When Abdi Lanjui landed a job as a driver with the Mwanza Cotton Authority in 1963, he dreamt of the good life—much like any young man of his age. Little did he know it, but the job he secured in Musoma town would not only lead to a rift between him and his relatives but also shatter his dreams.
On the day his troubles began sometime in 1969, Mr Lanjui was driving a nine-ton Leyland truck from Mwanza to Shinyanga, which was fully loaded with cargo and four passengers. As he cruised to the town at around 5pm, the front right tyre burst and the truck overturned. None of his four passengers were hurt.
For Mr Lanjui, it was the start of a torturous, painful and wasted life in hospital—which has been his home for 45 years now.
Mr Lanjui, an only child, has had plenty of time to reflect on the event that changed his life dramatically. These days he is a shadow of the man he was in his mid-thirties, when he loved getting behind the wheel of his vehicle. He is to be found at the hospital, trying to come to terms with rejection by his relatives.
He tells us that his 45 years in hospital is a bitter miracle. After the devastating accident, he did not expect to live long. Speaking softly, he describes how he has spent more than four decades on a hospital bed.
We find him in Ward 4—the men’s ward—lying there silently under a turquoise mosquito net. There are three other men in the room—an elderly man, a man in a wheelchair and a man attending a boy. Lanjui’s bed is at one end of the ward, just before you reach the toilets.
He is always excited to receive visitors, even he is used to them now. They are strangers coming to see the man who’s made a hospital ward his home—literally. “I didn’t know I would live this long,” says the old man.
Mr Lanjui was born in Muhintiri Village, the only child of Lanjui Kanta and Sita Lakat of the Nyaturu tribe. He cannot tell the exact date of his birth. When government officials came to issue him with a national voter’s card five years ago, they worked out that he is likely to have been born in 1939, making him 75 this year.
Mr Lanjui recalls: “Bugando Hospital was not yet built at the time, so I was hospitalised at the Sekou Toure Hospital from 1969, when the accident happened. I was transferred to Singida Regional Hospital on January 1, 1971, so I could be close to my family. They took me there to die.”
The accident left Mr Lanjui paralysed from waist down. He wanted them to take him home to Muhintiri, where his parents could take care of him, but his employer declined. “The hospital was the best option at the time,” he explains. “They said I needed to be in a place where they could send money (when I die). If I was sent home, they wouldn’t know when that happened.”
The Cotton Authority paid him half his salary, which was 25 cents at the time, for six months and then stopped. Mama and Baba Abdi came to see him when he was in hospital in Singida. He remembers his kind mother and the food that she brought him. It made him well. Soon after, he started recovering and was even able to sit on a wheelchair, which he couldn’t before. He was hopeful that he would live a full life again.
But then his parents went home and did not come back for a long time. He did not know what had happened until someone sent word that his mother had died. He was devastated. The only people who cared about him were gone.
Where is Abdi Lanjui’s family?
“I do not have a family. You must believe me, they are all dead,” he explains desperately after I tell him that an African man cannot claim to not have a family.
Singida Social Welfare Officer Zuhura Karya, 55, was there when Mzee Lanjui was brought to the hospital. She started off as a social worker in 1978 but began handling Mzee Lanjui’s case in 1982. Through the years, she has seen him become resilient each day. “This man has gone through a lot. To be alone without close family members all these years needs a strong mind,” the social worker explains.
Ms Karya was involved in trying to reunify Mzee Lanjui with his extended family after his parents died, but her efforts and that of the social welfare department were unsuccessful.
Abdi Lanjui was born to a farming family. He spent most of his childhood and young adult years helping his parents take care of sheep and the farm. He doesn’t remember what year it was, but sometime when he was a young man in his 20s he enrolled in adult education. A desire for a better life crept inside him.
So he left Muhintiri Village and the life he had known and went to Mwanza. “It was a year after uhuru, 1962,” he recalls. Soon after, he moved to Musoma where he got that job as a driver in 1963. Ms Karya explains that the family members, most of who were distant uncles, complained that they had not seen him for years.
From the time he left in 1962, he never wrote to say how he was doing. He didn’t send money home either. Now that he was in trouble, he wanted their help? “They said they were not ready to help him. And so that is how it was,” she says.
Mzee Lanjui agrees. “I was wrong,” he adds.
“I cannot blame them for their attitude towards me.” But he explains that things were so hard for him at the time. His salary was only Sh25 a month and it was quite difficult to send money back home, unlike these days.
“Do you know the story in the Bible about the prodigal son? I am that prodigal son. Maybe if I had not left home, this wouldn’t have happened to me. Maybe I should have been content with life in the village. But no, I wanted a better life.”
He wishes he had been closer to his family from the beginning. “Young people of today should learn from my mistakes,” Mzee Lanjui adds. “You must remember home.”
He once dreamt of being a wealthy man—to have a family, build houses and a business and a name. But all his plans vanished into thin air in a split second. Everything he ever wished for is gone.
“I have lived a wasted life, stuck in this hospital,” he says. He shakes his head and adds: “I wouldn’t want this to happen to anyone else. It has been a hard life.”
Don’t miss the second and final part of Mr Lanjui’s tragedy in The Citizen tomorrow.
The Citizen
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