The Magic of Saida (7 page)

One last round as the streets turned dark and they would part company at the monument.

They never spoke about each other, they just were, the two of them, a conspiracy together. An implication.

During Ramadan the stores stayed open late, for it was the month of shopping, with money saved, money borrowed. Even the poorest needed new clothes for the Eid celebrations at month-end. Groups of women fluttering out in bui-bui, trailing sweet perfumes, children wailing for the toys displayed so cruelly in the stores, tailors on sidewalks, their machines grinding away creating dresses and shirts, beggars unrelenting. Night fell, the lamps would come out, the shops began to close. The Indian boys and girls would be outside playing in and out of the shadows. Their fathers sitting around in groups drinking kahawa and playing cards by lamplight.

Among the beggars was the despicable Salemani Mkono. Not with an enlarged foot, or leper’s hands, or unwieldy scrotum, not old and covered in poxes. He was just a purple-skinned beggar, with a short, scruffy beard and an idiot’s grin on his large round head. And a bad, motionless left arm at his side. He wore the same soiled clothes for months, a checkered cloth round his waist and a torn T-shirt, until someone gave him a new set, and he might appear suddenly in green and red instead of red and black. Come Friday morning and he would be out, hand outstretched, and the faithful could not very well deny him alms on this day, even if it was a cent or a heller. Sometimes the kichaa hit him, that fit of madness, and he would march up and down the street of the Indian shops like a soldier, a stick on his shoulder, kids following, teasing him, calling after him, “Generali, generali”—the general. To their utter delight he would come to a sudden stop, shout a hoarse “Halt!,” then turn around and scream, “Achtung!”

One Ramadan evening he approached Kamal as the boy paused on the street with his tray. Eh Kashata! “Come see this miracle, young man,” the grinning Salemani said, and foolish curious Kamal followed him open-eyed into the shadows, where Salemani turned around suddenly and lifted up his loincloth to reveal his prodigious penis. Kamal stared at the monstrous piece of flesh, his heart thudding inside him, walked away, as Salemani called after him, “Feel it, hold it.” At home he couldn’t eat that night, his heart still pounding, and he went outside and vomited in the yard.

A few days later, walking with Saida, still during Ramadan, he turned sharply away as Salemani approached. The girl snickered. “If you go with him, he will show you his mshipa!” she said, shocking him.

“Who is this Salemani?” he asked his mother. “Why does he have such bad manners?”

One look at his face, and she knew. “Salemani the shameless. Eti, he showed himself to you?”

He nodded, tears in his eyes.

“That bastard, I’ll teach him manners!” She picked up the broom and stormed to the shopping street, rolling her wonderful haunches. “Where is that shameless fellow?” she demanded, until she found him slinking at the refuse dump on the main road near the monument, where she flew at him with the broom. Bystanders joined her in the abuse and the beggar was pelted with pebbles and anything else possible. Hamida’s fury was well known. Don’t toy with her or her son. Ni mama na baba huyu, she is mother and father, now that her man, the Indian, has absconded.

Sometimes the Indian barber gave Salemani a haircut, shaving his grey head completely, and the boys would jeer at the bald, shameless general. He trimmed his own beard at the dump, using an old knife or a piece of glass, appearing on the street bleeding and shocking.

But who was Salemani? What did he want? Why did he beg? And why did he act crazy, when all the town knew that he wasn’t?

One day he and Saida strayed away from the square, took the path alongside the creek, an inlet running north from the harbour through a wall of mangrove forest. It was noontime, just before lunch, nobody was around. The tide was low, the creek depleted of water. A salty stench hung in the air. Walking side by side in this private moment, holding hands while pretending not to, what do you talk about? “When I grow up I will buy Mama the best dress from a shop window in Dar es Salaam. Or from Nairobi—they have the best shops there.” “How do you know?” “Some Indian boy told me.” “You will go all the way to Nairobi? Where is that?” “It is in Kenya Colony, where Jomo Kenyatta is in prison. What will you buy
your mama?” “I will have a husband,” she says, “and he will buy me a dress.”

So simple. Recalling that moment so many years later, when he, now a doctor, was back in Kilwa inquiring about her, he was moved by his desperation to utter: “I will buy you your dress, Saida, where are you? … I’ll buy you a house!”

At the German cemetery, where they arrived, the two youngsters strolled about among the graves, the empty grey beds of stone under which rested the remains of dead white men of long ago, and eventually as they sat down on the ground with their backs against one of them, suddenly there was a murmur among the bushes down towards the creek that startled them; but when the sounds seemed human they crept stealthily closer to peer at the source. Male and female voices and a thrashing in the bushes. They looked through leaves and branches, saw an Indian girl lying down, the boy kneeling over her. Together they pulled down her knickers. He lowered his trousers.

Kamal and Saida stood away.

“He’s fucking her,” she said matter-of-factly. Anamtomba.

“Ah, Saida! Don’t say such bad words! Who taught you to speak like that?”

“Mm-mm.”

That surely linked them, this knowledge. And he looking at her like the girl she was; a female. She looking back at him, wide-eyed and innocent.

And how old were they? Perhaps ten and eight. Even now, he said, that image in his mind, the memory of that primal revelation had the power to chill the heart. There was something about what they saw, where they saw it. Some days after that incident, he would hear of a violent ruckus in the Indian community, involving a girl and a boy, and that the girl had been sent away.

We were sitting, Kamal and I, on a bench at Dar’s Oyster Bay; before us, on the beach, young men playing football, a couple of hawkers vending coconuts, and young teens in uniforms, fresh out of school. Behind us a steady traffic. This area in colonial times was for Europeans
only. Our previous governments, against advice from bankers, kept it free of development and tourists, so that now we can come and enjoy the beach unimpeded. Until the developers, someday, win.

He had rented a furnished flat in the Asian area, in one of those new eight-storey affairs built on two-storey former foundations and a prayer (his word). He enjoyed the crowded ambience of the neighbourhood, though not the cars parked thick on the sidewalks so you couldn’t enter the building easily. To keep fit he jogged, early in the morning. And he gave free medical advice, while he bided his time.

A ship appeared in the far distance and he gazed at it intently—an understandable obsession if you’ve lived by the sea. Soon the ferry from Zanzibar came speeding along, headed towards the channel into the harbour, and Kamal turned to me with a grin.

For decades he’d had this story to tell, and now he was telling it.

“It just happened,” he said. “We would meet at the shore and hold hands and walk by the creek.”

Impulsively he would wander off by the creek and wait; it would be after the noon hour, and she would be there or soon appear. There was an illicit feel to their trysts, they both knew that, without knowing quite why. Perhaps it was the secrecy that made them so. They would stare out at the dhows, watch them being loaded, painted. They would imagine spirits haunting the tall, mysterious deep-green forest of mangrove that sheltered the harbour. They would race to the German graves and play there. Near the bushes where they had discovered the Indian couple, they had found a shallow lagoon protected by overgrowth, with a narrow sandy clearing around it that was like a beach. She would remove her dress, enter the water and splash about in it. He would do the same in his shorts. It was here that she once immersed herself in the water and did not emerge for what seemed a very long time; he could see her clearly, looking flat and ghostly, and he got worried and called at her. When finally she emerged, she said, “I am Kinjikitilé.” The magician of Ngarambe, who went by that name, had also immersed himself in water, before emerging to inspire men and women to make war against the Germans.

One day from the mud near the bushes she picked up a piece of white rock. “It looks just like you!” she said and giggled nervously, holding it forward. Not a rock, but part of a skull. He picked up something else to beat her with for the insult, and she ran off, throwing down the skull. Then he saw that what he was holding was a bone. A broken tibia. He dropped it.

She came back. They concluded that these bones were the work of sorcerers, those of the evil sort who sometimes killed people and dismembered them. Ate the parts in order to gain strength. Used the brain to make medicine. So much for wandering off by themselves. Their sin, unarticulated, instinctive, against the modesty required of them had received an admonition. They stopped their outings together.

But it was their secret place, this lagoon, its compact beach; for one day she would arrive there again to meet him. But that was later.

When he told Mama about the bones on the beach, and his explanation, she cut him short. “What do you know? Witches go to the forest, not to the sea, out there in the swamp!” He was shocked by her unexpected sharpness and turned to go, but then she said kindly, “Come here, you. So the two of you went out for a walk together?”

He did not reply.

“The sea holds many secrets, you understand? Kilwa is an old town. Slaves were brought here, from the south. Many died. Others?—sent off to Zanzibar, Bagamoyo. Arabia. India. Know this. Those are the bones of our ancestors.”

So she told him. Know this. Eyes fixed into his. But before she said “India,” she had drawn a long breath.

There were African slaves in India? Slaves everywhere?

“Mama, what is your tribe?”

She eyed him angrily.

“Mama, were you a slave?” A mtumwa.

“Do I look like a mtumwa to you? Whose slave, eti—yours? Do you see chains on me, like this—?” She circled her neck with her fingers, making a funny face, tongue sticking out, then clutched at her ankles, pretending to cry out. “Do you see minyororo on me—clinking,
cheng-cheng, cheng-cheng
?” She looked at his hands. “Where is your whip, you Swahili?”

He slapped her behind, and they burst out laughing.

“You want to know my tribe.”

“Tell me, Mama!”

“I am a Matumbi. You want to know how. Do you know the Matumbi? The bravest of people, who live on those hills in the distance. Once upon a time in the days of kalé they defeated the fierce Ngoni warriors who had come from all the way in the south. The Ngoni. Even now they think they are something. How did the Matumbi defeat the Ngoni? They set bees upon them. Don’t laugh. The little people find all sorts of ways. And later they defeated the Germans. Now you ask, how could they defeat those white men with their guns. I am telling you. When the Germans came with their askaris carrying bastolas, the Matumbi rolled pumpkins on them from their hills. Those Germans!—I’m telling you they didn’t come back soon.

“You have heard of Makunganya. Also known as Hassan bin Omari. He was of the Yao people, and a wealthy businessman. Compared to them these Indians of Kilwa are nothing. His agents went to Dar es Salaam; they went to the south; they went into the interior of the country where the barbarians lived. They brought gold, they brought ivory. But they also captured slaves and sold them at the market, here in Kilwa. One day his men captured my grandmother, who was a Matumbi. Makunganya sold her to an Indian.

“And God knows the rest. I am not going to tell you more. Go away.”

He was a descendant of a Matumbi slave. Did the African genes call out in his children’s interest in African American pop culture? He laughed at his own question. Of course not. The whitest Canadian kid blared out rap from his car.

I reminded him that rap was ubiquitous, you have it everywhere in East Africa too, even among the Asians.

In spite of his evident African features, there was no way he could make his wife, Shamim, acknowledge his Matumbi origins. “Why
do you want to bring this hypothetical connection into our lives?” she asked bitterly. The very thought caused her anguish, and he could well be guilty of mental cruelty. “The kids have enough handicaps as it is without your Matumbi complex.”

After all their training in violin, voice, and piano, it was not Bach or Beethoven but 50 Cent and Beyoncé they went for, and he had muttered cynically that that surely was the subversive Matumbi gene wreaking havoc on a mother’s ambitions.

That day, when Mama informed him of her Matumbi origins, he had surreptitiously examined himself in the mirror. Nothing different. What did he expect? Something else in the nose, the lips? And after that argument with Shamim he would see her examining the children for any vestiges of Africa.

It was easy to get sentimental and recall those drawings from the histories and see your mother’s grandmother chained in a train of slaves, then in the market picked by an Indian merchant. Your great-grandfather. What does it matter now? Go and make your future, as Mama said. And he had made it. Do we owe anything to the past? A silly question?—the past is over—or a profound one?—we are part of a continuity.

I would have given him a publisher’s answer: it’s important if it’s interesting, and you have made it so.

I was of course keenly waiting for him to get back to Mzee Omari the blind poet, our historian.

He had been drafted to be her teacher, the mwalimu, superior and domineering, who was privileged to go to the Asian school. He had agreed to share with her the precious knowledge he himself received, with which she could hold her head up with pride in that world away from the humble Swahili quarter of Kilwa, on the other side of the German monument. She could become somebody special, just as he would become. Over the months they’d become friends; her former awe and respect had yielded to a certain kind of familiarity. But he had ruefully come to accept that she was not very bright, her interest in his lessons limited, often feigned and fleeting. There were weeks when she did not show up. And when she did, the sessions on the floor ended at times in their moments of amusement. Her nickname for him was Bwana Hodari, Mr. Clever.