And Home Was Kariakoo (37 page)

He had owned a petrol station. Early morning on the day of the revolution one of his workers phoned to tell him not to come to the station, there was trouble in town. Chagpar called up the mukhi,
the Khoja headman, and started walking towards the khano. As he approached it he saw on the quiet, narrow street a woman coming towards him, very obviously in grief. Her two sons had just been killed before her eyes. He and the mukhi put up a few people in the khano, then after a day or so the others arrived and the khano filled up to become a shelter in God’s house.

He says, dramatically, “Don’t ask me what I saw during the revolution, ask what I didn’t see. Murder, rape, you name it—everything happened.”

His favourite story is about how he was made an army major by Karume, the new president of Zanzibar (and vice-president of Tanzania).

Abeid Karume was somewhat of a laughingstock among the educated on the mainland.
Time
had likened him in build to the boxer Sonny Liston, whom the handsome and sharp-witted Muhammad Ali had just beaten. There were schoolboy jokes about his impromptu utterings, and he was clearly an embarrassment to Nyerere, the Union president, a sophisticated man educated at Edinburgh and a translator of Shakespeare. But Karume was a canny politician.

One day some policemen came to Chagpar’s office and told him, “Come, the president wants to see you.”

A summons like that could mean jail, or execution; he could disappear. Fearfully, Chagpar followed the men and got into their car. At State House, where he was taken, he sat at a table and waited nervously. Then Karume strode in with his underlings.

“Waswahili ni wezi,” Karume said bluntly to Chagpar’s face. The Waswahili—the local Africans—are thieves. This is a stereotype some Asians might have used.

“But I never said that!” Chagpar protested, utterly shocked.

“All of them are thieves!”

“I didn’t say that, Your Excellency. I swear by the Almightly, I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t say it,
I
say it! Give him orange juice,” Karume commanded.

Chagpar was given orange juice.

It turned out that money was being pilfered from the army, and Karume wanted Chagpar, an Asian, to keep the army’s accounts. Chagpar said he was not an army person. “You are now a major,” Karume declared.

A bizarre story and typical of the times, of the randomness of the leaders and the fears of the minorities. It was Karume who introduced an amendment to the Marriage Act to force Asian girls to marry Africans; these men were usually elderly and connected to the government. A girl as young as fifteen or sixteen had only to catch the eye of a passing elderly bigwig for a marriage offer to arrive. Refusal of such a proposal was punishable by a fine or imprisonment and possibly a corporal punishment of twenty-four strokes of the cane. But this was mere legalese, much more could happen to a family if it refused the offer. In response to the act, families married off their girls posthaste to boys through the usual family and community connections; many girls escaped by boat to Dar. The case became notorious because four of the girls so coerced were Iranians, of whom one committed suicide. The intention of the act, Chagpar says, was to increase racial integration. Soon we will become like Cuba, Karume told him, where you cannot distinguish among the races. One wonders.

“When we read
Animal Farm
in school we thought it was just a funny story about animals. Well, after the revolution I understood that book, because Zanzibar had become Animal Farm. Everything was upside-down.”

Chagpar had to undergo military training, and his instructors
were Russians. Because he knew English, he was also their interpreter. Soon he was making a fat salary. He recalls personally putting people on boats to escape to the mainland.

Not far from my hotel on Kenyatta Road is the old English Club, a large boxlike structure. Next to it is the old German Consulate. Behind these stands the stylish and expensive Serena Inn, where today’s foreign delegations put up. The nightly cultural entertainment and menus of local food at the Serena promise to be good, though the lengths of human flesh stretched out inert by the pool tend to discourage any thought of lingering there over a beer or coffee. Close by is Vuga Road, which has some interesting traditional-style buildings with white facades, balconies, and arched windows. Most impressive is the court building, now dilapidated but still in use, an example of what the historian Abdul Sheriff calls Saracenic architecture—with arched doorways and windows, verandas and balconies, dark wooden trimming, and raised domes—a style in fact introduced by a British official named J.H. Sinclair. An example of this style farther down the road is the old Aga Khan School, now part
of the local university. Close by is the new Majestic Cinema; the old one, burnt down in a fire, was also in the Saracenic style, the new one is a pastiche art deco structure in typical twentieth-century cinema style.

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Photo Caption 20.1
)

The bloodletting of the revolution therefore has not carried over into a violence against the past in the form of its monuments and architecture. Zanzibar remains a puzzle. Unlike Dar es Salaam, Zanzibar’s Stone Town has preserved its distinct physical character. Its economic power is gone, the political landscape has altered, yet the island thrives on its historical and cultural connections, in the same way, I am reminded, that Shimla, the former British summer capital of India, does. Zanzibar now hosts film, book, and music festivals. It promotes traditional taarab music—when the ancient diva, “the Queen of Taarab” Bi Kidude, died recently, the entire coastal region of the nation mourned. And Zanzibar likes to tell its stories. Of course it’s also moved closer to Oman, where everyone—one is told—has links to Zanzibar, and Swahili is the second language.

Dar es Salaam, in contrast, is a market that keeps on growing as it destroys and alters the cityscape. It seems to remember nothing.

A friend has arranged to have a car take me to Kizimkazi, a village near the southern tip of the island. We pass on a quiet road through a forested region to reach the village—a scattering of houses—at the edge of which in the midst of farmland is its famous mosque, built in 1107 and still in use, except for the Friday prayer. Today is Friday and 1 p.m., the caretaker is praying at the village’s other mosque. He arrives on his bicycle to open this ancient one for us. It is a square white building with a green, corrugated, and sloping double-roof. The inside has three original fat pillars, newly plastered and painted green and white. The front—the qibla—is also original, with a row
of Kufic inscriptions on the line of bricks above that give the date of the mosque’s construction, by settlers believed to have come from Iran. Unfortunately the inscriptions have been oil-painted over, a prettifying defacement much lamented by historians. Because the mosque has been in continuous use, it has seen regular renovation, and that is the reason why it doesn’t look typically ancient.

On the way back we cross over to the southeastern coast of the isle, to an area called Makunduchi. Here Muslim Indians from the Kumbhad (potter) caste had settled in the nineteenth or early twentieth century, becoming completely accultured to native life. (The Kumbhads of Dar es Salaam, in contrast, are Hindus.) Already in 1925 it was observed that the Kumbhads of Makunduchi, called Makumbaro, spoke Kihadimu, the local Swahili dialect, as fluently as the local Africans, called the Hadimu and considered indigenous. The Makumbaro were from Kutch and Kathiawad, in Gujarat, and were the only people on the island who used the camel for transportation. There were thirty families in the area. Kihadimu was very distinct from Kiswahili (Swahili) and for an outsider took some effort to understand, as we find even now when we stop to ask if there are any Makumbaro around. After a few queries, we are directed to a house that’s one among a cluster, well built and plastered; outside in the yard two children, who look of mixed race, are at play. We knock and are met by an Asian man wearing shorts and an open shirt, who greets us warmly in Swahili, welcomes us to join him for a lunch of rice, stew, and mango. We decline politely. He says that all the Makumbaro have moved to the towns; they used to run shops. This must have been, presumably, after they gave up their traditional occupation of working with clay.

As we drive back, we pass on the highway signboards indicating tourist restaurants, which are closer to the water and not obviously
visible; and men in white kanzus and kofias walking back casually from Friday prayers. It is a quiet, tranquil scene, ours the only vehicle for long stretches of the road, which is often shaded by the trees. When we reach the town I treat the driver to a lunch at Passing Show, where they have run out of pilau and banana, so we opt for chicken and fish biriyanis.

Two men in their sixties, one of whom, Shiraz, left forty-eight years ago for the U.K., soon after the revolution, at the age of sixteen. His Swahili is halting and accented. The other, Sadru, left more than thirty years ago for Toronto. Both have children and families abroad; Shiraz is divorced from his English wife, Sadru is widowed. And now—this is a typically Zanzibari attitude—they both feel utterly at home here, where they run a much-appreciated dental clinic. Shiraz is a long-experienced dentist from Brighton, Sadru is the manager. They have converted a storage room into a consultancy, having had it cleaned and painted and installed with a dentist’s long chair and other equipment. Judging by the looks on the patients’ faces as they wait outside to be called, these two men are a godsend. As I arrive, a root canal is in progress.

A woman in her sixties lies on the chair, mouth open. Shiraz instructs an assistant, a qualified young graduate; Sadru stands by with the cement for the filling. A generator rattles away somewhere; mains electricity is unreliable. Sadru usually takes care of the business end, banking and buying supplies. He also lectures the patients on dental care while they wait. The clinic charges what the patient can afford to pay. European prices for Europeans, though, to make ends meet. Some donations come from Toronto. The men work hard, five and a half days a week, plus a half-day to take care of business.

They live on the first floor of a traditional-style white house off the main drag that is Kenyatta Avenue, not far from the practice. All around them, NGO residences, SUVs parked outside. The building is owned by an old Khoja family. Shiraz is a Bohra, Sadru an Ithnasheri. Shiraz, who has acquired his accent and mannerisms from the U.K., doesn’t practise his faith anymore, but one day, he says, he went to pay his respects to the local Bohra mulla, who received him cordially—which community doesn’t appreciate a doctor or dentist in its midst? Shiraz had put on a kofia for the occasion, out of respect. But having met the mulla, as he came out of the room he was accosted by a young man for not wearing the traditional Bohra hat. (I didn’t even know that such a thing existed.) There were more youthful fanatics waiting as Shiraz came out of the building, threatening to beat him up for his effrontery. He looks nonplussed as he narrates this, and I ask, But why did you bother to go? The answer, though he does not put it this way, is simple: it’s not so easy to break off one’s traditional ties completely. Reason says one thing, the heart pulls the other way.

It is Saturday night, and the anniversary of the Prophet’s death, so Sadru dresses up, cologne and all, and goes to his mosque. He returns late, past midnight, having paid a visit to an Arab friend. She went to school with him, he says.

As boys both Shiraz and Sadru witnessed at close hand the violence of the Zanzibar revolution. Shiraz was smuggled out on a boat at night and after reaching Dar, ended up in Tanga at his married sister’s. Sadru was sent off to Dar by his brother. And yet here they are, home in a way, living out their senior years in the place where they grew up, still belonging to it. It’s not that they are not aware of race; they are, as everyone here is; their attitudes regarding efficiency and punctuality have also altered. But Zanzibar is a small place and
different peoples have lived together for centuries. Memories of the aberration and nightmare that was the 1964 revolution remain but are being set aside to continue on with the simple process of living. The people are Zanzibaris first. Regardless of their politics, the overwhelming majority being Muslims, they all bow to Mecca during prayers, and on the Prophet’s birthday and during the Eids they all come out to celebrate. Islam—in principle—does not distinguish between races. The first person to make the call to prayer in Mecca was a black man named Bilal.