The Magic of Saida (13 page)
Kamal hesitated, concerned that there should not be a wrong impression. He could say they were like brother and sister; but that was a lie they would see through, and it would make him suspect. He could not understand this reticence, this cloak of secrecy about Saida. This whole elaborate performance for a simple question: Where was she? Was something wrong, or did they simply intend to squeeze some benefit out of him?
“Our mothers were like sisters. The closest of friends. I want to find out what happened to her. That is the absolute truth. I swear to you by God.”
“And you want to help her?”
“Yes … What help does she need?”
“And how can you help us?”
She looked away, with the flourish of a chess master having made a decisive gambit. Was she expecting money? Her arrogance amazed him; where did it come from? What made her feel so superior—that someone like him had come to beg at her door?
“Now look,” Lateef scolded. “Stop harassing the doctor. He’s a Swahili like you and I. Why do you have to try to extort from him?”
“We all need help,” Fatuma replied, unfazed.
“He’ll look at your ailment, he said. If you want.”
“Can’t he talk for himself, if he’s a Swahili, as you say?” she retorted. “I have yet to meet a Swahili who can hold his tongue.”
Kamal laughed out loud. “I will examine you, if you wish, my mother. But please help me. I beg of you.” Tafadhali. I have come a long way for her.
It appeared that he had been tested, more or less, and had passed, because some kahawa was brought for them all. And he discovered over kahawa that Bi Kulthum had been Fatuma’s older sister. He could have wept with joy.
It was, said Kamal to me later, despite the suspicion and the runaround that preceded it, a most significant moment. Before him sat the old poet’s daughter, no less; Saida’s aunt. I’ve done it, he murmured to himself, I’ve discovered her. I’m back. He grasped the tawiz around his neck. His pleasure was so radiant on his face, the other three people on the porch all smiled back at him.
“What have you there?” asked Fatuma.
“A tawiz,” he replied, clutching it again. “Saida gave it to me … when I left.”
“Show it to me.”
He handed it to her, and she held it in her palm, gave it a quick look before handing it back.
“Where is Saida?” he asked. “What happened to her?”
“That, we don’t know,” Fatuma said and looked away again, almost casually. Taunting him. And all his hope and joy turned to ash.
“You don’t know? You don’t know where your child lives—the daughter of your sister? How can that be, Bi Fatuma?”
She looked straight at him and said, “Then how come you don’t know, you who claim to care? We don’t know where she is, I tell you.”
Why the change of heart—for so it seemed? Was the knowledge so precious that—just like a child—she could not bear to share it?
Kamal stood up, his dejection as evident as his pleasure had been a moment ago. “Could you inquire with any jamaa, any relatives, if they have news of her?” he asked her desperately.
“I will.”
As Kamal and his guide reached the door, Fatuma called out, “Daktari, I’ll come and show you my ailment.”
“You are most welcome,” Kamal replied.
This wasn’t the end of the matter, he was certain. There were a few moments in that backyard when the tension had eased, and there was a willingness to talk. Saida had been there. He had found her. But where was she?
Lateef left him at the taxi stand, joining there a rough-looking man who had been waiting anxiously for him, and together they hurried off towards the harbour. From what Kamal could overhear, a ship had been loaded and the captain needed some money.
It occurred to Kamal that he knew next to nothing about the man who had devoted himself to helping him.
The Composition of the Coming of the Modern Age
.
By now the Germans had vanquished the Swahili coast. They had hanged Bushiri bin Salim in Pangani and Hassani Makunganya in Kilwa, together with their allies and companions. They had defeated Mwana Heri in Sadani. And many others too. They had defeated proud Mkwawa, chief of the Hehe, who chose to take his own life. With arrogance and verve they cut his head off and sent his skull to Berlin. Our lives had changed, we were the subjects of the Germans, to do as they commanded. We grew cotton where we had grown maize and millet; we paid taxes and learned their language; we were sent north to carry lengths of iron and build the railways. We cleaned their houses and carried their women, who were too precious to touch our earth. We bowed, accepted the yoke, and became their slaves. Like a shetani they stole our spirit. Like a worm that enters the body and eats you from inside, draining your strength, they turned us weak and helpless.
Now in the land of Matumbi, in the place known as Ngarambe, rose a wizard, a mganga from the waters, who was known as Hongo, who was called Kinjikitilé, who called on the people to come to his kijumba-shrine and take the magic water, the maji, and beat the war drum. They came in their hundreds from all around singing their woes and their hopes and brought their offerings, and he said we must repossess our land and he sprinkled them with the
magic water. Go, he said, with this magic water on you, and the rifles of the Germans will turn limp like the penises of old men, their bullets will fall like water from your bodies. The ugly German will become weak like a fish. We are sultans; we are the Sultan of Zanzibar. But for this maji to work you must follow instructions. You will not loot. You will not eat meat. You will desist from relations with your women. And word spread through the country like the whisper of the wind that the white man could hear but not discern. Have you heard? There is a mganga in Ngarambe. This is the year of war. We are suffering, and there is this fundi in Ngarambe called Kinjikitilé who has the medicine.
The people made war; they uprooted cotton and threw it on the ground, and thus they declared war. With their spears, their bows and arrows, they attacked the towns; they set the shops on fire. Planter and overseer, askari and jumbe, all these they killed. All over southern Tanganyika the cry of Maji! rang with a roar, the Germans trembled. Then the government came with their foreign troops, with guns that rained bullets without end. But it was not a rain of water, it was a rain of steely death. Kinjikitilé was captured and hanged. Elsewhere the fighters were defeated and hanged.
Following the defeat of the warriors, the Day of Judgment came, Jehanna arrived on this land, and the archangel was the German; grief and hopelessness, drought and starvation befell the land; poverty and hunger was the lot of the people. The Germans, like God’s angels when in His fury He sent them to punish the Egyptians, scorched the farms and forests to deprive the warriors of food. They burned granaries, they destroyed huts and villages; people slept in the forest and were devoured by lions. If you asked a beggar in Kilwa or in Dar es Salaam, Where do you come from? he would tell you, I come from a place that does not exist. I have seen it and played in it, my ancestors’ spirits lived in it, but it is now smoke and ashes. I am but nothing.
• • •
The Maji Maji vita—the War of the Waters—was called a rebellion in our schoolbooks; the image cultivated was of gangs of half-naked, chanting, superstitious Africans foolishly pitting their spears and bows and arrows against the most modern machine guns. Now we are told that the uprising involved large swathes of the country; as many as three hundred thousand Africans—some ten to fifteen percent of the population—perished from the scorched-earth tactics employed at the direction of the governor, von Götzen. Fifteen Europeans were killed. A genocide, as some call it? Perhaps not. But that’s only a word to allocate a star to a measure of destruction and death. Now, a century later, a modern German government acknowledges the atrocities of a predecessor.
Meanwhile, we in this—and other—nations must face a conundrum: How do we accept those who collaborated with our colonizers? Worked for them; put on boots and uniform and took up arms on their behalf against fellow Africans. Were they traitors or simply practical and realistic? This was the dilemma put to me by Kamal. It is the shameful part of the history of any nation that is often glossed over in silence. The policemen who brought down their sticks on the skulls of Gandhi’s followers were fellow Indians; those who hunted the Mau Mau in Kenya and the ANC in South Africa were in large numbers fellow Africans.
How to judge, then, the poet who yielded, who took up his pen and praised our oppressors, and gave them legitimacy? To resist was heroic, but was it better for some to create, to record, to learn and to survive?
“As a boy I was moved by Mzee Omari’s stories of resistance,” said Kamal. “Mkwawa. Makunganya. Kinjikitilé. These were the heroes. How could you not be proud of them, when we were on the verge of our independence? When our own flag now flew outside every shop and house. There were processions, meetings, songs, poetry; the radio was listened to avidly, just to confirm, yes, freedom was coming, we would have our own prime minister! And so how to explain the old man’s pride in his association with the German colonizers? He was a man of great dignity, much loved. It was impossible to imagine that under that venerable, ancient exterior of our poet-historian there lurked something else, so fragile—and guilty?”
In the anthology of Swahili poetry which had become Kamal’s faithful companion during this visit to Kilwa, and which he had possessed for many years now, there was one short poem by Mzee Omari and nothing else by him. Other poets in the book had written touchingly about their loves, and about aspects of their faith. Mzee Omari’s poem was about the German governor. It was distressing to read.
The German Bwana is fair
He looks after us
But he is strong, watch out
If you are thinking mischief
.
He watches us, the Governor
Bwana Schnee in the European city
Called Bendaressalaam to our north
As beautiful as Berlin itself
.
This wise sultan from Europe
Governs the coast of Swahil
From Tanga in the north
Through Dar essalaam, Pangani
,
Our Kilwa Kivinje and
Down to Lindi in the south;
His manwari steamers
Prowl our ocean with canons
.
How different the tone, the message of these abject lines compared to that of his majestic, upright utenzi, the magnum opus,
The Composition
…! According to the book, the eulogy was written in 1907, when Mzee Omari was a young teacher at the German school in Kilwa. It was for reading such lines in public in honour of a German official at the town plaza that Salemani Mkono had taunted him, at the very same venue fifty years later: “Didn’t you sing praises to the German?”
Yes, he did, and Kamal had seen that flash of pain cross Mzee
Omari’s face when he heard that stinging taunt. Couldn’t the editors have picked a better poem than this for their anthology? They had included a short biography of the poet, which read:
Omari bin Tamim, a.k.a. Mzee Omari, was born in Kilwa Kivinje c. 1880, according to von Rode, German Commissioner in Kilwa, 1905–1910. It is likely that the poet witnessed the suppression of Hassan bin Omari Makunganya by the Germans and the punishments inflicted on the rebels, including hangings at the “Hanging Mango tree.” It is certain that he witnessed the Maji Maji war. It is not known when he attended the German school but he was a teacher when von Rode commissioned this poem, which was later included in a collection sent to Berlin and read to the German parliament. Omari’s older brother, Mwalimu Sheikh Karim Abdelkarim Qadri, was also a poet. As the last name indicates, the older brother was a member of a Sufi tarika. He is known to have been involved in the Maji Maji uprising. Sheikh Abdelkarim was tried in 1909 in Kilwa for conspiracy against the government and hanged. None of his works have survived.
Sitting in the quiet refuge of his study in Edmonton, Kamal had often contemplated this summary of a life which had touched him so deeply as a boy, and tried to understand it. Carl Schmidt’s grave was in the old German cemetery that he and Saida would visit during their escapades. Mzee Omari, she had told him, stopped there regularly to pay his respects and recite the Fatiha; Kamal had stood beside her as she too recited that Quranic verse for the dead German. They did likewise at the grave of Mzee’s brother Abdelkarim in the cemetery of the Sharrifs farther up the road.
One day Bi Kulthum told Mama that Mzee Omari was behaving strangely. He had stopped writing. He had run out of paper, and ink for his pen, and said rather obtusely that he had no money with which to replace them. He slept badly and was quarrelsome at home.
They could even hear him abusing his djinn in his room. Mama said she had a solution. She sent Kamal over to the old man with a sheaf of papers the two of them had torn out from an old exercise book. Kamal also took along a pencil and an eraser.
It was Bi Kulthum who met him at the door and sent him to the old man’s room. For a long moment Kamal stood nervously outside in the dark corridor of the Swahili-style house. Then timidly he knocked on the warped, wooden door. Mzee Omari surprisingly heard him and opened the door, saw him with his dim sight, and asked, “What have you brought for me, child?”
Bi Kulthum had already informed him that Hamida’s son had arrived bringing an offering.
“Paper and pencil and eraser,” Kamal replied. Karatasi na kalamu na raba.
Mzee Omari accepted them and thanked him gracefully; then, as if in afterthought, he bade Kamal come inside and sit next to him on the mat, behind his writing desk. Kamal went in and sat down at the spot as told. He could smell a faint odour of agarbatti in the air. A block of sunlight streamed in through the window behind them, dust motes dancing in the morning’s golden rays. Opposite them on the wall, the two faded photographs; on the right, the certificate. Nothing else but the mat and the desk, and the rolled-up bedding in the corner. He turned nervously towards the poet.