And Home Was Kariakoo

by M G Vassanji

  Later we sit on the terrace and have dinner as a gentle breeze blows in.

  I first met Walter Bgoya at a dinner party in Issa Shivji’s house.

  Shivji is an institution in the country. If you say you know Shivji, they—almost everyone, it seems—look at you with respect. He is consistent, he speaks his mind, he is honest. I lay a claim to him because we went to the same high school, he three grades higher than I.

  I remember him as a founder of a student representative body in our school, called the Pupils’ Own Council (POC); it was a radical idea, allowed perhaps because the principal was an Irishman who loved our school where, he told us once, the attitude to learning was so much better than in British schools. POC created great excitement, and I recall Shivji on the stage with others giving a spiel. He was also involved in a movement called Moral Rearmament (MRA)—which was at the time making a push in Asia and Africa. This was an embarrassing episode, I believe, in Shivji’s life. He would have been sixteen or seventeen. Those were the days of our idealism, and these involvements reflected that idealism. One day some MRA representatives from England or America came to our school and made a big impression, selling a lot of books, which we could barely afford. But MRA was not heard of much again. Perhaps it was banned by the government, which also banned POC for supporting a student protest at the university. Shivji was a brilliant student and went on to study law. From all that I have heard, often with envy, the University of Dar es Salaam was a place throbbing with radical new ideas and optimism. It was where Uganda’s future president Museveni, and Tanzania’s, Mkapa, studied. Mahmood Mamdani of Uganda was here, as were Walter Rodney of Guyana and the Kenyan Swahili poet Abdilatif Abdalla (who became a jailmate in Kenya of the author Ngũgĩ). Professors of a liberal bent converged from all over the world, including Canada. Later Shivji became a professor here, writing books and opinions, keeping in mind always the interests of the common people.

  When I first returned to Tanzania, after a long absence and having just finished my first book, I went to meet Shivji—a person I had come to admire from a distance for his consistency, against what I saw as my own inconstancy and betrayal. I had never spoken to him before. We became friendly, though not quite friends, for he is a private person. He lived in Upanga in the same area and in the same kind of flat I had lived in during high school, and he has continued to stay there when anyone else with his influence would long ago have moved on to Oyster Bay.

  It was at a dinner party at his modest home that I met Walter. At the end of the evening Walter drove me and another guest back. All I recall of that other passenger is that she was an Asian and had returned from the United States for a visit; when we dropped her off on India Street—the Bohra area—she quickly produced a black veil, put it on, and quite nonchalantly went on her way. The Bohra mulla in India had recently decreed stricter orthodox observances for his followers. Then Walter dropped me off nearby at the Flamingo on the perpetually potholed Jamat Street; it’s always surprised him whenever I stay there, but it’s at the heart of the Dar I grew up in.

  During my next visit to Dar, I was a guest of the International School, which put me up in Oyster Bay. I had been asked to meet the pupils of every grade in the school. This was the first time I had stayed in that beautiful, breezy area by the ocean, and the sense I had then was of how times had changed. Oyster Bay was still lovely, though a bit more crowded; egalitarian. One evening when I returned to my hotel, a note was waiting for me, from Walter, chiding me for not having informed him that I was in town. We met several times during that visit; once we ate at an Indian vegetarian restaurant; a few days later he took me to his home in Gaam, like Shivji’s a modest place, where I met his wife, Frida, and his young son, Mkuki, who made a drawing of me—which he showed me years later when he had returned from the U.S., a professional designer.

  Walter had just left TPH, Tanzania Publishing House, and was now a dedicated independent publisher of Swahili books in a sliver-thin market. When I left Dar after high school, there were several bookstores in town, some of them new—the book business was booming. Now there was one belonging to a church and another, a meanly stocked, dusty one run by TPH. Life could not have been easy, and one could not help but admire Walter’s dedication. His office was in Kariakoo, behind Msimbazi Street—whose hustle and bustle becomes ever more forbidding with the years. It was where my grandmother, an uncle, and an aunt had their shops once, when my family moved to Dar from Nairobi. From Msimbazi, at the intersection of my aunt’s provision store, I walked three blocks on an unpaved street through a residential neighbourhood, passing bungalow-style traditional homes with sloping iron roofs, inquiring here and there for Bwana Bgoya, until I arrived at the house that was his office. There was an outer room, with a secretary, and an inner room where he sat surrounded by books—all that he would need, but it was not downtown where a professional business should be. The very site of a publishing firm in that humble neighbourhood spoke of resolve and rebellion. He told me how hard it was to sell books in the local market, spoke of everything he had tried, including book vans. There was an international collective based in London on which he relied to distribute abroad.

  Since then he seems to have done well, though there have been snide remarks—the barest hints—I have heard about him and his old pal, former president Ben Mkapa. Perhaps the president put in a word or two in his favour. Perhaps it’s the economic boom, however selective it is. But surely he deserves some reward for the essential but very thankless service he has performed for the country. There is no other publisher like him in East Africa. His new office is in a smart new business complex on the airport road, and occupies a good portion of the ground floor, the several rooms separated by glass walls. He has also bought the old TPH bookstore—which was one in name only—on Samora Avenue and converted it into a unique outlet for African titles. But Walter is not a businessman, not a good investment. A venture into a restaurant—an excellent one—is bound to fail because it is in an area where expats don’t go out to dine. He needs to move it, but where to find investors? His wealthy friends, Harko is one, know that Walter Bgoya is not a businessman. Still, even as he plans to move—office rent is too high—he thinks of new ventures. He organizes an annual book fair. And every month his son holds an open mike with book readings and jazz at the office premises.

  Once when I was in Dar, Walter was seriously ill, being treated in South Africa. Our common friend Fawzi gave me the news, and together we phoned him to wish him luck. We were not sure he would survive.

  I had never heard of Fawzi before she rang me up one day while on a visit to Toronto and introduced herself; we met briefly then, and later again when I visited Dar. She was head of a women’s organization and the large front section of the office was buzzing with activity, with young, bemused-looking foreign interns hanging around. Fawzi, a flamboyant presence who dresses colourfully, often looks angry, and she is quick to speak her mind, but she is a warm personality and perhaps emotionally vulnerable. She is one of the Zanzibari exiles, her family having lost everything in the revolution, but now is able to maintain a home on the island. She is also a victim of Zanzibar’s barbaric forced-marriage episode of the 1960s. While walking home from school one day in Zanzibar, she says, she caught the eye of an official of the revolutionary government in his car. One day he knocked on the door and told her father he wished to marry her. Fawzi had taken the long route home from school that lunchtime and was not back. Her father, with the inspiration of the desperate, quickly told the man she was already engaged to be married very soon. A groom was sought overnight by the anxious, frightened family, and she was convinced to marry him. The alternatives were unthinkable. She was sixteen, he in his twenties, from a known family. The marriage never worked. It never could have, she says. All her ambitions and dreams for the future were laid aside by that single episode. She later married a charismatic professor at the University of Dar es Salaam, and her memories of being a member of a support group of cam
pus wives in the 1970s, a “chapati-maker” to the intellectuals who discussed all the great topics of the day, still rankles her. But she’s made herself known as an activist and feminist, and was on the board of the Zanzibar International Film Festival. She is still connected to her own family, and can hardly go out with the guys for a drink at night—it’s not done. She has brought up a son, sent him to university in the United States. Now she has a grandchild.

  When I meet her most recently, at al-Qayyum, the new kabab and bhajia place, she looks beleaguered. Her sister’s granddaughter was one of three girls who drowned in an accident outside Toronto, and the grieving sister is visiting. And the building in Upanga where both Fawzi and her son own apartments was recently slated for demolition, to put up one of those high-rises that are supposed to turn Dar into New York. The development company is of course partly owned by a high-placed government official. She’s managed to have an injunction passed, and waits.

  She has stories, many stories of Zanzibar and herself that she’s hoarding and wants to write up.

  I call up Shivji and ask him if he has time to meet. Of course, he says, let’s meet at Barbecue Hut tonight. And so I go to the place, in Upanga, famous for its barbecued chicken, chips, mishkaki, and a kind of naan. I am early and therefore find a table outside on the patio.

  The restaurant is in the middle of a row of townhouses in the Khoja Ismaili community’s extensive cooperative housing development. In the 1950s, the Ismailis had resolved collectively that every family should be able to own its own flat. When the cooperative development came up, the roads were mud trails and much of the area was wooded; frogs were heard all night, and snakes abounded; nevertheless many families from bustling Kariakoo moved their residences to Upanga. To visit family here, in the country so to speak, made for a good Sunday outing but it was a long trek through the streets of Gaam. I wonder now what zoning regulations were flouted to put up this restaurant in the midst of a completely residential neighbourhood. From where I sit I see a tall new building rising up on the site of a former block of flats, the scaffolded structure looming grotesquely in the dark, a godzilla waiting to devour everything below.

  The street outside is broken and potholed, over which large SUVs arrive, bouncing on their springs. They park, families emerge and enter joyously through the restaurant’s wide entrance; this is a crowded, popular place. The owner, Sadru, comes to meet them. A big man with cropped hair, he’s a good host, greeting new arrivals, kissing babies, Asian and African. He tells me the fish is excellent, he bought it himself soon after it was caught. I tell him I’m waiting for Shivji, and his esteem goes up several notches. He’s been to Canada, he says, but saw no reason to stay there. He has a daughter in Boston. When people started leaving in a panic in the early 1970s, he picked up a few properties at a few thousand dollars each. Now—he doesn’t tell me this, though it is implied—each is worth a few hundred thousand dollars.

  Shivji arrives. Simple and professorial, wearing shorts and faded shirt and sandals—in the former Tanzanian, not to say Gujarati, way. You don’t show off. Following retirement, he was recalled by the university to take up the Julius Nyerere Research Chair in Pan-African Studies. Since Nyerere is to Tanzania what Gandhi is to India, Jinnah to Pakistan, and Mandela to South Africa (of which he was the greatest champion when it needed champions), Shivji’s status is extremely elevated. Now and then he gives an opinion in a newspaper, in Swahili. People listen.

  We talk about this and that, including our families. I remind him about my recent visit to Dodoma, where I spoke at the university at the invitation of his daughter, a faculty member. He glows with pride. He tells me his department is organizing an event to honour Walter Rodney, the Guyanese historian and intellectual who taught in Dar in the 1970s—will I be around then? He gives me the date. He reiterates what many people on the left say, that the economic condition of the country is worse than what official statistics reveal. Food prices have gone up, people can’t afford to feed themselves. Even the KT Shop, he says, is becoming unaffordable. He walks a mile and a half to the chai place early every Sunday morning, and he’s observed that the number of patrons has considerably declined. Twenty percent increase over most items in one go.

  I would like an in-depth chat with him, but this is not the time. We get up when we finish, and go out and have kahawa from a street vendor across the road, and since I hanker for a tea, he says, Why don’t you come home for tea. Shamelessly I accept.

  Over tea, which he makes, his wife also having joined us, we arrive at that irresistible and obsessive subject, the state of the Khoja community, in which we both grew up, and to my great surprise he recites a line from a Gujarati bhajan, “Raakh na ramakada …” These toys made of ashes, which my lord Rama made … It’s part of our Indian heritage, isn’t it, he says.

  At some point he mentions two episodes from his life.

  He grew up in a small village, in extremely modest circumstances. One day, his father being away, their landlord, a community man, came over and threatened to throw them out. His mother pleaded and cried for the man to show some mercy. Finally she took off her siri—the nose stud—the last bit of jewellery she possessed, and said, Here, keep this, until my husband arrives. It was a wounding, unforgettable experience for the eldest boy, who witnessed his mother’s humiliation.

  Another incident involving rent occurred when the family had moved to Dar. The property was owned by a lawyer. Lawyers, Shivji says, were like gods, arrogant men whom you approached with trepidation. They were from wealthy families, which had afforded to send them to England to study. Shivji’s father went to the landlord to plead for an extension, taking his son with him. He received the haughty reply, Why do you people breed if you can’t afford to feed your kids?

  I think it must have been then, Shivji says, when I was ten, that I resolved that I would be a lawyer.

  He became one, and also a champion of the poor. And I realize that I have been privileged to have caught this very private person in a special moment, some chemistry having worked as the three of us sat with tea in his house at around ten at night, when he felt like revealing these experiences.

  Of all these old leftists, I find myself personally closest to Walter; I can banter and joke with him, speak freely and let him contradict me if he wants to. When he smiles, he seems intimate. I’ve been meaning to sit down with him for a long chat, and finally a few days before my departure from Dar I text him: “How about meeting this afternoon for a tête-à-tête? Kili or New Africa.” Kili is the lounge of the Kilimanjaro Hotel; it’s cool, quiet, posh, and anonymous and you are not badgered by the waiters. You can stay as long as you want. Kilimanjaro has had several name changes, but this was its original name. Here sometimes I come to rest and make notes, after a day’s running about in the sun. New Africa Hotel is a modern high-rise built upon an old, much beloved colonial watering-hole. The two are close to each other and face the harbour. “New Africa,” comes Walter’s reply. And so at six I go there and wait for him in the bar.

  It’s a good place to sit and wait without being hassled; the TVs show constant cricket and football. But it’s Friday and the bar is crowded: young Indians (from India) on business; local business types; musicians making a deal. When Walter arrives we decide it’s far too noisy and get up to go elsewhere, and it’s to the Sheraton that we repair. Here we sit on the veranda facing the pool, and we talk.

  It’s hard to speak to Walter on personal matters. I want to ask him how he managed to move from his modest Kariakoo office to the modern premises on Nyerere Road; what kind of success allowed him to open a restaurant or buy a bookstore, drive an SUV. I can’t, quite, but somehow we get on the subject of the failure of the left. He knows I’ve been meeting the others, Harko and Shivji in particular.

  He says the problem with the left is that they went out of touch with the basics, became too theoretical and idealistic. I am not interested in the abstractions of the constitutional debate—he says, exaggerating sure
ly—but I am concerned with how to change the attitude of a policeman who thinks nothing of bashing a suspect’s head in. The basics, respect for life. Here we are—he gives an example—at a live mike organized by Mkuki, people come on the stage auditioning jazz, reciting poetry, and these guys (the old intellectuals) are still discussing politics, the constitution. There’s live art in front of them! Fantastic jazz, poetry! They’re deaf to it.

  He had to bring up his children while struggling as a publisher, with no foundation money to support him, no guaranteed academic salary, or wealthy relatives. He must have had some foreign support, but I don’t mention that. He couldn’t afford the thousands of dollars required for the good—private—schools, whereas others had the means to send their kids off to exclusive schools in Dar or abroad. He had two daughters who were enticed into going to the U.S., where they became stranded and couldn’t complete school. He didn’t hear from them for a whole year. It was only after the American amnesty for aliens that they could go on to finish their education. He gets passionate, his eyes spit fire, and I feel privileged and moved to be given this confidence. The veranda is surrounded by lush greenery, the air is warm and humid; the tables are full but not loud, the guests are mainly tourists. I wonder if he picked this spot because it makes us anonymous. He carries the wounds of having lived through socialism’s lean years and the costly war with Uganda, and the satisfaction of having survived pursuing a dream. I feel, vainly perhaps, that I’ve earned, I need this confidence. In him I see that other life, the one I left. The road not taken.