And Home Was Kariakoo Read online

  We talk about various East African groups, or tribes—the latter a somewhat controversial term because it’s associated touchily with colonialism. Scholars consider the Meru to belong to the Bantu group of peoples, but many Meru themselves believe their origins lie in the north, as far as Egypt perhaps or the Near East. Even a Jewish origin has been claimed. They could easily pass off as Somalis or Ethiopians. Their ancient occupation was metalworking, i.e., they are not like the other Bantu, natural tillers of the soil. On linguistic evidence the Bantu appear to have originated in western Africa and dispersed. Secondary dispersals took place more recently, and some tribes in Africa show evidence of this—the Luhya in northeast Kenya are related to the Hehe in central Tanzania, and people even farther south.

  I suggest—uncertainly—that the Boers came to South Africa before many of the African peoples did. He agrees emphatically; even before his own people came to Kenya, he says. He’s had Afrikaans literature introduced into his university African Literature curriculum. I suppose that coming from a smaller tribe makes him more accepting of differences. His concept of modern Africa is very interesting.

  The bunge, the new parliament building, is in a quiet area set off not far from the town centre; designed by a Kenyan firm, it is an impressive structure modelled on the traditional African round hut. The pity is that it’s hidden away in a section of a small town where few Tanzanians will happen by to see it. We return to the hotel by a shortcut across the railway tracks.

  The new Dodoma University, apparently the previous president’s legacy, where we arrive in the afternoon also looks impressive—it’s stunning, actually, consisting of a number of white buildings gleaming under the open skies, scattered across a vast plain. Each is a separate department. You can imagine the parking lots of the future, playing fields, commuter buses. The student body has already expanded to 20,000, but Natasha, our host, tells us there are not enough lecturers or books, and there is no easy access to the Internet as yet. Students have to rely on photocopies of texts. Lunch has just been served in the cafeteria of the department where she teaches—History—and the sweet vapours of ubwabwa—steaming local rice—greet us warmly as we enter. We have tea. My lecture has been advertised as “Burton and Speke and the Kutchi Bhatia (and others): The Importance of Telling Stories.” The subject of my talk came to mind when I saw a small but lively controversy about the two explorers in the pages of a well-known literary journal, following the publication of a book on John Speke, and I began to wonder about the African angle to the story. In my lecture I make the point that while we have been told so much about the European explorers who passed here, we know little about the local Indians and Africans who made their journeys possible; we have so little recorded history, so few personal accounts from those times. I expand on that: we read over and over about the great men of Europe and America—there must be hundreds of books on Lincoln, not to mention films—yet we know little about our own. We should be telling our own stories. One lecturer reminds me that Tippu Tip, the nineteenth-century slave and ivory trader, did write a biography; another reminds me of the Kilwa Chronicle from the sixteenth century. These exceptions only serve to prove the point. The Chronicle is only a fragment in Arabic, its author unknown; Tippu Tip’s is the only Life from these parts and from his time. I produce UN statistics comparing the number of books published in the U.S., U.K., and Tanzania: 206,000, 172,000, and 179. Even though the number for Tanzania is for 1990, whereas the other two are from the mid-2000s, the disparity and its implications are staggering.

  When I finish and look around the room, I get the sinking feeling that the students, some fifty in number, have all the time been staring blankly at me. They don’t know what I’ve been talking about. The problem is partly language. They come to university, especially here in rural Dodoma, with only a rudimentary knowledge of English, from places which have not seen libraries—and here I was, speaking of literary journals and the latest books published in England and America. They are here for a degree with a minimum of fuss, in order to get jobs afterwards. They would rather hear of accounting, computers, business. Abstract issues such as history and culture are not as relevant to them as they were for an older—my—generation, better educated and bred on the rhetoric of idealism—which, these young people would argue, was what held the country back in the first place and why they don’t have sufficient English. But surely it should matter to them what the world reads, and especially what it reads about Africa and how it sees Africa on its screens?

  Natasha my host is different. Hers is the only Asian face in the hall besides mine, but that’s not what makes her seem alien. From Dar es Salaam, the daughter of a university professor and one of the country’s leading intellectuals, she went to high school in Botswana and university in Canada. She’s small and strikingly delicate-featured, but a sophisticate, earnest and serious, though perhaps with a tendency to trip into jargon. She’s young yet. I imagine her scaling her chosen mountain: teaching with passion, poring over books she’s ordered with her own money, copying chapters for her students to give them the latest and best in political and historical theory, organizing seminars. She lives by herself in a university-supplied apartment. She was on the same bus as us coming in from Dar, her father having come to drop her off. It was a touching sight. She could have taken a plane. While she teaches she’s waiting to join a doctoral program somewhere, her proposed subject the traditional modes of conflict resolution in Somalia. All this enthusiasm in a world in turmoil makes one want to be young again, until I recall the silent phalanx of students I had just spoken to.

  After the lecture we have tea at her place, where she serves us the traditional Indian fare sent to her by her parents. She talks of rethinking the state, and I wonder what that means practically. Joseph is smitten.

  We leave early the next morning for Nzega.

  His life—“sansar,” an Indian might call it—pursues him over the phone, each of his wives demanding more money. He has yet to find a way to send a course outline for his students in Nairobi, he’s not found an Internet service that works. He promised too rashly, I think, to accompany me, though I’m sure he finds it rewarding. I feel a bit guilty, though. My own phone’s suddenly quit on me.

  We speak in a mixture of Swahili and English; he speaks with passion and humour, doesn’t judge, just states. He’s a joy to be with.

  He tells me of his experience as a teacher in Somalia, where he worked two years for a Norwegian NGO, which took him there. There was skimming at the top—he signed for more money than he received, and he describes his amazement at seeing the ultra-posh residences of his superiors in Nairobi. The flight back and forth from Nairobi to Djeberra was on an old Russian plane, the seats coming loose, the co-pilot tipsy as he wandered up and down the aisle in singlet, the Somalis shouting at each other at the tops of their voices, from one end to the other. It’s a scene easy to picture and laugh at. The senior members of the NGO used a better airline, he adds.

  He describes a scene:

  In a class, outdoors, while he’s speaking on a point of grammar, a student raises his left hand (the right hand is used to ask for permission to go to the toilet) and stands up, and asks, “Sir, do you know what to do when you are walking and a plane is dropping bombs?” A nonplussed Joseph says, “No—what?” “You stand up still and don’t move—and they will think you are a tree.”

  There were many instances of battle-shocked young men; places where there were only boys and old men, the young men having gone away abroad to send remittances or having been killed. When the Americans put the squeeze on the hawala system of remittance, a large number of people were left without money. British and Italian companies dropped tons of toxic waste near the Somali coast, poisoning the fish, Natasha says as we discuss Somali piracy.

  The world from here looks different. CNN is far away.

  The ride from Dodoma to Nzega is so smooth and speedy that we feel exhilarated; surely nothing can impede us on this trip. The l
andscape is vast and flat, a sparse bush country, except for a short, very hilly stretch, and a scattering of tors—heaps of grey boulders. These are the granite protuberances that both Speke and Burton mention. We see maharage (bean) patches here and there, which supply the food staple, taking advantage of the recent rain. It surprises Joseph that there is so much empty land in the country. In Kenya, he says, where land is scarce, all of this would have been distributed and planted; the stone boulders of the tors would have been cut up and carted away for building. That’s why, I remind him, the Tanzanians are nervous about a free market with Kenya. Kenyans are aggressive and greedy.

  The huts in this Gogo country are rectangular and flat-topped with thatch. Soon we see them with V-shaped roofs, and presumably we have left Gogo country; the people are darker. It is ironic, I observe, that the Gogo, who seemed to fill the European explorers with trepidation (Stanley called them “a powerful race” and “ferocious”), are now seen begging. What a twist of fate, Joseph replies. The Masai, he adds—and here do I trace a shade of schadenfreude?—once feared from central Kenya down to the Serengeti, and perhaps the reason why the slave routes did not pass through Kenya, have been reduced to working as watchmen and taking up hair-braiding, which they are good at; you can see them at bus stations practising this trade. As he says this we are observing, in a town bus station, a Masai walking about with a stick and a red blanket over his shoulder, and a Gogo standing erect, leaning on a stick, wearing a black blanket. Both men lean and angular, handsome. The town is Singida, fairly busy and well known; several of my Asian high-school classmates came from here.

  We left Dodoma at six and arrive at Nzega at eleven feeling happy and positive. But it’s now that our troubles begin.

  Nzega is a busy way station, a T-junction with no other character to speak of, with one road leading off north to Mwanza, another south to Tabora. One paved, the other bovu—rotten—as they say; on one side the Sukuma people, on the other the Nyamwezi, both major tribes. Which direction to pick? Our bus takes its place alongside others, waiting before a row of stalls and chai shops, all under a red metal roof painted with large white Coca-Cola signs. Vendors sell fruit and soft drinks from their carts, and an exuberance of coloured small cottons, plastic travellers’ bags, and knickknacks, all made in China. There is the ubiquitous cell-phone kiosk, bright and adrift at the edge of the station, a link to the world. We pick a place to have our snack. And after that begins a frantic search for a suitable bus.

  Touts and agents abound. The choice is still between the uncertainty of the Tabora road and the safety of the Mwanza one. We decide to risk it and buy tickets for a Tabora-bound at 1:30 p.m.; but when we push through a crowd to claim our seats, we find that they’ve been double-booked. After a heated argument with the present occupants, we get off, defeated, and demand a refund. We wander around. A number of buses have now left and suddenly the choices have diminished. One bus, undergoing much repair, has painted on its back an angry, oversize José Mourinho, the charismatic coach of the Real Madrid soccer club, berating someone. We resign ourselves to missing Tabora and pick a bus bound for Mwanza. It would be nice now just to sit down and arrive somewhere. It’s hot and dusty and we’re tired. But at the last minute the Mwanza driver decides to mend a puncture. Meanwhile the two agents who first sold us Tabora, feeling guilty, have found us another Tabora bus, ready to depart. We take credit for the Mwanza ticket and follow them to a waiting bus, where we find excellent seats behind the driver. It’s too good to be true, and surely enough all are asked to get down, the bus has to go for servicing. Another hour passes while we wait outside the tea stalls. We’ve become a fixture, Joseph and I, earning pitying looks and sympathetic commentary from onlookers. Most of the buses have gone, but Mourinho has not budged, we wonder what ails him. Finally our bus returns, we sit down, and it begins to fill, and fill. Packed, it drives out slowly from the station, and our hearts leap with joy, we grin at each other. But rounding a corner, it stops again. The driver jumps out. More people squeeze in, the aisle is packed right up to where sits the new driver, a calm elderly man in a kofia. We depart finally at 4:30 p.m.

  The old driver seems to know his potholes and drives expertly and carefully. The countryside is denser than before, scattered abundantly with mango trees of a short variety with spherical crowns. Houses are intermittently strewn about next to the road. Men sitting around doing nothing, waiting for the sun to go down. It’s a strange sign of muted life: no market, no children, no cattle, no electricity. Inexplicably, after two hours the driver stops in the middle of nowhere, “kuchimba dawa,” dig for medicine—a pit stop. No one asked for it. Some fifty people clamber out, get back inside. The babies, having woken up, start hollering.

  The driver looks uncertain about the road now, and for some reason he has his grandson, a little boy, next to him in his seat. An hour later he stops again, for his own convenience. The sun has set, and it’s now obvious that he cannot see well anymore, since he tends to drive over the potholes. The bus has become quiet, the babies are settled. The headlights beam on a partially wet and streaky road ahead, not easy to follow in the dark—a slight distraction in our captain could land us inside a ditch. The conductor, in the seat across, eyes fixed ahead on the road, begins to signal warnings of approaching road bumps by stretching out an arm or banging his hand on the dashboard. We pass a distressed bus pulled over on the side, the passengers spilled out. The young woman next to Joseph on the other side informs him that those people would not spend the night on the highway for fear of witchcraft. There’s a lot of superstition in Tabora, where she herself finished high school. Finally, a few electric lamps ahead on the road. It’s close to nine when we arrive at the Tabora bus station.

  The sight of the meagre settlements on the Tabora road have turned Joseph thoughtful. We are, essentially, on the old slave route. He wonders if the pathetic, reduced state of human life we see reflects the devastation of the slave trade. He is reminded of his own village, which was divided into families along functional lines—shopkeeping, plumbing, carpentry, harvesting, auctioning. There would be a central place for people to gather. There would be children around, and cattle. His area, as much of Kenya, never saw the slave trade.

  Am I surprised that the slave trade, on this old slave route, is the ghost we carry on our journey?

  There is something pleasant about Tabora, a sense of quiet settledness, a certain self-containment. It was a vital stop on the old east–west caravan route, and is one of the few towns in the country that can be found in the old, precolonial maps. Yet it has hardly any recent urban development. You wouldn’t call it pretty—there’s no river flowing through it, there are no hills to modulate the landscape, though mango trees abound. Tabora’s problem today—why it appears physically neglected, as though development suddenly halted sometime in the 1970s, why you can now go to Mwanza or Kigoma (Ujiji) without stopping here (as you once did)—has to do with national politics, as our taxi driver the next day affirms. Chief Abdallah Fundikira of the Nyamwezi—this is traditionally their territory—had run afoul of the ruling national party, TANU, and founded his own party. He lost, and as a result Tabora was punished. None of the roads leading in and out is paved, therefore during the long rainy season the town is rendered into an island of sorts. But help is on the way now, the Chinese will soon come to build the roads.

  At independence Chief Fundikira became a cabinet minister in the new government. Soon after, he was tried for receiving bribes from two Indian merchants in a celebrated court case, an incident which today reeks of politics, for rarely if ever is an eminent politician tried for bribery, let alone for anything else. The two Indians pled guilty, perhaps expecting leniency, but were given the maximum sentence of two years in jail and twenty-four lashes. The chief, however, fought the case using East Africa’s most prominent criminal lawyer, Byron Georgiadis of Nairobi, and was acquitted. As Fundikira emerged from the court, he was greeted by a large number of his supporters. I happened to
be one of those standing outside the courthouse to witness that hectic scene, a misfit surely, but I had followed the case in our daily newspaper, my interest piqued perhaps from having read too many Perry Mason paperbacks.

  The centre of Tabora consists of a main street, on one side of which are a busy bus stand and a large open-air market. The former Indian quarter lies on the other side of the street, with its typical commercial strip. Here, prominently, is the Jamatini, the Khoja khano looking very similar to the one in Dodoma and built during the same euphoric era. Tabora was an important Islamic as well as administrative centre, and the old German boma lies a short drive away from the main street. It’s used by the army now, and to get through the gate one must have permission. I tell the adjutant at the gate that I did my National Service some years ago, expecting a favour. He bids us formally to a conference room nearby and in sombre tones asks for our details, including my NS number, which of course I do not have. Suddenly I am reminded of the hair-raising bureaucracy of old, which I have not experienced in decades, and Joseph senses something similar; we eye each other across the large table, dutifully give our names and cell numbers, and depart in a hurry, hoping not to hear from the army. We head out of town towards “Livingstone.”

  Says our driver, there’s not a single white man who leaves his country and doesn’t come to see “Livingstone.” We, however, have not seen a single white man in town. And the driver doesn’t really know who Livingstone was; in his mind, he was some white man who lived at the time of his father. On the way we pass a large but plain white house that belonged to Chief Fundikira, where he is also buried. The driver is chatty, and since on our bus coming in we were told of superstitions and witchcraft in the area, we ask him, “Kuna uganga hapo?” Is there witchcraft here? The answer is strongly in the affirmative.