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  Then wham, the rubber prongs came down right across the snake’s body, about midway along its length, and pinned it to the floor. All I could see was a green blur as the snake thrashed around furiously in an effort to free itself. But the snake-man kept up the pressure on the prongs and the snake was trapped.

  What happens next? I wondered. There was no way he could catch hold of that madly twisting flailing length of green muscle with his hands, and even if he could have done so, the head would surely have flashed around and bitten him in the face.

  Holding the very end of the eight-foot pole, the snakeman began to work his way round the room until he was at the tail end of the snake. Then, in spite of the flailing and the thrashing, he started pushing the prongs forward along the snake’s body towards the head. Very very slowly he did it, pushing the rubber prongs forward over the snake’s flailing body, keeping the snake pinned down all the time and pushing, pushing, pushing the long wooden rod forward millimetre by millimetre. It was a fascinating and frightening thing to watch, the little man with white eyebrows and black hair carefully manipulating his long implement and sliding the fork ever so slowly along the length of the twisting snake towards the head. The snake’s body was thumping against the coconut matting with such a noise that if you had been upstairs you might have thought two big men were wrestling on the floor.

  Then at last the prongs were right behind the head itself, pinning it down, and at that point the snake-man reached forward with one gloved hand and grasped the snake very firmly by the neck. He threw away the pole. He took the sack off his shoulder with his free hand. He lifted the great, still-twisting length of the deadly green snake and pushed the head into the sack. Then he let go the head and bundled the rest of the creature in and closed the sack. The sack started jumping about as though there were fifty angry rats inside it, but the snake-man was now totally relaxed and he held the sack casually in one hand as if it contained no more than a few pounds of potatoes. He stooped and picked up his pole from the floor, then he turned and looked towards the window where we were peering in.

  ‘Pity about the dog,’ he said. ‘You’d better get it out of the way before the children see it.’

  The Beginning of the War

  Breakfast in Dar es Salaam never varied. It was always a delicious ripe pawpaw picked that morning in the garden by the cook, on to which was squeezed the juice of a whole fresh lime. Just about every white man and woman in Tanganyika had pawpaw and lime juice for breakfast, and I believe those old colonials knew what was good for them. It is the healthiest and most refreshing breakfast I know.

  On a morning towards the end of August 1939, I was breakfasting on my pawpaw and thinking a great deal, like everyone else, about the war that we all knew was very soon going to break out with Germany. Mdisho was moving around the room and pretending to be busy.

  ‘Did you know there is going to be a war before very long?’ I asked him.

  ‘A war?’ he cried, perking up immediately. ‘A real war, bwana?’

  ‘An enormous war,’ I said.

  Mdisho’s face was now alight with excitement. He was of the Mwanumwezi tribe and there wasn’t a Mwanumwezi anywhere who did not have fighting in his blood. For hundreds of years they had been the greatest warriors in East Africa, conquering all before them, including the Masai, and even now the mere mention of war caused such dreams of glory in Mdisho’s mind that he could hardly stand it.

  ‘I still have my father’s weapons in my hut!’ he cried. ‘I shall get the spear out and start sharpening it immediately! Who are we going to fight, bwana?’

  ‘The Germani,’ I said.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘There are plenty of Germani around here for us to kill.’

  Mdisho was right about there being plenty of them. Only twenty-five years ago, before the First World War, Tanganyika had been German East Africa. But in 1919 after the Armistice, Germany had been forced to hand the territory over to the British, who renamed it Tanganyika. Many Germans had stayed on and the country was still full of them. They owned diamond mines and gold mines. They grew sisal and cotton and tea and ground-nuts. The owner of the soda-water bottling-plant in Dar es Salaam was a German and so was Willy Hink, the watchmaker. In fact the Germans greatly outnumbered all the other Europeans in Tanganyika put together, and when war broke out, as we now knew it must, they could present a dangerous and difficult problem to the authorities.

  ‘When is this enormous war going to begin?’ Mdisho asked me.

  ‘They say quite soon,’ I told him, ‘because over in Europe, which is ten times as far away as from here to Kilimanjaro, the Germans have a leader called Bwana Hitler who wishes to conquer the world. The Germans think this Bwana Hitler is a wonderful fellow. But he is actually a raving mad maniac. As soon as the war begins, the Germani will try to kill us all, and then, of course, we shall have to try to kill them before they can kill us.’

  Mdisho, being a true child of his tribe, understood the principle of war very well. ‘Why don’t we strike first?’ he said, excitedly. ‘Why don’t we take them by surprise, these Germani out here, bwana? Why don’t we kill all of them before the war begins? That is always the best way, bwana. My ancestors always used to strike first.’

  ‘I am afraid we have very strict rules about war,’ I said. ‘With us, nobody is allowed to kill anyone until the whistle blows and the game is officially started.’

  ‘But that is ridiculous, bwana!’ he cried. ‘In a war there are no rules! Winning is all that counts!’

  Mdisho was only nineteen years old. He had been born and brought up 700 miles inland from Dar es Salaam, near a place called Kigoma, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, and both his parents had died before he was twelve years old. He had then been taken into the household of a kindly District Officer in Kigoma and given the job of assistant shambaboy or gardener. From there he had graduated into the household as a house-boy and had charmed everybody by his good manners and gentle bearing. When the District Officer had been moved back to the Secretariat in Dar es Salaam, the family had taken Mdisho with them. A year or so later, the DO had been transferred to Egypt and poor Mdisho was suddenly without a job or a home, but he did have in his possession one very valuable document, a splendid reference from his former employer. That was when I was lucky enough to find him and take him on. I made him my personal ‘boy’ and soon the two of us had formed a friendship that I found rather marvellous.

  Mdisho could neither read nor write, and it was impossible for him to imagine that the world extended much beyond the shores of the African continent. But he was undoubtedly intelligent and quick to learn, and I had begun to teach him how to read. Every weekday, as soon as I got home from the office, we would have three-quarters of an hour of reading. He learnt fast, and although we were still on single words, we would soon be progressing to short sentences. I insisted on teaching him how to read and write not only Swahili words but also their English equivalents, so that he would learn a little basic English at the same time. He loved his lessons and it was touching to see him already seated at the table in the dining-room with his exercise book open in front of him when I came home in the evenings.

  Mdisho was about six feet tall, superbly built, with a rather scrunched-up flat-nosed face and the most beautiful pure white absolutely even teeth I had ever seen.

  ‘It is most important to obey the rules of war,’ I told him. ‘No Germani can be killed until war has been properly declared. And even then the enemy must be given the chance to surrender before you kill him.’

  ‘How will we know when war is declared?’ Mdisho asked me.

  ‘They will tell us on the wireless from England,’ I said. ‘We shall all know within a few seconds.’

  ‘And then the fun will begin!’ he cried, clapping his hands. ‘Oh bwana, I can hardly wait for that time to come!’

  ‘If you want to fight, you must become a soldier first,’ I told him. ‘You will have to join the Kenya Regiment and become an askari.’ An as