The Magic of Saida (14 page)

Mzee Omari leaned forward and brought out from under the desk a sheet of paper and placed it on top.

“Can you read Kiarabu?” he asked.

“Yes,” Kamal replied, then hastily added: “A little—only a little.” Saida came home only occasionally now, and practice by himself was not so compelling. Besides, reading the big and bold Arabic letters in his Juzu was different from the script placed before him, which looked like a shaky trail left by a crab on the sand.

“Read this, then,” Mzee Omari commanded, pointing a finger at the page on the desk. But the page was upside down, and so in a barely audible voice, Kamal inquired, “Can I turn it …?”

Mzee smiled and turned around the paper himself.

All Kamal could recall reading from that page that morning was the first word,
auwali
, “in the beginning,” which much to his lasting
shame came to him after some effort. When he finished the verse, with not a little assistance from Mzee Omari, the elder smiled and said, “Nzuri, you have done well … you have read the mwanzo, the beginning.” He picked up the paper and put it back under the desk. Then he picked up a small sheaf of manuscripts from his side and made as if to read the top one, and recited a verse. Then another, and another in that steel-edged, sinuating voice that grabbed your insides. And Kamal’s own heart pounding. But did he detect the slightest tremor in that throat? Kamal glanced around. He should have been proud of this privilege, being sung to by the town’s eminent poet and elder, yet he felt oppressed, felt an intense urge to dash out of that bleak, empty, and haunted room echoing with the poetry that he normally so much adored.

Mzee Omari stopped reading and said, “Go then. Nenda zako. Come back when there is more paper. God will bless you …” He kept muttering as Kamal left the room. As he hurried out into the corridor, he felt someone trip him: it could only be the jealous djinn, Idris. Kamal swore at him in Arabic,
naalabuka, kilbvahed
, “Your father’s arse, you dog,” having learned the curse from the Indian boys at school.

The boy started collecting paper for the old man, pages donated here and there by classmates. But he never delivered them, never again entered that sanctum, the bare imposing room with the desk and mat, the testimonial and the photographs.

It was when he first read in the anthology that brief biography of Mzee Omari, together with his eulogy of the German governor, that Kamal began to grapple with the mystery of Kilwa’s poet laureate and the dark side to his career. And one night as he recalled those privileged, though nerve-racking moments he had spent in Mzee Omari’s room, as he mused over the verses that Mzee Omari had recited for him, a few broken phrases began to come back to him. One of them was, “barua kutoka Makka tukufu,” meaning, the letter from Holy Mecca. Much later he would come to know it as the infamous Mecca Letter of 1909. Mzee Omari, Kamal realized, had been attempting to recite to him the khatima, the end of his history, when Kamal betrayed on his young face his desperation to escape.

•  •  •

It began to seem that all he had to do was rub a lukewarm bottle of Tusker or Serengeti, or merely ask John the Kenyan barman, “What’s in the cooler today?” and Lateef, his own djinn, appeared, admonishing forefinger raised against imbibing. But it was pleasing to see him. It was the afternoon following the impasse with Fatuma. He had read. He had reflected. He had decided against an impulse to visit Kilwa. And reluctantly he had given medical advice to a relative of a kitchen hand. All this while he awaited news from Lateef. Perhaps he should have rubbed a beer bottle sooner.

“What are you reading today, bwana?”

Kamal showed him the page. Lateef leaned forward, read a few lines slowly. Kamal inquired, testing him, “Why do you think Mzee Omari would praise the Germans after the Maji Maji War?”

“The German was powerful,” said Lateef, straightening up. “It made good sense to flatter him. If you misbehaved, it could be the kiboko, the whip.” He made a gesture, flicking his fingers. “You know, bwana, we Africans have had to be cunning.”

“Yes,” agreed Kamal, and recalled his mother. “Do you know how Mzee Omari died?” he asked.

“Yes, bwana.”

Kamal was surprised. “Were you born by then? How old were you?”

The man looked down and said, “I heard.”

“Do you know why he died?”

Lateef looked up and smiled sheepishly, which could mean anything.

Then he said, “Sir, I am still talking with the family about this woman Saida. They are very nervous.”

“Nervous?”

“Enh.” A heavy assertion.

“But why? About what?”

“They do not say, sir.”

They eyed each other briefly as the barman brought Lateef a soda.

“You know, Lateef, I’ve been thinking. Perhaps they are the wrong people to talk to. Isn’t there someone else who can give me the information?”

“These people know something, sir.”

What do
you
know that you are not telling me?

“You think they want money.”

“It could help.”

Kamal gave him a few American bills and he left, saying he would be away on business the next day and would call or visit when he returned. He must have seen the desperation, the doubt on Kamal’s face, but this time had no cheer to offer.

He said—continuing from where he had left off—he said, speaking quietly in response to something earlier, “When I think of my life changing, so that I am what I am now, a medical doctor and returnee from abroad talking to you, instead of a local businessman or civil servant, it always begins dramatically, with the sound of running feet. Bare feet thumping the ground, a multitude of them, approaching. That thunder reverberates in me even now, it would come to torment me in the comfort of my study in Canada … and awaken the most painful memory.”

It could have been a thief getting chased. Not an uncommon phenomenon; the fellow would get caught, beaten up, and taken to the police station in a raucous, even joyful procession. It was fun to watch, though in retrospect not so much for the unfortunate thief. Such was the frantic roll of running feet outside their house early one morning, heading towards the main road. Kamal ran out with curiosity and after a moment’s hesitation he too took to his feet. What boy could resist? The crowd, mostly men, kept up a pace, but no thief was in sight up ahead. The boy realized that this was not some fleet-footed shoplifter they were chasing, and where were the shouts of Mwizi! Mwizi! anyway? This was some other chase. But nobody had answers, everybody was running. And so he ran and he panted, until he arrived where others had stopped, at mwembe kinyonga, the hangman’s tree. He pushed through the crowd, even as he overheard the disturbing buzz: The old man’s hanged himself; Mzee Omari has taken his own life. Astaghfirullahi. Allah forgive him.

He reached the centre of the gathering under the old mango tree.

A few shehes, venerable old men, were tending to the body of Mzee Omari, as it now lay, flat on the ground in a muddy white kanzu; a noose lay beside him, having been removed from his neck, which was bruised red. His face was firm as always, his eyes were closed; on his feet, the ancient leather slippers. Beside him, his tasbih, the beads, and his embroidered white cap.

As Kamal gaped at this nightmare, all the time from behind him came the muttered prayers, Astaghfirullahi; adhubillahi shetani rajim … W’allahi karim.

He stared and he stared, his hand now clasped in someone else’s next to him, a small, clammy hand, and he heard a sob, and felt a tug and glanced sideways to see that it was Saida. She started wailing softly, crying, “Polé Babu, Babu amefariki,” and he wept with her, repeating her words, Grandfather has died, and then they slowly made their way home.

The streets were quiet that day, which was a Friday. Mzee Omari had chosen his day well. A light shower fell, though it was sunny, a sign from the heavens, for sure. People stood about to talk, and asked the same question, Why would a great man like Mzee Omari take his own life? If our spiritual leaders lost hope like this, what about us ordinary folk? He was a saidi, a man of God and descendant of the Prophet. Teller of our history. The azan from the big mosque was loud and clear, at noon and again at four. People went in numbers to pray.

The following morning an inspector of police, named Mwanga, flew in from Dar es Salaam. A stocky man with a bureaucrat’s belly, wearing a long-sleeved bush shirt, Inspector Mwanga interrogated those who had found the body. Mzee Omari, he heard, had been found hanging from a thick branch of the famous mango tree, and a few men of the town had cut him down. Having heard the witnesses, the inspector was driven to the site in the government Land Rover, accompanied by the District Commissioner, and followed on foot by a crowd. The great tree, which had stopped bearing fruit many years before, stood by the roadside near the hospital. The two men walked towards it, the inspector in front. “So this is mwembe kinyonga,” Inspector Mwanga exclaimed, “from which our heroes
of the past were hanged!” He went forward and embraced the tree trunk. The onlookers found this behaviour amusing from a government man. The inspector walked a few times around the tree, deep in thought. The fat branch from which Mzee Omari had been cut down was cracked and split, it hung crooked. It was the same strong branch, the inspector was informed, which had held the weights of the old warriors. “If it could only talk,” said the inspector. “This tree bears witness to our history.” He walked back with the DC to the vehicle.

Inspector Mwanga departed early the next morning. Having spoken to witnesses, and examined the knot on the noose, he had determined that Mzee Omari had hanged himself. This was the conclusion he had reported to the DC and it spread through the town.

Mzee Omari was buried that day. His body, which had been kept at the hospital, was brought to the town in a procession, borne on the shoulders of men, a few of them walking with it all the way, while others waited on the highway to give it their shoulder when it passed. Kamal and Saida waited at the monument, and when the body arrived, they accompanied it home. The prayer ceremonies were brief and the corpse was taken in another procession to the cemetery behind Kamal’s house.

The inspector’s conclusion confirmed what most people had believed anyway, until it began to be whispered about that nothing had been found that Mzee Omari could have used to climb up to the height of the noose. Besides, the man was almost blind. He could not have hanged himself.

Evidently some menace had come to lurk in the town; who knew what else it was capable of? Stories of evil deeds of the past were recalled, and Mariamu the witch was remembered, who had only recently stopped stalking the streets at night. Finally some of the town’s influential elders held a meeting outside the big mosque on the Friday following the death and came to an agreement that what was needed was someone who could root out and neutralize the evil. Such a man was the sorcerer, or mganga, Akilimali.

Akilimali was a native of the Kilwa region and the nation’s most
celebrated mganga, renowned for his ability to counter evil and discover hidden truths. His method was to use secret medicines. Recently he had garnered great fame by solving two cases which had stumped the police. In one of these, which happened at a sisal estate up north, a newborn baby belonging to a European couple was kidnapped; the police dragnet yielded no result, and witchcraft was suspected. The couple’s plight drew great sympathy, and Akilimali was finally called as a police advisor. The mganga determined that the baby was alive and the kidnapper was none other than another European woman, from a neighbouring estate. The case made headlines throughout East Africa.

Some years before Kamal’s birth, Akilimali had been called to rid Kilwa of its evil spirits, which he claimed to have accomplished, sprinkling every corner of the municipality with a secret medicine. Now the town was ready to redeem his warranty. A messenger was sent to him at his home outside Dar es Salaam.

The day before the mganga arrived, three assistants came in a bus and went about snooping all over town, asking questions. The next day in the afternoon Akilimali himself appeared, riding up the main road on the back of a pickup, the sun like a bright halo behind him. The truck was bedecked with his witching paraphernalia—gourds, pots, bottles and pouches of medicines, strange-looking rattles, small drums, their grating jangle amply announcing his arrival. He sprang down in front of the monument, holding up his flywhisk, and instantly the crowds gathered, and watched from a good distance, awestruck. So this is the man. The mganga was a short man with surprisingly soft features, and he had an amused, enigmatic smile on his face. A smile to be feared, not answered. Like the grin of a leopard.

Having cast his gaze all around him, he was met by his three assistants, and went along with them, taking long jerking steps as they escorted him to the house which had been readied for him.

A kind of unease had settled upon Kilwa, a dread brought on by the uncertainty and doubts concerning Mzee Omari’s death. An evil spirit was harassing the town. In the evenings, a couple of times, Mama took Kamal to the small mosque down the street, where they sat outside with other women and heard the men inside go “Allahu!
Allahu!,” chanting in unison and swaying back and forth, in the form of mystical prayer called dhikri.

Kamal asked his mother, “Mama, this Akilimali is a Muslim?”

“He sure is,” she replied.

This was when they were returning from a sitting outside the mosque.

“Then why doesn’t he ask Allah to give him an answer instead of using magic?”

“Maybe Allah doesn’t give him the answer.”

Mama had had their door bolt repaired against possible evil, though she said that with people down the street chanting Allah’s name, no shetani could beset them. Besides, what was a mere bolt in the face of real evil?

On his first night in Kilwa, Akilimali stayed inside, in his allotted house down the street from Kamal and Mama. A hush fell on the neighbourhood. People didn’t call out and there were no children outside. But the mganga had a quiet and steady stream of visitors who brought presents along with their shidas, difficulties to be resolved. Mama said that the sorcerer made a lot of money this way. Some of the sorcerer’s visitors were Indian shopkeepers. “You ask me why they with their strange ways would appeal to African magic.” He hadn’t asked, but he listened to her answer. “Well, if it works, why not?”