The Magic of Saida (20 page)

Then why that poem, why such abject flattery of the Bwana Mkubwa, the German overlord? Every such falsehood he wrote and uttered was a betrayal of those Kilwa warriors and all the others who had hanged for resisting; it was a betrayal of his language and
its beautiful poetry, so much so that it embarrassed; it was a betrayal of his people. Omari knew all that. But he had resolved that there was no alternative to bending to the new order. Who could deny its superiority, its achievements, its strength? Instead of fighting it blindly and arrogantly, and be vanquished, why not take from it? Why not learn to recite a few lines of Bwana Goethe, appreciate the German lied? And as for telling the truth, surely there would come a time; there would come a time to explain, to revoke this Faustian pact. After all, how could a subject’s simple-minded homage to the Kaiser be taken at face value?

When obliging a request for a poem on the occasion of the Kaiser’s birthday, how could the young poet laureate tell his king that his rule over the African was symbolized by the cruelty of the khamsa-ishirin, the twenty-five lashes of the whip; or by taxes and forced labour in the farms; or by abject humiliation, as when a German child was carried in a palanquin by four conscripted barefoot Swahili elders? That a frequently used moniker for the German was mkono wa damu, hand of blood? A poet had first to survive: to eat, yes, but also to witness. There would come a time to explain.

Abdelkarim on the other hand continued his exile in the interior, where he travelled extensively. Occasionally the Kilwa Sufi centre had news of him. Omari himself was by now aligned to the more orthodox and mainstream Muslim community. That pleased the new commissioner in Kilwa, Bwana Rode, who was made uneasy by the secrecy and close camaraderie of the Sufis. Captain Schmidt had succumbed to malaria and been buried at the local German cemetery.

Omari was eager to see his beloved elder brother, yet he knew he was safer at a distance. News about Abdelkarim sent a tremor through him, of joy and concern, of fear. There was a fragility to Abdelkarim, a fineness; he was in search of the impossible, had always been oblivious to the world around him that was cruel and crude. They had met once, two years after his departure, when Abdelkarim appeared mysteriously in Kilwa in the cover of night to take part in the Maulidi festival on the Prophet’s birthday. Tall and handsome, he had walked in the procession during the day, chanting with the others and holding up one end of their master Sheikh Aleta
Baraka’s green-and-gold banner. In the evening during the dhikri session, in his beautiful rich tenor Abdelkarim had recited several devotional poems, including, modestly, one of his own. After the dhikri the two brothers met in the house of an elder for dinner, and there, while partaking of kahawa, when Omari, barely thirteen, expressed an admiring opinion about the ways of the Germans, showing off his acquired language, the older brother had admonished him with a resounding slap. Abdelkarim slipped away into the night before someone reported him to the authorities.

That was the one meeting of the two brothers, since Omari had gone to the school in Tanga, and by the time he returned he had moved even closer in his German affiliation. Outwardly confident and successful, a teacher respected by most, but at heart a grieving young man. For to add pain to his memory of the hangings—that tableau of events under the mwembe kinyonga in the quiet of dawn—there gnawed in his breast the guilty knowledge that it was he who was responsible; he, however witlessly as a boy, who had betrayed the Kilwa warriors.

Some ten years after the Kilwa hangings, a rumour began to be heard: There is this man. In the Matumbi district, eti. In a village called Ngarambe. He entered the water for a whole night and when he came out he was possessed by the spirit. Kinjikitilé. Enh-heh, that’s his name, this mganga. He is the one with the dawa and the spell. Bokero, Hongo—these are also his names. He will spray you with the magic water with a branch; or he may make you drink it, or pour it on your head. He will tell you what to do. And then? These Germans—nothing. They will go. How? Their guns, their bullets—nothing. How, nothing? They will fire,
pe-pe-pe!
but their bullets will turn to water with this magic. Soft as rainwater, and then we will fight them. But the time is not now. The water is travelling through the country.

In large numbers pilgrims went to Ngarambe, some fifty miles from Kilwa, to hear the mganga Kinjikitilé speak and to make him their offerings. From tribe to tribe the whisper of war spread, as the agents of Kinjikitilé brought their water and performed their ceremonies. Do not look behind you, those who received the water were told; do not enter your women, don’t spill the water; abstain from meat. Do not loot when you fight. Finally, in upper Kilwa, in Matumbiland, the people went and uprooted the dreaded German cotton fields, where so many of them had been forced to work under the whip; a settler named Hopfer was killed; towns were attacked; Indian shops were sacked.

Thus began the Vita vya Maji Maji, the War of the Waters. It was July 1905.

Kinjikitilé of Ngarambe, the prophet who inspired the movement, did not himself go to battle. He was the spirit of the resistance, its inspiration. He raised the possibility, he offered the method. In August, however, two thieves went and robbed his shrine, then betrayed him to German forces. Kinjikitilé was hanged. But the whisper, the water, and the fighting spread like a wildfire across the country, to the south and west and thence back up north, attacking German stations, planters, missionaries, and collaborators, from Kibata and Nandete to Liwale and Masasi, and on to Songea and Kilosa, involving a good swathe of the country, thousands of fighters everywhere, using bows and arrows and rifles.

The Germans did not take the outbreak lightly. Warships were called; more soldiers arrived and set off to the south and west, into the forests and along the coast; settlers organized militias. Gradually, from region to region the insurgency was quelled, the better weapons and training prevailing, as rattling machine guns mowed down close-packed formations of chanting men who had believed themselves protected by the dawa of blessed water. In the mopping-up that followed, villages and farms were scorched by the troops, and granaries were confiscated or burned down to starve the people into total submission. The policy had worked wonders in Southwest Africa. As Captain Wangenheim, a German commander, reported,
“Only hunger and want can bring about final submission.” Finally, after two years, in August 1907 the war ended. Much of the country in the east and south lay wasted and starving; the devastated area in the hinterland became the Selous National Park.

During much of the war, Omari lived with the constant dread that one day he might see his brother marched up to Kilwa by the soldiers and hanged from the mwembe, the mango tree, along with others. He, Omari bin Tamim, now a head teacher and man of family, would publicly have to acknowledge his brother as a traitor, and then bury him. Intermittent news of Abdelkarim had come from Kibata and Samanga, close by in Matumbiland, and later from farther away, Kilosa and other places where the Maji Maji resistance was pronounced; there were rumours of a certain mwalimu, a
tall and enigmatic man from the coast, who gave the most potent magic water to fighters while reciting from the Quran; and it had become obvious to Omari that his gentle brother, the poet and mystic, the lover of God, was involved in the Maji Maji movement as a recruiter of warriors. Omari did not approve of the movement. Chanting “Death to the Germans! Cut their stomachs open!,” these so-called warriors, drunk with the sounds of their own voices, set off to attack, only to meet their own deaths in a hail of machine-gun fire. Madness, blasphemy, suicide! What was the good of that? What had got into his brother?

When the war had just about ended, early one afternoon a young stranger in traditional Muslim garb confronted the teacher Omari on the street and told him in a low voice that a certain relation of his was living in Pembeni, a small settlement a few miles up from Kilwa on the coast. It could be reached by donkey in approximately three hours, and he was requested to bring provisions with him when he visited. Omari nodded that he understood. Early on Sunday morning, modestly loaded with provisions, Omari set off on a hired donkey called Fatuma to seek his brother. The village called Pembeni was on a track that ran over rough terrain some two hundred yards inland, and consisted of a few houses, a defunct shop, and some fishing boats on the shores of a narrow creek. He had been seen approaching, and his heart leapt as he sighted a tall figure, standing at the point where the track forked, waiting for him. Omari got off his donkey and walked the remaining way to go and kiss Abdelkarim’s hand.

“How are you, my younger brother?”

“I am well, my older brother. Praise be to God.”

“And your work is going well? I see you are in the family trade of teaching.”

“It is going well, my brother. And yes, my brother. And you, are you keeping well?”

“For which thanks are due only to the Merciful One.”

They walked to a small, shambling house, the crude wattle frame exposed where the outer mud wall had broken off. At the doorway Omari unloaded his parcel, which a young woman came and took from him with a curtsy, and he tied up his donkey.

Inside, at first the brothers sat on a mat in an awkward silence; the room was dark, but for a few thin rays of golden sunlight shooting through the roof, forming a somewhat catching display where they crossed in midair. It made for the only ornamentation in the room. Omari leaned over and handed his brother the manuscripts he had left in his custody when he first went away. “These have been with me a long time,” Omari said. “I have treasured them and learned from them.” Abdelkarim looked at them with a smile. “I do not remember them,” he replied. “They are all a young man’s compositions. But I can see that you must have improved them.” “I took the liberty,” Omari told him, “using what you taught me of composition. You will see that I have copied them on better paper too.” “I see that,” nodded his brother. “Well, keep them until I call for them. And I have more for you, copied on extremely poor-quality paper such as was available to me in my travels.”

Abdelkarim had married a woman from the interior, the one who had accepted the provisions from Omari at the door. Her name was Zaynabu, and she could barely speak Swahili. There was a child, a girl. Zaynabu brought the men kahawa, which was too strong. Then they had a meal of ugali, which was too dry and grainy, and fried fish.

“My dear brother,” Omari said as they sat eating this coarse meal, when some time had passed, “you should return to the comforts of Kilwa. You should teach there. The German commissioner Bwana Rode takes an interest in our poetry and language, and he will appreciate you.”

Abdelkarim said only, “Hmm.” Then a moment later he said in mild admonishment, “Omari, chatting while eating is a white man’s habit.” Thereafter they ate in silence.

Afterwards as they sat, it was Abdelkarim who spoke first, looking away from his brother. His knees were raised, where his hands met, the long slender fingers intertwined, and his long back curved like a bow. He looked like a sculpture.

“I have seen much in the forests. Enough for a full lifetime. I have seen terrible things, my brother. I have seen men cut open and left for the hyena, and I have seen men in the hundreds fall to the bullets just as … when a swarm of locusts rushes in and razes a field in moments. I have seen hunger and grief. There were unbelievers who
showed the utmost courage, took steel in their chests, and believers who betrayed them to the German’s mercenaries. It was too much to take, but events led from one to the next. Our Book tells us to resist oppression; but there comes a time to submit and leave the fighting to Allah. He sent us the plague, as though we were the Pharaoh, when in reality it is we who are the slaves. But He knows best. It seems to me now, my young brother, that the path you chose to walk in life was well considered and had its merits. There is no harm in learning new ways, even if they are of the oppressor; the Quran exhorts us to be curious. And so, my brother, forgive me for the harshness I showed you when you were only a boy.”

“My brother, you shame me,” Omari protested. “It was your love truly that has inspired me.”

“Still, I must walk on the path that I took,” came the quiet reply. “There was no other way for me. And I must live in hiding now. I dare not show my face to the Germans or their askaris.” He paused, then added, “It is Allah’s miracle surely that two brothers so close to each other can also be so different.”

Omari had brought with him some Indian sweets, the round ladoos the two would eat in Kilwa together, and as he unwrapped the package and placed it on the floor between them, the brothers exchanged a look and held back their emotions. Time and absence from each other had created this gulf, across which they could signal their feelings only in awkward gestures and formal speech. Omari told Abdelkarim about his own life, his wife who was called Halima, and his three children, and his work in the school under a woman called Frau Schwering; he spoke of his schooling in Tanga, a town of great charm, with its promenade and large buildings. He described the white people he had seen in all their finery, doing their pumzika, relaxing outside a hotel. The women looked like angels. He described his stopover in Dar es Salaam, also beautiful, but bigger, with two big churches, bigger than any mosque he had seen. He had been shown where the governor Bwana Goetzen lived, but it was a forbidden area. They said Dar was as big as Berlin.

“Yes, the Germans are a people of achievement,” Abdelkarim admitted.

He had not been to Tanga or Dar, but he had seen much of the
country. It was vast, endless, people after people, tribe next to tribe, and with a countless number of languages; but people in the villages everywhere were beginning to speak Swahili now. Soon the entire country would speak this one language, their language, of the coast.

“And your former patron?” Abdelkarim asked, finally. “What happened to him?”