The Magic of Saida (23 page)

Bwana Kendrick was aghast upon hearing of the fate of the manuscripts, which he still believed were Omari’s own; he was unconsolable. “I cannot believe it, Mwalimu. I cannot believe you would do such a thing.” He got up in his agitation and took a deep breath, and almost in tears walked out of the house for a few minutes, then returned.

“You should be able to recall them and write them down again carefully,” he said calmly. “After all, Mwalimu, they are your own words. Could you do that?”

“I have forgotten much,” Omari mumbled. “And my mind is giving troubles, I am haunted by spirits.”

“I have heard,” Kendrick said. Omari described his torments and Kendrick, turning thoughtful, simply said, “Those poems are calling you, they want to come back, don’t you see? They want to live!”

The Englishman wrote a letter referring Omari bin Tamim to a doctor friend at the government hospital in Dar es Salaam. “You should see this mganga, Mwalimu. He is an English medicine man, but he can help you with your problem. Currently I am travelling on behalf of the government, but if I am in Dar es Salaam during your visit, I will come to see you and show you around.”

In about a week Omari set off on a ship bound for the capital, accompanied by Mwana Juma. In the city they were put up in a room in the grounds of the hospital, a large, sedate two-storey white building from German times, close to the sea. They were told they would have to wait a few days; Dr. Jennings, whom they had come to see, was busy. And so while they waited they went about seeing the sights. The city had changed much since Omari had last seen it two decades earlier as a trainee teacher. Beyond the peaceful tree-lined avenues and the beautiful European houses, and the Government House where the British governor lived, thrived a teeming city where they could wander around and shop among people like themselves.

What impressed Omari the most during their jaunts in Dar was one prominent addition to the landscape since his previous visit, a statue of the African soldier, the askari, in the centre of the town, situated such that cars went around it all the time like a train of ants. The askari wore a uniform, with cap, boots, and puttees, and stood poised with his rifle and bayonet, ready to charge at an enemy. The resemblance to the soldiers Omari had seen long ago in German times was uncanny. Omari and Mwana Juma would contrive to pass by the statue every day. It had a hypnotic effect and they couldn’t help staring at it until they had passed it. One day Bwana Kendrick joined them, and as they stood together at the roundabout under the statue he explained to Omari that the memorial celebrated the courage and endurance of the African askaris who fought in the Great War between the Germans and the British, on either side.

“It is a generous tribute,” Omari said, adding, “I have often
thought, the war was not the Africans’ war, we had no quarrel with each other, and yet these soldiers killed and were killed by their brothers.”

Kendrick smiled. “Tell me what’s on your mind,” he said quietly.

They had come to sit at a shed to have tea. Mwana Juma, too embarrassed to be seen beside the white bwana, sat by herself on the ground at a distance until she found someone to chat with. That she was talking about her husband and the white man, Omari could tell by her occasional glances towards them.

Omari said, “When the Germans came, there were wars that were our wars. We lost them. But there are no memorials, no statues to honour those dead warriors. Only the old mango tree stands as witness.”

“Write about them,” said Bwana Kendrick. “String your utenzis, Mwalimu, and in them make the people see and remember those warriors who died.” He became thoughtful, before continuing. “Listen, here is what one British poet wrote about that same war.” He recited haltingly in English, then translated.

When Dr. Jennings saw Omari he asked him many questions. He wanted to know the exact descriptions of the snakes and scorpions of his nightmares, and exactly what they said. He wrote everything down patiently, a process that enervated the patient. These white men want to capture our everything, even our thoughts, even our spirits; what will we have then? When the doctor asked Omari about his brother, Omari clammed up. Aa-aa, don’t go there. The doctor then questioned Mwana Juma. Finally the doctor spoke to Omari and Mwana Juma together.

“Omari bin Tamim,” he said. “Mwalimu, you are a learned man. What you have not learned in school you have learned from life itself. It is evident to me that you have seen much. You should confront what’s tormenting you. Face up to those spirits that haunt you. Even by refusing to speak to me about your brother, you are confronting something in your mind. That is good. Tell me, have those snakes and scorpions come to pester you during your stay in Dar es Salaam?”

“No,” said Omari. “But they are lurking somewhere, I can sense them, somewhere close behind me in the air.”

“They are afraid of the English mganga,” put in his wife. “Enh.” She nodded confidently, then kept quiet.

Jennings said he would send a report to Bwana Kendrick.

Back in Kilwa, Omari’s condition improved, though it remained somewhat ginger, as he thought of it. It was a matter of treading softly so as not to provoke the devils. Bwana Kendrick had given him some paper and a pen and ink as gifts, but these remained on a table waiting to be picked up.

A few months after the couple’s visit to Dar es Salaam, Bwana Kendrick came to town, while on a tour of the area by car. He paid a brief visit, gave them news that he had been sick and that his father had died in Scotland, and left. Some days later there came news at the district office that there had been an accident on the bridge over the Rufiji River, and Bwana Kendrick had died in it.

The following Friday, after the midday prayer at the mosque, Omari was invited to speak, and he spoke about the death of the Scotsman and how much grief that caused him. Bwana Kendrick had been a good man, a friend of the African. His birth was his fate, but he had earned his worth by his own deeds. Surely he would be welcomed by the angels and at resurrection earn his deserved reward in paradise. Later that afternoon Omari went and paid his usual respects at the grave of his brother, stopping briefly on the way at the German cemetery. On his way back, his head bowed in contemplation, he felt a gentle shove from behind him against his right shoulder. A voice spoke, “Samahani, excuse me.” Omari turned but saw no one. He was in the grassy stretch of land between the two cemeteries and it was very quiet. Dusk was approaching. He became wary, but he was not afraid. He could deal with spirits.

As he walked on, the voice said, “Your brother forgives you.”

Omari looked up and then around him in annoyance.

“What do you know? Get away! And who are you, you barbarian?”

“I want to help you.”

“Help me? Help me to do what?”

“You yourself know what. Help you to pick up your pen and give life again to your brother’s work, and to your own skill. Don’t demean it.”

“And your name?—laana on you if you come from Satan.”

“I am Idris, your faithful servant.”

The next morning, having had his tea and mandazi, and taken his bath, Omari bin Tamim sat down on a mat and formally asked his wife Mwana Juma to give him his paper and his pen. Happily she obliged. She also lit some incense and then left him alone in the room.

Omari wrote, Bismil,

For “merciful” he had deliberately used “karim,” thereby placing his brother’s signature in the poem. It brought him joy, to begin thus.

As he contemplated his strategy on the page, he asked himself why it had not occurred to him that Abdelkarim was always merciful, had always understood and forgiven him.

Omari bin Tamim composed several long poems in the utenzi form. These include, besides the well-known “Buraq” and the narration of the Prophet’s exile, the story of Adam and Eve, an account of the Prophet Moses’ humbling adventure with the ascetic Khizr, and a dialogue between Muhammad and the angel Gabriel about the future of the world. His last work was the historical magnum opus,
The Composition of the Coming of the Modern Age
. Of which of these utenzis he was the sole author is impossible to say. None of them survive except as subjects of hearsay, or in memorized fragments. A few corrupted verses of the celebrated “Buraq” were recited to a German student, Gudrun Eberhardt, by an Indian car parts dealer in Dar es Salaam in 1994. In an interview with the same researcher, an aged Mwana Juma binti Nassoro, widow of Omari and a resident
then of her native Lindi, affirmed having knowledge of these and other poems:

Her last answer is not quite accurate, as we know. The trunk that Mzee Omari buried in the ground beside the mango tree contained the older compositions, and obviously not those he began after his consultation with Dr. Jennings and his encounter with the djinn Idris. Omari’s final work,
The Composition
 …, must have ended abruptly, after describing the conclusion of the Maji Maji War. I recall sitting beside Mzee Omari in front of his portable writing table, as he showed me the last page he had written up to then, in which he mentioned the Mecca Letter. Frightened, I was anxious to escape. And many years later, caught in the grip of nostalgia and the need for answers, I would be possessed by this other guilt, that with my child’s insensitivity I could not give comfort to an old man when he had turned almost completely blind and needed it most.

It was a short time after he had showed me that page that Mzee Omari hanged himself from the mango tree.

“It was time for him to die,” Mwana Juma said in her interview. “He was possessed by his old madness. It would not leave him. His time had come.”

“I don’t understand,” Gudrun Eberhardt responded adroitly to this ambiguous pronouncement. “If he hanged himself, someone must have collaborated?”

“It was that djinn Idris only.”

The researcher knew better than to question the existence of
djinns in a Swahili home. But if it wasn’t the djinn who assisted in Mzee Omari’s suicide, it must have been a person. There was one person who had confessed at the sorcerer Akilimali’s truth session that he had been about at that ungodly hour, adding moreover that he had seen Mzee Omari on the main road walking towards the mango tree. He was Salemani Mkono, Mzee Omari’s accuser. The truth, writes Ms. Eberhardt, seems remarkably simple and obvious. Salemani himself must have assisted the poet in hanging himself, and then successfully conned the sorcerer with a tall story about having seen a djinn in a veil following the poet. What bargain these two old antagonists made was one of those secrets forever buried in the past.

What Gudrun Eberhardt did not discover, apparently, was that the sorcerer Akilimali had the reputation of being able to divine an answer from a drugged witness before he or she even spoke; as my mother had remarked astutely, this raised the possibility of planting an answer. And this too seems to have escaped the otherwise intrepid Ms. (later Dr.) Eberhardt: there was one witness under the tree that night who did not sit with the others in the circle to receive the sorcerer’s truth medicine: Mwana Juma.

It was Mwana Juma, perhaps to put the old poet out of his misery, who encouraged his ironic exit, with the assistance of the one-armed beggar. The sorcerer became instrumental in the cover-up.

“I had returned after thirty-five years,” Kamal told me, “a respected doctor, fortified with vaccinations and prophylactics. I took care with food and drink, used insect repellent, slept under a net. Every means to protect myself from the ills of the tropics in which I was born. Yet I was horribly sick.”

It was that one exception he had allowed to breach his armour, the single glass of water he drank at Fatuma’s—and Africa invaded him, reclaimed him once again. To get to Saida he could keep no defences—he knew that when politely he sipped the ill-tasting clear liquid behind the medical store.

Gripped by bouts of fever, attacked by diarrhea, hammered by headaches, now it was he, not his innkeeper Markham, who was the stinker, too weak for a bath, with no appetite but constant thirst. And fever led him back to revisit his childhood Gehenna, to resuffer its torments in the loneliness of his hotel room. A nightmare within a nightmare.

In his later life, in the comfort of wealthy suburban Canada, he had occasionally dreamt about his abandonment, though in his dream he would see his trauma transferred onto some other tender thing—a child, an animal—and woken up shaken but in the safe surrounds of a delicious climate-controlled certainty. He never expected he would relive his hell. He never believed he would return.