by M G Vassanji
He saw her almost immediately. She looked dead. She was in a sitting posture on the floor against the wall, her head lolling sideways towards her right shoulder. Her eyes were open. Catching his breath, emitting a choking sound, he went over to her slowly and with tenderness picked up one of her hands. He felt her forehead, caressed strands of hair, and with the back of his hand touched her neck where the line of blood ran. He pulled the hem of her frock down so that she was decent, and dropped her hand gently to her lap. Then he ran to the mukhi.
Jamali walked hurriedly back with him. The baby, he said, had been brought earlier to their home by his wife, to relieve Mariamu. He was safe, playing, being fed — what was wrong with Mariamu? Pipa beside him, pulling him by the sleeve, was breathing fast, in large, audible gulps that might have seized and choked him.
“Oh, God!” gasped the mukhi when he saw the sight. “Oh, God and the Prophet …”
She had been violated, but there was no point in broadcasting that. All these foreigners about — brutal and shameless — Africans from all over, Punjabis and Baluchis and Rajputs, it could have been any one of those depraved men. Poor innocent, they all said when they buried her, who could have wished this for her, and why?
Could it be them, Pipa thought. The Sufis of Moshi. As revenge. Punishment. But why her? Why not me?
Later Pipa went through Mariamu’s belongings, sifted through her trunk to look for things he could send as offerings to the mosque, whose value she could reap in the other life, but there was nothing suitable except her pachedi. As he extracted the green garment whose shimmer had once thrilled him so, he felt a hard flat object wrapped inside it. As he unfolded the slippery cloth, he found himself holding a book. The book. He was so startled he dropped it back into the trunk, then picked it up again. Bwana Corbin’s book, he thought, which he himself would have so liked to steal that day, now hidden among his wife’s things! He recalled the morning, coming from the ADC’s house, seeing the book with a pen lying on the chair where Corbin had left them in a hurry … then meeting Mariamu and Khanoum walking in the direction from which he had come, to the ADC’s house to collect her things. She must have taken it then, along with the pen, which was now here inside the book. But why?
He examined it briefly. There were some snapshots in it — in one of them the ADC Bwana Corbin on a horse.
Why? To steal back her secret — her shame — from the Englishman? To prove to her husband her innocence? Or to permit herself — and her husband — to take revenge on the mzungu? A revenge he himself had been unable to take. So was this her gift to him; one which she, one day, some evening in better times, would have shown him had she lived? …
He was convinced the book contained the answer to his torment. What was the relationship between the ADC and his Mariamu? Was the boy, Aku, really his own? He could not read it, yet he would take this gift with him wherever he went. It was from her and she must be in it, described in it. The book contained her spirit.
Miscellany (ii)
From the personal notebook of Pius Fernandes
April 1988, Moshi
It has been a little over a week since I came to Moshi and met Young Jamali. Together we have visited some of the sites, and he has told me stories and anecdotes he heard as a child in his home … and much else besides that is not pertinent to my inquiries …
Yanga (Young Africans) have been beaten at soccer by their old rivals Simba (formerly Sunderland), and for the last hour the Moshi bus station has been in an uproar of celebration and recrimination. The Taveta bus is, predictably, late, and when it does arrive its passengers are celebrating and transistors blare.
Young Jamali and I push through the throng with our tickets and confront the conductor confidently. “We have seat numbers!” “Of course,” he says. “Go right in.” But the bus, coming from Arusha, is smaller, does not conform to the seat plan flourished before us earlier at the ticket office. What we thought would be the comfortable mid-section is, in this vehicle, the last row of seats.
It is a hellish, rattling ride. We cling to our seats as to our lives. We are on a trade route, and with us are seasoned, hardy passengers: Masai youths, Taita men and women. Now that market day is over, they bring fresh goods from Tanzania, pay not duties but bribes at the border, freely exchange and carry forbidden currency. The young man sitting next to us explains how it is all done: everyone makes a living — from the blustering policeman who first boards the bus to the bullying customs officer with darting eyes to the slow-witted immigration inspector who takes ten minutes to press a stamp on our papers. Who can survive on a government salary, our friend offers a truism, putting a candy into his mouth and once more taking a quick reassuring glance along the luggage rack where his goods lie, and an anxious look outside lest something of his be carried off the roof of the bus. We arrive in Taveta at about midnight.
It is a black moonless night folding in dim-glowing pockets of light. There is a slight chill in the air. To our right as we start off from the bus station is a large open area that has been used as a garbage dump. This presumably is where the market was held. The smells of the day have long ripened, though the crisp night air abates them and keeps them distant. We walk along what seems to be the only main street (the other direction, we have figured, goes out of town, Voi-way). Some doors are open, shadowy lights inside. Strains of music. Hardly a soul on the unpaved, cratered road. A sign on a wall, MODERN CINEMA NEW VIDEO, beside it posters advertising a double feature — Sylvester Stallone and Amitabh Bachan, Hollywood and Bollywood, facing opposite directions. The buildings are low, part mud, part cement, part brick — whatever fit — the roofs, corrugated iron. Suddenly we come upon an amazingly modern building. TAVETA INN is painted boldly in foot-long letters on the side wall. The doorway is lighted, orange. There is a tree outside, cars parked, an askari. We enter and are greeted by a young man in blue Kaunda suit. “Welcome,” he says. The rooms are, to our surprise, very good.
I have not felt so alone, so away, in years. The last time was when I first came to Africa, long ago. Outside, the music still plays. Downstairs in the lobby two men talk earnestly in the bar, their voices carry clearly and without inhibition. There comes the sound of water, from somewhere. Young Jamali sleeps in the adjoining room. So many times in the past few weeks I have seen this town, this area, in my mind as it must have been eighty, ninety years ago; imagined the thousands of troops and animals on the march across the dry land, digging in battle lines, relinquishing them; the guns firing, the bayonets thrusting; the disease and thirst and death. Now to be here … the feeling is eerie, unreal.
Morning, after a Swahili breakfast. The town is so exposed, so uniformly bright, the sun seems to have simply poured in, leaving not a spot untouched. This is the town at the edge of a desert that during the war had to be crossed to recapture it.
But there is no sign of the war here, no sign of the past. History drifts about in the sands, and only the fanatically dedicated see it and recreate it, however incomplete their visions and fragile their constructs. Yes, says the morning askari, at his post at the doorway, his grandfather would talk of the old days, of the war and the Germans. But he had died recently. If only we had come two or three months ago. The manager arrives, unhappy that it is the askari who receives the benefit of our conversation.
“The guests wish to know of old times, Germans and so on,” says the askari.
The manager sends him off and eyes us. “Who are you?” he asks.
When we tell him he shakes our hands and says, “My friends, this place is full of history.”
From then on he is unstoppable. His name is James. A slight man of about thirty, with a thin moustache, a beige Kaunda suit today.
“Are you from here?” I ask hopefully.
He stops. “No, sir. I am from Rabai. On the coast.” He is not going to say more about that. He continues: “Did you know that this town was the only British territory — anywhere on our globe, mind you — that was captured by the G
ermans in the Great War. They held it until …” and he goes on, telling us a history we already know.
“Are there people here — wazees — who remember the war, perhaps stories from their fathers? …” I ask.
“The last one died just six weeks ago. I doubt if you will find anyone else.… Come with me.”
Dutifully we follow him back inside, take the stairs to the roof terrace two floors up. This is the highest point in the town, looking out upon the entire countryside for miles in all directions. Instinctively drawing our breath we gather to take in Kilimanjaro. There are huts on its slope, smoke rising at a few spots; the round peak is visible, capped with snow: so majestic and yet so benevolent. Almost emerging from its side is a range of hills. “In the hills there is Lake Chala, a crater lake,” James says. “It is fed by an underground stream. The stream continues underground from there — look, you can see the line of vegetation that follows it above the ground — and erupts in a spring there.” He shows us some dense growth in the distance. “Next it feeds Lake Jipe,” he says, pointing now southwards, “and proceeds to the Pare Mountains in Tanzania. Taveta, you see, is practically surrounded by an underground river.” He beams proudly.
We walk around, in different directions, pulled separately and privately by the awesome panorama that surrounds us.
Down below us, the mundane and gross world of the town is slowly but assuredly coming to life: the street with the sparse human traffic, the four-wheel-drive that’s just arrived and parked downstairs, the video place with the double feature now with the radio on, blaring news interrupted by the jingle of an ad from Nairobi. Behind our hotel, rails of a defunct line that once carried an army; next to it a group of houses sharing a common backyard. A child emerges from an outhouse that is obviously doorless, a woman with a can of water goes in. I look away, into the distance.
Straight ahead, rising upon a bare round hill, an impressive church built of rough stone. Towards it, on a trail through bush and plantations, well-dressed but simple folk make their way to service. Could that be the CMS church, or its site, I wonder.
Towards the east, in the near distance, a quite distinguished feature of the local geography: a low circular hill, a gentle bump in a flatland. It would not take long to walk to it, just out of town where the thorny desert terrain is beginning to take over. “Salaita,” James says, coming over to my side. “Here a famous battle was fought.” He corrects himself: “Three battles. It was captured by the British after the last one.”
Does anybody care about the history, I ask: does it matter?
“Ah, not to the local public, alas. But from time to time there are visitors like you. Last month there was a German expedition from Tanga — a man and a woman. They took photographs of Salaita Hill.”
He has had a brochure prepared, he says, describing the local attractions for tourists. He would like them to visit this place for its history, as well as the wildlife and the mountain. “Why do you think I’m paying you so much attention? I like you, you are my brothers from across the border. But I also want you to tell people about us.”
As part of his overwhelming hospitality James drives us to the church in the four-wheel-drive. A padre and a flock of his congregation come to greet us as we get out of the jeep.
“When was this church built?” I ask anxiously after an exchange of greetings.
“In the thirties,” says the padre, a trifle disappointed we will not be joining him for the service. “After a fire,” he adds.
“And before that? There was a CMS station here a long time ago.”
“Ah,” he says. “Long before my time. It wasn’t on this site. I believe it was where the cemetery is.”
He sends a girl with us, who does not seem too keen to miss the morning service. She looks committed, must be a favourite. In the middle of a mango grove, we find a graveyard. The graves have all been reused, very recently. Ancient carved gravestones, new graves, five, ten years old.
On our way back to the hotel, Young Jamali points to the old brickwork of what looks like a relic chimney. We stop. It is a surprising, somewhat startling sight on top of a bare mound identical to the one on which the church stands, directly across the road from it. The chimney rises next to a dull rectangular structure with grey concrete exterior. No one saw fit to mention it to us, yet it is a decidedly old structure; there is nothing else of that brick we’ve seen. The grey building is the parish office, partly rented out. A bent old woman interrupts her sweeping of the yard to show us the chimney, which is attached to an ancient kitchen now used as a storehouse; it doesn’t have a roof. As far as she knows the chimney has always been here. The newer building has been put up on an older, larger site, whose outer brick walls are just visible flush with the ground, and from one of whose corners rises the chimney, scant reminder of the past.
Unlike Alfred Corbin we do not have Masai guides to take us up to Lake Chala. But on seeing this secluded jewel I concur with Corbin: this must be the sight of the Creation itself … so blue the lake surrounded by hills, so crystalline pure its water, so cool and gentle the breeze rippling its surface, so unspoiled the site. The vegetation all around the lake — thorn, bramble, small trees — not obtrusive. Nothing man-made here, except, on the lip of the crater, and only just noticed as we prepare to depart, is the remains of an old brick wall. This must be one of the emplacements for the machine-guns now long silenced. It takes a feat of imagination to people this terrain with the actors of war, to hear it echo with the boom of guns. What manner of men would let these slopes be covered with guns, blood, guts? Alien, I say; then remind myself of the carnage our own leaders have wrought on the land. As we go back we see a car from Nairobi driving away from a picnic site, leaving pizza boxes behind, Masai youths picking them up.
We drive part way on the unsurfaced Taveta-Voi road. It is a hazardous journey, the road is often not visible for the dust that rises, and the opposing traffic is frighteningly swift.
Mbuyuni, once a city of military tents, is now a gate to the Tsavo National Park. There is a sideroad that goes northwards, that takes us to a town on a site where Kikono perhaps stood. This one is called Glory: neat square church, tiny neat houses in immaculate rows. Under the only mbuyu tree (not remotely resembling a hand) a class is underway. I look around for a cliff and see a hill in the distance. Could this be the site of the MCA station? We have not seen a single wild animal on our journey.
“Please return,” James tells us back at the hotel as we prepare to depart. “I have stories for you. I have talked to the wazees … including the old priest at the church — the one you met was his son. And the people of Lake Chala — believe me there is a tribe there — have a story about why and when the lake sank.”
Young Jamali did not tell me his father was alive, was in Moshi, until my last day there.
He is a bent old man, in his eighties I guess, thin — grey hair, gummy eyes — wearing a wrap round his waist and an open shirt. I sit facing him, in the backyard of the house in which he has a room. His son, Young Jamali, stands uncomfortably beside us. The backyard is bare earth, stockaded, and there is a dark dilapidated shed at the end, which is a kitchen. The old man sits on a stool, chewing a piece of cassava, spitting out the hard bits and the fibres on the ground. Next to him is a pan of water. When he’s finished with the cassava, he picks up the pieces from the ground and throws them to the far and littered end of the backyard. He picks up the pan of water, walks to the middle of the yard, and carefully pours the liquid out, spreading it about on the earth, which drinks it up. Then he comes and sits down on his stool.
“My father was a chief,” he says. “In Kenya.”
He has a confused memory of the war. He mentions it with the Maji-Maji uprising. But he was born after Maji-Maji, I quickly tell Young Jamali, who shrugs. Are you sure he is your father? I say exasperated. He is amused. Maybe not, he says.
The old man recalls a brother. He was stolen.
“Come,” he says.
We follow him inside to a room so dark-we stand still for a while to let our eyes get used to it. Young Jamali and I sit down uncomfortably on what looks like a bench. But the old man quickly tells us to get up. He removes the cloth which covers it, revealing an old wooden trunk, its sides carved in the coastal fashion. He opens it, motions for me to come and look. I kneel down beside him.
There are all kinds of knick-knacks: pieces of cloth; a mirror; a Swahili newspaper without a date but apparently from colonial times; coins, including a heller from the German period. There are photographs, including a framed one of himself and his wife. She is sitting on a chair, he is standing beside her. He wears a coat and kofia, she a dress. The photo was taken in a studio a good forty years ago or so. Then he pulls out a postcard-size one of an old African woman — his mother, Khanoum. I pick up the photograph, which I see was taken at the same time and studio as her son’s. She’s standing, staring directly at the camera; a short determined-looking woman. Her son picks out a scrap of aged yellow paper printed with an Indian script I cannot decipher. Then a remarkable thing happens: he starts singing in a low voice, watching me with amused eyes, moving his head a bit as I stare at him unable to tell the language. But very soon I know what it is: an Indian hymn. Young Jamali, obviously angry and embarrassed, says we must go.
“What was all that about?” I ask Jamali once we are outside. “Why did you get cross with him, your father.”
“He’s an old fool.”
I ask him about the brother who was stolen.
“The story is that he had a fair-skinned brother once. He had been given to the family. Then he was taken away to Dar es Salaam.… That is why I don’t like the old man speaking the Indian language, singing their song. For what the Indians did to my grandmother. They did not recognize her when her husband died, they took away her adopted son and let her die in poverty.”