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27 Chapter 4 High School and University College I was over eighteen years old and so no longer a child when we embarked on the train at Moshi Railway Station in January 1951, on our way to Tabora High School after successfully passing the Standard X Territorial Examination we sat in October 1950. It was an overnight train to Korogwe, where we boarded a Tanganyika Railways Bus to Morogoro through Handeni and Mziha. This bus ride took a whole day. The road was of rough murram with potholes all the way, and the driver was so rough in the humps and bumps that many of us who had not travelled continuously for such long distances suffered nausea and threw up most of the day. The two hundred miles took more than twelve hours, and we arrived at Morogoro Railway Station at 9 o’clock, thoroughly exhausted. The train from Dar es Salaam for Tabora was expected at one o’clock in the morning and we had to sleep on the benches at the Railway station, with mosquitoes biting and stinging all over. Those of us who had money went to the near-by Community Development hostel, where they got rooms and were able to lie in bed with mosquito-net cover. I did not have much pocket money and so I had to wait for the train lying on those benches, praying that I would not catch malaria before arriving at Tabora School. The passenger train bound for Tabora was on schedule at 1.00 a.m., but the Third Class coach allocated to Tabora High School pupils was already almost full of students who had boarded it at Dar es Salaam. We had to squeeze ourselves in, and since the earlier occupants were strangers to us, they were reluctant to rise up from the seats they were lying on to give us space to sit. Like the Moshi /Korogwe train, the Central Railway train was slow and after approximately every fifty miles, it would stop in the bush to load firewood for the steam locomotive engines. At Dodoma, which we reached at about nine in the morning, more Tabora-bound pupils, especially emanating from Iringa, Kondoa and Arusha, joined us and the Railways staff allocated us an additional coach. More students joined us at Itigi, late that night. Most of them were from Rungwe/Tukuyu and Mbeya and 28 together we made our last lap to Tabora, which we reached at 5 o’clock in the afternoon. It was a three-day gruelling experience. John Crabbe, who had been a mathematics lecturer at Makerere University College for many years, had just taken over as Headmaster for Tabora School and received us the following morning. Tabora Boys’ School was actually two schools in one: there was the Lower School, which had pupils from Standards V to X and occupied the old buildings erected early in the 1920s, and had served as the élite school for sons of Tanganyika chiefs. This is where people such as Adam Sapi Mkwawa, Abdallah Said Fundikira,HumbiZiota,HarunLugusha,DavidKidahaMakwaia, Thomas Lenana Marealle, Patrick Kunambi, John Ndaskoi Maruma, Vedasto Kyaruzi and, their star, Julius Kambarage Nyerere went in the late 1920s and 1930s. The other school was the Upper School, built in the late 1940s to take students who had successfully completed Standard X and prepare them for the Cambridge Overseas School Certificate Examinations. Entrants into the Upper School came from all other secondary schools that taught up to Standard X in Tanganyika, as noted in the previous chapter. Prominent personalities in our history such as Rashidi Mfaume Kawawa, Oscar Kambona and Job Lusinde had just left Upper School Tabora when I joined in 1951. Geoffrey V. Mmari, who was to become Vice-Chancellor of the University of Dar es Salaam and later of the Sokoine University of Agriculture, joined Tabora with me in 1951. He had been at Ilboru Lutheran Secondary School. Although the teaching facilities at Upper School Tabora were excellent and the teachers very highly qualified, the climate and the other amenities were not very congenial, especially to me personally. I suffered frequent bouts of malaria and on several occasions during the two years I was at Tabora was admitted at the infirmary suffering from malaria or dysentery. The food did not agree with me at all. Even drinking water was bad. This problem did not affect me alone. Several students, especially those from Kilimanjaro, also suffered, although probably not as often as...

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