The Magic of Saida (11 page)
They spent a few more quiet minutes, each to himself, before Kamal ventured, “What brought you to these parts, Ed? Not business, surely. Where were you before you came to Kilwa?”
Markham shook the ice in his glass, the tinkle startlingly eloquent. “I came to East Africa in 1965,” he said. “Nairobi. The days of Kenyatta. Happy days, generally speaking.”
“And never went back?”
“Once—for the World Cup in sixty-six.”
“England won.”
“They did. Beat the Krauts and that made the win sweeter.”
He had worked as a book salesman initially, got to travel around East Africa, but mainly the three capitals. He took a car dealership in Kampala, in Idi Amin’s Uganda, slipped out in time and became hotel manager and owner in Arusha for many years. Serengeti, Ngorongoro, and all that. A salesmanship for Land Rover enticed him to Dar, disappointed him, and he returned to Arusha to manage a hotel.
It occurred to Kamal that the Englishman had spent more time in the country than he himself had, yet he thought of him as a foreigner. Markham spoke familiarly of events and conditions that happened long after Kamal was gone.
“All South Africans there now, young chaps,” Markham was saying, “can’t bloody well understand them half the time when they speak.”
“South Africans? Where?”
“Arusha. Ran the hotels when I was there.”
They had fired him. He came to Kilwa.
“To the end of the world.”
“The end of the world.”
They clinked glasses.
Markham had come to Kilwa once in the 1980s with a group of archaeologists; that was when he decided it might not be a bad place to retire in.
What had he left behind in England? What part of England, for
that matter? Had he married, did he have children somewhere? Kamal dared not ask.
It was while he looked pityingly at the man that the thought came, Shamim came, intruding once again,
Is this what you want to become. A wretched old stinking bag of an exile dying unnecessarily in a tropical hole
.
To which, riled, he replied as viciously as he could,
That’s one way to think of it, from where you are in your sanitized world. He’ll be buried next to the ocean that brought him here, and you’ll lie embalmed under several feet of snow in the middle of a continent you don’t quite belong to
.
The Composition of the Coming of the Modern Age
.
They had come in their manwari warships from Berlin, bearing instructions from their Kaiser, full of guile, eager to make war and acquire territory, and they coerced the Sultan in Zanzibar to yield them Tanganyika’s coast, the home of the Swahili. In Tanga, Sadani, Pangani, Bagamoyo—great markets of the north—they alighted from their boats and haughtily put up their flags; they shot at the people with their rifles and stormed into the mosques in their boots. The leaders of the coast refused to lower the Sultan’s banner and declared a jihad. They won great victories, but finally their strength was found wanting against the might of the foreigners and they lost. Bushiri bin Salim, the leader of Pangani, was hanged and the people were disheartened. Mwana Heri, the leader of Sadani, fled into the hills.
In the interior of the country, Mkwawa of the Hehe, the bravest of warriors, whose equals you will look for in vain, also fought. A great fortress at Iringa was his lair. To crush this hero, the Germans sent Captain Zelewsky, the warrior who had defeated Bushiri and was known as Nyundo, the Hammer. This Nyundo met his death at Mkwawa’s hands. The furious German government, vowing, Mkwawa we will crush! Nyundo we will avenge! sent the soldier von Prince to do battle against the Hehe. After a long and hard war of seven years, Mkwawa was betrayed where he was hiding,
but when von Prince found him, he had taken his own life. The German cut off the chief’s head and sent it off to Berlin for the Kaiser to look at this African who had resisted him so fiercely. And so the Hehe were left without a head and dispirited.
When we display ignorance of the world and take up battle against greater forces, it’s a bitter lesson we learn.
Kamal sat silent on the grassy verge behind the elders, mesmerized by the world that Mzee Omari had wrought. A gust from the sea shot a shiver through him; the branches overhead swished and swept at the air, as if by this show of force echoing the poet’s last words. A hush had fallen on the scene, and the oracle himself sat still on the tree trunk, a white-clad figure outlined by the night. Kamal could imagine the German askaris—the Somali, the Sudanese, the Zulu—Mzee Omari described them all, with their backpacks, their thick boots, their long rifles at their shoulders, cartridge belts at their waists, pounding the earth, trampling through the jungle, hacking through the bushes as they tracked down Chief Mkwawa of the Hehe, who awaited them. The drum belting out its boom-boom-boom, the men singing hoarsely, “The Hammer will be avenged! Oyé, oyé, Nyundo will be avenged!” All these details Idris the djinn had conjured up for Mzee Omari. Kamal looked around nervously for a sign of that malignant spirit. He stood up, for the men were dispersing, and walked back slowly home in the dark. In the far corner of the square he spied Salemani Mkono the one-armed beggar slinking away into an alley like a rat.
Why would Africans fight fellow Africans on behalf of the Germans, the boy wondered. And now, as we sat together in Dar’s Asian quarter eating bhajias at a vegetarian joint, tormented by an army of flies, discussing distant historic wars and the poet of Kilwa, Kamal said, “What a defeatist message, that one: ‘a bitter lesson we learn.’ ” I replied the obvious, that many African peoples, having tasted heavy defeat, took the prudent decision to cooperate with the Germans. Thus, the next time around, in the great Maji Maji War, the Hehe kept quiet for the most part, as did the Swahili.
We were approaching the real story behind Mzee Omari and his muse, the djinn called Idris.
“Where were you?” Mama asked severely, when he returned. “So now I have to leave my work and go looking for you!”
“I was playing.”
“Playing what?”
“Gololi”—marbles—“with the Indians.”
“Wewe …” She heaved a sigh. She didn’t believe him.
But he could catch a whiff of Bint el Sudan on her, The Beauty of Sudan, the thin, dark bottle of which stood on her table. She had on a new khanga, a white, black, and bright red wraparound, which he did not recall her buying. She too had been out. At such times, when he knew she kept a secret from him, he felt depressed, he couldn’t sleep. She knew his hurt, he could see the sympathy in her eyes. That night as she lay on the mat facing away from him, she muttered, “I am doing all I can for you.” Why wouldn’t she? She was his mama, and he would buy the earth for her, just let him grow up.
Meanwhile, he would get her a present. During mwisho mwezi, the month-end, one or two Asian stores brazenly displayed ready-made clothes on racks and shoes on stands outside their doors to entice customers; so easy to steal. One day he made a resolution. While out selling kashatas, Kamalu hovered outside the shops, wandered by the clothes racks and shoe stands, made his choice. Just as he was about to pick off a pair of bright new plastic sandals for Mama, he became aware of two sharp eyes watching him: a boy his age sitting quietly at the store’s threshold, a comic book on his lap. Pretending to look casual, Kamal wandered away with his tray, bleating, “Kashaataa!” These Indians always had someone watching their goods; to them every African was a thief. They had no right tempting people, especially boys with mothers and no fathers.
But he had gone to steal, hadn’t he? If that Indian boy had not been there, watching, Kamal would have become a thief. He felt ashamed of himself, for the way he had been anticipated. How lucky that boy. What fears could he have? Did he ever go without food at night? How far apart their worlds were.
• • •
The Composition …
Each time he continued with his composition, Mzee Omari began with an altered invocation.
To start Bismil I invoke / the blessed name of He / the Merciful and His servant / Muhammad the honest one / and the blessed Companions …
In Kilwa Kivinje too, and in the nearby towns, they resisted the Germans, not having learned from the defeats of the others.
The trader and warrior Hassan bin Omari, the giant in white kanzu, famously known as Makunganya, celebrated even in our day, began to gather weapons and men. A thousand strong warriors rippled their muscles, hungry for battle. When these majitus stood up in a straight line, a wall of shields and spears extended as far as the eye could strain to see, their voices rose like thunder in the sky and this land called Tanganyika itself trembled with pride. Makunganya vowed to chase out the foreign devils from Kilwa all the way up the coast to Dar es Salaam and there cut off the head of Wissmann, the governor, and to put all the Germans who remained on a ship back to Berlin to the Kaiser. And so when the German force was away fighting Mkwawa of the Hehe, Hassan attacked the Kilwa fortress. The surprise was great, victory was but a breath away; Makunganya’s spies had done their work. But the German commander Schmidt who remained behind was prepared; he too had been listening. And the spear and the shield were no match for the hidden guns that rained bullets. Makunganya escaped. When news of the attack reached Bwana Wissmann in Dar es Salaam, this furious German sent a shipload of his soldiers to Kilwa. Capture Makunganya, he thundered. I will despatch the chief to his God. On the Lindi road, that obstinate chief fought valiantly against the soldiers, until he stood alone against them all. But they would not give the
warrior his death. He was captured and brought to Kilwa. Wissmann himself arrived in his manwari warship to put Makunganya and his collaborators on trial. Boats rowed the German and his men from the warship to the shore. Fierce in his moustache, wearing helmet and boots, his legs apart and arms akimbo, he stared up at the boma in which the prisoners were kept: thus Wissmann the warrior governor. Show me Makunganya, he said.
The trembling voice proceeded in the night narrating events from a distant, hazy past in short, rhyming lines of a slow rhythm, in a poetic, archaic Swahili with Arabic gutturals and stretched vowels not always easy to comprehend … And Punja the Lion, Punja the Lion, when would the poet’s words describe the deeds of Punja, Kamal’s great-grandfather? In the dark Kamal sat waiting anxiously for his ancestor’s turn to come, when he heard a stirring to his side and saw one-armed Salemani Mkono crossing the square, approaching the poet and his audience of old men with an evil grin.
“And weren’t you his slave, you Omari bin Tamim?” The beggar sneered, his voice rough and bitter as a rotten cassava. “Didn’t you sing praises to the German? Wasn’t the white man your master? Didn’t you betray your own blood—”
At which point Salemani, approaching Mzee from the side, spewing forth his venom, felt a push from the djinn Idris and stumbled back, then recovered himself and departed, to jeers and abuses from the assembly.
Polé, Mzee Omari’s companions said, Polé, Mzee, the man is no good. Laana to him!—may he be cursed, that beggar, the son of Iblis, beloved to none!
Mzee Omari stood up and left, his hand on the shoulder of Saida, who had accompanied him that night.
Kamal went home crying.
Mzee Omari, the most venerated of men, pious and gifted, the town’s own poet and historian, had suffered an insult. How could that be? His face had clouded, and for the briefest moment it seemed
to fold and he was someone else. This was too much. But the next day all seemed normal; those who knew, knew. Salemani continued to hover about town, despised as always, but Mzee Omari’s night recitals stopped. He is not ready, it was said, he is composing. When Kamal contrived to go and buy vitumbua from Bi Kulthum one morning, Mzee Omari was at the porch as usual, having kahawa by himself; his greeting was elaborate as always, but the hand was limp, the voice was from somewhere else.
It was as if the Mzee Omari he had known was gone.
He had asked his mother about it the morning after the incident.
“Mama, that Makunganya—he was a great man, a jitu, who fought the colonialists—sio?”
“Eh,” his mother agreed. “That he was. But he was also a slaver who captured and sold my grandmother. Or it was his men who did that.”
“Could he be my ancestor, eti?”
“Maybe.”
He took a little time debating with himself whether to tell Mama about the previous night. She would be angry. But he had to tell her. It was too important.
“Mama.”
“Naam?”
He told her, and her response, which he expected, was, “Didn’t I tell you not to go listen to those old men at night?”
“But Mama—why did Salemani say that?”
“That fool says anything that comes to his head.”
She was busy ironing, and they both were quiet, he watching her. If she got tired or had something else to do, she would ask him to take over the chore.
Finally she said, “I will tell you. This is only what I have heard.
“Long ago Salemani was a pupil of Mzee Omari in the German school. One day after the Maji Maji War, a German bigwig came to Kilwa by steamer from Dar es Salaam. A great public meeting took place outside the boma, right there where you say that crazy man insulted our Mzee, and there Mzee Omari recited a poem in this bigwig’s honour. The next day in class Salemani taunted him—just as he did last night. He was punished. He was given the
khamsa-ishirin—twenty-five strokes of the whip—and then sent off north to work on the railways. He returned many years later with only one arm and a little crazy.”
“But why did Mzee Omari honour the German?”
“Eh? He was young. And what would you do when the man holds a whip and your job in his hand?”
Salemani’s language was coarse, his intonation different from that of most men of the coast. He evidently came from somewhere else; possibly he was a Nyamwezi from near Tabora. Some years ago, the District Commissioner had him dispatched to Dodoma, to the big hospital for mad people. He had returned crazier than before.