African Insights

As I was growing up in the UK I had been led to understand that poor African people deserve our sympathy and are to be pitied and assisted.

She lived alone. Her husband had died some years earlier. Her days were spent keeping her compacted bare earth yard free from a single speck of dust, preparing food in her tiny mud-walled hut and tending to her clump of ragged-leaved bananas. She was organised beyond measure and always had a lush supply of water in her home, arranged neatly in colourful plastic buckets that are Tanzania’s trademark, despite the fact that the time window to obtain water from the tap seemed impossibly small. She always had some to spare when we needed more than we had. I remember her always bent at the hips with a grass broom in her characterful, wrinkled right hand, a colourful sarong snugly wrapped round her hips and an equally vibrant scarf tied around her head. As we crossed her immaculate yard to access our gate she would stop, stand up proud and smile. Her ebony lips would part wide and curl high into her cheeks to reveal big, happy, white teeth that set off her twinkling white eyes. She always had time for a chat, even though I didn't speak a word of Swahili beyond “hello”. Somehow I knew what she meant, without actually understanding the words. We had a special bond that transcended culture, race, colour and generation.

Mama Justin was not just Justin’s mother, she was everyone’s mother. She would brush our yard when it looked neglected, pulling out every shred of greenery that might trap dirt around its fragile stem. She found a chameleon in the garden one day and brought it to show me. Such was my delight that she came every morning to find one for me to marvel at.

I was doing laundry in the garden when I heard the unmistakeable cackle that starts low in her throat and reaches a contagious crescendo. It was the same laugh I had heard when the rat had run over my foot and I emitted an involuntary squeal of surprise. She had laughed for twenty minutes before she came to see what had happened. I turned my head while still frantically rubbing the clothes together in a vain attempt to remove the red mud that stained everything I owned. She was laughing at my weird foreign attempts to hand-wash clothes. She knew it would never work. Patiently and in her humorous way, she demonstrated how I should do it until I had fully grasped the concept. She was not only a mother, but a teacher. To this day I do laundry the Mama Justin way.