And Home Was Kariakoo

by M G Vassanji

  Karim and I went to school together, his family running a produce shop opposite the Dar es Salaam market, next to the post office. Ever since we finished school and went overseas to university, we’ve run into each other by sheer accident in the oddest circumstances, but rarely in Toronto. (This current meeting is an exception, and by arrangement.) The first time was in London, where I was stranded once, a student on my way to or from the United States. It was the 1970s. Soon after finishing his chemical engineering degree, Karim, having grown up amidst the fish smells of the teeming market near his father’s Kariakoo shop, had the audacity to purchase a small supermarket in London. We had met at the Ismaili guest house on Gloucester Road where a bed could be had for five pounds and there was every likelihood of running into someone from back home, on a tourist visa but searching desperately for an accounting articleship, a secretary’s job, or a place in a college. London, after all, had been the centre of our colonial universe, a magnet at a distance; it would take time to wean ourselves away from it. Come and visit me tomorrow, Karim said. I did so, taking the tube next day into Harrow and walking into a typical small English supermarket. That night he and another classmate, who had been a close buddy of his in Dar, took me to the Playboy Club. I was in a somewhat stunned state in that dark and glitzy hall, smiling white bunnies with bouncy breasts and long bare legs hovering around; none of us drank; all three of us were from simple families of the pious variety, and this was definitely not Karim’s beginning on a path of debauchery—he still is the pious, prayerful sort. We soon escaped from the scene. Why had they brought me there? It’s too late to ask, but I would guess it was to demonstrate their success in the world.

  It seems to me that after he left Dar he’s never had a home—a single, permanent dwelling. He’s lived in many places, he’s lived in two places at the same time. The last few times I’ve simply run into him in the streets of Dar. One morning while making my way from my guest house, the depressingly essential and affordable Flamingo, to Uhuru Street and Msimbazi, where Walter Bgoya had his publishing offices, a 4 × 4 stopped ahead of me and gave two sharp hoots. A voice called out my name from the window. You here? It was Karim. Get in, he commanded with a grin. I obeyed and he drove me first to an outlet on Samora Avenue where he took two bundles that could have contained sugar or rice or even books, but they contained instead Tanzanian currency, which had become so devalued it had to be carried in packages and baskets and changed into dollars as quickly as possible. Without asking me, he next whisked me off to KT Shop, where we had vitumbua, kababs, and sweet chai.

  What was he doing here in Dar? Didn’t he have property abroad? I’ve moved here, temporarily, he said. Business is good. In Dar he owned oil mills and imported canned condensed milk; he had a partnership in a broadcasting company and a garbage collecting company; he brought in soap from Indonesia, packaging the same variety as detergent and body wash. He had had his life threatened by a competitor. Come, he said, and he drove me to the location of a new venture. To my utter amazement, it was on Uhuru Street right across from where my mother had had her shop. As I jumped out of the car, visions from the past assailed me; I gazed up fondly at Mehboob Mansion where I grew up; at Bhanji Daya Building, Salim Mansion. All two-storey buildings. The shop Karim took me to was in an old-style dwelling even in those days—a house with metal roof, a shop front, and living quarters at the back—where Baby Ndogo, famous as the fattest woman in town, had lived with her family. Karim’s business was run by a local relative. It sold “mitumba,” used clothing imported mainly from Canada. A large variety of fashions and sizes hung on racks, and bales marked “Babies,” “Men Shoes,” “Ladies Jeans,” etcetera stood waiting to be slit open. The long rows of shops and the numerous tailors that had supplied the clothing needs of the city for a good three-quarters of a century had been run out of business by this incoming tide of stylish, ready-mades of the sort that once upon a time only the rich could afford. Now the lowliest menial could wear denim, sport Reeboks. Do you see anyone in rags now? Karim asked me with a grin, and answered after a pause, No. These are good clothes, better than what you and I wear. But we don’t wear them, I said to myself.

  Having shown me this latest enterprise, Karim drove me into an unpaved alley nearby, where at the back of a traditional and very modest African house, sitting on low wooden benches we ate bhajias made of ground pulse, a variety rare outside coastal East Africa, eaten with coconut chutney. He knew I would like them—who wouldn’t, if only for old times’ sake? In our schooldays, a young man used to go around on a bicycle selling bhajias like these; my mother would buy them while I was in school and save them for me.

  Many years later, here at the Starbucks patio in Toronto, he asks rhetorically, would we let our twelve-year-olds go anywhere far? We wouldn’t. When his father was twelve, his grandfather in India put the boy on a dhow and sent him off to Zanzibar, from where he went to Dar and opened a shop. The old man himself followed with another son and the three of them set up trading posts in three different coastal towns, importing cashews to Dar, exporting grain, copra, and oil. When Karim would return from school, his father would get him to sit in the shop and help. Never mind homework, first things first. And so in London when he went to the bank manager to ask for a loan to purchase the supermarket in Harrow, and the bank manager asked him why during a recession should he give him, a young nobody from the colonies, a loan, Karim replied: My father is a businessman; my brother runs a business in Congo; and I always helped out my father in his shop since I was yay high. I know business, it’s in my blood. He got the loan. Soon afterwards he invested in his first piece of real estate, in Calgary.

  I am convinced that it is not greed that drives him and his like; he’s made and lost money, and made it again; real estate in Calgary crashed, but by that time he had property in New Mexico and London. He moved on, and kept moving. People like him don’t really lose money. Business drives him as chess does a grandmaster. It’s his passion. He thinks it, he talks of nothing else but. Opportunities lost, opportunities to gain; moves made; stories of success and tales of failure. He looks around and his mind calculates: rent, costs, profit. Africa, he says, is full of opportunity. Believe me. There are millions to be made … though we are not young anymore.

  Wary of my occupation and curiosity, still he cannot control himself. He looks at me earnestly, and his soft fair features light up with that smile which gives him the look of a simpleton. We’ve run into each other again in Dar, and we’re sitting in the evening outside the old Odeon Cinema on the sidewalk, which every evening is cleared of vendors and cleaned up to convert it into an open-air restaurant; tables have been set up under tube lights and barbecued chicken comes off the fire and is served with soggy chips, the way they like them here. A few other tables are occupied. The atmosphere is hushed, and at this time it’s mostly men who are about. On all sides of us, the normally noisy streets head off silently into residential darkness. And Karim talks.

  He talks of the gold region of Tanzania, where a few years ago people might pick up gold pieces off the ground; if he were younger he would go south and clear acres of land, bought dirt cheap, and grow cashew. He runs off a quick budget for a cashew farm managed along western lines, efficiently. Millions to be made. He’s currently surveying property in Zanzibar. His mitumba business has moved to Zambia—a country, he says, whose business potential was never realized by “us.” Corruption is not as bad as reported. Don’t believe what they say. But then he tells a hair-raising yarn about a road trip from Zambia to the Congo in the midst of the civil war. For me the very idea of the Congo is a nightmare; for him, sitting here like Conrad’s Marlow turned into a businessman, that heart of darkness is just one more wrinkle in a life of commerce. There’s no mineral the Congo doesn’t possess, there’s immense wealth in that country. And Kenya? Don’t believe what they say, corruption’s not so bad there either …

  I gape. My life’s taken an orthogonal turn to his, though I like to think that
with my Gujarati heritage I understand business. I cannot but admire the sheer courage of men such as him, their spirit of adventure. Nothing fazes them, there’s no trouble they cannot, Houdini-like, walk out of. This, my classmate, who would sometimes give me a ride home on his scooter. He did not come from the more pretentious segment of our small society, whose children came every summer from London and put on airs with their Beatle haircuts and fashionably bare feet, the girls wearing miniskirts; his were the old Gujarati bania type, who had more money but never flaunted it, living across from the market, quietly going about their business.

  There are others like him. One of them, a former classmate and now a retired multimillionaire, would—I am told—take a drive through the streets of Kinshasa at night and throw bundles of currency at the despot Mobutu’s soldiers posted at the street corners: insurance for times of trouble. There’s the returnee from Toronto (a failure there) who manages a transport business in Dar. When I met him, he was on his way to Dubai to buy one hundred trucks. The rumour mill has it that the trucks are used for the stealthy transport of precious rare earths from Congo to a special location in Dar es Salaam harbour, and thence to America.

  It seems to me that my friend Karim has seen so much and it’s all unchronicled; he needs someone to tell his stories. He trusts and likes me, based on—I suppose—the ancient Indian respect for the harmless book person. I would like to raise a moral issue. Is it right to line the pockets of corrupt politicians and army men who feed on their own people? But the baby face dissuades me. It’s I who am the child; these people take risks, after all, they move the goods and open up markets, they see the world. It takes more than one hand to drive corruption. What risks do I take, who simply watch and listen?

  Recently, returning to Toronto from abroad I was with some impatience pushing my baggage cart in the customs queue when another cart nudged mine to vie for the space just ahead. I looked up to my side. Whom should I see but Karim, and we greeted each other warmly. He had flown in from Dubai. Are we always destined to meet like this?

  7.

  Kilwa, the Old City

  THEY TELL US IN DAR that Kilwa—down the coast—is only four hours away, perhaps a little more, the road is all tarmac except for a small stretch; it’s definitely the place to go, with unspoilt beaches and new resorts, and there is of course the ancient city on Kilwa Island; the French have an interest there; and so on. Even in my youth, flights of fancy would do in the absence of certain knowledge: it’s what people want to believe. For people in Dar, Kilwa is a flight of fancy.

  It takes us eleven hours to get there. The small patch of unpaved road so casually mentioned by the enthusiasts is actually sixty kilometres long and takes us roughly six hours to cover, a wet muddy stretch with craters large and small, and sometimes we’re driving through three feet of water as though in some gruelling safari motor rally of times past. We stop at a truck station called Muhoro, where the only repast to be had is sweet black tea—“chai rangi”—from a tall thermos, over a table covered with a spread of torpid, overfed flies. A curtain of rain before us, through which we can see a wet and muddy square outside, with a few parked trucks. We finish our tea and depart.

  The road, despite its ominous state, looks doable, until—one’s worst fear—it comes abruptly to a stop in front of a deep ditch where a bridge has been washed away. A thin rain falls constantly, the day is still bright, the tree foliage glistens a variety of greens. The ground is red and drenched. A jolly crowd has gathered to watch a long queue of mud-splattered SUVs and trucks get their just desserts: revving their engines, bracing themselves when their turn comes, they confidently speed down the road to defeat the ditch—and almost inevitably get stuck in the swirling water. The onlookers, belying the proverbial kindness of the countryside, won’t lift a finger to help. A tractor from a road-construction camp does service pulling out the stuck vehicles one by one, and sheepishly these safari-equipped SUVs crawl out and drive away. It’s a slow process, taxing one’s sense of humour. It’s well past noon and muggy, and some of the vehicles will definitely spend the night here.

  Our turn comes. Our elderly driver, Mzee Othman Bonde, the soul of respectability in his kofia and clean, pressed clothes, whom we have berated thus far as a timid slowcoach, has meanwhile silently taken the measure of the crossing, and picking a spot to enter he just manages to drive through the waterway on his own. There is applause. And Mzee Othman Bonde rises immensely in our esteem.

  “You must have said a dua there,” we say in admiration. A prayer. “I flogged out seven of the best,” he replies with a grim smile, oblivious of the implied humour.

  Behind us in the muddy ditch a truck full of cows is balanced precariously at an angle of forty-five degrees. It’s too late to pause and watch their fate, and we race, or rather bump, along and away. There are light forests to either side; scattered mud villages that perhaps have not changed much in a hundred years. Periodically we see a figure, a woman or a child, standing still on the roadside, a bag of charcoal for sale.

  It is about nine in the evening when we arrive at the intersection by a mango tree where an exit heads off towards Kilwa Kivinje. There is no other traffic on the main road, which continues on along the coast towards Lindi; the exit road is unpaved but dry, the headlights illuminating a forest. We arrive finally at what looks like a town, but it’s covered in darkness, a few glows of light here and there. This must be Kilwa. When we ask some young men sitting about for a hotel in town, we are greeted with a silence and murmurs. We have posed a conundrum. The night is thick and salty in this backwater; and the thought occurs, what right do we have to create a ripple in this stillness, intruding upon this closed intimacy of a town? The website for the hotel we have in mind said clearly, “Kilwa Kivinje”; but there is no hotel here, there could not be one. We should go to Kilwa Masoko, up the main road, the young men tell us. We head back to the highway.

  Some ten miles farther we enter another side road which takes us to Kilwa Masoko, “of the markets.” There’s a little more light and life here. Two modest beach hotels are made known to us, on a dirt road leading away from the main road, and we pick one due to its more imposing gate.

  In Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost (1674), when the angel Michael takes Adam to the Hill of Paradise to view the Hemisphere of Earth, which would henceforth be Adam and Eve’s to inhabit after their Fall, curiously the angel points out more of the East African coast—“Mombaza, and Quiloa, and Melind, / And Sofala …”–than he does of India (only Lahore and Agra).

  The name Kilwa (Quiloa), then, carries a certain mystique, for its connection to hoary times. When you’ve been brought up to skim over the contemporary surface of modern life, when history and the past were relegated to an unwritten irrelevant appendix of your existence to stay hidden or possibly receive a nod later, there is a certain thrill to discovering the verity and extent of these ancient connections; to touching them.

  Seen from the vantage point of the nation’s capital, Kilwa is this coastal region down south with a vague but distinguished history. But there are actually three towns called Kilwa, one sprung from the other. The oldest of these, known to the world in Milton’s time and much before, capital of an ancient mercantile empire, is Kilwa Kisiwani, “on the Island”; after its somewhat mysterious demise arose Kilwa Kivinje, across the channel on the mainland, an entrepot of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; it was displaced in importance by a very typical colonial move, when the nondescript Kilwa Masoko, the market town, was founded and made the administrative centre at a place down the coast with its deeper harbour.

  (Photo Caption 7.1)

  The hotel we have come to, Island View, is behind some scrubland but looks upon a pristine white beach. It has several cottages scattered about and a large hut-shaped structure that is the dining hall and bar, with a half-wall all around, so that you can look upon the ocean and the beach from inside, while a sea breeze passes through. The rooms are air-conditioned and clean, th
ough dimly lit and filled with insecticide fumes; the bathrooms are modern. “Use the mosquito nets,” we are instructed. Except for a couple of motor-boats owned by the hotel to take you to Kisiwani to see the ancient ruins, there is nothing on the water. The boats lie unused. The Island itself is visible in the misty distance to the right. The other guests here are the occasional businessman and a hunting-tour operator, staying overnight, and two young Europeans surveying for a gas company with a crew of Filipino youth. The talk among afternoon arrivals is about the broken road into Kilwa.

  Masoko consists of a few settlements, shops, and eating joints scattered carelessly about the main road, the only one paved, running the short stretch from the highway to the harbour. On the way comes the small airport, a bus terminal, called “Stendi,” which has a couple of “bajaji” or Indian auto-rickshaws (manufactured by the Bajaj Auto company) servicing it, and a regional government centre. The colonial government moved its headquarters here, a few businesses set up to service it, people came to settle—and that’s Masoko. The harbour, the raison d’être, now lies desolate.