Ngongo Chronicle 10

By Ron Singer

Chapter Ten.
Tanzania, 1992; Zambia, 1991; South Africa, 1992-1994.

As it turned out, she did neither (seduce or kidnap me). For that matter, “Bila” and Pierre’s dramatic meeting in Moshi proved anticlimactic. She was a matronly young woman wearing a dark business suit (with trousers) and horn-rimmed spectacles. When we had exchanged cliches about the weather and my travels, we got into her vehicle, an old sedan, and drove about thirty kilometers, past several coffee plantations, to another car park, at the southern approach to the mountain.

As we exited the car, I noted that she had brought neither food nor water. Nor had I. I also noted that neither of us was wearing hiking boots. All over the parking lot, people of different nationalities were exiting their vehicles. Many of them were decked out as climbers, their outfits ranging from worn boots, shorts and bush jackets, to fancy outfits and climbing gear that must have cost many thousands of Kenyan shillings in Nairobi.

“Breathtaking, isn’t it?” Bila remarked. “But very crowded, with all these climbers. Is it your hope today to ‘conquer’ the legendary mountain, Pierre?” I laughed, and pointed at my shoes. “In that case,” she suggested, “suppose we just wander around and chat? The wild strawberries are excellent this time of year.”

“I love them. They grow back home.”

“Which is…?” So I told her, and we set off on a trail that she said would be a circuit of a few kilometers, with many laden bushes.

The strawberries were, as advertised, delicious. I would like to say that we fed the fruit to each other and rubbed the juices onto each other’s bare skin, but neither of those things happened. By early afternoon, I was back at the Arusha bus depot in Moshi.

As she told me, Bila came from Lusaka, Zambia’s capital. Like myself and so many other young Africans, she had ventured abroad, in her case to Tanzania, in order to pursue her studies. The rest of what she told me that morning turned out to be more about her own country than her adopted one. For the most part, her revelations were only mildly interesting, for they included nothing about land collectivization or copper mining. Instead, Bila’s focus was on recent political events.

The previous year, 1991, she said, had been a tumultuous one for her nation. Following riots over food prices, and a failed military coup, the country’s constitution had been revised so that the government changed from Kaunda’s so-called “one party competitive system,” or “mild dictatorship,” to a multi-party democracy.

Of course, Nyerere was also a “mild dictator.” In his famous 1967 lecture on Pan-Africanism, he had praised his nation’s new constitution for creating a viable one-party democracy. He also singled out universities for leadership in the Pan-African movement, which sat well with me, of course, since my own education had already involved three countries (Ngongo, Kenya, and Tanzania), to which a fourth (South Africa) would soon be added.

As for Kaunda, Bila felt that he had proved to be a disappointment. Early on, this teacher and moralist had ridden his bicycle thousands of miles all over the country to promote the cause of Independence. His dual nicknames, “Lion of Zambia” and “the Gandhi of Africa,” expressed his perhaps contradictory ideals of staunch resistance to white minority rule, and his commitment to a non-violent multi-racial society.

Shortly after Independence, in 1964, he had astutely enunciated these principles to the administrators of Western Province (which contains the Copper Belt) many of whom were restive holdovers from the colonial era. What made these overtures so significant was that, in 1964, Zambia possessed a full one-third of the world’s copper resources.

Although this paragon gradually turned into the “mild dictator” who triggered the unrest of 1991, he was also the ruler who agreed, perhaps reluctantly, to his nation’s subsequent change toward greater democracy. Bila proudly explained exactly how that change had come about.

The 1991 conference, at which competing Zambian parties thrashed out their differences, was spearheaded by the MMD, or Movement for Multiparty Democracy, an umbrella opposition group that included the ZSFC (Zambian Students for Change), of which Bila was an officer. The Conference was spurred on by Kaunda’s having closed the University, in response to student protests.

The reason Bila had been “manning” the phone at TYDM headquarters the previous day was that the TYDM was loosely affiliated with the ZFSC, and since most of the TYDM members were on the run, their office was shorthanded. Bila was a team player. What I took from her summary of recent Zambian politics was that, had she ever experienced the reign of a serious tyrant, as I had in Ngongo, she would have had far less cause to complain about her own nation’s “mild dictator.”

It was not until she was dropping me back at the bus depot that she said something of practical importance for me: “You can skip Zambia, Pierre, where nothing of real interest is now happening. You should also avoid the chaos of Zimbabwe. Instead, you should go directly to South Africa. There, you will be able to contact the ANC Youth League, which was just ‘unbanned’ by de Klerk. South Africa is where the action now is.”

Since South Africa was already on my itinerary, and I anticipated that it would not be too difficult to make the suggested contact, I agreed. Then, I thanked her, and we parted. My expectation that I would never see Bila again proved incorrect.

This was an eventful time for both Africa and me. Via Lusaka, I flew to Johannesburg, where I was able to bear witness to some of the successes achieved by the recently altered strategies of the African National Congress (ANC).

In this year 1992, even my fleeting contact with ANC cadres seemed heady stuff. To a young man of twenty, who had thus far lived only in backward Ngongo and relatively well-governed Kenya, these daring South Africans, of different races, ethnicities, classes, and national origins, quickly became objects of semi-worship. Two years later, the shift to majority rule would be a powerful tonic to those people across Africa -- people like me -- whose nations were still governed by tyrants, of whatever race or ethnicity.

I wound up sojourning in South Africa for almost three years, visiting many parts of the country, not only the cities, such as “Jo’burg” (as it was called), Cape Town, and Durban, but big towns like Pietermaritzburg, and even smaller ones, such as Viljoenskroon, in the Orange Free State (soon to drop the “Orange”). My travels in South Africa also took me to a few of the most scenic areas, such as the mountainous Drakensburg region and the coastal Cape Peninsula.

Of course, my itinerary also included many so-called “townships,” areas set aside, over the years, for racial groups that white economic interests wished to exclude from the central districts of cities. My travels included the Indian township of Chatsworth, in Durban; Cape Flats, in Cape Town; and both Alexandra (“Alex”) and Soweto, in Jo’burg.

The last named was the world-famous site of student riots over a new government decree of “Afrikaans only in all schools,” which had begun on 16 June 1976, four days after my sixth birthday. In 1992, however, it was Alex that was the site of one of my most memorable South African experiences, an experience that can be said to have marked my entry into post-graduate African political studies.

To be continued...