Story 1 from ‘Absurd Tales from Africa’ by Robert Gurney
He was a shy sort of fellow, not very popular with his peers. He found himself one day waiting to meet a budding entrepreneur with a view to acting as a guide on trips to a little-known game area to the west of Kampala, Lake Mburu. He was going to report on his progress in securing basic accommodation there.He was a little nervous, because he was not sure that he was allowed, as a civil servant, to engage in business activity. As he was still a DipEd student at Makerere, he had been trying to convince himself that a student could not be a civil servant at the same time. He still had a gap before that status kicked in, he said to himself.
His contact, a friendly chap who had approached him on one of his few visits to The City Bar restaurant — he wouldn’t go into the bar — was late. Mark began to think that Philip was not going to turn up.
His mind began to turn to his special relationship with Dr Hughe Lee Dimwitty. He fed the latter with juicy titbits about fellow students’ peccadilloes. It was he who had bought up some of Jones’s lucky charms: bracelets that Jones claimed were made from his facial hair, although the rumour was that they were taken from an old Makerere mattress. Jones had been selling these to African tourists in the Speke Hotel, claiming they were “Mzungu Hair”. Jones was at the top of Dr Carse’s growing blacklist. The bracelets had been produced in front of the Professor of Education, Dr Lew Carse, during the trial in absentia after which Jones was ejected from East Africa.
They had chosen the Lake Victoria Hotel as the venue. TEA students, Teachers for East Africa, tended not to go there. It was too far from Kampala for them. He was contemplating his Pepsi, watching the remnants of the ice dissolve, when, suddenly, a huge sneeze interrupted his thoughts.
He looked up and his vision was filled with the sight of a beautiful young woman sitting by herself at the bar. It all happened in a flash. As his eyes focussed on her he saw an object flying towards him. He was a good cricketer and lunged forward to catch it. It was a glass eye!
Instinctively he leant forward and handed it back to her. She popped it back in.
“Come and talk to me,” she said.
A wave of self-consciousness swept over him. He looked down at his shorts and became aware of his sartorial inadequacy. His shorts, he realised, were absurd. He hadn’t thought about it before. They were brilliant white, like those of the other teachers at Makerere College School but they had shrunk through constant washing by the school’s over-zealous laundryman. The result was that they were too tight, too short and tended to balloon out. From a distance it looked as if the staff were wearing nappies.
He dismissed these thoughts as he climbed up on to the bar stool.
She introduced herself as Margaret. She was, she explained, a secretary in Prime Minister Obote’s Office at Entebbe and lived with two other secretaries in a large colonial bungalow in the bush off the Kampala to Entebbe Road.
He stared helplessly into her eyes and knew that he was in love, despite that fact that one of those eyes was false.
“Would you like to come back to my place?” she asked. He nodded, choking back a desire to confess that he was a twenty-three year-old virgin.
The following morning, Mark went down to the kitchen where Margaret was already busy.
“English breakfast?” she asked.
He nodded. He was lost for words. His whole world had suddenly changed. He felt as if it had been turned upside down. Tongue-tied, he blurted out the following, without really thinking:
“Do you always do this with men you have just met?”
She gave him a quick look over her shoulder, her blue eyes sparkling.
“ONLY IF THEY CATCH MY EYE,” she called out above the noise of sizzling sausages.
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Story 2 in this series is ‘The Dead Ringer of Rubaga’.
The Dead Ringer of Rubaga
The bell ringer at St Mary’s Cathedral, Rubaga, in Kampala, retired after decades of service, so the priest placed an advertisement in the Uganda Argus for a new campanologist.
….to be continued.
