I have had my fair share of silly escapades in my life. But the most memorable are those that occurred during my first two years of employment, when I was receiving a guaranteed monthly paycheque in the late 1970s.
At the time, I was employed by the Government-owned Daily and Sunday newspapers as a cub reporter. It so happened that at the end of every month, soon after receiving my paycheque, I would disappear from the office for two or three consecutive days to do justice to my monies. Naturally, this behaviour attracted serious repercussions.
I was reprimanded, warned and even threatened with summary dismissal from my job at the papers.
Nevertheless, this did not stop me from my bad habit of enjoying my end-of-month pay at the then-exotic joints that included Matumbi Bar, Bonga Nikubonge Bar and Villa Bar, all in the Kinondoni/Mwananyamala suburbs of the city. I would only report back to the office after my meagre salary was kaput.
The problem, my editors thought, boiled down to my immaturity — I was in my early twenties. Therefore, the management of the esteemed papers, in their Nyerere-inspired wisdom (and perhaps some divine intervention as well), decided — notwithstanding my misdemeanours and because of my apparent immaturity — to send me back to college.
I was to proceed to the then-communist Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR) or East Germany, for a one-year Diploma course in Journalism.
So in September 1978, as the Uganda–Idi Amin war began, I found myself at the International Institute of Journalism, in the forested suburb of Friedrichshagen, in what was then East Berlin.
To cut the long story short, I enjoyed my stay at the college where, after intensive studies, I graduated with flying colours. But some experiences which I cannot erase from my mind were the philosophy lectures from one Dr Wolf.
On the first day he walked into our lecture room, he made this startling statement: “Believing is a declaration of ignorance.” We understood him — after all, we were in a communist state where religion, in the words of Karl Marx, was “the opium of the people.”
Expounding on his statement, Dr Wolf went on:
“If you are told that there is a city on the other side of a mountain, and you have never climbed it to see and verify for yourself what is on that side, you are forced to believe. But if you have been to the top of the mountain and seen the city, you know it exists.”
In a nutshell, his whole course in Journalism and Philosophy was based on this principle: that believing is ignorance, and journalists have the sacred duty of uncovering hard facts to expand knowledge in their communities.
Personally, I am not a very religious person, notwithstanding the fact that both my paternal and maternal grandfathers were priests of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in what is now the Njombe Region. But I still found Dr Wolf’s theory intriguing.
After all, one still wonders: Where did mankind come from? Who are we? Why are we here? Are there beings on other planets? We are therefore compelled to believe. And yes — it all comes down to knowledge. The more we know, the less we believe.
Many years later, in the early 1990s, after the collapse of communist East Germany and the fall of the infamous Berlin Wall, I again found myself in Berlin, the city of “a thousand beers”.
While moving around, I took a cab from the famous Brandenburg Gate to Alexanderplatz, the former centre of East Berlin. In my now-poor German, I asked the elderly driver about the latest developments in Germany.
To my utter surprise, the cab driver turned out to be my former lecturer, Dr Wolf. Apparently, his communist philosophy had no place in the now-united, capitalist Federal Republic of Germany.
“God works in mysterious ways. Here I am driving my former student. Only God knows!” he said solemnly.
Had he now become a believer? I wondered.
