AFRICA, THOUGH GOAN EYES: OF CLUB HOUSES, AFRICANIZATION, AND HUNTS By Mervyn Lobo mervynal...@yahoo.ca
I am a fourth generation Tanzanian. My fore-parents left Goa in dhow, got ship wrecked on the Somali coast and arrived in Zanzibar in the 1860's. To put this era in perspective, the slave trade was still going on and Livingstone had not yet 'discovered' the source of the Nile. I was born in Dar-es-Salaam in the late 1950's. Dar had an established Goan society then with most Goans employed in the banks, schools and in the civil service as administrators. My "wonder years" in the 1960's were lived in a society where most people could take a look at a person walking down the street and point out, without having met that person before, "that person is a Goan." We had Goan teachers in all the schools, including the convent school I attended. We had Goan doctors, dentists, lawyers, architects and even priests. Most of them were born and raised in Tanzania. During this period Goan bands dominated the music scene and one extra-ordinarily talented guitarist, George D'Souza, had his own 30 minute program on Radio Tanzania every Saturday night. Goans had built a school, a church and even a two storied club house in the centre of town. The Goan Institute (later Dar-es-Salaam Institute) was the centre of social life. ---------------------------------------------------------- WERE YOU IN AFRICA? Contribute your experiences to a book being edited by Tony de Sa (now in Moira, Goa). This essay is a submission for this book too. Contact Tony tonyde...@gmail.com --------------------------------------------------------- The Institute had to be the best club house in the world. The building itself was designed in the shape of a "G" with an outdoor sunken dance floor in the shape of an "I". When viewed from above, the club house and dance floor revealed the shape of "G.I." In the 1960's, the Institute had members participating in badminton, tennis, table-tennis and snooker every evening. The bar was well patronized and had a lively group of dart players. The largest social gathering was the weekly tombola, where two hundred plus members would compete every Sunday evening. Christmas celebrations started every year at the D.I. on December 9th (Independence Day). There were activities every day including carol singing and a Xmas sweet contest. Santa would arrive at the D.I. on the Saturday before Christmas and there would be over 500 kids waiting for him to distribute their presents. The finale of the season was the "Anniversary Dance" held on 31st December. This dance was for members only and every member made it a point to attend in all his or her finery. In the 1960's, Tanzania started experimenting with socialism. In 1967, the Government nationalized all the banks and industries and then began a program of "Africanization." Those who chose to hold on to their British or Indian passports were told that their contracts would not be renewed and they were told to train indigenous employees as replacements. At the same time, countries like Canada were actively recruiting bankers. Some of the braver Goans began to relocate to the U.K. and Canada. My parents chose not to leave Tanzania. That decision allowed me to enjoy an almost carefree youth. I got to spend a lot of time playing hockey and playing keyboards in a band. I was also able to develop my passion for spear-fishing. In 1967 my parents decided to drive their VW Beetle around East Africa. We went through central Tanzania, got on a car ferry in Mwanza and crossed Lake Victoria. After visiting the parks along the Nile we drove to Nairobi and then to Mombasa on the Kenyan coast. We stayed with friends and relatives along the way and returned to Dar without even a single tire puncture. That trip planted the seeds of adventure in me. Hockey was my first love. I captained the secondary school team and then used the same players to form our own club, the Dar City Rollers. We were the worst team in the league. However, we had the most fun at the out of town hockey tournaments. There were two hockey tournaments held each year outside Dar-es-Salaam. The unofficial hockey championship was the "Guru Nanak" tournament held every year in Tanga during the Idd holidays. Every December we went to Arusha to compete in the Uhuru Cup. The official hockey club championship was held in Dar. The Dar, Tanga, and Arusha Institutes always sent a men's and women's team to compete in the tournaments. The Institutes in E. Africa all had reciprocal facilities. When we went to Arusha, the Arusha Institute would hold a dance which meant the players from the visiting institutes got a chance to meet and mingle with the youth of the host Institute. Needless to say, these hockey tournaments, especially the "sports visits", lead to many romances and marriages. Dar-es-Salaam had a rivalry between two Goan teams, the D.I. and the Tornadoes. After high school you joined one of the two and did not change teams until you retired from the game. The rivalry was so intense that we prefered to loose in the finals to the Sikh or army team than to lose to each other. The rivalry was the same with the ladies teams. A strange twist to this rivalry was that many a captain from the D.I. men's team married the captain of the Tornadoes woman's team, and vice-versa. Spear-fishing was a hobby I picked up after buying my first car, a beach buggy. Unlike Goa, the Tanzanian coast is protected by coral reefs. This means that the white coral gets ground up and ends up as sparkling white sand on the beach. It is so white that at times the beach appears to be a sparkling silver in colour. The coral reefs host my two favourite creatures: rock cods and lobsters. A typical Sunday would start with the gang collecting me at church after the 7.00 am mass. A Gujarati, a Bohara, an Ismaili and myself would head out of town to a Government run tourist hotel. Sundays were the only day another Government firm, Seafaris, ran a shuttle boat to Mbudya, an uninhabited island about three miles off-shore. We would go to the Seafaris captain's house, wake him up, and take him to the hotel with us. He would then drop us a mile up tide from Mbudya. We used to free dive to sixty feet. At that depth, you had two times the atmospheric pressure acting on your mask. The capillaries in the whites' of your eyes start bursting and you returned to the surface with blood shot eyes. If you were lucky, you also had a lobster or rock cod as a reward for your effort. On a normal Sunday, the gang would shoot about twenty assorted fish as well as some lobsters and squid. The one guy who could dive better than me would only shoot lobsters. For religious reasons, he did not want to kill anything unnecessarily. However, he claimed that lobsters where the cockroaches of the sea and thus, he was shooting them to clean up the reefs. We soon realized that we could barter lobsters for almost anything at the tourist bar on Mbudya island. The best crab curry in the world comes from using a recipe from Porbandar and Tanzanian crabs caught during a full moon. Once on an overnight trip to Mbudya Island, we ate the crab curry late one night and discarded the crab shells on the beach where we slept. The next morning, a local fisherman pointed out python tracks, weaving in and out of where our sleeping sleeping bags had been. Apparently, the python hunted the mice who fed on the discarded crab shells. Paradise is a deserted island in the Zanzibar channel called Pungume. Whenever we could gather enough people, we hired a boat and headed to the island for a weekend trip. The island had a large light house and was surrounded by coral reefs and rocks. We sometimes arrived at the island around dusk and had to carefully navigate our way, in the twilight, in the ebb tide, through the corals, to the beach. Every time I went to Pungume, I thought about the great irony of me purposely heading straight for those rocks. My grand-dad was the Chief Engineer on one of the Sultan's coastal steamers. The crew on his ship must have always been on the look out to avoid those very same rocks. At Pungume, at low tide, we would dive just 15ft, go waist deep into a rock and spend the next 30 seconds letting our eyes adjust to the darkness of the rock which was often the size of a small room. Just as we would run out of breath, we could see the white antennae of about 10 lobsters dancing on the ceeling of the rock. We took our time picking out the biggest antennae, estimating the location of the lobster's head, and pulling the trigger. On my best day, I shot thirty-one lobsters. On one of the trips to Pungume Island, we watched an American whizz by us in a speed boat. He had two 150 hp engines on board. The boat we had, with ten of us aboard, had a 40hp engine. At Pungume he soon started to follow us when he figured out we knew the dive spots. One of our gang decided to gift him the last fish he shot. When he swam up to the American's boat he noticed beach toys on the floor of the boat and asked the American where his children were. The American answered that he had drooped his wife and kids at a sand bank in the middle of the Zanzibar Channel. It took us a full fifteen minutes to convince the American that the sand bank only appeared at low tide. Our guide raced back with the American to the sand bank. When they got there, they found his wife in waist deep water, holding an orange beach umbrella while balancing a baby on her hip. With her other hand she was trying to keep the second child, perched on a cool box, from floating away. I still see this image every time I pass a sand bank. The best fishing spot I experienced is Mafia. Mafia Island is at the mouth of the Rufigi River. The Rufigi brings a lot of nutrients to the sea. It seems that every sea creature there is twice as big as those in the rest of E. Africa. Fifty feet from the shore, the sea bed drops from ten feet to five hundred feet. The water there is so clear that you can see over one hundred feet. While scuba diving, I have watched what looked like a two inch fish turn into a eight foot hammer-head as it came from the depths to the surface. An Indian government firm discovered natural gas underwater near Mafia and later a Canadian company built a pipeline from Mafia to the capital. On one of our fishing trips to Mafia, we met a bunch of hunters who invited us hunting. They had the same problem we had. They needed "x" number of people to make their hunting trips affordable. We went hunting in Selous, which is a game park the size of Switzerland. Unlike the northern circuit where tourists abound, Selous remains one of wildest places of the world. There are still areas in the park where man has not yet set foot. Selous is infested by the tse-tse fly. Each fly is about an inch long. The bite of a single fly is so painful that it seems like someone has inserted a needle into your skin and broken it off. The bite causes sleeping sickness and the sting of a single bite pains for six weeks. I have been to parts of Selous where the tse-tse flies were so numerous that when they appeared on the windows of your vehicle, it seemed like darkness had descended. It was only the windshield wipers, going furiously, that swept away the buzzing flies and allowed for light to enter the vehicle. Our hunting trips included a truck so well equipped that it could provide major repairs for any of the vehicles in our expedition.The organizers had all the supplies required for a forty man expedition. Key elements were enough ice for three days and a mincing machine for kabobs. Driving 50 miles into Selous took eight hours since we were driving where there were no roads. Animals would make tracks when trekking to the Rufigi river. Larger animals would then follow these tracks for prey. When elephants followed the same tracks, it would seem like there was a highway in the bush. Just before reaching camp, we would look for dinner. Guinea fowls always walk on these tracks in a straight line. One parent leads, five or six chicks follow and the other parent brings up the rear. This means that a single shotgun blast would provide dinner for twenty people. After a shot is fired, wildlife usually disappears for half an hour. The Rufigi river in Selous is also known as the "Rivers of Sand" as it changes course frequently. I have seen western prospectors pull up cat fish eight feet long. I have also seen people cross the river in dug out canoes that were only three inches above the water. A slight shift in weight of any of the passengers or cargo meant that the canoe would capsize into the river which was teeming with crocodiles and hippopotamus. On the banks of the Rifiji, we often saw people illegally cutting down ebony trees. An ebony trunk that is thick enough for carving a clarinet takes forty years to grow. The wood is so hard that a eight inch trunk takes days to cut down with an axe. There is a spot in Selous that looks like a golf course. The area is four or five square miles with no trees or shrubs. The grass is closely grazed every day and is smooth as a carpet. Whenever we could, we used to walk up against the wind to the "golf course". The animals would scatter when they sensed us, which was when we were about sixty feet away. Most cats and hyenas hunt at night so we were safe during the day. One of the saddest sights in Africa is seeing a wildebeest or another large animal, furiously running around in a tight circle while trying to scoop something off his shoulder. This is an animal which has had flies lay eggs in its ears. The developing eggs have penetrated the ear drums and have destroyed the animal's sense of balance. Whenever we saw animals in such agony, we would shoot it, load firewood on its head and then burn it. One campsite we used frequently was an abandoned primary school. When Tanzania started its program of universal primary education, funding was tight. Primary schools in the villages were built with corrugated iron roofs and mud walls. There were large gaps where there should have been doors and windows. One morning, pupils arrived at this school to find a pride of lions in their classroom. Since the villagers believed that lions would always return to a place where they had urinated, they abandoned that primary school. I have often spent restless nights thinking about the pupils of that primary school who never got a chance to complete their primary education. I left Tanzania in the late 1980's to study in the U.S. The previous year, my youngest sibling won a scholarship. She followed the footsteps of my uncle who had won a scholarship in the 1950's. He became a civil engineer in the U.S. and returned to Tanzania after starting his studies for the priesthood. I too, had to find out what surprises the 'new world' had to offer. -- Mervyn A. Lobo wrote this essay in September 2008. He is based in Toronto. ----------------------------------------------------------------- GOANET-READER WELCOMES contributions from its readers, by way of essays, reviews, features and think-pieces. 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