by M G Vassanji
We departed at sunset, headed east, the mountain behind us, and night had fallen. Nothing else stirred on the highway, the bus the solitary creature grinding through the thick foggy darkness, its headlights sweeping across the hills and forests. There would be the occasional flicker of light, an only lamp at a distant habitation, drawing you in like a spell. Who lived there up on the hill, how would they spend the evening? Could one but peep into those lives and in some way share them. Did this habitual craving turn me into a novelist? What makes this primitiveness, this forbidding solitude of the jungle so wrenchingly attractive from a distance? There is in this stillness a certain spirituality, a welcome loneliness that I’ve often treasured in my travels, in which there seems to be only the universe and I, an endless moment devoid of fear or death. Perhaps it is death.
In the middle of the journey, in the pitch-darkness ahead a cluster of electric lights appeared in the distance, at which the bus arrived and abruptly stopped. It was a roadside restaurant. We were in Mombo, at a stop that was familiar to me from trips taken long ago in childhood; one always arrived here at night, it seemed. The place was still owned by an Asian, probably of the same family. The men’s facility consisted of a dark windowless backroom with a stinging stench. You held your breath, did your job, and rushed out. I had a Coke and took my seat, and our journey proceeded
We reached Tanga at 2:15 a.m. instead of the scheduled 5 a.m.; some of us, who had no home in Tanga, opted to stay inside and snooze until morning broke. At 5:30 we were summarily cast out and the bus grumbled off to the depot. Outside, in the humid coastal coolness, I accepted a taxi with trepidation. It was an old car and had to be push-started. Barely a hundred yards on it turned off and came crawling to a stop, and started again after another push, then decisively sputtered out. “What now?” I asked, somewhat nervously. At this hour no one was about except the two of us. “No petrol,” the driver said. “Isn’t there a station nearby?” No. What to do, on this dark street, in a town in which I knew nobody? But I could see that the man had no evil purpose, he had only tried to eke out a fare in difficult times and his vehicle had betrayed him. I had not even seen his face clearly in the dark, though he was a small person and sounded as sleepy as I was.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll take you there.” We got out, he picked up my bag and put it on his shoulder, and we walked together to the Khoja prayer house, where I presumed I would be directed to the guest house. There was a mukhi there, the headman, chatting with two women after the morning’s meditations and prayers; the guest house had been closed for some time, he said, and sent me with a worker to a local hotel where, however, there was no vacancy. I returned, had a wash in the shower in the ladies’ room, and waited until seven, when two old men walked me to the house of the man whose address I had been given by a friend in Toronto. His name was Samji. He dismissed the idea of a hotel with “What’s the need? Stay with us.”
There were three of them in the house, Samji, his wife Roshan, and their son Karim, in his early twenties. After a rich breakfast of bread, butter and jam, and fried eggs, Karim said he would show me around town. This was typical community hospitality. It was the kind of welcome our grandfathers gave to new immigrants when they arrived penniless from India to start afresh in a foreign land. And I recall that during my National Service at a camp outside Bukoba, on a Sunday I only had to show up in the shop of a Khoja, introduce myself, and—in the home of complete strangers that seemed primitive by Dar standards—I would be treated to a hot bath, a longed-for Indian meal of pilau and curry, and after siesta be given a ride back to the camp. Here too, a complete stranger, I was given a home. (The mukhi, who had sent me to a hotel, was clearly an aberration.) But it was not easy to explain to my hosts my interest in their neglected coastal town. To them, writers were journalists who wrote in the papers and those who wrote books about life in Europe and America. What was there to write about Tanga? And what kind of writer could I be, a mere Asian from Dar?
No traveller or explorer of any eminence in the past has mentioned Tanga. An obscure Swahili port on the Indian Ocean coast, it was on nobody’s itinerary, until the brief twenty-year period of German rule when its star began to shine. The Germans were fond of it. It was the entry point to the hilly Usambara and Kilimanjaro regions, where climate and agriculture were good. While farther south along the coast the fortunes of the old market ports and Swahili culture hubs of Kilwa, Bagamoyo, and Lindi fell, Tanga prospered and grew.
In the 1890s a certain Richard Hindorf ordered 1,000 plants of Mexican sisal to arrive in Tanga by way of Miami (direct export was forbidden from Mexico). Sixty-two plants survived the journey via Hamburg and were the beginnings of a sisal industry that would flourish over the decades to provide the country’s pre-eminent export. Sisal estates, scored with row upon row of thick spiky leaves shooting up from the ground, soon characterized the landscape outside Tanga and became its welcome to the weary road traveller. As Tanga’s economy grew, more settlers arrived. It became an important administrative centre, its port exporting twice as much as Dar es Salaam.
It would not have been unusual in Berlin to receive a postcard from Tanga, a pretty European town then, its gleaming white, veranda-ed houses tucked away nicely behind their green hedges. The town boasted three landmarks. The railway station, the bahnhof, was a two-storey building with sloping double roof, a wooden veranda, and a round stationmaster’s clock prominent on the outside wall; a balcony on the first floor went around the building and was accessible by external stairs. The region’s affairs were handled at the imposing, multi-gabled white boma, the German imperial flag prominent outside. And the Kaiserhof on Imperial (now Independence) Road was the local hotel and the settlers’ cultural centre. At the Kaiserhof you would go for your sundowners or the town Christmas party. Full room—guaranteed mosquito-free—and board cost five rupees.
(Photo Caption 5.1)
The Usambara (or Northern) Line, went from Tanga to Moshi, roughly parallel to the Mombasa–Nairobi line across the border. In the 1960s a link was effected between the two lines, connecting the towns of Voi and Korogwe, providing the exciting prospect of a railway journey from Nairobi (or even farther-away Kampala) all the way to Dar es Salaam. I recall it as a miserable journey, spoilt by the agony of a long wait in the absolute dark at Korogwe in the middle of the night, under a massive onslaught of mosquitoes. In German times the entire Tanga–Moshi corridor was well populated by settlers. Once, when sixteen German peasants arrived from Jaffa in Palestine, the Usambara-Post gave the opinion that they would make excellent settlers, used as they were to “a hot climate and fevers.” They would not have thought that a war back in Europe would drive them away so quickly from their new home.
Tanga has given its name to one of the most ignominious British defeats of the First World War, in an encounter that has become known as the Battle for Tanga. Soon after the declaration of hostilities, a unit called the Indian Expeditionary Force B was set up under Major General Aitken in India with instructions to “bring the whole of German East Africa under British Authority.” Easier said than done. Said the confident Aitken, “The Indian Army will make short work of a lot of niggers”; and further, “I mean to thrash the Germans before Christmas.” In Tanga he would meet his nemesis, the wily von Lettow-Vorbeck.
On October 16, 1914, a convoy of forty-five ships left Bombay Harbour, among which were fourteen transport ships carrying some 8,000 Indian troops. Aitken knew little of the conditions in East Africa. Moreover, his Indians were ill-equipped and ill-prepared, coming from different regions and castes, speaking different languages, and eating different foods, a requirement that was often not met. Many had been newly drafted. They were overcrowded and unhappy. According to one British officer, the two-week voyage to Mombasa was “a hell on crowded ships in tropical heat.” To add to the Indians’ misery, upon their arrival in Mombasa they were refused shore leave to recuperate. And finally, to top off the sheer incompetence of the operation and f
oolish confidence of its commander, there was the lack of secrecy; the Germans knew of an impending attack from any number of sources, besides what common sense had already informed von Lettow-Vorbeck.
The British troops landed at a headland called Ras Kasone, two miles from Tanga town. But it was fifty-four hours later when they began to advance, by which time von Lettow-Vorbeck had calmly reconnoitered the situation on his bicycle, having watched the transport ships from the land. His soldiers were in place and prepared. As the British—mainly the Indians—approached the town, through dense rubber and sisal plantations under a burning November sun, the Germans—mainly the askaris—fired. The Indians bolted in numbers. As the official history relates one instance, “The Madrasi troops, like the rest, were suffering much from the tropical heat and consequent thirst. In poor condition as a result of their miserable voyage, and short of sleep during the previous night, the companies of the 63rd began to disintegrate from the moment the German machine gun fire opened.… Nothing could prevent the Madrasi rank and file from pouring back and dispersing into the thick undergrowth of the rubber plantation.” One group from the mainly Gurkha Kashmir Rifles, however, reached the Kaiserhof and tore down the German flag, before being forced to flee.
Von Lettow-Vorbeck writes of this battle, such as it was,
no witness will forget the moment when the machine guns of the 13th Company opened a continuous fire.… The whole front jumped up and dashed forward with enthusiastic cheers.… In wild disorder the enemy fled in dense masses, and our machine guns, converging on their front and flanks, mowed down whole companies to the last man. Several askaris came in beaming with delight with several captured English rifles on their backs and an Indian prisoner in each hand.
And I would be told by a cultural officer in Tanga how his father recalled collecting chapatis from the bodies of dead Indian soldiers.
As it turned out, it was not only the askari bullets that created panic and mayhem among the Indians. The bees in their hives up in the trees, having been disturbed by gunfire, had also viciously attacked the soldiers. Bees and askaris, then, routed the poor Indians. And to give credit where it was due, the Battle for Tanga has also been called The Battle of the Bees.
The next morning, on November 5, Colonel Meinertzhagen from the British side went to meet the German command bearing the white flag of truce and medical supplies, and was warmly received at the Kaiserhof and given a breakfast. Meinertzhagen was a brilliant intelligence officer, a soldier, an ornithologist, and later a memoirist. The memoirs are valuable—few people have recorded the events of those times in East Africa—though he is generally regarded as an exaggerator. He was also a racist thug who took satisfaction in killing. In his accounts of the early colonial years in Kenya he seems to have enjoyed bayoneting Africans, including women. In Tanga, this is one account of his behaviour:
As [Meinertzhagen] approached the British lines, still with his flag of truce, an Indian sentry, probably ignorant of the meaning of the white flag, fired at him, the bullet passing through his helmet and grazing his head. Meinertzhagen, enraged, jammed his flagstaff into the sepoy’s stomach, wrenched his rifle from him, and stabbed him with his own bayonet.
The official history calls the Tanga expedition “one of the most notable failures in British military history”; it helped to prolong the war in East Africa and made a hero out of von Lettow-Vorbeck. The British casualties, wounded, dead, and missing, amounted to 817; the German, 147.
One day in Toronto I received a letter from someone called Ann Crichton-Harris; she wanted to talk to me about Tanga. A few days later in a coffee shop I met a cheerful, enthusiastic woman of middle age, and with her was a young friend who had recently escaped from Ethiopia via Djibouti and was keen to write about that experience. Ann’s story was remarkable, though—as I’ve come to realize more and more—of a sort not unusual in Canada with its historical connection to the British Empire. Ann’s grandfather, Dr. Edward Temple Harris—known as “Temple” to his family—was in the Indian Medical Service (IMS) in Bangalore when war was declared; soon after, he was recruited as a captain into the Indian Field Ambulance and accompanied the Expeditionary Force B to East Africa. He landed at Tanga with Aitken’s doomed party. Dr. Harris wrote seventeen letters to his brother Tatham, which were hand-carried to India by IMS contacts and therefore not censored; they are chatty and candid, and sympathetic to the common soldier, and he describes his own fear in the face of fierce German machine-gun fire. After the Battle for Tanga, Temple was sent to Nairobi to recuperate from an attack of dysentery before being sent to Mombasa and then Voi. Here, like the other doctor, the novelist Francis Brett Young, he was a member of the medical corps of Smuts’s army as it pushed into German East Africa. Following Edward Harris’s letters, which came into her possession, and using her own research, Ann had written a book, titled Seventeen Letters to Tatham, describing vividly both the Battle for Tanga and the invasion at Taveta under Smuts. Her mission had taken her off to Tanga, a place she would never before have contemplated visiting. Here was someone whose chief interest had been her Cornish heritage now speaking as an expert about the landings at Ras Kasone, the fates of the various British regiments, and the layout of the Voi–Taveta plain. She had a photo of herself taken with an old German askari in Tanga.
I saw Tanga as a quaint town with remnants of the old architecture, but essentially in a state of decay. A typical house in the Asian section of the town had arched verandas on the ground floor, and second-floor balconies enclosed by latticed wooden barriers or wire mesh. Robbery was evidently a problem. The old European houses were more solid. The roofs were corrugated iron or tile. No longer was it the neat colonial town; the railway didn’t run, the streets were potholed, the sisal market had been destroyed first by the arrival of synthetic fibres and then by the nationalizations of the estates during the two decades of socialism. But it seemed the Germans still loved Tanga. There was a German program in place to preserve buildings from their colonial days.
The Asian population in Tanga had declined considerably. Half the Khoja khano, a large two-storey white building within a fenced compound, was in disuse for lack of people and partitioned off. It was a bleak sight. The khano and the Khoja development consisting of modern bungalows—portending the great optimism and cheer of the 1960s—were in the neighbourhood called Ngamiani—“where the camels are.” Perhaps there was a camel station here a long time ago. But for the Asians who remained, business seemed to be fine. Samji’s wife spent a good two hours every evening counting out the day’s take. (To be fair, the counting took long partly because the currency had inflated so much.) They had four children outside the country. One of their friends, Ramji, had all his five children overseas. Both men were satisfied with their lives; they had cars, servants, remained busy. It was the wives who insisted on leaving. I couldn’t help thinking of men of their age who had immigrated to Canada only to become useless and lonely, waiting to grow old and eventually die in a nursing home. For the women, emigration often was a matter of prestige and status. The Nanjis have gone, so should we the Ramjis; we are not nobodys. I held my peace.
(Photo Caption 5.2)
The next evening Samji and his son put me on the bus to Dar.
The name of the bus, painted with a flourish on one side, was Scud. (The first Gulf War was a recent memory.) It was also decorated with pictures of Indian actors and the action-movie character Rambo. It left the station at 8:30 p.m. and at around midnight broke down. Groggy from sleep we got off one by one and came to stand around the right front tire, where the driver and conductor were inspecting a leak—oil or water, it wasn’t clear. The mood was light, as though this were the order of the day, with joking, cussing, laughing. A bright moon lit up the pavement and the landscape. After some two hours, the driver gave up tinkering and caught a ride back to Tanga to fetch another bus. A young Bohra man borrowed a thousand shillings from me, frantic to get to Dar on time for something; when an overcrowded bus stopped, he
got in and left. I never saw him again. The rest of us slept in a row at the side of the road, in front of the bus, using our bags as pillows.
In the morning it was surprisingly, intensely cold. It was after five, and I saw that we had stopped near a village and a roadworks; women were going off in a line to fetch water, barefoot and wearing khangas round the waist. A roadside stall had sprung up and we had sweet black tea and mandazi. The talk was fast and free and the government was openly criticized, with that casual sense of coastal humour. The freedom of the people was refreshing after the sombre, repressive mood that I had witnessed in Kenya. Someone mentioned that there could have been lions prowling about in the night. Yes, and they always dragged off a person sleeping somewhere in the middle of a row, not the end. A nervous tingle crawled down my spine. I thought I had been clever when I placed myself third or fourth from one end. I could imagine those man-eaters of Tsavo who had so terrorized the railway Punjabis, dragging them off even from their tents. On the Dar–Arusha route, the men around me said, a driver had abandoned a woman with two kids on the highway for not having tickets; one kid and the mother were eaten by a lion and the driver was in jail.
The relief bus arrived at seven, much to everyone’s surprise.
A man complained, “Would the mzungus (white men) have made tools if you didn’t need them?” Apparently our previous bus had lacked the appropriate tools. But the statement said much about the speaker’s faith in the abilities of his own people.
Postscript
Twenty years later Tanga still looks as laid-back, as neglected, as forgotten.
I sit with a taxi driver called Taju on the large veranda of a seedy old hotel called the Sea View, waiting for the rain to let up; it’s falling in sheets. The only other person around is the young Arab manager and a European guest consuming instant coffee. Inside the hotel, the paint is peeling, the furniture is shabby, the lighting is gloomy; a staircase goes up to the rooms, which have balconies. This is all that remains of the Kaiserhof. I ask the manager if there are any mementos in the hotel from olden times. He says no. And then, an afterthought: he points to a cello hanging high on the wall above reception. Perhaps in the past they heard Bach here on Saturday afternoons.