‘The vessel tipped over’: The long, sad saga of helpless water people of E. Africa

"Merikebu ilipinduka,” Grandma Hajara used to narrate casually. The vessel tipped over, sank into the water and nearly all the people on board perished. Hajara Nakku bint Ramadhan, as you may remember, was my maternal grandmother, born in Mzizima, somewhere between Dar-es-Salaam and Bagamoyo, in the final decade of the 19th century.

Hajara’s tale of the upturned and sunken vessel, complete with the heart-sinking, massive loss of human lives, leapt back to my mind with startling reality last week when I heard of the fate of the MV Nyerere near Ukerewe in Lake Victoria.

I heard Hajara’s story some 70 years ago, and the events in it date from more than a century ago, when the narrator was a sprightly eight or nine-year old girl on the southern beaches of the Victoria.

Fortunately for Hajara and her genetic ramifications, of which I am a part, she lived to tell the tale. According to her, she and her mother had spent several days in the “port city” (probably Mwanza), waiting for a steamer to take them across the Lake to Uganda, the homeland from which Hajara's parents, Zubeida and Ramadhan Mukasa, had fled the religious wars and persecutions in the final decade of the 19th century.

But Zubeida and Hajara failed to board the steamer to Port Bell. Hajara had gone off to play with her newly-made friends.

The ship had long left the harbour when an anxious and irate Zubeida found her in the company of her playmates. Grandmother did not tell us if she got more than a tongue-lashing.

Not long after, however, reports began trickling back to the port that the merikebu (vessel) that Hajara and her mother missed had overturned in the middle of the Lake, killing most of the passengers aboard. Naughty Hajara had, accidentally, saved herself and her mother from the maritime tragedy.

TRAGEDIES

Unfortunately, similar tragedies still happen with sad regularity on Victoria and her sister lakes, like Tanganyika, Kivu and Albert.

The obvious questions here are why, over centuries now, our people still die in these water “accidents” and whether such deaths are inevitable. You will certainly have heard a lot of opinions on this from analysts and experts alike.

But I thought I should also share with you my two-pence worth of feelings on the matter because I believe these disasters concern us personally, regardless of where they happen.

This is why I started with my own story, told through the eyes of a nine-year-old child.

The technical shortcomings that lead to the catastrophes are notorious. The seaworthiness and maintenance records of the vessels, absence or insufficiency of water-safety equipment, like life jackets or lifeboats, all stick out like sore thumbs in these events.

Equally questionable is the administrative competence of those concerned, like the qualifications and integrity of the operators of the craft, and the availability and readiness of rescue personnel and equipment at likely accident sites.

But, even at the risk of being considered insensitive in the face of massive tragedy, I will assert that the root of the problem is our own collective attitude to the realities around us.

In the case of our waterways, for example, our attitude is characterised by fatalism, under-estimation and indiscipline. This is harsh judgement, I know, but “a hundred years of silence” (as Garcia Marquez would put it) are just about enough. It is time we spoke out and considered decisive action

The fatalism that keeps doing us in is that false belief that “there’s nothing we can do about it”, what Fundi Konde, commenting on a Likoni Ferry accident, puts in song as “Jamani ajali haikingiki” (my people, accidents are unavoidable). We should not take this literally.

PRECAUTION

There is a lot that we can do to avoid accidents, or at least to minimise their impact. If, for example, the operators of a vessel are reluctant to provide life jackets, would it be too much to expect a regular traveller to invest in a jacket of one’s own?

What I called under-estimation is the apparent tendency among littoral and island dwellers to take water for granted. After all, huge expanses of water are part of their environment. But we water people have just got to learn and understand the vast threats latent in this environment.

Lake Victoria, for example, my own environment, is colossal. I have flown numerous times across it, and I know you reach points where, even at over 30,000 feet above sea level, you see nothing but water. That in itself should be reason enough to make us pose and consider what would happen if the unexpected were to befall us in that watery waste.

But, as far as water travel, or any kind of travel, is concerned, discipline or the lack of it is the bottom line. We are told, for example, that in the case of the MV Nyerere, one of the main reasons for its sinking was that it was grossly overloaded with both passengers and cargo. This is a sadly common factor in most of these tragedies.

There may be reasons why a person in their right mind should board a dangerously overloaded vehicle, but disciplined logic tells us that the outcomes of such behaviour are often unfortunate.

Similarly, the second reason for the MV Nyerere’s disaster, we are told, was the apparent stampede of the passengers scrambling to one side of the vessel as it approached its landing.

Now, the indiscipline of our people in boarding or alighting from vehicles is not unfamiliar to most of us. Neither is the impatience of the drivers and riders who force third and even fourth lanes on our roads, where there should be two at the most. But we should stop pointing fingers.

Still, we need not only administrative efficiency and integrity but also a lot of education on security in our transport systems.

***

Prof Bukenya is a leading East African scholar of English and Literature. abubwase@yahoo.