And Home Was Kariakoo (31 page)

Nguvumali came from a village in the Kilwa region, though he often came to Dar es Salaam for his work and would be cheered by the crowds. He used plant or herbal magic, and so successful were his methods that on certain occasions he was consulted by the police to solve murders. He died in 1957, when the bus in which he was travelling from Kilwa to Dar overturned. The
Tanganyika Standard
, the English-language daily, called him “a white witch doctor working on the side of law and order rather than with any evil or ulterior motives.”

The story told in the epic is somewhat anticlimactic. When the police arrive, Binti Ramadhani confesses, naming not only her accomplices but many others, and dies from remorse. Nguvumali arrives in the village, summons all the suspects named by Binti Ramadhani; he dons his special clothes and puts on his necklaces, as do his assistants. Twelve hundred people from the area gather around to watch the magician at work. After doing a dance he brings out his charms, his herbs, and other medicines. He gives a medicine to the suspects to drink. The three guilty sorcerers feel its effects immediately, but not the others. Bwana Shambi’s eyes pop out, his nose drips, his face changes. He starts talking and confesses to many misdeeds. He then asks to be taken to his hut. Among the objects that he shows them is a portion of a tongue. The two women meanwhile are confessing volubly. The guilty three are finally handed over to the policemen, who are from the Luo and Nyamwezi tribes and beat them up mercilessly. Later Bwana Shambi recants. And when
the three sorcerers are brought to court, they each receive a sentence of less than a year for witchcraft, there being insufficient evidence of murder.

Years later, in 1990, Nguvumali’s son, named Matoroka, was practising sorcery using his father’s name and would visit Dar es Salaam periodically to collect money that was placed at his father’s grave. And two more decades later there occur the grisly albino murders, and a taxi driver in Tabora tells me casually that a mganga can make me rich, but for that to happen I have to sacrifice someone dear to me.

But most waganga are there to solve ordinary problems believed to be caused by spirits and spells, or cure illnesses that cannot be cured by ordinary medicines. When I was young, there were a couple of Asian women who were called on to “strip” away jaundice, which they did using a certain secret ritual requiring water, a brass bowl, a needle, and special prayers; this ritual was learned during the festival of Diwali and the women healers could be Khoja or Hindu. Asians also consulted the Muslim maalim for cases of spirit possession.

As I write this, a man in a remote northeastern village of Tanzania, affectionately known as the Babu (grandfather) of Loliondo, claims to cure all illnesses, including AIDS and cancer, with his herbal potion. Ambilikile Mwasapile, as the man is called, is a former Lutheran pastor who received his formula in a dream. Hundreds, if not thousands, go to see him every day in hired minibuses from as far away as Nyeri in Kenya. The queues waiting for him are claimed to be miles long. There they sit before the elder and receive “the cup”—and are cured, so they say. He charges the equivalent of thirty-three cents for a cup, some of the proceeds of which he donates to the Church. But a bus ride over the rough terrain to Loliondo costs
as much as forty dollars. In all seriousness, a newspaper report criticizes the Babu for not having a medical degree. Suppose he did have one? The government has set up a task force to evaluate the situation. Not surprisingly, even government ministers are said to have taken the Babu’s cup.

When I was in Kilwa, one morning I inquired of Mwana Hamisi, our young waitress at the Island View Hotel, if she knew of any mgangas in the area. Kilwa, like any old town on the coast, had its reputation as a place of the supernatural. And it easily had the look of one. Nights were pitch-dark and empty but for the occasional subdued, disembodied voices; there were old graves scattered around town, some of them mysterious and abandoned; and the baobab trees looked suitably grim. As a man of these parts, however rational I’ve made myself to be, a man of science who sees death as mere corporal disintegration into the elements, someone who’s tangled and tangoed with complex mathematical formulas that explain intriguing features of atomic nuclei—of which we are all made—in all honesty I could not in Kilwa’s dark night help that little supernatural shiver, the skin prickling at the slightest suggestive brush from the breeze at night.

That evening as my companion and I were quietly finishing our meal, our visit to Kilwa having come to a close, the chef—a short, stout man wearing the white jacket of his profession—came over from the kitchen and told me somewhat furtively to be ready the next day at 3 p.m., if I wished to see a mganga. I said I would be ready. I did not know what to expect, but the temptation was too great, and my friend’s presence emboldened me.

At the appointed hour, the three of us and our venerable kofiaclad driver (who it appeared had been informed of our mission) headed off on Masoko’s main and only paved road, from which, just
past the small airfield, we turned into a track winding over a grassy landscape. After a short, bumpy ride we arrived at a small settlement of typical Swahili houses. The last house, somewhat more solidly built than the others, looked away from them and was our destination. There the chef asked us to remove our shoes on the porch, which we did, and we stepped inside.

The house opened into a large room, on the floor of which sat a collection of women, perhaps twenty in number, all looking patient and subdued, ready to wait forever if necessary. We were in a consultancy. To the left the room led into a short corridor, at the end of which, leaning against the front wall, sat the mganga, the maalim, speaking in a voice rich and mellifluous, but pleasantly edged. He was a man in his forties, small and wiry, with a chocolate skin, wearing shirt and trousers and a kofia. Before him sat a woman, between them glowed a brazier. While he spoke, with mechanical deftness he executed symbols or characters on an aluminum tray using his forefinger and an orange solution as ink. What he wrote looked like an Arabic formula, possibly from the Quran. Having finished each tray he would set it aside and pick up another one. Room was made for my friend and me to sit against the wall across from him. Finally he sent off a bunch of finished trays to the main room, where the women poured water on them and drank the solution.

Throughout the process a benign but firm smile lit up the man’s face and his inscription-writing was fluid and automatic. The woman in front of him having got up, he invited the one beside him to come forward and asked her what ailed her. A husband not paying attention. He sprinkled some incense on the brazier, the smoke billowed out, and he asked her to repeat after him:
I am Fatuma, daughter of Binti Yusuf, I beg you, Almighty God, to remove my problem and help me
 … When she finished he gave her an inscribed tray into which he poured
water; the writing dissolved and she drank from the yellow solution; he poured what remained over her head. She stood up to go.

It was my turn. He asked my name, my mother’s name, and then my shida—my problem, which I had practised beforehand: I was a writer, I told him, but recently whenever I sat down to write my mind went blank. This was a recent affliction, I added. All the time I spoke he carried on his writing, his questions put to me in a bantering, teasing manner. When I had finished he gave his diagnosis. You are possessed by some air spirit, he said. It was perhaps sent to you by a no-gooder. It may have been around and got into you while you were walking. It is not going to come out by the pills of the wazungus—the whites. It has made you weak. It will affect your virility. That is your problem.

I didn’t know what to say. I had invented my problem, therefore I couldn’t look desperate. Perhaps he guessed. My friend and I were the only non-Africans there, though we spoke Swahili; and my problem was not the kind that would come his way. He must know too that we were from the tourist hotel. Nonchalantly he returned to his writing and said, Who’s next? A woman came forward and sat before him and underwent the procedure. She was depressed. When she had left, the maalim turned to me and asked, Well, what do you say? As I fumbled for a response, not knowing what was expected of me, the chef came to my rescue. But he’s come for the cure. You should give him the cure. I agreed promptly, and was asked to come and sit closer, across from the maalim, and to spread my legs, the brazier hot before me. Sprinkling incense on the glowing coals, as instructed, as the choking smoke billowed out, I recited after the maalim,
Mwenyezi Mungu, I beg that my problem goes away, that I am able to write well
—and more that I can’t recall. Then my friend did the same, asking for my cure but with more eloquence than I had
managed, clearly affected by the ritual. His grandfather, he had already informed me, had been a maalim in Bagamoyo.

And then the maalim took my hand in his hands, saying, Let this man’s problem go away, let him write well, let it come to his head; if the problem is caused by a person, let that person come to no good; if that person is on a plane, let it fall; if he is in a car, let it break; if the problem is caused by a jinn, take it away; if it is caused by you, My Lord, let it escape from him …

On and on he recited, in that warm, fluid, yet edgy drone, now reading in Swahili and Arabic from a tattered book in his hand, giving me the full treatment. A tall man came and sat down beside him, picked up another tattered book and went full blast reciting some Arabic prayer, so that the two rich and full voices, one higher than the other, filled the room and there seemed no conclusion in sight. The second man could have been in his thirties; he had a short scruffy beard and a grave look, and also wore trousers, but with a T-shirt with a logo on it.

While this ritual proceeded, a woman in the main room seemed to enter a trance, rolling her eyes and groaning. The maalim continued, all the while holding my hand, his plea on my behalf sounding more urgent, counterpointed by the second voice, and I thought, This will never end, and my knees are hurting, and I struggled to suppress a sudden burst of giggling at the predicament I had put myself in. The maalim would throw the occasional look at me, hoping perhaps that I would also enter a trance.

Finally, at long last, the two men stopped, and we said together, Alhamdu lillahi rabb al alameen. Praise be to the Creator of all beings.

Now the maalim put an inscribed tray in my hand, gave me a glass of water. I poured it into the tray, producing an orange solution, which I then poured into the glass I found in my hand. Drink
it, the maalim commanded. I took a sip—tasteless—and said, I can’t drink more, pour it on me. There was a pause. The chef and my friend explained to the maalim that my stomach was delicate and there was a journey the next day—which was irrelevent, of course, if the water was blessed—whereupon the maalim poured the water over my head and sprinkled it on my face and body with some force. More orange water was produced and poured into a bottle for me to take away.

We walked out to the porch, where I was given two small bundles of cut roots to be boiled into a tea and consumed. An ugly black ball of gooey stuff was handed me from which to take up pinches and rub on my body.

We paid the maalim handsomely, took photos with him, and departed. The chef, our agent, also received his commission.

F
ROM THE SEA IT APPEARS AS ONE HAS READ AND HEARD ABOUT IT
, and consequently imagined it, and yet the breath catches when it appears glimmering in the distance. On the continent it’s the endless expanse of the land that impresses, here it’s the sea and the sky, and the small island in their midst. A row of short white buildings in a light haze; it’s been likened to a chain of pearls, though the buildings are not all the same nor all white. The sea is blue and green, parted by the hull of the speeding ferry leaving a frothy wake behind, and the sun is hot overhead. By compulsion or instinct, tourist cameras have appeared and click away. Perhaps it’s what one brings to the scene, but there’s a sense that here and now time has slowed, if not stopped altogether. That statement needs much qualification, nothing is so simple, this sleepy-looking isle has stories to tell and connections round the world and is rife with contradictions. It’s a conundrum in the sun. A young man has left me in charge of his backpack and disappeared, and as I stare at it, I get worried; it’s what the world has become. After a long time he returns, I sigh gently with relief and ask him which of the two prominent buildings before us is the palace. He points it out.

(
Photo Caption 18.1
)

Growing up in Dar es Salaam, to us Zanzibar—“Unguja” in Swahili, “Jangbar” to the Indians—was Easygoing Isle, close enough that it was thought our best swimmers could easily reach it. Actually it was some fifty miles away, and you got there by steamship or dhow, there was no ferry. But few of us mainlanders ventured there. It was too much of the past when we all looked to the future.