by M G Vassanji
—Eh. There is uganga. There are those who do it. They have the knowledge. They can solve problems.
At our piqued interest, he deflects our query about local practice, but is happy to tell us about elsewhere.
—But the real ones are in Kigoma. And Sumbawanga. The Waha [people] and the Fipa. They can point a finger at you, and you won’t be able to get up. Those guys are more powerful than those of Tanga … These ones here [in Tabora], they’re deceivers only. Wajanja tu. Tricksters, amateurs.
He goes on.
—They [the Kigoma and Sumbawanga magicians] can solve anything. Disease. Business problems. If you want to get rich.
They can make you rich?
—They can make you rich. But there are conditions.
What conditions?
—They can ask you to kill a dear one. Your child. Or you have to agree to kill your mother.
And they go after albinos?
—No albinos in Tabora. But in Sumbawanga they go after albinos. That’s what they are good at—magic.
Have you been to a mganga?
—No.
Which cannot be true, surely. But with the slightest nudging, the man has come out in a long spiel, a noticeable nervous edge to him as he speaks. Only recently the albino murders by sorcerers drew a spotlight on the country (though not enough), so that even the president was called upon to condemn it.
“Livingstone” is off the main road, at the end of a rough unpaved trek through lush farmland scattered generously with mango trees, a long, red house with a veranda and a yard in front. The locality is called Kwihira. Stanley was welcomed to this house by a Tabora Arab, Sheikh Syed bin Salim, in 1871 when he first arrived here from the coast, bound for Ujiji on his search for Livingstone. He immediately raised an American flag on its roof.
(Photo Caption 11.2)
At the time Tabora boasted some five thousand souls. The eminent citizens of the town were Omani Arabs who wore long white kanzus and caps, and considerably impressed Stanley, and Burton before him, with their grace and generosity. They lived opulently, their houses boasting Persian carpets, beautiful carved doors, and harems. Musa Mzuri was dead when Stanley arrived; the Arabs and their allies were at war with Mirambo, a Nyamwezi warlord who, having united several tribes of the region, now controlled the caravan routes, including the one that went west to Ujiji. Stanley calls him the “African Bonaparte,” and also a robber. In vivid detail he describes a battle in which he himself took part on the side of the Arabs and their allies, who, however, after several victories fled ignominiously at the first setback, an ambush by Mirambo. Two weeks later, from Kwihira, Stanley watched Tabora going up in flames.
Stanley found a way to continue on his journey west via a southern route. He found Livingstone at Ujiji, and the two of them explored Lake Tanganyika together before undertaking a rain-soaked journey to Tabora, where Sheikh Salim welcomed Stanley again. A plaque on the outside wall of the house says that Livingstone and Stanley stayed here during February to March 1873; a smaller notice says that Burton and Speke were in Tabora in November 1857. The Arab house where they stayed, however, had been destroyed when Stanley arrived. It is from here, while Burton stayed behind, that Speke made an expedition to Lake Victoria and was inspired to call it the source of the Nile.
Stanley bid Livingstone farewell and departed for the coast on March 14, 1873. Livingstone proceeded west towards the south of Lake Tanganyika, where he died.
There’s a museum inside the house, but the caretaker is away at his farm. We return to town.
Back in Tabora we ask around for old houses, ruins, places where the Arabs of old might have lived. Nobody knows about them. There is utter confusion: the past? what past? Livingstone—they tell you—have you been there? We’ve been there. Did you go to Fundikira? We saw it. Nothing more. We are stumped. Such an old town and yet no sense of its past, which is substantial. There is talk of “Nyamwezi” Arabs and Indians, but we don’t see them. Tabora’s history has been entirely erased.
Now Joseph informs me that the girl who sat beside him in the bus had asked him, “Why are you interested in those people who put us in chains?”
It’s a profound thought. In one’s quest for history, in one’s obsession with the past, one forgets that there are those who would rather keep it buried. But is that good enough? In the part of the world where I now come from, time is allowed to take its course, and history is revered as record. It is there to teach us about ourselves. Scholarship provides contexts, nuances, altering points of view to learn from. The past is never simply black and white, after all, never entirely good and bad, us and them, victory and defeat. And received memory is too often corrupted.
There must be a chai shop.
After making some inquiries, we find it in the local residential area, a ramshackle storefront run by a middle-aged Khoja couple; there’s a counter, four small tables with chairs, a soda fridge. A long corridor leads into the interior where the kitchen and the living quarters are. The sight of us is a wonder for them, but they don’t ask who we are. We sit down and are served samosas and bhajias, chai and soda. I see from the written menu on a board that they serve full meals too, and after consulting with Joseph I inform the owners that we will return for our dinner.
Tabora looks like Dar’s Kariakoo. A shop in the same row as the chai shop is run by two women, partly Arab, where we go in and banter and bargain, and I come away with a khanga. We cross the main road towards the bus station and find a water-tank shop, a bicycle shop, a spare-parts shop, all of which indicate a cash economy and money. The mode of public transport is the bicycle: you get on one and are taken to your destination. There’s a pleasing openness and casual pace to the town, it does not depend on tourists and NGOs. Islam is a presence, but not aggressively so. Our hotel is at the end of a trail on a dirt road, but comfortable and modern, and locally owned; the other guests are local businessmen. On the radio Bongo Flava vies with Swahili taarab. Bang! is a music program on TV, with the expected rap and dancing on hormones, the accents shamelessly Americanized, but I saw an interesting clip with tall lanky dudes wearing kanzus and kofias, Islamic style, swaying to music, and women with heads covered with khanga—tongue-in-cheek and stylishly original. Very confident.
The thought occurs that it’s music where the creative energies of the country are focused; not in Swahili poetry anymore, unfortunately; and not writing in English, which is too postured thus far.
In the evening we go to that Khoja chai place to have dinner. The couple is out praying at the khano two streets away, and a son is at the till, so we sit down and have bhajias. At a little past eight the couple return and the woman says she can make chicken curry and rice. And roti?—I ask. Yes, with a smile. And in a little while it comes, the chicken tender, the curry tasting as it did back home, long ago in Dar. Now the lady gives vent to her curiosity. (Her husband has gone on inside, the son remains with her.) She has to know. Are you Hindu or Ismaili? she asks. I no longer make these distinctions, but she would not understand. Ismaili, I tell her. We too. I could tell from the photo on the wall, I tell her. She’s from Gujarat, a place called Jam-something. Near Jamnagar? Yes. My grandmother came from Jam Jodhpur. Yes, it’s close by, she says. She stayed in Dar until ten years ago, for her two daughters’ education; now one of them, having attended Muhimbili Hospital, is a doctor at the Aga Khan Hospital, the other works at Standard Bank. The son, I notice, is dark and slim; the woman calls out to his wife, a petite young woman who appears from inside. She’s from Bombay, speaks Hindi. (The woman and family speak Kutchi with themselves, Gujarati with me.) They have relations in Toronto. When I’ve finished, she invites me to wash my hands inside—it’s her way of inviting me to her home. I walk inside to a Swahili-style structure—long corridor and rooms on either side. At the back is a dining and sitting space, where her husband and daughter-in-law sit watching TV—one of those Indian soaps that are universally popular. I go through a swinging storm door and wash my hands in
a sink. She gives me a towel. Joseph and I depart. I don’t even know her name, I tell my friend half in despair, when we’re outside.
It’s been a moving experience, my own tribal connection, in a dark little Swahili gulley in a little town in Tanzania; and that modesty and simplicity, that mutuality. It’s my inspiration.
And yet the thought lingers: why didn’t she invite Joseph inside? I was family, he wasn’t.
He says that following his circumcision rites at fourteen, he was considered a man. During these rites he was given knowledge of what it meant to be a Bukusu. This was a kind of self-awareness. Now his mother treated him differently, and he had a say over decisions regarding his sisters. For example, in the absence of his father, he could refuse permission to his elder sister to go to a dance, and he did not have to help in the kitchen. Among coastal people, he says, there is a similar rite for girls, in which the instructions imparted cover the subject of sex. Both the novelists Ngugi and Achebe have treated the subject and its conflict with Christianity in their works.
At five in the morning we emerge from our hotel into the cool darkness, avoiding muddy potholes. A light wind blows. It’s rained in the night and we worry about the onward journey. I recall from my reading that it was the rains that detained Speke and Grant here for weeks. We find our bus, put our bags on our seats, and go wait outside. There seems to be only one other bus preparing to leave at this dawn hour. People slowly trickle into the station, a tout goes around, selling tickets. The sun is rising, the food booths are only now stirring, but there is no hope of tea yet. Tabora keeps to its own pace.
Our bus, an old thing with worn seats, leaves sharply at six. It is not overfull, for which we are thankful. It takes a different, longer route than the one we came on, the road corrugated but not as bad. But very evidently something else is different about this route. It’s the vegetation we’re passing—burrowing—through, unlike anything I’ve seen before. Pure, dense jungle, varieties of trees and bushes—thorn, broad-leaved, soft wood, hard wood, short, very tall, some with wonderfully unique shapes—all arranged in a disorder whose intelligence only nature could tell in its bid for coexistence. No mango trees, which one recalls are an import after all. This must be the original African forest. Intermittent foot trails meander off into the dense interior. What kind of people would live in such isolation? The only sign of them are the wooden boxes placed intermittently up the trees, roughly two cubic feet in size, to grow beehives. Once or perhaps twice this dark wooded scene suddenly breaks into a burst of light and a human settlement comes into view by the roadside—huts, corn patches, people, and a scattering of mango trees. The mango tree in this region has a distinct crown, almost perfectly spherical and producing an equally perfect round shade. A mango tree prominently marks the centre of a village, gives form to it, for it is the meeting place. We observe a large meeting of women under a tree. After this relief, the forest again.
Thus, life flourishing, in glorious abundance and variety, oblivious of the sometimes unbearable euphoria of the metropolis.
Finally, near the end of the forest a notice appears, barely visible, written on a weathered, wooden board nailed to a tree, stating what’s become obvious, that we’ve passed a protected area. Now there occur frequent brief stops for pickups and drop-offs; our bus seems to have a complete monopoly on this route. A woman in niqab gets in. A Somali perhaps, but who can tell? A rooster comes on board, and its owner ties its leg to a seat with a long string. It edges down the rows, stealing legroom, and gets prodded gently but firmly forward, the owner sitting conveniently unaware in front.
We arrive in Nzega at around twelve, sore and hungry. The stop is brief, and we have to rush through our chai and chapati (me) and samosas (Joseph). There is an unexpected delay because a policewoman at a checkpoint seizes our driver’s licence, before a negotiation releases it.
We are on our way again, this time on tarmac. There occurs now on the landscape, which is otherwise plain, a proliferation of those rock formations called tors. Only here they are spectacular, the elements having contrived to shape them to look precariously, miraculously balanced, one on top of the other. Occasional baobab trees and the ubiquitous mango. Corn seems to be the most common crop, and the population is the most we have seen since Tabora. We pass an innocuous wooden sign for a gold mining company; since there is concern about working conditions at the mines and the pitiful royalties paid to the country, the near-anonymity seems explainable.
Mwanza hits us with a burst of colour and activity—a huge clothes market outside the city, festooned with shirts, pants, dresses, and bedcovers spread out on the ground or hanging on stands. Hotels and guest houses are abundantly advertised; presumably out-of-towners can shop without having to go into the city. There’s money here, Joseph says approvingly. The bus stop comes shortly.
Our taxi driver is a man from Kigoma, and moreover from the Wahaa people, famous as those especially skilled in the dark arts. He agrees, in Kigoma there is a lot of magic—uganga—though he hasn’t had occasion to come across it. Naturally. Now see how he contradicts himself. Once, he says—the chatterbox unable to resist—he almost got killed. He had picked up an elderly gentleman along with a woman. When she got off, the man immediately brought out his “mguu wa kuku”—chicken leg. A gun, explains Joseph to me with a nod. This was a stickup. Our plucky driver tried out his luck: He said, Go ahead, shoot me, then see what happens to your bullets and to you. Can you see who I am? Do you know where I come from? The bandit could tell, and realizing his error, began to tremble and plead: Come on now, let me go. The driver turned his car around and drove straight to the police station, and ended up receiving a lot of cash from the terrified bandit.
The point of course is not the veracity of the story but the casual belief in witchcraft. The driver, we have noticed, does have distinct features—very dark skin, narrow shaved head—which might have convinced the bandit, if he was real, that he was in the presence of someone special, possibly with “elimu”—knowledge—or access to it.
Mwanza easily distinguishes itself by the number of hotels and restaurants, the new buildings. This is a wealthy city, founded upon an old town. Gold mines are to the south of here, and there is fish in the lake. Smuggled gold has always made a good contribution to the economy. The main thoroughfare is Nyerere Road, starting from the lake and heading into a business section whose old one-storey buildings, going back to the 1930s, remind one of Nairobi’s Indian Bazaar. The businesses on this street are still owned by Asians. Farther up, next to the former Lohana Community Hall, the Lohana Hindus having presumably departed en masse, is the Khoja khano, behind a gate inside a large compound. It is an old, distinguished structure, spoilt somewhat by a misfit dome, a crude later addition to give it—one supposes—a more Islamic look. On the street, traffic is brisk; a distinct feature are the three-wheeler short-haul trucks for hire to carry small loads. The dominant mode of public transport consists of the numerous bodabodas, the single-passenger motorcycles. With only the driver wearing a helmet, the ride seems daunting.
Our hotel is a modern though modest building of some six floors in the residential area behind Nyerere Road; to reach it we have to negotiate through a bustling open market occupying two full blocks of a side street. At first we avoid it, for fear of being sucked into the mass of a clamourous consuming humanity and falling prey to a pickpocket or something. Now we easily walk through, mesmerized by the clamour and clash of colours and sounds, the variety of goods on display. I make a list: blue jeans spread out in piles, in a quantity greater perhaps than at any Walmart; T-shirts, dresses, shorts; shoes, suitcases, backpacks, handbags; leather belts and wallets; kitchen items and knickknacks—almost all brought from China, the wholesale merchants travelling all the way to Guangdong to purchase their stuff. And then there are the foods on sale: fruits, vegetables, onions, ginger, popcorn, peanuts, sodas, mishkaki (skewered meat), bread. A dozen small buses wait to fill up, loudspeakers shout announcements, music blare
s out. I spot a CHADEMA (opposition party) flag outside a stall. This is CHADEMA city.
Upon a rise at the corner of two busy roads, a woman in her thirties, her head covered loosely with a khanga, sits intently before a blazing charcoal stove. She’s selling kahawa and sweet bhajias. May we have some coffee? we ask jovially, and she says, Have a seat. We go and sit down on a low wobbly bench for two. Three children are at play nearby, two boys and a girl. It’s midafternoon, school must be out. A young man goes around with a birika—kettle—pouring coffee for the various customers—the fruit vendors at the sidewalk who shout their orders out, the shopkeepers across the two streets who send theirs by text. The woman, the children playing around her, mock-fighting with karate kicks, chasing and complaining, singing—“A goat eats only up to the length of its rope”—reminds me of my own mother making ends meet at another busy intersection, in a business very different but not more profitable; we always hung around her after school. The price of coffee here? Three little cups for 100 shillings; similar coffee at a tourist hotel, 1,500 shillings or more. Per cup.
But they don’t seem to care for chai in Mwanza. It’s difficult to find a chai shop, yet surely there must be one? After much inquiry, including cornering a nervous-looking young man sitting on a sidewalk, who replies in English to us and turns out to be an illegal Bangladeshi, we find a rather small “chai” shop called Harish Paan. It serves vegetable samosas, kachoris, bhajias, and “mix” (a version of bhel) over the counter, and is run by an elderly Gujarati couple, the wife sitting at the till by the door. It is a popular place, people come in and go out, mostly men, and the food is cooked elsewhere close by and brought in as needed, since there are no cooking facilities in this narrow space. There are no tables either, just tall stools behind the counter and against a wall. And there is no chai, only soda. The couple are alone, the children have grown up and gone away.