The Magic of Saida (18 page)

“That day I saw my calling,” Punja repeated his oft-told credo. “Sidi Sayyad instructed me to come to Africa.”

“He instructed both of us.”

Kassu had followed two years later. It was surprising they had not met in Zanzibar, because Kassu had stopped on the island before heading off to the mainland. He looked bigger than Punja remembered him—more than fifteen years had passed—and in the manner of a provincial was dressed informally, his large shirt hanging out and his slippers ploughing a trail in the sand.

Beyond the harbour, the streets were beginning to stir: a couple of men emerging at their doorways still in their nightclothes; the smell of woodsmoke; a woman’s voice singing inside a house—life tucked away at the side, in the bagal, of the continent, whose vastness and reserves were awesomely apparent to the visitor as he looked away from this coastal coziness to the beyond. The casual spread of the distant hills seemed to know no boundary; the sight of the green, extending in wave upon wave of limitless landscape into the horizon, brightened in inches by the rising sun behind him, was enough to take the breath away. Through all that vastness ran the routes along which the caravans brought back the ivory, which was taken to all the ports of the world. Not many years ago the routes had also brought back slaves, before the British warships put an end to the trade. And into the interior went cloth, metalware, beads, and jewelry. This was his new home, this small but ancient entry point into the continent, he the appointed gatekeeper. He had sold all he had accumulated in order to settle here. His prospects, from what he had gathered from his mentor, Tharia, were good. A trader was a trader, said Tharia, whatever else changes.

Behind the seafront was a row of large white stone houses where
the Indian traders lived; here a shop and house had been arranged for Punja, who also had an office in the boma as the customs agent. All arrivals were reported to him; sometimes he went to meet them. All the exports and imports were entered into his ledger and appropriate duties collected. A monthly tax was collected from the traders. From the treasury a few policemen and a peon were paid. From what remained, Punja gave a percentage to the Vali, the sultan’s local governor.

But Punja’s official status did not last long.

Late one morning, three months after his arrival in Kilwa, a few boats were sighted in the harbour, heading towards the shore. People stopped to watch. There was something special about them, the way they stayed together. Two Germans landed, accompanied by armed askaris and much baggage. Showing the Vali, who was among those who had gone down to greet them, a decree in Arabic, the two men instructed him that they had the authority to take over the administration of the town. The sultan’s green flag was thereupon brought down by their soldiers and the German eagle went up the flagpole outside the boma and was saluted. All the bystanders were commanded to stand still, at the point of the askaris’ rifles, as one of the two white men stood to attention and, his eyes raised to the flag, solemnly sang an anthem. It was the day of Eid, the morning prayers had not begun.

The Vali left the next morning by dhow. And Punja had no more business at the boma. When he vacated his office, the Germans did not prevent him from taking his ledger and the sultan’s cash with him. We do not need your sultan’s money, they said, our Kaiser is a rich man.

In this manner the Europeans annexed East Africa, having conferred among themselves around a table in Berlin and carved out much of the continent for their colonization. The mainland north of Tanga and Kilimanjaro had been declared a British colony, where white governors ran the country, and white families with children had begun to arrive to settle and farm and be served by African retainers. The territory to its south, long under the loose influence of Zanzibar,
became a colony of Germany, the takeover effected by means of its warships’ guns trained on the Sultan of Zanzibar’s palace, the British Consul’s exhortations to the sultan to acquiesce to the brazen threat, and the prior machinations of Karl Peters, who had gone about collecting signatures from ignorant chiefs on treaties they could not read, in which they ceded territory to the German East Africa Company.

But this takeover of the mainland did not go without resistance. The coast, from Lindi in the south to Mombasa in the north, long a cultural and political extension of Zanzibar, was burning with a fury that the island itself could not show openly.

From Tanga news arrived that the townsfolk had fought daringly against the foreign occupiers and locked up the German officials; Bagamoyo, directly across the channel from Zanzibar, took up the call, as did Pangani, to its north, under an Arab called Bushiri bin Salim. One Captain von Zelewsky was captured and then expelled from the town with jeers and abuses, but only after the Germans had paid a ransom. Arriving in Zanzibar, Zelewsky was heckled further. A short sail up from Bagamoyo, in Sadani, a Swahili called Mwana Heri was in charge of the resistance. And so on, down to Kilwa and Lindi, and in the interior. The news looked good; the people may have been divided, but there was a common enemy, the white infidel and interloper with the gun and the warship.

The two administrators in Kilwa who had taken over from Punja were called Krieger and Hessel, and were about the same age as he. If they had shown due diligence and gone over the Indian’s ledger book they might have noticed the arrival, in a few shipments, of a suspicious number of knives and arrowheads and a few rifles. A discrepancy between monies collected and at hand in Punja’s cash box might have been attributed to misappropriation or—Punja was an honest man—to certain discreet disbursements. They might perhaps have discovered that a distinguished-looking passenger had accompanied one of the arms shipments and stayed two days before departing; he was called, simply, Wasim.

One late afternoon on a Friday there ensued much commotion in the town. Kassu Ghulamu came over to Punja’s shop and told him grimly, “They have done it.”

“What have they done, my brother? And who has done it?”

“They have slaughtered the two Germans.”

“They have killed the two Germans?”

“Cut off their heads.”

“By God, now what.”

An armed gang had attacked the boma; the two soldiers on duty were overpowered and killed. Then the Germans were attacked and beheaded, their heads displayed on poles. The remaining soldiers disappeared and the bodies of the Germans were hastily buried. War had been declared by Kilwa. Consequences would follow. The town waited with trepidation for events to unfold.

Chaos ruled on the coast for a year. But there was no stopping the aliens, with their warships, their soldiers, their superior weapons. The German chancellor von Bismarck sent his friend von Wissmann to quell the insurgency. Von Wissmann arrived, having recruited hundreds of Sudanese mercenaries, and went down the coast in a warship from town to town stamping out the “Arab Revolt,” as he called it. Tanga was shelled and reoccupied; Bagamoyo was burned to the ground. Pangani was captured and Bushiri bin Salim hanged from a baobab tree along with others. Mwana Heri of Sadani escaped into the hills.

In Kilwa, von Wissmann arrived with three boatloads of troops. It was May 1890. As they landed, a few men took shots at them with their rifles, wounding a soldier, and were immediately chased and shot down; their bodies were displayed at the fish market across from the boma. The soldiers then went searching house to house for more rebels; they entered the mosques with boots and guns; finding no rebels they rounded up all the adult males they could find to attend a meeting at the boma.

Von Wissmann, impressively cut out with a neat moustache and smart uniform, stood on a crate and sternly addressed the crowd in a mixture of Swahili and German. It was useless to resist, he warned. The sultan himself and the chiefs of the tribes had placed the country in the able hands of the Kaiser, the king of Germany. The Kaiser’s name was Wilhelm. He was a just and benevolent ruler; under him the country would prosper and become modern. But if defied, his retribution would be swift. Those who resisted would be punished severely.

The two murdered Germans were buried properly, a short distance from the boma, on the main road leaving the town. The site of the graves was marked by a mound of rocks, to await a proper monument. Von Wissmann left behind two new administrators with a contingent of armed soldiers.

And so was established Deutsch-Ostafrika. All homage was now to be paid to Kaiser Wilhelm, whose chief representative, the governor, sat in Dar es Salaam, his commissioners running affairs in the districts. There was another language heard in the country, German; there were new laws and customs, there was new punishment and fear. And the air and the sun and the seasons seemed suddenly different.

But the warships had no reach in the forests, and back in Iringa, Chief Mkwawa of the Hehe gave the Germans a resounding defeat. Zelewsky, “the Hammer,” was killed during an expedition to defeat the chief. And down south Machemba of the Yao would not surrender.

From Zanzibar, news came that the new sultan, after only two years on the throne, had died of grief. But the jihad must go on, said Wasim.

Punja was now a man of the coast, a respected Indian trader and honorary Swahili who was convinced by now that Sidi Sayyad of Singpur had sent him to Africa with a noble purpose: to help his people, the Africans, resist the onslaught of the Europeans. He gave himself a place name, in Indian fashion, so that he was now Punja Devraj Sawahil. He was that saint’s emissary and gift to his ancestral homeland. He would do all he could to help resist the invasion of his adopted land.

Punja’s great-grandson, a century and some years later now, wonders whether Sidi Sayyad, if we grant him his supernatural powers, lying in state in Singpur under a mound of fragrant flowers, was aware of this singular irony, that those leading the fight against the foreign invasion on the east coast of Africa were eminent traders in slaves too; that it was slavers of this ilk who had brought at least some of his people all the way to India, there to subsist in the back of beyond in Gujarat as one of the lower castes. And what was Punja’s reaction upon seeing the heads of Messrs. Krieger and Hessel displayed on the poles outside the boma? Was the hatred against the
white men so absolute that there arose for them not an ounce of pity or compassion in the townspeople? Were the Germans so irrevocably alien that no empathy was possible? That the situation was capable of evoking complex emotions and contradictions we know, because they managed to entangle a local poet.

Briefly, very briefly, in the year 1890, a teacher appeared in the Kilwa region called Sheikh Muhammad Aleta Baraka, the bringer of blessings. He couldn’t have come at a better time with his message, the coast being caught up as it was in chaos and war following the German takeover. In these troubled, bewildering times of violent changes the charismatic, soft-spoken Sheikh Aleta Baraka promised his followers a life of spiritual happiness. The key to his teaching was devotion and gratitude to Allah, expressed in observance in prayer and the ecstatic dhikri-chanting of His name at evening gatherings; he exhorted modesty, charity, and honesty from his followers. I will be your doorway to Allah, he told them, I who come from a long line of teachers, beginning with the incomparable and beloved Muhammad His Prophet, and Aly His favourite, and down the blessed lineage through Sheikh Abdel Qadir Gilani of Iran, and Sheikh Ayesi of Barawi and Zanzibar, who made me his khalifa and representative. Follow me and I will guide you. Change your ways and obey the One, and the German foreigner and unbeliever will disappear. God knows best.

A young man called Muhammad bin Tamim, son of a poet and eminent teacher now dead, and himself an aspiring poet, was greatly moved by this message. Wistful of the piety of the beloved Prophet and his Companions in Arabia, their honesty and compassion in victory and their courage and fortitude in persecution, about which his father had written some lovely utenzi, and about which he himself had attempted his own verses, he grieved in his heart at the iniquity and sin all around him and the breakdown of order. Ah, to live
in those times, witness the honesty of the Prophet! The courage of Hamza! The purity of the desert!

Sheikh Aleta Baraka accepted him as a disciple and named him Karim Abdelkarim.

Not long after his arrival, having set up his centre and new mosque in Kilwa, Sheikh Baraka set off to proselytize in the interior of the country, many parts of which the message of Islam had yet to reach. Karim Abdelkarim stayed behind and ran the madrassa at the centre. He was also the guardian of his younger brother, Omari.

Thursday nights being holy to Sufis, the new adherents to Sheikh Baraka’s order would stay behind after normal prayers to conduct dhikri. Other townsfolk, including Indians, joined too, this being a more rewarding pastime than playing cards or bao or smoking. It was at a dhikri session that Punja Devraj first paid notice to the tall, noble figure of the young teacher as he stood in the front row, swaying side to side in a gentle ecstasy like a young tree seduced by a sweet breeze, repeating Allah’s name. Punja’s two wives had joined him in Kilwa by this time, with some of the children, and Punja enrolled two of his younger boys with the teacher.

One evening after dhikri, Punja asked Abdelkarim if he would come to partake kahawa with him. They picked up Kassu Ghulamu from his shop and the three strolled over to the town square at the seafront. There was no moon and the night was dark; a cool wind blew as the waves washed noisily upon the shore. Behind them to the right loomed the boma, draped in darkness; farther to it was the compound where the Germans lived. A kahawa seller went around with his urn serving all the men who sat on the square in small groups chatting quietly. The two Indians asked the young poet and mystic whether he didn’t wish to see the infidels driven out from the land. Abdelkarim agreed with all the vehemence his gentle nature would allow him. “I would like nothing better than to see this country subservient to Allah’s will, guided by his representative the Caliph.” Gradually the two older men made him understand that even though the last insurgency in Kilwa had been quashed by that devil Wissmann and his African mercenaries, and resistance in other places was meeting with defeat, there were those who believed it was still possible to make life difficult for the Germans. Did he
understand? Could he keep secrets? There was a certain movement of concerned citizens. It involved eminent people here on the mainland coast, and in Zanzibar, and was known to the sultan, and it was providing support to the fighters who were resisting the iron hand of the Germans. None of them here were fighters—they laughed at the thought—neither Kassu Ghulamu nor Punja, nor indeed the pious Abdelkarim. But there were ways to help. At present the movement needed a secretary versed in Arabic and Swahili and other local languages.