Out of Darkness, Shining Light

by Petina Gappah

  After I made it clear to Ntaoéka that Amoda was not for her, she began to make eyes at Susi. When Misozi ran to complain to Bwana Daudi, it was then that he said she should pick someone else. “I do not like to have such a fine-looking woman on the loose among us,” I heard him say to Amoda. “I would rather that she choose any of my worthies.”

  But look at her now; tethered though she is, she is still causing problems. She is like one of those pretty bowls in the Liwali’s house: too shallow to drink tea from, but too small to eat dates from, so they sit on a high shelf, where they are only good to be looked at, and take up space for no reason.

  Since the Nassickers arrived, six months after Bwana Stanley’s departure, Ntaoéka has been giddy with excitement. I bet she would open her legs to any of them if they asked, and play the close buttock game too, particularly with that Jacob Wainwright. The way her eyes flutter about when she sees him, you would think she was trying to work up enough tears to get dust out of them.

  I told Misozi that I supposed Ntaoéka regretted not waiting, because if she had chosen after the large group of men sent by Bwana Stanley arrived, she could have had any of the fifty-five pagazi and the seven Nassickers that came with them. Bwana Daudi also called them the Nassick boys, and though they are young, with a little too much milk still to be squeezed out of their noses, they are far from being boys, particularly that Jacob Wainwright, a well-grown man who has seen at least one and twenty Ramadans. Proud as anything, he is, with all his English and his learning and his shoes and books and heavy muzungu suit.

  But it was Misozi and not Ntaoéka who came out to me, wiping the sleep out of her eyes: “What is it?”

  “He is dead, he is gone, he is dead!” I wailed.

  “Who?” Misozi said as she yawned.

  Sometimes I think that the woman cannot possibly be as stupid as she looks. Who else could I possibly have meant, the donkey? With a woman like that, it is no wonder that Susi looks three times and then twice more at every woman he passes.

  She went inside to get her wrapper cloth, and while she was in there, I saw Ntaoéka slinking her way from the direction of the hut where Carus Farrar had slept. So that was how that loaf was cooking. I wondered if Misozi knew. There would be time to tell all, not that I would say anything, of course, because, and this I can say straight, I have never been one to gossip.

  “You also, Misozi,” Ntaoéka said. “Who do you think Halima is talking about? Whose was the death we expected daily? Whose the frail body that was just hours from being a corpse? It can only be the Bwana.”

  The two started arguing enough to make the head spin. I moved to the fire, where a group of men sat and talked. Among them were Susi, Amoda, Chuma, Carus Farrar, and the boy Majwara. They were waiting, Carus Farrar said, for the stiffness to leave his body so that they could lay him out. It would not be too long, he said, for Bwana Daudi had died sometime in the night, and the heat in the air would help the stiffness to leave his body.

  More and more of the pagazi arrived and took up places around the fire. On every lip was the same question: how had it come to this? Susi and Majwara took it in turns to answer.

  “Just before midnight,” Majwara said, “Bwana Daudi emerged from the hut to say that Susi was to go to the Bwana, for his mind was quite delirious.”

  Susi took up the tale. “I went in at once. The Bwana was trying to rise from his bed. He was clearly not in his right mind as he said, ‘I have found the fountains, Susi. I have found the fountains. Is this the Luapula?’

  “I told him we were in Bangweulu, at Chitambo’s village,” Susi said, at which the Bwana started babbling in English, but the only words that Susi heard, and he is not sure he heard them properly, for they made no sense to him, were: “Poor Mary lies on Shupanga brae, and beeks fornent the sun.”

  Mary, I knew, was the name of Mama Robert, Bwana Daudi’s wife, and Shupanga, which is also where Susi comes from, is where she is buried. I interrupted to ask Susi what he thought those words meant, but he had no answer. We all turned as one to Jacob Wainwright, but he simply looked into the distance as though he had not heard the question. I have noticed before that if he does not know the answer to something, he pretends not to have heard the question.

  “What happened after that?” I asked.

  Susi continued his narration. “I helped him back onto his bed, as the Bwana, now speaking in Swahili, asked how many days it was to the Luapula.

  “ ‘It will take three days’ marching,’ I said.

  “ ‘Three days to go to the Luapula,’ he said. ‘Oh dear, oh dear.’ ”

  After this, Susi said, he seemed to come to himself, and realize where he was. He then asked Susi to boil him some water.

  “Had he eaten the dish I made him?” I asked. “Groundnuts and grains it was, mashed together soft-soft so that he could swallow it all without chewing. I was that pleased when he asked for food.”

  Susi shook his head and continued. He had gone outside to the fire and returned with the copper kettle full of water. Calling Susi close, the Bwana asked for his medicine chest and for a candle. He picked out a medicine, which he told Susi to place by his side.

  “His stomach must have been upset,” Carus Farrar interrupted. “I saw that bottle. It is a potion called calomel. It purges the contents of the stomach.”

  “If his stomach was upset,” I said, “it had nothing to do with my dish. Made it fresh I did, with the groundnuts that we got from Chitambo’s women just yesterday.”

  Susi went on. “I am certain he did not eat your dish, Halima. It was still beside him when Bwana Daudi dismissed me. I then left, leaving Majwara in the hut.”

  Majwara now took up the tale. A few hours after Susi had left the Bwana, he said, he roused Amoda, who had taken over the watch but had fallen asleep, with the words “Come to Bwana, I am afraid; I don’t know if he is alive.”

  Amoda then roused Susi, Chuma, Carus Farrar, and Chowpereh. Passing inside the hut, they looked toward the bed. Bwana Daudi was not lying on it, but was kneeling next to it, seemingly engaged in prayer. They instinctively drew backward. Pointing to him, Majwara said, “When I lay down to sleep, he was just as he is now, and it is because I find that he does not move that I fear he is dead.”

  Carus Farrar then said, “The candle was stuck to the top of the box with its own wax, and shed a light sufficient for us to see his form. Bwana Daudi had left his bed, and was kneeling beside it, his body stretched forward and his head buried in his hands upon the pillow. He did not stir. I advanced to him and placed my hands on his sunken cheeks. The Bwana felt cold and stiff to the touch. I turned to the others and nodded. I told them what we had all of us felt the instant we entered the hut. Bwana Daudi was no more.”

  In the silence that followed Carus Farrar’s narration, Majwara got up and moved off by himself. I left the men around the fire and followed him to an outcrop of rock a small distance away. He sat down. I sat next to him and waited as he wept into his hands. His face, when he lifted it, was a mask of grief.

  When he was not acting as the kirangozi and beating the drum to which we marched, Majwara was the Bwana’s own servant. He is no longer a child but is not yet a man; he is the only one of his age among the six children, and is still most content alone with his drum. It is a great responsibility for one so young to have in his care the bathing and dressing of a grown man. Look at that, I keep forgetting that Bwana Daudi is no more. Amoda had often suggested to the Bwana that the boy was perhaps too young for the job, but Majwara, overhearing him, had insisted that this was the very job he wanted.

  We had come upon him the year before. He was part of a cargo of the enslaved who were being herded to the coast. Whenever we came across such scenes, they caused the Bwana severe distress. He had been struck by Majwara’s young looks, and indeed, Chuma said later that he himself had been of such an age—just fifteen Ramadans, no more—when he too had been captured, and then rescued by Bwana Daudi.

  Just as he had done
with Chuma, Bwana Daudi persuaded Majwara’s captors that the boy was too young and sick to travel all the way to the coast, and he would give them the price for a full man. Seeing a chance to make something quickly, they had handed the boy over to Bwana Daudi for five strings of beads, which the Doctor often joked was more than I had cost him, for he had bought me too; not for himself, but for Amoda.

  Bwana Daudi’s rescuing him, and his healing Majwara afterward of the malaria fever, meant that the boy would have done anything the Bwana asked him. The only thing he had refused to do was change his name, even though Bwana Daudi had suggested several other names for him.

  “Chuma is James, and you too shall be an apostle,” he said. “You can be my Peter, and I will lean on you just as Jesus leaned on his rock.”

  But Majwara had said he would keep his name. It was in memory of his mother, he said, for she had chosen that name for him above all others. “I will never see her again,” he said, “but she is with me in my name.”

  “What a sentimental boy,” Bwana Daudi said, and clapped him on his back. “Very well then, my young rock, you shall continue to be called Majwara.”

  And now here we were, on this rock in Chitambo’s village, and Bwana Daudi was dead in his hut.

  Majwara and I sat together in silence. Then Majwara said, “He asked for his medicine. I gave it to him, and he picked out what he needed. But what if it was the wrong one? What if, in the confusion of his illness, he picked the wrong one? And then I fell asleep. I was so weary. I should not have been so weary. What if he called out to me and I did not hear?”

  “You did what you could, child,” I said, and patted him on his head. I had to raise my arm to do so, for though he is many moons younger than me, he towers over me like a sapling above the dug earth.

  “He saved my life,” the boy wept, “but I could not save his.”

  I let him weep without talking. After his passion was spent, he said again, “I will never see him again.”

  “Yes, that is death,” I said to him. “We will none of us see Bwana Daudi again in this life.”

  Together, we walked back to the camp. By this time, the stiffness had left the Bwana’s body, and the men had laid him out. We arrived to find them going into the hut in little groups to pay their respects. After all the men were done, I led the women in to see him.

  They had laid him on his back on the mud bed. His hands were at his sides and his eyes closed. Against his scalp, his hair was gray and thin. It was strange to see him without his hat, for no day had ever gone by that he did not wear it. In the thin light that broke the darkness of the hut, it seemed as though he was asleep. A blue fly buzzed from the ceiling above. His medicine chest formed a table next to his bed.

  As I looked at the uneaten dish of boiled grains and mashed groundnuts that rested on it, which he had asked for only the night before, it came to me that, truly, he was dead. And it came to me then that his death was everything to me.

  2

  * * *

  [Tippoo Tib] describes him as quite an old man, and adds that his name was Livingstone but that in the interior he called himself David. Livingstone thus seems to have been obliged, for the sake of greater intimacy, to have himself called simply by his Christian name by his blacks.

  Heinrich Brode, Tippoo Tib, the Story of His Career in Central Africa, Narrated from His Own Accounts

  When Bwana Daudi first bought me for Amoda four years ago, Amoda told me that the Bwana was a learned man, that he was a mganga more skilled than all of the Sultan’s men of medicine. I thought he was laughing at me because I do not know as much about the things of this world as he does. But in the time that I have been with Bwana Daudi, I have learned that all Amoda told me is true: from reading his large books in all sorts of tongues, Bwana Daudi knew well the diseases that strike both men and beasts.

  He could heal almost anyone with potions and ointments. True, he had no joy in curing Chirango’s eye after he lost it in that beating that Amoda gave him, and poor Chipangawazi did die after a week of the runs in Nyangwe, but he healed Majwara of the malaria fever and many others of aches of the flesh and joints.

  He had no divining bones, horns, animal skins, or plant powders like a real mganga, but he had other doctor things, potions and ointments that he said were used by the mganga of his own land. As well as his many ointments, powders, and potions, Bwana Daudi traveled with several instruments that he used to measure the height of the earth and through which he looked at the stars. His reading of the stars aided us often in our travels, for this was a wisdom that was understood by many people, and indeed in some places, positions of honor were given to men who could read the stars. And he was forever writing. When he ran out of ink, he asked me to pound fresh, dark berries so that he could use their juice for ink.

  It took some time for me to learn this about Bwana Daudi, which is why I did not immediately believe Amoda. For it seemed most peculiar to me that a man should leave the life he knows in his own land, should sail for months and months in a jahazi on an angry sea to come all this way just to wander about looking for the beginning of a river.

  Why any man would leave his own land and his wife and children to tramp in these dreary swamps to inquire into the flowing of a river, and into that which does not concern him at all, is beyond my understanding, but Bwana Daudi had no wife, poor thing, he did not take another after his first wife, Mama Robert, died, more is the pity. Perhaps it was her death that made him abandon his children.

  And though he tried enough to explain to me why he was looking for this Nile beginning, I never could quite understand it. I said to him, “Go back to your children, because the Nile has been there since time began, and it will be there after you and I are in the soil, and what will you do then, because the Nile won’t care about whether you know where it begins. It will flow on as it always has whether you find it or not. Look at that bwana of Mabruki’s, Speke, I think he was called, yes, Bwana Speke, the very one whose grave Bwana Stanley’s man Bombay wants to visit.

  “Shot himself dead, didn’t he, cleaning his gun. Bombay told me all about it when he was here with Bwana Stanley. A most stupid way to die if you ask me. Why did he clean his gun himself, as if he had no slaves to clean it for him? Well, he is in his grave now, and still the Nile flows.”

  And I said to him, “You are best off finding a young wife to warm your bed, and yes, you are old and your teeth are bad, there is no getting away from that, but like my second master the qadi, you are rich in cloth and gold and beads, and like the qadi, you could get yourself a pretty wife. Three wives he had, the qadi did, all pretty as sparkling jewels, but did he spend any money on them, mean as anything he was, and look where it got him. Dead, just like that, leaving it all behind, with his sons and bastards all fighting over every last thing.”

  Laughing as he waved me away, he said, “Come now, Halima, leave me to eat in silence.”

  Now, Bwana Daudi may have been content to wander about for no reason, but if I had my way, I would be back in Zanzibar, far from this jungle and mud, snug in my own house, shut behind a door that would truly be a marvel to all. I told him often that I was not born to march in wildernesses, forests, and swamps looking for rivers, that I was not. Lived my very first years with my mother in one of the biggest palaces in Zanzibar, didn’t I, at Beit el-Mtoni.

  Before she became a bondswoman of the Liwali, my mother, Zafrene, was the cook for one of the Sultan’s most petted and spoiled nieces. She was accused of theft, my mother, lucky for her it was at just about the time she caught the eye of the Liwali, and why not, for though she was a Nubian with skin like burnt coffee, she was tall and elegant, with teeth and eyes that were whiter than new milk. The Liwali bought both her and me from the Sultan’s niece’s husband, and that is how we became bonded to his household.

  The women of the Liwali’s harem said she had light fingers, my mother, Zafrene. I do not know about that, and to own the truth, there is nothing I hate more than a thief, as tha
t lazy pagazi Chirango knows full well. Thought he could steal the cloth from a bolt that had not been opened, didn’t he, and some beads along with it, and sell it all to me and have me blamed for it, but I soon showed him what was what.

  After the Liwali’s death, I passed on to the qadi, who was a judge in the maẓālim and sat as judge in that court pronouncing on who was not following the words of the Prophet, blessings be upon His name. Now, though I say blessings upon the Prophet’s name, truth to tell, I am no Mohammedan, but when you live among Mohammedans you can’t help but get into their ways of doing and saying things. I tried enough to get into it, had to pretend hard enough for the qadi, didn’t I, but I must confess that though I did outwardly all that was wanted of me, and did it properly too, on the inside of me, I never could get along with it. It was too much to take in, all the salat and zakāt and hadīth and teachings and rulings and whatnots.

  From the qadi’s household, I was sold off by his greedy sons to the Arab merchant who dragged me from Zanzibar to Tabora in the interior. What a life that was, living in a low mud house, and, in the whole of Tabora, not a single door you could call a door, nothing that you could stop to really look at.

  If I was good to him and tended to him and cared and cooked well for him, my Arab merchant said, he would make me his main wife, would make me his horme, he said, and if I did not treat him well, it was off to Zanzibar with me, he said, to the slave market. To think of it. A bondswoman I may have been, but I have never once been sold in the market, where anyone could touch and prod me here and prod me there like I was some common mjakazi slave.