Eighty Not Out (27 page)

The political climate in all three of the East African Community countries continued to simmer, the latest blow being sequestration, without compensation, of all property worth over £5,000 or more than ten years old. The justification being that the landlords – mostly Asian – had already made their pile, and it was time for the state and the common man to have his whack. How many of the latter would benefit was debatable, many small shops having already closed, and such Asians as were able, including professionals, had left the country. The Chinese contingent was active, beavering away on the railway project, and new Russian staff were seen at the office of the
WHO
area representative in Dar.

Late in June we made another gruelling trip to Katharine's school to attend open day. We did not reach the Kenyan border until one thirty in the afternoon, having been delayed by two young men dressed in untidy army uniform, who stepped into our path waving guns, and saying they wanted to inspect our luggage. It was a small settlement, they wore no caps, and no sentry box could be seen – they were probably poseurs. Fergus waved the
UN
laisser passer
, and other documents claiming diplomatic immunity, but by the way they scrutinized the papers it was clear they had never heard of the
UN
. After an inordinate time spent going through our belongings, including the no longer cold insulated box, we were waved on.

At the official post Fergus, now tired and irritable because of the loss of time, aroused the wrath of the duty officer by omitting to remove his sweaty hat in the presence of an enormous photograph of Jomo Kenyatta. A severe ticking-off ensued, but Fergus appeared duly penitent, where I would have been explosive; he always feared that my ill-concealed exasperation would get us into real trouble. We reached Kisii by four thirty, but after a look at the crummy hotel we had stayed in two years earlier when a freak hailstorm had halted our progress, we decided to press on to the Tea Hotel at Kericho. The road was a single-track tortuous strip of tarmac bordered with loose chippings; to continue by the direct route via Sotik would have invited early demise – to meet another vehicle it would be a case of who would first lose his nerve and take to the sides. So we descended almost to Kisumu before taking the good road to Kericho, thus putting another eighty-five miles on the clock. For the last ten miles the petrol tank registered an unwavering empty as we climbed every steep hill.

It was the last week of convalescence for Fergus and the strain of the journey was clearly visible. Luckily the hotel had vacant rooms. In the gardens, near the tea plantations with their unique shade trees, the lawns were still well maintained, the aviary loud with healthy-looking inmates, the fountain in the pond working and the water lively with large carp. The food was excellent, and the charge little more than at the sleazy dump in Kisii, with its memorable scrambled eggs floating in half an inch of tinned margarine, accompanied by bloated, burst, undercooked sausages resembling roadkill.

Next morning we made our way to Kaptagat for the open day. Katharine looked healthy despite a badly sunburned nose, and was overjoyed to see us, quite unaware of what we had been through to get there. We were treated to displays of Scottish dancing, wrestling, boxing, rugger and tennis, but the swimming was cancelled because so many pupils had colds – tough on those, including Katharine, who excelled. While the parents were given an excellent lunch, the children were banished to the dormitories to eat sausage rolls, potato crisps and fizzy drinks. Mary and Michael were in the care of Anna Jenset, now eleven, and proud to be put in charge of younger children. Along with the Jenset girls, we stayed two nights of the exeat at Eldoret, where I developed the school cold, which quickly turned to bronchitis so severe as to require an intramuscular tetracycline injection in the posterior, followed by a course of antibiotics. On the final day I recovered enough to crawl around, so Fergus was in charge of the children for an afternoon only. Before returning to Mwanza, we stayed overnight in the Jensets' house, and did a massive shop for things like bacon, cheese, sausages and butter, and detergents to deal with our inevitable vast load of washing.

The political situation continued to deteriorate, with General Amin threatening to strike deep into Tanzanian territory. Nobody understood what he was up to, but he had closed the Ruanda-Burundi border and made a claim – patently untrue – to have killed six hundred or more Tanzanian troops near Bukoba. We were glad we had advised an enthusiastic young American water engineer, who had written at Christmas for advice, not to sign a two-year government contract. Even continued funding for the institute was jeopardised when Amin announced he would withhold his contribution to East African Community funds until such time as Tanzania ‘shows a more co-operative attitude'. The headquarters of the community were in Arusha (Tanzania), making the situation even more complex.

I finished slides for a trip Dr Eyakuza was making to the
US
, and completed stencils for Fergus's latest paper, but he was seething because two papers sent to Brazzaville in February, to be forwarded to Geneva for publication in the
Bulletin of the World Health Organization
, had not even been acknowledged by Dr Quenum. Fergus wrote such a forthright memorandum on the subject, I was relieved that he now held a career service appointment.

In mid-July Fergus travelled to Nairobi with a load of data for processing at the Epidemiological Centre. I was keen to get a call from him, worried that Tanzania would be cut off from all neighbouring countries. We were no longer on speaking terms with Uganda, and the British government's recent loan of ten million quid to Amin hardly improved matters. So far there had been no official reaction – partly because Nyerere's policy seemed to be to ignore anything nasty, and partly because we no longer had a daily air-link with Dar, whence the newspapers came. Fergus did get through by telephone, saying he planned to bring Katharine down to Nairobi for two days, and would take her for a dental appointment.

During this time, Fergus developed a virulent skin condition which was never diagnosed, but was so severe he had to be hospitalised after arranging for Katharine to fly down to Mwanza, escorted by Peter Kilala. Fergus was in a hospital wing without a telephone, so I had to depend on reports from friends who worked at a nearby laboratory. He was covered in sores, like something between carbuncles and enormous blisters, which were erupting almost as one watched. It was thought to be an allergic reaction of some sort, and I later heard that on admission it had been deemed life-threatening. When he got back to Mwanza, he played down the severity, but I was appalled by the extent of the raised and angry reaction; his neck, both arms and part of his back looked as if he had been badly burned and large, red blisters were slowly scabbing over. He was not an allergic type – apart from when he had elephantiasis of the scrotum, later attributed to a tick bite. Eventually the scabs fell off, leaving marks that were slow to fade; afterwards he was on a cortisone regime, which had to be phased out gradually – he said it made him more than usually irritable.

We both had reason to be tense and irritable, due to the silence from headquarters, so in August we wrote to the chief medical officer expressing surprise at the delay, considering all reports and recommendations had been with them for more than two months. The lack of response was particularly galling in the light of
WHO
's lofty ideals about ‘Man being only in a state of health when both
mind
and body are at peace …'

During the summer holidays, Anna and Edit stayed with us for a week, and the usual uproarious time was enjoyed by the children – exhausting for the adults, particularly me and Stephano. Their father was very generous and had brought piles of cheese, frankfurters and ice cream from Kisumu in defiance of an officious English customs officer who had spoken severely to another ship's officer who had brought bacon and butter for a friend. Officially foodstuffs were not subject to duty between East African Community countries, and there was a noticeable lessening of tension after the rabid editor of the
Tanzanian Standard
, a female Asian, was sacked. Thereafter fewer references were made to imperialist machinations, and ‘our own pure maidens' being exposed to decadence. She was South African, and a committed Communist.

Orderly queues at the Somali butcher's shop were a thing of the past, and at the central market one had to push and jostle with the rest – a hard, unyielding back and capacious basket in hand were a help. Prices soared as never before, and two highranking officials had been jailed in Dar for offences relating to the trade. The abattoir workers, who did preliminary hacking, took many perks in the form of ‘waste', so carcasses no longer weighed as much as previously, and often vital parts were missing – ‘Sorry, this cow did not have any kidneys.'

The tense border situation continued, with both sides lying through their teeth, and there was good reason to think a move would shortly be made to reinstate Milton Obote: the spearhead was likely to be through Bukoba. Many lorries had been commandeered locally, creating a petrol shortage, but Fergus did his best to ensure that the project vehicles had full tanks. Chinese officials had been demanding unheard-of delicacies, such as frozen pork and bacon in the stores, provoking cynical comments from the old colonialist contingent. Almost all the shops were selling off stock, and newspaper deliveries were erratic.

Near the end of August I wrote to my mother, telling her that, for the first time, we both felt less than enthusiastic about the possibility of coming to Northern Ireland for our home leave. We were very concerned at the level of violence now perpetrated by both sides of the community in Northern Ireland. We were particularly appalled by the shooting of a priest giving the last rites – even if it was to a member of the
IRA
– which we felt just about surpassed all. Cardinal Conway's evasive platitudes shocked us and the pronouncements emanating from the Vatican were feeble – even devout Catholics were shocked by an attitude reminiscent of the silence during the years of Nazi dominance. The army had been either unfortunate or careless, on some occasions, but there was clear evidence that both the
IRA
and Protestant loyalists had been guilty of brutality on a horrendous scale. We may have felt detached by distance, and not committed to either extreme, but the situation was not possible to ignore. Nor was it possible to envisage a relaxing holiday at home when life there had become so unsafe, when timed devices lurked in multi-storey car parks.

Meanwhile, the sharp letter we sent to Geneva did not produce any concrete or satisfactory reply. What they said more or less shelved the main issues, pleading they were still awaiting further reports and a full check-up from another physician of Fergus's choice in Mwanza, ‘in order to judge your reserves'. We wondered if that indicated if his reserves were thought to be slender, he would be considered a bad bet, and forced into early retirement.

In September we rescued a clutch of pied kingfishers, which the ball boys at the club had intended to eat. When we got them home two were dead; of the remaining three, two were almost fully grown, but their wings had been cut, and they too expired. However, the smallest, now called Dewey, whose wings were just starting to feather, thrived in its stinking sand box on frequent meals of tiny fish, soon emerging to fly around the house, perching on curtain rails and leaving a trail of droppings. Too humanised for its own good, it would settle on anyone's hand or head. When the time came to release it near a wild colony at the lakeside, it returned within the day, either on its own, or proudly borne by an urchin expecting reward. Our hope that it would learn fishing techniques from the flock was probably never realised.

Katharine's return to school for the Michaelmas term was imminent, and this time we chose the route by the Serengeti corridor to the new Lobo Lodge, Keekorok, and Narok to Nairobi. Our booking for Lobo was unconfirmed, irregularities about reservations were commonplace – mostly perpetrated by Asian travel agencies – and there was, of course, always the threat of arbitrary border closure.

The Serengeti corridor, desert-dry for weeks, suffered a localised downpour the night before we set out, so it took more than an hour to cover the first fifteen miles. I drove in first or second gear, while Fergus squelched ahead, indicating the best route. Since our first visit, the main track to Seronera and Banagi gate had been much improved by grading and laying of drains at crucial points. We stayed the first night at the Lobo Lodge, a beautiful building set high on a kopje; many of the rocks had been incorporated in the lodge by a female architect who had used locally available materials wherever possible. The central nucleus resembled a sophisticated mediaeval banqueting hall: towering timber pillars supported a timber roof, and mature trees, their trunks protected by glass enclosures soared upwards. A swimming pool was perched right at the edge of the cliffs overlooking a water hole and the vast plains beyond. It was a magical place to visit, but the company, whose chain extended to the West Indies and who held a large share in state tourism, had already priced themselves out of the local market, and catered almost exclusively for package tours.

Instead of treating the children as such, the waiters, all in full regalia – white with cummerbund and fez – ushered them to a formally laid dinner table, and produced the menu for the evening meal. After I explained their modest requirements, they took an inordinate time to produce some soup, glasses of cold milk, and plates of meat and vegetables, for ravenous children, eight, seven and four years old. Despite the brochure quoting a fifty per cent reduction for children under twelve, they charged the adult rate for Katharine and Mary, arguing they were too big to share our room. A leopard was regularly seen at dusk padding about near the swimming pool, and during the meal a terrified American woman rushed inside, complaining of having met it face to face on a narrow track. The children were thrilled, but despite going out very early the following day, we never saw it.