Eighty Not Out by Elizabeth McCullough

Author:Elizabeth McCullough
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstaff Press Ltd

13

Kenya – Uganda – Tanzania

The federation of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania was by this time demonstrating that Francis Kofi’s firm conviction that ‘All Africans are brothers’ was patently untrue in East Africa. Indeed, ten years earlier, when Fergus conducted school surveys in Ruanda, he had been present at silent ‘morning after’ scenes in village compounds where Tutsi teachers had been massacred overnight by Hutu raiders. In early 1967 there was border tension and sabre-rattling in the Bukoba region, from which Dr Eyakuze came, on the western shore of Lake Victoria, and General Idi Amin was at the height of his power in Uganda. Jomo Kenyatta still reigned in Kenya and Julius Nyerere – an exceptional leader – ruled in Tanzania, where technical collaboration with both Russia and China was much in evidence.

The BOAC flight from London via Cairo landed at Entebbe in torrential rain; the children’s raincoats had been left in Ireland, everyone was shouting in Swahili, and Fergus was not there to welcome us. Katharine and Mary, excited at the prospect of seeing their father, kept repeating plaintively, ‘Where can Daddy be?’ Michael was bawling, and his bottle of milk, entrusted to a hostess with a leopard-skin hat, was now on its way to Nairobi. A corpulent but amiable Idi Amin lookalike led us to his office; despite his seniority, his English was rudimentary, and there being no equivalent of West African pidgin, I was unable to communicate our plight. I tried unsuccessfully to contact David Bradley at the university, with whom the East African Institute for Medical Research and WHO collaborated, and with whom Fergus had co-authored several papers on bilharziasis. The noisy downpour continued and Mary, having found a pair of bluntnosed scissors, was quietly littering the floor with fragments of white paper. Mugs of thick sugary tea were offered. Then Fergus appeared: there had been a long delay on the road, due to a lorry having crashed axle-deep into a pothole – it sounded all too familiar. We had a token breakfast of fusty cornflakes and watery milk, and I prepared a fresh bottle to placate the baby. In the three years since Mary’s infancy I had forgotten the tyranny of preparing sterile feeds under testing circumstances – on the bonnets of cars, inside Land Rovers, in semi-darkness in unfamiliar rest-houses, often aware that our large container of sterile water was running low.

Our combined baggage amounted to seventeen pieces, all of which were loaded onto an old DC-3 aircraft, which took off at ten in the morning on a direct flight over Lake Victoria to Mwanza. The lake’s immensity was immediately apparent, and for a while we might have been over the Pacific, until we started to lose height and saw small islands with little sandy coves, and a hilly coastline with huge sculptural rocks topping some of the summits. The pilot announced that we were nearly there and drew our attention to Saa Nane island zoo, on which, to the children’s delight, several giraffes could

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