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.
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