And Home Was Kariakoo (30 page)

It takes thirteen hours to get to Ubungo station in Dar. And then two more hours of traffic to get to my host’s house.

I
N
D
AR ES
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ALAAM ONE MORNING
, the Asian owner of the hotel in Oyster Bay where I happened to be staying, Mr. Solanki, asked me if I wished to consult a mganga—there was an African wunderkid who had shown amazing powers in solving all kinds of problems and bringing good luck. I would be well advised to see him.

Ashok Solanki, a short rotund man in his forties, wearing a grey Kaunda suit, belonged to the Kumbhad, or potter—a so-called “lower”—Indian caste, whose community used to live in the poor, self-contained neighbourhood of Dar es Salaam called the Kumbhad wadi. Here in an enclosed compound in a corner of downtown they had their rather basic residences, no more than shacks, where they produced assorted earthenware, which they would take around in pull-carts to sell in the Asian streets of the city. Their red clay pots were used for storing boiled water for drinking, and their rounded, shallow pans—the tawas—for baking chapatis. As children we would sometimes be cajoled during the holidays to go to Kumbhad wadi and fetch clumps of wet clay to play with and keep ourselves busy. In the heyday of socialism, the late President Nyerere paid a visit to this Kumbhad village and praised its communal, self-help style of living.
The daily paper printed a photo of that visit and the potters became famous. Where other Asians were often caricatured as capitalist exploiters, bloodsuckers with long straws (though most eked out a living in small trade), here were the true and exemplary socialists living right in our midst.

Since that time, I discovered, many of the potters had done well economically and moved into other, more profitable businesses; some became mechanics, others drove taxis. The old Kumbhad wadi neighbourhood was now occupied by a few apartment buildings, though it was still set apart. Solanki himself was in construction and owner of the Karibu, one of the leading hotels in the city, in Oyster Bay; his daughter attended the exclusive International School, which had invited me to Dar and put me up at the hotel. That morning, Solanki, having introduced himself, had taken me to his office and treated me to chai. He had proudly pointed to the photo, hanging on a wall, of that famous presidential visit to the Kumbhad wadi. After some chitchat, he recommended to me the wunderkid, the boy-mganga, whose name was Sheikh Sharriff. All my troubles would go away. Did I look so troubled? But I was curious. Was it from such help that Ashok Solanki had gone from potter’s son to local tycoon? He had already consulted Sheikh Sharriff before, he told me, now he needed more advice before starting on a new venture.

The next morning when I came down, Solanki had already left; obviously his business with Sheikh Sharriff was urgent, not to mention too private for my ears. But later his driver was ready with a Mercedes to take me. On the way, on a tape recording I was treated to the life story of the boy—his ominous birth, the miracles he had performed. He had begun to speak when he was only nine months old, all of a sudden, when he reminded his mother of a vow she had made when pregnant with him, that she would take him to
a mosque. Both his parents were Christians, his father was a former policeman. The boy refused the name they gave him, Fidelis. He also refused the names that various Muslim sheikhs offered, and preferred to call himself Sheikh Sharriff. He had since gathered a large following.

The driver took me to Temeke, into a neighbourhood with houses of the traditional type—plastered mud walls, tin roof, a front porch supported by an upright or two. Coconut and mango trees were scattered over the neighbourhood, giving shade from the sun; the ground was sand. We parked under a tree, and as we approached a house, a gathering of about thirty people was being dismissed outside with a prayer; the driver pointed out Sheikh Sharriff, a little boy of about seven wearing kanzu and cap and barefoot, trotting away by himself. The driver spoke to the father, a tall and burly man, who replied brusquely, “Wait,” and strode away to the house, which had two entrances. We followed and were told by someone to sit and wait in one of the two corridors leading inside, where we met the boy’s two older brothers, attired traditionally like the father and the boy. After a while we were instructed to proceed into the second corridor, which we did through the backyard and entered one of the rooms. It was empty, but soon two charcoal braziers were brought and placed on the ground. This was going to be a private session. It occurred to me that the family wouldn’t want too many Asians to be seen here: Asians meant money, and presumably corruption.

Sheikh Sharriff shuffled in, preoccupied with two toy cars he was clutching in his hands. Very much a shy little boy. Behind him walked his father. I could sense that my beard perturbed the father—he seemed suspicious, perhaps, that I was an orthodox Muslim (nothing could be further from the truth) who might denounce his prodigy and call out the sheikhs. The boy’s lack of attention embarrassed him.

A small number of men had now come inside to watch the proceedings.

“Sharriff,” said the dad, “these are the people who help us. Pray for them.”

Sharriff was playing with the cars. One of his brothers stepped up and took them from him. Then the father told the driver and me to reflect on our problems and needs, and he opened two of the packets of incense we had brought and sprinkled the contents onto the braziers. A scented smoke arose. The other packets were emptied into a partly full bottle. There was something remarkably bare-bones about this ritual, as though this were the mere outline, a postmodern enactment of an opera ordinarily more elaborate and complete.

Sharriff was asked to begin. Looking distractedly at the ground, he mumbled the name of a sura of the Quran, and either “three” or “five.”

This was hardly the articulate precocious child I had been told about and heard about in the cassette recorder, the wonderful young African Jesus who carried out serious discussions with elders in the mosques and performed miracles. As a brother recited the prescribed Quranic verse, all the men having raised both their hands in prayer, the boy began playing with a timing mechanism he had produced from somewhere, pressing it to move the digits. After three recitals, the men stopped, and the mechanism was taken away from the boy, who commanded, “More.” “You said three times,” said the brother. “Two more,” the child replied, sounding wilful. The verse was recited, and the litte sheikh named another sura, which was also recited. The session was over.

The driver put some money into the boy’s hands, who without looking at it gave it to his father. I put a bill into the little hands, and it too went to the father.

There was something to ponder in that small episode; from the outset it reflected comprehensively the complexities of Dar es Salaam’s multicultural, multiracial society, throwing up as well some delicious ironies and coincidences. Solanki’s resorting to the Temeke boy’s famous powers broke at once the traditional barriers to Asian-African and Hindu-Muslim interactions. Perhaps his “lower” caste background made that easy. Caste discrimination was still very much in existence in Dar, as I was soon to find out. The boy’s family itself combined Christian and Muslim faiths, the boy having been fashioned by his minders into a caricatured Muslim Jesus. When I was asked during my session with him to think about my “shida,” my problem, I had brought to my mind a recent injury, which had recently received the services of a young Toronto physiotherapist of Tanzanian background. Did I believe in the boy’s powers? Hardly. I had long put my faith entirely on the rational. I could afford to, of course; others had to rely on miracles.

As we drove back from Temeke to Oyster Bay in the Mercedes, I saw displayed on the sides of bus shelters garish posters announcing a revival meeting, to be attended by pastors from Kenya, Uganda, and Canada, and calling on the public to bring their sick, blind, and lame to be prayed for.

I never found out if Sheikh Sharriff’s prayers had helped Solanki in his endeavours. In fact I never saw the hotel-owner again. But soon after that episode, when I had moved from his luxury hotel to the familiar and cheap, though mean-spirited Flamingo Guest House in Gaam, I came across an angry letter in the national daily that named Ashok Solanki and a few others as members of an Asian “mafia” that had “bought” the government but whose days were surely numbered. He had made his millions, it was said in the city, using the goodwill that the potter caste had gathered in the past due
to their exemplary “socialist” living and the famous presidential visit. These days, as I had found out, he resorted to other help. Perhaps he ended up in England, where part of his family had already moved.

Uganga is the Swahili term for magic or sorcery of whatever sort and the practitioner is called a mganga. In the past, regular medical doctors were also known as mganga, before daktari became common. The word mchawi is sometimes used for the sinister sort of magic; and the Muslim mganga is also called a maalim.

There are various forms of sorcery. There is the magic of the Book, involving the Quran; there is the magic of the medicine, involving potions, sometimes obtained in gruesome manner; and there is magic involving sacrifices. All these may overlap—why stop at one means? Potions are often made using parts of murder victims. There is good magic and bad magic.

Living abroad, it is easy to forget how common are the beliefs in witchcraft even today, how much a part of life they once were in your own life—when you feared passing by a cemetery or walking under a tree at night in case a djinn got you and you were transformed into an albino, or became possessed and acted strangely, and needed the services of a maalim or mganga. Djinns and spirits supposedly stayed on trees, especially the dreadful-looking baobab that looked as if its head were buried in the ground; they wandered out at dusk, the time known as maghrab, which could be both holy and sinister. Asian children were commonly threatened with bogeymen who could take you away—in Kilwa there was said to be an old woman who set traps for children. You could come under a spell, cast by some mganga, through a drink or some other means. The outcome of a football match could be blamed on a wicked spell:
rematches have been demanded on the basis of a rooster having ominously crossed a field before a game.

All this sounds amusing and primitive. But only a few years ago came grisly reports of albinos being abducted and hacked to death by sorcerers’ agents, their body parts used for magical purposes as far away as the Congo. Victims included babies and family men; a man had offered to sell his albino wife. Tanzania has an inordinately high number of albinos. The incidents involving their murders and hacking received large coverage, especially from the BBC, and Tanzania’s president made a speech condemning such sinister crimes. The police subsequently exhibited an albino skin at one of their stations to demonstrate how terrible the crime was. This begs the question: did the people need convincing?

One day in the 1950s, at dusk in the Muslim month of Ramadan, a coven of four sorcerers held a meeting in the village of Mteniyapa in the coastal region. They were the senior sorcerer called Bwana Shambi and three women: Binti Jizia, the planner of their misdeeds, Binti Hanifu, a young woman, and Binti Ramadhani, an older woman and their weakest link. Bwana Shambi sounded frustrated that day. Listen, he said to the three women gathered around him. We must perform a rite to bring us good fortune; enough time has passed, and we suffer. For what? At once Binti Jizia pounced upon the young Binti Hanifu: It’s your turn now, she said, you’ve done nothing for us. Bring us a victim if you want the benefits from this coven. It’s as simple as that—no free rides, pay up. When Binti Hanifu demurred, Binti Jizia pressed on, And your victim must be someone close to you—your child, or a sibling. Just anyone won’t do. Bring them soon.

With this ultimatum given, the four went their ways.

The next day was Saturday. Just as Bwana Shambi was passing Binti Jizia’s house, she came out. I am looking for you, she said. Bwana Shambi, feeling listless that day, said querulously, Binti Jizia, you are our planner. Tell Binti Hanifu to give us her sister—if not, let herself be sacrificed.

On Wednesday the four of them sat and waited in their secret place, which was towards the sea. Binti Ramadhani had already had qualms about the plan, and she had come unwillingly. As they waited, Salima, Binti Hanifu’s younger sister, who was also Binti Ramadhani’s daughter-in-law, left her house, pulled by the power of sorcery set in motion by the evil four. As she walked through the village, entranced and barely in her own mind, she was observed by a few of the villagers. She left the village behind and approached the four sorcerers.

Grab her, cried Bwana Shambi as Salima arrived, whereupon Binti Hanifu grasped her sister and pulled her down, saying to the others, Now I’ve settled my debts to you, I owe you nothing. The other three sorcerers rubbed Salima with medicines, and as she lost her strength and became faint, knowing her end was near, she said the Shahada, her confession of faith: There is no God but God. The four sorcerers left her there, trussed up, planning to come back for her that night.

At sunset a cry went out that Salima was missing, and the next morning a frantic search began, in which the four sorcerers also participated, though they had already killed the girl in the night and placed the body in a derelict hut to make it appear that it had collapsed over her. When the body was found, it was clear that the girl had been murdered. A part of her tongue had been cut and taken away. The police were called, and it was also decided to call the famous magician Nguvumali.

This story of the four sorcerers and the murder of Salima in a
small village has been narrated in a long epic poem of 393 four-line verses,
Swifa ya Nguvumali
, by Hasani bin Ismail, an ode to the powers of the most famous magician in the country during that decade. The poem has been translated by Peter Lienhardt, with an excellent introduction.