Bwana’s geographical instruments were all cracked glass by now. How pointless to seize them. But the British never reason. There was no attempt at logic.
I need them, Susi. Searching for Livingstone these many months has made my case weaker—
Why bother searching for man you know is dead? thought Abdullah. Maybe at first there was money or fame to be had. What do you hope to gain now? He watched the white man marching in a small circle before him. Lieutenant Cameron was bemoaning the dwindling of his expedition.
We began with a large caravan, a search party, the finest men. Moffat died of fever. Dillon—
And me, I have only three caravan leaders left: Jacob Wainright. James Chuma. Farjullah—
And you? Cameron leered, his blistered cheeks flushing. Do you conceive that you have replaced your deceased master? This ridiculous funeral party you’ve formed—
We have lost our father. And you want to take his things from us. Force us to bury him.
Every day, putrefaction eats into that body. Soon enough, there will be nought to bury. In the territory through which we just journeyed, the Wagogo forbid carrying the dead . . .
Abdullah closed his eyes. Night. A man kneeling on the bed, his face buried, his neck bordered by a froth of white hair. He wears his old nightshirt. His hands are hidden.
Abdullah opened his eyes, opened his mouth, spoke over the muzungu.
We will take the Doctor home to England. We are so close to the coast, I can smell the salt.
J. lit a fire. The caravan leaders huddled inside the shack they had been granted—except Wainright, whom the colonial officers had taken in because his name was Christian and his English was good. The air in Zanzibar was silken and spicy. The sea was less than a mile away. From the doorway, Abdullah watched the sun’s copper embers, the smoke-grey clouds. The day softened off slowly, but his thoughts were bitter and quick. He saw that the others felt the same. They were sitting on a blanket on the ground. Abdullah thought about their lives of catch-and-release. The Doctor had freed each and every one of them from slavery: broken their chains, sometimes with his own hands. Anointed them, hired them, trained them.
J. had brewed a pot of tea—hot water, leaves, no sugar—and was handing tin cups around. The inside of the shack was ripe with its metallic smell.
The HMS Vulture, said Abdullah.
What’s that? Farjullah looked up.
The name of the ship.
It’s here? J. said eagerly, putting his cup on the ground.
Yes. It will carry the body away by sea.
Farjullah wiped his hand down his face. It is done, he sighed.
And Wainright? J. demanded. Where is that bloody toady?
They only have room for one of us. They said they will send for the rest of us later. They’ve paid us—
They don’t even know Wainright! He’s only been with us for five years. He is not family. He is the help. J. sipped his hot tea and winced.
Wainright will go ahead, Abdullah said. We cannot afford to refuse the bwana’s people.
The sun looked spent in England, unhealthy. The light was more silver than copper here. But Newstead Abbey was lovely, with its lush green lawns and smooth stones like closed eyelids. J. sat across the dining table from Abdullah, in his blue serge jacket with its round bright buttons. He was stirring limp salad leaves with a fork. Abdullah watched without pity as J. pressed his thumb against the tine of his fork. They hadn’t eaten British food in years, not since the Doctor had left them at Dr Wilson’s Nassick School in Bombay while he scrounged money for a ship to replace the Lady Nyassa. Abdullah and J. were still called “Bombay Africans.”
Their British host, Mr Webb, was leaning against the far wall, observing them, a hand on his hip. Abdullah’s patience had withered: the man hadn’t stopped staring at them for weeks. Mrs Webb, his wife, was seated at the table, shouting at a page.
Is it cooked? she asked sternly. Come here! Are you deaf?
The page moved hesitantly toward her and her hand fell heavily onto his arm. She often used the servants as props this way, displaying her might to her guests. Her accent rasped over words, shaving bits of sound off them. In the dull light of the chandelier, her eyes were tarnished coins.
We should take pictures! she panted at her husband. Souvenirs. We could show the Doctor’s marvelous maps!
Mr Webb gaped, a laugh catching in his throat. That would be a dumb show indeed, my dear.
J. glumly pushed a tomato slice around his plate.
Abdullah had not thought they would be brought to Great Britain at all. The invitation was cold comfort a year after the state funeral. They had managed to get the great Doctor Livingstone halfway across the world, only to be plied with wreaths of pity: ornamental swords, thin ribbons, silver coins. J. gathered the medals in his hands like bounty and held them in Abdullah’s face: Look! he said, his grin deepening the scar in his cheek where the bwana had once lashed him.
Their time in England stretched long. White men hosting them in big houses in every corner of the country, dragging them to yet another desolate mansion, a dark irregular trail across the land. Abdullah felt listless beside J. with his bloody felt hats—how far they had fallen, scraping and bowing for these whites. Mr Young made them build a thatch model of the hut where the bwana had died—a kilanda on its stilts inside. Reverend Waller took them to Leytonstone Church, and to the agricultural show, and on a tour of the workhouse. Abdullah thought with disgust about that awful speech J. had made to the orphans about slavery. The children had been so dirty. So very young.
I do not want to stay here, said Abdullah.
J. looked up from his plate. Are you a child that you must run home?
Abdullah stood and wiped his hands on his trousers. He crossed the stone floor of the old tollhouse where they had been put up for the week. J. kept on quarrying into his meal, humming. Abdullah crouched in front of his trunk and took out the book with the leather binding.
Not this again, J. muttered. I thought you were the wise elder.
Abdullah sat down. He inserted his dinner knife between the pages and the binding and cut the leather strap. He tipped the book open, pushed it across the table. J. continued eating in that slow noisy way of his.
Look, said Abdullah, pointing his knife at a page.
J. reached for a serviette to wipe his hands.
Who stole bwana’s medicine box?
You have it wrong, said J. I was faithful to that man, to the very end.
Faithful? Nts.
J. leaned back in his chair, his forearms, dark and thin, crossed over his striped vest. What word would you like? Obedient?
What do you know about that word? Abdullah sucked his teeth again.
J.’s cheeks were dotted with white crumbs. Oh, yes, bwana, he seethed. I know nothing about obedience.
Abdullah glared at him. Rage beat across the air between them. Strange food in a strange land, parading the Doctor’s death around. This moldy tollhouse had rekindled something between them.
I did not steal that medicine box. J. released the words one at a time.
I have always suspected you and those—
No. I will not listen to false charges. I have dreams, bwana, J. spat.
He stood and paced the room with the easy vigour of an animal. His words cut through the smell of damp and stone, through the wind’s whimpering.
I dream of Victoria, said J. The English name was steely in his mouth. My black hand in her white hand. The Queen’s smile, true and full. Her crown like the sun, with jewels and gold. I ask: Will you honor us, Your Majesty? She nods. It will come to you when you accept it. Christianity, Commerce, Civilization.
Abdullah looked down and pulled the journal toward him. January 20, 1867. The entry furred under his eyes. When he looked up, J. was gone. Abdullah closed the book.
You shouldn’t talk about that medicine box.
It’s done.
It’s been done a long time.
Bw
ana—
Bwana is gone.
Abdullah turned away in the cot they shared, gingerly hitching up his knees. The moonlight poured through the tollhouse window. Christian boys from Nassick do not need to be told not to murder, the bwana had shouted once. Abdullah still scratched invisible prayers to Allah in the sheets. Which God would be more forgiving?
They carried the corpse to the coast to show their loyalty. They came to England to confirm their innocence. They even recreated the scene of the crime—the hut in the night where the great Doctor Livingstone died—to prove that they hadn’t committed it. But Abdullah knew that a shackled man, once freed, is still shackled to the man who freed him. A slave learns early to weigh flesh against gold, life against life, death against profit.
Abdullah felt J.’s breath in hot waves on the back of his neck. He thought of the times bwana shot at them for insubordination and smoking bange, for womanizing and caracoling. The moonlight swooned. Abdullah closed his eyes.
The first time he had touched the old man’s neck that night, bwana’s eyes had opened, his hand scrabbling under his pillow for his bottle of calomel.
The pain, he said, it pulses. Terrible pain, Abdullah. What is that howling?
A screech owl, bwana.
The old man sucked the calomel from the spoon like a child, then nestled the bottle back under the pillow. It wouldn’t slow the fever’s momentum. He had stayed alive as long as he could but his death began as soon as that medicine box vanished.
Abdullah remembered how they shuffled through the dawn, carrying the corpse to the shelter before the sun rose, how it dangled between them, swaying as they stepped unsteadily between the trees. J. went backwards, and when he stumbled over a root, the bwana’s mouth opened with a sucking sound. They handed the body down piecemeal: buttocks, then torso, then legs.
They stood looking at it for a long time. All of a sudden, J. pitched over the corpse, as if grappling it. A moan lifted, slipped, rose again to a jagged cry.
His eyes open. A face floats above like a stone: flat as day, dark as night. Now the hand around his neck. He clutches at it, fingers forming a bolus of flesh and bone. Slowly, it wrenches the air from its home. The living ebbs. As darkness comes sweeping through, he sees that there is no light. He’s surprised to realize that this comes as a relief.
Warsan Shire
A Somali-British poet, her debut pamphlet, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth, was published in 2011 by flipped eye publishing. She won the inaugural Brunel University International African Poetry Prize in 2013. In 2014, she was appointed as the first Young Poet Laureate for London and was also selected as Poet in Residence for Queensland, Australia. Her poems have appeared in many publications, including Poetry Review, Magma and Wasafiri, and her pamphlet Her Blue Body was published in 2015. In 2016, she provided the film adaption and poetry for Beyoncé’s Peabody Award-winning visual album Lemonade.
Backwards
For Saaid Shire
The poem can start with him walking backwards into a room.
He takes off his jacket and sits down for the rest of his life;
that’s how we bring Dad back.
I can make the blood run back up my nose, ants rushing into a hole.
We grow into smaller bodies, my breasts disappear,
your cheeks soften, teeth sink back into gums.
I can make us loved, just say the word.
Give them stumps for hands if even once they touched us without consent,
I can write the poem and make it disappear.
Step-Dad spits liquor back into glass,
Mum’s body rolls back up the stairs, the bone pops back into place,
maybe she keeps the baby.
Maybe we’re okay, kid?
I’ll rewrite this whole life and this time there’ll be so much love,
you won’t be able to see beyond it.
You won’t be able to see beyond it,
I’ll rewrite this whole life and this time there’ll be so much love.
Maybe we’re okay, kid,
maybe she keeps the baby.
Mum’s body rolls back up the stairs, the bone pops back into place,
Step-Dad spits liquor back into glass.
I can write the poem and make it disappear,
give them stumps for hands if even once they touched us without consent,
I can make us loved, just say the word.
Your cheeks soften, teeth sink back into gums
we grow into smaller bodies, my breasts disappear.
I can make the blood run back up my nose, ants rushing into a hole,
that’s how we bring Dad back.
He takes off his jacket and sits down for the rest of his life.
The poem can start with him walking backwards into a room.
Novuyo Rosa Tshuma
A native of Zimbabwe, who has lived in South Africa and the US, she is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Maytag Fellow and a recipient of a Rydson Award for Excellence in Fiction. Shadows, her short-story collection, was published to critical acclaim in 2013 by Kwela Books in South Africa and awarded the 2014 Herman Charles Bosman Prize for the best literary work in English. In 2017, she was a resident fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, which supported work on her novel House of Stone, published in 2018. Her writing has been featured in numerous anthologies, including McSweeney’s and The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, edited by Viet Thanh Nguyen (2017). She serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of the Bare Life Review, a journal of refugee and immigrant literature based in San Francisco.
Mr C
My fainting spells began around the time Mr C stopped replying to our letters about my father’s estate. I was sixteen. They began as a rush of heat to my chest and a tingling coursing through my limbs, a surge of adrenaline that, on a hot day, would make me shiver, followed by a feeling of dread, and this is the only word I can think of that can come close to describing that sensation, so terrible is it, there are no words adequate to describe it. I would black out, whether from the terror of that sensation, as though death were at my heels, I don’t know, but this is what I thought at the time, that the death that had taken my father was now after me. This is the feeling, and even though of course I’ve never experienced death, that is what these spells bring to mind, a sensation that is almost beyond articulation.
No doctor was able to diagnose what was wrong with me; all physical tests came back normal. I had to learn to live with these fainting spells; to anticipate them and try to abate them, this dread, which invariably plunged me into a terrible darkness.
I had loved writing those letters to Mr C. They were the strongest connection I had to my father, communication with this man whom I had first met at his funeral, dabbing his eyes with a checkered kerchief, his big hand warm on my shoulder, sniffling how so very sorry he was, so sorry, Frank had been his best friend, he didn’t understand how this could happen. I felt the sour, steel taste in my mouth recede, then, but still I could not speak. I was eleven years old. I hadn’t even been able to cry, ever since learning my father had died. He had been visiting Bulawayo from London where he lived and worked, and had been involved in a car accident on his way home from the airport. I had spoken to him on the phone just after he alighted from the plane.
“See you soon, Daddy!”
“See you soon,” he had said.
And so I took great care with those letters. I would sit with Mum and together we would go over Mr C’s correspondence, written in an extremely cold, lawyerly tone. I would help Mum draft our replies to him. I had taken care to research formal letter-writing, and where I thought of an ordinary word I would consult my father’s thesaurus for a more severe-sounding synonym, so as to reflect back to Mr C his lawyerly tone. I thought this was the correct thing to do, but it irked him no end as, it later turned out, he thought I was being rude. But I was only trying to mirror him, matching him in both wording and tone. Instea
d of writing “things are not as you make them out to be”, I would look for the appropriate wording and write: “matters are not as you purport them to be.” I loved writing those letters; I laboured over them so, revising and revising and revising. I needed them to be perfect for Mr C!
But then, one day, he just stopped responding, and after a while, it became apparent that he had no intention of replying to any of my letters, which I imagine became less professional and more child-like, more me, with each unanswered correspondence. It was only natural that, when I turned eighteen, I decided to take over my father’s estate. With a thrill, I realised this meant I would have to meet with Mr C.
Each time I telephoned his office to make an appointment to change the named executor of my father’s estate from him to me, though, his secretary said he was booked up for months on end, and could not see me, and although she always assured me that he would get back to me, he never did. My emails to him went unanswered too.
I decided, then, to take the Greyhound bus from Bulawayo down to Harare and ambush Mr C right outside his offices. I thought myself terribly clever. And though I had come under the pretext of discussing my father’s estate, what I really wanted was to see Mr C, to feel the reassuring weight of his hand on my shoulder again. I had with me the letters my father and I had exchanged when I was a child, and also an old copy of the University of Zimbabwe Law Review that he, Mr C, and my father had run while as undergraduates, during those days when my daddy, a sharp, pensive Marxist, had penned legal articles full of the passion of that age, the early twenties when one is full of ideals, and fueled as well by the politics of that time, the 1980s, just after Zimbabwe’s independence, when notions of freedom and justice had run high, and our country had then had what had seemed a bright future.
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