Ruminating on Family Folklore in Ruaha

Myth and Memory in Ruaha

I was seven when our family left Tanganyika, uprooted by a country that had no further use for a bank that called itself Dominion, Colonial, and Overseas.  The wellspring of the particular joys, unique to those times, has been elusive ever since.   Body armour was strapped on to withstand the 24 7 scrutiny of boarding school, and to survive in what is often referred to as the "real world".  Weighed down by all the armour, it has been hard to find the way back to the source of all those memories.

That changed when we visited Ruaha National Park.  One look at the map brought back names rich in mythic family connotation:  Iringa, Mbeya, and Tukuyo (not shown).

Ever since our Ruaha safari, flickering fragments have been floating across my flatscreen of family folklore.  

Grandma Kitty made up in will power what she lacked in stature.  Determined to escape the dreariness of de Valera's time with all its shades of depression, divinity, and damnation, she qualified as a nurse in Protestant Belfast.  As a midwife, she cycled with umpunity through the slums of the Protestant Shankhill Road, delivering more babies in a week, than most doctors deliver in a month.  

Adventure beckoned in the shape of an advertisement for a job with the British Colonial Service in Tanganyika in the early Fifties.  She found herself working as a District Nurse visiting the aforementioned Mbeya, Tukuyo and Iringa.  Living all on her own, it was explained that she needed to employ servants, as there was a shortage of jobs in the area.  In order to cross a flooding river without contaminating her nursing bag, she took a piggy back ride from an ancient tribesman.

For somebody who grew up waiting until she was old enough to in inherit her older brother's bicycle, she marvelled at the fact that she could actually afford a Vauxhall Velox:

At a dance in Dar es Salaam, her well intentioned friend warned her from dancing with Grandpa Michael - judged to be "far too much of a Pukka British Sahib" for a feisty young Irish woman like Kitty.  Fortunately she decided to make up her own mind.

As bank manager in Musoma, Michael defied Head Office and dispursed funds so that the local farmers could plant the next season's sysal crop.  As a boy loving anything to do with guns, my proudest moment was watching my father wear a Berretta pistol as he escorted the monthly gold shipment to the waiting plane.  The hero worship only grew when it fell to Dad, as the resident Bwana, to wield an axe against a deadly Black Mamba snake.

We would waken to the sound of fishermen bickering over the morning's catch on the shores of Lake Victoria, at the bottom of our garden.  Mum's favourite gooseberry patch eventually became a hippopotamus wallow.

At Christmas, Santa Claus would make a grand appearance arriving on a motor boat.  One year we were given inflatable floaties for Christmas.  Fear of bilharzia kept us out of the lake.  We had to settle for using the floaties in the bath, which was a very poor substitute.  Our frustration was only slightly assuaged by the warning that if we caught bilharzia, we would need twenty injections in our stomach.  Of course watching our neighbors' boys allowed to go water skiing on the lake, just rubbed salt into the wound.