The Gunny Sack

by M G Vassanji

  The next day a furious Kulsum came to school and almost slapped Mr. Ramji on the face. “Is he your son, you bastard? Don’t you ever touch him again.” Mr. Ramji stood red-faced in the compound, looked on by Miss Penny Mrs. Gaunt and the servants. “No Cutchi,” he feigned, and the servants pacified Kulsum.

  Miss Castelinho (who had hidden herself during the confrontation) had a brilliant idea. She would use twelve fairies. When the performance was given and we sang “May the Good Lord Bless and Keep You,” holding our cardboards in front of us, tears were seen in Miss Penny Mrs. Gaunt’s eyes. And when we turned the white cardboards in our hands she read the words “God Bless You!” across the stage, and she definitely looked away, she could not contain herself. I was that bright beaming exclamation mark on the stage, Miss Castelinho’s brilliant afterthought.

  She left us a gift. The 400th anniversary of the birth of William Shakespeare is drawing nearer, she said. I want to leave you a gift of a book … Alice in Wonderland. Because it was truly wonderland for me, this place … On her last day, it was recess, the car came to fetch her, again he kissed her. The car drove away slowly, followed by a crowd of running cheering waving shouting boys. Goodbye, Miss Penny! Goodbye, Mrs. Gaunt! Goodbye, Miss Penny! … Mrs. Gaunt!

  It was December 1959. The school year was over and Miss Penny Mrs. Gaunt was gone. In the evenings, TBC’s request programme Dial a Disc was under way, collecting charity for the Christmas season. At Karimjee Hall, on the 15th, the Legislative Council sat for an important session. The public gallery was packed. Thousands waited patiently outside. Acacia Avenue was lined with people carrying green TANU cards. Taxis and private cars were bedecked with flowers and greenery. Movie cameras were in sight, the world was watching.

  The speaker was A. Y. A. Karimjee, descendant of the great Karimjee family of traders. At some point the House adjourned and awaited the arrival of the Governor, Sir Richard Turnbull. The Governor was escorted in and read a long address from the throne. When he had finished there was applause from the members, which grew in strength, louder and louder, until at home our ancient Philips radio could not contain the thump-thump-thump of joy and emitted loud static. A shout of joy went up at Moonlight Restaurant, and a procession took off to meet the bigger one emerging from Karimjee Hall bearing Nyerere on shoulders. Thus Dar received the news of madaraka, self government.

  “Godspeed,” said the Colonial Secretary lain Macleod, wishing the country a happy journey.

  Independence was painless. A man’s colour is no sin in Tanganyika, said Nyerere. Those hooligans who go about making wild statements that the events of Congo would be repeated in Tanganyika should be severely reprimanded, scolded the Herald. Tanganyika is not Congo, where nuns were raped and hundreds murdered and shops looted.

  A few weeks before the great day, PWD lorries appeared in our street at night and left behind wide, stocky pipes edgewise in the centre of the road. Soon large, colourful canopies went up from these pipes, colourful lights and banners appeared, and at night Kichwele Street looked bright and glorious, like a street from toyland, and those with cars drove all over town to compare the decorations and to speculate which public display would win the first prize.

  There were some doubts and more serious speculations; Kakar the lecherous grocer in Mrs. Daya’s building stockpiled corned beef tins and rice and potatoes in his store, and some would ask the Ismailis what the Aga Khan had advised them to do, but the Ismailis were smiling, not saying, and simply joining in the celebration.

  Independence was painless. Prince Philip came to give the country away, but in Kichwele we stayed home and followed the events in the newspapers and on the radio. And on independence day, at midnight, zero hour, while the decorated street below was empty of man or motor vehicle, sitting silent, neglected, like a bride not picked up on the fateful day: upstairs, sitting quietly around the ancient Philips oracle, we saw in our mind’s eye the lights turn off at the National Stadium, the Union Jack quietly come down and the lights turn on again to reveal the new green and black and gold national flag flying; we heard the thunderous applause in our sitting room, carried by radio waves, and again, we all swore, far away at the National Stadium, carried this time by the wind.

  BOYSCHOOL AND INDEPENDENCE.

  When the new Shamsi Boys’ Secondary School was built, it was so far from the nearest habitation that it was still a picnic spot. Hassan Uncle estimated it on his bicycle odometer to be five miles from our shop, and “five miles” it remained, it being risky to question the stony expression that could elongate in an instant into a look of contempt. It took forty minutes of brisk walking on Viongozi and United Nations to get there. Touring expeditions of large, extended families took off from Downtown, Kariakoo and Upanga for the new school every Sunday afternoon before it officially opened. Each batch of pilgrims brought news about its wonders. The light-brown stucco and blue painted exterior, the neatly cut hedges, the garden alive with red bougainvillaea and hibiscus and khungu trees. Every classroom had a side of French windows facing a neatly cultivated patch of garden. There were individual desks and chairs with rubber shoes, instead of the barely movable bulky desk-benches of previous times. There were the cricket and football fields, the tennis and basketball courts. All that was lacking was a swimming pool. When Kulsum returned from her journey her varicose veins acted up and her legs had to be massaged. “All around … jungle,” she sighed with pleasure as Sona’s hands kneaded her calves and feet, “we thought there might be lions around.” But the lions had left some years before, and when the school opened monkeys were occasionally caught in the trees.

  The two-storey school building partly enclosed a square that was a rock garden and housed the bell. Every hour a servant in khaki, conscious of a hundred pairs of eyes pinning him from all directions, would walk over to it and ring it, twice for ordinary sessions and a long peal for recess and end of day …

  The Boys’ School. Boyschool, or BOSS. It was the pride of the community. Everything about it, its architecture and construction, its location away from Downtown, its expanded curriculum and emphasis on English, pointed to new vistas. Its motto: Labor Omnia Vincit. Its symbol: a blazing torch, Promethean fire. Its uniform: khaki and white. Before it moved into these premises, it produced barely literate shopkeepers, their highest achievement a failed junior Cambridge. Now like a rocket launchpad it was on its way to meet the world … really meet the world, as witness Alu and Sona, or even Jogo in his own crooked way …

  To belong to it brought privilege and status. It was to be one of the big boys, the next educated generation; it was to belong with Solanki, Kara, Goani, the test cricketers who played for Tanganyika, with the genius Kassam whose brilliance even the teachers feared, the actors Peera and Jaffer, the hero Ali who gave his life saving a drowning girl, as the plaque outside the front gate testified. In the December holidays prior to my admission there, Solanki had scored a century against Lindi Secondary School and led the school to victory in the annual Christopher Cup match. On the second day of school, crusty old Mrs. Silver the acting headmistress held up the trophy in assembly, shook Solanki’s hand, and amidst loud cheers declared the day a holiday. This is the way it should be, we thought, Jogo, Alu and I, grinning all the way home to surprised parents, this is Boyschool!

  When we came, the headmaster was Mr. Green, one of the new batch of teachers who came after independence. He replaced the legendary Mr. Smart who had been there for more than a decade. Of the original group of English teachers only Mr. Gregory remained. He stayed on in school, and when he retired, as Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka replaced Charles Dickens and John Buchan in the curriculum, he stayed on in Dar, and now he lies buried in the Anglican cemetery, which is only fitting for someone who taught Shakespeare to a whole generation of schoolboys there. The Indian teachers stayed on. They watched one generation go by and waited for the next. “You, baboons!” said Mr. Haji to Form IB one day. “I have taught your fathers before you!” “Did you also teach our
grandfathers, sir?” asked Jogo in all innocence, and then pulled in his neck like a tortoise and waited in resignation for Mr. Haji’s wrath to land on him. Which it did, on his back, a brief pummelling of blows. Mr. Haji was big and fat, stuttered, and had balls the size of coconuts. He came pouncing on you, stuttering oaths and invectives, a steamroller hissing and puffing. It was said by the senior boys that the momentum of those pendulous gonads was so great when he came rolling along that he had to apply brakes, which he did, and stopped suddenly with a jerk. The flywheel effect.

  Mr. Haji taught biology. He had his own museum, which housed a specimen of a human foetus, and on parents’ day the fathers and mothers, uncles or sisters, filed by respectfully before it. Boyschool meant that we were done with cockroaches and butterflies, sunflowers and pollination. On the first day Mr. Haji introduced the seven systems of the human body, from the lowly digestive to the lofty nervous. “I know which one you want to do first, last and always,” he wagged his finger. “For this you come to Boyschool? For that you have to wait until Form IV! What, ‘Aaaah!’ Tell me. You groan! Do you know this, eh, do you know it …” And our mouths opened in amazement, Did he really do it, that gesture, he is really something, the lecher. He was a sly customer. He started with the digestive system.

  They never reached the reproductive system. For that you had to consult the Nurses’ Book of Anatomy and Physiology, which you borrowed, and there you saw it, in full glory, to the last pubic hair, the female genitalia, and you would look at it in the afternoon, upstairs, while the rest of them were downstairs in the shop, and you kept the book hidden, hoping that Mehroon or Begum would not discover it, until you discovered one day the books they kept hidden, books like Introduction to Marriage, and How To Keep Him Happy, which did not resort to the abstraction of drawings but gave you photographs, and you sweated and you swore to yourself that you would never do that thing again, for as Mr. Azad had taught, you would never then be able to satisfy your wife …

  There were two religion teachers, Mr. Rahim and Mr. Azad. Mr. Rahim, portly Rahim Master who was approaching retirement, was of the old guard, his method exhortation and the whip, a veritable terror, particularly for those who had no sense of a melody. He expected you to know entire hymns by heart and to be able to recite a verse or two when called upon. He would start from the first desk on the first row: an arbitrary verse, and then, if you didn’t know the whole hymn and thought you could predict your verse, by simply counting to your seat and learning it quickly: wrong! Rahim Master could read the heart of a cheater. “Your mark E, and write the whole hymn fifty times.” A thump or two on the back, and “Stand on your chair!” Rahim Master had a squad of Monitors, who went around each evening searching the lavatories of Empress and Empire and Avalon and Odeon Cinemas for truants from mosque, and reported them the following day. They could come into any class in session, be it that of Mr. Siddiqui or Mr. Gregory, read from their list and take away the trembling miscreants to receive their due punishment: usually a couple of strokes from Rahim Master’s cane. This was of course at the height of his powers, which declined gradually after independence. Even then, it was he who dismissed the daily assembly after the headmaster had finished. “School,” Rahim Master would say, not having lost an ounce of his former composure, “School, ’shun. Dismiss.”

  Of Mr. Azad, what can one say … Younger than Rahim Master by a generation. He had been to London: “A milkman leaves a bottle of milk at your doorstep. A newsboy leaves a newspaper. Two hours later, they are still there, untouched. How long do you think they would last here, eh, Jogo? It is not for nothing they ruled the world.” He gave us notes on The True Faith, a mystical treatise, with promises of explanations. At the end, we discover, we have copied the book word by word. Only his lecture on masturbation was original.

  It is Rahim Master they remember, old dying Rahim Master: “He taught us. At least he taught us. Name a hymn—I can recite it, even now …”

  At the same time as Mr. Green and the British teachers came a new breed of local boys now become teachers. Mr. Datoo, who took our maths, was called “Guy.” He was tall with crew-cut hair and had girlfriends among the new teachers at the Girls’ School. Mr. Datoo’s teaching methods were a novelty. While Mr. Kabir of the old guard remembered theorems by heart and expected you to do the same, Mr. Datoo would demonstrate them. To teach Pythagoras’ Theorem he took the whole class to the cricket field and proved it by measurement. In midyear he left for America. He returned several years later on vacation with his American wife, and was followed round town like the Pied Piper by many of his former pupils. He took them to the USIS library and showed them the university catalogues.

  That year also Cheeky Bottoms left to study in England, never to return. Snivelling Alnasir also left for England. Some years later he called up Mr. Datoo in Connecticut. Mr. Datoo was amazed. “Alnasir, do you have any idea how much this call will cost you?” he asked. “Don’t worry, sir,” came the sleepy reply. “I have free access.” My former neighbour and classmate was a night clerk in a hotel in Earls Court. This was before he owned this and other hotels, of course …

  We greeted Sekou Touré of Guinea, Tubman of Liberia, Olympio of Togo, and we wondered when the great Kwame Nkrumah would come. The Japanese trade ship Sakura Maru anchored at the harbour for several weeks and gave away much-prized advertisements; for many it was like a gift ship from a friendly people … BOAC advertised “Good Night Nairobi, Good Morning London!” on the Comet 4, which one day Begum and Mehroon went to see with Alzira and from which they brought back plastic forks and knives, which were also much prized. Circus Brazil came. A motorcyclist from the Seychelles set up a Wall of Death in Mnazi Moja; people paid a shilling at the door, climbed the stairs to a circular balcony and watched the man ride his motorcycle round and round up and along the wall.

  What is this thing called Independence? We woke up one morning, the green and black and gold flew instead of the red, white and blue … and we were one nation among many … A brotherhood of nations? No, said some. Think about it. See all those boundaries on the map? Soldiers on every one. Customs. Immigration. You need a passport simply to go to the toilet. (Hassan Uncle’s words.) Only the Masai can travel freely these days. Soon they’ll need a passport. And their cows will need a passport … (Aside: … meanwhile we can use them to smuggle goods and currency to Nairobi and abroad.)

  Then there were of course the demagogues out to provoke reaction against the Asians. “The Asians are not integrating enough!” thundered one. “If you want to stay in Africa, you must learn to live with Africans … the days of your dukas are numbered!”

  “Foul!” murmured the gathering of shopkeepers at Diamond Jubilee Hall. “Didn’t we only recently give a gift of four sewing machines to the women’s movement?”

  “They have their eyes on our daughters, mind you,” Hassan Uncle gravely muttered.

  “This flag,” roared the commissioner, “it has the colours of Africa! This black and green and yellow flag—what does the black signify, eh jamani?” He held up his arm and pinched his black skin for all to see. “This. And the green is the beautiful land of Africa. Eh? And what is this yellow stripe in the middle? Eh?”

  “The Indians! The Mhindis!” shouts an unknown voice.

  Uproar. Laughter. Gleeful self-congratulation. And an angry commissioner. How to pacify a furious commissioner? “E e TANU ya jenga nchi …” someone started. Everyone joined in, clapping hands, “E e TANU ya jenga nchi …”

  The commissioner was escorted to his car.

  “Never invite him again. First he eats our food, then he lambasts us!”

  Dear Sir. In this newly free and democratic country of ours there are certain rights and privileges due to its citizens, i.e. a respect for privacy and consideration for the majority. I would like to use this space in your esteemed newspaper to lodge a complaint about a disturbance that has been going around in my street at an ungodly hour when the respectable and working population of th
is country sleeps. I talk not of the anopheles mosquito, of which there are plenty in my street, nor of djinns, of which there may or may not be in the same. I draw attention to a certain person who goes about the streets at four in the morning making incomprehensible utterances to wake people up to go and pray. Now those who wish to go and pray at this hour may prefer to be shouted at from the street, but what, I pray, is the fault of the majority who wish not to be disturbed? I have proof that from the twenty buildings surrounding mine, only two people get up and follow this person to the mosque. This is a clear breach of democratic principles, and I beg the authorities to persuade the person concerned to cease his disturbance immediately. A. A. Raghavji.