And Home Was Kariakoo (39 page)

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 campus 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 surely—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.

But how different the country has become, since socialism was kicked aside, when the generation of idealists has aged, when collective concerns have been replaced by individualistic ones. We are at Ali’s house, also in Oyster Bay, some six of us. I met Ali at a reading at Novel Idea, the bookstore that’s a sign of the new times, following which he’s organized this luncheon on a Sunday. Nadir shows up and Walter, and Abdu, a media person, and his wife, Jane, a medical doctor, and Mehboob, a publicity and financial consultant. We sit in the living room in a circle; wine flows freely, the conversation is loud and passionate, about the status of the country and its future. The leadership is held up in utter contempt—what do you say of a government that cannot pay the medical interns their allowances, threatens them when they protest, and immediately gives its own members a handsome raise in their own allowances? Is there hope for the country? Abdu asks. He is pessimistic. He’s made a documentary on a serious cultural issue but to have it shown on the national station he’s required to bribe someone. He will not do it. Walter, the father-figure in this crowd, scolds him. It is better to show the film, even if you have to bribe—what use is a film in storage? What contribution do you make by your obstinacy? Abdu has children studying abroad and he wonders if they will return. What opportunities can the country offer them? He accuses the older generation of idolizing Nyerere, whom he blames for the nation’s current complacency and hostility to entrepreneurship; and surprisingly it is the Asians among us who defend Nyerere’s old order, however flawed his policy of socialism. What Nyerere bequeathed to the country was a sense of nationhood, the people’s sense of themselves as Tanzanians, that the neighbouring countries envy. The
irony of course is that with the broad brush of racist generalizations of the period, most Asians were portrayed as greedy Shylocks and exploiters, with long straws to suck the blood of the poor, and it was Nyerere’s nationalizations of private property that largely contributed to Asian flight. Still, among the Asians, in Tanzania and abroad, Nyerere has left a deep impression, he is still respected, even loved, for his honesty and humility. He was a man of the people.

Time flies, it gets dark. The snacks Ali had provided for a plain lunch are long gone. Walter gives me a ride back, and I tell him I’m hungry, rather hoping that we might get a quick something on the road. Come home, he tells me, we’ll eat there. He calls Frida to tell her to order barbecue chicken, and we drive to his home in the dim, old section of Nyerere Road—where he’s lived as far back as I’ve known him—park the car and walk through a dark alley, climb precariously up the dark stairs to the second-floor apartment. It’s late, Frida has stayed up, and it takes a long time for the chicken to arrive; meanwhile Walter’s feeling sick from the wine he’s had, and he lies down on the sofa as I watch the news on an Iranian channel, and soon he falls asleep. When the chicken arrives, I eat by myself, as Frida sits beside me, chatting, and I then leave.