The Dhow House

by Jean McNeil

  The coast does not feel like somewhere I stayed for two months. It has the density of home. I don’t belong here, I would never belong here because I’m not a deep-sea fisherman, I don’t run a franchise of whisky bars in sub-Saharan Africa, I didn’t found a hot-air balloon safari company or run the national division of Mitsubishi trucks. Crucially, I was not born here. No amount of years racked up here will compensate.

  And yet I look back and know that I loved the hours I spent here, trapped in the sordid eloquence of an obsession. I never expected that would happen to me.

  Today the sky is a clear Kaskazi sky. The weather is just as Storm said it would be – hot, dry, bringing a stable, unhurried wind. Kitesurfers rip through the waves just beyond the reef. I miss the Kusi monsoon. Then, the sky is a person – you can talk to it with its flexing moods and rains so sudden they feel like a visitation.

  I pay and go for a walk on the beach. At the bar the waiters are cleaning jars for the candle lanterns with window cleaner. Asante sana, tutaonana badaaye. They thank me, say we will see each other soon. It’s good to hear the swish of the language again, to walk under crimson bougainvillea and the arbours of neem and moringa trees draped over the hot sand. Out to sea, just beyond the reef, the isosceles triangle of the jahazi sail leans in to the horizon. Yes, I am back in the land of the Zanj, an Arabic word, meaning black, the word the Arabic traders used for the coast as well as for its inhabitants.

  Tomorrow morning Daniel and I will walk in the forest. He is the best bird guide on the coast, possibly in the entire country, or so says a website full of testimonies from other students who have studied under him. I have met him before. Storm introduced us one day, when we stopped at the forest reserve where he works. We were driving to Moholo for a party. Suddenly he stopped the car and pulled up on a nondescript stretch of road.

  ‘What is it?’

  Storm reached for the binoculars he kept underneath the driver’s seat. ‘A Böhm’s spine tail.’ He pointed to a jet-shaped bird, like a large swift, fluting through the sky above electricity wires.

  ‘It looks like a bat.’

  ‘It does, they have an uncertain flight. They’re hard to see. We’re lucky.’

  We drove on for a few kilometres, then stopped at the forest station and talked to Daniel, who accepted our offer of a basket of mangoes with a smile. ‘It’s amazing how happy a basket of mangoes can make people,’ Storm said.

  He seemed alive that day. Animated from within.

  I have arranged to meet Daniel at the Miombo supermarket at 1pm. I have an hour to kill so I walk. In town, tuk-tuk drivers huddle outside the village supermarket, waiting for fares. The supermarket is cavernous, its shelves filled with boxes of matches, bottles of bleach and bags of low-grade pasta imported from Italy and little else. The tourists have come back. Italian girls totter down the street in platform sandals, squeezed into beach dresses, trying not to trip into the gutters, which have been dug deep to capture tropical flash floods.

  I lose my way and end up in the tight streets of the Arab quarter. I pass Mullah Electrics, Al-Nujim importers and Mustafa glass enterprises, then the small honey-coloured office of renowned makers of halva, which is exported all over the Mediterranean. I pass a man wielding a wheelbarrow full of red plums, another man with a foot-peddled Singer sewing machine on the pavement, dressed in a skullcap and a lemon-coloured kikoi, the sign for kombucha – Wild herbs cure HIV! I catch sight of the ocean. It is striated with brown sediment that has been washed down from the mouth of the Mithi river.

  I must have seen all this when I walked these streets with Storm, but I was distracted. The town appears more real to me, now that it is empty of him.

  I thread my way through chickens, charcoal fires, narrow passages. Women in black veils crouch over black pots. Children sit on dirty kerbs and sneer at me – beetch, beetch! They call. I don’t know if they are saying beach or bitch.

  On the beach I find the root of a doum palm and sit down. I take out my cardboard lunch box and start to eat, but wind blows sand in my food.

  Two young boys sit underneath a coconut palm nearby. They frown at me through long eyelashes; their expressions are severe, for such young boys.

  ‘Hello?’ they say. Immediately they sidle closer, shuffling along on their bottoms until they are sitting next to me.

  ‘What is your name?’ they chorus.

  ‘Rebecca. And what is yours?’

  ‘Mohammed,’ says the boy in the lime polo shirt.

  ‘I am also Mohammed,’ says the boy in the white shirt.

  ‘Aha, I’m going to call you Mohammed Times Two.’

  ‘What are you doing?’ they say in unison.

  ‘Eating lunch.’

  I wonder if I should give them some. My chicken leg is scrawny. I don’t want to insult them. Instead I look out around me. It is low tide and the water is divided into jade slices of sand bars and dark patches of seaweed. From afar it looks as if there is a pattern. In the shallows are black-tipped reef sharks and cerulean damselfish.

  It was early September and my last week on the coast. The wind was changing; the Kusi was waning and the skies were no longer as conflicted. We were surfing, we had to wait for the tide to come in. At low tide we passed the time snorkelling, edging over the reef that grazed our stomachs, over dark beds of seaweed, our hands sinking into its channels as we stroked, fish slipping from the shadows of their coral overhangs. Storm lifted me onto the board, his arms underneath my armpits. Our bodies never became truly familiar to each other. He felt it also, I know, that I feared him – feared what he might do to me, if he were withdrawn from my life. But it was pleasant to be handled like an object, or an animal. To be just a body in his hands.

  I am still absorbing the feel of this place. Everywhere we go broadcasts a message, a current of meaning. Here, it has something to do with danger. Anything can happen and there is no protection – not from the law or its enforcers, not from the state. People sense this and live faster here, more recklessly. They drink and play because here death really could happen today or tomorrow. It is not a distant country you are just getting round to applying for permits to enter.

  I realise now that the exposure I felt here was not about this danger frequency, the realisation that my life was cheap here, just like everyone else’s – especially Africans’ – or even what happened to me in Gariseb, or the political situation, but him. Storm had locked himself away, long before I had met him. I felt an impulse to move him to feel something, anything. He had a glassiness, he was the explosion between heat and cold, like cooling lava. I understood that for his whole life Storm would deflect experience effortlessly, and emotion along with it, and felt the injustice of this. He would get off scot-free.

  ‘What are you doing now?’ the Mohammeds ask.

  ‘Thinking.’

  The boy in the white shirt is marginally more bold of the two. He asks, ‘What are you thinking about?’

  ‘About the last time I came here.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Two and a half years ago.’

  ‘What were you doing here?’

  ‘I was with someone I loved.’

  The Mohammeds consider this with a grave expression. The tips of the boys’ eyelashes are lined with grains of sand. The sun catches them and they shine like miniature jewels. We sit looking out to sea for a while. I feel reluctant in the face of the future, I realise. I can’t judge the right moment anymore. Mohammed Times Two and I are waiting for something – to be delivered some impetus, for a neuron or nerve to ignite and to vault us into the next moment. We are waiting to be animated by life, but it is us who have to make the first move.

  Daniel is already outside the Miombo supermarket. He sits in the shade under the awning. He must be seventy, but it is impossible to tell and impolite to ask. His nose is straight and long and wide. He has high cheekbones and large, intelligent eyes.

  I greet him and tell him we have met before. He gives me an uncertain
but not unfriendly look. ‘I’m sorry. All white people look the same to me.’ He laughs – a strange sound, a guilty giggle.

  We agree to meet the following day at 6am at the gate. I make my way back to Kilindoni by matatu. As I am alighting I make a decision, or rather my legs make a decision for me. The turnoff to the Estate road is only a hundred metres from the gate of the Kilindoni Club. Soon I am walking down it, with its shattered bougainvillea bracts, the spikes of sisal plants that line it on either side.

  I reach the road to the beach. This is the same road I used to run in the mornings. Everything looks unchanged: the gates of Oleander House are still flanked by two metal zebras, the mango trees along its perimeter are still there; Oleander House itself is just visible, its white bulk hidden in a grove of casuarinas. The house was protected from the looters who had free rein for a day or two in the post-election violence, perhaps, by the influence of Charles Mgura, the owner. Mgura was the Interior Minister then. We could hear their parties, two-day affairs involving loudspeakers blasting reggaeton, for which the owner’s sons had a weakness. I remember his wife who drove their two white Range Rovers very fast down the lane, the huge rings on her hands as she gripped the steering wheel as I was swallowed by a cloud of dust.

  A short slip road down to the beach takes me to sandstone cliffs. The beach has been eroded since I was here last. Oleander House perches not far from the edge now. A dozen pied kingfishers emerge from their roosting holes in the cliffs and fly out to sea in fighter jet formation. I remember the camouflaged transport aircraft and fighter jets that tore along the coast. Then, the military were flying sorties to bomb Al-Nur inside its stronghold thirty kilometres from Puku. There was no mention of this on the television news, in the local newspapers or even on the BBC website. But everyone on the coast knew all the same. War is always an open secret for the people whose lives bathe in its shadow.

  Daniel waits for me at the gate in the morning, his motorcycle balanced on a kickstand beside him. He tells me we are walking in a remote part of the park, that we have to drive eight kilometres down the road to another gate. We zip down the tarmac, turning heads: a seventy-year-old black man, a white woman riding pillion, clutching his ribs.

  We stash the motorcycle in the trees on the side of the road and set out on foot. We enter a cool canopy of brachystegia. Immediately they are all around us, birds in every tree: weavers, drongos, sunbirds, the gorgeous bush-shrike with its panels of four-coloured feathers, the tropical bou-bou, whose bell-like call chimes through the forest. We walk over fresh elephant tracks. In the forest live three hundred small, furtive elephant.

  Daniel has programmed the tour: local endemics. He leads me to the endangered pygmy tufted owl, which only lives on this postage-stamp remnant of tropical lowland forest that once stretched all the way along the coast from Somalia to Mozambique, to Graham’s weaver, of which only two hundred remain, to the tiny sifaka duiker and the golden tree frog.

  Nearly every creature in this forest is endangered, some of them critically. A Chinese mining company has been given a concession to flense this land of bauxite. They recently started open-pit mining in the north of the forest. Another Chinese concession claims to have discovered oil.

  The forest feels unlike any other I’ve walked in. There is a sense of urgency emanating from it, as if the creatures know their days are numbered. The air drips with calls. We hear the bass hoot of the narina trogon, then the eastern nicator. A steel-blue whydah tears through the shadows. Gold sun-coated leaves shudder as monkeys launch themselves from the upper branches.

  Suddenly, a deep-voiced, owlish call reverberates through the forest. The call crescendos, then is answered, fainter, from the opposite side of the clearance.

  A flurry. We see a Napoleonic quiff. A white mask slashes his face, making him look permanently surprised.

  ‘Fisher’s turaco. They are calling to each other,’ Daniel says, ‘the male and the female.’

  We listen to them for a while. ‘Why are they so insistent?’ I ask.

  Daniel is regarding the bird now with a particular expression. Storm looked at birds like this, too, always, as if he were in special communication with them, as if he could read their intentions.

  ‘They are anxious,’ Daniel says, finally. ‘They want to be together, but something is keeping them apart.’

  V

  NUBIAN NIGHTJAR

  The sun hovered on the horizon. Within twenty minutes it would set. The patients who were well enough tied and retied their headscarves or washed their hands in the sterile washbasin outside the recovery ward in preparation for Maghrib, the sunset prayers.

  They were six men from the same village near Gao, Ali among them. They spread out their prayer mats. She watched their genuflections, the way their heads touched the mats so lightly before springing away, as if the ground had delivered them an electric shock.

  After prayers he found her in her office. She saw his feet first, beyond the flap of her door. They were slim and sinewy, they reminded her of leather bridles.

  She asked him to sit. He folded his body with great fluidity, considering his injury, sustained a week before.

  ‘Why do you watch us at prayers?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He nodded, satisfied, she could only suppose, with the honesty of her response.

  ‘Why do people walk dogs in the rain?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘On television, once, I saw people in England, in a green space. A park.’ He landed upon the word as if he had only just learned it. ‘They had their dogs on strings.’

  ‘Leads. Dogs have to be walked. It doesn’t matter what the weather is.’

  ‘Ah.’ His eyes flared. It occurred to her he might be hungry for conversation, nothing more. At times in Gariseb she felt this same famine blow through her, a hunger for abstract thought as much as anything. Her mind now was stuffed with facts and actions.

  ‘How is life in Gikayo?’ she asked.

  ‘It is bad.’ His expression was solemn.

  ‘Is it a big place?’

  ‘Normally there are two thousand people. It is a large village.’

  ‘Normally?’

  ‘Now there are three hundred refugees also. But they live apart. They have their own quartier.’

  ‘What are they refugees from?’

  ‘Al-Nur.’

  ‘Why do they fear them?’

  ‘Because Al-Nur will change their laws. Until now they have lived like Kufir.’

  ‘I don’t think so. They have been observant Muslims, but they have had freedoms.’

  He considered this with a reasonable expression.

  ‘Are they right to be afraid?’

  ‘In Gao, yes. Al-Nur now control most of the city. Eighty per cent. But you know that.’

  She played with the pencil on her desk. ‘How would I know that? We are three hundred kilometres away here.’

  He did not answer. Ali was the exact person the refugees of Gikayo were trying to avoid, she knew – a fighter, or a spy from the security wing, who policed social behaviour. Women found outside without their husbands were shot in those areas now controlled by Al-Nur. Or at least that is what her security briefings in the Chequers mansion had taught her. The security wing of Al-Nur were impossible to spot because they were ordinary people: shopkeepers, tailors. Spies were everywhere.

  He was still looking at her.

  ‘And your camels, are they well?’ she asked.

  ‘Very well. My father has fifty.’

  ‘Then your family is secure.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. Something of him relished the word, she thought. Secure. Safe. His hunger for language was one of the characteristics she could relate to, as well as his precise yet unfussy speech, which gave him an instant gravitas. You almost feel you could trust this man. More and more her thoughts had taken on this quality: mental compositions she would later send to Anthony, requisitioned from afar. No longer her own.

  ‘W
hat do you think of Al-Nur?’ she hazarded.

  ‘What is wrong with my country is that it is not a country. It never has been. For two hundred years the British have been trying to turn it into something they can recognise, and so control.’

  She didn’t argue with this explanation, even if he had evaded her question. It was broadly true.

  ‘Have you ever thought about leaving your country, living somewhere else?’ she asked.

  ‘My country does not yet exist,’ he said.

  ‘It does. But it is eating itself alive.’

  Ali did not shrug – the fighters she treated did not seem to have that gesture in their physical vocabulary. Instead they flared their nostrils and flashed their eyes in indifferent disdain. ‘I can’t leave. We need to become a country. Then perhaps I will be a diplomat.’ He beamed at her, a sudden, innocent smile. ‘Before, it was possible to be a tribal kingdom or a religious state. But now the world requires countries in order to engage with you. We must be realistic. But the country needs to be under Islamic law, like Saudi Arabia.’

  ‘Why?’

  He laughed out loud. Her question was that preposterous, she supposed.

  ‘Because Sharia law is a good law,’ he said. ‘The people respect it. The mosques are always completely full. There is no going back now. The people prefer it to socialism. They remember only hunger of those years.’ He paused. ‘A country needs resources. Angola has diamonds, Botswana copper. Even Sudan has oil. We have camels, and sand.’

  ‘You want to enrich your country?’

  His eyes narrowed. Most people did this involuntarily. It was part of the parasympathetic nervous system, like blinking, or breathing, but his reaction had a deliberateness about it. She wondered where, or how, he had learned to become such a self-contained, an entity, an uncrackable egg.

  There were four reasons why men like Ali became guerrilla fighters, she had learned long ago, courtesy of the army and its seminars pre-deployment and post-deployment, conversations with logistics experts, and then those long, dry weeks and months in the field. They had sent an instructor, a Sandhurst-educated strategist in sandy fatigues.