A greedier man you never saw, greedier even than the qadi’s sons and bastards, and I had not thought that was possible, for they would have sold their wives and daughters in the market if they could get away with it, that they would. And if he was an Arab, well then, my father was an elephant and my mother a giraffe. Powerful ugly he was too. I do not know what I have ever done that I should be surrounded by ugly men. Well, there is Susi, but he has Misozi, hasn’t he, and I was never one to cry over a tomato plant that is being tended in someone else’s garden.
It was while I was with the Arab merchant that I caught Amoda’s eye. So it came to be that Bwana Daudi bought me for him. He has two proper wives back in Zanzibar, Amoda does, with two sons almost grown and three small girls besides, but he had no wife for the road, and men, you know, they get itchy for a woman when they are on the road. He bargained hard, and what it came down to was that the Arab knew he had a good story to tell if he could say he sold his favorite slave to a white muzungu. The Arabs were keen to show it wasn’t true, that the wazungu wanted slavery gone and done with.
Day in, day out, the whites pestered the Sultan with petitions, my Arab merchant said. They made all sorts of promises if only the Sultan would close down the slave market at Zanzibar. And where will we sell our slaves, if the market is closed, my merchant and his friends said in indignation, as they tore their teeth into my good food. They have had enough slaves, said my merchant, they have sent shiploads of the shenzi all over their islands in the Carib and in America and where have you, but now that they have enough of their own slaves, they will stop others from doing what they did. Sheer spite, his friends agreed.
So when the chance came for my Arab merchant to sell me to Bwana Daudi, well, it was as though the end of Ramadan had come for him, along with all of his feast days at once. If he could say to the other Arabs and to anyone who cared to listen that he had sold his favorite slave to a white English, well then. He could say they were not so high and mighty then, these English, going to the Sultan to close the market in the day and buying slaves in the night.
I was pleased enough to go, I will tell you that. As I say, Bwana Daudi had bought me to please Amoda, and I liked the sight of him well enough. And there is nothing like being in the arms of a man who knows what is what. But just like green limes, men are sometimes well looking enough on the outside, but once you open them up it is something else. Bwana Daudi gave me my own wages too, when he found out I could cook as well as I can. Not that I have cooked him anything proper, apart from that time we spent at Manyuema, for we have simply not enough provisions.
And now he is dead. I know but little about the world, that is true, but there is nothing you can tell me about how slaves are passed on and how they are freed. I know that Bwana Daudi bought me for Amoda but did not deed me to him. With his son in his own country across the water, unable to claim me as his own, Bwana Daudi’s death has dissolved the bond between us. For the first time since I was a small child in my mother Zafrene’s arms, I am free.
3
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I have found it difficult to come to a conclusion on their character. They sometimes perform actions remarkably good, and sometimes as strangely the opposite. I have been unable to ascertain the motive for the good, or account for the callousness of conscience with which they perpetrate the bad. After long observation, I came to the conclusion that they are just such a strange mixture of good and evil as men are everywhere else.
David Livingstone, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa
That things could come to this sorrowful pass had been my fear since the Manyuema women were massacred before our eyes at Nyangwe. This was in the middle of the month that Bwana Daudi called July, just four months before we met with Bwana Stanley’s party in Ujiji. Bwana Daudi had collapsed in his sorrow. It took him more than a week to recover.
He had had much to endure up to then. I often said to Misozi that he had enough illness in one body for a dozen men. There were hundreds upon hundreds of small, invisible creatures in his body that were eating at his bones, he said. Quite how they got in, he never explained, though it seemed perfectly clear to me that only a powerful witchcraft could explain it. When I urged him most seriously to find a mganga to cure him of this terrible witchcraft, he laughed me away.
He also suffered a sickness that gave him the runs when he ate anything. On top of that, his teeth were falling from his mouth. Between the missing teeth and the runs, his frame became thin and skeletal.
All he could eat then were the damper cakes he liked. They are easy enough to make: they are just flour and water cooked in a little salt butter that I make myself from milk that has gone off. Those damper cakes were the only thing that his bad teeth could take, that and a little ugali, not cooked the usual way, with the maize powder stirred in water until it stiffens, but cooked soft-soft so that it was almost a porridge, like you would feed to a weaning suckling.
But more serious than the affliction of his body was the wound inflicted on his heart. For many days afterward, he could talk of nothing but the massacre. He even stopped asking about the Nile, that is how shaken he was. He would write about Manyuema to the world, he said. He would write about it in words of fire.
It had happened on market day. We had been among the Manyuema for weeks of peaceful rest. In that time, a quarrel had arisen between Bwana Daudi and a man called Dugumbe bin Habib, who was the chief ivory trader and slaver in Manyuema country. The two men had met before. Though I asked both Amoda and Susi, I was never able to understand what the quarrel between them was about, but it was something about this Dugumbe and his war with a man called Mirambo, who was a sultan somewhere in the interior and had killed scores of people in his raiding parties. Whatever it was, there was bad blood between them, that was clear.
On this day, five of Dugumbe’s men came to the market. A warm day it was, but not so hot as to burn the skin, for there was a cool breeze from the clear sky. We were all in the market. There is nothing more we enjoyed than looking at the pretty things the Manyuema women brought on market day. The men liked to look at the women too, especially Bwana Daudi, who said he would write in his book that the Manyuema are remarkably beautiful in appearance.
The air sang with the Manyuema tongue. I did not understand it, but it rang pleasantly in the ear when spoken in the high chattering voices of the women as they sold their colored fruit and wares and things and tended their children and braided their hair. Pretty things they sold, pearls that they got from the river oysters they call makesi, and wooden beads and bowls. Pawpaw fruits they had too, and pink-fleshed guavas and prickly cucumbers, all pleasingly arranged to entice the eye. From one corner came the pleasant smell of roasting meat.
We traded and ate our fill. It was as we were leaving, content with our trading, that we saw Dugumbe’s men. They carried their guns with them and passed Bwana Daudi without a greeting. Amoda said he would ask them what they were doing, bringing arms to the market. Bwana Daudi laid his hand on Amoda’s arm and said, “This is not our quarrel. Leave it be, for I do not like their looks.”
As we moved away, we heard the loud sound of a man in quarrel. One of the men had seized a fowl from a market stall and was arguing over it with the woman who sold it. The creature squawked along with her protests. Then he threw the bird to the ground and hit her full in the face with the butt of his gun. Amoda and Susi cried out at the same time she did.
As they moved in her direction, they were stopped short by the sound of guns. From the opposite end of the market, Dugumbe’s four other men were now firing, and soon this quarrelsome fellow joined them. They fired their guns, those five men, first this way, and then that way, ratatata ratatata, that was the sound that filled the air, that and the screams and wails of the running women and their children too, dropping their fruit and vegetables, their pretty wares covered in their blood.
Amoda, Susi, and Bwana Daudi shepherded our party to some nearby bushes from where we could only wat
ch helplessly as those poor women were massacred. Their only escape was by the river behind the market, but the canoes were too few. In their desperation to avoid the bullets, they jumped in the river and headed for an island that was too far out of reach, for we soon saw them disappear under the water. Bwana Daudi cried out in his tongue, but I do not know what he said. The fear of death was on the air, the smell of death too, for still the guns thundered, as the poor women ran to the river only to be stopped by the merciless bullets.
It was over as quickly as it began. As soon as Dugumbe’s men left, Amoda, Susi, and Chuma tried to help the women who had fallen into the river. In their confusion, not knowing if these were friends or foes, the women fought back and struck across the water, where they all drowned.
Afterward, Bwana Daudi insisted that he, Amoda, and the men count the bodies. More than four hundred it was, slain in daylight, with the sun shining above without a mind to what had just been done under its sight. This was the work of just five men with ten guns, done, too, in less than the amount of time it takes to make a goat stew.
We did what we could for the poor people. We dug their graves, made fires and cooked, and fed their children. The many in the river could not be counted or buried until they washed up downstream, if at all.
Bwana Daudi was in a trance of shock, that he was. I thought then that his heart would give from the misery of his low spirits. I said to him he had to let go of the sorrow, for it was sure to finish him. That is how the slaves die at the end of their journey from the interior to the coast. Sometimes, whole groups will fall to the ground and never get up again. Dead. Just like that.
My mother, Zafrene, who made such a journey herself as a girl, from a land close to Nubia it was, told me that it is not the weariness of walking all that way that does them in. It is their hearts that collapse after they learn that after walking all the way from where they came to get to Bagamoyo, with heavy ivory tusks on their heads and scars from the whips on their backs and marks from the slave sticks on their necks, they will not be sent back after all but will be forced on yet another journey across the water, to the market in Zanzibar, where they will be sold.
When they lay down their loads and realize there is no return, their hearts die within them. Their hearts just give out and crack. The moyo inside them goes baga, just like that, and stops beating. It is why all the slaves call it Bagamoyo, for it is the place of breaking hearts.
Bwana Daudi became consumed by a searing anger. Dugumbe began to put it about that it was Bwana Daudi’s men, that it was Amoda and Chuma and Susi, who had caused the fight that started the shooting. I have never seen the Bwana more angry. To think that Dugumbe could kill all those people and then try to cover his deed by taking away the good name of Bwana Daudi and his men gave him a helpless sort of anger, for there was nothing at all he could do. Dugumbe had far too many men, and our provisions were almost depleted.
That was the beginning of the end for him. The heart within him simply went baga and broke inside him. Though it took him many more months to finally die, I believe it all started in Manyuema. For truly, he never recovered from the horrors of that day.
4
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Public punishment to Chirango for stealing beads, fifteen cuts; diminished his load to 40 lbs., giving him blue and white beads to be strung. . . . It was Halima who informed on Chirango, as he offered her beads for a cloth of a kind which she knew had not hitherto been taken out of the baggage. This was so far faithful in her, but she has an outrageous tongue.
David Livingstone, The Last Journals of David Livingstone
After the massacre of the poor Manyuema women at Nyangwe, Bwana Daudi became desperate to get to Ujiji, where his stores and provisions awaited him. It was from Zanzibar, through Bagamoyo, that Bwana Daudi’s stores had come. They were supposed to wait for him in Ujiji, and after all that he had seen at Nyangwe, he needed them sorely. He had run out of paper and had to make do with writing over old books using the juice of berries.
It was the paper he missed the most. So you can only imagine the crushing disappointment that was to come. When we got there, we found that his provisions had all been plundered by that dishonest Arab man Sherif, who had been put in charge of them until Bwana Daudi came to claim them. He stole everything like the common thief that he is, even the paper, for which he had no use. Bwana Daudi kept saying, “Even the paper, and not even the ink has been spared.”
To add salt to Bwana Daudi’s wound, every day that we were there, stuck and unable to move, waiting for nothing, he had to look at that Sherif parading himself in the Bwana’s cloth and smiling and salaaming his deceit at him. Salaaming and bowing all day long when he had stolen from Bwana Daudi. He had all the spite of a snake, that bastard bandit, because a snake will bite even what it does not eat. His concubine sashayed and swayed before us, clad in the Americano cloth that belonged to the Bwana, and it was all I could do not to tear it off her, the thieving slut.
I said to Bwana Daudi, “We should send a party to beat up that Sherif and his concubine too. Amoda will want it, that is sure, and I am willing to be of their number and lead them too if it comes to that. I will pound them both like they are two cassava roots in my grinding mill.” But Bwana Daudi said only, “I must have forbearance, Halima, as a Kristuman, I must do what Jesus would have done.”
But if you ask me there was more to it than that, for Bwana Daudi is not above having a man beaten if it is what has to be done. Just the other month, he ordered Chirango beaten for stealing the blue beads from the package that had not yet been opened. He received fifteen lashes with the whip, Chirango did, and afterward the Doctor prayed that he would mend his ways, though if that whip did not mend him, no prayer will, because Amoda wields it with a hard hand, I will say that for him.
If there is something that man of mine can do as quickly as he can build a hut or ford a river, it is to beat a man, and a woman too, as I know all too well when he finds himself in liquor, although he is a Mohammedan. But I have the good fortune that my scars are all under my clothes where no one can see them, not like poor Chirango, who was beaten more badly than I ever was.
So it was not softness of heart that stopped Bwana Daudi from having Sherif beaten. It was that Bwana Daudi was afraid that Sherif would bring the slavers and they would turn on us, that I am certain, and Abdullah Susi said the same, and he should know, he has been with Bwana Daudi long enough. That is why Bwana Daudi did not go after Sherif.
Only when Bwana Stanley came to Ujiji, and the Bwana, and all of us, were saved, did we stop feeling bitter about Sherif’s betrayal. I am certain as certain can be that the same fears that prevented him from dealing with Sherif also led Bwana to flee Dugumbe without sorting him out for his lies.
But as I say, Bwana Daudi does not hesitate to have men beaten when they deserve it. Chirango blames me for his beating, and I suppose he is right. He tried to sell me the blue beads from the package that had not been opened, Chirango did, and cloth from a new bolt. Now, I like a pretty thing or two to adorn myself, about that, I won’t lie, but I won’t take what is not mine. So, I told Bwana Daudi about it, and he said Chirango should be given fifteen lashes of the whip by Amoda.
Lost his eye too, Chirango did, when he turned the wrong way as Amoda beat him, and the whip caught him full in the face. His eye bled and swelled up something terrible. The Bwana offered to heal the eye, and when Chirango refused, he ordered the men to hold him down while he forced an ointment into it. Held back by Amoda and Susi he was, fought them something awful while Chuma and John Wainwright forced his head down. Then Bwana Daudi smeared something in his eye, and still Chirango fought the men.
A whole week it continued like that, with the men holding him down while Chirango cried in agony, held back first by Chuma and Mabruki, then Susi and Munyasere, then Carus Farrar and Toufiki Ali, one of the strongest of the pagazi. Bulging muscles he has, with not an ounce of fat about him. The men held him down so that Bwana Daudi could treat
his eye but it did not open again after that. There is a scar there now, and it is not a pretty sight; his eye bulges out like there is a small lime under it. For days and days, it wept a mix of blood and unpleasant-smelling pus, which made the men seek to avoid him more than they had before.
For days after the whipping, he had gone about with his leaking eye, muttering that between them, Amoda and Bwana Daudi had blinded him and his men had assisted him. But then he changed and knelt first before the Bwana, and then before Amoda, and cried out his penitence, but if you ask me, he meant not a word of it. There was something a little too cowed, a little too humble in his new manner. Not even the lowest slave in the Liwali’s household held himself in this way. “Chirango of the One Eye,” he began to call himself, and laugh too when he said it, but it was a sound that carried no mirth.
Though he made efforts to ingratiate himself, the men remained unchanged toward him. They spoke roughly to him, in short sentences and barking orders, as one would to a dog. And no wonder. His face was sorrowful but his eyes were hard and he spoke trembling penitence in a voice that was like a knife.
He puts me in mind of a plucked chicken that has sat too long without being cooked, so that when you see the white flesh, you think all is well within, but when you slice it open, it is all green and crawling with maggots, and the smell hits you like a stone to your head. A maggoty fellow if I ever saw one is that Chirango.
He was not in the original group of men; that was just Susi, Chuma, and Amoda. Nor was he in the large group that followed with the Nassickers after Bwana Stanley left. Along with Ntaoéka’s man Mabruki, he was one of the men who were left behind by Bwana Stanley, and if you ask me, Bwana Stanley was pleased enough that Chirango chose to stay instead of going back to the coast with him.
Even before the beating, I often caught him looking at Bwana Daudi with an unfriendly face. Mark my words, I said to Misozi, that Chirango is certainly up to no good. Though they won’t believe me, that they won’t, for they say, oh, Halima, you talk too much. Well, I may talk too much, but I have more than a tongue in my head. I have eyes too and what they tell me is that Chirango is up to no good at all.
Out of Darkness, Shining Light Page 3
