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 be seen; then he indicted Bismarck Rock in the bay, and Buganda hill, on top of which a fine new hospital was under construction.

A welcome delegation, consisting of Dr Eyakuze, and several field and laboratory assistants recruited to work on the new project, met us at the rudimentary airport: the names of the latter – Hermann, Reinhardt, Klaus and Dieter – a reminder of Tanzania’s years under German rule.

A small cavalcade of vehicles, headed by us in the director’s Mercedes, took the main road to Mwanza town. The vegetation was lush and most of the flowering shrubs were familiar from Ghana. We turned right onto a branch road leading to the residential compound at Bwiru, and met, for the first time, herds of cattle with humps and wide spreading horns driven by turbaned men or small boys. The tarmac degenerated to deeply rutted laterite before a sharp left turn up a slight incline led to a circular parking space beside the bungalow that was to be our home for the next six years.

The garden, though neglected, had been landscaped many years earlier, and Fergus had already recruited a shamba boy to help him restore some of its former glory. The lake could just be glimpsed, and the kopje, directly above the house, was topped by a giant cone-shaped boulder on which the leader of a pack of baboons often sat contemplating his territory; a colony of rock hyrax lived at its base. During fierce electric storms, the children would ask: ‘What if the lightning strikes the rock? It will tumble down and hit our house.’ We dismissed their fears with explanations of the geological time-scale – ‘It has stood up there for millions of years …’ – but there were times when I too felt a bit uneasy. Some dangers would be real enough, however – a hyaena crunching bones under the guava tree just outside the children’s room, a leopard coughing as it passed under the window beside Katharine’s bed, a giant python coiled in the ancient fig tree.

But this was all in the future. For the moment, the contents of our cases were strewn around, the children were demanding the whereabouts of favourite toys last seen in Ireland, and I was getting to know Stephano, a cook/steward who had worked for ‘Webbo’ – Gerry Webbe, a Medical Research Council scientific officer who spoke fluent Swahili and had specialised in schistosomiasis transmission. Stephano came with glowing references but spoke almost no English, so I would have to acquire a rudimentary vocabulary in Swahili. Under the colonial regime, all government officers had to pass an examination in written and verbal Swahili if they were to advance in their career; it had not been obligatory for wives, but most acquired what was termed ‘kitchen Swahili’ if only in order to survive. By this time only a few such wives remained; one or two had come from Kenya or Nigeria, and regarded Mwanza as the sticks. They insisted their servants wore a white uniform, cummerbund and fez, and were notoriously demanding – one, for whom Stephano had worked for a few months, had asked him to wash the kitchen ceiling. His flat refusal had led to dismissal not long before our arrival. The lady in question called on me, emphasising that I should not take any nonsense from the ‘natives’, who were without exception lazy, unreliable and dishonest. Her manner was condescending and I was frosty, intimating that five years of living in Ghana had led me to form my own opinions: thus effectively ensuring that we were not invited to dine.

The house bore the signature of German rule, similar in many ways to the one that had reduced me to tears in Wa, but this one had not been neglected to the same extent. However, after a few days only, many imperfections revealed themselves. Malodorous man-holes half hidden in the vegetation, and old cans and discarded tyres harboured stagnant water in which mosquito larvae thrived. The concrete floors of the bedrooms were the familiar red Cardinal, and the living room was battleship grey with areas of red showing through – I later compounded this mess by using dark blue paint which failed to key with the underlying layers. The kitchen was enormous, but the windows so high that one might as well have been in a prison. Two Belfast sinks with sodden and stained draining boards, an ancient gas cooker and yet another kerosene-fuelled fridge completed the equipment. There was a capacious store cupboard with ample shelving next to the back door, from which a track led to Stephano’s quarters, and over a ravine to our neighbour’s bungalow. There was a separate lavatory and the bathroom had the usual temperamental gas-fired water heater. The WC was far from pristine, and blocked within hours of our arrival; a suspect trap, topped with disgusting brownish froth, lay below its window, and that of the kitchen. Fergus arranged a meeting with the clerk of works, who came with his team in several vehicles, noted the many holes in the mosquito netting, counted the mosquito breeding sites, then left without actually doing anything, or giving any promise of intent. Memories of the painters at Kintampo were revived.

The cot we had asked for duly arrived, with a fitted net, but after a night of restless sleep for Michael, I found little specks of blood on the net, and something that looked very like a bed bug, which I sent to Fergus for identification. It was positive, so an intensive scrubbing session with Dettol, kettles of boiling water and a toothbrush ensued, annihilating the bug population that had thrived in the wooden slats under the mattress. An Italian electrician came and pronounced the wiring in the house potentially lethal.

The climate was pleasant and the girls played outside in their paddling pool with a hose, while Michael lay on a rug on the veranda watching. Katharine made friends with the five-year-old flaxen-haired daughter of the German vet; she was a stolid unresponsive child, but Katharine did not seem to mind. Mary preferred the company of Salome, one of Stephano’s six daughters, whom I overheard her informing, ‘Rolf Harris has got three legs, you know.’ The girls soon picked up a basic vocabulary of Swahili nouns and could count up to ten, but like me, had little concept of sentence construction. The children of our Australian friends – John and Rosemary McMahon, both doctors – by contrast spoke fluently, having spent much of their time in the care of a massive, light-skinned ayah who came from the coast. Their daughter Sheena already attended the Anglican Diocesan Primary School, which was the only option other than the state primary, at which all lessons were in Swahili. So by the end of July, Katharine joined a large class of mixed Asian, African and European children. Bishop Wiggins and his wife, both from New Zealand, were the founders, and their son taught the higher grades. I never heard of any application being refused, but Mrs Wiggins was quoted as having said of us: ‘Such a pity, we hear they are heathens.’ Katharine really enjoyed singing hymns at morning assembly, and once, when I enquired what they had sung that day, the reply was ‘Oh, we sang about vicious cement’ – it took me a while to work out that it must have been ‘fishers of men’. For a while, until firmly discouraged, she would return from school chanting: ‘Did y’ever say Yes to Jesus, did y’ever say No to the Devil?’ The uniform was a cotton dress of harsh blue with small white polka dots; boys wore a shirt in the same material, which could be obtained from one of many stores owned by a member of the Alibhai family, who also owned the largest general store, which stood on a prime corner site in the centre of the town.

A young entrepreneur – Nur Mohammed – owned a specialist shop offering many surprising things not otherwise obtainable without making a visit to Dar es Salaam (former capital of Tanzania), Kampala or Nairobi. I found melamine ‘unbreakable’ tableware, odd bits of Hornby train-sets, including rails, and he sold me a Rolleicord twin lens reflex camera, to which I later added attachments enabling me to photograph maps and diagrams for the project. He talked about his hope of settling in Canada, and I often wonder, as I arrange my breakfast on a pale blue plastic tray bought from him, if his dream was realised.

The Elna sewing machine bought in Boston came into heavy use during these years when the children were growing rapidly, and the lifetime of garments, due to sunlight and frequent washing, was short. I made shirts for Fergus and almost all my own dresses, not to mention one or two for Stephano’s six girls. His wife spent much of the time on the coast at Tanga with their only male child, Joseph, while his eldest daughter Joyce, ‘married’ to the librarian at the institute and living in another of the houses nearby, kept an eye on her father.

Stephano knocked on our bedroom door each morning at six: he would call ‘Hodi’ and if the answer was ‘Karibu’, entered bearing mugs of tea; then while we all got washed and dressed he laid the breakfast table with packets of cereal, a jug of milk, freshly squeezed orange juice and a slice of pawpaw for each of us. This did not vary over the years, and I still miss the fresh pawpaw with a little slice of lime. Shopping was more complicated and time-consuming than it had been in Ghana: in addition to the Land Rover, we had the Peugeot 504, which, after dropping Fergus at the institute and Katharine at school, I drove to Alibhai Stores and the main market, sometimes, if I could face it, stopping at the Somali butcher’s shop on the outskirts of the town.

Good meat could be obtained from this butcher. He had an immense gap between his front teeth and dealt with customers while giving sharp orders to his assistant, who wielded a variety of choppers and knives. An entire fillet of steak, costing three EA shillings and sixpence, had to be ordered in advance, but one still had to join a queue stretching from the shop, down a flight of steps, which ended near the malodorous wayside drain, to claim and pay for your moist blood-stained brown paper parcel. The chopping block was an ancient tree stump stained with the blood of many years. One particularly repulsive incident lingers clearly in my brain: a cow’s head, black and white skin, ears in situ, was targeted by the axe-man while teeth ricocheted off walls and customers. On another visit I stood wedged in a line of overweight, pungent-smelling women, while a cascade of greenish liquid flowed down the steps from a stomach, laid on the floor of the shop, which was being hosed before being cut into portions for sale; tripe was a great delicacy. The overpowering pong of blood, body odour, charcoal-burning stoves, dried fish, roasting plantain and roadside drain varies little throughout Africa, and is fixed on my ‘memory stick’.

Mwanza was a thriving cosmopolitan centre at the railhead of the track that led from the coast, the construction of which had cost many lives, African, Indian and not a few Chinese, during the latter years of the nineteenth century. It was also one of the ports at which the MV Victoria stopped – the others were Bukoba, Entebbe, Kisumu and Musoma. Mwanza had spread rapidly, and was a magnet for hopeful illiterates who had little to offer in the way of skills, and often spoke only the language of the Sukumu tribe, which inhabited the hinterland between Mwanza and Tabora, the capital during the days of German rule. Lepers were more numerous than in Ghana, and many cripples with wasted limbs begged on the streets. The Somali men were strikingly tall, thin, very black, and wore heavy turbans; their regal women sometimes wore heavy gold jewellery. Ismali women wore clothes and ornaments exotic in comparison to the simple batik prints favoured by the indigenous women, and the older men tended to be overweight, sometimes illiterate, but oozing prosperity. One patriarch in particular took a regular Sunday afternoon drive, in a cream-coloured Rolls Royce stuffed to capacity with family members of all ages, along the lakeside, passing Bismarck Rock, the dusty golf course, the Mwanza Club, with its swimming pool and tennis courts – once an all-white bastion, it now had a few Asian members – before returning at a speed that must never have exceeded 15 m.p.h. to the town centre.

Alibhai Stores strove to satisfy the demands of a rapidly growing expatriate community. A textile factory had recently opened and employed managers from the UK: I remember the shock of hearing a rasping Ulster accent bewailing the fact that she could not find any cornflakes. The only milk available was the Ultra Heat Treated (UHT) kind, which the girls condemned as undrinkable, or Carnation in tins. The shelves were packed with tinned guava, pineapple and pawpaw from new canning factories in Nairobi or Kampala; they were regarded as luxury, and held in high regard by both the African and Indian population, presumably because of the sugary syrup. Tinned mandarins, frankfurters from Eastern Europe, and crab from Russia also sold well. A Lebanese bakery produced white bâtards, which went stale very quickly, so again I made our bread. An elderly German woman and her son ran a farm on one of the islands in the sound, and had a small depot in the town where they sold pasteurised milk as well as large eggs in lieu of the problematic local ones; pork could be ordered, though often it tasted a bit boarish. Delicious tilapia fish could be bought at many wayside stalls, but even then supplies were declining due to over-fishing, rafts of water hyacinth, which made parts of the lake inaccessible to fishermen, and, of course, pollution, to which the new textile mill contributed. The farmers were liberal in their use of pyrethrum, which they could buy freely at the Agricultural Depot, and this, too, found its way to Lake Victoria.

Shopping excursions were possible only after we had employed an ayah to look after Mary and Michael. Maria’s complexion was very dark, and her countenance scowling, but Michael, happy to be carried around on her back, did not have to look at it. Stephano excused her surly manner by explaining that she was the single mother of five, who worked to provide for them and her own mother, who had a small farm in the valley on the other side of our kopje. Stephano, the new shamba boy, Joseph, Maria, and ‘Mzee’, a desiccated, wall-eyed ancient who lived in a hovel near the foot of our drive, congregated near the back door every morning for a protracted tea break. Sometimes the group was joined by another ancient who made beautiful, finely woven baskets with an integral purple design; a few have survived the years, but the purple fades in time. Our wall-eyed Mzee was so old that he had worked as a stone-breaker for the German army during the 1914–18 war. He told how harsh the soldiers had been with any labourer suspected of malingering or dishonesty: a lash had frequently been used and serious crimes resulted in execution – heads being displayed on stakes by the roadside. No free tea and sugar in those days.

It was not long before we found ourselves involved in a drama precipitated by Joyce returning to live in her father’s already overcrowded quarters. The librarian had agreed a bride price with Stephano, who claimed that some of this was outstanding, that his son-in-law had shown disrespect and was taking advantage of his position at the institute to avoid coughing up the remainder. The situation was a tickly one for Fergus, the librarian being a colleague who thought this conferred an advantage when divulging his side of the story. This he did at length, seated at ease on our veranda, downing companionable pints, while Stephano lurked resentfully in the back regions. He claimed that he had taken the pregnant and indolent girl off Stephano’s hands; an exorbitant price had been asked and he had done her family a favour, while demeaning himself by marrying beneath his station. Other accusations involved the borrowing of a paraffin stove, which had been returned only under duress, and then found to be damaged beyond repair (enquiry revealed that the stove had, in any case, belonged to the institute). More disputes concerned scraggy hens which ranged around both compounds, a tethered goat, and suspected ill-treatment of the librarian’s affectionate dog, Bobby, which was already devoted to me. Further complications involved two children from the librarian’s first wife, who, when the inscrutable Joyce decamped, were left in his care.

In some ways the stalemate suited Stephano, allowing him more time after work to slope off and drink too much pombe, after which he would return in a belligerent mood. Often raised voices would echo across the compound as he harangued his beautiful, if bovine, daughter before sleep overcame him. With bloodshot eyes and a hangdog expression, he would appear the next morning, apprehensive about how much we had overheard. He was also aware that I was not quite as gullible as he had first thought, being ignorant that the years spent in Ghana had given me a fair understanding of African attitudes, and the intricacies of the extended family system.

I discouraged the use of ‘memsahib’, settling for ‘mama’ rather than ‘madam’, favoured by the Kofi brothers. Yet again, I did not fit any comfortable category. I liked to do a lot of the cooking myself, but finding that Stephano could make excellent curries, as well as preparing fish irreproachably, I allowed him to make many of our midday meals. This freed me to deal with secretarial work connected with the project, in the office space I had set up in a corner of our vast bedroom. The only competent secretary was in theory to be shared with Dr Eyakuze, who monopolised her when she was not absent on a training course, or on maternity leave. There were two typists at the laboratory, but their skills left a lot to be desired, so Fergus had expropriated an Imperial machine for me to replace the old Olivetti portable. I had also made enquiries about access to the darkroom at the institute: there had been an English photographer, but he had resigned, leaving a hopeless trainee in charge of what little equipment there was. However, permission would have to be obtained through the director; on hearing that I had run a university department, he made no objection, particularly when he saw that my work might well enhance project reports and would cost him nothing.

We joined the Mwanza Yacht Club – another reminder of colonial rule. The modest wooden clubhouse was almost on the sandy shore beside a very old gnarled tree, the roots of which were often under water; it reminded me of an Edmund Dulac illustration. One of the traditions was that female members would take turns to prepare a Sunday lunch for an unknown number, usually in the region of thirty. I recall how on one occasion I managed to make stuffed pancakes for fifty diners. We had acquired an electric fridge freezer from a departing Canadian couple – it was old and the star-rating allowed survival of the occasional cockroach, but far superior to anything we had previously owned. I also had brought from Ireland one of the earliest food mixers with attachments for kneading dough, mincing meat and grinding coffee. A large quantity of steak was minced, and I spent the previous day frying and stuffing pancakes, which were then covered with cheese sauce and put in dishes ready for reheating at the club. A circular letter from the chief engineer, also commodore of the club, to the effect that there would be an electricity cut from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. arrived the same day. Fears of putrefying pancakes and guest mortality were not realised, and my effort was appreciated even by an Italian family. Mass catering is not for me, but I wholeheartedly admire those who can and do, like the finalists in MasterChef.

These tasks terrified me, but the children so much enjoyed their visits that I suppressed my fears. They clambered over the rocks, climbed the tree, were taken out in the rescue boat, and to my surprise, accepted that they were not to paddle in the water because of the threat of contracting schistosomiasis. It was safe to swim in deeper water, and many adults did so from their boats. Few crocodiles remained in this part of the lake, but hippos were seen from time to time in the bay near Bismarck Rock.

The girls pleaded so relentlessly that I succumbed and a visit to Saa Nane zoo was arranged. A lone pioneer had dedicated his life to establishing it between the wars, but tragically, at the age of forty had suffered an incapacitating stroke while on leave in Europe, and had never returned. When we visited, there were no obvious signs of deterioration, but later reports indicated many problems had arisen due to no suitable director having been appointed. Apathy, declining visitor numbers, shortage of animal feed, and ignorance cast an all too familiar shadow on this small enterprise. An ancient Masai attendant, one of whose ears had been slit and elaborately coiled around the orifice, took our ticket money and let us through a turnstile. The giraffes were a bit too matey for my peace of mind and had to be shooed away with sticks; I was afraid of back-kicks when they did shift, or that they might take off through our party. They were, however, in good condition and really beautiful, as were several zebra. Gazelles lay around like so many cows, and an evil little dik-dik sprang on to small rocks, from which it then charged us, head down, with short sharp horns. The rhino, about which we should have been warned, stood immobile, wearing a supercilious expression: the girls suggested prodding him, unconvinced when told that rhinos can move at great speed. Most of all they were thrilled by a pair of large torpid crocodiles, insisting on sitting as close as possible on the wall surrounding their enclosure.

The western corridor entrance to the Serengeti reserve is about eighty miles north of Mwanza: Fergus and John McMahon decided to explore the possibilities of staying inside the park at a recently abandoned research camp that had been built for two German vets working for Bernhard Grzimek, the animal conservationist, the project having folded after much money had been spent on housing and laboratories. Plus ça change. Currently it was being used by a young zoologist friend, Richard, as a base for his research. It was decided to delay our first safari by a few weeks, by which time the treacherous black cotton soil near the entrance to the heart of the reserve should have dried out.

Meanwhile, the Schistosomiasis Control Project area had been chosen at Misungwi in Sukumaland some twenty miles south of Mwanza. Twice weekly Fergus and his team of field assistants spent a full day listing water-bodies, groups of dwellings, estimated population, species of water snail found and likely transmission sites. In the absence of a statistician, the data had to be tabulated by Fergus, although one was soon to be seconded from Nairobi for a few weeks, and WHO hoped to recruit a public health engineer. Together we dealt with a mountain of paperwork, much of which had to be sent to the regional office, with copies to headquarters.

Early in August Fergus flew to Nairobi, leaving me alone with the children for the first time in East Africa. The institute would have provided a night-watchman, but I declined and slept with a cutlass beside the bed. I knew that I could never bring myself to use it, and would have felt more secure if I had had a small gun, like the pistol my mother kept until the Royal Ulster Constabulary’s regular inspections during the Troubles annoyed her so much that she handed it in. Nothing disturbed us at night apart from the howls of our resident hyaenas. At night their eyes could be seen in a group at the bottom of the garden. I remember a gruesome incident involving these animals, which took place during a barbecue held by the German vet, whose terrace overlooked the same gully as ours. An antelope was being spit-roasted, the air redolent with appetising smells, when our host’s dachshund, which had wandered out of the pool of light, was snatched almost literally from under our noses. Subsequent howls of feasting ensured the party began on a sombre note. There were far too many hyaenas in our area, and the hungrier they got, the cheekier they became, but old-timers assured us they ate human meat only if it was carrion, or comatose from drink. Not long after this incident a body was found, its face entirely eaten, by the roadside not far from our house.

Inevitably, sooner or later, whatever their prejudices, almost all Europeans, particularly those with children, joined the Mwanza Club, which had a swimming pool and two tennis courts. It also had a library with some interesting books on the dusty, sagging shelving, but nobody was officially in charge of it, or bought new books. I managed to revive it to some extent, opening for two hours on Sunday mornings, arranging the shelves more logically, and wheedling some cash from the committee for new purchases, as well as appealing for donations of money and unwanted books. Damp had already damaged some books dating back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; almost all were foxed and some old engravings were missing, probably taken to be framed. An early edition of Livingstone’s journals was incomplete: before we left in 1973 I ‘liberated’ the remaining volumes, which bear the purple stamp of Mwanza Club Library, remembering how Fergus spoke with regret that he had not done the same for a valuable first edition set of Bannerman’s Birds of West Africa, used to raise the seat of one of the clerks in Kintampo. At the poolside were a number of rusting metal chairs and chipped tables with malfunctioning canopies; a few bar staff, retained from pre-independence days, would bring orders and wipe the tables.

It was here that we met another couple who became lifelong friends. Donald Gilchrist, a tall, spare Scot with skin of the type that never tans, had worked at mission hospitals since graduating in medicine just after the war; some years later he qualified as a surgeon, and now worked at the old hospital in Mwanza. His wife, Jean, was a radiographer and they had two sons, Robert and Mungo, about the same age as Katharine and Mary. Donald is a philosopher manqué, and he and Fergus spent hours thrashing out world affairs, while ostensibly in charge of the children. Thankfully our girls could swim confidently from an early age, but other users of the pool needed constant supervision and there were several instances of near drowning while we were there.

Each month a film was flown in from Kenya to be shown in the open – no matter how liberally insect repellent was applied, one always returned home badly bitten. Some of the films came under the heading ‘family entertainment’, but others, memorably Spartacus, were for adults, and I do not recall how Katharine persuaded us to let her see it – maybe it was later, when she was on holiday from boarding school in Kenya – but she was taken home in floods of tears after seeing Jean Simmons on her knees at the foot of the cross bearing the crucified Kirk Douglas.

One of the narrow roads along the shore led to an overgrown cemetery with weathered headstones, some recording the death of young men from England who had died within months of arriving at Mwanza; others in memory of pioneers who had reached a ripe old age before death. One of Mwanza’s most colourful residents, Gertie Brown, lived on the road to the cemetery with her partner, a geologist who had spent years searching fruitlessly for the diamond pipe he was convinced existed at a specific location south of Mwanza. Gertie remained a striking woman with high cheekbones and lovely skin, although by the time we met her she must have been about eighty and had put on weight. She was vivacious, and it was easy to believe that she had been a Gaiety Girl in the twenties. We were asked to afternoon tea, served in fine porcelain cups and poured from an ornate silver pot; there was juice for the children and thin cucumber sandwiches. We were introduced to her pet pelican, with which we had already had an encounter: I had stopped the car to admire the scene when I turned to find myself eye to eye with a small red orb – clearly the brute expected a handout. I wound the window up just in time to avoid the first thrust of that incredible beak; when no fish was forthcoming, in frustration he attacked the headlights. The girls, safely out of range in the back of the car, were thrilled. We met Gertie’s geologist once only before he killed himself in a particularly messy way, blowing his brains out in her chintzy living room just before dawn one morning. Thereafter she became a recluse, joining him after a few years among the headstones in the cemetery.

Fergus went to Dar to meet the WHO representative, but we did not accompany him, as the coastal climate is similar to that of Accra – more often than not humid and conducive to prickly heat. Indeed, we never visited the capital, though later we spent time at Tanga, a coastal town south of Mombasa, when we had to leave Mwanza during Amin’s hostile attacks from the air.

The garden rapidly rewarded Fergus’s attentions. In addition to judicious pruning of flowering shrubs, he scraped a sandy bank bare to encourage kingfishers, and by late July one pair was nesting. We considered making a pond in a natural hollow where water tended to collect, but were discouraged by pessimists who predicted that ants would eat any rubber or synthetic lining. Plans for the Serengeti trip continued and Fergus hoped to revisit some of the places where he had conducted school surveys in 1957 in south-west Uganda; we were deterred, however, by reports that three Belgian tourists, who had accidentally crossed the border into the Congo, had been marched off by militia and summarily shot.

Despite the demands on my time, I continued writing to my mother and a few really good friends in the UK: among these were Sybil and Iain, our Scottish friends from Boston, who had returned to work at the Medical Research Council at Mill Hill in north-east London. Iain had a contract to spend two years at their research centre in the Gambia, and a letter from Sybil sought information about what they might expect. From what little I had seen of the Gambia in 1960, I could think of few less desirable places to be stationed, but did not say so, rather, listing the things I had found indispensable such as Wettex cloths, muslin nappies, insect repellent, an ample number of towels and, assuming they would have a generator, a fan and a sewing machine. I complained to my mother that most people were lazy about letter-writing, not realising how welcome letters from home were.

During the last week in October, as soon after dawn as possible, we set off for the Serengeti in the Land Rover, with the children, Maria and her six-month-old baby, plus Stella, Stephano’s third daughter, to look after Maria’s child, and help with what would be an enormous load of washing. The road to Musoma was tarred for the first twenty miles, then the laterite began. As we crossed a bridge cobbled together of widely spaced wooden planks, which rattled as we lurched to the other side, a swarm of bees filled the interior of the Land Rover. Fortunately I was the only one to be stung; it was very painful and the lump lasted several days. Gradually the land became more fertile, with banana and sugar cane plantations, and we could see the range of hills that juts into the lake south of Musoma. Soon a scattering of dwellings appeared on the lake side of the road, an indication that we were nearing the entry gate to the western corridor of the Serengeti at Ndabaka. We knew that many of the local inhabitants, even some park rangers, were dedicated poachers, operating on quite a large scale, despite the heavy penalties they faced if caught.

On arrival, a ranger checked that we were legitimate, took the payment, and gave us permission to park under a jacaranda tree, which provided the only shade. We all wandered off to pee and stretch our legs, returning to drink lukewarm pineapple juice and eat peanut-butter sandwiches. Michael’s sodden nappy went into a big plastic bag, in which dirty items stayed until washing facilities were available. Disposable nappy design was still in its infancy; in any case, their use was a guarantee of developing a sore bottom, so inside plastic pants were an outer layer of terry towelling, an inner muslin nappy lined with Kleenex to take the worst, and the skin liberally plastered with a barrier cream. I never discovered how Maria coped with her own baby, but the breast-fed infant was content and there were no unpleasant smells other than the pervasive body odour we had come to accept as part of life in Africa.

After a few miles the track changed to black cotton soil, which after rain would turn into a treacly morass, dreaded by all travellers. We were fortunate, unlike Dutch friends, who two weeks earlier had been forced to return to Mwanza. Soon we began to see small groups of Thomson’s gazelle, several giraffes, a pack of hyaenas, bunches of four or five warthogs scarpering off, tails erect, waterbuck, a few ostriches, many baboon troops and hundreds of gnu. Katharine spotted a group of vultures bouncing up and down on a heap of something that attracted myriad flies, insisting on closer inspection despite Fergus’s protest that at this rate we would not reach Seronera by nightfall. The heap was a gnu – its ribs already exposed.

We stopped at the camp beside the Grumeti River, and were lucky to find the young zoologist ‘at home’. We had brought contributions for Richard’s larder, tinned sausages from Czechoslovakia, a can of rubbery orange cheese, a dozen cans of beer and some fresh fruit. One round hut was his bedroom, another the office/laboratory, and a row of outbuildings contained the kitchen, cook’s room and a modern bath, which had to be filled by hand with grey-green water from the river. This same water was what one drank after boiling and – I hoped – filtering, though I did not see a filter. The loo, perched over a deep hole in the ground, prompted the girls to ask if it led to Australia. They sat on a low branch above the silky river, and pronounced it heaven. In many ways it was.

Maria and Stella had remained impassive throughout, and Katharine and Mary had become blasé about the more commonly seen animals, complaining that they had yet to see a rhino or elephant. Richard patiently explained that they were rare in the area, but we might see some hippos in a nearby pool. Leaving Michael with Maria and Stella, we set off in Richard’s vehicle, lurching over a mile of deeply fissured track, before he stopped, announcing that now we had to walk – in total silence. Fergus had sensible desert boots, but the girls and I wore only flipflops. For a while the quiet was broken only by the distant call of a bulbul shrike, and faint rustlings from the surrounding bush. A large flock of wood ibis clattered into the air, giving away our presence just before we reached a round soupy pool no more than fifty feet in diameter, where several crocodiles immersed themselves immediately. After a short interval, about fifteen hippos of assorted sizes surfaced, little ears twitching, to inspect the intruders. A fully grown elephant silently crossed the stream on the opposite side of the pool; only then did I feel a tremor of fear, realising that Richard did not carry a gun, and my faith in Fergus, though considerable, did not extend to imagining he would be of the slightest use should we be forced to take evasive action.

On leaving, we thanked Richard sincerely for having allowed us a glimpse of his Mara paradise. (From what I have read recently this area is now at the centre of luxury lodge accommodation, which makes me even more grateful to have been there before mass tourism, and continued poaching, made their mark on yet another site of special scientific interest.) Travelling on to Seronera, we made a stop for drinks and leg-stretching. Then, while Fergus and the others stayed in the Land Rover, I climbed a slope overlooking a bend in the river, hoping to get a picture of a somnolent crocodile. A child’s voice floated over the stultifying air: ‘Watch out, Mum, there’s a lion.’ ‘Shut up, Mary,’ I replied; ‘bad-taste joke.’ Then Fergus, in measured tones, said: ‘There is a lion, just walk back slowly, don’t run.’ I glimpsed a dead gazelle on the riverbank and quickly realised I had disturbed a meal.

Late in the afternoon, hot, exhausted and engrained with red dust, when the sun was turning to a red ball, we reached Seronera Lodge. It was a relief to find that we were expected, and that two self-catering rooms were ready for occupation, but accommodation for Maria and her baby had to be arranged at the servants’ quarters, near the laundry. Stella was to stay in our second room with the children. Formerly these rooms used a communal kitchen with a steward to lay tables and do the washing-up, even cooking if requested, but rumours had been rife over the previous eighteen months of a marked decline in standards and they turned out to be all too true. The cot requested for Michael was nowhere to be seen, and when one was produced, it was encrusted with bat dung. There was no fridge for the food I had brought in our now warm ice-box, no cook and no means of cooking until six in the evening, when a fire was lit to warm bath water. Luckily we had brought a Primus along, so it was back to the old Ghana regime of making up baby feeds on the dressing table among hair brushes, melting butter, hardening lumps of bread and our precious tin-opener. The kitchen was filthy, such pans as there were blackened and misshapen – fortunately I had brought one along just in case. There were no aids for dish-washing other than a slimy rag, which I incinerated as soon as the fire got going. We found an assortment of cutlery and china in a cockroach-infested meat safe; most of the cups had a layer of hardened sugar at the bottom. The dining room was some distance from the kitchen; grimy cloths covered the tables, which bore crumbs from the last meal, and there were several Kapok mattresses on the floor, indicating it was a multi-purpose room. (I wrote a letter of complaint to the National Parks manager at Arusha, who was English and probably well aware of the situation: Seronera, the main lodge in the largest reserve, was one of the worst.)

We had hoped that after the children had been fed and had gone to sleep under Stella’s care, we would dine at the main lodge, mostly patronised by rich Americans, but we were refused, owing to a new rule that no meals would be served to tourists staying in the self-catering rooms. They graciously agreed to serve us with drinks and nibbles in the amphitheatre in front of a stone-fronted bar. A large fire was blazing and beyond lay the vastness of Serengeti under a clear star-sprinkled sky.

After a good night’s sleep, we woke to see two giraffes delicately nibbling the tops of some nearby acacia trees, and tame glossy starlings, their iridescent oil-slick-coloured plumage brilliant in the soft early light, hopping around outside: all the effort suddenly seemed worthwhile. The children discovered a colony of tame rock hyrax, and wanted to visit the museum. A sad and dusty place it was: stuffed, moth-eaten specimens of smaller animals were displayed under flyblown glass, the labels curled and brown at the edges. There was a collection of pallid snakes and frogs in formalin and a few hand-axes and arrowheads said to have come from the Olduvai gorge. Faded sepia photographs of nineteenth-century pioneer hunters, standing proudly with attendant askaris beside a kill, hung crookedly behind cracked glass. The children were unimpressed, but strangely often referred to it afterwards. Leaving Michael with Stella and Maria, we hired a guide for the afternoon. Driving his own vehicle, he took us first to see a family of lions at their ease in the shade of an acacia tree. The male lay prone, legs in the air, while two females watched several cubs at play nearby. Then, alerted by seeing another of the park vehicles stopped near a large solitary tree, he drove to see what the attraction was: wedged high in a fork in the branches, a fine leopard stretched out, long tail dangling, guarding his kill –a Thomson’s gazelle, its head also dangling from a long neck. Nowadays, thanks to the mixed benefits of digital technology, all the rangers have mobile phones, so such a kill would be surrounded by four-wheel-drive vehicles, each sprouting video cameras and telephoto lenses. Buffaloes we found about as entertaining as domestic cows, but we knew they were among the most dangerous animals, liable to close in on and trample any interloper. Visitors were warned on no account to leave their vehicles, but in practice many did.

Gradually we learned to indentify the less common antelopes – kudu, topi, gerenuk and hartebeest – but by the time we set off on the journey back to Mwanza, we were all sated by sightings of baboons, zebras, warthogs and troops of green vervet monkeys. We stopped briefly at Richard’s camp, where his cook contrived a meal using some of our remaining canned contributions. Fortuitously one of the Land Rover’s tyres chose to develop a slow puncture just as we approached the camp, for a search revealed that the institute’s mechanic had not replaced the tool-set in its usual place under the driver’s seat.

As we were on the point of leaving, one of the rangers implored us to take his heavily pregnant wife to the hospital in Mwanza, as she was thought to be miscarrying, so she managed to squeeze herself into the back of the already overloaded vehicle. Steely blue clouds had formed behind us, flashes of lightning shot over the horizon, and distant peals of thunder could be heard. When we got to the black cotton soil area, it was much softer than it had been on our way in, so we decided that I should take over the driving while Fergus walked ahead to test the surface, to a chorus of anxious voices: ‘Look Mummy, there are big drops of rain, and why does Daddy have to get out so often, and what will happen if a lion, or rhino comes?’ What indeed. We made the gate with about fifteen minutes to spare before the downpour started in earnest. (Two weeks later a young couple were stuck for forty-eight hours before deciding they had no option but to abandon the car and walk the remaining eight miles to the exit. The girl told me she had been terrified – they had seen three rhinos and a large herd of buffalo.)

We deposited the pregnant woman safely at the hospital, then, mission accomplished, on reaching Bwiru, collapsed with stiff drinks. Stephano had the house in good order, beds made, table laid and a curry prepared. He announced that the cat, recently consigned to our care by a departing European family, now had six kittens: the girls were thrilled, Fergus and I less so, as we faced having to tell them that we could not keep them all. Eventually two handsomely marked males were kept, and the mother spayed. It was thought a wild cat was responsible, and indeed the one we retained matured into a fiercely independent character with a large bushy tail, which spent days away from home. The other we managed to foist on a missionary family living in the project zone.

As the end of the year approached, a succession of minor incidents occurred. An unidentified insect bit my ‘bad’ leg, which swelled to elephantine proportions and broke out in small blisters – the agony subsiding only after a couple of days. Mary spent time with Stephano’s wife collecting termites from a previous night’s swarm, hopefully bringing a cup of them for us to try. Fergus bravely did so, pronouncing them rather like shrimps, but I declined, feeling much as my mother did about lobsters. The girls, together with John and Rosemary’s children, Peter, Sheena and Andrew, had collected a number of large land snails (Achatina spp.), which were housed in boxes all over both houses, even on the dining table at breakfast, to Stephano’s disgust. They marked them with nail varnish and held races in the garden. I drew the line at a vacated tortoise shell in the house until the ants had removed all traces of its dead occupant. Mary started to attend a nursery school that had opened on three mornings each week; unfortunately it was short-lived through lack of demand, and she had to wait until March 1969 to join Katharine at Isamilo Primary School. Our insensitive German neighbour annoyed a black mamba by injuring it with a stone; Fergus then saw it near our car park, chucked a large stone at it, and missed completely; we were astonished how quickly nine feet of snake could disappear into the rockery. Much ineffectual hue and cry ensued, all neighbouring cooks and shamba boys joining in the fray. I hoped it would get the message that it was unwelcome, but it didn’t, and was seen from time to time on the track crossing the gully up which cattle were driven daily by a little boy no more than ten years old.

By mid-November I had recovered from the Serengeti trip enough to contemplate taking our entourage to Uganda by lake steamer. Fergus had been asked to attend a schistosomiasis expert committee meeting early in January, followed by the annual medical conference the following week. John and Rosemary, with their three children and their ayah, planned a similar excursion. I had in mind to visit the Queen Elizabeth and Murchison Falls game reserves in western Uganda at the conclusion of the conference; Fergus was less enthusiastic, having been there in 1957 unencumbered by family. It must be hard for readers to imagine how difficult communications then were between countries in the East African Community. Any attempt to make steamer reservations by telephoning the central booking office in Nairobi was guaranteed to provoke a rise in blood pressure. The alternative was to send a letter, which in theory should arrive the next day, but never did. So unable to visit the office in person, chances of booking return tickets for our family and vehicle from Mwanza to Jinja, near Kisumu, and back were slim.

The situation became farcical: Fergus had a personal invitation to go to Kampala, but the regional office in Brazzaville refused permission, saying they intended to send the regional representative (who had not been invited, and had nothing to contribute) as an observer. The secretary of the East African Medical Association then intervened, asking Brazzaville to reconsider its position in view of the valuable contribution which Fergus would make to the special committee on schistosomiasis. He was determined to go, even without official travel authorisation, but this was dangerous territory and might have resulted in days being deducted from his leave, and refusal to pay travel costs. More seriously, he risked arousing the wrath of Dr Quenum in Brazzaville, and seriously jeopardising his future career. As the time approached for our departure, John and Rosemary, their children, the youngest of whom was Andrew, a year older than Michael, and ayah, had their return journey, including their car, confirmed by Nairobi, but not the outward trip; in our case, it was the reverse – between us we had a full booking. Our reservation covered the Peugeot 504 brake.

We liaised with the McMahons when it came to festive catering: our servants, being nominally Christian, wanted Christmas Day and Boxing Day off, while the McMahons’ cook, shamba boy and ayah were all Muslim and did not mind working on those days, provided they got two days later in the year or could add them to the celebrations at the end of Ramadan. I had bought a tree, bearing little resemblance to any northern hemisphere conifer, from the forestry department’s nursery, insisting that the roots should be preserved. Decorated with old baubles, including those bought in Boston the previous year, it looked authentic when surrounded by small presents for the children, including Stephano’s brood, and the ten-year-old son of one of the administrative staff, to whom Michael had taken a liking – John Leugobola. There were soft drinks for the children and hard ones for the parents. Father Christmas provided two dolls in wicker cradles for the girls, proudly displayed to all visitors, but played with minimally thereafter, as predicted; I suspect they were of status value, as all their friends had frilly dolls and cradles. The Barbie craze had yet to reach Mwanza. I was determined to prepare a better Christmas dinner than those we had suffered during the Ghana days, and ordered a free-range turkey from the island farm; ingredients for stuffing posed no problem, in fact the only traditional items missing were Brussels sprouts and potatoes; cranberry sauce and a good variety of dried fruits and nuts were on the shelves of Alibhai stores.

In late January 1968 we travelled to Kampala for the conference and arrived at Makerere University guesthouse exhausted by the trip. We had found the MV Victoria unsafe for children and constant vigilance had to be kept lest any of them were tempted to sit on the rails or crawl below the lifeboats, beside which there were no rails at all. The lifeboats were, of course, on the upper deck, and the stairs up and down to this area provided an irresistible round circuit. By now Michael had a fair turn of speed and tried to keep up with the older children. The cabins were comfortable but exceptionally small; the girls and Fergus slept well but I had to share a bunk with Michael, who was wide awake at intervals, humping and thrashing around all night. David Bradley, seconded from the London School of Tropical Medicine, of which he later became director, and joint author with Fergus of a paper to be presented at the conference, found us an excellent temporary ayah who used to work for his family.

The food at the guesthouse was excellent, and the accommodation almost luxurious: we had two enormous bedrooms, two bathrooms and two loos all to ourselves for £6 per day – food included. While Fergus was at the conference centre, I was able to find many things that had been unobtainable in Mwanza, where austerity was beginning to bite with a vengeance. Even rice, which we bought by the sack, was in short supply and riddled with tiny fragments of quartz, so many washings were needed before cooking; even then, tiny bits were liable to surprise the unwary diner. David took us to the botanical reserve, where the variety of exotic butterflies surpassed even those in Sierra Leone. In the end, our five-day safari to the game reserves proved quite legitimate, because the steamer service was unable to honour our return booking until a week after the conference ended; even then we had to accept second-class cabins – sexes segregated even within families, but happily we were allowed to use the first-class dining and bathroom facilities.

We reached Mbarara, where we checked into an Agip motel, in mid-afternoon. We would have preferred a small privately run hotel overlooking the Queen Elizabeth game reserve, but did not dare risk it, as the road was bad, they had no telephone, and might not, in any case, have had any vacancies. An early start the next day was more prudent, even though nine in the morning was the earliest we ever managed. The sky was slightly hazy and it was not too hot on our journey north to Kichwamba, on the edge of the escarpment overlooking the plain, where we stopped for coffee and soft drinks at a small hotel/restaurant owned by a Swede and his Finnish wife. Forty years on I wonder how their enterprise fared under Amin’s reign of terror, and whether our Tutsi ayah, some of whose children were still in their teens, survived the atrocities perpetrated by his troops.

On the second day we checked in at the main lodge in the middle of the reserve. Any view of the Ruwenzori range was obscured by dry season haze and smoke from bush fires. One early explorer spent six months at Kasese, without realising the Mountains of the Moon existed, and we saw only a faint shadow of them on the day we left. The park was totally different in character from Serengeti; but we saw any number of elephants and hippos, the birds were more varied, and we saw a pride of seventeen lions – in fact, we parked right in the middle of them. Hordes of warthog, vast herds of buffalo and a serval cat – the last mostly nocturnal – crossed our path. A bull elephant wandered around the staff quarters at the park, searching for fermenting pombe, to which he was addicted – nobody seemed in the least perturbed. There were many chimpanzees in the area, but we were told that we would have to stay at a campsite to have any hope of seeing them.

On our last two days we drove down through the south end of the park, which bordered on the Congo. Elephants were everywhere, while the roadworkers worked on, apparently oblivious of their proximity. Outside the park we came on vast herds of topi, before starting to climb steadily into the famous Kisengi province of Uganda, where the mountains reach eight-thousand feet. The road was rough and the precipices almost alpine in character. Everywhere the steep hillsides were neatly cultivated, or in some places forested with coniferous trees interspersed with eucalyptus: a formidable feat of planting if one considered the distances, gradients, and stultifying heat during the day. There were small compounds on even the steepest slopes with plantations of bananas, beans, maize and even strawberries. We stayed at Kabale, which is famous for its pleasant climate, but unfortunately did not have time to visit Lake Bunyoni or Kisoro some fifty miles away on the border of Ruanda-Burundi and Congo, where the ascent to mountain gorilla territory begins. The final day was just a straight batter back to Kampala, which we reached early in the evening in time to take the girls for a swim in the university pool. On this trip Fergus had, technically speaking, ‘abandoned post’.

When we eventually boarded the MV Victoria again, the children and I were conducted to a nine foot by six foot secondclass cabin, to be shared with two Indian women, one African woman – all immense – and six assorted children. The Asian ladies got on board at Bukoba, and amid much thumping and loud discussion, filled the available floor space with huge tied bundles. All the lights were ablaze, and at one time the cabin door was filled with voluble male relatives of assorted ages, giving advice, while I lay in my ‘negligée’ on the top bunk, my head about eighteen inches from the ceiling. Michael, beside me, slept through it all, but Katharine and Mary in the lower bunk added their views on where things could best be stowed. Outside the cabin, the floor was packed with recumbent bodies shrouded in blankets and cloths; between them a narrow route led to other cabins and several bicycles chained to the rails were a hazard to our shins. In the other cabin Fergus and John McMahon were trying to discourage a nervous elderly Asian, who thought his bunk was dangerously high, from laying his mattress on the floor; also in their cabin was a doctor from Dodoma mental hospital, who helped us by taking the older children up to the first-class deck and reading them stories. Michael celebrated the journey by doing five ‘smellies’ en route, so I spent a lot of time in the foetid bathroom trying to clean up, before adding the rinsed nappies to the huge load we had accumulated over the previous few days. Rosemary, whose younger son was still in nappies, was fortunate indeed to have her ayah on board.

During the latter part of February Michael was very ill for three weeks. It began with loss of appetite and persistent thrush which did not respond to treatment with gentian violet, followed by teething problems and a chest infection resistant to all the drugs prescribed. He was miserable and, because even sucking was painful, would not drink enough fluid to prevent dehydration. It was emotionally and physically draining all of us, but he rapidly regained lost weight, and soon was back to normal, dishing out orders to his peer group. I fear Stephano’s brood had been told not to thwart the boss’s son. Lucy had inherited Joyce’s inscrutable countenance, and unlikely to rebel, little Joseph clung limpet-like to his mother, while Margaret, Salome, Elizabeth and Hilda, who saw themselves as trainee ayahs, were happy to carry Michael around. Stephano, unknown to us, had negotiated the sale – for that is what it was – of Stella, by this time fifteen, to a policeman in Dar for 400 EA shillings. A previous attempt to ‘marry’ her to a middle-aged local man had provoked her to seek shelter with the family of a school friend. ‘That girl is always troubling me’ was what Stephano thought about the matter.

Maria of the scowling countenance continued to look after Michael in the mornings, but I had unspecific reservations about her. One day I returned to find Michael at the front of the house, one foot wedged between the blades of the lawnmower, while Maria gossiped with the shamba boy at the back door. Michael was not distressed, and probably would have extricated himself, but I blew a fuse in Swahili, which no doubt sounded ridiculous. The message got through, however, that this was the final straw, and her services were no longer required. She did well out of it, getting three months’ severance pay, but no glowing reference. Katharine and Mary were pleased, Stephano enigmatic, and the shamba boy more industrious after the incident. Stella took over in the interim period, before, to our regret, moving out of our life, to live with the policeman after Stephano got his final payment later in the year. I hope the man was kind, as Stella had a nice nature and would have preferred to stay at school for another year.

In mid-July we all went on home leave to Northern Ireland; Fergus for a month only, while the children and I did not return to Mwanza until November, in good time for the festive season. On New Year’s Eve I gave a party for more than twenty with turkey, roast pork, all the traditional trimmings, and lots of booze. I do not remember whether it was before this party, or a subsequent one, that Fergus found me late at night crying into the stuffing for the cavernous bird. His reaction was: ‘Throw the bloody thing in the bin if that’s the way you feel about it.’