Uncle Anargyros learns to drive..

N. Rhodesia ( Zambia now) circa 1957 and uncle Anargyros, who was living next to us at the time, decided he had to learn to drive. Even my 11 yr-old brain could tell that a wildebeest had a better chance of learning the mambo.

Still.. one day, he took his poor driver, a reasonable and sweet black man, some other greek guy, and me as a kind of ballast.. and off we went for his maiden voyage.

the infamous uncle Anargyros 

It was at this point in my barely 11 yr-old life that I became acquainted with the true meaning of fear.

Uncle Anargyros looked like Moe of the Three Stooges, wore his pants so high that his waistline was just under his nipples but, perhaps more importantly, had a violent temper and no sense of decorum or shame.

He hated every aspect of existence in british N. Rhodesia and the image of himself ( whom he viewed as a fallen but respectable small-shop owner) selling mealy-meal flour in kiaffa-market brought ulcers to his already overtaxed stomach.

The Three Stooges

It was thus understandable that, for him, learning to drive under the guidance of a black man was yet one more visible manifestation of his giant downward slide on the social ladder.  So, with every lurch and screech of the clutch he would come face to face with his limitations and take it out on the poor driver showering him with oaths and verbal abuse in Greek, cursing his inability to magically bestow driving abilities and certain that all this was a kind of plot to keep him away from the elite circle of men who drive..!

I was convinced that that the logical end of all this would be to strangle us all, set fire to the car to punish it for not remotely behaving as it should, and in a final operatic act, throw himself to the lions while singing the greek anthem.

It didn’t help either that he took the wrong road, went through a native compound where rabid picanins started throwing stones at our car. We narrowly escaped with our lives. ( if you thought apartheid in S. Africa was bad.. English rule in N. Rhodesia was worse ! )

Eventually we returned, exhausted, psychologically scarred beyond repair, as if we had crossed to the “other side” and back again.. the car pouring black smoke from the indignities it had suffered.. and uncle Anargyros beaming and reporting to his wife that he thought it went “pretty well”.

He never learnt to drive which is just as well.. he would have become a legendary figure of african road rage, an Osama bin Laden of the roadways.. cursing at the clutch and shaking his fist at the traffic lights.