In the 1960s the Tanzanian government instituted compulsory National Service for the nation’s high-school leavers. This was in order to make us more tough and patriotic. After my final exams, when the National Service placements appeared in the newspaper, I found out that I had been assigned to a camp outside Bukoba, on the shores of Lake Victoria. I had never been so far into the interior of the country; I had no friends or relations in the region. No one I knew had gone there before, or had been assigned to go there with me this time. I was a city boy and a soft Asian, used to certain amenities and food habits. To be fair to myself, I had also succumbed a few weeks before to a certain condition that a visiting Sri Lankan specialist had declared as a tuberculosis of the knee. To this day I don’t know any more about the condition, except that it had mysteriously swollen up my knee, but the good doctor did give me a letter stating that I could possibly need further treatment.
Ismailimail 