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European governments loved Nyrere, donating billions to his cause and infesting the country with idealistic aid workers. They would come on contracts for three years, laden with enough books to last their sojourn, for Dar-es-Salaam had none. On their departure, the books were donated to Khan's Secondhand Books and Photocopying, established for a generation beside The Empire Cinema.
The boy was their grateful beneficiary. For a trifle, he obtained the six volumes of ‘The Second World War’ by Winston S. Churchill one day and Emile Zola the next. The brightly chalked cover of ‘Hyman Kaplan’ captivated the boy, who, at the age of five, had been shipped off to England, with no knowledge of the language, to be brought up by an English working-class family who knew no other tongue.
Each episode of the book saw Mr. Kaplan set a torch to the English language, while all the time trying his hardest to master it, either through its inexplicable rules of spelling or insane rules of guidance in its pronunciation. Each story saw Mr. Kaplan get the better of Mr. Parkhill as the perplexed teacher tried in vain to explain the arcane intricacies of the English language.
In one sentence that Mr. Kaplan wrote on the board for class scrutiny, his fellow learners found ten mistakes. Instead of leaving him embarrassed, Mr. Kaplan stood up and gazed at his masterpiece in awe that he had created such a puzzle for the class to solve.
As a five-year-old, beached upon an island of English kids in a classroom, he had neither the bravado nor the belief to question the teacher on the arcane syntax of sentences. Unlike Mr. Kaplan, he could not withstand the slings and arrows of his classmates. And so, he developed an admiration and affection for the character whose travails he too shared. Besides, the stories were funny.
Summer vacations drew to an end in Africa, he would meekly return the books he had read to Khan's - save for the dissertations of Hyman Kaplan. These volumes were kept in a hallowed glass-fronted bookcase until his
return to Africa, or, as it happened, until his family fled the country,