10. Wazungu

The following morning, I was excited at the prospect of moving into our own house, which we had been told would be ready today. By lunchtime, however, no-one had come to confirm that this really was the case, so we decided to walk down and see for ourselves. One-thirty in the afternoon may not be the most sensible time of day to go for a four mile walk when living on the equator, but we were feeling increasingly frustrated at not knowing what was going on, and so set off through the banana plantations to find out. I could remember the way from when Dr Semu drove us around the area on our first day - you just find the tarmac road and follow it down the hill.
It was not long before we attracted attention - there were few white faces seen around here, so it was not surprising that we caused a stir among the children. Some of them seemed rather scared and just stopped what they were doing to stare at us walking past. The majority, however, were surprisingly confident and ran up to us, pointing and laughing and crying ‘Wazungu’, which means ‘White men’. We tried out our limited Swahili, which the children found hysterical, and they repeated their only English phrase, ‘Good morning teacher’, which became a sort of chant for them, despite our attempts to point out that it was in fact afternoon.
It was all good fun, but before long began to wear a bit thin. The further we reached down the hill the bigger the pack of children walking behind us grew.
‘I feel like the bloody Pied Piper’ said Pat.
Their shouting and chanting took on an increasingly mocking tone, which was made worse by the fact that we couldn’t understand the things being said. The laughing and pointing, to start with quite amusing, began to make me feel rather paranoid and its persistence started to grate as I grew more exhausted and stressed under the relentless sun.
We passed the occasional adult along the road, some of whom smiled and said ‘Jambo’, others of whom just looked at us silently. It felt humiliating to be seen being laughed at by all these children, so we came up with a strategy to disperse them.
‘Ready?’ I said under my breath. ‘One, two, three.’
We stopped dead in our tracks and whirled around to face our protagonists with a menacing growl. It got the reaction we wanted: the laughter was cut short, the pointing fingers were dropped, the little eyes widened in terror and they all turned and ran screaming to a safe distance.
‘Excellent.’
Unfortunately, this desired effect did not last for long, and most of the children tentatively returned and started laughing, waiting, I think, for us to whirl round again. I felt as though I was caught in an absurd game of Grandmother’s Footsteps. Eventually, however, some men who were standing on a nearby shamba saw what was happening and barked instructions at the children, who promptly dispersed. We waved our thanks, and I resolve to get to grips with Swahili so I wouldn’t feel so helpless in situations like that.
Arriving at our house there was remarkably little sign of activity. We crossed the garden and approached the building, calling ‘Hodi?’ No-one answered, and we peered through the windows to find that everything was exactly the same as when we visited with Dr Semu the previous week. It was disappointing, when everyone had assured us that it was being cleaned up and painted, but somehow I was not surprised.
The house had obviously been standing unoccupied for a long time, and was caked in dust and grime that would need a good deal of scrubbing. I wondered if they would let us clean it ourselves - at least then we would know it was getting done.

From the house we walked further along the track to have another look at the school. The new library building at the top of the hill afforded the best views: on one side the ever watchful mountain loomed over the lush vegetation of the banana plantations, with tendrils of cloud softening its sides, while in the other direction the dusty brown plains stretched into the distance, shimmering in the afternoon heat.
I was surprised to hear movement in the library building. A very upright gentleman with greying hair and spectacles emerged, who was equally surprised to see us. He seemed to know who we were, though, and came over to introduce himself in very good and carefully pronounced English.
‘Ah, hello. You are the Oxford boys.’
We introduced ourselves to him and he continued. ‘Good. My name is Mr Uronu. Yes. I am the Civics teacher here, you see.’
He was dressed in a light blue safari suit and wore a little white sunhat perched on his head. We stood chatting in the sun and I learned that he was another of Dr Semu’s brothers and had seen us the previous day at the confirmation celebrations. He told us a little about the school and then turned and gestured towards the plains.
‘You see the land down there? It is very dry. We have not had a proper rainy season for two years, you see. It is very bad.’
‘When’s the next rainy season due?’ asked Pat.
‘Maybe in a few weeks it will rain. I don’t know if it will, but I hope so. If you look out there beyond those trees, that is the school land. We grow our own maize, but for the last two years, nothing.’
Mr Uronu showed us around the school, and took us into the new library, which was so new, in fact, that it did not contain a library at all, but was simply an empty concrete building. He told us that Mr Kwayu had big plans for the library here and hoped to have it functional by the beginning of term.
In the same building as the library but walled off into a separate room was the staff room, where we came across the Physics teacher, Mr Johansen. I couldn’t help smiling when we were introduced, because he looked to me like the original 70’s funkster: he had an enormous afro, and a flowery shirt with huge collars, and wore a cool pair of thick-rimmed spectacles. To top it all he had one of the biggest smiles I had ever seen, with more large teeth crammed into his mouth than I would have thought possible. Unfortunately his English was not good, or at least he was not used to our pronunciation, and we had great difficulty holding a conversation with him, despite speaking with patronising slowness to be understood. It didn’t seem to matter, though, and his grin did not fade.
The four of us stood in the small staff room, and looked through the window to the bottom of the valley, where the river Makoa ran.
‘Ah yes,’ said Mr Uronu. ‘The river Makoa. Ma-ko-a. This is where we get our water for cooking the school lunch. The students carry buckets up the hill before assembly.’
‘Do you know what subjects we’ll be teaching when term starts?’ I asked.
‘Straight from the mountain, you see. It’s very good water.’
‘Ah, I see. And do you know what we’ll be teaching?’
Mr Uronu looked uncomfortable, as though sensitive to being asked direct questions.
‘Well, this is an important issue.’ he said. ‘And we will need to discuss it fully, yes. Before the term starts we will have a big staff meeting, very big, and I think there we can discuss your lessons. Yes.’
When we decided to head back to the Aishi Mr Uronu offered to show us a short cut that avoided going along the tarmac road, so the three of us said goodbye to Mr Johansen and set off in the direction of the mountain along a rutted path. We walked through a rabbit warren of interconnecting tracks that cut their way through the undergrowth, and passed houses dotted in little clearings among the banana groves. Between the properties ran an intricate network of tiny irrigation channels, which are a famous feature of Kilimanjaro, carrying water from its streams to distant shambas, and as I stepped across these flowing ditches I recalled their significance in the development of life on the mountain.
After settling into the area, the Chagga had become remarkably adept at irrigation and learned to grade channels along the slopes so skilfully that they could appear to be carrying water uphill. Perhaps unsurprisingly, their original motivation for developing these techniques is said to have been a love of alcohol, for the crop eleusine, which is used for liquor brewing, could not be grown outside the rainy season without artificial watering. But whatever the original cause for their construction, these channels are essential to the mountain and its people, carrying its lifeblood from its main veins to the further reaches of its body.
They can also be said to have played a part in the development of chiefship on Kilimanjaro, for the building and subsequent use of these vast and complicated irrigation networks required a great deal of organisation, which the early chiefs provided. Many furrows were operated under a timeshare system, with different people drawing off the water on different days, and disputes frequently arose over abuses of the system. Such arrangements needed an authority with which they could be regulated and enforced, and it was the emerging chiefships that supplied this.
The Chagga’s love of alcohol can therefore be seen as a surprising force for good. As the administrative officer Sir Charles Dundas wrote in the 1920s:

‘The cultivation of Mbeke, a much condemned industry, has been responsible not only for a remarkable skill in artificial irrigation, which as time goes on will be of inestimable benefit, but it has directly promoted social development of a relatively high order; hence the Chagga tribe presents the unprecedented instance of economic and social welfare vigorously furthered by the vice of alcoholism.’

As we crossed these furrows on tiny makeshift bridges, Mr Uronu explained to us how the land was divided into districts and regions and sub-districts and villages and so on, but I found it hard to follow, as all the different named areas that he pointed out to us seemed to blend into each other. The houses were spread evenly throughout the bush in all directions, rather than concentrated in certain places, so it was hard to distinguish between the different designated areas.
Eventually, we popped out onto the tarmac road just opposite the turning for the Aishi Hotel. Mr Uronu assured us he would see us before term begins, at the big staff meeting. He shook our hands, said ‘Goodbye then. Yes.’ and was gone, back into the vegetation.