Eighty Not Out (29 page)

In our absence the long-suffering staff at the institute had sent an ultimatum to the East African Community headquarters in Arusha, saying they were going on strike unless Dr Eyakuze was removed from his post. The dispute had yet to be resolved, as the decision rested with the secretary general of the
EAC
. The situation was farcical, in that there were by that time three typists at the institute, none was competent, and all, including the latest appointee, were hugely pregnant. So my workload expanded to include typing a few letters for the director. As mentioned previously, he was a brilliant clinician and good administrator, but lacking in ‘people skills'. Many colleagues felt that Fergus deserved a medal for having survived, with only two major altercations, for as long as he had. My belief is that, in his own quaint way, he respected us both. More than twenty years later, on hearing that Fergus had died, he wrote me a very sincere letter of condolence.

In August, we spent the first night of our trip to Tanga at Lake Lagarya, where Jane Goodall and her husband made their first studies of hunting dogs, jackals and hyaenas. The last crooked wooden sign had underestimated the miles from Naabi, the red-ball sun had started to sink below the horizon and the track could no longer be distinguished from surrounding scrub when we drew up, in clouds of dust, at George Dove's Ndutu camp. George was a reformed white hunter with a magnificent waxed handle-bar moustache: he was a glorious extrovert, but his warm welcome was genuine, and he had an inexhaustible store of anecdotes about people and events. Each tent had a Heath Robinson shower and thunderbox at the rear, and the children were thrilled to have their own tent beside the one we occupied. They slept soundly, but Katharine complained in the morning that something had been scratching at the canvas of their tent, trying to get inside. We dismissed this as having been a loose bit of dry grass stuck in the roof, but later in the day large paw marks were found not far from the tents. The antelopes were more varied than we had seen in other parts of the Serengeti, with herds of topi, hartebeest and a few gerenuks. We had also seen areas where large trees had been damaged by elephants, although none were to be seen, apart from a few stragglers crossing the road at the point where the track down to Ngorongoro crater begins its tortuous descent.

To keep costs down we broke the journey to the coast by staying overnight at a new
YMCA
hostel in Moshi. As we drove past the North Pare Hills the next day the views of Kilimanjaro were superb: like many other peaks, the mountain is often obscured by low cloud and mist. That my pictures have survived is little short of a miracle, because on projecting them in Tanga, the dreaded Newton's Rings appeared, contracting very slowly under the heat until they disappeared. Some had developed a fungal growth, and the desiccators I had hoped to find in the laboratory in Tanga were nonexistent.

After initial shyness, the children resumed the happy relationship they had formed three years earlier, but we were surprised to find the McMahon lot had, in the interval, lost their fluency in Swahili. We stayed in a guest wing of the main house at the Medical Research Council centre, where John was director, and Rosemary worked on a
WHO
health and nutrition project. Fergus spent most days working with John at the laboratory, while I looked after the children. I took them through the mangrove swamp to the beach, and explored the town, dead after the recent exodus of Asian shopkeepers. But between shuttered premises a few hung on, selling ancient stock, collections of second-hand books, old records of American origin, a few quality model railway carriages, and an exquisite Scandinavian green celadon stoneware pot, which is now in my sitting room. The locality was also in recession because of a slump in the sisal industry, on which it had been over-dependent. Arusha and Moshi too were sad reminders of what they had been when we had first visited them three years earlier: by comparison Mwanza was a centre of abundance. Fresh seafood could be bought daily, and by trial and error I learned which were the best, and to avoid anything exoticlooking that the stall-holder would waft temptingly under my nose. We were introduced to snorkelling, which Katharine and Mary took to immediately; they swam out to an offshore raft, around which myriad small multicoloured fish, including the angel fish they had seen in their grannie's tank, teemed. Even I, who have always loathed having my head under water, managed some tentative viewing. Michael, who had not yet dispensed with rubber wings, had to be taken out on adult shoulders: his breakthrough happened at Christmas in the pool at the Kericho Tea Hotel.

We returned to Mwanza to find new Dutch families installed on the compound: a biochemist with wife and three children of five, four and eighteen months; and a young doctor and his wife, whom Noggin and Blackie had adopted in our absence, finding they got the kind words and pats they did not get from Stephano, who did no more than dish out their daily food. That the new children spoke not a word of English was no deterrent to Michael, who disappeared soon after lunch on our first day back and was not seen again until I went to collect him and introduce myself to the new neighbours.

Shortly after Katharine returned to Kaptagat, there was a marked change for the worse in relations with Uganda after Amin fulfilled his threat of taking punitive action against Tanzania. We awoke one morning to the sound of low flying aircraft, followed by the unmistakeable
wump
of bombs landing, which I recognised from the air raids on Belfast in April 1941. The noise grew fainter as the two planes dropped more bombs on Mwanza town, before fading to silence. Several of the bombs had landed in the Bwiru area, and one made a hole in the roof of Jarockij's prison, unoccupied at the time. In the town the only fatality was reported to have been a beggar who had been sleeping under a mango tree. This action galvanised all sorts of dormant groups, and the embassies were inundated with enquiries from nationals about where they stood in the event of full-scale warfare. From the safety of the coastal region the Swedish and Dutch embassies took a detached view of the incident – ‘Oh, is there some trouble in the Mwanza area?' Our lot took a more realistic approach, having got it wrong the previous year when there had been an incipient crisis, but the official line was that one was on one's own until one reached Dar es Salaam. Rumours were rife that not a gallon of petrol could to be bought between Mwanza and Arusha, owing to the exodus of practically the entire Asian population.

We packed bags, ready to depart should the situation worsen, though some people with numerous dependants fled the next day, and many in the town moved to their families in outlying villages, leaving a ghost town with all the shops shuttered. Fergus was due to fly to Brazzaville – also liable to violent outbursts – early in October, so it was out of the question for him to leave me and the two children in Mwanza. Dr Eyakuze advised him to evacuate us to Tanga when we heard that Libyan reinforcements had reached Uganda and had crossed the border near Bukoba, where heavy fighting was in progress. This was later denied by both sides, but in truth total chaos reigned, and nobody had the slightest idea what the situation really was.

Despite Nyerere having said that such infringements were not to be tolerated, no official statement or condemnation of the action was forthcoming. Our decision to get out was strengthened by the fact that we could be completely cut off if Ugandan forces were to arrive by air. Situated as we were on an offshoot of the road to the airport, the local authorities had only to declare the closure of road, air and steamer services for us to be isolated. So, in convoy with one of the Land Rovers driven by a Canadian, Steve, whose car had been found at the last minute to be unroadworthy, we left on the same route to the coast we had covered little more than a month before. Stephano, whose daughter Elizabeth was in the last fortnight of her second attempt at the final examinations for upper primary school, was left in charge of the house and dogs. We were particularly sorry for the Dutch biochemist, a nervous type at the best of times, having survived internment by the Japanese in Indonesia. His car was the same model Renault 4L that I had driven in Nairobi, and they had set off through the Serengeti to Dar the day before us. Steve, his wife, two children and another childless couple, had crammed their baggage and camping equipment, plus several large containers of petrol, into the Land Rover. These, which Fergus and Steve had spent sweaty hours filling and lifting, were later found superfluous; the rumours had been panic-driven, and we were able to fill up at intervals on the journey to Tanga.

Fergus left us in Tanga and travelled on to Brazzaville via Dar and Lusaka, and during his absence the news blew alternately hot and cold – indeed, the day we arrived the air-raid we had witnessed was being publicised as almost a nonevent. Then Amin resumed his tactics: he finally sent his delegate to the peace talks – a week late – and a Tanzanian source reported that he had agreed with Mobutu to delay the final date for departure of any remaining Asians. This was not broadcast on Radio Uganda. He continued to claim that forces were poised to invade his territory and that he was taking sole command of the army. I believed that his end would undoubtedly come soon, and I hoped it would be a sticky one. My intuition let me down on that one. We had a friend who was to receive a higher degree from the hands of the dictator, but the investiture was postponed when it was announced that the vice-chancellor of the university had ‘gone into hiding' – probably a euphemism for liquidation by Amin's undisciplined troops.

A good aspect of the situation was that neither Mary nor Michael was missing school, as all the Mwanza schools had closed soon after the bombing of Bukoba, and they were in any case heading for the six-week holiday period that began at the end of September. In the meantime, I taught them both in the mornings, but found it hard to cope with that on top of cooking, washing and the variety of insect life, which peaked now that the climate had turned humid. Mary worked without complaint, but Michael's ploy was to make the exercise so unrewarding that in frustration I would release him to play outside. That, however, was not without its risks: there were quite a lot of snakes around, and one morning a tall tree crashed without warning to the ground, narrowly missing a corner of the house.

On the day that the wind rose in sporadic gusts and the first heavy rains fell, Fergus returned from Brazzaville. No decision had been made about our future with
WHO
; both assistant directors general were on leave and nobody had been officially appointed to the controversial post. We felt they were probably waiting until Ansari's retirement at the end of March before taking any action. Accolades continued to come from all quarters about the project, but no job offers. Fergus was getting a number of requests for references from fellow scientists wishing to escape from Uganda. Forty-five expatriate lecturers at Makerere University resigned in protest against the treatment of some of their African colleagues, including the vice-chancellor, who had disappeared without trace.

The last time we had returned from the coast through the Serengeti I had said, ‘Never again', no matter what the circumstances, despite the great game viewing and stupendous scenery, and here we were en route again, heading back to Mwanza five weeks later. There was a sort of Marx Brothers unreality about the peace talks. Amin said they would form a good basis for future improved relationships, and one got the impression that a treaty may have been signed hastily by the foreign ministers who then rushed to their respective bosses to see if they would agree to the conditions.

January 1973 would be devoted to finishing Fergus's final assignment report. It was vital not to jeopardise the report, or delay its production, and I knew I could finish it, provided I could get peace in the mornings. The two competent typists at the institute, recruited when the pregnant trio left, had resigned saying they could no longer put up with the rude and inconsiderate behaviour of the director, so I was left with no choice. Fergus had asked to defer his local leave until 1973, but the regional office, in its usual gracious way, refused his request: so it was either use it up in December or sacrifice it.

Before beginning this leave, we decided to give a party for the fourteen supporting staff who had worked for Fergus since the start of the project in 1967. When the wives and partners were included, the head count was more than thirty. I calculated we would need two legs of goat, a large variety of fruit and vegetables, samosas and six cups of dry rice, as well as thirtysix bottles of beer, local gin, a few bottles of wine and a variety of soft drinks. After a shy start, it turned into a really good party with ‘loud music', as they say in
Noggin the Nog
, including ‘African Safari'. I showed slides of the staff, the project area, and some pictures of the Serengeti and its wildlife, which many present had never seen. The effort was much appreciated, which made it worthwhile. Stephano helped me, but clearly he did not approve: his position was anomalous as the father of the librarian's ex-‘wife'. Periodically he let drop uncharitable remarks about one or other member of staff at the institute; sadly some of the gossip was well based. One talented technician had died from acute alcohol poisoning having drunk 100 per cent proof wood alcohol. Fergus had seen him a few times with woefully reddened eyes, never suspecting the cause, because his work was irreproachable.

We began our two-week holiday, spending the night at Thomson's Falls, north-east of Nakuru, en route to Mount Kenya, which Fergus said I must see before leaving East Africa. All effort was in vain, as it was invisible under a pall of bluishblack cloud. We stayed in a pleasant old house perched near the top of the falls. There was not much to do except take walks, do some riding and descend the 261 steep stone steps to the bottom of the falls. I would happily have settled for the view from the top, but the children were determined to go down, so I had to accompany them lest something untoward should happen. Thomson's Falls village sewage was discharged into the river at the top, and the water supply was taken out at the bottom: local health authorities claimed it was treated and quite safe to drink, but the lodge manager told us that she boiled and filtered it. Hot and sweaty when we returned to the top, all agreed the view was better from there. We then went to Nairobi, where the Christiansens had managed to get us a house to stay in rather than at the Fairview Hotel, thus saving some cash, but not as much as one might wish, if you take into account a token gift of gratitude to the owners, and supermarket bills for five. I got through Christmas shopping and dental appointments after three days, but at the end began to feel distinctly odd and very cold, and took to my bed on arrival at the Tea Hotel in Kericho. I ran intermittent fevers of mounting severity which lasted till Boxing Day, each time, after a heavy sweat, feeling a bit more normal, and able to eat a little; but full value for money was not enjoyed.