains, to the red earth just east of them, then on to the dry barren country near the coast, and finally to the pale azure blue of the shallow Indian Ocean waters. The drive from the airport to town was short and ended a few blocks away from my hotel, Emerson’s House; four-wheeled vehicles are not allowed on the narrow old-city streets that surpass in labyrinthine complexity anything I have previously encountered. Dubrovnik is modern design and Kathmandu a simple maze by contrast.

Back at the airport early the next morning–Nasser had come to the hotel to fetch me in his remarkably well preserved 404, a 1968 model like my second one–I discovered a problem: Julie, my friendly Zata booking agent in Arusha, had somehow failed to get my reservations through to Zanzibar. So while I publicly and firmly stated my intention to return to Arusha as soon as possible and inwardly contemplated just where I would stay on Zanzibar in the meantime–Emerson’s was fully booked over the Easter weekend, which is why I planned to visit Pemba in the first place–Zata’s passenger agent finally decided I could go on the morning’s flight as originally planned, but my return to Zanzibar would be delayed two days. Since this meant missing the first afternoon of the conference, I took his suggestion as a sign of divine intervention of the most inspired kind and readily acceded.

To depart from Zanzibar for Pemba is to leave Zanzibar as an individual island but not to leave Zanzibar as a political entity; these two and numerous lesser islands off the Tanganyikan coast have been governed together for centuries, and it wasn’t all that long ago that many other islands, both to the north and the south, as well as vast areas of the opposing mainland, were stripped from the sultanate by European intervention. Pemba is even more Islamic than Zanzibar; 95% of the former’s population and 90% of the latter’s claim that faith. Pemba seems friendlier, more relaxed, less densely populated, cleaner, cooler, and more refreshing. When my first Zanzibar taxi driver–not Nasser–compared the two islands for me by saying “Zanzibar is hot; Pemba is cool,” he was comparing the pace of life, not the temperature, and his words were more apt than he probably realized.

Although Mohammed Omar, owner of Chake Chake’s Star Inn, Ltd., does have a telephone, 2190 to be precise, it proved inaccessible to Heidi, the room-booking counterpart to Julie, in the Arusha office evidently managed by Peter under the title Scan Tan Tours. The first mentioned is an irresistible force, however, and she simply persuaded Emerson’s to call Mohammed to book my room; he expected my arrival, and in typical East African style characterized my wish to stay two extra days as “no problem.” Now, you could have shown up on any of my five preconference days there and had your choice of four or five rooms–I think the total is eight. The best room, number one, was naturally assigned to me; it cost eight dollars–resident rate–per night, which included a pretty fair breakfast, the fried eggs being done especially nicely. It has a private bath and tub, operating on unheated water, which is preferable in this hot climate. Its major shortcoming is a location next to the kitchen, where dishes are washed until about 2:00 a.m. and are then being set on the table again about 5:00. This actually didn’t matter too much; on nights when we had power, the overhead fan lulled me to sleep despite the contiguous cacophony, and on nights when we didn’t, it was too uncomfortably warm to sleep anyway.

Electrical power for the island is supplied by two generators, both of which must be working simultaneously it appears, or powerlessness prevails. It’s about a break-even proposition, as I learned the first afternoon when I was told they had no beer baridi; it was all warm. “What about the soda? Is it also warm?” “No, it’s baridi.” “Kwa nini? How can it be that the soda is cold, and the beer is not?” “We had power yesterday, but the beer was finished; what arrived this morning cannot be chilled until the power returns.” It was a day or two later that I discovered mungo juice, a more than adequate substitute for pre-dinner beer. Made from a local fruit, somewhat like a bumpy-skinned orange in appearance, the juice has a silky texture and intense flavors, much as does apricot juice, but it also presents an appealing thirst-quenching tartness.

Pemba presented two fascinating treats: surprisingly lovely scenery viewed in almost total solitude, and delightfully delectable, fastidiously fresh shellfish. The prawns, an immense pile containing some gargantuan giants and costing $3.25, were the best; I ordered them grilled, and the chef at least touched them with some oil or butter, of which they needed very little to enhance their succulence. Lobster was my second choice. The first time, my respect for a chef’s opinion, if indeed the waiter correctly reported it, misled me into having them fried; they were better grilled the second time. That dinner would have been divine with some drawn butter, but at $7.00 for a huge serving, I could overlook that. But the calamari cried aloud to heaven for some aoli to anoint them. Deliciously tender and cooked without batter, a serving costing $2.40 was almost more than I could eat. Excellent chips–rice could be ordered instead–accompanied each dish, a modest salad and occasionally a cooked vegetable could be ordered ala carte, and except for the initial day the beer was at least cool. Beginning that first evening, we had continuous power for about 36 hours, and a good supply of beer got sufficiently cold to survive subsequent outages, but, alas, it too was ultimately finished. A Muslim host is hardly the most reliable provider of alcoholic beverages.

A main tarmac road pushes right in front of the Inn, which provides a marvelous site for stargazing on powerless evenings. I’ll never tire of viewing the Southern Cross above the southern horizon and the Big Dipper opposite it. I shrugged sijui to Mohammed’s question “How many stars are there in the world?” and he seemed equally unimpressed with my pointing out Jupiter to him. Public transportation is limited to a six-route network of numerous “matatus,” the small open-sided vans lined with two wooden benches that are cheap and efficient, particularly if one enjoys being squashed; the compressibility of East Africans on buses, like that of Japanese riding commuter trains, is virtually infinite. Many residents use bicycles and motor scooters, but I saw none of either for rent; no problem, I was much happier with the car and driver Mohammed arranged for me at $40.00 per day. The former was adequate and the latter both sensible and non-English speaking, so I could view the countryside in blissful silence. By the end of our four days together he could even distinguish between the more common birds we didn’t need to stop for again and those we hadn’t seen before.

The island has two major north-south highways, one very new, with interconnecting roads of various ages. For our first outing, on Saturday morning, we drove north along the new one, and I was impressed with its smoothness, gentle curves and inclines, and many other modern features, such as a center line, edge lines, occasional direction signs, and even stop signs at major intersections. At these last the driver neither slowed nor looked to the side; evidently a two-vehicle coincidence was too improbable to be considered.

At first the road was lined with houses, seemingly set down in a helter-skelter fashion with no planning objective beyond nearness to the road. They are mainly of traditional structure, a framework of wooden poles with the interstices of the walls filled with mud and those of the roof covered with thatch. Some of the better looking ones use white stones in the mud to add a little artistic appeal, and more than a few have the ornate carved door frames, and occasionally even a front door, that are associated with Zanzibar. As we drove farther from Chake, however, the country became hillier and less populous. It was very open, with tall palms dominating the skyline, their fronds shifting slowly in the breeze against a curtain of blue sky and white cloud. The lower landscape was filled with rice paddies, plots of cassava, and occasional tropical fruit trees.

We passed through Konde and the very dense Ngezi Forest–birds were very hard to spot here–before reaching our objective, a lovely white sand beach near the northwest corner of the island. I alternated riding and walking along the beach depending on the bird life visible: no sea birds, but quite a few shore birds. And then there it was, the bird I most hoped to see here, the white-backed night-heron. But no, it was not; a view from the front revealed it to be the dwarf bittern. That was okay; I had not identified it before either. It was on this beach that I first saw the still unidentified, mainly black, egret that was seen again on Pemba and also on Zanzibar. A local boatman gave its Kiswahili name as kalastara, which I was later told implies the bird seeks its prey with its head tucked under a wing. Since the black egret, also known as the umbrella bird, displays similar behavior, the two must be closely related.

I was just nearing a vantage point for some final careful looking, when a group of women came along the beach collecting I’m not sure what; I was too disappointed at their intrusion, completely understandable and reasonable though it was, to look closely. So while the women continued wading in the surf, the birds flew east, and we drove south, all three groups in search of some more succulent shellfish.

On subsequent days we sought the shore in different directions. Kojani Island, just a hundred meters off the east coast, provided habitat more for kids than for anything else. Their scattering cross section was easily the largest found yet in either Tanzania or Nepal; one medium-volume, low-frequency growl sent at least a hundred off in full flight. Mind you, they thought my walking stick, a basketless collapsible ski pole, was a gun. Still, during those few minutes when I was free from the crowd to walk alone along the shore, I observed many beautiful birds in both the trees and the water.

Two days later on a western beach quite near the port town of Mkoani, I put that lesson to good use. After slogging through trees along the shore in search of the bird whose song we could hear, I admitted defeat and suggested we hire one of the traditional dugouts with twin outriggers that were tied up nearby. The vessel plus a three-man crew cost me less than a buck for a half-hour’s poling along the shore. It was fun and quite productive. The bird whose song we followed turned out too common for me to remember, but I did make some new sightings. This is definitely the way to seek birds on Pemba, along the eastern shore just after sunrise, the western shore before sunset, and in the dining room devouring shellfish in between. New birds for this trip, including the endemic Pemba sunbird, totaled about a dozen.

Located in the old part of Zanzibar city, Stonetown, Emerson’s House “is an old Omani Palace carefully restored to its original style.” Of the nine guest bedrooms, two have private baths, including Red 2 where I slept the third night, but there are five toilets and showers for use by the other guests. The facilities include two special baths, one of which I used my second night there: “a huge stone tub embedded with some antique tiles. Here, we offer champagne and appetizers or dessert in a honeymoon bubblebath in a candlelit room strewn with flowers and jasmine blossoms.” Since I was sharing Blue 2 with Martin that first night after the conference–it’s the best of the three rooms I saw on that floor, the other being Green 2, where I spent my first night, before the conference, because it’s on the corner and gets more breeze; it is a double, however, and costs $75.00, like Red 2–I skipped the champagne, and Martin soaked alone, at least so far as I know.

The water was not hot but was at a lukewarm temperature, which, with its scented oiliness was very refreshing in this hot humid climate and imparted to the skin a lingering bouquet that somehow accentuated the fragrance of the jasmine blossoms liberally scattered between the bed-sheets. I skipped the “traditional Zanzibari massage with tingling oil of fresh cloves” without regret, but I was more than a little disappointed to learn that the “traditional Zanzibari hand and foot painting of lovely henna floral patterns by a local artist” was an adornment reserved for women; my granddaughters April and Jan each brought along to the conference an ankle so decorated. Men are entitled to tattoos, I thought, and if Kate, an English colleague of Diane, whom I met in Arusha some months ago on their return from Nairobi where the latter surrendered her wisdom teeth, thus shattering yet another Peace Corps rule that such nonessentials must be eliminated before a prospective Volunteer leaves home, could have a tattoo on her left shoulder and I know not where else, then why could I not have a henna pattern? Well, my time in the tub was up, so I withdrew to dress for dinner.

“Emerson’s House offers two uniquely atmospheric restaurants. The Teahouse provides sumptuous dinners and hearty breakfasts in an intimate aerie nestled atop the ancient city. The cafe on the ground floor invites you to recline beside the lily pond while enjoying light lunches and rich desserts.” On my initial stop the cafe was already closed for the evening when I arrived, and the Teahouse was fully booked, so I attempted to find food on the street. The first restaurant to which I was directed was nearby and easily found, but alas it was no longer a restaurant, only a hotel. My second objective proved elusive, and even with a city map in hand I was fortunate to regain the security of Emerson’s. I retired quite early and more than a little hungry.

Beer with a cheese and sausage sandwich made delightful lunches on the two post-conference afternoons I visited the cafe, but my first meal on the roof was disappointing; it may well have been because the pre-dinner bath had been so delightful. The second meal was just the opposite. The dishes were interesting and properly prepared from quality ingredients. It was especially pleasing that Joe, who arrived without a reservation, received vegetarian courses to match those on the regular menu.

The relaxed pace of the conference–we were even encouraged to skip sessions that didn’t appeal to our interests–plus a half-dozen free days, all in a hot and humid milieu, left me quite relaxed on returning to Ilboru, and subsequent days seemed to drag a bit. But finally it came, another of those days I had long ago marked on my internal calendar–the morning I would leave on vacation after finishing my teaching at Ilboru. At the beginning of the term, when I agreed again to add form five to my normal teaching load, the headmaster concurred in my wish not to teach past the time of form-six graduation, in late April. Having learned a lesson from the extreme weariness and fatigue accumulated during the third term, I paced myself more carefully and emphasized “covering the material” rather than teaching; the riot, the Easter break, the COS conference, and preparations for graduation all helped immensely to disrupt any attempt to maintain a consistent schedule. Since I know two thirds of this year’s graduating class quite well after our two-year safari in physics, I found watching their preparations for graduation much more interesting than teaching, so I cut a few form-five classes to take some photographs. My guys thought it was good fun, and there wasn’t much left in either syllabus to discuss anyway.

The morning of my exit, a Friday, I awakened about 3;00, organized a little, and then lounged in bed an hour before arising permanently to begin packing. By 7:00 I was showered, packed, and ready to go. The morning was gorgeous, so I strolled down the hill, carrying only my walking stick, to watch the boys’ final rehearsal for graduation; they were to have begun at 6:00.

When I first observed the corresponding ceremonies a year ago, I assumed the boys marched as they did because they chose to. This time around I learned it was a basic military drill, essentially the first step in the year of national service required between secondary school and university. It looks pretty much like a goose step and is done to the beat of timeworn drums and the music of pipes. It’s not at all easy, and these guys were wet with sweat, even in the cool of early morning. As I learned long ago in high school, it’s best to play in the band.

My good friend Makonge and the athletic director Machakula–the form fives broke out in laughter, as had the form sixes months before, when I used this sobriquet in describing his and Makonge’s antics–were in charge of preparations, and they had been good earlier in the week; if even half of my telephoto shots work out, I’ve got a comedy evening worthy of Chaplin. I was really impressed on this final morning with the second master, however–the headmaster had been in another world ever since the riot–quite formally dressed, he strolled over to the bass drum and quickly got the boys to handle correctly that final set of steps in place before halting. Twenty years after their service, these older guys can still do the drills well. Maybe this helps explain why it’s so hard here to break from tradition.

The drill consists first of the guest of honor inspecting the marching graduates, then the band, and finally a parade reviewed by that guest. I had planned to watch this final practice from near the guest of honor’s position, and as I passed and greeted my faculty colleagues, Machakula asked, “Professor, will you act as our guest of honor this morning?” “Oh of course, that’s a real honor,” I replied. What a marvelous gesture from a man I’ve not always admired. So, he dismissed the student who had been standing there, and I took up my position.

Petro, a premedical student whom I suspect will marry a rich woman, probably Caucasian, long before he completes medical studies, was the commandant. When he came to accompany me on the inspection, he spoke in English the lines he had originally learned in Kiswahili: “Dear honored guest,”.… On this first inspection it was fun and games; I patted a few arms and received smiles and comments in return. Walking back to my position after also reviewing the band, I made a mistake that Petro didn’t forget.

The reviewing march didn’t go quite right, so it was repeated, and then it was down to the final practice. I knew the routine now, and this time the review was serious, for the graduates and for me. Petro whispered, “Don’t stop here” on the walk back, and I too had that already in mind. And then they marched by for the last time, certainly the last time we would all be together and quite possibly the last time I would see any of them. My eyes welled with tears, as they still do when I think of it, and my lower lip began to quiver; twice I had to look up at Mt. Meru to regain my composure. They came by in threes, from the tallest to the shortest: Serafini, John,..., Genes, Lohay.

After they were back in position, Petro once again approached the “esteemed honored guest” to invite his participation in the graduation ceremonies that would begin immediately in the assembly hall. Here Mr. Mtui would flatter, cajole, and entertain his captive audience for endless hours in his most fervent, evangelistic Kiswahili. I certainly would be happy to miss all of that on the morrow; a year ago I walked up the hill and napped for several hours at this stage of graduation. Today, however, the boys, led by the band, were marching off to an empty building. To me this final practice was much more fitting and exciting than the real thing would be, no matter how important the visiting honored guest who took the graduates’ final salute.

The marchers quickly disappeared into the crowd of onlookers awaiting the beginning of classes, and I slowly approached my colleagues who thanked me for helping with the practice. I mumbled my appreciation for the honor they had done me and turned to start up the hill for my house where Mary would soon come to drive my luggage and me to town in preparation for the shuttle ride to Nairobi. Makonge joined me and commented on what a strong group they had been. “They only do what they want,” he said, to which I added, “Yes, and they do it their own way.” Quite a few of them will very soon be real men, and perhaps one of those will develop into the leader this country, and the world, so desperately needs. I certainly hope so.

Frankly, I don’t care if I never see Ilboru Secondary School again, but Emerson’s is certainly worth a return visit, particularly in the company of someone to share the bath.

W. Vance Johnson

22 Apr 94