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Wilson Kaigarula
MEMORY TAPE
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My memory is neither as sharp as a new razor blade, nor as rusty as a long-discarded nail. It’s in-between, on the strength of which I hazily recall a juicy rumour that swept a certain Dar es Salaam City suburb in the early 80s.
It focused on two adulterers who were stuck in a house, after failing to disengage from one another, at the climax of a love-making session.Hundreds of curious people milled around the house to view the spectacle, which turned out to be the fictitious creation of a super rumour monger.He had placed two logs on a bed and covered them with a bed sheet, and they made battery-operated movements.
The bed was in a locked room, from whose window people peeped and left, convinced that the lovers were in a tangled form.
In the early 60s, a rumour swept across my home village, to the effect that an Englishman who had no mouth, was in the house of the local pastor, Reverend Apolinary Onganyile. His mission was to discuss plans for setting up a dispensary affiliated to the church.
My friend Gosbert Taishula and I, were among those who flocked to the reverend’s compound, to await the re-emergence from the house, of the man called Mr Wonderer Brickstone.
When he re-emerged, we fled and scattered, confused and wailing. It transpired that the visitor’s presumed mouth-less-ness was created by an over-enthusiastic moustache that over-shot its boundary and covered the mouth, and literally kissed the northern part of the similarly over-enthusiastic beard that extended to the southern region of the lower lip!
When I visited Gosbert in Kinondoni recently, we laughed like madmen when I ‘rekindled’ the ‘mouth-less’ Brickstone drama of 43 years ago.
Shortly afterwards, my host received a phone text message, following, which he smashed his glass of beer on a wall, rushed to the store, picked a ‘panga’, jumped into his car, and sped off.
The full picture subsequently emerged: Someone had tipped off Gosbert that his wife was enjoying herself at Leo Ni Leo Bar in another part of Kinondoni, in the company of a man who seemed to be more excited over her than over the beer he was sipping.
At the bar, he was enthusiastically greeted by his wife and her brother, Nico. Since the ‘panga’ wasn’t new, he could neither pretend that he had bought it from a ‘machinga’, nor that he was a ‘machinga’ selling it.
Sheepishly, he joined his puzzled wife and brother-in-law, silently swearing that if the rumour monger were to show up there, he would use the ‘panga’ to divide his head into two approximately equal parts.
Half an hour later, a three-man gang stormed the bar, led by a pistol-brandishing heavily-built man with a thick beard that made him seem mouth-less. Nico, who had spent one year in a police college before switching to another profession, noted that the ‘pistol’ was a toy.
He grabbed Gosbert’s ‘panga’ swiftly, swung it at the head of the bandit and donated a generous blow on his neck. He let out a pitiful scream as blood gushed from the un-blessed neck, as the other bandits fled, and the manager phoned the police. The heroic Nico was carried shoulder high for a few minutes, at the climax of which he was minus his wallet, which hosted Sh260,000.
Mr Kaigarula is the revise editor, The Citizen
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