And Home Was Kariakoo (11 page)

The slave trade was lucrative, with 25,000 humans shipped to Zanzibar annually, the government charging two dollars a head in duty. The Scottish missionary David Livingstone was touring the area to the west of the country, his dispatches home concerning the horrors of the slave trade making a large impact on British public opinion. In 1872 Britain sent a Special Mission to Zanzibar, “[bearing] a letter, as well as many valuable presents, from Her Majesty to His Highness” to negotiate a stronger ban on slavery. There was much resistance, but a treaty proscribing sea transport of slaves was agreed upon on June 8, 1873, and all slave markets were closed by decree. Even after this ban, it was estimated that 15,000 slaves continued to be smuggled annually by sea—at least for a period—into the nearby island of Pemba to service its new and fast-growing clove farms. Moreover, slave transportation by land continued. The sultan’s authority on the mainland went only so far and was openly defied by the traders.

On December 11, 1873, a handsome, bewhiskered and somewhat dreamy-eyed young British official and member of the Special Commission, Captain James Frederic Elton, departed Zanzibar by dhow for the mainland coast to enforce the slave ban on Her Majesty’s Indian subjects. He wrote,

Elton was born in 1840, when Krapf was already three years into Africa. When the Englishman arrived, Indians—hailing from the areas of peninsular Kathiawad and Kutch, both now in modern Gujarat—had settled in small towns all along the coast, running their little shops, selling retail goods, and buying local produce—mainly gum copal—which was shipped to Zanzibar.

Elton marched from village to village southwards down the coast. The Indians he met belonged to the Gujarati Bhatia and Khoja communities, living separately. He describes a Khoja shop thus: “It is noticeable in the Khoja houses that they are built with an upper loft and rough ladder for the storage of goods.” Presumably this storage was a safeguard against native thieves. Of a Bhatia home he says, “…  they have built an enclosure and planted a garden round a covered and raised terrace, on which they meet for meals, which, with inner sheds, forms at once a fort and pleasant lounge; and here we slept for the night.”

In those early days of settlement the Indians were mostly single men, and their slaves would have been their concubines and house servants. But our forefathers cooperated readily with the Queen’s agent and their slaves were duly freed, in some cases opting to stay with the household. Elton describes in pithy detail his meetings head-on with the slave caravans bound north from Kilwa, whose
leaders were well armed and often hostile. Elton’s brief did not include interfering with these traders. On December 22 he estimates that he must have passed seven hundred slaves. And he notes that the villages he visited were often used as caravan stops:

The leaders of the slave caravans and the traders were described as “Arabs”—though even the upper-class Swahili could be described as Arabs. The most prominent slave trader of the period, Tipoo Tip, renowned from Zanzibar to the eastern Congo, who went on to write a memoir, was a Swahili. The slave trade was a multicultural enterprise, involving Arabs (whatever that description meant precisely), Indians (financiers at one end, and keepers of concubines and servants at the other), and Africans of various tribes. As Krapf remarks, “Many a Wahiao [Yao] and Waniassa [Nyasa], returning to Kilwa from his own country, is caught at night in a snare, laid in the way by the Wamueras … when the captive has a forked-like piece of wood placed round his neck, and his hands bound, and so the poor wretch is taken to Kiloa.”

Elton arrived in Kilwa around December 24 and had a miserable time there. He was sick with fever and from his writing it appears that he had lost his earlier zest for his mission.

Perhaps with its terrible history as a slave depot, Kilwa Kivinje’s current neglect is poetic justice; but politics and inept government are undoubtedly the actual cause.

James Elton died before he was forty, in 1877 or ’78, of sickness while on a march from Lake Nyasa back to the coast.

Just eight years later happened the so-called “scramble for Africa.” The area called Tanganyika was annexed by Germany to be administered by the German East Africa Company.

A short, preliminary excursion to Kilwa Kivinje the morning after our arrival. We park at the end of the main road that comes in from the highway, and stroll about. The side streets are unpaved, most houses are mud and wattle. It seems reasonable to ask for the boma, where once upon a time all government business was conducted. It should be the most prominent sight, a focal point. We see it on the promenade facing the shallow harbour, a large building of three floors, all beaten and broken. Gaping holes where the windows used to be. The sight of it takes the breath away. How to interpret this ruin that is history; that is metaphor and reality? We ask for the German cemetery—there must be one—and are directed. At the end of a long crossroad, at the edge of town, past the shops first, then a residential stretch, we arrive at a small shady area giving shelter to a couple of dozen graves. Some are large, most are piles of tumbled grey brick. We manage to read a couple of headstones. “Hier Ruhet Carl Staeck,” says one. Born May 31, 1872, in Waren; died May 9, 1897,
in Kilwa; age 25. What hopes dashed, for this young man from Waren who set off for distant lands to help found an empire?

Where is the Muslim graveyard? we ask some women we find chatting outside on the porch of a Swahili home. A foolish question, obviously, but we are groping for some hold: how do we go about exploring this town? A group of boys walk us on a long sandy trail through a field of grass and out of town, staying close to the shore. Past a saltworks we arrive at a graveyard with two prominent graves, said to belong to sharriffus, holy men, the headstones unevenly etched in Arabic script. Smaller graves are scattered about on either side of the trail, flat headstones stuck edgewise in the ground, marked and unmarked. As we inspect the graves a couple of men, one on a bicycle, pass silently by without even a curious look at us. The boys are a cheerful, chatty lot, wearing singlets or bare-chested with elastic-waisted shorts, and all are barefoot; one of them sings to himself. The oldest of them answers me that he will go to an Islamic school after primary school. Secondary school, of course, costs money. We find a kiosk and have sodas with the boys; several others come and join us.

It appears that women here no longer wear the buibui, the black, full-length, translucent drape they used to put on over their dresses, but instead cover their heads informally with a loose khanga or, more formally, cover the head and shoulders tightly with a white or coloured chador in the now international style of hijab.

The pounding heat of the January sun that Elton wrote about 140 years ago we can attest to now, for it’s the same month. It’s the kind of heat that has a wasting effect—the body sags, the clothes cling, the face flushes and drips as you hopelessly breathe in the hot air. It was in such heat, though, that as schoolboys in Dar we walked two or three miles back and forth to school; we are now older, and
softer. But we’ve taken a measure of the town, walked its length and breadth, stood at the harbour, caught glimpses of buried history. We’ve been observed and raised curious eyes.

Tired and still jet-lagged, my cold acting up, we repair back to Masoko.

In the afternoon I sit on the hotel patio in front of the beach, writing my notes, drink at hand, watching the sea recede. Boats floating, sea shimmering, Kilwa Kisiwani, the Island, looming to my right—a low, hazy hump in the sea. It all looks idyllic, postcard-perfect; the journey in, long and nightmarish, hot and muggy, a thing of the past. We remain wary of the return. Our elderly driver, Mzee Bonde, fits in with the pace here; he was so timid coming in—we remind ourselves—that he would stop for an oncoming vehicle half a mile away. But he was grand at that ditch. We suspect his night vision is bad. His sore throat I blame for my terrible cold. I suffered from it last night and it’s not gone away. But the sight of Kilwa Kivinje, its calm sense of itself, of its past, and speaking with the men and women in town, and with the kids, has left a nice feeling of anticipation. This afternoon is just to rest and bide our time. The waitress who served us is young and pretty, called Mwana Hamisi; she is from Lindi and married, with a three-year-old. “Ubwabwa” is cooked rice; I hadn’t heard that word in ages. Kilwa Kivinje, said a waiter, had many Asians once. There are Shadiliya and Qadiriyya Sufi centres in all the three Kilwas. There is so much to explore, so little time.

The next morning I am awake at four, and the omens look good. My cold is gone, and the infection I brought with me, due to which I had almost called off the entire trip, is miraculously gone too. The sea laps quietly at the shore, before full tide, and the sunrise when it
arrives is breathtaking. Growing up on the coast, I recall, watching it had been a casual, at times a daily, affair at dawn.

After breakfast we drive to Kilwa Kivinje once more.

On the main road going in, just outside the town itself, is the hospital; next to it is the site of the famous hangman’s mango tree, called Mwembe Kinyonga, from where the Germans used to hang their rebels. It died only recently and was cut down. We park inside the town, farther up close to the main crossroad, which is also the country bus terminal; conductors wearing vests or shirts with the sleeves cut off, their arm muscles gleaming like polished ebony, hang about cheerfully calling out impending departures to Lindi, Dar, points between. A moderately busy chai shop does service nearby.

Across from the chai shop is a site which must have been a small plaza once but is now a garbage dump and parking space; in the midst of it, partly visible, stands out something strange and white. We cross the road and find it to be a memorial to two German men—Gustav Krieger and Heinrich Hessel of the German East Africa Company—who died in 1888. I surmise they must be the two men who—according to sources—were beheaded by local people resisting the German occupation. They were the first Germans (after Krapf) to set foot in Kilwa. Reports say that they arrived to take over the town on the day of the Eid festival, and they entered a mosque with their boots on. The white cenotaph stands like an alien object fallen from space, neat, geometrical, and upright, its inscription executed precisely on a marble plaque. It is a certainty that no one in this town today would have an inkling of who these men were.

Farther along, where the main road ends, is the three-storey ruin of the boma, and facing it to the left is the shallow harbour. There is no beach, the harbour consists of an inlet between tall
mangrove stands, but the oceanfront is a wide space, with shady trees, stone benches—a plaza or promenade of sorts. One easily imagines here, once upon a time, vendors of corn, cassava, oranges, mangoes; children running about; men sitting down for a game of bao or cards in the late afternoon as a brisk wind blows; Indians out for a stroll in the evening, men in ones and twos, the women in groups. Today we see two eyesores of recent vintage: a utilitarian customs shed and a bar.

Behind the plaza run two parallel, wide streets, with an abandoned look to them, also reminders of another era. One—in ghost-town fashion—contains the brooding remains of large stone houses of two and even three floors, with balconies, grilled windows, Arab doors. These broken dwellings are now only partly and haphazardly occupied. The neighbourhood bespeaks a period when Indian life thrived here. The former Khoja khano is a large broad building next to a chowk, or square. It’s been abandoned. The mind drifts to conjure up families sitting outside their houses at night, the men playing cards and chatting, the women gathered separately, the children running in and out, playing hide-and-seek and “thuppo!” Life before television or video. I recall people who lived here once, part of the community: a chronically down-and-out uncle; my friend Karim’s mother.

Behind the ghostly Indian residential neighbourhood runs the old Indian bazaar. It currently has a pharmacy, an outlet selling Islamic inspirational videos from abroad, a restaurant with a large veranda that’s a mockery of its former self. It would have served samosas and kababs and bhajias, there is an elaborate entree menu fading upon a wall; but today there is only mandazi and black chai. Across from us, where we sit on the restaurant veranda surveying the scene, there is the small but well-constructed town market, empty but for three women sitting before meagre heaps of mangoes.
Where are the meats, grains, vegetables? Mango trees proliferate in the area—who would go to the market to buy mangoes?