Irony

As I sped through some of the poorest communities I’ve seen since arriving in Tanzania, on the pillion of a motor-cycle, whole families came to stand, stare and point; the children calling, with eyes agape, “Mzungo!”.
I looked like some zealous claims adjuster clutching a battered briefcase, bouncing down dusty rutted tracks and dodging ruddy pools. We slid past families, where old men sat listlessly on a caked and cracked clay floor, children barefoot played with wire toys, women with babies wrapped on their backs and, sometimes, young men were cutting back whole fields of grass with wide steel blades. At the village – some thatched shops on the main road - most young men sat chatting and calling “habari” aimlessly; some were drunk, most without work or purpose. We were just east of Masasi, and whilst southern Tanzania is the poorest region in this country, here, sixty miles west of Mtwara, I could see evidence of some of the worst poverty yet.

We were visiting Mwena Secondary School, a collection of one storey classrooms without water or electricity, huddled round a neat, dusty quadrangle of flower beds and the Tanzanian flag, hanging limply from its pole, centre stage. I had come to assess four students on teaching practice and my first lesson was history- the scramble for Africa and the impact of colonialism. In this ramshackle classroom, with a pitted concrete floor and the government standard blackboard the only thing vaguely resembling a teaching resource, the deepest of ironies washed over me, as I sat at the back, awkwardly aware of these students’ grasp of some of the reasons why I was the richest person they had ever seen.

I had assessed four students that morning and watched their faces crumple as I gave them honest but constructive feedback on the quality of their lessons.

“Can you say whether the students were learning?”, I asked

“Yes. They understood well.”

“I’m not sure,” I said gently.

“But you see, sir, it is their English.” And it’s your English too that’s the bigger problem, I thought, but, thank goodness, didn’t say.

Tanzania has a lofty, but misplaced, goal of teaching across the secondary curriculum in English. It is the Government’s view that the future prosperity of Tanzania is dependent on its people being able to speak the international language of business and tourism. There is a huge shortage of teachers, few of them can speak English well enough to teach in that language and when they arrive in secondary school they are faced with classes of sixty children who have studied English grammar at primary school, but have little, if any, functional English language.

That afternoon, after I had observed lessons on ‘Sources of information for history’  and  ‘writing a business transaction letter’, I congratulated my students. The learners were reasonably engaged, many had understood the basic facts and in any case with a mzungo in the room, they could be forgiven for not listening as well as they should. What was disheartening was the brazen way in which most of the students had coached their classes prior to assessment. One boy conspiratorially whispered with the student teacher at the start of the lesson, as he looked nervously in my direction. They need not have been anxious. With no resources and a dry syllabus, it is easy to spot those trainees who have both the language skills and the presence to make effective teachers.

We’re staying in Ndanda, more accurately the Benedictine Mission at Ndanda, a huge complex comprising the largest and best hospital in the region, workshops, printing press, a mineral water plant and much more. Guest houses for visitors are spotlessly clean, with heavy wooden furniture and plumbing that works. Breakfast, lunch and dinner - salami, eggs and wurst or schnitzel. We could be in Bavaria. The rooms have keys, showers, sockets and switches straight from Germany.

What they do have that is African is wildlife. A crocodile was found in the sewage system at the sister hospital twenty miles down the road; a monitor lizard patrols the lake especially dug by the Benedictines for swimming and last night, Caroline, screamed, ran into the bedroom and shut the door.

“That’s it,” she said. “You’ll have to deal with it.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s either a frog or a large hairy spider, about an inch high.”
“How can you tell?”
“By the stripes,” she said.

I was wondering how Caroline knew so much about hairy spiders. I found my slippers. I looked. A piece of sellophane from a plastic bottle drifted across the floor. For a moment it might conceivably have looked like a one inch hairy spider, but not for long.