And Home Was Kariakoo (21 page)
Read And Home Was Kariakoo Online
Authors: M.G. Vassanji
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 blares 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.
“Thank you, Mama,” says Joseph in Swahili as we leave.
“Welcome again, my son,” she replies.
What a long way we have come.
On our way back to the hotel through the street market, over a radio blaring music, a Jeep announcing a political meeting over a loudspeaker, we suddenly hear a burst of shouting and cheering from behind the shops and curiously walk into an alley towards the source, and come to a dead end where a man sits at a small table. We are told to pay a fee to go and watch mpira—soccer. It’s Saturday afternoon and the English Premier League is on. We pay and enter a long, dark shed, the air thickly pungent with the reek of male human odour and electric with a palpable excitement. Three simultaneous
live games are being watched on three TVs by some two hundred men seated in rows on chairs and free with their commentaries and rejoinders. “Give it the boot!” “Go forward, you!” “I told you!” “Now will we listen to you or watch the games?” There are judgment calls, shouts of joy and frustration. A wonderfully raucous atmosphere, the sheer joy of watching football, but at one thousand shillings a ticket this is expensive entertainment for most. But the TVs are flat and wide-screen. How the three matches are mentally processed by the audience is a wonder. They must all have their favourite teams. And there can be no question, Sir Alex Ferguson, Manchester United’s manager, is better known than the British prime minister or the Queen.
Passing through the bustling market, Joseph speaks of the “discourse on Africa” in the West. All around us here is abundance of life, moments of joy—which is not to deny there are problems elsewhere. But why don’t they show this side of Africa, the sheer exuberance that can also be here? It was impossible for his German colleagues and teachers to accept this idea. Their view of Africa as abjectly poor and starving was unshakeable
.
The Sukuma, the predominant tribe in Mwanza, he explains, are short and dark; they have a flattish nose, curved up front. They are related to his own people the Bukusu in Kenya. As we walk around, I look for confirmation of his statement without seeming obvious. The variety in the people we have seen has been a thing of wonder for me ever since we left on this journey; Africans are not simply “Africans”; they are as diverse as Indians. I think, not for the first time, how insular we Asians were, how little we cared to know about the
lives of the people among whom we lived. Not that the Africans were aware of the nuances of Asian existence either. Once a Tanzanian African said to me, “I didn’t know Asians could have hard lives too.”
Says Joseph—
His father would not come to his home, doesn’t know where the son lives. No, they have not quarrelled, this is according to custom. He is an adult, has been initiated. Joseph himself would never live with his in-laws, even as a visitor. At his initiation he was instructed that he should see his in-laws at most once a year. When his wife came with him to his father’s home, she had to use the neighbour’s washroom, even if that meant knocking on the door of an irate man at
3
a.m. For his part Joseph, in this traditional setting, would not get on the same bus as his mother-in-law, even if that meant spending the night at a way station
.
But times are changing. According to Kenya customary law, property was inherited only by the male heirs. But the new constitution, which was ratified recently by a majority, is more equitable. There is a palpable excitement in Kenya, Joseph says, people feel it: “Not only are we facing the right direction, we are moving towards it.” It’s thrilling to be living in Kenya now, which is why he returned from overseas. He supports the incursion of Kenya into southern Somalia, it’s supported by the vast majority of people, according to polls. Blood is collected, food sent to families of fallen soldiers. This is an issue over which all sections of the country are united
.
The six-storey hotel has a reachable roof terrace, from which the entire city is visible. Mwanza sits in a basin, surrounded by hills
and Lake Victoria. It’s surprisingly cool and dry in the morning. When I look immediately down at the street below, with its quiet pace of habitation and business, I am reminded again of Uhuru Street in Kariakoo, Dar es Salaam, as it was a long time ago. In fact there is an Uhuru Street nearby and it goes all the way to the lake. The street I am on is Rufiji Street, another Kariakoo name. On the hotel’s other side is Nyerere Road; the Khoja khano is clearly visible, with its fake dome.
Later that afternoon we sit for kahawa at our favourite spot, on that shaky wooden bench for two. The corner, we now know, is called the Victoria Hotel Annexe. A troupe of African women in full hijab cross the road purposefully, leaving in their wake a whiff of sweet fragrance. We watch the men bantering with each other, the boys playing; we discuss the meaning of happiness and contentment.
Two men loose on the road—Joseph and I—without those worldly attachments, at least for now, which in Indian spiritual thought go by the name
sansara
, we find ourselves in an atmosphere, a rhythm of sound and life in which we seem utterly at ease. Should I feel a hypocrite, deluded, when I actually live in Canada in a comfort and safety these three children before me can only dream about? I don’t. Living in Toronto has its own insecurities, with a fractured being and an in-betweenness that draws me into thoughts such as these, sitting on this corner on a wobbly bench, stifling my euphoria and questioning my belongingness. In Toronto I would ask myself, Am I a real Canadian? What is such a thing? And I would pull out my hyphens.
A young man sitting nearby shouts out to a friend across the street, where there’s a strip of shops and a cluster of vendors. “You, Memedi’s father!” Memedi’s father, in a white T-shirt, looks away as though he’s not heard. The men around me laugh. Joseph explains: for Memedi’s father, a young man, to admit that he’s a
father would spoil his chances of hitting on prospective women. Call someone “Mama Rehema!” and she’s likely to mutter, “Keep it low. Rehema only.”
“Does that mean that philandering is common outside of marriage?”
“Rampant.” He grins.
I wonder if that explains his mysterious disappearances some nights. I don’t ask. Polygamy, of course, was the order of the day traditionally. Mainstream Churches have been losing support due to their interference in private lives, Joseph says.
Over beer in the hotel patio that night, we get into the giggles. It’s time for father jokes
.
When he graduated from university, Joseph says, his father proudly took him to the village baraza (meeting) of elders and asked him to give a speech. Joseph began to speak in Bukusu, to his father’s chagrin. “Speak big words!” the dad scolded. “What did I send you to school for?” He himself would utter things like, “To your great comportment, I say with much alacrity …” And the elders, sitting around, stuffing tobacco into their noses, would look at each other and exclaim with satisfaction, “Educated! Educated!”
There was the time when a young man who had found work in Kisumu, some distance away, would send a three-page letter in English to his father, who couldn’t read. A boy would therefore come on a bicycle to Joseph’s father with the letter to have it read and translated. Joseph’s father, without a qualm, would take out his pen and make corrections and add commentary to the letter, before giving it back with his personal interpretation to the boy to take home
.
He had been a liberal as a young man, worked in Nairobi, got married out of tribe to a Kikuyu. He did not believe in religion. His wife, however, had been a staunch Catholic, her family had been among the first to convert. After retiring, back in the village, contemplating inevitable death, the pull of ritual stirred inside the old man. And so he married a young woman thirty years his junior, from his own tribe, who would undergo the traditional rites with him that were required of the elderly. He wore charms. He had two “pure” kids with her, who would perform the required rites for him when he died
.
We have excellent lake fish for dinner at the hotel. The next morning we walk at the lakeshore. The area is surprisingly quiet and tidy. Across the road are some expensive homes. There is a mysterious stone monument at the shore, with its brass plaque and inscription removed; the screw holes are still visible. What could have caused the removal, rendering this memorial anonymous? Politics? Theft? Could this be where John Speke stood when he first came to Mwanza and declared the vast lake before him as the source of the Nile? Bobbing on the water are two modern ferry boats that do not run anymore, having been declared unsafe. A conventional ferry comes in and spills out passengers from one of the nearby islands. Across the lake, to my left is the town of Bukoba, where I did the initial (farming) part of my National Service at the age of nineteen, where we worked on a banana plantation, marched and sang and learned discipline, and washed our uniforms and bathed in an ice-cold stream at the end of the day. Across the lake on the right is Musoma, where some of my friends went for their Service, and from where the best ghee used to come to us in Dar. Nyerere’s birthplace
is not far from there either. One of the largest islands on the lake is Ukerewe, straight ahead. We inquire about times and fares. As I stand at the shore, looking out, I am sorely tempted: out there are Bukoba, Musoma, Ukerewe; and Kisumu in Kenya, where I visited a rich aunt once; and Kampala in Uganda, where I went on a high school trip. Not long after that came Idi Amin. If I went to Kampala, I could return to Dar via Kisumu and Nairobi. How long would that take? But then Joseph, standing a little behind me, tells me in a quiet voice, “Daktari, I think we’ve gone far enough. We should go back.”
