Song Beneath the Tides

by Beverley Birch

  Leli

  As if he’d simply strolled into the house; she saw him with the same clarity she’d seen Rubairo in the glare of the sun on Kisiri. The angle of Leli’s head when he tilted it and studied her face. The way he had the last day in Shanza, walking along the beach together, the looming departure bristling with misery. She’d looked away at the boat traffic that constantly moved about Kisiri since the discoveries, and a dhow coasting south, and she’d tried not to think of the call that would come any moment from Carole – time to go.

  ‘I am thinking now to say goodbye, quickly,’ he’d said abruptly. And he’d held out his hand in a formal, strangely awkward way. As if they were strangers again, meeting and parting after nothing. She’d wanted to fling herself at him, hang on, never ever let go. But she’d just mumbled something, shaken his hand and dropped it, the threatening distance, awkward and cold and immense, wedged between them.

  Now, she could hear him say, ‘tell me everything about your life.’ Just as he said ‘sacred’ to sound like ‘secret’, he’d pronounce ‘life’ so it sounded like ‘love’.

  She laughed. And didn’t care that Jack and Ben, coming down the stairs, would hear and want to know why.

  I am very happy if our journeys will meet again, Ally, Leli said.

  She threw all caution to the winds.

  ‘They will, Leli,’ she vowed. And though they were more than four thousand miles and two continents apart, she thought he probably heard.

  Inspirations, experiences, echoes

  When I was twelve, I used to wander around the ruins of an ancient Swahili town nestling in a primeval forest. It wasn’t far from a long white beach curling round expanses of coral reef where we camped. I remember the strange moods and sudden silences that shrouded the ruin – birds, monkeys, animal scuttlings in the undergrowth, all ceasing abruptly, then tentatively beginning again. I still recall my first glimpse of a great fig tree, its aerial roots forming a twisty door through, shafts of sunlight beyond, as if from another world. Years later I took that idea from my twelve-year-old self and wrote my first novel, The Keeper of the Gate.

  You can visit this place now: Gede (sometimes spelled Gedi) a city dating from the twelfth century, its ruins buried in beautiful, unique Arabuko Sokoke Forest in Kenya.

  Song Beneath the Tides draws on these memories and all the friendships and places of my childhood and teenage life in East Africa. I was fascinated by other ruins I saw, so many up and down that coast: I began finding out about their birth, life, and death. It all fuelled this story.

  The events revealed in the Portuguese boy’s diary, and the legend of Bwana Fumo and Mwana Zawati, centre on the savage two-hundred-year Portuguese pursuit of the trade in African gold, ivory, ambergris and slaves. The ships of the Portuguese explorers and invaders – the first from Europe – arrived on the east coast of Africa in 1498. They found vibrant Swahili city-states each with their own Kings or Sultans, trading across the ocean with the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, Arabia and India. At once the Portuguese set about trying to subjugate these communities to seize their trade. The people of the coast and inland tried to survive this onslaught of massacre and plundering by juggling outright resistance and shifting alliances amongst themselves, against the Portuguese, and with them. Disillusioned Portuguese sailors and soldiers deserted and were welcomed into African settlements. Punishment if caught by the Portuguese was horrific. After two hundred years, the Portuguese left behind – as Makena says in the story – only destruction, and a few forts.

  All this is shown in vivid Swahili and Portuguese records from that period now housed in museums and universities in Portugal, East Africa and London. In all this I found anecdotes, eye-witness accounts, diaries, letters, official reports from Portuguese commanders and chroniclers. Many of the Portuguese records comment in repulsion and disapproval on the antics of their own countryman. Archaeological evidence from hundreds of scattered ruins is another rich mine of inspiration.

  The events of my story, and the characters in the fort, all have some small original thread here.

  My fort is inspired by many real ones, particularly the long siege of Fort Jesus in Mombasa by Arabs who came down the coast from Oman to help the Swahili cities. There really was a sixteen-year-old Swahili prince commanding the fort for the Portuguese for a time, though rather different to my invented Jabari. The sickness that killed many in the fort may have been a strain of the plague. One tiny reference to a few survivors in the fort being a handful of African men and women, a Portuguese youth and some children, set me off on my journey to create Rubairo.

  Fumo and Zawati, the Songs of Zawati, are inspired partly by, as a child, hearing drums echoing nightly from places along the coast, and wondering what people were celebrating, what story they were telling; also by Fumo Liyongo, legendary hero, warrior and poet, reputed to be eight feet tall, who is celebrated in ballads and stories. Even Mwana Zawati entered my head because of the real Swahili poet Mwana Kupona, who, although very different, lived on the Kenyan island of Pate two centuries later.

  Animal trafficking and poaching is of course, all too real. I witnessed the horror of skinned, headless cheetah, and dead elephants with tusks wrenched out by poachers. News reports of this continuing onslaught on wildlife across the world are all too frequent. But so are the efforts to combat it, and advice on how we can all play our part in stopping it.

  For the effects of uncontrolled tourism on people and places, I’ve drawn on what I saw: peaceful, purposeful communities, unspoiled beaches and reefs overrun by massive hotel building projects designed exclusively for the wealthy. Places I knew became unrecognisable within months. Land-grabbing by business interests is often part of this, ignoring the rights of people whose territory is seized and livelihoods threatened. It’s happening all over the world. I’ve tried to portray the eye-view of people buffeted by these winds of change and fighting the distortion to their lives that too often follows.

  The island of Kisiri is inspired by many islands off the coast of East Africa, including those around Lamu, Kenya. Some have ancient Swahili ruins on them. Some are privately owned now, with hotels on them.

  All over the world there are court cases brought by people fighting to protect sacred sites from seizure for tourism, mining or other business interest, just as in my story of Shanza and Kisiri.

  I’ve drawn Leli, his family and his community of Shanza from my own friendships then and now, and from the many narratives from African writers and poets across the continent that I’ve been reading since my teenage years.

  In the end, however, this is a made-up place and made-up people – I’ve threaded all this through the weave of my imagined story. If you want to know more about the realities behind it all, and see pictures of the places that inspired me, visit my website www.beverleybirch.co.uk.

  Acknowledgements

  First and foremost, profound thanks and gratitude to Bella Pearson for your steady guiding hand, understanding and nurturing this book with such wisdom and insight, insisting I meet your very high standards! And for launching your wonderful Guppy Books. Thank you to all your superb team. I’m honoured and grateful to be published by you: you are the editor and publisher of my dreams.

  Thank you Salvador Lavado for this beautiful, apt, resonant cover. I couldn’t have imagined it before; now it feels as if it was born with the story.

  Thank you Fritha Lindqvist for your energy, experience and enthusiasm in launching this book out on its journey to readers.

  Enormous thanks to my wonderful agent, Ben Illis, for your unstinting encouragement and inspirational conversations as I developed this story, from its early beginnings.

  Gratitude to writer friends, Sarah Mussi, Jamie Buxton (J.P. Buxton), Sam Hawksmoor, Margaret Bateson-Hill. I inflicted a very early draft on you: your enthusiasm and incisive comment was invaluable and egged me on when I might have flagged. To Jon Appleton, autho
r and former editorial colleague and friend: for important editorial comment and a firm push forward. I remember you standing over me, rejecting my nerves, insisting I press the send button when I first approached agent Ben Illis. How important that was!

  Thanks to all CWISL (Children’s Writers and Illustrators for Stories and Literacy), for friendship and all the shared experiences in meeting young readers to talk about books and writing. To the librarians and teachers who foster these encounters and work so hard to bring books to young people. To all the other writers and illustrators out there, your work and talent is a continuing inspiration and you are such a committed and supportive community.

  To Ann Cloke, Jayne Gould, Shirley Imlach, and all the Ipswich Children’s Book Group – thank you for welcoming me into your midst, providing so many opportunities to get to know other local writers and their books, and for your interest in mine. I’m so glad I’ve found you!

  To Adamma Oti Okonkwo: your editor’s eye, your wise comments on the nuances of this story, its characters and voices, have all been profoundly helpful and encouraging. The book is all the better for it. A special thank you.

  To my daughters Rachel and Kate, thank you for always being my first readers, giving me an essential critical (never any punches pulled) overview on the chasm between the raw ambitions in my head and what is actually reaching the reader. To Rachel a big thanks too for a detailed, knowledgeable comment on a late draft, and for many midnight conversations which led to the title.

  Thanks to others (you know who you are), who absolutely refuse to be named, who have put up with me while I write this, and for many conversations about Life, the Universe and Everything.

  To young readers everywhere, so open, curious, eager, and honest: you’re the most exciting audience to write for, and hard task masters! You tell it how it is and keep all of us on our toes. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

  BEVERLEY BIRCH spent her childhood roaming vast plains and deep forests near her home in East Africa, dreaming of becoming an intrepid explorer in fantastic, far-away places. Instead she became a writer, and explores people and places through her books. She travels widely, and says, ‘Wherever I go, I’m fascinated by the way people and events of the past seem to me to leave a gleam, or a shadow, or a resonating murmur of sound in a place. In a way, that’s where all my stories begin.’ Critically acclaimed, and translated into more than a dozen languages, she has been nominated for the Carnegie medal, and shortlisted for awards here and abroad.

  Beverley worked in children’s publishing, on both sides of the fence, for many years, running her prolific writing life alongside commissioning and editing children’s fiction. She first joined Penguin in 1975 to edit adult nonfiction, but moved immediately to the children’s list, and there found her true home. Three times shortlisted for the Branford Boase Award in recognition of the editor’s role in nurturing new talent, she continued to commission until 2013, working with many outstanding and award-winning writers.

  She lives on the east coast of England with her husband.

  www.beverleybirch.co.uk

  Praise for RIFT:

  ‘Rift is that delightful thing, a book which holds you from the first page. It’s a fine book, with heroes to cheer and baddies to hiss at, with a satisfying ending and yet resisting the desire to tie up every single detail – readers are allowed to finish some of the jigsaw puzzle for themselves’

  MARCUS SEDGWICK, GUARDIAN

  ‘Set in Africa, this is a fragmented enigma, the story of a school trip gone mysteriously wrong, with not only several students but also a journalist gone missing in a wild, rocky region . . . stylised, sophisticated and richly atmospheric’

  DAILY TELEGRAPH

  ‘A tightly written, highly entertaining novel. Vibrant and haunting, Rift will hold readers’ attention well after they’ve finished reading the last page.’

  SCHOOL LIBRARIAN