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’Uwanja wa fisi’ victim recounts her ordeal
2006-08-20 09:34:40
By Rayner Ngonji
When a 14-year-old girl (name withheld) left Iringa last year in June to gamble into her first job opportunity as a housemaid, she didn’t know that things would turn sour landing her into an immoral and filthiest business in life.
Surely that was beyond her expectations. Having suffered for so long, she thought she had secured a relief, a condition that would lead her to peace of mind.
The girl, a school dropout of Mlangali Primary School in Iringa municipality, along with 19 others were lured by an alcohol sales proprietor, Mariam Athumani, younger sister to try Dar es Salaam as housemaids.
’’Although she did not approach me directly, I trusted her words because of the situation I was then facing...having lost all my parents mid last year,’’ she says.
Nevertheless, she suspected a fishy deal might have transpired between the lady and her brother who had made her abandon her primary school studies in standard six, for in the course of their talk, some circumstances hurriedly led her brother to conclude within a twinkle of an eye.
She recalls that on that material day they were loaded into a lorry as if they were sisal fibres on transit.
When they reached Dar es Salaam, they were taken straight to Uwanja wa Fisi, Manzese and handed over to the proprietor who is yet to be identified and police are still hot on her toes.
’’This is where you will be working and staying,’’ the lady proprietor told us without introducing herself and giving us a hint as to where she resides, adding: ’’your duty here will be serving alcohol to your customers, and mind you, this is a full time job.’’
There were no discussions over the remuneration. They all took it for granted that things would soon solve themselves as days call for weeks and months meaning salaries.
’’It was a really full time job, changing from the smoke screening alcohol engagement to other intimate and social activities till midnight or late hours regardless of the time spent,’’ she would say.
She says throughout their stay the proprietor made sure they did not know her name.
’’Whenever there were visitors for her, she would chase us away from them so that we never followed their conversations or grasp clues, let alone her name and residence,’’ she explains.
She narrates that right from there, they started sensing something was odd because that was not the type of the work they had been told before boarding one of the farm produce lorries in Iringa.
But since they were new to the place, they could not do anything as ’rioting’ could be disastrous. They couldn’t even predict what would befall them if they remained at the place.
The place has been baptized uwanja wa fisi because it has been the centre of all evils ranging from marijuana smoking, different brands of alcohol trading underworld with no one bothering about the expiry date, whether illicitly brewed or not including bamboo wine ulanzi which traditionally is found only in selective highland areas like Iringa, Songea and Mahenge in Morogoro Region to casual sex popularly known as short time.
All types of meat also is traded there besides daring robberies and other movie like crimes you would dream of.
It was silently set up when it was felt that there was a need to have a social pub where people could interact freely without interference.
But as days went by its activities expanded into incorporating bhang smoking, sale of illicit drugs for others survival.
The girl notes that the going was extremely tough. ’’Sometimes you are compelled to do something not because you like it but just that you don’t have an alternative.
You have got to go ahead to suit the circumstances and get the ball roll,’’ she emphasizes.
’’We never had a lap of sleep, because once you finish one job, you engage in another and no spare time to rest...it was a continuous process. By the time you are through, in the real sense of being free, you are extensively weary,’’ she says.
She says she did that job for all those months, the best she achieved was engaged in premature sex relationship for which they were never paid for.
The so called ’’customers’’ paid everything to the businesswoman who used to stay up till late hours and come back early the following morning.
Asked if she was ready to go back to the four walls of the classroom if there was a sponsor, she smiled and said she would appreciate that.
During the crack down exercise in which the proprietor and her aids managed to slip out of the arms of the law, all suspects found at the scene were rounded up and ’’worked on’’ by the police.
The short and fat girl, currently staying with a relative recuperating from psychological torture, could vividly be seen stammering while talking indicating that her brain might have been directly or indirectly affected.
Whenever you pose a question she takes time to respond or responds to it vaguely, a situation that explains that she hasn’t grasped your question well.
This, according to medical personnel shows that the business she had engaged in before her age, has affected her memory system and her ears.
The question that arises after the swoop is how did it manage to persist under the very nose of the government and the public all those years?
Does it mean that the local authorities didn’t see it or just decided to thaw it down as another passing cloud?
Now that it’s no longer there let’s us clean all other remaining areas.
Wananchi have already extended their cooperation by identifying the area where the crime was done. The ball is now in the hands of the authorities to act.
If we are really serious about establishing a decent society, the crusade that has been launched by the newly appointed Dar es Salaam Regional Commissioner, Abbas Kandoro must be upheld.
We shouldn’t wait for another campaign, but by the way, the whole society should be held responsible for the crime narrated.
Why? It provided the so called customers, sanctuary to the mother and in away or another knew of the existence of the brothel but kept quiet.
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