The other day, when somebody reminded me of the early 1960s, what sprang to mind immediately were the hazardous nights! We had just been hounded out of Congo-Kinshasa by Mobutu’s boys, (after being hounded out of Rwanda by the Belgians and Kayibanda before that!) and were trying to settle in, finding our way and our abode around the sprawling refugee camps of Nshungerezi, southwestern Uganda. Luckily, we found empty houses that had been abandoned by other refugees — the way the interahamwe are enjoying those that we abandoned! To think that we built our houses for those satanic killers …!
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. After all, it was only going to sniff at your maize and sample its aroma: it was not going to eat it. It slithered on your leg, your chest or your neck harmlessly if you did not move a muscle. If you dared move, it dug its fangs into your flesh. Alternatively, you could choose to fight it, if there was enough light. Many of us who were used to these reptiles did not think twice about fighting them. You just got its neck, near the head, between your thumb and forefinger and pressed hard. It could not escape, however big. For a python, of course, it was a bit tricky, owing to its size and strength. Once it twisted, it could throw you a number of kilometres away! You had to have tact.
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, etc. Still, despite being fugitives who had narrowly escaped the wrath of the 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, any malediction, name it. We, too, believed it. If you had survived the numerous diseases of the Congo jungle, what climate couldn’t you face? If you had survived all the creatures of Congo, including humans and animals, who or what could scare you?
In the Congo, the simplest skin disease will kill you! Take ubuheri, scabies, for instance. Anywhere else, you could scratch them away and just nurse the wounds for a short while. Not so in the humid Congo jungles: there, the smallest scratch will grow into a wound that will consume the whole of you. To make matters worse, the scabies only concentrated on vulnerable areas like between your fingers, your armpits, on your seat, between your toes, and such other areas. So, such a simple disease incapacitated very many people. You could find people who could not sit, hold anything or even walk. It is for this that usually you offered not only a chair, when you received a guest, but also a mat. This was just in case your guest had the scabies and could not sit down, but preferred to lie down. There were, of course, worse skin diseases like leprosy, and others that see to it that you are minus a few limbs. It is thus that we hit the grasslands of Ankole, hardened fellows that had stumps of limbs that were harder than any rock. Those of us who had escaped without a scar had anti-bodies stronger than the strongest bull!
That, however, was before we met the tsetse fly of Nshungerezi! The camp was erected where formerly there 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 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 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 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!
This was a revolutionary discovery because we were now able to get time to go to school. Which school was not much to talk about at the beginning, but what the heck, Rome was not built in one day. I am talking like that, of course, ignoring the bitter truth that at least Rome was built, whatever time it took. Our schools were not buildings! They were trees, those trees that were lucky enough to survive our rampaging pangas, knives, as we cleared the forests to get firewood. This meant that the classrooms were scattered all over without order, because classes formed under any tree that could provide a shade. Which was very fine, and actually people in the end started enjoying them. The snag only came when we were required to take notes. We had no exercise books, so we had to write on our thighs. This was very well if your skin was dry and had no oil, but some female pupils did not have such luck!
