FIRST IMPRESSIONS V

MID-YEAR GRADUATION

Graduation comes twice a year at Ilboru, and it turned out to be a full-blown military-like affair, complete with a pipe and drum corps, a march past the reviewing stand with inspection of the graduates by a visiting dignitary and the headmaster, and an inside ceremony that lasted the better part of three hours. Monday of that week seemed like just another day until I reached the parade ground and observed the headmaster exceeding his previous highs in volume, length of monologue, and frequency of Kiswahili. During tea break he made some kind of announcement in Kiswahili, and when I stood up a little later to leave for my next class, a colleague said, “Sit down, the headmaster wants to conduct some business.” “But why should I stay if he's going to talk in Kiswahili?” I asked. “Oh if you're present he'll speak in English,” came the uninformed reply. So I waited for another fifteen minutes until the headmaster at last began the meeting, which was conducted completely in the local language, of course. It was later explained to me that since staff members, who generally don't speak English, were also present, he was forced to use Kiswahili. Nonetheless, I quickly realized that the topic of discussion was the budget for a graduation party, and to judge from the attention paid by the teachers, quite unusual for a faculty meeting, and from the meticulous care with which they noted down, item by item, the proposed costs, I fully expected that the faculty was to foot the bill, and they were talking big numbers by Tanzanian teachers' standards.

I was sitting there half asleep, wondering how best to make a quick but courteous exit, when I suddenly realized that the headmaster and the faculty were taking opposite sides on a rather fiercely argued debate. The question was: how many sodas should each of the students receive, six or four? Neither side would budge, and at times the headmaster seemed downright nasty in his demeanor toward the faculty. I thought the argument would never end, but suddenly and without rancor the number was set at four. The pace of decision making accelerated remarkably, and by the time an incredible number of kilos of peanuts was agreed to and discussion turned to deciding on a reasonable price per kilo, some other people left on legitimate errands, so I followed them out and went to class about an hour and a half late; I assume that nobody else taught that afternoon.

The next day, Tuesday, the headmaster was decidedly unfriendly and hardly acknowledged my morning greeting. Later while discussing my dismay at sitting through all of that nearly meaningless Kiswahili with one of the few teachers who understand my attitude toward teaching here, Mr. Mnjokava, I blurted out in exasperation, “Sipendi soda, ninapenda bia tu.” “Oh,” he replied, “I'll see that we have some beer then, as well.” I thought he was kidding, given that Ilboru was started by dry Lutherans and that the typical resident of the area today is also very likely to be a dry Lutheran. It turned out, a few nights later, that he was right, however.

Sometime in the middle of the week a formal invitation, produced on that ancient mimeograph and in Kiswahili of course, was delivered to my door. Since I really do retain a vestige of understanding of that language, and also because of the events that had occurred earlier, I was able to figure out that I was being invited to some sort of graduation celebration at five on Saturday evening. But, just to make sure, I asked a colleague to verify that nothing regarding graduation was happening before five on Saturday. He assured me that such was the case.

The next day the headmaster knocked at my classroom door and asked permission to enter. After motioning the students to remain seated, he sat down and fixed me with a vacant and not terribly friendly stare and gestured for me to continue my presentation, which I did. I was showing my students a way to estimate the effect on the earth's gravitational acceleration of the slight difference in its polar and equatorial radii. Neither he nor they seemed particularly interested in the procedure, but I had no option other than to struggle on through the glacial atmosphere. Finished at last, I asked the students to do the same problem, as homework that night, by direct calculation and assured them they would get the same result. “Mind you,” I concluded, “I haven't done that problem, and if you don't get my answer, then you had better ask the headmaster to get another physics teacher.” He looked up immediately and asked, “Where am I going to get another physics teacher?” I'm glad we understand each other on that score. He left shortly thereafter with a passing comment to me that I was doing OK.

On Thursday I inadvertently learned why the regular teachers so frequently check the class schedule posted on the wall of the TOD room. I had previously supposed they were too lazy to make a copy of their own schedule, or perhaps they taught so infrequently that they actually forgot it between visits to campus. As I approached my second classroom of the morning I encountered Mama the biology teacher who asked sweetly, “Don't I teach these students this period?” I responded in the negative because I had been teaching them at that time for several weeks. When we checked the schedule, however, she was found to be correct; without my knowing it the schedule had been changed, I suspect to accommodate the second master, since he had recently been seen on rare occasions to teach some mathematics to that class. I also overheard him propositioning the woman volunteer from Japan to assist him with his teaching of that class. She was understandably flustered, poor thing; she struggles valiantly with mathematics, English, and Kiswahili but with only token success.

In an effort not to waste the two unexpected hours, I stormed downtown to attend to some business and was making my equally stormy way back up the hill when I was literally stopped in my tracks by the call of “Professor” from a woman I had just passed. It was none other than Mama Mnjokava, who had left her class on some kind of cleanup project while she went downtown to shop. She slowed my pace to a mere crawl and filled my earlobes with more talk than they ordinarily encounter in a year, but she is lots of fun, and on an ordinary day I would have been happy to share the walk with her. “Having someone to talk to makes the road much shorter,” she observed. Our talk then turned to the coming graduation procedures, and she told me that the formal ceremonies would start “sometime after 2:00; they will likely be set for 2:00, but nothing in Africa ever starts on time.” Her comments came to mind the following Saturday afternoon.

Sometime during this week I made a very personal acquaintance, a significant one-on-two relationship with a pair of crowned hornbills. They are small compared to the trumpeter hornbill, which is very common downtown and is seen occasionally here on the hill, and I had noticed them in a nearby tree fairly regularly in the mornings and evenings. But this day as I slumped into a living room chair to await preparation of my early afternoon dinner meal, I glanced out the window and there they were, barely two meters from my face on a tree just outside the window. I rushed to grab my print camera, thinking they would fly away long before I could retrieve a slide camera. Little did I know then, but I soon discovered they were as hard to frighten away as an epidemic of influenza. We soon came to be sworn enemies.

During the past year my travels have kept me in an environment of essentially perpetual spring, so whenever I see unfamiliar avian behavior, I simply ascribe it to the birds’ mating ritual. It was hard to see how banging their bills into my windows and screeching their raucous cries at me all afternoon would promote the survivability of their species, but I hoped they would get bored or fulfill their passion or something. So for the first two or three days I satisfied myself with beating on the window, yelling at them, and even heaving an occasional stone in their direction. But they always came back, and it didn't take long for them to make a mess of the windows and the sills. They even began perching on the clothesline wires across the front porch, which I found intolerable; clothes are now dried inside, because I took down the lines.

By Saturday morning of graduation week, the big day itself, I felt rather defeated by everything and so took an aimless walk in a direction I had never traveled before. I found another secondary school and briefly contemplated applying for work there, and I also found several bird varieties I had not seen near my home; it was good to learn that I still liked birds, at least most of them. On returning home I just sat down on the front steps and gazed idly at my two unwanted guests who were sitting next to their favorite window, just a stone's throw–literally–away. Suddenly an idea came to me; they were captivated by their reflections in the window, narcissism, plain and simple. So I hastily grabbed my roll of Scotch tape and those few sheets of newspaper Dow had used in shipping some packages and began cutting off their view. I ran out of supplies long before I could cover their last mirror, but by the end of the next week, with a new supply of tape and pictures of Clinton, Bush, and Perot from Newsweek covers, I had finished papering the house. The birds are still around; they even scream at me in the middle of the night from the big tree just across the field from my house, but they only rarely come near one of the papered-over windows and then soon fly off amidst a raucous chorus of frustration. But what will happen when I remove the paper?

About 2:00 on that graduation Saturday afternoon, I suddenly realized that I would be sorry to miss the ceremonies if they did indeed take place, so I hustled down the hill and was very pleased to see the spectacle. My students seemed happy that I had come, and we chatted amiably during the empty periods between events. The party for faculty and visitors was tame compared to what the students enjoyed–two of my streams had such a great time that they were not allowed to attend classes at all on Monday, a form of punishment I still fail to comprehend–but I enjoyed the free beer, and pilau, even when mass-produced in steaming cauldrons is a good dish.

But why two graduation ceremonies a year, you might well ask? To answer adequately requires some time, but a thorough response will help you understand the Tanzanian calendar and perhaps also my vacation schedule. Primary education here consists of seven years: standards one through seven. I don't know its timetable at all, but in September after completion of standard seven, graduates wishing to go on with secondary-school studies take a series of national examinations. Those who pass with distinction are invited to attend a particular government school, quite typically close to home; all who pass have the option of attending private schools–these are much more numerous than government schools–at a considerably higher cost of course. A daughter of the family with whom I stayed in Arusha during training told me that the results of these exams and the accompanying invitations to government schools are not released until after Christmas. Her older son, Moses–which may explain why she is known as Mama Mose–took the examinations two months ago, and she is scurrying around right now lining up some private schools in case he is not invited to a government one. "Scurrying" is the appropriate word because the next term starts in mid-January. Moses struck me as bright and very serious; he and his younger brother, Abraham–the Lutherans have been here a very long time–lived with their grandparents when school was in session in Arusha, and I fully expect to see Moses again at Ilboru in January.

So, a new class of form-one students will arrive at Ilboru in January to begin their four years of ordinary-level studies. They typically read eight or nine subjects each term, and only during the third and fourth years do they specialize a little bit into arts streams and science streams. They will complete their studies here four years later with the October graduation festivities that I just witnessed. Keep in mind that I teach form-five students–and quite a few form-sixers who routinely pass the tough questions on to me–at the advanced-level of secondary studies. How did they get to Ilboru? The answer is by doing very well–as I've mentioned before, my guys are the country's best–in another set of national examinations. After graduation the form-four students did not go home, but while the rest of us had a week or two more of classes and then end-of-term exams, they were taking national examinations to gain admittance to A-level work and for invitations to government schools. The schedule in the staff room shows these tests going on for eighteen days, but of course any one student does not take all of them. Test results and invitations will be released sometime next spring, and successful students will then begin their two years of advanced secondary work in mid-July, which is where and when I entered the Tanzanian scene.

After completing those two years, in May or June, the students are certainly entitled to another graduation ceremony, and the faculty to a few more free beers, which is why there will be another big party next May. The advanced students come from all over the country; I know only two, one in each form, who are from Arusha. But these students don't go home right after graduation either. There is yet another set of national examinations, this one to gain admittance to university, to be taken. I don't know when results of these tests are announced, but it hardly matters, since a year of national service is required before going on for more study. The saddest part of this narrative is that only a handful of the qualified graduates can be accommodated at the country's one university.

Well, graduation week was a busy one, and much as I regret saying it, I must: it was basically for the birds. But when it's me against a birdbrain, to put it in the vernacular, I sure as hell better win.

W. Vance Johnson

20 Nov 92