Last week, I wrote about my travel adventure to Tandala Upper Boys Boarding School, in what is now Makete District, in 1965 and how my colleagues and I arrived worn out and mud-splattered from torso to toe, carrying our red wooden boxes on our heads as heavy rain drenched our tiny bodies.
Well, we settled down to begin our Class V studies. Life was hard in this God-forsaken corner of the world, located in one of the many valleys high on the slopes of the imposing Mount Livingstone ranges, in what is now Njombe Region.
At Tandala and for that matter throughout the whole area, the weather was well defined.
If it was not raining cats and dogs, it was wintertime. From May to August, snow, the kind we see in Europe, would fall heavily on the valleys and ridges of the area, turning them snow-white. Unbelievable!
Worse still, the freshwater stream from the hills, which we had redirected to pass by our school, would be completely frozen until around noon. It goes without saying that water for washing our faces, brushing our teeth and so on had to be kept overnight in pans under our beds to prevent it from freezing. Under the circumstances, taking a full bath was something we did only once or twice a week.
We were also forced, by circumstances, to perfect our singing talents. There were no writing exercises in the mornings because our fingers were stiff with cold. So our teachers introduced mandatory singing classes until mid-morning, when the weather improved. No wonder that, by the end of my three years there, I had become a prolific singer.
There were several extracurricular activities at the school, including a carpentry club, a young farmers’ club, a dancing group and a church choir, among others.
I was interested in carpentry, but much as I tried, I could not make even a simple, crude stool. I instead settled for the choir and dancing group, where I excelled.
In due course, we became accustomed to this spartan life at the school and even began organising excursions into the thick and vast temperate forests surrounding it.
Lo and behold! Deep inside this thick and seemingly uninhabitable forest, we were astonished to find the graves of early German Lutheran Church missionaries from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
But even more surprising was the abundance of fresh, mouth-watering fruit, including peaches, apples, pears, oranges and passion fruit. These, we were told, had been introduced by German missionaries in the 1890s. The locals even named the pears ‘MaBerlin’. By then, they were growing wild in the forest.
Naturally, we gorged ourselves and took some of the fruit back to school. But the excitement of bringing fruit back was somewhat diminished by the school’s own routine of placing sackfuls of it in the dining hall for every pupil to take home.
Then, one day, the school Scoutmaster organised a climbing expedition up the towering hill behind our school. After a gruelling four-hour trek through forests, over rocks, across streams and through temperate grasslands, we reached the peak.
What a breathtaking view greeted us! The peak towered above all the forests, buildings and other structures below. And in the far distance, we could see a lake.
“That is Lake Malawi. And the land beyond that lake is Malawi itself,” explained our Scoutmaster.
It was at that point that I resolved to pursue my studies diligently and reach a stage in life where I would be able to explore the lands beyond my own country.
