The Game: Mjanja, Mjinga, and the LA Times Walkout
The BoldTimers Oral History Project • The Thumb Piano That Opens Doors • Chapter 2
David opened our second conversation the same way he opens a lot of doors: with a compliment and a grin.
“That color looks pretty darn good on you,” he said, looking at my shirt on camera. Then he followed it with a jab that landed like a friendly elbow: “When you wear those kinds of shirts, people think you play golf, right?”
It was an ordinary start. Two men on a Monday afternoon. Santa Cruz on his side. Southern California on mine. Coffee in the background. Life rolling forward.
And then, as usual with David, a small moment turned into a lesson about how the world works.
Chapter 1 was about the stage—Pete Seeger, 15,000 people, and an African thumb piano. This chapter is about something quieter and more powerful: the rules of the game.
Because David has spent a lifetime switching between worlds (countries, professions, languages, social circles), he learned early that the difference between connection and conflict often comes down to one thing: whether people know what game you’re playing.
The thumb piano as a key
When I asked David what drove him to help one of his career counseling clients meet Jane Goodall, he started with an honest motive: he wanted an excuse to go, and he wanted to give his client a moment she’d never forget.
Her name was Deborah. She had lived several lives herself, professional model, image consultant, jewelry business, and designer. In one session, David asked her a simple question: “Is there a woman on the planet whom you respect a lot and would love to meet someday?”
Deborah said quickly: Jane Goodall.
David checked the calendar and discovered Goodall was giving a lecture at the Flint Center at De Anza College the following week. “Would you like to go with me?” he asked.
Deborah’s body started shaking just imagining being in the same room with her. Mainly because some forms of public recognition turn human beings into untouchable objects in our minds.
They went. They sat in the balcony, far enough away that Goodall looked “about an inch high,” David said. When the lecture ended, David turned to Deborah and said, “We’re going to go meet her now.”
He hadn’t met Goodall before either, he told me. That detail didn’t slow him down.
They walked toward the stage. Security formed the usual perimeter. And somehow David and Deborah got through.
David had brought the same tool he carried into so many unfamiliar rooms: his African thumb piano.
He walked right up to Jane Goodall like they were old friends. “Hey Jane,” he said. “It’s really great to see you. I wanted to play you a little tune on my African thumb piano.”
Goodall knew the instrument. She had worked in Tanzania. David played. Introductions happened. Hugs happened. Deborah shook like a leaf while holding the kind of moment people think they’ll never be allowed to have.
Then David asked for a photograph. Goodall said yes. They took the picture.
To David, the whole scene made perfect sense: “She’s just another human being.”
And then he said the line that should be printed on the back of every glossy magazine cover: publicity can make someone feel untouchable, even when they never chased that status in the first place. I thought to myself, indeed.
Gravity doesn’t care who you are
David has a way of pulling the conversation back to the body. In the middle of our talk about fame and access, he shrugged and reminded me, “Regardless of our notoriety, we’re all dealing with gravity—and it never gives up.”
I told him about my own small encounter with gravity that week: a breakfast burrito, a cup of water, too much in my hands, and an unthinking moment where I dropped the cup and spilled water everywhere in a coffee shop. The kind of mess that makes you blush for a second, until you remember everyone has been there.
David riffed immediately: “They say don’t cry over spilled milk. What do you say when you spill water?”
I told him, “Let it evaporate.”
This is part of the point. Humor is a social technology. It lowers threat. It reopens attention. It gives people room to breathe together.
The pollinator of Santa Cruz
David called himself, through a friend’s nickname, “the pollinator of Santa Cruz.” He connects people the way bees connect fields: not because he needs the credit, but because he can’t help noticing what might happen if two lives touched.
He told me why he does it. If he introduces two people he respects, he gets to sit back and listen to how they draw each other out. He learns things he would never learn in a one-on-one conversation, because people reveal different parts of themselves when a third mind enters the room.
He gave me an example from his life right now: a monthly coffee conversation with a friend named Bruce, someone who once helped start the Santa Cruz Guitar Company, later became a marriage and family therapist, and now travels the world sourcing specialty acoustic wood for major guitar makers. David recently met another man, a psychiatrist with more than five decades of practice. He invited both of them to coffee—not to perform, but to listen.
That’s what a connector does. He shares stories, and he creates conditions for more stories to happen.
Back to Tanzania: the two words that changed everything
At a certain point, I asked David the question that matters for this whole project: where did you pick that up? Where did this instinct to connect, to improvise, to read a room come from?
He answered in plain language.
David spent three years in Tanzania (1965–1968). When he arrived, he had to learn Swahili. Then he learned greetings in the local language of the people he lived with, the Nyakyusa.
In that culture, he said, storytelling was entertainment and a social skill. It was a way to earn respect, make friends, and prove you could move with the group instead of against it.
David told me he realized he needed to become an “mjanja” rather than an “mjinga.”
He spelled them out:
Mjanja (M-J-A-N-J-A): the clever one, the improviser, the storyteller who can make something up on the spot and pull a crowd into it.
Mjinga (M-J-I-N-G-A): the fool—the person who can’t read the fiction, can’t play along, can’t create the story.
David wanted to be the insider who could participate. He wanted to be respected. So he practiced. He learned how to make up stories. He learned how to invite people into play.
And it worked. He made friends quickly. He got embedded. He became fluent in the social rhythm of the place.
But then he came home.
The LA Times walkout
Here’s the problem with learning a powerful cultural skill: you can forget it has context.
David told me that when he returned to the United States, he was still in “mjanja mode.” He was still making up stories—sometimes for fun, sometimes because improvisation had become natural.
His father was proud of him for doing meaningful work in a hospital for three years. He invited groups of people to dinner. David showed slides from Africa and told stories.
Then his father invited another group the next week, and David told a completely different set of stories.
His father misinterpreted it as lying. He got worried. He thought something might be wrong with his son.
Then the organization that had sent David to Africa, the American Friends Service Committee, asked him to sit down for an interview with two Los Angeles Times reporters in Pasadena.
David walked into that office and made a mistake that still feels vivid decades later: he didn’t explain the game.
He didn’t tell them, “I’m about to show you how storytelling works in the culture I lived in.” He didn’t say, “For the next few minutes, we’re going to talk in fiction.”
He just started making things up on the spot.
The reporters were disturbed. They walked out.
It’s one of those moments you can feel in your gut even through someone else’s memory: a door that was open, closing mid-step.
David’s takeaway became clarity.
If you’re talking in nonfiction, and you want to shift into fiction, you have to name it. You have to tell the other person what rules you’re using. Otherwise, they will experience you as dishonest—even if you’re trying to invite them into something deeper.
“If I can get you to agree,” David said, “for the next five minutes to talk in fiction where we just make stuff up as we go along, we can have a lot of fun… and sometimes we’ll say things that are even more truthful than if we were talking in nonfiction.”
This is the heart of the chapter. The lesson is “improvise.” And the lesson is “set the context.”
Comedy, improv, and the truth hiding in embarrassment
David connected this idea to something he learned over decades of career counseling, including work with professional comedians.
Comedians, he told me, all said some version of the same thing: when you get on stage, announce who you are. Tell the audience you’re a comedian. If you don’t, they’ll feel insulted by what you say.
Then you do the second move: you tell the truth about embarrassing subject matter. People laugh because they recognize themselves in it. The body reacts before the mind can defend itself.
I told David my spilled-water story again and admitted the truth: yes, most of the time when I make people laugh, I’m laughing at myself first.
David’s point landed clean: humor is often truth wearing a safer shirt.
Why this matters for BoldTimers
This is where David’s story stops being a fascinating personal history and turns into a field manual for the rest of us.
If you’re building a new chapter of life after 50, you’re going to step into rooms where you don’t know the rules: new industries, new communities, new identities, new rhythms. You’ll be tempted to perform. You’ll be tempted to hide. You’ll be tempted to apologize for being new.
David shows a different path: declare the game you’re playing and invite people into it.
That’s what the thumb piano has been for him. It’s an instrument, yes. It’s also a signal. A way to say, “I’m safe. I’m curious. I’m here to connect,” before the words arrive.
It’s also what I try to do in my work on “What Time Binds”: help people rebuild shared meaning when our tools and our emotions push us into misreadings. We get into trouble when we assume the other person is playing the same game we are. We get out of trouble when we clarify the rules together.
David’s LA Times walkout is a small story with a big warning label: don’t make people guess your intent.
Chapter objects
If Chapter 1 gave us the stage and the crowd, Chapter 2 gives us a new set of “chapter objects”—anchors that can hold the memory in place:
Two Swahili words: “mjanja” and “mjinga.”
An office in Pasadena where an interview ended early.
A simple rule: name the game before you play it.
A thumb piano that keeps opening doors.
Where we go next
Next week, I’m going to ask David to bring the thumb piano and play it on camera. I want to hear it—not as a symbol, but as sound. Then I’m going to do what I do: describe what I heard, and ask what that sound has carried for him across decades.
Because the longer we talk, the clearer the pattern gets: David doesn’t use music to escape life. He uses music to enter it—one room, one handshake, one story at a time.
About the Author
Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D., is the co-founder and Chief Community Officer at BoldTimers, where he works with purpose-driven adults 50+ to design meaningful, experience-grounded next chapters. He also publishes What Time Binds on Substack, exploring how our tools outpace our wisdom—and what it takes to rebuild shared meaning, better judgment, and long-horizon thinking in everyday life. A United States Marine Corps veteran and educator, he is