MEMORY TAPE : Brief career as producer of rare wine
What you need to know:
- If the subject had been compulsory up to form four, cancellation of its result in 1971 (like happened recently in respect of 2012 exams) and it had been reviewed, I would not have emerged with a better outcome.
If I were jobless as opposed to being ‘job-ful’, and the only job opportunity available for me was in a factory that specialises in producing a quinine-tasting substance known variously as ‘gongo’, ‘machozi ya simba’ and ‘salimu amri’, I would rather die of hunger than take the offer.
Factories that produce liquid products remind me of secondary school science laboratories. I was a zero student of chemistry; never able to make head or tail of why the hell (as opposed to why the heaven) a substance owning a given colour, being hosted by a test tube, divorces it and marries another colour after being warmed up by a small flame.
The tendency of substances changing colours like a ‘handsome-less’ creature called chameleon, and the teacher asking me to explain why this happened, was an unnecessary torture.
The torture was deepened by the realisation that, roughly half of the other students unravelled the mysteries as easily as sucking the juice of stolen sugarcanes. Believe me, I hated chemistry so much that hearing and reading that word created nightmares for me even during daytime.
Firing line
If the subject had been compulsory up to form four, cancellation of its result in 1971 (like happened recently in respect of 2012 exams) and it had been reviewed, I would not have emerged with a better outcome. My zero would have been demoted to ‘zero-minus’ instead of being promoted to ‘zero plus’.
I therefore concentrated on arts subjects instead, and that’s why, subsequently, I easily got jobs such as conductor in upcountry buses, a salesman for sewing machines, and ‘connecter’ for people who were in the mood to buy swampy plots during the dry season.
The other day, a peace-loving Tanzanian, the type who would not kill a mosquito that had just sucked quarter a drop of his precious blood, let alone detonate a bomb at a public function, approached me while I was sipping copper-coloured water at King’amuzi Bar.
He was promoting packets of powdery substances that (so he preached), produced a prize-winning wine that enhanced thinking capacity, after being mixed in specific quantities and fermenting for a day or so!
I bought the stuff, conducted the experiment in my kitchen, drank the wine and slept for about 24 hours. My boss isn’t convinced that I was a victim of being a temporary amateur chemist, and so my job, to use a poetic-sounding expression, is on the firing line.
