Reflections on sunday: Who wants to remember the 1960s?

At the risk of repeating myself, and earning your wrath, I’ll oblige a person who asked me a question in an e-mail. The person wanted to know the truth of where I was in the early 1960s. On reading the question, what sprang to mind immediately were the hazardous evenings! Early evenings in the refugee camps of Nshungerezi usually found us in the kitchen, which was a small outhouse behind the main house. The light in this outhouse was never adequate, owing to the scarcity of firewood. It was a tough job collecting the firewood, so we made sure that only very little was used, and none was wasted. Very often, then, when you were busy roasting maize, you experienced a cold feeling and you felt as if your hair was standing on end. When you got that feeling, you knew automatically that a snake was in the vicinity. If there was too little light, then you opted not to declare war, alerted the others, and you all stopped talking and sat still, to let it pass. Being fresh from the Congo, we were known as ‘Congomen’. A young and artificial ‘Congoman’ is a tough egg and we were feared! Having been hotly pursued by the Mobutu elements, we were happy when we hopped over the border to safety in Uganda. We went through humbling experiences that I have no time to recount here; in the Lorries, in Kabale and so on. Still, despite being fugitives who had narrowly escaped the wrath of the real Congoman, we made our presence felt immediately. First of all, we made sure that everybody knew that we could use our heads for many purposes. And that apart from carrying any load, our heads could split the head of anyone who joked around. We made sure that everybody knew that our legs could do more tricks than the best of the conjurers’ hands. You could use your legs to overcome a foe in a way only wizards could comprehend. Those we found in Nshungerezi held us in awe and reverence. They believed that we could control the elements, the beasts, and any malediction, name it. That, however, was before we met the tsetse fly of Nshungerezi! The camp was erected where formerly was the Kagera Park Reserve of Uganda, a park infested with all forms of parasites and germ-carriers. The moment these hungry pests saw us, they welcomed us with such zeal that sometimes you could find the whole community down with one disease or another. It was not rare to see somebody fall asleep while walking, because he had been stung by a tsetse fly. The mosquitoes there were so efficient that you could fall down with malaria within a second of one mosquito pricking you! And so, we who were not accustomed to mosquitoes and tsetse flies were kept in a sort of quarantine, the new refugees not mixing with the old ones, and the old ones not mixing with the nationals. If there were refugees who had to leave the camp for some very important reason, then a net was carefully passed around them so that they did not escape the camp with a fly of some sort. Not that we did not have some athletic young men, who could reject the humiliation of being cleansed before joining the citizens of Ankole, outside the camps. One such young man I remember, Silver, is now an elderly man, still athletic but not equally quick of limb. One time he was stopped at a tsetse roadblock, two forked branches on both sides of the road and a rope joining them, so that the tsetse flies could be netted. Being a good high jumper, he decided to skip over the rope and join free-land. The ‘tsetse officers’ pursued and set upon him as if he was escaping with a weapon of mass destruction! No one dared escape inspection after that. Man, of course, is the ultimate survivor of all creatures. It was no wonder, therefore, that hardly after a year all the beasts had vanished, and refugee man reigned over all the camps. The first to go were the big creatures, like the hippo. The hippos had hunted us with so much vengeance that we stopped all forms of nocturnal movement. Then somebody came up with a revolutionary idea that changed all that. Instead of these beasts putting to waste our flesh, why don’t we put their flesh to good use? This sounded so simple and yet it worked so well that we laughed at ourselves for many years after that. As people had not started to cultivate the land and the rations of maize flour and American sorghum from UNHCR trickled to a halt, people had to think of other ways of finding food. The alternative that presented itself was to go and work in the neighbouring banana plantations. You could go early in the morning, clear the weeds in a Munyankole’s shamba, if you were lucky enough to get the job, then you would receive a bunch of bananas as your payment. Instead of that arrangement, we started running to the park guards to report a rogue hippo that was on the rampage. It did not matter that it had not attacked anybody: someone was always ready to scratch or smear themselves with blood to show that they had been assaulted. The hippo was then shot dead and the people shared the meat, which was salted and dried. It is this meat that we used to take and exchange for bananas, and thus came to our rest. The Munyarwanda does not consume hippo meat, as a tradition, but those of us who had lived in the Congo did not mind the taste, clandestinely! Contact: ingina2@yahoo.co.uk