And Home Was Kariakoo (18 page)
Read And Home Was Kariakoo Online
Authors: M.G. Vassanji
There were fun moments too, daring escapes we still talk about, into the town to get away from the camp’s rigorous monotony. A few times I asked permission to go to the government hospital and, after the consultation there, would have lunch with a friend at the posh Dodoma Hotel, which I could not really afford. We would arrive here in our military uniforms. There were white tablecloths, the service was formal, and we ate English fare with forks and knives. I had never been to such a place before, but my friend seemed undaunted. She had a tooth problem and a couple of times I feigned
that malady to accompany her, and allowed myself to suffer a gratuitous drilling from a rather confused dentist.
We reach Dodoma at 4 p.m. and head for—where else but—the Dodoma Hotel. It is situated at the end of a quiet, shady street away from the town and behind the station, just as I remember it, but evidently has been remodelled since my visits. The rooms, sprayed with insecticide, are good but not luxurious, constructed around a square courtyard at the back. Meals are served mostly in the courtyard, but there is a dining hall towards the front in which I discern the place where I would come for that English lunch.
After a journey of eight and a half hours, having showered, we happily sit down to a few beers and a lavish Indian dinner in the courtyard. There are only a few other guests. The night is cool, the sky above us dark and clear; it is eerily quiet. What we have to beware of are the mosquitoes.
We’ve hit it off completely, Joseph and I. He’s chatty and knowledgeable, with a sense of humour. To come with me he’s had to delegate his extensive teaching duties and bear the wrath of his first and the critiques of his second wife. He married the first one when he was only twenty, has two children by her, a boy and a girl. She’s kept the boy, “of course,” and given him the girl, who is twelve and very close to him; knowing he’s away in Dar, probably having fun, the first wife has demanded more money. The second wife is recent and they have a little boy. She too demands more money. “You wonder if it’s worth getting married.” He has a doctorate in literature from Berlin. When he arrived there first, he says, there was no one to receive him at the airport, everyone he turned to would say words equivalent to “No English” and turn away. He waited for taxis, but all that arrived were Mercedes-Benzes, which he imagined would charge him more. No Toyotas or Nissans! Finally he took a Benz and arrived at the train station. No one to help him get a ticket to Leipzig, where he had to spend the first few months to learn German, until at long last he found a Moroccan worker who helped him. He arrived in Leipzig station in the middle of the night to see a bunch of skinheads busy making a ruckus. He waited nervously at a McDonald’s, and when morning came took a taxi to his university department. In four and a half years he was never invited to a colleague’s house; he frequented an African bar where he heard all kinds of “narratives,” the stories of lonely Africans in Europe. There was a Camerounian who went to Nigeria, crossed the Sahara to Libya, waited until a boat took him to Italy, worked at an orange
farm in Spain, walked to Austria, and finally arrived in Munich, where he was immediately arrested and deported. Now he was back
.
I have with me a fine storyteller
.
It’s rained all night and I worry about our journey onwards. The plan is to go to Tabora tomorrow, and then onward to Kigoma and Lake Tanganyika, following the old caravan route. We step out into a quiet, shady street. The morning is cool and dry, pleasant to walk. We are at 3,600 feet above sea level and the sun sets later here than in Dar.
If there was hope that moving the nation’s capital to impoverished Dodoma would charm it into a burgeoning city and change its fortunes, this has not happened. Like other purely political capitals, there is the sense of a quiet, tidy dullness, of seasonal activity, which explains why our hotel is almost empty. Parliament is not in session. Dodoma did not exist before colonial times; like Nairobi it is what the railway left behind. But Nairobi prospered.
First thing, we walk up to the bus station. On the way we pass an opulent two-storey white building with a dome, a structure dominating a major intersection. It’s the “jamatini,” the Khoja prayer house, or khano. One of the cross streets is named Jamatini, so is the dala-dala (bus) stop. A man inside the gates tells me there are about 150 Khoja Ismailis in town. At one time there would have been a thousand. We walk onward, passing a row of young Masai “doctors” from the north, men in traditional red or brown togalike body covers sitting under the trees on the sidewalk, selling local medicines for potency, good luck, and the like—you are shown a printed list of ailments they can cure that is as long as the menu of a Chinese restaurant. Business appears to be not bad.
At the station, we face a dilemma. Kigoma via Tabora, following the caravan route, is a tempting destination. Tabora is the Kazeh of former times. Kigoma is close to Ujiji at Lake Tanganyika, the actual caravan stop and slave market. Opinion is universal among the touts, however, that the road all the way to Kigoma is unpassable due to the rains. We decide to get tickets for Nzega, a three-way junction, and there to decide which direction to turn: north will take us to Mwanza and Lake Victoria; south will take us to Tabora and perhaps, with only the slightest chance, on to Kigoma.
We come back to Jamatini, choose to turn left and head towards the mental hospital. It’s a long walk away and finally we arrive at the gate, from which a road leads inside. The hospital grounds are quiet and look well tended; two men guard the gate. A vehicle goes in, a small bus comes out. We have no desire to go inside, and return to Jamatini by taxi.
On the other side of the prayer house is the town’s business section. It could not have changed much from when I knew it—a few intersecting streets and moderately busy. There must be a chai place here, I tell Joseph, and he looks surprised. How do I know? Obviously we have enough to learn from each other. Where there are a few Asians, there is a chai place, I explain to him. He’s all for it. We ask around and are finally escorted by a young man to a rather small, narrow joint, run by an Asian woman, serving the usual fare: kababs, samosas, bhajias, and chai. We sit down and are served. This food is a revelation to my friend, he’s not had it before; soon he’ll become addicted to it. But instead of chai he prefers soda.
On our way to Dodoma, at the road stops, boy vendors would come by to the windows offering fried termites for sale. Termites, says Joseph, are a delicacy, raw or fried; in
the latter case they taste like chicken. His folk spice them with chilies. He is from the Bukusu, a Bantu people. They live in northwest Kenya by Lake Victoria. Some years ago, he says, a Meru district officer (DO) was sent to their area and created havoc, imposing his alien ways upon them. Driving around in his Land Rover with two bodyguards, he came upon some elders outside the village gorging themselves upon a termite mound, and assumed they were drunk. He arrested them for “loitering with intent”—a grin comes over Joseph’s face at the ludicrousness of it, but it’s a crime in the books introduced in colonial times, presumably to restrict the Africans to their neighbourhoods. Another time this same Meru DO came upon a gathering of villagers drinking the local brew. The custom is for the youngest wife to sit in front of her husband, between his legs, while he drinks his beer. She’s his favourite. The DO was furious, convened a kangaroo court right there, and had an elder whipped. “First you drink illicit alcohol, then on top of that you rascals rape your young women!” There was an uprising and the DO was withdrawn
.
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.
