But there was no point whatsoever in having him sit inside, and I reasoned that obviously our contribution to his family income, as meagre as it might have seemed, was enough to make it worthwhile for him. But the many holes in his old sweatshirt tugged at my heartstrings, too, so I gathered half a dozen old shirts Herbert was no longer using and presented them to Mr. Suleiman. He rewarded me with a dazzling smile and a very heartfelt “Asante sana!”
Almost every day, we made the short trip to Zanzibar Town, jumping onto a kind of overcrowded local bus called a dala dala. Once in Stonetown, we’d wander through the maze of small streets, buying fruit in the open market or browsing through small shops selling carvings and antiques. Invariably, we would lose our way and wander, hopelessly disoriented, through the warren of alleyways, an absolutely essential Zanzibar experience.
Other days, we toured spice plantations and Persian baths and roamed through the palaces of the great sultans of Zanzibar and Oman, including one mighty ruler who had ninety-nine wives in his harem and sired more than 130 children. One of his palaces was just a short walk away from where we were anchored. It was in ruins, with most of its roof gone and part of the second floor collapsed. Enough of it remained that the boys were inspired to play hide and seek within its massive, crumbling walls. While one of them counted, his face pressed against a stone pillar in the Sultan’s great audience chamber, the other two ran off to hide in small anterooms or hidden alcoves. We explored with unalloyed delight, feeling as if we were the first to discover this treasure, for there was no one else around: no watchmen, no tourists, no local people. I sat back and watched with delight – who would ever have imagined that my own children would be playing hide and seek in the palace of the Sultan of Zanzibar? Even today, it seems hard to believe.
In the evening, we would find our way to the night market, where a huge variety of mouthwatering Zanzibar foods was laid out in outdoor stalls at the waterfront – samosas, potato cakes, shish kebabs, naan and chapatti, and delicious Zanzibari pizzas, which were something like a fajita. All five of us could eat a plate heaped with these treats for eight dollars. We ate on rough benches, with paper plates in our laps, and as soon as we finished, a flock of ragged young boys would swoop down and run off with our leftovers, gobbling as they ran.
On our final day in Zanzibar, we marched through the market one more time, passing the spot where slaves used to be sold, buying our last tiny loaves of fluffy Zanzibar bread, haggling over the price of pineapples and passionfruits. We had seen what we came to see, but Zanzibar still had a hold on us and it was hard to leave. Everywhere we went, people greeted us, as always, with a smile and a hearty “Jambo!”
We headed over to where we knew our favourite taxi driver would be to drive us back to Northern Magic. Mr. David had two (concurrent) wives and fourteen children to support, so we always gave him our business. This was our last chance to breathe the Zanzibar air, redolent of spices, sultans, and slaves. The sense of nostalgia was already growing.
“When you stop getting lost in the streets of Zanzibar, you know it’s time to go,” remarked Michael.
And so, reluctantly, we went.
After leaving Zanzibar Town, we made short hops up the island, stopping at ancient caves where slaves were hidden to escape detection by British warships, and exploring mysterious coral-stone villages whose shy inhabitants did not want their pictures taken. We then sailed to Pemba Island, which was considerably poorer than Zanzibar. We saw several boys of ten or twelve pushing around little homemade wooden trucks on the end of a stick. The ragged children really had nothing, and these pitiful little toys made Herbert and me cringe. Our kids didn’t have the same reaction, instead admiring their counterparts’ resourcefulness.
We went for a walk out of town, followed like the Pied Piper by a rapidly swelling group of children. Our boys found some sticks and engaged themselves in Star Wars light-sabre duels while the Pemba kids stood by and giggled. I enjoyed observing the girls, who, unlike most we had seen, were not robed from head to toe and could therefore play freely. They had very short hair on their bare heads, just a little bed of springy black whorls. It was surprisingly attractive, and certainly practical. These little girls, although they wore dresses, were as athletic and gregarious as their brothers, and I liked them for that.
I decided to offer a small bag of cookies, which was disappointingly crumbled when I opened it. I held it out and the kids, as soon as they realized what it was, dived into it en masse, about twenty grubby hands reducing it instantly to a pile of brown cookie dust. In seconds even the dust was gone, but there were lots of smiling faces.
We headed across the channel to the mainland Tanzanian city of Tanga, arriving in mainland Africa at last. This was a tired old town whose buildings, sad reminders of more glorious colonial days, were quietly crumbling into disrepair. You could walk down the middle of its main street and not be inconvenienced too often by the passing of a car – although a bicycle once made us jump by issuing the surprisingly loud bleat of a goat, the source of which turned out to be trussed up and tied to a basket on the rear wheel.
We anchored in a quiet bay in front of the Tanga Yacht Club, the local hangout for an expatriate community made up mostly of foreign aid workers. Virtually all of Tanga’s industries had beaten a hasty retreat years before, when many businesses were nationalized. Now it was a shell of its former prosperous self. Tanga was a welfare community whose entire cash flow was derived from foreign aid and the money brought in by the three hundred or so expats who administered it. Within a minute of landing ashore, we were adopted by Rob Jurgens, a big South African in his forties. Rob was in charge of renovating Tanga’s water filtration plant and installing new water mains. Everywhere we went, we could see evidence of his team at work. He had about four hundred local employees reporting to him, making the German construction company for which he worked by far the largest employer in the region.
Rob brought us back to his home for showers and dinner. He had several staff – a cook, a housekeeper, a watchman or two – but lived in his simply furnished four-bedroom house alone. “I can’t find a woman who will share this kind of life with me,” he explained. “I’ve tried, but no one wants to live in places like this and move every few years.”
Rob’s casual clothes, baseball cap, and shoulder-length hair couldn’t disguise the fact that he was very smart and very good at his job. It was his business to get things done in the most backward of places and for this, he earned about double what he might in North America.
“If you’ve worked in Africa for ten years and don’t have at least half a million dollars in the bank, you’re doing something wrong,” he explained. But the price of financial success was high. Rob had suffered malaria fourteen times in five years – was quite ill from malaria, in fact, that very day – and the medications that controlled the potentially deadly disease had taken a terrible toll on his liver.
It was soon apparent that we had landed on the pinnacle of a three-tiered colonial-style society. Our gracious host and his European friends were on the very top, living a servant-supported lifestyle we thought had died with the end of the British empire.
“It was this way in South Africa until recently,” Rob told us. “If you were white and had any kind of skill, you lived like this. Even a car mechanic could afford to live in a big house and have his own gardeners, maids, and cooks.”
On the second tier were the second- and third-generation Indians, who owned the smattering of little stores and workshops in town. There were a few educated blacks who fell into this reasonably prosperous, tiny middle class, but very few.
At the bottom of the heap were the vast majority of native Tanzanians, who considered themselves lucky if they found jobs digging water pipes for Rob with their own shovels for three dollars a day. The women tended little plots of land, raised and buried many children, and grew their own maize, a kind of corn that is the staple food here. Most of them were barely literate. Jonathan, who was in gr
ade six and a voracious reader, was stunned to learn that he probably had more education than the average village schoolteacher.
The next day, Rob, although feverish and bleary-eyed with malaria, took us on a tour of the countryside. We left town on a track that was more pothole than road, and our boys, in the open back of Rob’s pick-up truck, had a wild and bouncy ride. After leaving town, we didn’t see a single other motorized vehicle.
We passed through small villages that looked as if they had barely emerged from the stone age – tiny huts made of mud and sticks with thatched roofs, no water, and no electricity. We saw lines of women walking miles with large jugs of water on their heads and others trudging under heavy stacks of firewood. The villages weren’t dirty or squalid, in fact they appeared quite clean and cheerful. The women looked wonderful in their colourful robes and turbans, and the children invariably waved and called “Jambo!” as we went by. Tanzanians are a beautiful people, and their faces lit up in brilliant smiles when they saw us, especially if we smiled first.
But these little collections of hovels were achingly primitive. As we travelled through them, we were seized by the terrible knowledge that these people were living much as their ancestors had for centuries, perhaps millennia past – and worse, that there was little prospect of this changing. Tanzania ranked near the very bottom of the UN’s list of countries, ranked by standard of living, the one in which Canada often places first. Life expectancy was a shocking forty-seven years.
Rob brought us to a river, the source of Tanga’s water supply. It was a fantastically beautiful scene, with tall mountains mistily rising up on the horizon, grassy countryside interrupted by clusters of flat-topped trees, and this enchanting river tumbling over a myriad of cascades. “Isn’t this great?” said Rob, his arms outstretched. “This is why I love Africa.”
He pointed out white kingfishers hovering like giant hummingbirds over the water, waiting to dive for fish. Other water predators – storks, egrets, and ibises – stalked around in the shallows. Great golden ospreys circled in the sky. Earlier, Herbert had seen one of these raptors plunge down and narrowly miss catching a mongoose, which scurried back into the undergrowth.
“Don’t go near the water,” Rob warned the boys. “There are lots of crocs here. Big ones, eight metres long, and also white Nile crocodiles.”
We watched as a man with a bicycle, barely visible under a giant green haystack of grass, pushed his way down the dirt path to ford the river. He stood and paused for a full minute before he entered the water.
“He’s checking for crocs,” Rob told us. We held our breath and were pleased when he made it safely across.
On the way back to town, Rob stopped at a roadside sisal rope maker. Sisal is a large plant that looks like the top of a huge pineapple, with stiff spiny leaves. Its fibres are woven into ropes and mats. These men were making rope by hand. They had strung along the field a series of metal stakes to hold the strands off the ground, and at the end was a crank that they turned to make the rough twisted rope.
Rob negotiated to buy a spool, the biggest they had. The rope maker looked as if he couldn’t believe his luck – the forty-dollar order was a big one by his standards – and ran around to make sure he had enough fibre to produce the rope by the next afternoon.
“If not tomorrow, then sometime later in the week,” Rob said breezily, to the man’s evident relief. As we climbed back into the car, the man energetically waved us goodbye, a huge grin on his face, Rob’s cash deposit in his hand.
“I don’t actually need the rope,” Rob confessed as we drove off. “But there are so few businesses here, it’s important to support those people who are trying to get something going. These are good people; they’re hard workers, but they just can’t get ahead.”
We spent a lovely week in Tanga, our experience memorable because of Rob’s extraordinary friendliness and hospitality. But the impression made by our first glimpse of mainland Africa was even greater. Everywhere we turned, we were confronted by the sheer size of the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. For the first time, we saw a leper. We met a beggar with elephantitis, a disease that had so deformed this poor man’s legs and feet that they looked just like those of the animal after which the disease is named. At the supper table, we found ourselves debating ways the Western world could help. In the middle of the night, we would wake up troubled, our brains grappling even in sleep with the immensity of the problems and the scarcity of answers. Try as we might, we could see no solutions that wouldn’t require generations to take effect.
These people had so little – not enough money, not enough education, and, most importantly, not enough hope that it could ever be otherwise. We liked Tanga and its smiling villagers very much, but what we saw hurt. Once again, we felt shame at our unearned, undeserved, and mostly unreturned good fortune.
After leaving Tanga, we sailed north, crossing the border with Kenya. A few days later, we were anchored securely in Kilifi Creek, north of Mombasa.
One day, not long after we arrived, two friendly young men approached us as we disembarked from our dinghy. They were carrying a small, tattered plastic bag, and inside it were dozens of beautiful fossilized shark teeth in hues of copper and black. They were hoping to sell us some. We had a better idea, however, and asked them to take us fossil hunting ourselves. We offered to pay them, but they refused to suggest a price, saying we could decide.
The next day our two new friends, Boniface, age sixteen, and Hamisi, eighteen, showed us how to search out the shiny fossilized teeth, about twenty million years old, which washed up on the pebbly beach every high tide. It took some practice to get good at spotting them, and our eagle-eyed experts found ten for every one we did. Boniface and Hamisi gave us all the teeth they found that morning, several dozen in all. Sometimes, I caught them planting teeth conspicuously in the sand so that we would all experience the thrill of discovery.
Both of them were finished school, Hamisi having only gone as far as primary grades and Boniface confessing that he had been forced to leave his secondary school a few months before. His family could no longer afford the fees. But they were both intelligent young men who spoke English well, and we enjoyed their company.
The next day, Boniface and Hamisi brought us down a cashew-tree-lined path to their villages. Hamisi’s family compound was mainly empty, because his mother and sisters were away at the family shamba, or fields, some thirty kilometres distant. Like most rural families in Kenya, Hamisi’s family were subsistence farmers who grew maize, the staple food of Africa.
The compound was a circle of a dozen tiny huts made entirely from thin mangrove poles and mud, each one measuring perhaps three by four metres. Everything in the homes was hand-made by Hamisi’s family, including the thatch on the roofs. All the materials were from things that were locally available, and free. Not a single nail was used in their construction. The family owned virtually no possessions at all – each house was furnished only with a bed and a mud bench built against a wall. There was, of course, no electricity or plumbing, in fact no latrines of any kind.
Hamisi proudly showed us the house he was building for himself, something every young man does as a teenager. Nearby, he showed us the deep pit he had dug to find the thick red mud for the walls, filling in the gaps between a crude latticework of sticks. While we walked through it, Jonathan said enthusiastically, “This is really nice! It’s big!” But later he confessed to me that he had said this only to make Hamisi feel good. Herbert and I were doubly glad we had paid the boys generously for their services the day before. It was dawning on us that these people – like most people in Kenya – lived virtually outside the cash economy, growing all the food they consumed and purchasing almost nothing.
Hamisi was eager to show us a special place at the edge of his village, a holy tree where his brother, a medicine man, performed his craft. He ushered us into a tree-shrouded grove where, at that very moment, his brother was performing a ceremony for a local woman.
/> The middle-aged woman was crouching at the foot of a giant baobab tree, whose grey, cigar-shaped trunk was draped with several lengths of bright cloth. All around the tree were hundreds of old bottles, some of them half-filled with liquids of various colours. Incense was burning. The woman’s eyes were closed. She was chanting a long monologue. Hamisi explained that she was speaking to the spirits that resided in this holy place, asking for their help in solving a personal problem.
As the woman spoke, Hamisi’s oldest brother, a thin man in his early forties, stood beside her. He was holding a weakly struggling white hen by the feet, just inches over the woman’s bowed head. It looked like a large, feathery bouquet. Hamisi told us that his father had been a medicine man and had passed on his knowledge to his oldest son before he had died. Hamisi, too, had been instructed in the craft.
The woman rambled on for a long time. When she finally finished her plea, the medicine man carried the chicken to the side of the tree, held it over a plate, and, just as we had feared, slit its throat. He expertly caught the spurting blood in a bowl. He tossed the chicken aside and it landed, feebly moving, just a few feet in front of us. Ignoring the dying chicken, the medicine man mixed its blood with some of the mysterious potions contained in the forest of bottles that surrounded the tree, and began sprinkling the crimson liquid all around. The woman departed, pleased and smiling. She paused to thank us for watching.
We couldn’t believe we had been permitted to witness this, or that this type of ceremony was still openly practised at all. When it was over, at Hamisi’s suggestion, we contributed a hundred shillings, or two dollars, to the medicine man, as the woman had done.
Of Hamisi’s ten brothers, only three, which included the medicine man, were employed. The other two earned sixty dollars a month working at distant hotels. Hamisi’s family of about thirty people survived on two hundred dollars a month. We began to understand why Hamisi had not been able to continue his schooling, since secondary school cost about five hundred dollars per child a year.
The Voyage of the Northern Magic: A Family Odyssey Page 28
