And Home Was Kariakoo (23 page)

Still, he says, you tell yourself you are one of 46 million, what’s special about you? You made your decision to return, and you live with it. He did so for the sake of his aging parents. But things are slowly happening. An open mike for poetry that ran for a few months; a session with an author; a proposed prize for Swahili poetry; the discovery of an exciting Swahili poem. It’s in music that the greatest creativity lies. The time will come when we will become independent.

Walter calls to wish him a happy birthday, and to seek help with his Mac. He’s in London, at the book fair. A friend calls, and the young folks plan a birthday lunch at a high-end restaurant and later a visit to a jazz club. Finally Mkuki says to the waiter, “Take a photo of me with Baba (father).”

“Truly he’s your father?” the waiter asks, astonished. He knows me well, for I use the coffee shop as a place to meet and to cool off after my sojourns into town on foot.

“You can say that,” Mkuki replies with a laugh.

When he’s gone, the waiter tells me, “Truly, the resemblance is uncanny!” In all seriousness.

Genial Jinnah comes by once.

“Where else can you find a place like this?” he says, meaning Dar.

I call him Genial because in the decades I’ve known him, I’ve never seen him without that toothy, good-natured grin. I met him once in 1980 in downtown Toronto; we had both recently arrived. Opening his arms wide, he declared, “This is a great country. A
beautiful country. You should see it coast to coast!” He had all the intention to stay in the city. A couple of years later, however, he was working in the Middle East. Some more years later he was back in Dar, where he ran a business. Recently he’s joined the NGO Brigade, with a white four-by-four and suit and tie, proudly working for the World Development Network, WDN, saving Africa.

I tell him I was at a book reading at a jazz club the other night and the music was good. I was impressed.

He grins. “We have everything here, you’ll find all kinds of culture!”

“Really?”

Yes, the cinema that shows Indian films in the city, he explicates, is always full, with kids running around, and plenty of food. All South Indians and recent. I raise my eyebrows. Yes, there are four to five thousand South Indians doing professional jobs in the city. They are good and reliable. The irony in this doesn’t strike him. The WDN is doing all sorts of good work, a knight on a white horse saving Central Asia and East Africa. Education crisis? We are working on a curriculum overhaul. Health care? A hospital in Arusha. Relief? Building villages in the south.

“East Africa is a single entity, I try to convince people of that, high school kids need to be told that … the West is becoming irrelevant now … transnational trade is growing …”

But who is “we”? People sitting in Geneva and Paris?

When he’s left, I walk over to the hotel reception and pick up a
What’s On?
Under “Culture” it shows all the numerous restaurants. In Dar, those who can afford to, eat very well.

Abdu comes by, hurrying on his way to somewhere. He’s a filmmaker who’s been frustrated by bureaucratic obstacles. An energetic man in
his forties, he speaks fast, is always full of ideas, and has recently returned from spending three weeks in India with his father at an Ayurvedic health clinic. Just to get away and be healthy. He regrets how the sense of African-ness and history was lost on his generation and is now completely lost on the younger people. More so in South Africa, where he could be attacked by xenophobes who have not been taught of the role played by Tanzania and the “frontline states” in their liberation.

Gaam—the Indian quarter—is in Bongoland, of course; it was the original Dar es Salaam. But now it sits in its mostly Asian isolation, with a distinct life of its own. Various roads lead into it, though it can be bypassed. There are half a dozen mosques and as many temples, and social life tends to be communal and around the family; bustling by day, at night it turns eerily quiet. The concerns of the folk here would be as far from those of Mkuki and his friends as is possible. Creativity is reserved for business, and perhaps also food.

The realization dawns one day—as I sit at the crowded AT with a bhajia and a cup of chai, the TV showing BBC-format news from an Iranian channel—that there’s no music to be heard anymore in public in Gaam. You can hear the azaan—call to prayer—rising up from the several mosques at various times, even in the middle of the night, but no music. Time was when music blared out on the streets, piping down from every home, ranging from Bollywood to western pop, Mukesh to Elvis. Odeon Cinema was close by. Partly, perhaps, this absence of song can be explained by the fact that the technology has changed, rendering music more private; and many homes now are air conditioned, therefore the windows are shuttered. But it’s more than that: Gaam no longer looks cheerful, its people don’t smile much—in public, at least.

Joseph and I step into Lalji’s Travel to buy his ticket to Nairobi; the agency has been recommended by my friend Kumar. The tradition, the adabu, is for the customer to be welcomed with a smile and a “Karibu!” (The reply would be “Starehe” or “Ahsante.”) Instead, five black-draped women look warily at us like birds of prey. This is the modern scenario. We make our inquiry and are directed perfunctorily to one of the women, who is Kumar’s acquaintance, from whom we purchase our tickets in a brisk transaction. We leave. No smile or welcome, no thank you or goodbye. We feel robbed, of our goodwill and our cheer. We brought business, airplane tickets are not cheap. Lalji’s was where I bought my first air ticket out of Dar; the agent who served me paid attention, he smiled, he was friendly. But times have changed, the people have changed. A few days later, pointedly avoiding Lalji’s, I bring my business to another travel agent. This time the hijabs are blue and yellow, but the service is as curt. It’s only with the African assistant that I can carry out a friendly, normal conversation. I come out thinking, What’s with these people?

Life, admittedly, is not easy in Dar. Basic food prices, such as of sugar and flour, keep rising. At the teashops, chai prices have doubled. It would seem that it’s only the poor, who suffer the most, who can afford to be cheerful. For the rest, it’s a constant battle keeping up with the Abasses and the Samjis—possessing your SUV and a second car, sending kids to private schools, dining out with large families. Habib, a business consultant and Stanford graduate whom I have come to know over the years, hides his anxiety behind a mask of preoccupation. He keeps an impressive office, has kids in exclusive schools, and needs to visit Toronto regularly. Like a common huckster, he hovers around the Serena or the Kilimanjaro, meeting potential contacts—the NGOs, the UN. Mention a name he’s not heard of and he’ll bring out his notebook to take down a phone number.

But there’s something more fundamental that has changed in Gaam, and is perhaps responsible for its new grimness, its lack of song: the people themselves are different, having arrived from the smaller towns to take the place of those who emigrated. The latter were in large part the more liberal Khojas and Hindus, as the names on top of the remaining two-storey buildings indicate; the newcomers followed the Shia faith, which grieves Imam Hussein and his extended family in perpetuity. To my mind, this nature of sombre, obsessive worship, and an orthodoxy influenced by Iran and Iraq and always on the lookout for halal and haram, and proscribing music, is the difference, is the reason why the town that once sang no longer does so. The man who owns Abbas Tea Room is polite but he too never smiles in his shop. It turns out that his daughter, refused permission to marry someone of a lower status, presented him with a fait accompli: a pregnancy. Now the baby is born, and as wedding preparations proceed, all—the entire community—pretend that nothing is amiss, there is no baby. What will happen to it? No wonder they don’t sing anymore.

T
HE END OF THE OLD EAST–WEST CARAVAN ROUTE
that began at the Indian Ocean was the town of Ujiji at Lake Tanganyika, which connected to routes in the Congo and all the way to the Atlantic. During the colonial period, however, when Kigoma became the railway terminus, it was developed as the administrative centre and port, and Ujiji was sidelined, much as Bagamoyo, Kilwa, and Lindi were in the east. All four towns were predominantly Muslim and linked to Zanzibar.

It was impossible for me to reach Kigoma by road from Tabora because of the rains, and so back in Dar I have to take a flight, which I do in the company of Shabir, an Asian and a long-time party politician from Kigoma who has new business interests and a daughter in Dar. He picks me up early before sunrise one morning, after his prayer services, to go to the airport. Shabir was recommended by a friend and we met once and discussed my proposed visit to his hometown; since then we have spoken on the cell. He is an energetic, chatty fellow, full of stories. On the way to the airport I ask him to recommend a hotel in Kigoma, to which he says in surprise, “Why a hotel? You’re staying with me! Don’t worry, my house is almost
empty.” Just as I had expected, but I had to make sure. To refuse his hospitality would be rude.

Dawn is about to break, the air is cool and damp, and the silent streets under dim overhead lamps have a weirdly alien look. The airport road, the drab old industrial Pugu Road, has been modernized in recent years with smart office buildings and lit show-windows, and in a while it becomes adorned with brightly lit advertising, some of it electronic, atop the buildings. As we check in at the local terminal and show our identities, Shabir startles me by saying casually, “They won’t ask for your identity if you are black.” He thus reveals a frisson of racial resentment that I’ve already met elsewhere, but graciously proceeds to explain that a brown person could be from anywhere. Surely a black person too? In the waiting lounge, however, Shabir knows a lot of people, none of them Asian, and when we arrive in Kigoma he alights with a spring in his step and a grin on his face and actually knows
everybody
he sees.

Because I fly into Kigoma, it becomes for me an experience on its own, not the end-of-a-road journey, which is what I had desired. The town lies snugly in a basin formed by the green hills of the plateau and the blue, placid Lake Tanganyika to which it descends. The lake lies inside the great Rift Valley and is the second deepest in the world. Kigoma has one business street, lined with shops of the ubiquitous Indian style, beginning at the rather grand railway station, a legacy of German rule next to the harbour, where an equally ancient steamship, the MV
Liemba
, is docked ready to depart south for Zambia. Kigoma’s identity is tied, as it’s always been, to its overlooking the Congo and the other side of Africa, just as Dar es Salaam’s is tied to the Indian Ocean. The capital, from here, seems far—and actually is, because few can afford an airplane.

My host’s home is up on a hill from the main street, accessible
via a dirt road that is badly broken so that only a good four-wheeler can make its winding way there, or a pair of healthy, willing legs. As we drive up to the gate, two Alsations are taken away. The house is large with a driveway and a lush garden. Shabir’s wife answers the massive door, a sleepy look on her face. Behind her is a high-ceilinged living room, the large flat-screen set to an Indian program, and a raised dining area. The floor and wall panelling are wood. It was obviously built with much optimism for the future; Shabir once ran a hotel from here. I wonder who the clientele would have been besides the politicians.

(
Photo Caption 13.1
)

The daughter, who picked us up, is a chirpy twenty-something who runs the family auto repair shop. Father and daughter discuss business during our ample breakfast served at the large dining table, then Shabir drives me to Ujiji, a few miles away. He has an idea, though I have not put it to him, that I am looking for “history.”
History to him, and to others, as I will find out, is something specific and finite, consisting of some quanta of information to be given and accepted, and very kindly he has volunteered to make it possible for me to receive it.

Ujiji, though, comes as a revelation, a breath of the familiar. Its structured layout is immediately striking, a grid of streets with mud and plaster Swahili houses, all having the typical front veranda. The highway through it must have come later, built over an existing local road. There is an implicit togetherness to this town, as Tabora has, as Kilwa Kivinje has, all three, of course, among the oldest towns in the country. In the late nineteenth century Ujiji was a flourishing entrepot in the centre of Africa, trading not only in slaves and ivory, but also fish, fruit, salt, butter, honey, grains, and cattle, in addition to goods brought from Zanzibar, which would have included imported cottons, wire, and beads. The marketplace was on the lakeshore, as Stanley observed when he arrived here and saw men and women from more than a dozen tribes from as far away as Rwanda, “engaged in noisy chaffer and barter.” In 1900 the population was ten thousand, far more than today, the important residents being the Arab traders. In 1882 the German traveller (and later governor of the colony) von Wissmann observed some forty dhows on the lake at Ujiji.