And Home Was Kariakoo (2 page)

Perhaps I judge unfairly this “western” aesthetic. It is novelists, of whatever country and culture, who in some sense never leave home, who keep returning to it—despite that old cliché. Why this need to return? My answer is this: there is simply too much of life unexplored that, at a distance and prompted by nostalgia, yes, and the clarity of observed youth, yields precious narrative and self-knowledge.

The question arises: Is the return of the Asian African different from that of an African African? The answer is yes, if only because for the former the ancestral South Asian homeland is a reality that looms closer today than it did on the streets of Dar es Salaam and Nairobi; the links to it are more realized. The returning African African at the same time comes with a global black consciousness. There is that unavoidable pulling away, then. And yet I’ve kept returning to this African homeland, and at each arrival there is that unmistakable tug at the insides, the same instinct to draw in deep from the air. The smoky coolness outside Nairobi airport at night, the salty humidity of Dar at the same time. The exclamations, the echoes of spoken Swahili.

F
OR DECADES NOW BY
D
AR ES
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ALAAM
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, open seashore its Asians have arrived in numbers to stare out at the ocean, carrying out a mysterious communion with the water that separates them from their ancestral homeland to the north and east. So it appears. In my childhood we came on foot, and during our frolicks we would go tumbling down from street level to water’s edge. Two tugboats plied the harbour; a liner might depart at that hour, the passengers would wave, we waved back. Nowadays the Asians arrive in their cars or their oversize 4 × 4s, which they park in a long straight formation across the road from the water, and seated in their transport or standing beside it, they stare out at the blue beyond. Vendors, as they have always done, ply varieties of street food. Then as dusk falls, all depart.

The harbour is natural, a bay with a narrow inlet that is swimmable by the brave. The story goes that in 1862 Sultan Majid, the rather dashing Omani ruler of Zanzibar, whose domain included the long East African coastline, happened to arrive at this haven across the channel, and was so impressed by it that he called it Bandar es Salaam, the harbour of peace—hence the name Dar es
Salaam. He resolved to build a town here, with a palace—a private pad, a home away from the political clamour, family intrigues, and foreign machinations at work on his island metropolis. But he died in 1870, the dream unfulfilled. It was the Germans who completed it when they colonized the mainland a decade and a half later, making Dar es Salaam their capital and bypassing the nearby great market town of Bagamoyo, which had processed thousands of slaves over the years and perhaps deserved the snub.

The population of Dar es Salaam when I was a teenager reached 100,000. Consequently, at about the independence of Tanganyika in 1961, the town was declared a city—by what authority we were not quite sure but we were now in the big league. The world looked bright. Eminent visitors from all over the world dropped by in the sunshine of our new country, looking thrilled, announcing hope and promise. We had emerged from the backwater of an empire into a community of nations. A tower was erected to commemorate the “city status,” at the centre of a traffic roundabout a block away from the harbour. It was a modest rectangular structure, painted a plain yellow and some twenty-five feet tall, with a clockface at the top; it proclaimed no ambition or lofty thought. The only other monument in the city was the bronze Askari statue, a mile away on the acacialined Independence Avenue, which honoured the African soldiers who gave up their lives during the First World War. How a European war was fought by Africans and determined the fate of this nation and city is one of the ironies of colonial rule.

The city-status tower stands intact now, surrounded by the same one- and two-storey buildings of yore and overlooking a decrepit parkette. Heavy traffic runs both ways past it, rendering the monument small and insignificant, almost invisible. Which is as well, for the population of Dar is now some four million.

A necklace of gleaming white buildings with a tall, grey-spired cathedral at one end graced the shoreline of the colonial harbour capital and met the traveller who arrived by sea. Unfortunately the white necklace is broken now, defaced by questionable or even haphazard modern construction. To the proposal, or protest, that historical buildings—German, Arab, Indian—should be preserved often comes the retort, Whose history? The answer requires some thought.

My forefathers left the small towns of western Gujarat—Jamnagar, Junagadh, Porbandar—with populations of 15,000 to 20,000 at the turn of the twentieth century, to settle on the East African coast. The old town of Dar es Salaam, the commercial section behind the elegant white shoreline, was their construction. It was the area of the first Indian settlement of Dar, and we called it Gaam, “Town”; in Swahili it was known as mjini, meaning the same thing; nowadays it is also referred to as Uhindini, the Indian (or Asian) area. A single long street, called Kichwele (later renamed Uhuru) Street, went down from Gaam past Mnazi Mmoja (then Arnautoglu) ground into the African area called Kariakoo; it was lined all the way with Indian stores and homes.

It was here, between Gaam and Kariakoo, that my mother opened her “fancy goods” store, when we moved fatherless from Nairobi to Dar. Running a small shop in a competitive market was hard work, and we all pitched in. It was here that the tailor Edward told me stories, where my cousin Shamim told me different stories, where my mother told me about her childhood. My strongest memory of her sees her seated on her high stool behind her shop counter, brooding, picking her chin. Awaiting customers. At night we would fight for the chance to press her aching feet.

Some time in the 1920s and ’30s the Indians had replaced their old, slummy settlements with single-storey brick buildings; in the ’50s and ’60s came the double-storey and the rare three- and four-storey buildings, and the singular five-storey tallest building in town with its distinctive pyramidal front, overlooking Mnazi Mmoja ground. The owner of this pyramid was a man called Habib Punja, whom we kids knew as a somewhat short, round man who oscillated side to side as he walked—which he did rarely, since he was possibly the richest man in town and went about in a chauffeured Mercedes-Benz. But it was believed that he had made his wealth by starting out as a peanut vendor on the sidewalks, and he died of a heart attack when his many properties were nationalized during the heyday of socialism in 1971.

Dar es Salaam for all its smallness had six cinemas, a football stadium, and several cricket grounds. There were many schools, including three high schools, with their own sports grounds, and a few clubs. There were football teams, and two cricket leagues; only Indians and Europeans played cricket, coming out in all-whites on Sundays. There was an annual tennis tournament held at the Gymkhana Club and a national football competition for the Sunlight Cup, broadcast across the country and followed at the market and outside restaurants, over the radio, and a national school cricket trophy called the Isherwood Cup. There was the Little Theatre, where the elite might catch a local production of a Gilbert and Sullivan piece. The annual Youth Drama Competition for high schools was a literary feast lasting many days, staging the likes of
The Crucible
and
A Passage to India
(with Africans playing Englishmen, Indians playing themselves), and was reported avidly in the newspapers.

One day in 1971 the government announced the confiscation of all rental property, in keeping with its recent socialist doctrine
proclaimed as the Arusha Declaration. This meant that for the Asians, who had arrived penniless to Africa, two generations or more of family savings invested in property disappeared at a stroke. Of course, most families, including mine, did not possess such savings. But the shock of this announcement, seen as the Great Betrayal by the businessmen, who could easily have kept their money in the banks or invested it abroad, led many to decide to emigrate. Since the mad dictator of Uganda, Idi Amin, following a divine revelation, had just expelled Asians in an ethnic cleansing (the term was not in use then), the decision to emigrate was relatively easy. Most went to Canada, some to the U.S. and U.K. The evacuation of Gaam, especially by the Khoja Ismailis, opened space for upcountry Indians to move into. Gaam changed its face and its ethos; the newcomers had the aggression and all the scruples of the pioneer; it is from among them that the wreckers of the old Dar have emerged. Meanwhile the business streets of these upcountry towns look haunted, as they wait to fill the vacuum left by their Asians.

As I negotiate the maze of dusty streets that is Gaam, which I know like the proverbial palm of my hand, as I turn into this one and onto that one at a whim, the provenance of this area is still evident in the names of the buildings, put up in Indian fashion on top of each—Salim Mansion, Durga Manzil, Jiwan Hirji Building. “Mansion” meant a two-storey building, not a grand home in its dictionary sense. In each “mansion” four or more families of five to eight people had their apartments, in three-room flats. Four to six kids could easily share a room; it was not unusual to share beds. It is almost bizarre to imagine that in many of these Dar families, living now in Toronto, Los Angeles, or someplace else in North America, the children have their own bathrooms, and sometimes even for a married couple to share one seems awkward. It’s almost as if one
were transported from the rowdy wooden front seats of the Empire Cinema onto Sunset Boulevard itself.

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Photo Caption 2.1
)

Some years ago I visited Jamnagar, Gujarat, and walking along a street I could have sworn that I was in Gaam: the yellow or white buildings with oil-painted window frames, the shop names, the variety stores for small needs, were identical to those you would see around Dar’s Khoja khano (prayer house). My forebears had brought Gujarat with them.

My friend Walter Bgoya one day shed a new light for me on those cataclysmic property nationalizations that altered the demography of urban Tanzania. I met Walter first in the 1990s when I began returning to Dar and knew him as a publisher struggling in a hopeless book market. His books were in Swahili, small and simple in
design, his market almost moribund. His office was a modest house on an unpaved street in Kariakoo, behind Msimbazi Street, where my grandmother had had her shop once. I had put up at a guest house called the Flamingo in Gaam, where for five dollars you could share a room and at night as you lay awake hear the tales told to each other by itinerant young Asian businessmen, in town from someplace like Mwanza or Arusha. My friends in Dar were always amused that I would stay here, but it was where the action was. You could run into someone from London or Toronto whom you’d not seen in a decade; you might gaze pityingly at an aged, sickly man whom you just barely recognized as the ghost of someone you’d last seen in childhood; you’d hear tantalizing stories of smuggling during the Uganda war and adultery in the community. Here were
characters
. And here one evening, the khano nearby blaring out a prayer on a loudspeaker, Walter picked me up in his jalopy.

He lived in a flat in a two-storey building nearby that was once owned by some Indian. As we went up the dark stairs, past the first floor to the second, he said, “Without the government takeover, I would never have lived in this area, next to an Indian family.” Indians had lived in unofficially segregated community neighbourhoods, Africans lived next to Africans, in accordance with a town plan drawn up by the Germans during their rule and followed by the British who came after. Now Walter’s son was close friends with the daughter of his Indian neighbour. Politics and economics aside, this revelation was an eye-opener for me.

Sadly, this Gaam, the India town to which I would come almost daily up Uhuru Street to go to the khano or the library, and lingered on the way back to play cricket at a friend’s backyard; this Gaam which connected the bedroom suburbs of Upanga and the wealthy and expatriate areas of Oyster Bay and Msasani to humble Kariakoo
and the airport; this city within a city was sealed off into an Asian ghetto soon after I left. Some expatriate city planners had apparently decided to construct a highway to bypass it so you had no need to go there unless you lived there or had some business; and for good measure they barricaded the area, putting up a pipe fence at the end of the key Jamhuri Street where it joined Uhuru Street. It takes an outsider to be so insensitive to a thriving, historical neighbourhood. I cannot help but wonder: Was this brutal closure prompted by that old animus towards the Asian in Africa, the tribe that always comes between white and black and so irked the Europeans? Or is this simply paranoia on my part, a residue of the old colonialism?

Cavafy says, of his own gaam, Alexandria,