Birth of a Dream Weaver Read online

  To live in Dinwiddy’s Northcote was to be part of something that seemed slightly bigger than oneself. Victory and loss, triumph and disaster engendered a common sense of grief or joy; and even we, the 1959 newcomers to the family, were soon absorbed into the Northcote spirit. If a Northcoter was competing in any arena, we flocked there to cheer him. But nothing—not even sports—compared with the interhall English competition in audience presence and anticipation. One did not have to be a specialist to enjoy a theater performance.

  The Interhall English Department Competition for original short plays, short stories, speeches, and poems was initiated by Professor Alan Warner in 1958. His wife, Phyllis, was well known in Makerere and Kampala theater circles and was a key actress in the Makerere Players, an amateur company mainly for expatriate staff on the Hill. Because of the place of English in the academic, intellectual, and cultural life of colonies, this annual interhall competition was the crown jewel of all competitions.

  I was among the Northcoters present in the 1960 competition and experienced the humiliating loss of our hall’s entry, which came in at the bottom. Jonathan Kariara’s The Green Bean Patch, with Ben Mkapa, won the coveted first position for New Hall. Years later Kariara managed the Oxford University Press office in Nairobi, and Ben Mkapa became the third president of Tanzania, but then they were happy victors from New Hall, our neighbor. The collective gloom in our hall was palpable in our every gesture.

  Something happened inside me. I had never written a play before or even thought of writing one, despite my theater experience at Alliance. But even without saying it to anybody, I knew that I was going to write a one-act play for the next time. My first foot in theater was in response to a community need and hope. Thus was born my first one-act play, The Rebels.

  The play deals with a male Makerere student from Kenya who falls in love with a local Ugandan girl and gets engaged to her. Their marriage plans are thwarted by the objections of his community, which cannot accept a marriage into a culture that does not circumcise women. He oscillates between the demands of love and the commands of tradition, unable to bring himself to break with the girl or to rebel against his community. The girl makes up his mind for him; she rejects him and contemptuously throws the engagement ring at his feet.

  The ending was supposed to be somber, sad with tragic overtones. But Wahome,11 the boy who acted the girl’s part—and made a beautiful girl, at that—decided, against everything we had rehearsed, to wiggle his hips in an exaggerated gesture of contempt, and the entire audience burst into laughter. Up until then, we were doing very well, but that gesture did us in. We took second position, but that was still a great leap from the one we had occupied in recent years.

  That was in 1961. I had become a playwright despite myself. Though I had taken part in Shakespearian drama in high school, I had never seen myself as a possible playwright, my literary ambitions being vaguely in the area of fiction. But now circumstances had plunged me into theater first, and my effort at a one-act play, which came in second to Nazareth’s Cosmos, had earned me the title of playwright. Every Northcoter said I was one. Dinwiddy said so and mentioned my name prominently in his Northcote Hall Newsletter. I became my hall’s best hope for 1962. I did not disappoint.

  I fulfilled the expectations with my second one-act drama, The Wound in the Heart.12 And every Northcoter was happy with our winning the trophy for the entire 1962 Interhall English Competition.

  VIII

  However, nobody took umbrage at the denial of a national stage for The Wound in the Heart—not Dinwiddy, not my mates in Northcote, and not the faculty or students in the English Department. For them the competition was a thing of yesterday, months ago, really.

  Nevertheless, the denial intruded into my mind at odd times and places. I was now in my third year, having passed Preliminary exams, the end-of-second-year ordeal, the halfway mark to a degree. Those who failed were discontinued. Those who passed could choose their concentration. I had been accepted into an honors English program, a year longer than for a general degree.

  I dropped economics. Bye-bye, Doctor Cyril Ehrlich—no more lectures about students’ big heads—but the vague idea of doing something that had not been done, just to show him that I could, remained. I missed history, the other subject, but it didn’t matter. Literature, I had come to realize, carried a lot of history, philosophy, and culture of the different periods into which the study of English literature was divided. Some of the secondary reading lists that accompanied particular texts helped me situate literature in the great movement of ideas and social changes of the time.

  Not that those connections were often drawn clearly in class. To discuss them further and tease out their implications, Gulzar Nensi, Selina Coelho, Emmanuel Kiwanuka, Bethuel Kurutu, Bahadur Tejani, and I formed our own study group, which met after the official hours. One of us would make a presentation on a self-chosen theme based on a common text; the others would respond. Among our group, a text that had been devoid of life in lectures and classroom seminars generated passion in defense or challenge. I once talked on the topic “King Lear: The God,” tracing the movement from his self-conception as divinity to his discovery of his humanity in the storm. Forty years later in an e-mail13 to me from her home in Oxford, Gulzar Kanji née Nensi could still recall what she called the King Lear seminar.

  Why then, with all the excitement of learning, did denial of a national stage for a one-act drama bother me so? The play and the competition wouldn’t even count toward my degree.

  Perhaps if I had remained ignorant of the reason behind it, I might have accepted the refusal. But the phrase, “a British officer cannot do that,” riled me. The ban told a lie. Unanswered, the compliance would merely cover up the lie.

  The Makerere oath spoke to me, clearly, unequivocally: seek the truth. That was my avowed mission. That was why I was in college. I couldn’t reverse the decision of the powers that be, but I could fight back, at the very least contest the monopoly of the Kampala National Theater by the European community. The big question was how?

  The year 1960 had already set in motion a series of events in the world and Africa that would affect the campus in ways that would shape my eventual decision and response to the question.

  4

  Benzes, Sneakers, Frisbees, and Flags

  I

  John F. Kennedy, the thirty-fifth president of the United States, was sworn in on January 20, 1961. His challenge, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country,”1 was on the lips of many students on the campus. Not that we had any country on which to make demands or pledge devotion. We were all colonial subjects at the time, and yet somehow the words seemed to speak to us and offer hope that we would soon have countries to which we could make a similar pledge. Kennedy was already a name among us because of the dramatic student airlifts begun after he and our own Tom Mboya met in 1959 at a conference on international affairs.

  At twenty-nine, Tom Mboya2 had risen from a leading trade unionist to a leading figure among the politicians who had emerged in Kenya following Jomo Kenyattta’s imprisonment in 1952. He was among the most fervently admired of the young anticolonial nationalists. Education was the third of their triad of demands, the others being land and freedom. But it was clear, to them that the colonial institutions could not produce enough skilled and educated manpower to meet the challenges of the new Africa heralded by Ghana’s independence in 1957. The Mboya-Kennedy airlifts of African students to American universities was meant to close the educational deficit.

  Among the first batch of the eighty-one students that landed in New York City on September 11, 1959, were a few from Alliance High School—bright minds, but they had not managed to secure any of the limited spots in Makerere. Thanks to the airlift, Philip Ochieng, my Ping-Pong-playing pal of the past, and I had gone to college the same year, he in the United States and I in Uganda. Among other beneficiaries was Barack Obama Sr., the man who would father the future presi
dent, Barack Obama Jr.

  The feel-good moment of the educational mass rescue was a healing counterweight to the Hola massacre earlier in the year. Along with themes of eradicating poverty in some of his speeches, the airlifts, which continued throughout the year 1960 and beyond, made Kennedy a voice of the new against old colonial Europe. Young Kenyans readily identified with Kennedy’s electoral fortunes and the triumph and ambition of his 1961 inaugural.

  The Kennedy moment and momentum inspired other initiatives, including some to Eastern Europe organized by Jaramogi Oginga Odinga. Cold War rivalries affected everything, including offers of school. In addition to a student airlift, what about teacher airlifts to the students?

  The idea of Teachers for East Africa, forerunner of the Peace Corps, formally came out of the 1960 Princeton conference sponsored by the African Liaison Committee of the American Council on Education. Years later, the originators of the idea, R. Freeman “Jay” Butts and Karl Bigelow, would be seen in a photo in which Idi Amin, the scourge of local teachers and intellectuals, is smiling at them, but his grin doesn’t diminish the animating idealism of the original aim, “to assist East Africa in expanding and developing secondary education and the training of teachers in such a way that East Africa can most rapidly move to supply its own teachers.” Nor does it take away from the commitment, dedication, enthusiasm, and friendliness of the individual teachers. They viewed themselves as respondents to the challenges of a new frontier, a sense deepened by the telegram John Kennedy sent to their initial training base at Columbia University, reminding them they were unofficial ambassadors of the United States, for “while in East Africa you will be viewed as representatives of the United States, your values will be considered as its values; your words as its words.”3

  Makerere College was to be the final leg of their training. That was why in 1961 we woke up one day to skies over the green lawns of the Hill filled with “unidentified flying objects” and the ground full of sneakers-wearing aliens trying to catch them.

  II

  In his book Adventures in Education,4 Bernard de Bunsen, the principal in my time, describes Makerere as a Charing Cross, with a constant flow of visitors, from governors and secretaries of state to world leaders like Indira Gandhi of India and Golda Meir of Israel. Governor Sir Andrew Cohen frequented the dances held at Main Hall.

  Makerere attracted not only the scholar, politician, and musician. There was the adventurer also. I remember the German couple, Friedrich and Susan Vogel: they had driven their Mercedes-Benz across North Africa to East Africa, the first leg of their first African journey, which would later take them back to Germany through Central and West Africa. They became guests of Northcote, courtesy of Dinwiddy. Theirs was probably the first Mercedes-Benz on Ugandan soil, in all of East Africa probably. It didn’t attract too much wonder or admiration, East Africa then being a British Ford territory, but I did note that the Vogels made their car fairly ubiquitous and conspicuous at public events and took many group photos of themselves and the students around it.

  The couple were very pleasant, the opposite of the images of the Germans drawn by the English in their narrative of German colonialism in Tanganyika and South West Africa, and of course World War II. The couple and the warmth they exuded were a far cry from the Germans of the Herero massacres and the Auschwitz gas chambers. They hardly ever talked politics, but spoke more about German philosophy, art, and industry. Still, I always thought of the couple whenever the politics of the Berlin Wall, begun on August 13, 1961, came up in newspapers.

  When, fifty years later, they received me in their Munich home overlooking the snowy Alps, I learned that theirs had been a journey prompted less by the waters of the Nile, Congo, Zambezi, or Niger than by the flow of blood in their veins. Susan had agreed to marry Friedrich on condition that their honeymoon be a drive across Africa, a continent neither had ever visited. He accepted the challenge. They collected all the money they had saved, not much for the newly graduated, and then negotiated a free secondhand Mercedes-Benz from the company. Their romantic journey became also a mobile commercial for the three-point star logo, the global symbol of the Mercedes-Benz brand since the merger of Daimler and Benz in 1926. The name Mercedes was adopted in 1902 at the insistence of the manufacturers’ wealthy client, racing driver Emil Jellinek, who wanted his cars to carry the Spanish name of his daughter, Mercedes.

  Mercedes Benz soon became the status symbol of the newly emergent elite spawned by Makerere and independence. I wrote short stories, “The Mercedes Funeral” and “Mercedes Tribesmen,” satirizing this obsession. Wamabenzi, or the Merceded, became the name of the new postcolonial upper-middle class.

  From its inception as a university, Makerere attracted visitors who left their marks here and there in the social life at the campus. However, there was nothing quite like the sneakers-wearing aliens.

  III

  Call it an American invasion! No sooner did they arrive than they spread across the campus playing catch with monsterlike gloves that swallowed the ball, flinging Frisbees that flew in the air like plates out of space, throwing oval balls to each other and shouting “Hi” to locals. Some wore multicolored baggy shorts and vests and, for footwear, sandals and sneakers, what we called tennis or rubber shoes. This first batch of the aliens was wholly white.

  The sartorial difference between them and us was striking. On my first arrival at Makerere in my not-so-smart-looking trousers, my friends had rushed me off to Sayani’s Draperies on Kampala Street for a customized gabardine and wool jacket and trousers. Sayani was an Indian tailor who somehow had become the clothes designer for Makerere. Every student was always dressed as if ready for a cocktail party at a moment’s notice. The tie completed the wear. I liked a narrow black bowtie with a touch of white at the edges. On solemn occasions, the Americans would turn their casual into formal wear by adding a bow tie in bold colors. The American and the British sartorial traditions were clearly in conflict.

  There had been American visitors to Makerere before. In 1959, it was flutist Herbie Mann, courtesy of the State Department; in 1960, Louis Armstrong hosted by Peter Nazareth’s Makerere Jazz Club. Both had performed in the Main Hall. But the arrival of the first wave of Teachers for East Africa in June 1961 was altogether different in ways big and small. The teachers were in Makerere for an orientation program and a diploma from the Department of Education, then headed by Professor Eric Lucas. Afterward, they would be sent to African secondary schools in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania.

  Their adaptability helped them quickly assume the character of the hall of their new residence, while their inventive vigor affected the character of their adopted residence. On the campus as a whole, they changed some old ways of doing things. The first to go was the red gown, slowly at first, but in time the authorities were forced to loosen the requirement of its regular use. Sneakers and sandals began to challenge leather shoes shined to a mirrorlike finish. The Makererean, the printed newspaper they introduced, soon replaced the old student news magazine, called the Guild Information Bulletin, cyclostyled typed sheets clipped together. Dating, too. American girls with African and Asian boys; American boys with African and Asian girls, or simply American and American. Whatever the pairings, the Americans were more prone to public displays of affection than the local counterparts.

  They also ventured into theater, most notably a production of Macbeth in African robes. I had seen many Shakespearian productions, at Alliance mostly, but the African actors wore imitations of seventeenth-century English garb. This was a complete novelty. It may have been my previous year’s second placement in drama that made Nat Frothingham seek me out, but I agreed to be assistant director. I would take notes on movements and positions; I would contact the actors, and if Nat were absent or engaged elsewhere, I would go over the movements already blocked. I became the production’s memory.

  Frothingham subsequently became the editor and publisher of the Montpelier Bridge, a free community newspaper, and an advocate
of Vermont independence, but at Makerere he seemed driven by love of theater more than politics or ideology. Still, he was conscious that the production was a challenge to the status quo. At the Hill, all the previous Shakespeare productions had been by the white faculty grouped around an amateur company, the Makerere Players.

  Frothingham was incredibly optimistic and had an infectious energy and enthusiasm that turned the initial skepticism among some of the actors into belief and commitment. Macbeth in African clothes and accents was a success in terms of attendance and the buzz it created. There had not been a wholly student production of Shakespeare, much less one in African robes.

  Scene from Macbeth

  Uganda Argus, “A Courageous Macbeth by Makerere Society,” November 1961

  He asked me to join him in another production. I declined. I was then in the middle of writing the play The Wound in the Heart, whose fortunes would immerse me in the politics of art in a rapidly changing colonial situation whose force and speed had been captured in a memorable image by a British politician a year earlier.

  IV

  The marquee politician was the Conservative Harold MacMillan whose image of a wind blowing through the continent of Africa became the trope for an unstoppable resurgence of national consciousness.

  Context of time and place are as much a part of meaning as the words that carry it. When the “wind of change” speech was first given on January 10, 1960, in Accra, capital of the newly independent Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah, it was applauded, but on February 10 in Pretoria, capital of apartheid South Africa under Hendrick Verwoerd, it was received with stony silence. Soon the silence sounded louder than the applause; the white rejection of the implications of the phrase was as fast and furious as the wind itself.