A Stone in the Road: Two Years in Southern Tanzania

By Jim French

A single-lane, dirt road, 18 miles long, leads to a secondary school in the deep bush of Southern Tanzania. Jim French and his wife Marlyn, CUSO volunteers, journeyed to the end of this road in 1967 for two years of teaching and unexpected adventure. The only Canadians ever at St. Joseph's College, Chidya, they learned to dodge camel spiders in the bedroom and red ants on the paths, to live with skinks in the attic, and to cope in a region of malaria and poisonous snakes. In dry season they travelled, in rainy they hunkered down with the students and small cohort of staff, trapped by a Chidya road often wrecked by the rains. They witnessed the fine work of missionaries, and engaged with young Tanzanians who competed and celebrated. This Africa memoir is about travel, teaching, beautiful bushland, culture, friendship, growing up – and about the lurking stone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Oct 16, 2020

Jim French

Jim French was born in Kirkland lake, Ontario in 1939, and spent his high school years in Sudbury and Elliot Lake. He has an honours degree in English and Philosophy from the University of Western Ontario in London, and a master's in English from the University of Sussex in the U.K. Jim is married to his second wife, Beth Whitney, and has two children and two step children. After 45 years' teaching English, Communication, and Writing in high school and college, Jim celebrates retired life with Beth in London. This is his first book.

Book preview

Never forget us

Fifty years have passed. Why bother writing now about my time in Africa? The Tanzanian South? The Chidya school? The Church of England mission? Does anyone still remember, or care? A few years ago I reunited in England with three British colleagues of my Africa years. We talked about our lives and doings, and suddenly one of them laughed and said, Why are we still talking about Chidya? I realized that it was I who was pushing the subject of Chidya. My two years there, from September 1967 through July 1969, were still alive in my memory, rich in detail and powerful in feeling.

The three colleagues had recently been back to the Tanzanian South, and indeed were still connected with the ongoing mission work there. They had seen how the region had changed. The guerilla war in Mozambique was long over and its northern border with Tanzania, the Ruvuma River, had been open for several years. The Ruvuma was now bridged, as was the Rufiji Delta, the great, watery barrier between Dar es Salaam and the country’s southern coastal cities. Much development had flowed into the South as a result. In my years a restricted area, the South has long been open to tourists. Today’s South does not lure me back. If I were part of a mission, I might feel differently. But first and last, I was just a teacher.

The years 1967-69 were a rich time to teach in Tanzania. Education was the top priority of the founding president, Julius Nyerere. Tanzania was newly independent. A new morning had broken for the nation, and the Chidya students were seizing the day with optimism and hope. My then-wife Marlyn and I were young and newly married. We worked in a community of missionaries, depended upon by President Nyerere to help operate the southern region. Around us, local, subsistence life had not changed much since the pre-independence time, the old days. Thousand-year-old practices and traditions were still in place. We could see evidence of those past days and, also, look ahead at the new nation abuilding.

To this day, I remember the students’ talk, their clipped, slightly formal way of speaking, devoid of slang and elisions: it was do not, not don’t, I shall go, not I’ll go. Most of them were 18 or older, a few with wives and children back at home. There was much humour and laughter, music and dance around the school, a boys- (or men-) only school, O-level on the British model, set by itself well back in the bush. There was also fierce competition among those men and a truly serious commitment to the school work. Entering the school’s Form 1 after an elementary education of eight (later, seven) years of instruction in Kiswahili, the students had very rapidly to master English, which was the teaching medium of secondary school. They did so remarkably quickly, and were functioning in the new language after only a few weeks’ time. Never have I taught more highly motivated, hard-working students than those Chidya men.

St. Joseph’s College, at the end of a long, life-sustaining road, was the centrepiece of a beautiful place to live. The elevation of Chidya hill meant that the nights were cool for sleeping. Despite the guerilla war going on in Mozambique just a few miles to the south, our local area was resolutely peaceful. Despite Marlyn’s and my lack of Kiswahili, the local people were friendly and helpful. We bought much of our food from the folk who lived close by, who sold us chickens and eggs, papayas and eggplant, and elegant Makonde ebony carvings. We had access to good medical care, to books, and to a mail service whose efficiency was admirable, given the difficulties of distance and, in the rainy season, flood conditions.

I remember the almost-always sunny mornings, the cool, sweet air, and the early-morning sound of high-life music on the radio from Mr. Abraham’s house next door; the double-forte din of the cicadas; the heavy, sultry smell of the korosho trees in October, as the blossoms promised the cashews to come; the amazing emergence from the earth of the flying ants and termites as the early rains in December loosened the hard-packed surface; and later the tall, tall elephant grass, which walled in the pathways in the rainy season; and walking over the dark Chidya Hill to our house after an evening with the ever-hospitable Richard Price; and the utter blackness when the nights were moonless; and, as Marlyn and I lay in bed, the whistling and singing of the local people passing the house as they walked through this blackness—happy songs, to keep away the evil spirits.

I remember standing at the front of the class in the rainy season when, in mid-morning, a crackling sound, waxing steadily louder, would come through the open-screened windows from the east. The class would quieten, the students looking at me anxiously for the signal. Go! I’d shout with the wave of my arm. As one, the men leapt to their feet and dashed out of the room. They were rushing to their dormitory clotheslines to rescue their drying clothes from the daily rains coming at us. As the crackling turned into a roar, they dashed back in, their rescue completed. Then the rains would hit, a dense column-like torrent of water that smashed into the tin roof, creating a din that made all talk impossible. A full stop to the lesson! The men reached into their desks for their novels and spent the time of the downpour, rarely more than an hour, reading, or writing their daily theme.

In 1969 there was a social event in Masasi at the mission hospital to mark the occasion of the permanent return of several missionaries to England. Bishop Hilary Chisonga, an indigene who had succeeded Trevor Huddleston as the bishop of Masasi, said to the mainly European crowd, Never forget us. Of course, he meant Never forget this ongoing work of development, and stay involved in it. I see Never forget us also as a reminder to me to remember my time, the people and places, the flora and fauna of Africa, the ancestral home of us all.

Chapter 1: First Day in the South

To my delight, the flight south to our school on this mid-September Tuesday in 1967 was to be on a DC-3, a great and famous if old aircraft, but new-looking in its bright yellow-green-white East African Airways colours. The interior, though, was far from posh: steel-framed seats with thin canvas upholstery and an empty space at the rear of the cabin for cargo. No flight attendant or cabin service. But it was the usual beautiful sunny morning in Dar es Salaam as we took off. Destination: St. Joseph’s College, a secondary boarding school located in the southern bush at a place called Chidya.

After the chores of wrapping up our year in England, a two-stage flight to Dar es Salaam, and six days of orientation and fun in that dusty but charming city, Marlyn and I were happy to be at last on the final leg. We would touch down at Lindi, on the Indian Ocean coast, then fly westward to disembark at Nachingwea, some 90 miles west of the ocean and about 50 miles north of Chidya. The first 30 of that final 50 miles would take us to the smallish town of Masasi, the focal point of the southeast region and the headquarters of the region’s Church of England Mission, our employer at St. Joseph’s. However, once off the plane, we had no idea of how we would travel over that final 50-mile leg from the Nachingwea airport to Masasi and Chidya: bus? taxi? private car?

Our flight south took us alongside the ocean just to our left, with intermittent traverses over green, yellow and brown chunks of coastal land. It was well along in the dry season, and inland from the water there was little green in the landscape. I thought of our first look at Africa from the air, six days earlier, as our VC10, departing just before dawn from Rome, crossed the African coastline. Below us in the early sunlight was the Sahara Desert, not sand-coloured at all but a delicate mother-of-pearl pink. I thought also of the middle-aged man in a handsome pale-blue suit I talked to on the plane later that morning. He was Roger, standing behind me in the line of passengers waiting to use a washroom. Roger was an old Africa hand, a British mining engineer flying back to his job in the Congo. I mentioned Marlyn’s and my teaching jobs as Canadian volunteers in the Tanzanian South.

Huh! he erupted. What do you know about life in Tanzania? What do you expect to accomplish? Leave the Tanzanians alone. They won’t care about you. Volunteers! he scoffed. You’ll just be a burden. Let them work it out. Go back to Canada. The previous night had been a long one in the Rome airport, and I sagged beneath his negativity. As the washroom line inched forward, I mounted a thin defence. Nyerere invited our organization. Why would he do that? He must think we’ll be of some use. Roger softened a bit. Well, he said, do what you can. Then get out.

The DC-3’s was a smooth, level ride, the engines a comforting drone. An English-accented man’s voice came over the cabin public address system: This is the captain speaking. Do you have your seat belts on? A pause. Then, Would anybody like to see the wreck of the Konigsberg? Then, oddly, Put up your hands. Seven or eight of us hesitantly did so. The door to the cockpit popped open and there stood the captain, a slim, young, sandy-haired European, counting our hands while his co-pilot flew the plane. Good for East African Airways, I thought; how nicely casual.

The Konigsberg was a World War 1 German battle cruiser that had been contained by the British Navy in the delta of the Rufiji River, where it meets the Indian Ocean. (The Rufiji is a major river that drains all of central Tanzania.) In 1915, after failing to defend their ship against British shelling, the German crew scuttled the Konigsberg in the shallow delta channel where it had been anchored.

The plane descended, banked now to the left, then to the right as the aircrew hunted for the ship. Below, whizzing by, was an endless tangle of waterways and gray-green bush. Suddenly, The ship is just ahead. I’ll bank so you all can have a look. Sitting to port, we got the first look as the pilot banked left so steeply that we seemed perched on the wingtip beneath us. Below in the channel was the shape of an oval with sharp points at each end—the outline of the Konigsberg’s hull. The entire superstructure seemed to have eroded away. Then, after a manoeuvre that pointed our wing skyward to give the starboard side a look, the DC-3 leveled off and we continued south.

Sitting a couple of seats ahead of us was a European woman, probably in her late 40’s or early 50’s, with her brown hair waved in an attractive style. With the aircraft now level and cruising, she got out of her seat and came back to us. She had a bright manner and an English accent. Is this your first trip south? Well, welcome! I’m Miss Inkpen—Helen — and I am headmistress of the Mtwara Girls’ School. Where are you going? When we said Chidya, her enthusiasm went up a notch. I know Miss Peake who kind of runs things there and I’ve met your boss, Bishop Trevor. Your headmaster is Percival Mwidadi and he’s well thought of. Do you have any questions?

I mentioned that, after landing in Nachingwea, we had no idea how we would proceed from there to Chidya. Was there a bus? She shook her head and said that someone would have been delegated to pick us up. Somebody will take care of you. That’s the way of it here in the South. We all know each other. As the plane began descending toward Lindi, Miss Inkpen said, I’m sure we’ll meet again when you visit Mtwara. Don’t let anything shock you but be ready for anything. Good luck.

The plane glided over dense, palm-studded greenery and dropped neatly onto a tiny yellow-clay airstrip, braked heavily, turned about to the left and taxied to a small shed, a little larger than a roadside bus shelter, which was the entire passenger facility. This flight did not go on to Mtwara, but Miss Inkpen was on the plane because she had business in Lindi. We remained in our seats while she and most of the other passengers got off. Soon the steps were raised and the remaining half-dozen or so of us again took off, heading west, inland. Away from the populous coast, the flat landscape looked entirely uninhabited, sweeps of gray bush with yellow-brown patches, seemingly devoid of roads and dwellings. Yet below us were thousands of Tanzanians, the continuants of hundreds of thousands of years of human life on this continent.

Soon we were descending again, this time gliding straight over the dirt airstrip so the pilot could check that the runway was free of animals and other obstacles. The pale clay surface was dead empty, and after a long, shallow circuit we touched down and taxied to a shed smaller even than Lindi Airport’s. Nachingwea. Gathering our gear and with a lump in our throats, we descended the steps into the blazing sunshine. There in front of us was a stocky, smiling Tanzanian man who introduced himself as Percival Mwidadi, our headmaster. He said, I received word just this morning that you were coming to Chidya. It has been quite a race to get here. They’re expecting us for lunch at Mtandi, so we need to get going.

A towering plume of red dust trailing behind us, along we charged in Mr. Mwidadi’s car down a narrow red-dirt road through a startling monochrome, strange and disturbing. The trees, grass, bushes, and the frequent termite hills that towered six or more feet in the air were all the same shade of baked yellow-brown. Straight above us — it was about noon — the furnace-like sun cast no shadows and seemed to have drained the colour from the land. This was the dry season; we were 10 degrees south of the Equator. Concentrating on his driving, which was fast and made noisy by the endless waves of corrugations — tiny, rigid, sand dunes on the unpaved road — Mr. Mwidadi was silent. So we were too. The road arrowed south through the miles of scrappy wilderness, hardly a house or person or passing vehicle to be seen. The heat and light were so extreme as to be scary. What would we do if the car had a breakdown?

At last we were beside a row of houses and the road became a street. We had reached the town of Masasi; I sighed with relief. At a stop sign we turned left and, soon, left again into the enclave of Mtandi,¹ where our boss, Bishop Trevor Huddleston, famous earlier as an apartheid fighter in South Africa, lived with a cohort of priests and staff in a complex of buildings beside his stone cathedral. Mr. Mwidadi parked in front of the dining hall. Entering the large room, our sun-shocked eyes could see nothing but darkness—out of which rolled a loud, rough-cut voice: You’re late! Bishop Trevor, the speaker, a diabetic with fixed meal times, had been kept waiting.

A smiling, strawberry-blond young English woman came forward—Jill Duttson, who was soon to become a friend. The bishop’s secretary, she took us forward to the dais to meet Bishop Trevor, Canon Faussett, and Fathers Sparham and Cox. The four men were subdued and so was the lunch, cucumber sandwiches, scones, and tea, which were consumed quickly and virtually silently, although Jill kept up a friendly patter. I was tongue-tied. Mr. Mwidadi then hurried us back into the car, saying he had appointments.

We headed west into Masasi’s central business district just off the highway, a dusty, unpaved quadrangle lined on two sides with concrete-walled Asian-run maduka (shops) and a beer bar on the third, the Rafiki (friend). Mr. Mwidadi said that we would meet a Mr. Somji, who helps the school. (How true, as we later and often experienced.) As we were led into a duka, a flat-roofed building with two dirt-smeared windows and an open front door as the only sources of light, the gray-haired proprietor whose original home had been Gujarat State in India, came forward. This was Somji: we never afterward heard anyone use the honorific Mr. All the town’s shopkeepers were Indian, and Somji was highly regarded among them. We shook hands with him and two of his grown-up sons.

One of Mr. Mwidadi’s errands there was to pick up the living room curtain material for the house, presently under construction, which we would eventually occupy at Chidya. Having just learned that very day of our existence, he must have been relieved that the school possessed this new, unassigned house, a place to put us. The curtain material was a bolt of red cotton. In this ill-lit room, full of a random confusion of goods, Mr. Mwidadi showed the bolt to Marlyn, who praised its colour politely. Suddenly from the shadows a raggedly-dressed young Tanzanian man raced toward me, fell on his knees, and grasped me tightly around the thighs. He stared up at my face silently and imploringly. I was shocked and couldn’t move in his tight grip. But he was quickly pulled away by one of the sons who led him by the hand to the door. Don’t mind him, said the son; he can’t speak.

As we left the store, Mr. Mwidadi pointed to a nearby olive-gray Peugeot 340 pickup truck, outfitted with benches on either side of the rear bed which was covered with a brown canvas roof: the St. Joseph’s school car. Mr. Mwidadi said that he had to stay on in Masasi; we were to go on to Chidya with Yohana Bakari, the school driver, a man in a white shirt, beige shorts, and natty forage cap who was standing beside the truck’s (school car’s) cab. Yohana would take care of us, said Mr. Mwidadi. Yohana and I had a silent handshake and he tipped his head at Marlyn. Our suitcases were loaded into the back of the school car and we were off, Marlyn by the window and I in the middle beside Yohana, heading back east along the red-dirt highway,² past Mtandi, then turning south-east onto the 18-mile Chidya road, storied in the region for its length, poor condition, and the well-regarded school at its end.

The narrow, dirt road proceeded level at first, through open fields with burnt patches, clusters of bush, and the occasional tall tree that eased a bit the general look of devastation. The annual custom in the region was to burn the elephant grass which, filling the open land, grew as much as nine feet tall but now well into the dry season was long-dead, pale, and crackling-dry. Some of the grass had been burned, but the job was far from completion. The burning was a necessary prelude to the grass’s re-growing in November-December when the rains returned. This was a land well acquainted with fire.

Yohana drove at a moderate speed, necessarily so. We rolled through the bleak-looking surroundings, the roadside bushes layered with dust, the potholes and dry sloughs obvious underneath us as the school car rocked through them. Marlyn and I rode in silence. We knew no Kiswahili, Yohana knew no English. The car cab was noisy, hot, dusty, and uncomfortable. Surprised innocents, Marlyn and I were overwhelmed by this day and these new people. It was easiest to just stay silent.

We passed the occasional settlement: small, rectangular houses with mud-brick walls, roofs on which the thatch appeared to be haphazardly thrown, window coverings of translucent animal skins, and some small outbuildings. As we drove along, a few road-walking local people, about to be enveloped in our dust, stood aside as we passed, the men in shirts and long trousers, or coloured cloth, or the white, nightgown-like kanzus; the women wrapped in a sheet of either coloured or plain black cloth — wearing on their feet the standard soft-rubber flip-flops we had noticed on the streets of Dar.³

After a few miles, the open land gave way to encroaching bush, and we suddenly hit a trench-like section of the road filled with deep sand. The school car bucked and heaved, front wheels spinning, as Yohana kept us moving forward. Then bang! We had wallowed down onto a buried but sizeable rock which should have done the school car some injury but apparently did not.

Shaking free of the sand, we began a shallow ascent, then reached a clearing surrounded by trees large and tall, some of them dark evergreen and ice-cream-shaped like a child’s drawing—mango trees, suggesting a human settlement. The road split, and we headed up the left fork past a couple of small buildings. I turned to Yohana and asked Chidya? His headshake was negative, and he spoke some brief Kiswahili phrase. We later learned the place’s name, Mpindimbi, a small village that seemed to us deserted.

Soon afterward we crossed a concrete-slab bridge over a stream. This was Kambona Stream, a feeder of the Lukuledi River, the valley of which contained the east-west main highway from Masasi to the coast, a 90-mile journey. This tributary stream accomplished the rare feat in the semi-arid South of providing water reliably 12 months of the year. Its existence was the reason for the Mission’s locating St. Joseph’s College in such a remote place. A school requires a dependable source of water. Chidya, it turned out, was less than a mile from the spring that was the source of this substantial creek.

Now the road climbed significantly, twisting around curves and ascending low ridges. On one curve, perched beside a steep drop-off, was a half-overturned haulage truck, its underside visible, stripped of its tires, wheels, springs, and the crown gear cap of its rear axle—an abandoned wreck that had been a source of useful materials for the local people. At last the road straightened and leveled, the trees thinned into fields, buildings appeared, and Yohana said Chidya.

The road forked and we took the right track south beside student dormitories and a latrine building, then east past various school outbuildings and, a distance to our left, the two wings of the ell-shaped classrooms; then just a glimpse of a beautiful chapel faced dramatically in stone of various colours; then ahead to a grove of trees. Here was located on a slight prominence a substantial mud-walled building with an elegant, high thatched roof and, just past it, a small concrete-walled bungalow with a tin roof and a wide front porch — our stopping point.

As Yohana pulled up in front, the house’s screen