And Home Was Kariakoo (10 page)

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?

T
HEY TELL US IN
D
AR
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.

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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, though 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.

This market town, because of the hotel, becomes the base for our daily excursions to the more interesting Kilwa Kivinje up the road.

Kilwa Kivinje has history, has structure, and this is immediately apparent as we sight the town once again, this time bathed in daylight; there is dignity—albeit a tired one—that comes from that history.
This town under the sun and by the beach, with its deliberately laid-out grid of streets, invites you to explore and imagine and reflect. It surprises you with discoveries and enigmas, it upsets you by its state of neglect. Much went on in Kilwa Kivinje in the last two hundred years. It grew in importance after the demise of Kilwa Kisiwani, the Island city, and therefore carried the prestige of that name that went back to the twelfth century. In its heyday it was a commercial, political, and religious hub. It was home to poets, Sufis, and slavers, to Indian, Arab, and Swahili merchants, and it was a colonial administrative centre. Standing at the head of the ancient caravan route that went southwest all the way to present-day Malawi (Nyasa), it took to the people of the interior goods such as cotton, metalware, beads, and guns, and received slaves and ivory in exchange. Besides these two commodities it exported gum copal, tobacco, rice, and grain to the markets of Zanzibar and beyond. It resisted German colonialism, for which it paid the price of a hanging site, and as proof of that resistance there are two monuments in the town. Not surprisingly it received many eminent, curious visitors.

On February 2, 1850, an avid German missionary, Johann Krapf, having already since 1837 travelled considerable portions of East Africa in the north, searching for souls to show the Bible to, agonizing over incorrigible Muslims, idolatrous “Banyans,” and backward pagans, hired a Swahili sailing vessel in Mombasa to take him south along the coast to explore all the “havens and towns” as far as Cape Delgado in the Portuguese territory. Krapf was born on a humble farm near Tübingen, Germany, and has the distinction to be the first white man to see Mount Kenya and the second to lay eyes on snowy Kilimanjaro. He also went on to compile the first Swahili dictionary.

In the decades to come European governments would make their famous “scramble for Africa,” but Christian missionaries envisioning a spiritual wasteland were already descending upon the continent in order to extend here the empire of their God. Says a fervent Krapf in his memoir, “May Heaven soon grant to the friends of missionary-teaching[,] opportunities of spreading the Gospel throughout the benighted region round Lake Niassa [Nyasa], and of establishing one missionary station after another! From that central region the Gospel might soon penetrate further …” He was a man with a mission, and the African landscape and the variety of its people seem to have inspired him not even a little.

On February 19, at four in the afternoon, past a spot called Fungu ya Baniani, the “Indian’s Sandbank”—where once upon a time a passing dhow left an Indian to cook his own food and he met a mysterious death—Krapf’s vessel reached the shallow harbour of Kilwa Kivinje—“the most important town between Zanzibar and Mozambique, with from twelve to fifteen thousand inhabitants.” Unfortunately, this former farm boy of the cloth does not describe more. What he would have seen upon approach was a gentle nudge by the ocean into the side of the continent—an indentation marked by the scenic shoreline of a prosperous town, consisting of a row of white houses. On the left was the largest building, the boma, headquarters of the local governor and representative of the Zanzibar sultan. He would have sighted the sultan’s bright red flag. The tide was in and the harbour was embraced on either side by a deep green forest of tall mangroves. Behind the town rose the green, majestic and intriguing interior of Africa.

The Indian Ocean coast, from beyond Mombasa in the north to Cape Delgado in the south, a thousand miles of a green fringe, with small Swahili towns and villages serviced by Indian dukas and
small dhows, was directly under the rule of the Omani sultans of Zanzibar. A treaty of 1845 between Zanzibar and Great Britain limited the slave trade, but it continued at a brisk pace. Krapf was appalled by it and describes the scene amply as he saw it in and around Kilwa. Caravans set off in March for Lake Nyasa in the interior, he says, and returned with slaves in November; from here the slaves were dispatched in ships to Zanzibar and beyond. During the interim, the dhows would lie idle in Kilwa. The caravan journey itself took some fifteen to twenty days.