Oftentimes, the stories included songs, and it was not uncommon for the songs to excite even more than the story, and for Majwara to get his drum and for the children, and some of the men too, to dance.
When Chirango told his stories, he played his njari instrument. He has a beautiful singing voice, I will give him that. But his songs and stories always lay a little heavy on the heart because they were all about his lost kingdom, and the people who had been in it, like Nyatsimba the Salt Gatherer, who had left his home in the great city of stone and traveled north to found a new kingdom, and his son Nyanhewe Matope, who had been punished by their ancestors for tricking his sister Nyamhita Nehanda into lying with him, and of Chioko, who had been tricked out of his kingdom by the Portuguese. When he played his njari as he told of these far-off places, Majwara often joined him with his drum.
When Bwana Daudi was alive, he liked to listen to the stories and songs, but not as much as Bwana Stanley when he had been with us. Such a surprise it was when Bwana Stanley came all the way from his land, America, and marched down from the coast to Ujiji to rescue Bwana Daudi. He liked our stories, Bwana Stanley. His man Bombay said Bwana Stanley planned to write a book of all the stories that we tell each other, though who would want to read them, I don’t know.
Each person had their own style of storytelling. Susi liked to talk of the stories his father told him, the stories that were spun out like the nets of the fishermen in Shupanga. I like to listen to his voice. No one knows better the moods of the sea or how it responds to the moon and sun above it, the liquid silver it forms when the sun is at its highest, and the shimmering gold when it is sinking. The movement of the tides is as familiar to him as that of his own limbs. It is a surprise that one so attuned to the moods and ways of the ocean should have spent his life so far from it, but he explains it by saying that he wants to make money to fit his own dhow that he will build himself from wood and rope.
We knew already the stories of how we each of us came to be with the Bwana. The Nassickers who had been sent by Bwana Stanley had all been rescued as children. Though he was not a Nassicker, Chuma had also been rescued; he had joined the Bwana at just fifteen Ramadans. He had been sold away from his father, who was a chief among the Yao, along with his mother and two sisters. Susi and Amoda were freemen. They had never been enslaved. They had joined Bwana Daudi in Shupanga, then traveled with him to India, then back again.
Then there were the travelers like Mabruki and Uledi Munyasere. And of course, there were the inferior pagazi, most of whom had either come with Nassickers or been hired on the way from Unyanyembe, and who had no history at all with the Bwana.
Instead of telling the usual stories as we waited for Bwana Daudi to dry out, and the stories about where we came from, or even the stories that the children loved, the men talked about how they remembered him.
These were merry evenings. The men were now drunk on pombe sent by Chitambo daily to send away Bwana Daudi’s spirit. We had all picked up a few things here and there about him, and of course we talked of him when he was with us, but you cannot talk so freely about a man when you can hear him moving in a hut a few meters away. And Bwana Daudi knew our tongues so well that to talk about him in this way was all but impossible.
But now, he lay drying in a mud hut, unable to hear us, poor thing, and we could talk of him as freely as we wished. Susi and Chuma, who had been with him the longest, talked the most. Even Chuma, who normally prefers to listen, was willing to talk. They talked of all the responses that people gave when they saw Bwana Daudi, laughter, surprise, mockery, pointing. More than a few of the children they had encountered on their travels had burst into tears on seeing him and had to be consoled by their mothers.
None had been so surprised, said Susi, as a man in Susi’s home of Shupanga, who had watched the Bwana bathe in a river. He reported that indeed, he was white everywhere, but his brains came out when he washed his hair, then went back in again.
It took some time for the Bwana to convince the village that this was no sorcery, and that it was only the soap he used that created white suds that looked like they had come from within him.
“And you can imagine what Bwana Daudi felt,” Susi said, “when we entered some of the villages and he reached out to children who screamed in terror when they saw him.”
“Yes,” laughed Chuma, “we even had some of the mothers use him to make their children behave. Be good, they said, or we will call the white man to come and eat you.”
They laughed even harder when they talked about his expedition to the Zambezi, as Chuma described the boat’s failing to move.
“It is quite the most foolish thing I have ever heard. He may have been a learned mganga man of medicine and what have you, but who has ever heard of a boat going up the stream of a river, and not down it?”
“There was a section of the river with even faster water, the Kebrabassa rapids, the locals called it, and Bwana Daudi thought his boat could simply sail up against those fast currents.”
Susi said Bwana Daudi had been poor as a child, and indeed to hear him talk, he was as good as a slave, working, working, working like a slave in the day, then learning, learning, learning his books at night so that he could become a mganga. It is no wonder he did not want to go back to his own land, because it sounded like no life at all, all that learning and working and working and learning. It was terribly dark and cold too, Susi said, and they saw hardly any sun. I exclaimed to think that he had left his children to that life.
“Don’t feel sorry for them,” Amoda said, “they are taken care of.”
“He wanted to make all of us follow his Kristu,” Susi said, “but he failed with me, I can tell you that. I have no truck with all that. And even Chuma here, he was made a Kristuman in India, and there was no work for the Bwana to do. It was not the Bwana’s doing.”
As Susi burst into laughter, Jacob Wainwright frowned.
“And I heard from Bwana Speke that he quarreled all the time with the other whites,” said Munyasere, “and that is why he traveled alone.”
“And Wekotani, do you remember Wekotani, Chuma?” Susi’s voice was now loud with merriment and pombe. “That was not his doing either. Wekotani was turned by someone else entirely. And when you wanted to go off with him, Bwana said he was going to sell you if you went with him.”
They were now talking over each other and it was hard to follow who all these people were.
“But there was Sechele,” said Mariko.
Their response was to laugh even more heartily.
“You have talked of this Sechele before,” I pressed on. “Who is he, and why do you call Mabruki Sechele?”
The men laughed even harder.
Susi said, “Sechele was a sultan in Makololo country, down in the south. He was made to follow Kristu by the Bwana. The Bwana healed his son of malaria. Sechele, in gratitude, agreed that he would become a Kristuman. Then, after he turned him to Kristu, the Bwana made him send away his wives.”
“His wives?” asked Ntaoéka. “What on earth had they done wrong?”
Chuma said, “It was not that they did anything wrong, but Kristumen can only have one wife each. So the Bwana made him pick just one wife and sent the rest back to their homes.”
“They left their children behind too,” said Chuma. “The Bwana said they were born in sin, but with Sechele’s guidance, they would embrace the new faith.”
“They were all sent back!” I was aghast with horror.
“Don’t worry about them too much, Halima,” said Susi. “When Bwana Daudi went back to Sechele’s land, he found the wives had all returned. And some of them were heavy with child.”
The men close to Mabruki clapped him on the back and laughed again as they called him Sechele.
“This was his weakness,” Jacob Wainwright said. His voice was solemn and sonorous. “The Bwana’s weakness was that he did not sow the seed in any quantities.”
“Sechele sowed the seed instead,” Susi said. �
��Just like that Mabruki of yours, Ntaoéka. He will be sowing the seed in you next, if he hasn’t already.”
“Susi, you have drunk too much,” said Jacob Wainwright. The vein on the side of his neck was throbbing. I saw that he looked at Ntaoéka as he spoke, but she seemed lost in her own thoughts.
Susi said, “This is nothing, because you know who drank too much? The Bwana’s wife. She was a fish, that one.”
The Bwana’s wife, he said, had drunk herself to her death, and racked up debt after debt to men who sold her pombe. The thought of those poor children in that far-off land, so cold, so dark, and so dreadfully poor, with a mother who died from pombe and a father who died looking for rivers, wandering and wandering like he had no home, made me sorry, and I asked Chuma to name all of them.
“The one child of his that I knew the most was his daughter Agnes, for he often talked about her. His little Nannie, he called her.” Susi counted with his fingers as he said their names. “Robert, one. Agnes, two. Thomas, three. William, four. Oswell, five. Zouga, six. Anna, seven. Mary, eight.”
“And the baby, ten,” said Chuma.
“Are those the children of just Mai Robert?” Ntaoéka said as she counted with him. “And no other wife?”
“No wonder she drank herself to death,” said Misozi. “That is ten children to care for with no one to share the work.”
“But maybe,” I said, “maybe the older cared for the younger, who is to say that is not what happened? The Liwali’s second horme had a sister who left many children and her husband did not marry again, no matter how much they asked him to, so the older children raised the younger, that they did.”
“But, Susi, you count wrong,” said Chuma.
Susi raised his voice; it was always this way with him when he had drunk pombe, he raised his voice in quarrel, and though there was no malice to it, it was loud and long and he could argue with a tree.
Jacob Wainwright said, “Did he not have six altogether and five living? Chuma is right. You have named them wrong.”
Chuma scowled. He did not like to be rescued even by Jacob Wainwright. He quickly added, “Zouga is the name of the last son, he is the same person as William, who is the same person as Oswell.”
“So that last son is named thrice,” I said. “Do you mean that he has three names, like a Mohammedan who has been to Mecca?”
“He has just two names,” said Jacob Wainwright, “but he was called Zouga as his other name because he was born near a river of that name. It was his pet name. And Anna is the same child as Mary. It is not two but one, so where you have five children you have two, some with three names, and one with two.”
“Why does that particular child have two names? And why do the other children not have two names, or three names?” said Ntaoéka.
“Maybe it is only the children born by a river who have three names,” said Misozi. “Isn’t that so? It is only children born by rivers who are given three names.”
Jacob Wainwright ignored the question. He took up another log and leaned over to stoke the fire. In the flare of firelight, his impatience was clear on his face. He prides himself on knowing the ways of the wazungu better than Chuma and Susi even, but he can never stand to be questioned too closely. For many of us, the Bwana was the only muzungu we knew, but he has met others, and has read their books and speaks their tongue as well as though he were muzungu himself.
He has met more than one muzungu person, he is always telling us, there was the captain of the dhow that rescued him, and all the sailors on it who helped the captain, then the wazungu teachers in India who taught him in English, and the one who gave him his name and his suit and his books, then Bwana Stanley, who brought him here, then Bwana Daudi.
When he spoke with Bwana Daudi, the words between them flowed thick and fast, faster even than when Bwana Daudi talked to Susi or Chuma. But for all that, he does not always answer the questions we ask, and to hear him talk, there is no order at all in the things that these wazungu do sometimes.
The Mohammedans make no sense either, but at least they do not try to make sense. They just tell you that this is how things are, and it is for you to take or not take, and if you don’t take it, they will make you. But Jacob Wainwright wants to make us believe that this God has all the power but cannot stop the floods from killing or animals from attacking.
I knew from his sudden close attention to the fire that he did not know much about the meanings of these wazungu names. My own name, Halima, means “one who is of mild and gentle nature.” It is as though my mother knew just what sort of person I would become when she named me, not like the Liwali’s third suria, the one from Circassia, who named her son Naseem, which means “the breeze that blows softly across the land,” but oh, the trouble that boy gave to his family. The wind that blows off the coast in the rainy season, he was, the wind that capsizes every dhow too and brings down the new-planted palms and nothing good to any person. When I asked Jacob Wainwright to explain the meaning of these wazungu names, the same impatience entered his voice that overcame him now. He can never abide close questioning.
Susi now came back from the tree where he had gone to relieve himself. “Have you counted the baby in the desert?” he said as he took up his pombe. He drank deeply and said, “She need not have died either.”
Chuma said now, “Susi, you should not talk so.”
Ignoring him, Susi said, “Well, it is what it is.”
I asked how was it, what baby was this one now, and in what desert had she died. Susi said, “The Doctor had gone far out of Makololo country with Ma Robert, who gave birth right there in the desert, and the child died there, and it was like he did not even care.”
Majwara, upset, said, “But he was a good man. He gave me this coat. He saved my life. He ransomed me. He cured my fever.”
Afterward, I could tell that Majwara’s heart was still unsettled so I took him aside. “Now, you listen to me,” I said. “People can do good and still be bad, and do bad and still be good. Choose only to remember him as it gives you comfort.”
But in my heart, I must say that I was troubled. I looked to the hut where the smoke rose above his body. What manner of man was he? The men found it funny, this Sechele business, but I thought of those poor women, being told to go back simply because their husband had found a new god. How would they explain that to their families, what could they say? Who was Bwana Daudi to disgrace these women like that, to shame them before their people, to meddle like that and just go off, then come back years later?
He had not seemed to be this meddlesome when I talked to him, he had not seemed to care that he was surrounded by Mohammedans and Nassickers, and those like me who did not care one way or the other.
He had asked me once what I believed. I had told him my mother’s stories, the ones I tell around the fire. They are stories that other slaves told her, stories from every place. They were all about the creation of the universe and the first man, Kintu, and the first woman, Wambui. Those were just stories, he said, and what did I really believe, and I told him that I did not trouble myself with such questions when there was food to be made and could he hurry along if he needed anything because he was delaying me, he was in the way and there was work to be done.
It troubled me to think of his children. Bwana Stanley had tried to make him go back with him, but the Bwana had refused to be persuaded. I remember the set of his mouth as he talked to Bwana Stanley and said no, he was not going back, weak though he was, and ill with it too, but he would still go on. Had his wife tried to get him to turn back, to save the child? Had he spoken to her in that way?
What manner of a man was this, who thought that small things like the flowing of a river were of greater matter than the life of a child? How could he cure Majwara, and give the coat off his own back to a stranger, and still deny food to his own children? He had given me my Losi to love, and seen her through her childhood fevers and other ailments, and yet could not save his own child.
I thou
ght of his grief for that dog Chitane that had drowned while they crossed a river, even to the point of speaking of that place of drowning as Chitane’s Water. All that grief, and all that remembrance, for a dog. How could a man who grieved this much for a dog leave his own child to die?
I looked for a single unkind word Bwana Daudi had said to me. Apart from that unfair scolding after I ran off with Ntaoéka, I could find none. Yes, he had had Chirango beaten, and a few other men when they deserved it. But he had forgiven Susi and Chuma when they ran away, and me too, come to that. But perhaps he had had to forgive because he needed us all.
I thought of his abundant goodness to me. He had bought me for Amoda and promised me a house in Zanzibar. And there was all that had happened with the Manyuema at Nyangwe, the way he had grieved for those poor women, and his vow that he would write in letters of fire to tell the world all that he had seen. It was all too much.
Was this worth all of this trouble? Was he worth it? What were we doing, taking a father to his children when he had let one of those children die? His poor small baby had spent so few years on this earth, but perhaps it was as well because it sounded as though Bwana Daudi had been no better than a slave in his own country.
My mother, Zafrene, told me once that the good things that grow from the ground come from the good thoughts of people who are buried, and the evil things come from the evil thoughts. That is why there is a mix of good and evil things in the world. I do not know whether she believed that or if it was just a story to tell children. But as I passed the tree where his heart and inside things lay that evening, I felt glad that we were taking most of him away to be buried in his own land. Whatever evils were in him would flourish in the soil of his own place. I thought of all the unknown things that lay ahead of us, and for the first time since I had persuaded the men to take Bwana Daudi home, I felt afraid.
Out of Darkness, Shining Light Page 9
