AFRICAN EXODUS

VISIT TO AMERICASTLE

It was quite uncharacteristic and exciting to awaken in a Norfolk Hotel room on a departure day and realize that the Arusha shuttle, after thirty stops in each of the Namangas, was no longer part of my life. Of course several times before I had used this hotel as the first step in a vacation trip, but this was different; I was headed home. The nasal congestion that had troubled me for a month and the last three or four of the scabbed, slowly healing bites and scratches had improved during my stay, doubtless helped by long hot soaks in the tub, but their total disappearance seemed weeks away. I had again dined well at the Ibis, both Sunday evening and Monday noon, and I was looking forward to a traditional Kenyan meal at the Utalii Hotel with Richard as my guest and consultant.

The teaching component of my three weeks at Moringe Sokoine Secondary School in Monduli was more frustrating than effective, but I gained interesting insights on other important issues from several nonstudents I met, in particular three of the teachers and the family of Joseph, who had just finished form four at this school and was soon to begin his advanced-level studies at Old Moshi Secondary School. His father, John, who had spent two years in the US, most of it at the University of West Virginia, was a sort of agricultural extension agent for the region. Joseph’s mother, Nakaji, an elementary school teacher and like her husband a Maasai, is the daughter of a man with seven wives and fifty-six children, I think is the number Joseph gave. I was relieved to hear John’s reassurance that the local Maasai are now being fed adequately because of the externally funded food distributions, and excited to learn that his office is encouraging them to plant beans, sorghum, millet, and wheat in addition to maize to reduce their chances of being totally wiped out in drought years.

Government schools postponed their starting dates for several weeks, even months, because of funding problems; it was widely rumored and believed that the government cannot operate them for more than sixty days. Fees have been raised, but so have salaries, and of course food prices rise quickly when crops fail. Private schools have a greater potential for difficulty because the government authorized salary increases without providing for increased fees. Still, most of them opened on time, but this means only that a few students and teachers will show up on the appointed date, and little will happen for two or three weeks.

For example when I arrived at Monduli on the third day of class, after wishing my American colleagues safari njema the previous evening for their trip home, I was told by Kwayu, the second master, that no more than 10% of the expected students had reported; the families of most were still harvesting, and until the crops are in and sold, there will be no money to pay school fees. Some teachers were around but not doing much; I suspect they were there in hopes of coercing students to help with harvesting their crops. But the academic master, who is here titled senior master, assured me he would work very hard to complete the term timetable by Friday.

He failed to meet that deadline, but on Monday morning I was given my schedule, and the next day I started my assignment to teach one stream of form one students and two of form four. The subject was mathematics(“maths” it’s called here(and each stream was to meet for three double periods weekly, a rather modest 18-period load by Ilboru standards. The school is operated by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Tanzania, which adds the possibility of bishopric corruption to its near certainty in the headmaster’s office; it accepts both boys and girls, basically if someone can pay their fees, and about two thirds of its nearly 400 students board at the school. All went fairly well those first four days of instruction, which actually were the last four of the second week of school, technically. Form one was to study some basic algebra, but it was immediately clear that we had to retreat to the number line to work on the addition of positive and negative numbers; at first the addition of two negative numbers invariably produced a positive answer, but we got past that, sort of. Form four had been divided by the staff into two groups based on previous achievement, and when the second master, echoing opinions I had already heard from several teachers, said, “Form 4B are real zeroes, nothings,” I’m afraid he was being charitable, and since they knew they were classed as failures, they didn’t even try. The 4As did much better with the assigned topic, trigonometry, but I swear that the Pythagorean theorem, which they had presumably worked on previously in geometry, remained a total mystery during my entire stay.

Early one morning toward the end of the week, a school watchman noticed that some local villagers were stealing the school’s maize crop. School authorities were able to recover what had been harvested and put into bags, but the headmaster decided then and there that harvesting should begin on Monday, as it likely would have anyway. Well, that pretty much wiped out my classes for the first three days of the week, and for a variety of reasons I chose not to bother with the other two. First of all, I was feeling rather rotten again, and secondly, I had only one class on each of those days; it’s not at all easy to crank up enthusiasm for working again after so many interruptions. But frankly, I think the real problem was Americastle and its occupants.

The only reason for me to be at Moringe Sokoine was that Mama Mary asked me to go. The reason Mama Mary asked me to go was that her daughter Jennifer’s second and church-blessed wedding was about to take place in Minnesota. The reasons that Jennifer’s wedding mattered were Jane and Kristin, residents of Americastle, and of most importance, nieces of Mama Mary, and Abbey, all of whom were expected at the wedding. All three young women are dominant members of the school faculty. Now Jane is a Tellekson, on Mary’s side, and Kristin is a Nelson, on Mary’s husband’s side, so, as Carol pointed out when she joined the Monduli set about two weeks after me, they are not cousins. Thank God for that. What all of this meant was that the school would have no mathematics instructors for a few weeks.

The first thing one notices about Americastle is its guardian dog, Buster; in fact, if one is African, a wide detour to the back door is advisable. The second thing one notices is twofold: the back door has no outside handle, and the only key to its lock, a vertical deadbolt arrangement, is in the possession of Ruthie, the housekeeper. Had I not already known that a Tanzanian housekeeper is retained not to keep house, but rather as the daughter of a prominent family to guarantee the safety of the visitor(any problems are her father’s responsibility(I would quickly have learned it by observing, or rather looking for Ruthie.

The third thing one notices shortly after taking up residence there is that the house is in dreadful shape, by American standards, despite being less than two years old and costing the exorbitant, by Tanzanian standards, equivalent of $16,000. The back door had cracks so wide that Carol, who will live there for a year or more, on only her second day in town covered them over with duct tape. The deadbolt on the front door, for which I found several keys, could not be used because of a misalignment somewhere, but fortunately it still had handles and a skeleton-key lock. The latter typically required five to ten minutes of gentle persuasion to lock, however. Surprisingly, about half of the inside doors still closed easily; one or two others could be forced shut; and it was only the door to my bedroom that I never did succeed in closing. The toilet was broken so that the tank had to be filled manually and flushed by lifting the plunger. This was not all bad and may indeed have been contrived deliberately to save water(I was given no instructions on using the house. Various sources of otherwise wasted water were used for filling, and certainly the daily number of flushes was drastically reduced. Fortunately the bathroom door closed easily and could even be locked.

I had heard that young women are not necessarily good housekeepers, and these two definitely proved the truth of that rumor. The clutter was understandable in that Jane expected to move elsewhere on returning(Kristin is remaining in the US to begin graduate study(and had “emptied” her room, and the house was still occupied by visitors from the International School in Düsseldorf, Jane’s former employer, as I discovered when they returned home, unannounced, at about one in the morning my first day in residence. But the accumulation of filth was inexcusable and unacceptable; it came close to matching Ilboru the second time around. Almost anything free is tolerable for a few weeks, however, so I invested only minimal effort in the parts of the house I would use.

The most surprising observations came after dark. The first, a traditionally garbed Maasai man, actually arrived at dusk to announce, in Kiswahili, that he was on guard duty, which turned out to mean sleeping soundly outside the front door; his presence, like that of the housekeeper, was more symbolic than practical. On subsequent visits Sandam gulled me into giving him hot tea, cold water, and even occasional basins of warm bathing water, but he overestimated his welcome the night he asked to come inside to chat with Mmari, one of my teacher colleagues, and then decided to stay on, like an uninvited guest. I had first become acquainted with Mmari at the teacher-training seminar, where he served as one of the chemistry facilitators, and subsequently found him to hold refreshing and iconoclastic views on many issues; at Monduli he became my most reliable beer-drinking companion. Of mixed Maasai and Chagga parentage, he seemed quite familiar with Americastle procedures, perhaps too familiar, and with his concurrence I asked Sandam, politely but firmly, to move back outside permanently.

Soon after dark Buster showed his true talents, moaning and baying, not at the moon but after the bitch, and I use that term in both its literal and most pejorative senses, in heat, who was running around exciting all the boys in town. The only Americastle “resident” who seemed unaffected was Sandam, and his ability to sleep soundly only a meter or two from the dog’s nose certainly belied his ability to protect the house or its contents. Once or twice in fact when I went outside to quiet Buster, the watchman didn’t even rouse.

About the third night(the Düsseldorf contingent had finally left, and I had started to restore the house regardless of what Ruthie thought(it became ominously peaceful, and sure enough, after some very welcome sound sleeping by both of us, Sandam informed me the next morning, “Mbwa alikwenda”; Buster had slipped out of his collar. He came back in time for lunch, however, and was put back on his leash. It occurred to me that if he returned after running away, so would he after being deliberately released. Wrong. He was gone for the weekend, during which I slept very well, but when Mmari returned him on Monday evening, explaining that his running about(like all the other dogs of course(was a bit of a nuisance to the neighborhood, I reluctantly acceded to more sleepless nights.

But it was the following Wednesday, during the school’s harvest week, that everything fell apart. Form 4B was scheduled to meet that morning, only the second class in the week for me, but they were so slow to settle down, so lackadaisical, so reluctant to do anything, that I just walked out and over to the staff room to complain to Mmari about the 4Bs and dogs, and to suggest that I might just as well go home. He was more interested in listening to Wayne’s discourse on the difficulties of using English in Tanzanian classrooms than to me, so I continued on to Americastle. Wayne had come for the second of his ten-period Wednesday marathons of teaching five consecutive classes on Bible history, all the same, to forms one and two, but most of his students were in the field, also.

Ruthie received my fervent if unvoiced blessing for leaving even more prematurely than usual that day, and after lunch I settled down by the window for some quiet study. At first the noises I heard barely penetrated my consciousness, but then I suddenly realized what was happening. Some passersby, teenaged schoolgirls it turned out, were pelting the doghouse with stones, and someone had put Buster inside; he doesn’t use it voluntarily. I immediately chased the girls away by waving my walking stick at them, and if it lacked sufficient length to blister their butts, the language unused since I first learned it from a righteously indignant father during boyhood days in Baptist parsonages certainly assaulted not only their ears but those of the neighbors and anyone else unfortunate enough to pass by during the following thirty minutes. My fury was uncontrollable, and my voiced contempt for a culture that mistreated dumb animals it couldn’t afford was unrestrained and obvious; no translation was necessary. After freeing and calming the dog, I burned some papers I no longer needed(any garbage not burned, buried, or broken will be in some neighbor’s possession by sunrise(and then packed for departure. Even Sandam sensed he should not request tea or either variety of water that evening.

Nothing untoward happened during the night, and just before arising I decided on a compromise: I would not move back to Arusha, but I would skip both classes remaining on the week’s timetable. The latter was not out of vindictiveness, but mainly because my symptoms and weariness seemed exacerbated yet once again. I stayed in for four days; first Mmari and then Kwayu came on Saturday evening for reassurance of my well being, and from them I learned that Monday would bring the first celebration of a new national holiday, Seku Nane Nane (Double Eight Day), in honor of farmers, their equivalent of Thanksgiving, I suppose. Power was seldom available in Monduli, usually only from 10 p.m. until 6:00 a.m., but this Saturday it had been on all day, and I literally gorged on the tapes left behind by the girls: classical stuff, church music, some good bits by Garrison Keillor, jazz, and best of all, several KPLU broadcasts. This station is operated by Pacific Lutheran University, the Northwest’s bastion of conventional Lutheranism, and has long been a favorite source of broadcast jazz for me. In East Africa Lutherans live much better than PCVs.

Now I was really homesick and ready to head straight back, but there was Carol’s arrival to consider. She is one of very few in the group who did not attend St. Olaf College and is also not related to Mary. That is more than enough reason for me to forgive her sin of coming from Minnesota. She had taken her vacation home earlier than the others and was planning on her return to transfer to Monduli, Moringe Sokoine, and Americastle; I knew that she was reluctant to move into an unoccupied house, which was really the most compelling reason for me to remain. Her KLM flight to Kilimanjaro Airport was to leave Amsterdam sometime Saturday evening, so I expected she would come to town on Sunday afternoon, which she did in the company of Wayne and Jon, the latter being, all at once, the son of Wayne and Sindy, who teaches English here; the nephew of Mary, who teaches math in real life; the cousin of Jennifer and Jane; and like Jane and Carol, a math teacher.

She brought with her three assets: a ton, literally, of baggage, much of it teaching materials; a nose that quickly turned up in dismay at the house’s filth and debris; and a pair of sharp eyes that immediately saw and recognized those little black bugs that hopped about so quickly. They were fleas. Now please understand, I have never had pets, and my most immediate insect awareness had concentrated on tsetse flies, mosquitoes, and ticks, with good reason, and since these jumping black jobs were doing me no discernible harm, I had simply ignored them. But Carol could not; once they found her, she was in deep trouble, so I fell to the next morning, the very first Double Eight Day ever, and gave her the benefit of my vast experience as Tanzania’s premiere cleaner of houses. We even dismissed Ruthie for the day, assuring her that she too was entitled to the holiday, but we really wished not to have her underfoot and risk offending her.

By now the migrant bitch had cooled somewhat and with that so had the boys’ ardor, so nights were decently quiet and calm for me, but not so for Carol; she found Buster’s comparatively infrequent moaning and howling rather disquieting. I don’t know if the fleas bothered him as a direct source of discomfort, but they certainly did indirectly; I had never played with him as much as Jane did, not by a long shot, and he had obviously missed walking and running with her, but now we all almost completely avoided him, the Caucasians out of self interest, the Africans, as had always been true, out of total disinterest.

With the relatively quiet nights, another nocturnal characteristic of the house, one that I had pondered before Buster became the nighttime’s noisiest problem, returned to my sleepless attention and also occupied Carol’s: a considerable scratching noise overhead, perhaps on the roof, that recurred intermittently throughout the night. My first guess at its cause had been a flock of speckled pigeons, which commonly perch on rooftops overnight, but they are only active at dusk and dawn, and I could see no droppings on the roof, so I had already discarded that possibility. Bushbabies could probably produce such a disturbance, but there are certainly none of them in Monduli. Once again it was Carol who found the answer, this time from Mmari, who informed her that bats were nesting under the roof; they had even entered the house on several occasions, and Sandam had been ordered in to remove them. Well, that certainly explained not only the noise but also all the duct tape securely sealing the seams of my bedroom ceiling. It also suggested a possible source of some of the filth in the house.

My form 1C and 4B classes went very well on Tuesday morning(school was now officially in its fourth week despite my having taught only four full days plus two classes(and so would have the 4A had it been offered as scheduled, but at the staff tea break, which I attended for the second and last time, the headmaster told us that the remaining morning classes would be canceled to accommodate some unexpected visitors. Representatives of NORAD, the Norwegian aid organization that had invested extensively in the school, had arrived to gather data and conduct interviews in an effort to determine the effectiveness of its contributions. Uncharacteristically disappointed at this interruption, I persuaded the Kiswahili instructor, who is also the senior master, to give me his afternoon periods with the 4As. This may have been a noble gesture, but it was a total mistake; perhaps the students would have been interested in Kiswahili then, but they definitely wanted nothing to do with maths. Happily, time ran out just as I was about to.

Next morning the 1Cs were about as worthless as the 4Bs at their worst, so I informed them I had business in town, which was true, told them Kwaherini, and left; a Leb wohl was certainly undeserved. My business was with Joseph’s father, first to thank him for his hospitality and then to gather some names, addresses, and information about his time in the US and his work in Tanzania. I had gone to their home for tea, beer actually, had accompanied the family to Moshi when Joseph enrolled in school there, and Nakaji had even paid for my lunch; what little these people have, they share generously. I understand Maasai tradition demands that successful individuals share their gains with the entire extended family, which can easily number in the dozens. On our return from Moshi to Monduli, John had commented as we passed the Catholic church in Moshi that a few days earlier some Muslim extremists, disguised as priests, had smuggled explosives into the building and planned to destroy it; they were detected and removed when they failed to know the church rituals at prayer time. I can’t vouch for the veracity of this report(he clearly believed it(but it did remind me of a horrible incident that was described to us at the teacher training seminar by a Lutheran church education official and was reported in a local paper as follows: A “fire broke out and gutted down a dormitory and two other buildings on Saturday night,” June 18. About forty girls died in the fire, and John told me in Moshi that the three or four survivors had died later in a hospital. The Shauritanga Secondary School, where the fire occurred, is only a short distance from Moshi. At the time it was widely believed by the people with whom I discussed the matter, all of them Christians to be sure, to have been the work of Muslim extremists. John certainly believes it, and only Mmari dissents; I don’t totally discount the latter’s skepticism. Still, many people, including Joseph, are openly nervous about the likelihood of additional similar incidents in the Moshi area. After saying good-bye to John, I went straight back to the house for a final repacking without bothering to see the 4Bs for their scheduled class.

My bags went back to the Ilboru Safari Lodge that evening with Wayne, who had successfully persuaded the Bishop to let him continue using the Pajaro that had been assigned to Mary, at least for awhile, and I would have gone too except for Kwayu’s invitation to have dinner in his home; to me such an invitation is mandatory and also a very special treat. Our reception was extraordinarily hospitable and the traditional Tanzanian food of outstanding quality; once again, what little these people have is shared most generously. The evening also gave Carol a chance to demonstrate some scratching in public(she really had no choice. This gained Kwayu’s sympathetic and enthusiastic offer to help eradicate the fleas by spraying the house with some dreadful chemical like methionine. His response to my comment some weeks previously that Buster needed someone to take him walking had been the gentle but rather unhelpful suggestion, “Perhaps you could find the time to do it.” Carol had previously learned, probably from Mmari, the Arusha source of some more conventional remedies for flea problems, and she wisely chose to try them first. My 4A class the next morning was fairly good, and after her teaching was over Carol joined me for the ride to Arusha, she to buy flea powder, I to return to the Safari Lodge for a final few days. Kwayu was most gracious in his farewell, but Mmari, only partly in jest I’m sure, said simply, “I’ll miss you, but not as much as I’ll miss your beer.” As usual, on this, my final such ride, the matatu was crowded, and whatever flea population we brought on board was widely dispersed by journey’s end.

The final shuttle ride from Arusha to Nairobi was routine, although it did rain quite a bit on Kenya’s side of the border. In fact Nairobi had considerable rain during my two-day stay, too much for me to use the chair and table outside my room. The Kenyan immigration official seemed overly concerned with my transition from Tanzanian to US residence, but he did not reduce the visa fee to five dollars because of my claimed transit status. It somehow seemed appropriate that this final stop in Namanga was number thirty.

Lunch at the Utalii–I was relieved to find the second “i” on the hotel marquee, since that explained why everyone was accenting what I had thought was the final syllable(on Tuesday noon was indeed special. It’s served buffet style, and as Richard led me around the tables for a preliminary discussion of these Kenyan foods, I realized it would be a long hard afternoon. We started with a traditional Kikuyu soup, muleta, which is a broth made from herbs and goat meat with a resulting flavor that is too strong to be pleasant; it’s only slightly more palatable than the traditional Maasai soup that Mwanga had asked us only to taste at the first maize distribution. Many of the vegetable dishes were very appealing, however: njabi, a very refreshing blend of red beans and bananas; njugu, potatoes and cashew nuts; and minji, a blend of greens, maize, and potatoes. Richard suggested that all three were forms of irio, the vegetable combination I first tasted at the Norfolk. Among other enjoyable dishes not tried before were maini, a nicely prepared beef liver; a very tasty dish of potatoes done in a tomato sauce flavored with beef tripe, matumbo by name; and a pleasantly hot and quite large sausage, ngerima. A smaller sausage, matura, was too strongly flavored with goat for me to enjoy, but I found plain, unadorned intestines almost pleasant.

The hotel and dining room are the public side, the practical laboratory, of a comprehensive hotel-management school run by the Kenyan government. About 600 students live in school dormitories and undertake one- or two-year programs of study in one of six specialties. Richard, for example, took a basic one-year course in food service, spent a few years working at the Norfolk, and then returned for two years to study hotel management and administration. The school charges no fees, but instead is supported by the 2% training levy we all find on our bills in Kenya, and any profits that accrue from operation of the hotel. Students are given modest allowances to supplement the tips they receive.

I was a little sad, but only a little, to say farewell to the Norfolk and its staff; I’ve seldom experienced such friendly service. But there was nothing but joy in my heart on passing through Jomo Kenyatta International Airport for the 14th and last time. The customs official at its entrance was beginning to get interested in the contents of my four bags when he noticed the word “professor” on my departure card and smilingly waved me on. I went with KLM to Amsterdam because of its generous baggage allowance: two 70-lb pieces free, even on economy, and only $150 all the way to the US for each additional such piece. Although my total remaining weight(Brian and Jennifer had very kindly taken two boxes of books back to the US for me(was under 140 pounds, I had to take one checked bag with me to Nuremberg, so I deposited two others at Schipol’s left-luggage window and headed for Bavaria aboard a twin-engine turboprop Fokker F-50, one of many City Hopper flights KLM and cooperating airlines operate between Amsterdam and a host of European cities. And what a pleasure after the rigors of African customs formalities to enter Europe simply by holding up a passport and walking in.

At the information window in Nuremberg’s airport I was advised to ride the airport bus to that city’s main train station, which I did, and after finding a ticket seller who still remembered her school English, I was soon aboard a train to Bayreuth. There was no obvious information office in that station despite the presence of the customary sign pointing to one, so I walked across the street to the impressive-looking Königshof Hotel to see what advice they had for finding a room in this obviously very busy tourist season. To my surprise they had one room available; of course it was their suite, but I quickly decided I was worth the price, and there was no one along to argue with me. The rooms were indeed elegant and spacious, and I spent nearly twenty-four delicious hours in them, alternating primarily among a luxurious Jacuzzi, a large shower, and a spacious bed beside which is an FM-radio with superb classical music. I bestirred myself only enough to kill the small spider I found in the mini-bar, to descend for dinner that evening in the Franken-style inn, and to come down for an ample breakfast in the elegant dining room next morning.

I waited until checkout time to leave and then walked back across the street to the train depot to acquire one of the taxis I had shrugged off the previous afternoon, a fancy Mercedes of course. It was then I realized that although not yet home, I had come a very great distance, far more than halfway. It was a powerful machine, putting Arusha’s 505s to shame, and the guy behind the wheel knew how to drive it and where he was going, and he had superb rural roadways on which to exercise these skills. The Bavarian countryside is so green, so lovely, and there seem to be more flowers in each window box of each house in every village than there are in the whole of Tanzania. All too soon the driver waved across the valley to a large building atop the adjacent ridge, the Sport-Hotel Kaiseralm. From outside it was unfamiliar, but once inside I recognized the place, and there stood John, leader of my opera tour, looking at me in at most semi-recognition.

“Well, don’t just look at me as if we’ve never met before,” I ordered. “I didn’t expect you until this afternoon,” he ventured in self-defense. I don’t know why he said that; it was already practically noon, and there had been no correspondence between his office and Dow beyond a perfunctory exchange of invoices and checks. “You do have tickets for me then?” “Of course, and you even have a room. Come, let me introduce you to some of the others in the group.” And so began my reintroduction to the world of classical western music: the operas of Wagner and various symphonic works performed at the Salzburg Festival.

It will take big bucks, megabucks probably, and definitely a car and driver for any Third-World position, to lure me back to work, but should that happen, I shall certainly return to Bayreuth for my third retirement.

W. Vance Johnson

18 Aug 94