And Home Was Kariakoo (6 page)

To me the great war does not evoke Flanders or Vimy Ridge or Gallipoli, all vividly and multiply brought to life in novels and films, or the red poppies of November, in the same way it does the windblown thorny semidesert from Voi to Moshi under the mighty Kilimanjaro, the Usambara Railway, and the road to Tanga. And too, there is the overriding irony of it: the graves at Moshi, the anonymous monuments to the Africans and the Indians.

A week before my journey to Moshi from Nairobi, I had gone to visit Taveta from the Kenya side to look at the site of Smuts’s great push eighty years earlier. On the way, however, there was a bit of family history to lay to rest.

Even before Kenya was colonized and its great railway was built, Indians had settled along that interior route to Uganda, running their little dukas (shops) that brought supplies to the local Africans. My great-grandfather, Nanji Lalji, was one of them, having arrived from the village of Girgadhada in the Kathiawar region of Gujarat to begin a business in the town of Kibwezi, not far from Voi. Here he was the local mukhi, or headman, of the Khojas and presided over the khano. This bit of family history I had learned only recently after a meeting with one of his daughters-in-law, my father’s aunt, a shrunken old woman in a mattress shop in downtown Nairobi. Kibwezi turned out to be a typical nondescript town under the sun, with nothing of interest save the ruin of the old khano where my great-grandfather had presided. The Indians had all gone away. Several years later, I saw my ancestor’s village in India. Here too the
Khojas had gone away, except for one family, and the khano was shut down, after the Gujarat violence of 2002. It was a strangely moving experience, to come to the place of my origins, but by this time I could also manage a sense of detachment.

The Uganda Railway was built in the early 1900s using indentured Punjabi and local African labour. Given various names, including the Lunatic Express and the Iron Snake, it was an engineering marvel of its time, traversing some six hundred miles, ascending to more than 6,000 feet before plunging down into the Rift Valley and rising up again to meet Lake Victoria. The construction was gruelling, and many workers died from malaria, dysentery, and sleeping sickness; and for a few terror-filled months some Punjabis fell victim to lions in the grassland who had become so emboldened by access to easy meat that they would creep inside a tent of sleeping men and drag one off. This grisly episode of the railways—the plight of the “coolies”—is captured vividly in the book
The Man-eaters of Tsavo
by Colonel Patterson, the man who hunted down the predators.

The Nairobi–Mombasa highway, going east, stays close to the railway. Arriving at Voi around noon, we turned into the Taveta road. It was rough and dusty, punishing for the car, and there was not another vehicle in sight, so that if the car broke down, as our driver worried, we would be stuck in the middle of nowhere under a burning sun. All around us the dry thorny shrub of the Taru Desert, a dull brown and green landscape relieved by the occasional baobab tree. Roads led into villages now obscure, which in that brief moment of the war had assumed such importance. There was no sign of the military railway from Voi, only a herd of cows and a few lanky Masai youth in red shukas with their herding sticks. Finally we entered a grassland, and soon thereafter the land was abundant and green with
large shady trees and we were in Taveta. Straight ahead of us loomed Kilimanjaro, both peaks visible.

An eerie feeling. Could this be real? Is this where, under the eyes of this African god, the great war was fought?

Taveta was a sprawling village surrounded by hills and mountains. We found a decent hotel, from the terrace of which we could look upon a vista: the Pare Mountains before us on the left, Kilimanjaro directly in front, Chala Crater to the right. Behind us a stone church on a small hill, and behind that, Salaita Hill, whose occupation by a small party of Germans in 1915 had been the cause of so much British frustration. The hotel manager, a man in his forties wearing a Kaunda suit—a collared short-sleeved shirt of linen worn over matching pants—was a former schoolmaster and a history buff to whom I took instantly. He was delighted at my interest. Nobody knows about the war here, he rued; all that history, now lost. The church-on-a-hill behind us was relatively new, from the 1930s, but there was a cemetery, not very far, on the site of an old church destroyed in the war. There was a 1904 grave there, of a white woman.

He gave me a car with driver to go and have a look. The cemetery was a short distance away from the modern town, but I couldn’t find the old grave. The place was lovely, however, shaded with mango trees and utterly quiet and peaceful. The graves seemed to have been reused, and even the gravestones. On our way back, a surprise awaited. Across the road from the church rose a site that made my heart race: old brick ruins crowning the top of a rise. We stopped so I could walk around. What remained of the original structure—a rectangular bunker—were the ruins of the outer walls, and in one corner an almost intact room with crenelated walls, a square opening in each of them, used presumably to fire down on the enemy. There was no roof, and the room was now used as a kitchen. The rest
of the building had been patched up crudely with cement and brick and housed the church offices. Stones were scattered on the sides of the hill, debris that presumably had rolled away from the old structure. As we drove on, alerted, we noted occasional heaps of rubble that could very possibly—very hopefully—be signals from times past.

You have to go and see Lake Chala, the manager insisted, and the next morning we did just that.

The lake is inside a crater and invisible from the road, so that you have to walk up a hill to see it. And when you do so you come upon a sight of such pristine beauty it leaves you helpless. The sky blue, the leaves green, the dirt road an insignificant thin line. The lake below, crystal-clear blue, mysterious, deep; tiny ripples on the surface played by the wind like light fingers on a harp. You have no word to say; you walk away from the others. You think, This could be the site of Creation itself. And you want to hoard away this moment, so that years later you can say, I was at Lake Chala. When the tourists had not arrived and only a privileged few knew about it.

You can, if you try, climb down to the water. We meet two Masai youths who have done just that. We go halfway down, but the climb is steep, and without a stick (the Masai each have one) it does not seem wise to proceed farther. But at the top of the crater is a stone fortification, a wall, some nine feet high and twenty wide. This is where the South Africans had dislodged the Germans.

It takes some feat—amidst this spell-binding natural beauty that surrounds us—to imagine here tens of thousands of troops, animals, guns, motor vehicles. Dust, petrol fumes, animal odour in the air. They came, fought, and left, leaving only these stone clues behind, like men and beasts from another planet.

Lake Chala is fed by a stream from Kilimanjaro running underground. It runs, we are told, all the way to Lake Jipe, emerging
once at the Njoro Springs. From the terrace of our hotel later we could see a green belt apparently following that path.

Now here I was in Moshi a week later perusing the names of the war dead: J. Watson of the Machine Gun Corps, and Private S.H.V. Palmer of the 12th Regiment of the South African Infantry, and D. Scott King of the 4th South African Horse, and W. Dawson of the Calcutta Volunteers Battery, and many other young men of Smuts’s British army who died far away from home and were left buried here in Moshi.

L
ATE THAT AFTERNOON IN
M
OSHI
I took a bus bound for Tanga. When earlier in the day I bought my ticket, the company agent had confidently brandished a seating chart, and with the wisdom of a seasoned traveller I had put my name on an ideal place; to my chagrin the actual seat arrangement bore no resemblance to the one on the chart. Nothing to be done, a shrug of the shoulders by all concerned. That agent was nowhere to be found, and that too was par for the course. The bus terminal resounded with a football commentary: a Yanga–Simba derby was concluding, and a large crowd had gathered outside a stall to follow the match on radio. Yanga were the Young Africans and Simba were the former Sunderland, both Dar teams.

We departed at sunset, headed east, the mountain behind us, and night had fallen. Nothing else stirred on the highway, the bus the solitary creature grinding through the thick foggy darkness, its headlights sweeping across the hills and forests. There would be the occasional flicker of light, an only lamp at a distant habitation, drawing you in like a spell. Who lived there up on the hill, how would they spend the evening? Could one but peep into those lives and in some way share them. Did this habitual craving turn me into
a novelist? What makes this primitiveness, this forbidding solitude of the jungle so wrenchingly attractive from a distance? There is in this stillness a certain spirituality, a welcome loneliness that I’ve often treasured in my travels, in which there seems to be only the universe and I, an endless moment devoid of fear or death. Perhaps it is death.

In the middle of the journey, in the pitch-darkness ahead a cluster of electric lights appeared in the distance, at which the bus arrived and abruptly stopped. It was a roadside restaurant. We were in Mombo, at a stop that was familiar to me from trips taken long ago in childhood; one always arrived here at night, it seemed. The place was still owned by an Asian, probably of the same family. The men’s facility consisted of a dark windowless backroom with a stinging stench. You held your breath, did your job, and rushed out. I had a Coke and took my seat, and our journey proceeded

We reached Tanga at 2:15 a.m. instead of the scheduled 5 a.m.; some of us, who had no home in Tanga, opted to stay inside and snooze until morning broke. At 5:30 we were summarily cast out and the bus grumbled off to the depot. Outside, in the humid coastal coolness, I accepted a taxi with trepidation. It was an old car and had to be push-started. Barely a hundred yards on it turned off and came crawling to a stop, and started again after another push, then decisively sputtered out. “What now?” I asked, somewhat nervously. At this hour no one was about except the two of us. “No petrol,” the driver said. “Isn’t there a station nearby?” No. What to do, on this dark street, in a town in which I knew nobody? But I could see that the man had no evil purpose, he had only tried to eke out a fare in difficult times and his vehicle had betrayed him. I had not even seen his face clearly in the dark, though he was a small person and sounded as sleepy as I was.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll take you there.” We got out, he picked up my bag and put it on his shoulder, and we walked together to the Khoja prayer house, where I presumed I would be directed to the guest house. There was a mukhi there, the headman, chatting with two women after the morning’s meditations and prayers; the guest house had been closed for some time, he said, and sent me with a worker to a local hotel where, however, there was no vacancy. I returned, had a wash in the shower in the ladies’ room, and waited until seven, when two old men walked me to the house of the man whose address I had been given by a friend in Toronto. His name was Samji. He dismissed the idea of a hotel with “What’s the need? Stay with us.”

There were three of them in the house, Samji, his wife Roshan, and their son Karim, in his early twenties. After a rich breakfast of bread, butter and jam, and fried eggs, Karim said he would show me around town. This was typical community hospitality. It was the kind of welcome our grandfathers gave to new immigrants when they arrived penniless from India to start afresh in a foreign land. And I recall that during my National Service at a camp outside Bukoba, on a Sunday I only had to show up in the shop of a Khoja, introduce myself, and—in the home of complete strangers that seemed primitive by Dar standards—I would be treated to a hot bath, a longed-for Indian meal of pilau and curry, and after siesta be given a ride back to the camp. Here too, a complete stranger, I was given a home. (The mukhi, who had sent me to a hotel, was clearly an aberration.) But it was not easy to explain to my hosts my interest in their neglected coastal town. To them, writers were journalists who wrote in the papers and those who wrote books about life in Europe and America. What was there to write about Tanga? And what kind of writer could I be, a mere Asian from Dar?

No traveller or explorer of any eminence in the past has mentioned Tanga. An obscure Swahili port on the Indian Ocean coast, it was on nobody’s itinerary, until the brief twenty-year period of German rule when its star began to shine. The Germans were fond of it. It was the entry point to the hilly Usambara and Kilimanjaro regions, where climate and agriculture were good. While farther south along the coast the fortunes of the old market ports and Swahili culture hubs of Kilwa, Bagamoyo, and Lindi fell, Tanga prospered and grew.

In the 1890s a certain Richard Hindorf ordered 1,000 plants of Mexican sisal to arrive in Tanga by way of Miami (direct export was forbidden from Mexico). Sixty-two plants survived the journey via Hamburg and were the beginnings of a sisal industry that would flourish over the decades to provide the country’s pre-eminent export. Sisal estates, scored with row upon row of thick spiky leaves shooting up from the ground, soon characterized the landscape outside Tanga and became its welcome to the weary road traveller. As Tanga’s economy grew, more settlers arrived. It became an important administrative centre, its port exporting twice as much as Dar es Salaam.

It would not have been unusual in Berlin to receive a postcard from Tanga, a pretty European town then, its gleaming white, veranda-ed houses tucked away nicely behind their green hedges. The town boasted three landmarks. The railway station, the bahnhof, was a two-storey building with sloping double roof, a wooden veranda, and a round stationmaster’s clock prominent on the outside wall; a balcony on the first floor went around the building and was accessible by external stairs. The region’s affairs were handled at the imposing, multi-gabled white boma, the German imperial flag prominent outside. And the Kaiserhof on Imperial (now
Independence) Road was the local hotel and the settlers’ cultural centre. At the Kaiserhof you would go for your sundowners or the town Christmas party. Full room—guaranteed mosquito-free—and board cost five rupees.