Graeme Berry

Before

How would the group get on – would I recognise anyone, would anyone remember me?

How would we cope with being in close proximity for four or so days?

Would any of the area still be recognisable, apart from the hills of course?

During

The roads – improved out of all recognition since our last visit to Tanzania in 1997.

Tarmac all the way from Dar to Dodoma and beyond.

Dodoma Hotel – façade still the same but extended and improved – a bit

The church appearing on the hill – now with a corrugated iron roof.

No sign of the houses which we lived in.

The duka, (Wasan’s), now a church.

Approaching the old primary school round the back of Kongwa Hill – following the cross country course in reverse.

The primary school, now mud walled rather than wood, but the 3 main buildings unmistakable. Starting our visit where my Kongwa education began brought rather mixed emotions, everything recognisable but so very different

The amazing reception from the staff and governors – coming in to meet 11 elderly wazungu on a public holiday.

Walking round and finding that Snake Rock had shrunk – surely it was higher?; “A block” was almost still standing, but B & C had gone. Sitting on Snake Rock and looking out over the units, just as we did 50 odd years ago, and feeling the timelessness of the landscape.

Finding the village was not in the right place; the post office no longer in a Nissen hut; the tennis court where we had shows and dances (as well as tennis!) and proceeding to dance!! The generator site now unnecessary as electricity seems to be available on a national grid. Meeting with a grey haired old man (no, not me) who remembered working as an mpishi at the club in the mid 50s, and his words of welcome to us; the welcome that was shared by almost every local we met.

Recognising two particular baobab trees – the one on the path down from school to the club with a root forming a bridge over the donga; and the one by the cricket pitch with the pegs on the inside. Finding the swimming pool, rather forsaken with no water and no buildings in the vicinity. Driving up to the Church from the wrong side, I think the road approach was from the North (Kongwa Hill) side. The church in process of renovation, but the window space just the same – memories of trying to be the first to see the dust trail of the bus on a Sunday morning, meaning mail later that day!

On the last morning finding the village – well the old village as it was and still is. The shop with the same fixtures, shelving, sewing machines, and probably the same dust! The two Asian men, who’d run the shop for over 50 years and remembered the days of the Groundnut Scheme and the School.

The one sour note of the man who insisted we had to have permission to take photographs, whose permission wasn’t stated – obviously wanting baksheesh.

But the main memory has to be the actual anniversary day – the meeting with the DC; the meeting with the fundis who are going to make the desks and chairs for the school and then:

the amazing welcome from 800 or so kids, the staff and hierarchy. Sitting under the awning on comfortable (ish) chairs with bottles of water and tablecloths and flowers on the table, while the children sat or stood in the sun, then danced and sang for us, brought tears to my eyes, and looking along the line, to virtually everyone else’s eyes as well. The fact that these children had practised, sat about waiting, listened to what must have seemed interminable speeches and then performed with such gusto, made me feel very humble. The majority of these kids have nothing, and they put on such an amazing display for people whose only claim to fame is having attended a school on the same site half a century earlier, made me realise just how privileged we are. Seeing just how little they have when in a dance they raised their arms over their heads and displayed holes under the armpits. Then to present two people with kangas, and all of us with honey, and then to feed the eleven of us an excellent meal just reinforced the feeling of how incredibly generous these people are.

And more happy memories – seeing the “white” shirts and blouses, Kongwa pink; seeing my Kongwa feet when I wore open sandals and the dust got everywhere; joining in singing the national anthem and finding several of the staff who sang “Tanganyika, Tanganyika” or Tanzania as it should be now, with us

Some very minor disappointments – the lack of hyenas, cicadas, stink bugs, scorpions and kasuku! Not a Tanganyika boiler to be found, so no chance of pinching corn and incinerating it! No manyara hedges – just a few plants that had “bolted” and stood 3 metres or so high, so no chance of making manyara guns!

The feeling of loss as we drove away – I turned to look at Kongwa hill and Church hill one last time, and voiced what I think others were feeling, “I never thought I’d be sorry to be being driven away from school, but I am today”.

After

Not much more to add, really. The memory of this trip will live with me for a very long time. The feeling of how inadequate our gestures of help really are when set against the need. But, we have to start somewhere, and I for one am already looking forward to going back in 2010 and getting stuck in to some more practical help. I am thankful that we had this opportunity of travelling to Kongwa and only hope that more people will feel drawn to help, either in person or by donations, in the future.

Some thoughts and memories; not in any particular order

Junior school – August – December 1954

Arriving at school by train from Dar, about midnight and being taken to C block on the lorry, given a mug of cocoa and assigned to flat 8. On the day after my tenth birthday, it was a fairly traumatic beginning to my time at Kongwa.

The train, incidentally, had a wood burning engine for at least part of the trip and a veranda at each end of the carriage rather like the old Wild west.

Waking up to the sound of the cocks crowing – a first for a city lad from the back streets of Manchester.

Having your hands and face “inspected”, to make sure you’d had at least a token meeting with soap and water!

Having to make your bed for yourself – no houseboy or parent to do it!

Walking to the mess for breakfast and then to school; being in a class of only 16 students, and watching baboons pinching maize (mahindi) from the shambas.

Being forced to write “italic” instead of “copperplate” as I’d been taught – probably accounts for my lousy handwriting ever since.

Standing out as a new kid because my white shirts and shorts were actually white! Within a week or two, and the junior school dhobi, blended in to the pinkish off-white of everybody else

Getting a bag of hard boiled sweets per week instead of pocket money.

Learning to play rugby and shinty / hockey – and learning to dive to the ground when a locust swarm passed over. Also learning to swim in the chlorine infested water of the Kongwa Club pool, and traversing the baobab root “bridge” over the donga on the way back to school.

Being woken in the small hours by a hyena on the veranda, and on many other nights by electrical storms in the hills towards Mpwapwa.

Writing a serial for the class magazine – all handwritten, no Xerox or even duplicator available!

Walking up to St Andrews church on Sunday mornings and trying to be near the front – not for any deep religious belief but because you could see the train (from mid 55, the bus) coming from Msagali or Dodoma – that meant mail by lunchtime possibly!

The people – staff like Miss Powell; Barbara Edser our head of house; Penny Garnham, matron; Pat Hurley for French; Miss Scadding getting quite uptight because I couldn’t swim; Mr Ferguson teaching us to play cricket – he failed, I’ve never played the game with any skill and after leaving Kongwa never played with any seriousness again; Les Brownlow and his son Roger, fresh from Manchester; and of course Percy Shuttleworth teaching us Rugby – he never could pronounce Zbyszek Mieszek’s name, so the poor kid was always referred to as Spinach.

The other kids in C block – Michael Oliver, Peter Klapprott, Rolando Keller, Hendrik Wessels, the Maclean brothers (Graham and Roddy?) Don McLachlan, Richard Wiggins Headmaster Ralph Whitehead telling the whole school very emotionally that he was leaving.

And of course the wildlife – scorpions, lizards, stink bugs, ants, termites, snakes, hyenas and jackals, leopards, baboons and monkeys (the furry kind, not just the pupils). The horrible taste of manyara “juice”, the ubiquitous baobabs. Smelling the rain coming in mid November; the dust devils and the sunsets. . .

Senior School – Livingstone House – 1955 and 1956.

The culture shock of being in the “big” school – in a class of 30, most of whom I didn’t know!

The other culture shocks – the outside long drop toilet; and having to share a bath with the regulation two inches of (muddy) water with nine other grubby kids.

The freedom we enjoyed – Saturday afternoons and most of Sunday free to wander up Kongwa Hill or on Snake Rock (even the time when Snake Rock was out of bounds, we went there regardless and I broke my collar bone falling, I told the relief matron that I’d fallen off while jumping along the white painted stones on the path between school and House.

The occasional (frequent?) “raids” on other houses – mainly Curie – with the noise of the stones on the tin roofs.

The noise of the rain in the rainy season, and the suddenness with which all the dongas filled up.

The drought one year – with Joe our house prefect playing a song on his wind up gramophone, Frankie Laine singing “Water” (All day I’ve faced the barren waste without a taste of water ) surely some form of mental cruelty when we were restricted to half a mug of water a day for drinking and tooth cleaning etc.!

The Polio scare with rumours of one child in the hospital on the “Iron lung” and no running or sports at all for about a month.

Cross country running at 0545 – only made more bearable by the sight of the sunrise over Church hill. The one memorable morning when Alan Jones’ watch was running fast and he got us all up at 0445 and threatened to send anybody who complained round again. He believed us when we all reached home before any sign of the sun!

Going to the duka or down to the village for sweets or cigarettes and hoping no staff would be there!

Making manyara guns with the miles of cast off wire left all over the place, and finding electric wiper motors on abandoned Land Rovers and other equipment left to rot in the bush.

Making a “den” in front of Junior flat and slipping out to sleep in it late at night, and getting back in again before rising bell or cross country!

The times we caught lizards and scorpions and watched them fight in a cast iron bucket – well, watched the scorpion wait while the lizard dashed higher and higher up the side of the bucket trying to escape the inevitable sting and death. Horrible little creatures weren’t we?

The look of pain on Pete Gemmell’s face when he put his hand in his dhobi bag one morning and got stung by a scorpion. The look of disgust on all our faces when we got back after dinner to find someone had not closed the veranda doors properly and the room was covered in stink bugs and the necessary swilling of the floor with water.

The habit which persisted for years of knocking the heels of your shoes on the floor before putting them on so as to dislodge any insects, scorpions or the like!

Getting ten or eleven days off school to go home to Mwanza when Princess Margaret was making a two day visit to the town. The extra time was because of the train times. I got tonsillitis as she arrived and never got to see her at all, nevertheless I had a soft spot for her for years afterwards! (Also for the Queen Mother who asked that all Nairobi schoolchildren be given a day’s holiday when she visited a few years later!)

Looking across the valley to the hill with the cairn on top that supposedly marked the route taken by the porters carrying David Livingstone’s body back to Bagamoyo.

And again the people – Miss Strong reading to us in English lessons, I still remember a lot about Isambard Kingdom Brunel; Mr Wakefield and his odd habit of giving eleven (occasionally twelve) out of ten for essays – he reckoned he would give ten to a good essay, find a better one and give 11 and so on); Mr Sweeny and how easy it was to distract him into talking about Yugoslavia; Pinky O’Donnell – did he really abscond with the club funds?; Mr Chambers and his refusal to travel in the front seat of his own car; Maurice Moore trying to teach me to throw – am I the only one ever to have a javelin land behind the line?; Mr Gatti telling fortunes at a fete or some such – so far I did NOT marry at 28 (26), have 2 kids not 3, was an accountant not an engineer – his credibility rests on me dying at 73! Receiving 6 of the best from Mr Ferguson, Mr Shuttleworth, Mr Sweeney, probably others, I must have been most undeserving of Miss Davis’s nickname for me (Angel Face); Miss Currie asking about our French lesson, someone saying we’d just learned the verb to hope (esperer) and her calling me that ever after (Esperer – S Berry if you say it in a broad West Scottish accent; and Percy Shuttleworth and the first VW Beetle most of us had ever seen!

The kids of course – you Anthony – I still picture you coming through the hedge in front of our house, red faced and gasping for breath because someone had insisted you join in the games lesson whilst you were having an asthma attack; a picture that I took and will hopefully find again of you with parakeets on each arm; Douglas on his green folding – almost – push bike; Tony Smeed, the only one I ever knew who actually ran away, twice!; our classmates Pat Kerswell, Valerie Green, Pam Shaw, Wilma Milne, Tessa Maure, Morag Cormack, Sylvia Papini, Carola Sorenson , Anita Bayer (whose brother Olaf was my first senior school flat captain), Susan Allenby (whose brothers Athol and Craig(??) scared me to death with how tough Prince of Wales School was – but when I went there I found it wasn’t any tougher than Kongwa!), Eliana di Zitti, Tony Baker, Don McLachlan, Ian Priestley, Brian Firth, Lister Hannah, Adi Schneemann, Sidney Barallon, William Laws – at the time the only person I’d ever met who had never felt snow (he’d seen the top of Kilimanjaro); the haunting sound of Marcus Savy walking back to Nightingale after evening prep playing the mouth organ. Also the Mwanza gang – Paul and John Gilmour, Mike Gunston, the McLeod brothers, Pat Baker, Stephan and Mary Wechsler, the Allenbys
Also Zbyszek and his expertise with a catapult and knife – I can still taste the bird he potted and then cooked on the fire kept going the night watchman outside the bursars office! It was there that I had my first (and last!) Kali cigarette – even at 10 cents for twenty they were not worth it.

Cooking mahindi pinched from the local’s shambas on the Tanganyika boiler at the back of each house – I still prefer corn incinerated rather than the pale cobs we usually get - and no butter of course!

Singing Funga Safari as we waited for the bus to set off for Dodoma at the end of term – that memory came back several years ago when then President Moi of Kenya was inspecting a guard of honour and the band played the tune. Incidentally there is a web site called Funga Safari which gives contacts and reminiscences for people who attended East African (mainly Kenyan) schools.

The smell of the rain and the dust storms (at different times of course!)

The sound of the generator through the night – and that eerie silence as it stopped and all the lights went out.

Watching the school productions of Gilbert & Sullivan – Trial by Jury and Pirates of Penzance in particular

Surprising how much comes flooding back when you start to jot thoughts down. . . . . .

When Gill and I were in TZ in 1997, I felt almost as if I’d come “home”, not so much in Dar, but in Msagali, Dodoma and Mwanza. Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be!!