Anyone interested in ‘Kujon’ venture during yonder years?

There was a very popular song in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the then Southern Highlands regions (now Njombe and Mbeya), which did not make much sense to my then nascent brains. However, it was one of the most popular, if not the most popular song in the region.

It was sung and danced in all local pubs, rather ‘pombe’ shops, and across all the tribes from Benaland in Njombe to Nyakyusaland in Tukuyu. It went thus “Injinga, Isuti, Ihelmet ni mali ya Vasungu”. Its unofficial translation would be the Bicycle, the Suit, the Helmet are riches of the White People.

Dancers were mostly strong young men, who wore gumboots and had powerful torches on their forehead. Now this was an era, when the Rural Electrification Authority had not even been conceived. In goes without saying that these young men, therefore, were a treasure in any village or ‘pombe’ shop. They literally lit up the dark villages and their watering holes.

In time I came to know why. During those yonder years there was a special labour recruitment programme collecting all strong young men in the southern regions to go and work in South African mines. They could spend three or four years in “Kujon”, as Johannesburg was then popularly known, working the mines before being ferried back. And another batch goes.

However, arriving home these young men came with the white man’s riches – a bicycle, a suit and a miner’s helmet with its attendant torch and battery. And they danced the miners’ dances from the south praising themselves and their white man’s riches they had come back with.

In due course, they even influenced the Bena or Nyakyusa traditional dances to reflect this newly acquired musical taste.

No wonder, the other day, when I visited my ailing mother at home, at Ilembula in Njombe Region, and put on some South African oldies music, she cried. I thought it was sickness. “No! These songs remind me of the times, when I was a teenager and village boys dancing and singing them in the village square,” she explained. Actually, for many years between the 1940s and the 1960s there was heavy traffic of migrant labourers from the southern highland regions to Johannesburg.

The other day when I travelled to ‘Kujon” I was informed of these ‘Bena’ and ‘Nyakyusa’ settlements in that city of gold. These, now very old men, talk of the distant lands of Tanganyika, where they came from. They pray for the day, when their South African families of sons, daughters and grandchildren would travel to those lands to embrace their roots.   

       The author is a veteran journalist and communication expert based in Arusha