ICC World Cup veteran from Africa!

The following lines are borrowed from – based upon - one of the folk ‘hi-life’ songs for which Ghana is noted:

Now that I am still here,
If for me any love you bear,
Hide it not from me,
Show it now and let me see;
Don’t wait till I am dead
And dressed up on a bed
Like someone attending
His or her wedding;
For where I would then be heading,
I would surely never obtain
A single sip of sweet champagne!
A glass of beer in my grave?
Oh shucks! – don’t be a knave!

I have often thought of writing about John Nagenda, but somehow, I’ve always managed to put it off.

I told myself, I would ‘embarrass him.’

But that's nonsense. Embarrass John Nagenda?

On fact, the putative embarrassment was all on my side, for people who do not know how to love might not understand what I am on about.

Then came the question: ‘So who cares?’

Who cares indeed? If someone doesn’t understand one person’s affection for another, that's his or her problem, isn’t it?

Anyway, when the Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe, passed away recently, I listened to a tribute paid to him on the BBC. And I heard him say: ‘If you don’t celebrate your story, your story cannot celebrate itself!’

Absolutely right, Chinua. For if I managed to get ‘out’ ahead of John in the innings we are both nursing with elegant strokes (we hope) towards our "century," how could my story of John be celebrated?

So, Achebe has done Africa one last service: he’s removed my inhibition to write about John Nagenda.

John and I first met in 1962. We were attending a conference of African writers at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda.. Now, by 1962 much of the timidity induced in many of the African people by colonialism had been driven out of the continent for good. Nevertheless, I was immensely impressed when John was pointed out to me as a young Ugandan writer who had already begun to 'collect on his colonial debts'.

What was that? He was, I was told in a hush-hush manner, bedding the spouse of one of the colonial lecturers on the campus of Makerere Unversity. He'd been doing it even as a student there.

I swear I took a proper look at John. As we would say in Ghana, ‘Ei? Saa a?’ Or in Nigeria, ‘Na so, eh?’ These are expressions denoting delighted -- even excited -- astonishment.

I took a second good look at John. We had been sitting in Ghana proclaiming with loud voices that Africa must rid itself of colonialism, just as we in Ghana had done in 1957. But when we met white women at parties, many of us dared not flirt openly with them. Not quite yet. But here was a Ugandan, five years behind us in the [political] independence stakes, already saying to a whiteman in Africa, ‘Chum, if you don’t like it, divorce the woman, what? I am in love and I feel fine!’

In fact, if I'd been a woman, I would have fallen for the guy myself. I would not have hesitated to say, ‘Nkwangara nyor!’ the Luganda say-all phrase that he taught me to try my hand with, when I saw a very pretty Muganda princess and asked him to teach me what to say to her. Tall and lithe, he had this unforgettable face, with eyes sparkling with ‘waiting laughter’ and lips ready to manufacture caustic humour. Quick as a flash with a comeback and totally irreverent, you could hardly be at his side for five minutes without his forcing a good laugh out of you from the deep end of your belly.

He was extremely friendly, and made us West Africans laugh when he taught us that in Uganda, a ‘roundabout’ was called a ‘kipilefti’. And he took us to ‘Top Life’ night club, where the music dared us to talk arty-farty-lit and see whether we could hear one another's bilge. The girls at Top Life could interrupt us at will -- and they did. We'd be tearing into one writer or other of the ‘Dead White Male’ variety we'd been taught to revere when one of them would butt in and trill, ‘Shegun! I want to dance!’ (Segun was a handsome Nigerian writer who later became an Ambassador for his country – Segun Olusola).

Or ‘Chrees, my drink is finished!!’ (Chris was Christopher Okigbo, a very fine poet and even finer socialite, who perished at the front during the Biafran War of 1967-70. He was so daring as an officer in the Biafran army that he led his men from the front and – so the rumour goes – having led them too often into dangerous scrapes, was doing so one more time when he collected a bullet in his back that might well have come from one of his own men, and died on the spot.

I left Kampala in 1962 buoyed up by the African spirit I had encountered at the conference. The refusal of the South Africans – Zeke Mphahlele, Bloke Modisane, Bob Leshoai and Lewis Nkosi among them – to be too downbeat about their country, the Sharpeville massacre (March 1960) notwithstanding, gave me hope. My newly-found respect for my fellow Africans whose nations were still under colonial rule, saved me from being haughty and I travelled from Kampala to Nairobi, Ndola, Lusaka, Salisbury (now Harare) listening to my brothers rather than lecturing them, as I was previously wont to do.

Buoyed up with confidence, I managed, as editor of Drum magazine (Ghana edition) to bag an unusual interview with Sir Roy Welensky, prime minister of the then Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, in which we nearly came to verbal blows, when he described Africa as having contributed nothing but ‘darkness’ to world history. Were the pyramids in Egypt and Nubia the product of darkness, I asked him.

I even wrote to ask for an interview with – Dr Hendrick Verwoerd, prime minister of South Africa! But he refused. Nevertheless, I went to Dar-es-Salaam and sounded out, from ANC exiles, the possibility of smuggling myself into apartheid-land to report the situation there first-hand. It didn’t work out, but that trip to Dar enabled me to meet Dr Edouardo Modlane, who was in the process of transforming FRELIMO from a scattered group of idealistic nationalists into the fighting force that later liberated Mozambique, and assisted in Zimbabwe's liberation into the bargain. The Portuguese secret police assassinated Dr Modlane shortly after I'd met him.

I didn’t meet John again, after that trip for quite some time. And then we somehow linked up in London. That was at a time when both of us were not over-enamoured to say the least -- with the fellows in charge of our countries back home. In London, John took me to clubs in the Trafalgar Square area, whose names I never remembered because I never left them sober. The man’s energy was unbelievable – I would be on my last legs and yet he would be as fresh as if he had just emerged from the dressing room of an ancient cricket club. Often, I had to escape from one of these clubs. I learnt from him that it pays to develop a regimen of exercise when one's ligaments were still elastic!

As for his social contacts, they were second to none. He once took me to the offices, near Holland Park, of a cricket magazine he had founded and was editing (if my memory serves me right, it was called The County Cricketer). Now, I ask you reader: how could an African from Uganda get to found and edit a cricket magazine in London? Cricket is one of the most “uppity” sports in Britain, and to become the editor of one of its minor ‘bibles’ no joke. The office John took me to was manned almost entirely by very beautiful young ladies who served tasty white wine to me endlessly. When they weren't doing that, John was dispatching them to a betting shop to back horses for him in particular races he'd got tips in. John Nagenda, in short, was – and is – joie de vivre personified.

And now, to the really important things: John had been captain of the Nomads, a cricket club that was 125 years old at the time he was its skipper. He doesn’t talk about it, but if you know how the British treasure their traditions – and cricket clubs are among the most notoriously traditional -- you must mark it down as a major achievement for this black man and Ugandan.

You see, neither money nor political power can earn for you lines in English cricket literature that say, QUOTE ‘He was a mercurial skipper’ who was ‘elected a vice-president of the Nomads’; ‘He was a leading personality in the club’; and QUOTE ‘because of him, many cricketers from East Africa have been members.’

Finally -- and Ugandans and other Africans must raise a glass to cheer the sheer personal panache associated with Nagenda that teased out this pearly example of British understatement-- ‘The [Nomads] club celebrated its 125th year with a black tie dinner at Lord's in 2002, at which Nomads Vice-President, John Nagenda, garbed in formal Uganda dress, made a long, quite unscheduled speech.’

Can you hear the whispers at Lord's: ‘What’s he on about? It’s not on the bloody programme?’ Yet, the man would carry it off. That’s John Nagenda for you.

Did I say it was a great achievement to be elected vice-president of an ancient English cricket club? Well, that was only the ‘bit part’ in John Nagenda’s Cricket Extravaganza. The main part came when he took the field, on 7 June 1975, at one of the most beautiful cricket grounds in England, Edgbaston, in Birmingham, to face New Zealand as a member of the East African team playing in the first International Cricket Council (ICC) World Cup).

I beg your pardon? Yes, you heard right -- the ICC World Cup 1975! Cast: Viv Richards; Imran Khan; Richard Hadlee; Clive Lloyd; Sunil Gevaskar; etcetera etcetera.

East Africa and -- Sri Lanka with it, can you believe it -- were allowed to play as some sort of a favour, as they were not members of the ICC.

And John Nagenda wasn’t in the East African team just because he had a black face and most of the team's other members were of Asian extraction. John Nagenda took one wicket for 50 runs in 9 overs. None of the other East African bowlers was able to better that bowling performance, in terms of wickets taken. The New Zealander whose wicket John took was called Wadsworth. Unfortunately, John was listed as last man in the batting order, and the East Africans managed to get themselves bowled out, after 60 overs, before John could show what he could do with the bat. Many bowlers do surprise spectators with their batting – who can forget Malcolm Marshall of the West Indies batting with one hand while the other hand was bandaged from a broken finger – and making runs? Alas, with John Nagenda, the ICC World Cup 1975 story ends with a ‘DNB’ (did not bat!). It was his one and only match in the tournament, but can you beat that for relieving boredom on the After-dinner Speech circuit --in Africa at least?

75 -- an age which Nagenda attained on 25 April 2013 -- is thus a special number for him: he is now 75, and his most crucial century that never came was in 1975. That Nagenda century must eventually come, surely? I trust that if it didn't come with runs in Word Cup cricket, it will come in years.

* Cameron Duodu, the author of The Gab Boys (Andre Deutsch, London), is a writer and journalist from Ghana.