Out of Darkness, Shining Light

by Petina Gappah

  He was kind enough, the Liwali, I will give him that. Whenever he met me, moving from one task to another, and I stopped to ask him questions, he would chuck me under my chin and tell me to run off to my next job and not bother him. That is what I miss most about Bwana Daudi. If I asked him such a question, he answered me straight, even if I did not always understand him. I may not have understood everything, but he would answer anyway. But he can answer no questions where he is now, poor man, wherever it is that he is now.

  7

  * * *

  A man who accompanied us to the Falls was a great admirer of the ladies. Every pretty girl he saw filled his heart with rapture. “Oh, what a beauty I never saw her like before; I wonder if she is married?” and earnestly and lovingly did he gaze after the charming one till she had passed out of sight. He had four wives at home, and hoped to have a number more before long.

  David Livingstone, Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambezi and Its Tributaries

  I was as certain as I could be that the arrival of Bwana Stanley would surely mean the end of Bwana Daudi’s Nile madness. It pleased me to think that when Bwana Daudi had recovered his strength, we would all go back to the coast with Bwana Stanley, and what a merry party we would be, for Bwana Stanley had brought new faces to us, and new faces bring new stories and new stories bring new knowledge.

  For my own part, I was pleased to think of what awaited me in Zanzibar. Bwana Daudi had promised to free me and buy me my own little house, though I wondered how it would be with Amoda. I was just his road woman: he had his own women in Zanzibar, two of them even. Then again, I thought, he might wish to be on the road again. I would not have regretted his departure, nor his going back to his wives, for he could beat them instead of me. Perhaps they found him easier to love than I did, or perhaps with them he was lighter with his hand. I would not have regretted never seeing him again, but only if Bwana Daudi freed me like he said he would, and bought me my own house.

  I would much rather have had Susi call on me in my house, but, well, he had Misozi. But perhaps Bwana Daudi would take me and Majwara and our little foundling Losi to England with him, he had bought us after all, and the two of us would go with him and all that he owned.

  I call Losi my little daughter, though she is not mine mine, for I never could make them stay inside me long enough to grow. They just slid out of me, my children did, before they could breathe on their own, which may be just as well, poor things, for who wants to be born in bondage?

  We found her abandoned by the side of the road just before we reached Ujiji, poor mite. All skin and bones she was, she had been left for dead, perhaps by a slaving party. “You should be a mother, Halima,” Bwana Daudi said, “and here is one to practice on until you have your very own mtoto.”

  A piteous thing she was, and it took a lot of feeding to make her well again. Not a single soul begrudged her their food, indeed. I tried to explain to the Bwana that it was bad luck to take into your household a child you do not share blood with, for who knows what spirits and other things the child may bring.

  “If we were at the coast,” he said, “I would have sent her to the Nassick school in India, or even to England to my little Nannie, to my daughter Agnes, but what am I to do with her if you do not care for her?”

  He waved away my doubts, and I am glad of it. She has been a blessing and a boon, Losi has. That was his soft heart all over. I often heard him lament over his poor lost Chitane, who died before I joined them. That must have been a child, I thought, or perhaps one of his pagazi, but no. This much-lamented Chitane was nothing but a small dog remarkable for having so much hair that those who saw it could not tell which end was which.

  Drowned in a lake, this hairy little dog did. They were crossing a place with deep water and one of the pagazi had forgotten to cross with the creature. The dog had swum after the Bwana, only to drown before reaching him, for so wide was the crossing place that it had tired itself out from swimming. Bwana Daudi had named that lake forever after as Chitane’s Water. To think he would lament over a mere dog, over one of those creatures behind whose eyes djinns like to lurk and hide.

  Now, here was his soft heart again. And this was a child, not a dog. How could I say no to that? He had a way of getting to you, the Bwana did, and to get you to do the things you would not have done. I wanted to call her Zafrene, for my mother, but when she became strong enough to talk, all we could understand of her tongue was the word “Losi,” and that is what we called her.

  So there we were, the three of us, Majwara, Losi, and me, the Bwana’s foundlings. I was that excited to imagine that Bwana Stanley would force Bwana Daudi to give up all the Nile madness and go back to Zanzibar, then on to this famous England, but no, Bwana Daudi would press on and not turn back. They argued about it, but Bwana Daudi stood firm. He would journey on until he dropped dead, if need be.

  All that Bwana Stanley could do was to leave some of his men behind. And though I had never quite taken to Bwana Stanley and his boiled-groundnut eyes, it was certainly a gloomy day when he left us, for he took Bombay and his many companions with him. He left us severely diminished. Among the nine pagazi who chose to stay were Mabruki and Chirango. Bwana Stanley promised to send more men to meet us as soon as he got back, a bigger party of men, he said, to come with more supplies. We were to meet them in Unyanyembe.

  8

  * * *

  Halima ran away in a quarrel with Ntaoéka: I went over to Sultan bin Ali and sent a note after her, but she came back of her own accord, and only wanted me to come outside and tell her to enter. I did so, and added, “You must not quarrel again.” . . . She has been extremely good ever since I got her from Katombo or Moene-mokaia: I never had to reprove her once. . . . I shall free her, and buy her a house and garden at Zanzibar, when we get there.

  David Livingstone, The Last Journals of David Livingstone

  We reached Unyanyembe some months after Bwana Stanley had left. If you ask me, the hardest part of his travel since I joined his party was not the lack of food, or even the massacre at Manyuema, or not finding his provisions waiting, but the period we spent in Unyanyembe, waiting for Bwana Stanley’s men to come. The weary waiting, Bwana Daudi called it, or the wearisome waiting.

  He talked of nothing else but the waiting and how weary he was of waiting. It was enough to make me weary myself. He drove himself to distraction as he counted over and over again how many days it would take for the men to march from Bagamoyo.

  When he was not counting the days, he would sit in the shade of his hut, writing about anything he thought of, a group of ants one day, children’s games the next. One time he came to stand where I was shelling groundnuts while Losi, with her chattering voice, tried to help me. “Have you not seen,” he said, “that the children do not play like they are children, for they have no playthings?”

  I did not know what he meant by playthings and said so. “I mean the children play at being adults,” he said. “There they are, building pretend huts, and going to pretend wars to catch pretend slaves. Look at Losi there, playing with those groundnuts, pretending to be you.”

  “There is a lot of work,” I said, “and I cannot stand here chatting, so if you do not mind, could you move off to bother someone else?”

  He gave that laugh of his, shook his head, and moved off. Another time, I was pounding rice into flour as Losi again played beside me when he came and started talking to me about elephants, of all things. The man stood there prattling about elephants. Elephants indeed.

  “Do you know, Halima,” he said, “your ancestors in Africa used elephants as domestic animals at least as soon as the Asians?”

  “Why would the ancestors have wanted to use elephants as domestic animals?” I asked. “They must be hard to keep, elephants, for they eat everything in sight. Why, the other day, at the Liwali’s—”

  “Never mind that, but tell me what you think of this,” Bwana Daudi said. “It is written that some Africans refused to sell their ele
phants to a commander from Greece, who was in Egypt.”

  “Is this the same Egypt where this Nile is?” The minute I asked the question, I regretted it, for I knew that once started on the subject, he would go on and on about Herodotus this and Herodotus that, so I added quickly, “What did he offer for these elephants?”

  “A few brass pots,” Bwana Daudi said.

  “Then they were quite right to refuse,” I said.

  “They were indeed,” Bwana Daudi laughed. “You see the matter quite right. For it took them months of hard labor to catch and tame elephants but their wives could make any number of cooking pots for nothing.”

  There were many such moments with Bwana Daudi, and though they were mightily irritating at the time, for he simply would not let me get on with my work, I must confess that I soon came to miss his idle chatter. He began to sicken again. It was a sickness that made him refuse food, and his bones began to stick out like anything.

  It was then, in Unyanyembe, that Amoda engaged Ntaoéka as a washerwoman. As soon as Bwana Daudi recovered, he said she was to choose one of his men. She then attached herself to Mabruki.

  After this waiting, we were all relieved when the Nassick boys joined us. And what a parade they were. Their party was almost as big as the one Bwana Stanley had arrived with. The leading askari marched up smartly and stopped before the Bwana. They put their guns first on one side, then the other before firing into the air and saluting him.

  Behind the askari, all dressed in European clothes, came the seven Nassick boys. I could see Ntaoéka simper and smile as she moved her eyes from one to the other. After the Nassick boys were some fifty-strong pagazi, and to hear them talk afterward, the three months it took to march from Bagamoyo down to meet us in Ujiji was no pleasant experience, at least for the pagazi, for we soon came to learn that the Nassickers were too gentlemanly for any real work.

  What was most cheering was that there were three more women to join our party, and they brought with them their children. Khadijah, the wife of Chowpereh, had two children with her, as did Laede, the wife of Munyasere. Binti Sumari, the wife of a pagazi called Adhiamberi, had one child. This made ten women, with Bahati, who was Chirango’s woman before she died; Ntaoéka; and Susi’s woman Misozi.

  I was that pleased to see the children, for they would make playfellows for my own little Losi. And I was pleased to see more women, though to own the truth, with women you never know because where there are women, there is always talk.

  And there was soon talk enough, that there was. Ever since they heard of Bwana Daudi’s promise to me, Misozi and Ntaoéka were trying to argue me out of it. “When we get there, Halima,” the Bwana said to me, he said, “I will free you from my service and buy you a house in Zanzibar with a pretty little garden, far from the slave market.”

  “Wherever have you heard,” Misozi said, “of a bondswoman who owns a house? I do not know of any mjakazi who owns a house.”

  “Where have you heard of such a thing?” echoed Ntaoéka. “It is true that bondsmen can buy their own freedom and become wahadimu, and then as freed hadimu can buy the freedom of their wives and children, but there is no such thing as a bondswoman owning a house.”

  So I might never have had that house, but I know that he would have freed me in Zanzibar. He said he hated slavers, almost as much as Ntaoéka hates stinging ants. They talked on and on, he and Bwana Stanley, about how to stop the work of the slavers. But sometimes, I do not know what the difference is. The two Bwana talked like they both thought slavery must end, but Bombay told us that Bwana Stanley sometimes threatened his men with a slave stick.

  And for all he talked against slavers and wept for the women of Manyuema, Bwana Daudi himself got a lot of help from the slave traders. He ate once with Tippoo Tip himself, Susi said, and with his brother Kumbakumba too, and accepted gifts of powder and guns. They were his dearest friends when he was friendless, he said.

  And he bought me, yes he did, the Bwana bought me with his own money, he bought me for Amoda after he lost his heart to me, but afterward Amoda bothered and mithered me enough that I once ran off. After that Ntaoéka got it into her head to tell tales of me and Susi.

  When I came back, the Bwana gave me a big warm cloth, this very one around my shoulders, and it is just the thing for the cold nights in these horrible swamps. But a cloth is not the same as a house, and Ntaoéka and Misozi may well have been right, for no one has ever heard of a bondswoman who owned a house. In any event, as my mother always said, you only know how many seeds a pomegranate contains when you break it open.

  So there will be no house for Halima, and no garden either, pretty or otherwise, only this mad Amoda bin Mahmud, who looks at me like an angry jackal, particularly when Susi is near.

  9

  * * *

  It is rather a minute thing to mention, and it will only be understood by those who have children of their own, but the cries of the little ones, in their infant sorrows, are the same in tone, at different ages, here as all over the world. We have been perpetually reminded of home and family by the wailings, which were once familiar to parental ears and heart, and felt thankful that to the sorrows of childhood our children would never have superadded the heart-rending woes of the slave trade.

  David Livingstone, The Last Journals of David Livingstone

  Not even the shadow that spread over the camp on the morning of Bwana Daudi’s death could stop the children’s laughter. By the time the sun rose, they were all up. Their voices were loud as they chased each other and the chickens. They were a small band of six, always together unless they were working or had been separated by some of their sudden quarrels.

  My little Losi has come on very well. She chatters cheerfully as she plays, first in one tongue, then in another. No one picks up tongues faster than children do, it is a real gift, that. The only grown people I have seen with the same gift are Susi, Bombay, and Binti Sumari’s man Adhiamberi, for the three of them know more tongues than I have fingers and toes to count with. Jacob Wainwright too is gifted in that way, for he picked up all sorts of tongues at his school in India.

  They were pleased enough to rest these last days, the poor mites, because marching is hard on short legs. We normally would have been up long before dawn—“We march at four a.m.,” the Bwana would have said, by which he meant that we were to wake the roosters.

  It is hot work, marching is, best done when the ground is cool and there is still dew on the leaves and grass. Marching days began with what the Bwana called the reveille, which meant Majwara beat the drum from tent to tent or hut to hut to rouse the men, then Ntaoéka, Misozi, Binti Sumari, Laede, and the other women would have joined me in lighting the fires, then we would have broken the night’s fast with a meal, then on the road we would have gone, until: “It is eight a.m.,” cried the Bwana, by which he meant we would break to eat before going again and resting when the sun was high in the sky.

  As we traveled, the children skipped ahead to walk with Majwara, they were that fond of him. They would have run ahead, too, were it not for the constant rebukes from the caravan leaders. Amoda has now frightened them into behaving: if you go ahead of the kirangozi, he has told them, the slavers will get you and take you to the coast and you will walk a long time unless you drop stone dead and you will never be seen again.

  It is a powerful admonition. Indeed, they like to play a game they call Kumbakumba, where they pretend to be Kumbakumba and Tippoo Tip, the slavers that we all fear the most. They divide themselves into two groups, one made up of the raiders, the other the raided. The raiders come upon the raided and mimic the sound of the guns as they say, “Tippoo Tip, Tippoo Tip, Tippoo Tip.” Then they yell, “Kumbakumba!” and make to grab one of the raided. The captured are then marched off and the whole thing ends with a shout of “Kumbakumba!” and much shrieking laughter. Their quarrels are mainly over who is to be the raiders. No one ever wants to play the captured, they only grudgingly accept it so that they can be the captors in the
ir turn.

  That must be what Bwana Daudi meant when he said to me in Unyanyembe that the children do not act like children, but play at being grown. Tippoo Tip and Kumbakumba were born slaves, they were. Brothers too, they say, born to the same mother. And now look at them. Just like the children, they would rather capture than be captured.

  I was about to call to Laede to help me with the water when Chirango came up to me. He gave an effusive greeting. I looked at him without saying a word.

  Even before the whipping by Amoda for which he blames me, he was a troublesome one, always up to something. After his first woman, Bahati, died, he showed not the slightest care, and instead he got another woman, Kaniki, she is called. He also bought a young girl and boy for three strings of beads when we stopped at Nyamwezi. The girl was to be his concubine when she had sprouted breasts, he said, and the boy his servant. His woman Kaniki made sure that they did not join the other children in play.

  It was not like it had been with Bwana Stanley’s man Bombay, and his boy Nasibu. When he arrived with Bwana Stanley, Bombay had Nasibu carry his gun for him. He was no higher than Losi. I thought he was Bombay’s son, at first, for the poor mite would not be separated from him, and often fell asleep with his head on Bombay’s knee. “Son,” he said, “well I have sons enough, but they are with their mothers. Nasibu is my slave.”

  Jacob Wainwright, who had been listening, frowned and said, “Slave? Why do you need a slave?”

  “I don’t need him at all,” Bombay laughed. “If he was not my slave he would have been with another of Bwana Stanley’s men, and a bad master he would have had in him too. His mother sold him for a piece of cloth and some yams. She wanted him saved, she said, for the village was starving and another of her children was already dead, but the man she sold him to was hard on the boy and so Bwana Stanley said I could buy him. Got him dearly too, three long strings of red beads I paid for him.”