Adrian Begg

The date was 4th October, 1948 and there were 47 of us kids, together with sundry parents, gathered in the Kongwa Club for the opening of the new school. Other schools smelt of ink wells and chalk and empty milk bottles. This one smelt of stale beer and ash trays, which is my first memory of the place.

I didn’t want to be there. I was seven, not quite eight, and to that point in my life my acquaintance with formal schooling had been somewhat limited. A couple of illnesses that involved weeks in hospital and more weeks of recuperation at home had meant long absences - and then came the news of the big adventure: We were going to Africa to grow groundnuts, and I was more than delighted at the prospect of saying goodbye to school for ever. In my innocence I assumed that was the end of it. There surely wouldn’t be schools in Africa, and I could look forward to a life of endless freedom.

My grandmother was looking after my brother and me, our parents having gone ahead to be among the first to set up camp at Kongwa, the little settlement in the middle of Tanganyika that was soon to become a hub of feverish activity as the grandly-named Overseas Food Corporation grew and grew (even if the groundnuts didn’t!) spurred on to ever greater extravagances by the demands of the post-war Government for vegetable oil to feed the deprived British masses.

With our grandmother, we flew to Tanganyika in a converted Lancaster bomber. A couple of former RAF pilots had bought it as Air Force surplus, put in a few seats for passengers, and launched their own airline called Alpha Airways, much to the consternation of BOAC (now British Airways) which objected to the competition, insignificant as it was, and did everything in its corporate power to have Alpha Airways blacklisted. We boarded at Bovingdon airfield outside London and headed out into the night across the English Channel. We could have been going to Dresden - the Lancaster still had its bomb doors, around which we had to negotiate to reach our seats - but we weren’t. We were going to Valletta, in Malta, where we landed for an early breakfast. From Malta we flew to El Adem, once a desert RAF base in Libya, where (with some reluctance) they replenished our drinking water, then it was on to Khartoum to spend the night in a magnificent old colonial hotel on the banks of the Nile. As a seven-year-old who had grown up in the austerity of war-ravaged England, this was my first experience of colonial opulence - waiters in flowing khanzus and little red fez hats serving us exotic dishes at magnificent tables laid with starched white linen and silver cutlery - and I knew at once that it was the life for me.

The next day we flew to Entebbe, then to Tabora in Tanganyika and finally, in the late afternoon, to Dar es Salaam where, thanks to BOAC, we were refused permission to land. As the Lancaster’s fuel tanks were nearly empty the pilots wisely ignored the control tower and landed anyway. My father and one of the other waiting dads had to guide the plane across the apron, the bloke who usually handled the ping-pong bats having been told to ignore us, and an argument then ensued about how we were going to get off, BOAC also having refused point blank to lend us a flight of steps. We eventually disembarked down a ladder propped against the side of the plane.

(Alpha Airways did make a couple more flights. But of course the corporate might of BOAC prevailed and they folded quietly into oblivion).

From Dar es Salaam we took the train, huffing and puffing through the night to Gulwe, then the nearest station to Kongwa, where we had our first sight of the dusty red bush landscape that would be our home for the next three and a half years. Looking through the window of the old wooden carriage I fell instantly in love with the place - the massive upside-down baobabs waving their roots in the air, the dry, yellowed scrub of a wide open plain that simmered in the early heat of the day, and everywhere that distinctive smell of Africa. It was all so very different from cold, crowded, bleak old England...it was a place where a boy could truly enjoy his freedom, and for two weeks we ran wild. Freedom was all I had dreamed of and more.

Kongwa 1950 - Adrian Begg is the cocky little brat in the centre with brother Michael, father Rodney (Kongwa based public relations manager for the OFC), and in the background "Granny" Ethel Leggatt who flew with the boys from England in a converted RAF bomber.

And then, at dinner one night, my world was shattered.

“You will be starting school tomorrow,” my mother announced. My brother and I exchanged looks of horror. Surely she couldn’t be serious? But she was, and the next morning there we were, in our new khaki shirts and shorts, lined up at the Kongwa Club as Headmaster Ralph Whitehead and a small group of teachers bustled around getting us organised.

Mr Whitehead solemnly opened the register and began to read from the list of names.

“ Begg, Adrian,” he intoned, looking expectantly at the group of us kids, obviously expecting a “Here, Sir.”

It was my big moment. My chance to be recorded as the very first pupil of the new Kongwa School, but it was all too much for me. I fled. Out of the Club, through the courtyard where a couple of stewards were stacking the empty beer bottles from the previous night, and into the embracing freedom of the bush, with a teacher in hot pursuit.

The original school building in the early 1960s, much as it was when the school opened.

Fast forward to Kongwa, October 2008. A small group of us, former pupils and our partners, are sitting around at dinner in the hostel at nearby St Phillip’s mission, reminiscing about our days at Kongwa School. There are ten of us - Barbara Laing and her brother Peter Larlham, Jim and Carole Ivey, Aurelio and Pauline Balletto, Graeme and Gill Berry, Francis Howcutt, and my wife Jennie, who is enjoying her first visit to Africa. (Francis didn’t actually go to Kongwa School but he was born in Kongwa in those pioneer days), and we are back in Kongwa to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the school’s opening.

Someone has brought some old school magazines and I am mortified to discover in one of them that Ralph Whitehead has immortalised me in an official history of the school as the first truant - the kid who ran away from the opening ceremony.

From its start at the Kongwa Club the school soon moved to its new permanent premises, a timber-clad horseshoe shaped building on a concrete foundation that would later be replicated with an adjacent senior school block. There have been various changes over the years. The first building is partially gone, though the foundations remain, and the timber of the old senior school has been replaced with mud brick. But it’s still there, and it is still recognisable. Even the roundabout which provided access from the top end of Kongwa’s main street is just as it always was.

Originally, the school was established to serve the families who had been enticed from England to tame the red earth of Kongwa into producing groundnuts. But the project was a costly failure and as the fortunes of the Overseas Food Corporation waned, the school expanded to serve a wider community, taking in boarders from around Tanganyika and even further afield, and eventually moving away from Kongwa to other centres.

But the original buildings of course remained to serve the Kongwa community. These days the school is called Mnyakongo Primary, and it is very different from the school that I remember. Like many schools in modern Tanzania it is distressingly poor. We found that some of theclassrooms lacked desks, and there was an urgent need for power lines so they could get a few computers. But it’s a vibrant, happy sort of school, with cheerful, healthy pupils and a dedicated staff, and it has a strong and genuine sense of pride.

School reunion, October 2008. From left Adrian Begg, Francis Howcutt, Gill and Graeme Berry and Barbara Laing.

Going back after sixty years was emotional, and I think we were all overwhelmed by the great warmth and generosity of the welcome. Head Teacher Angelina and her staff had gone to incredible lengths to make the reunion a very special occasion.

There was really no reason why they should have gone to so much trouble. We were an anachronism, ageing blow-ins from a bygone era, and I doubt if the children really understood who we were, or why we were there. But that in no way diminished the enthusiasm of the celebration they had organised for us. They sang, they danced, they clapped - and we wiped away the tears as they made us feel very special indeed.

Pupils at Mnyakongo Primary School dance for guests at the school reunion.

The kids probably don’t know much about the groundnut scheme, though surprisingly some of the older Kongwa residents remember it fondly. They say it put Kongwa on the map and its legacies were a fine hospital which still operates today much as it did in the groundnut days, the railway, and the school of course. There are other reminders too. Some of the houses built for the OFC are still in use, though many are gone. We found the foundation slab of our home, overgrown with thorn scrub, but still recognisable. And tiny St Andrew’s church on the hill, laboriously built by a group of committed volunteers during the heyday of the scheme, is currently undergoing renovation having sustained extensive damage to its roof and upper brickwork. I still remember the consecration ceremony in 1950, singing ‘Oh, God Our Help in Ages Past’ and eating pineapple jam sandwiches afterwards.

For several years Kongwa was the site of training camps for freedom fighters from other parts of Africa then still under colonial rule. Accounts from some of those who trained there tell of making use of the old groundnut facilities. It was all part of Kongwa’s chequered history. The freedom fighters too sometimes make nostalgic return visits, and the people of Kongwa welcome them back with equal warmth.

On the day I ran away I would never have believed that sixty years later I would be coming back to a school assembly of my own free will. And if someone had told me I would be dipping into my wallet to help buy the school new desks, I would have said without a doubt that they were crazy.

But such are the twists of life.

A delighted head teacher Angelina Munduli with a contract to provide desks donated by the former pupils who attended the reunion.

I’m glad I returned to Kongwa. When I left Tanzania in 1968 to settle in Australia, I ruled a line under the Africa years, relegating them to the files of distant memory. Going back was somehow cathartic. It gave proper closure to a period of my life that was far more important to me than I had realised. It was a significant part of my growing up.

Not much has changed - Kongwa is still baobabs, red dust and thorn trees.

As the groundnutters discovered to their cost, Kongwa can be harsh and unyielding. It is tough bush country that nobody has ever really managed to tame. After sixty years, it didn’t look so different from the day I first arrived there. The town is a bit bigger perhaps, but it is still basically the same old Kongwa and, for all its flaws - the relentless heat, the choking red dust, the thorns that shred you as you walk through the bush - I realised that I still had the same affection for the place that developed on that very first day. It really was like going home.

Adrian Begg
Sydney, Australia.