I left the Tech after only a year with two more ‘A’ levels, having done much to redress the ravages of private education on my confidence, ready to strike out into the world. My application to do Voluntary Service Overseas had been accepted. I was ready to go, but far less prepared than I knew.
Africa, Revolution and Despair
TWO TUMBLEDOWN CORRUGATED HUTS at the side of the runway seemed to be the beginning and end of Entebbe Airport. The VC10 that had carried us via Rome and Tripoli appeared to be the only operational aircraft on the entire airfield. The terror that was to seize this place and inaugurate a new world of violence, in which the passenger became pawn, was still nearly a decade away.
It was September 1967. I had never been on an aircraft before, never been out of Europe, and only once out of England. I had felt compelled to shake my father’s hand upon leaving home in Yorkshire, for I feared he might be dead before I returned. It was the only physical contact with him I can remember. He was still the Bishop, my mother still his ever-faithful retainer. I knew he would be impressed if I won selection for VSO. I knew too that it would offer me an escape from his world. In the build-up to my departure, Africa had seemed an exotic and distant place, Uganda even more so. But had committing myself to a year of Voluntary Service Overseas been such a sensible idea? Aboard the claustrophobic plane, on balance I was beginning to think not.
As the door of the aircraft opened, the wet heat and the brown-green smell summoned me from my seat. The sound of the engines had roused the few customs and immigration officials from their slumbers. Father Grimes, chain-smoking in black, nervous, very white, with thinning hair, waited on the other side of the sheds. His greeting was unmistakably Yorkshire: ‘Welcome to Uganda! You’ve a long journey ahead of you, so let’s be going.’
There were two of us VSOs, David James and me. David was what I would call successful public school, strong in the areas where I was weak – sporty and academically bright. It was important that we didn’t fall out. Father Grimes was the head of the Catholic mission school where we were to teach for the year. The posting seemed more or less random, although we had been allowed to express a preference as to which continent we would be sent.
I had never known such soakingly wet heat. We got into Grimes’s Volkswagen and set off. Lake Victoria shimmered invitingly, but the Father told us we could never swim either in it or in the river Nile that flowed from it. ‘Not just the crocodiles,’ he said, ‘it’s the snails. Bilharzia, rots yer liver.’
People were everywhere. There was nothing a bicycle could not carry. A husband pedalling, his wife sitting sidesaddle behind with one small child in her arms and a baby on her back, lengths of timber, sacks of corn, even a small coffin. I was overwhelmed by both the heat and the sights. The men were in cotton shirts, the women in elaborate and voluminous brightly printed dresses. In Kampala, the capital, Asian shops spewed their wares out onto the pavements, mopeds roared, cars tooted, dogs, goats, even cows, wandered aimlessly. On the outskirts of the city the low urban sprawl gave way to tall tropical rainforests. Then suddenly as we rounded a bend, armed men scattered across the road ahead, flagging us down.
‘It’s nothing,’ hissed Grimes. ‘Just the state of emergency.’
‘State of emergency? No one said anything about that,’ I hissed back.
As one of the armed men peered into our stationary car, Grimes added, ‘It’s King Freddy, you know, the Kabaka. He wants a comeback role. Obote, the President, wants it for himself. Freddy’s gone off to the UK in a huff. Drinks a lot, you know.’
After only five years’ independence from British rule, things in Uganda were already sounding shaky. Yet after the military men had waved us through, as we headed out across the Owen Falls, source of the Nile, and then the great hydroelectric dam, Uganda still looked at peace with itself. The waters beneath the road churned ferociously. Crested cranes stooped on the river banks, terns sat on the backs of cows taking their ease at the calmer water’s edge. Once we were clear of the dam, jacaranda trees splashed unexpectedly potent blues along both sides of the road.
More than a hundred miles from Entebbe, and with the light fading, the tarmac gave way to the compressed red clay they called murum. In the dry season the road was hard as concrete, with a thick film of dust across it. In the wet season it became slithery mud. This night it was dry and spooky, the car’s headlights picking out tall, dark organic forms on either side. Small animals darted back and forth across the murum, their eyes glinting in the lights.
‘Only fifteen miles to Namasagali,’ said Grimes. Those fifteen miles took nearly an hour to negotiate. And with each passing mile my heart sank further. It felt so very far from anywhere. I thought of home, of people and places I loved; for once I envied my brothers, and even missed my mother and father. I was not enjoying my entry into Africa. But although I was unaware of it at the time, this journey, and so much of the ensuing year, was to prepare me for far more harrowing and taxing trips through Africa in years to come. Not just prepare me, but radicalise and change me more than I could possibly imagine.
Kamuli College, on the banks of the Nile, was set in an old railhead at Namasagali, which had once been a trans-shipment point for cotton heading north. The engine sheds were now the school hall and the bookless library. The cotton warehouses had been broken up into classrooms. There was little fight when we arrived at Grimes’s house, which was where the station manager had lived. Inside, the four other ‘muzungus’, or European teachers, were waiting. Tom and Anne Welsh were a radical, committed Scots couple. Gus was a don’t-care Scotsman on the wild side. The fourth was another priest, a warm and engaging Dutchman called Father Zonnerveldt. These, and the fourteen indigenous teachers I would meet in the morning, would be my isolated family for the next twelve months.
The house itself spoke volumes about what we were in for. A bare bulb dangled from the ceiling, the netted door frame opened onto a veranda where I could glimpse old boxes and cupboards scattered about. There was an ageing suitcase on a rickety table, with clothes tumbling out of it. Unrelated bits of furniture littered the living room, and through another door I could see the dining table, with ancient British consumer goods at one end: a discontinued line of Gale’s honey, a jar of Marmite, and a Bible sticking out from under a box of Corn Flakes. This was going to be a challenge. I went to bed in Grimes’s house that night feeling profoundly homesick and rather sorry for myself. I suspect David felt the same.
Feeling very white, the next morning we gathered around the flagpole for assembly. Grimes barked at the children. They were all crisply turned out, and seemed to know every word of the Ugandan national anthem, ‘Oh Uganda, the Land of Freedom’. ‘Our Father, which art in heaven …’ intoned Father Grimes. Suddenly the stark contrast with the dining room at Ardingly, General Tom, even Winchester Cathedral, sprang into my head. I was a world away, amongst the children of the still-poor elite in a country the General’s cohorts had tried to run for more than half a century.
That night David and I moved into our new ‘house’. It was more an outhouse, with a concrete floor, a living area, two bedrooms and a loo out at the back. There were beds but no sheets, mosquitoes but no nets. The night was a constant battle with insects and cockroaches seeking to share my bed.
We employed John Luwangula as our cook and houseboy. Dear John could not cook to save his life, and was well past being classified as any kind of a boy. But he was strong and confident, and a fast learner, and he attended to our every need for the equivalent of around £3 a week. My classes were large, one of forty souls, another of close on fifty. Many of the pupils were older than me, for as was often