The Magic of Saida (39 page)

Fatuma had died of her cancer while in the care of Dr. Engineer the week before we arrived, and we went together to the pharmacy to pay our condolences. Amina spoke to us from her serving window while we stood outside on the street. Her mother-in-law had been in great pain, she said, and it was for the better she had departed the world. “ ‘From Him we come and to Him we return,’ isn’t that so,” she said, reciting the Quranic formula in a Swahili-accented Arabic, and we concurred.

“Amina, there were many things Fatuma didn’t tell me,” Kamal said, sounding reproachful.

Serving a customer, she asked casually, “Such as?”

“Saida’s child was killed. Then what happened?”

“She lost her mind. They sent her to Dodoma.” The mental hospital.

He struggled with himself and looked away for a moment.

“That’s what I heard,” she added hastily. “But she returned.”

“Then did she go to live in that village? Minazi Minne?”

She said nothing. The answer was yes. He gazed down the street at the intersection, bus touts standing in a boisterous group. Behind them the monument to two beheaded Germans. Four young girls in headscarves hurried up to study at the madrassa next door, which was already clamouring with kids. It was eleven in the morning.

“You knew all this, and you told me nothing?” he chided, assuming the right now to such familiarity. “All those days that I came here, asking? You could have saved me so much grief by just telling me this, Amina. There was no mercy in your heart.”

“I am sorry. Polé sana. Mother swore us to secrecy.”

As we made to go, having thanked her, at a whim Kamal turned and asked her, “Eti, Amina. Did Fatuma leave any papers behind? In a sanduku or something? Papers written by her father, Mzee Omari?”

She replied, sounding a little guilty, “Those papers were used a long time ago to wrap things. There was shortage of paper then that you don’t know about, since you had gone abroad. How could we know they had value? The government should have alerted us. We had to wait for the foreigners to tell us, by which time it was too late.”

We walked back to the intersection and asked for a taxi to Minazi Minne. There was no taxi free and Kamal would not take a bus. He must have a taxi. We had to wait, and finally some businessman’s Toyota Cruiser, just in from Dar, was arranged for us to rent and we took off with the driver. On our minds the same thought, I imagine: Saida had arrived at that village, then what?

At the roadstop we were met by Zara, who had seen the white SUV draw up. She looked pretty in a new dress. The child was not around.

“Daktari,” she said to him, “are you well?”

“I have recovered, thank you. How are you and the child? Did you take her to the doctor?”

“Not yet …”

“You should.” Then: “Zara, that old woman—I want to see her. Where is she? Is she hiding somewhere?”

She stared wide-eyed at him, taken aback by his tone, wondering, I suppose, How can the rich and privileged be so desperate?

“Tell me about her, Zara. Where did she go?”

“Daktari … she died the day after you left. She was found in the river there in Minazi Minne.”

Her voice had softened out of pity. She was only a girl. It was not hard to imagine what life was like here.

Kamal was pointing at Zara’s blue sandals.

“Where did you get these?”

“I found them … in her room.”

“And the dress too?”

She looked away. “Yes. I didn’t steal it. She’s dead, isn’t she?”

“And what else did you find?”

“Nothing. You can go and look.”

He asked her, softly, “Zara, who was this woman? Did she have any people?”

“Bibi Ramzani. She was crazy. She called herself Kinjikitilé.”

“What did you say?”

“Kinjikitilé.”

He became still, and in those moments the girl several times looked from him to me, until I said to him, “Kamal, let’s go,” and reached for his elbow.

He drew a deep breath. “Yes.”

We drove back to Masoko in silence.

I would like to thank Kristin Cochrane, Maya Mavjee, and Sonny Mehta for their encouragement; Lynn Henry for her perceptive reading of the manuscript, her valuable suggestions, and for seeing the book through to print; Chiki Sarkar and Somak Ghoshal for their comments; Nurjehan for a final reading. Amyn and Nargis Sunderji generously shared their memories of Kampala; Dr. Felicitas Becker was helpful with comments and references regarding Tanzania, Kilwa, and Islam. The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture was generous with its services. I am grateful to Mohamed Sumar for his truly wonderful hospitality in Dar es Salaam, and to Iqbal Dewji for his companionship in Kilwa and for bravely sharing a memorable and lengthy visit to a mganga. And finally I would like to thank my old friend Amin Dharamsi for teaching me how to read the Juzu, long ago when neither of us could have imagined where this knowledge would lead.

I have consulted numerous sources on the Maji Maji War, the utenzi form of poetry, and the practice of magic in Tanzania. These are too many to name all, but I would be remiss not to mention these few: John Iliffe,
A Modern History of Tanganyika
(Cambridge UP, 1979, rpt. 1984); Gilbert Gwassa,
The Outbreak and Development of the Maji Maji War 1905–1907
(Koln: Rüdiger Köppe, 2005); Hasani bin Ismail, tr. P. Lienhardt,
The Medicine Man
(Oxford UP, 1968); Gudrun Miehe, Katrin Bromber, Said Khamis, and Ralf Grosserhode,
Kala Shairi: German East Africa in Swahili Poems
(Koln: Rüdiger Köppe, 2002); J. W. T. Allen,
Tendi: Six Examples of a Swahili Classical Verse Form with Translation and Notes
(New York: Africana Publishing,
1971); and José Arturo Saavedra Casco,
Utenzi, War Poems, and the German Conquest of East Africa
(Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2007). The excerpt on
this page
is from
The Lake and Mountains of Eastern & Central Africa
, J. Frederic Elton (London: John Murray, 1878), p. 82; the first verse of Mwana Kupona’s poem on
this page
is from Allen, p. 58; the quote on
this page
from Captain Wangenheim’s report is from Iliffe, p. 193.

This is, however and above all, a work of fiction; any deviation from historical truth (whatever that may be) is due only to me.

M. G. Vassanji is the author of six previous novels:
The Gunny Sack
, which won a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize;
No New Land; The Book of Secrets
, which won the very first Giller Prize;
Amriika; The In-Between World of Vikram Lall
, which also received the Giller Prize; and, most recently,
The Assassin’s Song
. He is also the author of two short-story collections, a travel memoir about India, and a biography of Mordecai Richler. He lives in Toronto.