And Home Was Kariakoo

by M G Vassanji

  Europe’s contact with Kilwa (and the East African coast) began with the search for the sea route to India.

  (Photo Caption 8.1)

  In 1497–98 Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope at the tip of Africa with three Portuguese ships, looking for India. This was just six years after Columbus had set off in the western direction from Europe, with the same objective. The voyage was hazardous, and the attitude of the Portuguese towards all whom they met was belligerent and mercenary. They came with superior weapons—crossbows, canons, and muskets—and body armour, and among the crew were select hardened criminals who had already been condemned to death in Lisbon. With that voyage a new era began on the Indian Ocean, that of European commercial and naval dominance.

  In March 1498—according to the account by Gaspar Correa (d. 1583)—the ships arrived in Mozambique (the island, in the northern part of the present country of that name), having captured a “Moor” on the way. This Moor did not speak Arabic, and did not drink wine, and was from the great Indian port city of Cambay (Khambat today, shorn of all its former glory); therefore we can only presume that he was a Gujarati, perhaps a Muslim. That he was described as a dalal, or broker, only makes one smile. He agreed to assist them, likely under duress—he was captured only because, unlike the others who were with him, he could not swim. His name was Davane. The Portuguese in their accounts use the term “Moor” somewhat loosely, because they did not know the people they were dealing with—a Moor could be an Arab, a Swahili, an Indian from Gujarat or from Malabar, a Christian, a Muslim, or a Hindu; and “fair,” “dark,” or “swarthy.” How Davane of Cambay was able to carry on lengthy conversations with them is unclear. According to Correa’s account, this stretch of coastal East Africa had a governor representing the sultan of Kilwa. Besides gold, silver, ivory, and wax, he says, pepper and “drugs”—it’s unclear what this term refers to—were also shipped out to Cambay.

  What followed in Mozambique, this trading colony of Kilwa, when the Lusitanian ships arrived is a tale of intrigue and treachery that includes a skirmish with the natives. The Mozambican port is described thus, as Davane the Moor comes ashore on behalf of the Portuguese:

  The Moor went ashore, and Nicolas Coelho carried him in his boat, and then returned to the ship. The Moor was surrounded by many people, and so he went to the house of the sheikh, who is the captain of the country on behalf of the King of Quiloa, and who was in this town as agent collecting the duties from the merchant ships, which are many in number, and some from many countries, with much goods of various kinds …; and with these goods they go along the coast, and up many rivers, which they find, in which they effect much barter of silver and gold, ivory and wax.…

  The Africans were naturally nervous about these white men in armed ships who spoke of the great wealth and power of their king. Informed by Davane of Cambay about a treachery planned by the “sheikh,” or governor, of Mozambique, da Gama pretended not to be aware of this and left, restraining himself from firing on the sheikh’s ships—he had a long way to go still and didn’t want news of his aggression to precede him. He left behind one convicted murderer, Joan Machado. Joan was joined by a fellow convict who swam ashore from a ship to join him and the two lived happily with the sheikh.

  As in all such chronicles, the local facilitator remains a cypher. Who was Davane (whatever the actual name was) and why would he attach himself to a foreign ship whose success was not guaranteed?

  Da Gama was informed by his pilots that Kilwa was a great city where ships came from all parts of the world, including India and Mecca—presumably Arabia—and that there were even some Armenian Christian traders dwelling there. But, according to the faithful Davane, treachery was afoot. This is how the Portuguese poet Camõens describes it in his epic, The Lusiads, which he wrote to extol da Gama’s exploits and Portugal’s glories:

  Then, subtly as when Sinon to the Trojans

  Sang the praises of the Wooden Horse,

  He let slip that close by, on an island,

  Lived an ancient race of Christians …

  There he saw his plot maturing

  With strength and numbers far

  Greater than Mozambique’s, the island’s fame

  There being widespread. Kilwa is its name.

  Fortunately for da Gama and his crew, “the Lord sent them a contrary wind” and they missed Kilwa, going to Mombasa and Malindi instead, before heading off to the port city of Calicut in India.

  In 1502 Vasco da Gama undertook a second voyage to India, this time taking ten large ships and five warships. He arrived in Kilwa on July 12. Says Correa,

  The streets of the city are narrow, and the houses are very high, of three and four stories, and one can run along the tops of them upon terraces, as the houses are very close together: and in the port there were many ships.

  Da Gama fired a series of salvos to frighten the people. Then he had the nervous sultan visit him in a boat with a few of his men, and demanded of the ruler that he become vassal to the king of Portugal and pay an annual tribute, with the threat that he had the capacity to “put the city to fire and sword.” In return, da Gama would give him a written guarantee of protection from the king of Portugal. The sultan acquiesced. The Portuguese standard was raised upon a spear and brought to the shore where it was received with trumpets and carried around the city. Thus began the demise of Kilwa, and indeed of the city-states of the coast. In time Mombasa and Mozambique became important, in the former of which the Portuguese constructed Fort Jesus. The Portuguese eventually left Kilwa, which was ruled by local sultans, before the Omani Arabs of Zanzibar took over.

  Much of East Africa would eventually end up in British hands; the Portuguese clung to Mozambique until 1975, fighting a bitter guerrilla war to keep it. The liberation of Mozambique, Angola (also Portuguese), Zimbabwe, and South Africa was a cause we grew up with in the 1960s in newly independent Tanzania, which had become a champion of African freedom. In National Service, where we were sent after high school, we sang about all these causes, wishing death to the enemies of Africa during our morning jogs, and on long route marches over the countryside, dressed in khakis and boots, our G3 rifles in our hands. The headquarters of the Mozambique freedom movement, FRELIMO, was in Dar es Salaam, on Nkrumah Street, where the leader, Eduardo Mondlane, was killed by a letter bomb presumably sent by the Portuguese. The head of the Angolan freedom movement, Samora Machel, was later killed in a plane crash believed to be arranged by the South Africans. Dar’s Acacia Avenue, its name already changed once to Independence Avenue, is now Samora Avenue.

  Yes, says our guide, there are ghosts on the Island; and there are also people who are descended from those early Arabs. He shows us a boy of about eight with an almost translucent brown skin and a round head. They are called Shombe, says the guide. We see another man, black, but with a greenish glint to his eye; he claims that descent too, on his mother’s side. Many of the Shombe have gone to Dar, the guide adds. I recall that “Shombe” in my childhood was a derogatory term for a half-caste.

  We walk farther inland through a field and come to an immense baobab tree, its girth some ten feet across. Looking up into the gnarly, leafless branches coloured a grim shade of grey, one can well believe them to harbour a ghost; an important spirit of the air, a captain among djinns. This would be an eerie place at night. Past the baobab we walk along a path and come to a settlement, all mud and wattle, and no electricity. In fact the Island is not electrified at all; from our hotel it appears totally dark at night save for some pinpricks of light. We come to a table where a few men sit idly and, just to bring business, we join them and ask for tea, which is brought for us. There are no jobs, the men say. Yes, there are the ruins, but the government has brought no development; what do we eat, the stones? Our guide takes us to a large, square structure closer to the shore. It is a madrassa. We walk inside and meet the principal. They teach Islamic doctrine, he says, up to Standard 6, and also English and Math. But the teaching is in Ar
abic, no Swahili is used. The boys come from different parts of the country on scholarship. After Standard 6, some of them get further scholarships to go to Egypt, Libya, and other places. This appears to be a madrassa of the Shadhiliyya Sufi group.

  The guide uses his cell phone to beckon the motorboat, which is ready for us when we arrive.

  The sight of the ruins and the present state of this Isle has left many a visitor in a contemplative or depressive mood. “Such is the state of a settlement which in 1500 the Portuguese found prosperous in the highest degree,” wrote Richard Burton, who visited it in 1859. “Every grace save that of beauty has now passed from it and … we see the wild ‘smokes’ of the tropical coast, and we hear the scream of the seamew harshly invading the silence and solitude of a city in ruins.”

  According to Krapf, who visited not long after, the Island should be turned into a place like Sierra Leone, a haven for freed slaves.

  (Photo Caption 8.2)

  9.

  The Mystics Down the Road: Discovering the Sufis

  BY THE TIME THE PRAYER STARTS in the mosque this blazing Friday afternoon on Sikukuu Street, Dar es Salaam, the sidewalk is close-packed with worshippers, and more are arriving, converging from the neighbourhood, some wearing their kofias and kanzus, some bringing their own mats to pray on. Not to be taken as unbelievers, as we more or less are, we go down on protesting knees on a proffered mat on the hard pavement and follow the motions of those around us. No one spares a look at us. As the prayer proceeds, in a rich, throaty voice heard clearly over a loudspeaker, the people on the street, as though charmed by a mesmer, stop in their tracks, go down on their knees, and begin to perform the familiar motions of the Islamic prayer. Traffic has stopped.

  We have come to see the Shadhiliyya Sufis at prayer. Is this a purely voyeuristic desire? Perhaps, but can you distinguish that from an intense curiosity about those amongst whom we lived, a desire to make amends for the sin of ignorance? I carry a tiny flame of resentment inside me at the fact that most of us, Africans and Asians, had grown up in such insular communities that we did not know how people down the street from us lived or worshipped. I had heard of the mystical and unorthodox Sufi Muslims, but believed that they resided elsewhere, in the countries of the Middle East and South Asia. That they existed in East Africa, and moreover were important in the spread of Islam in these lands, I discovered only recently—much to my embarrassment—in the accounts of some western scholars. Soon after my arrival in Dar, therefore, I stood outside the city’s main Jama Mosque and as the men emerged from their prayers I inquired about these Sufis: where could I find them, the Shadhiliyyas and the Qadiriyyas? No one seemed to know of them. This was not too surprising, for the orthodox do not view the Sufis very positively; and one group of worshippers is not going to send you to the doors of another. (I discovered this also when inquiring about Hindu temples in Dar.) In Kilwa Kivinje, however, I had been shown a Qadiriyya mosque and its sheikh had sung to me. And on Kilwa Island, in the madrassa next to the stone ruins, I was informed that indeed the Shadhiliyya had their centre in Dar, on Sikukuu Street. And here it is, in the midst of the noon prayer, hardly a mile away from where I had made my fruitless inquiries; and hardly a mile away from where I grew up.

  Sufis are intriguing for their oddball nonconformism. Their mysticism is manifest in expressions of devotion to God, either at the abstract level of meditation on the Absolute, or at a personal, devotional level. Sufi sects or orders have formed around hierarchies of spiritual teachers or masters. Devotion to God is often expressed through the dhikr (Swahili: dhikri), consisting of meditation or chanting, and sometimes singing and even dancing. The whirling dervishes of the Mevlevi order who sometimes tour North American cities express their devotion by their dance. For such unorthodoxy, and their close fraternity, they have often been despised. The medieval Iranian Sufi, Mansur al Hallaj, for repeatedly uttering, I am the Truth, implying We are all God, was—according to legend—hanged and decapitated, then burned and his ashes thrown in the Tigris; even then, it is said, they formed the words I am the Truth.

  Sufis exist everywhere, often in small numbers, practising innocuously. In the old city of Jerusalem I once came across a Sufi; he ran a tiny general store and when I made my inquiry agreed to take me to the local centre, which was on the first-floor terrace of a building nearby. It was Thursday, sacred to Sufis, and that evening the group was to meet and performed the dhikr, but much to my regret I had to be elsewhere and therefore missed it. For the moment, I could only peep through the grille door into the long, dark, silent hall laid with carpet. And in Toronto, on a winter morning, the ground covered in snow, my friend Munir took me to a Sufi meeting in a modest suburban home. This group was defined by its devotion to a master of Sri Lankan origin, now dead, who has a shrine in Philadelphia. This day the group, seated on the carpeted floor of the modest living room, spoke with veneration about their master—his demeanour, his simplicity, his wisdom. A visitor from Philadelphia was present. Towards the end of the meeting the devotees sat in silent meditation, after which a discussion took place, and then a simple meal was served. A far cry from the whirling dervishes, but these were also Sufis.

  Why my own interest in Sufis? The act of human devotion to the sacred intrigues me and draws me as an observer; perhaps there lies here a nostalgia for the simplicity and humility of devotion that I knew and saw around me in our prayer house as a child. I was brought up in the syncretistic Khoja tradition, containing the elements of both esoteric Ismailism and the Indian Upanishads, as well as devotional mysticism of the kind demonstrated in the songs of Kabir and Mira. I could add that the quest of fundamental physics, which became my specialty for a while, is also a quest for absolute truth.

  The African variety of Sufism—more often known as the tarika, or “path”—is little known, and most books on Sufism completely ignore it. Unlike in Iran or South Asia, there are no major Sufi shrines in East Africa, where people from all backgrounds and faiths can go and pay respects and ask for blessings.

  The Shadhiliyya path is North African in origin and named after Abul Hassan Ali ash-Shadhili (d. 1258), a Moroccan mystic. In the nineteenth century the Shadhiliyya movement had found a footing in the Indian Ocean islands of the Comores through a connection to Palestine. From the Comores the movement spread to the old settlement of Kilwa in Tanganyika, which became a local centre.

  What is in my mind as I go through the motions of Islamic prayer, up and down, both hands to the ears and back to the sides, mimicking my neighbours to the right and left and the man in front, is memory—fleeting visions of this street, Sikukuu Street, as it once was. It ran all the way down to Uhuru Street, where I lived at the intersection, and for several years it was the first leg of my long trek to school. The houses were of mud and wattle. As I passed, early in the morning at seven, elderly men in kanzus and kofias might be sitting outside playing bao; on the ground at some of the doorways there would be bottles of togwa, a light porridgelike drink, for sale. Across from where I now perform this ritual like a nervous robot was a rudimentary store of the poorest sort belonging to a friend’s family; sometimes I would stop and pick him up—he was always late—and we would then hurry off as I was regaled to a catalogue of dirty stories. The street was unpaved, and often we removed our shoes, not to pray but to wade through rainwater and mud. If there was a mosque at this location, a simple one, I didn’t know. Now the street is paved, there are one- and two-storey brick buildings, many motor vehicles. At the end of the street, a block away on this side, is the Fire Station, which had in those days a wall clock in a front room. Viewed from a distance through the window the clock was my timekeeper: How many minutes to bell? Should I run or keep walking? The vice-principal, Mr. Duarte, delighted in greeting latecomers with a swinging cane.

  And on the way back from school down this street in the hot afternoon I would stop at some shop and beg for water. At one of the shops the owners were especially generous, and some Thursdays, which were ho
ly days, they would even hand out sweets to passing schoolchildren. A few days ago, while I was walking outside the Khoja khano, an Asian woman came to beg me for money. It was an unusual and embarrassing experience; Asians never begged in public. Only when I had walked away did I realize, recalling the name she had given me, that she was from the shop on Sikukuu Street that had so generously given me water to drink and even some sweet on special Thursdays. Perhaps she had been sitting in the shop watching as I stood outside dripping with sweat and gulping down water.

  The prayers over, the men on the sidewalk get up and, without ceremony, except pausing to shake hands with familiars, disperse up and down the street to where they came from. They do this every Friday, of course, if not every day. The mosque begins to empty as a tide of men emerges from the two entrances. But now something strange happens: a number of men are conspicuous, easily discernible in crisp, extra-white kanzus and kofias, and against the emerging tide they are going up the steps and inside. Something is going on there. I inquire of a man beside me, and he replies, “They’re doing dhikri inside.”

  I walk up the steps, remove my laced shoes outside the door, and enter the cool shade of the interior. I go and stand against the back wall. Elderly men come to shake my hand, put their right hand to their breast in the Islamic greeting, very happy to see a stranger among them.

  At the front end of the hall a small tight circle of men forms, and then expands as they take a few steps back. And they begin swaying back and forth, back and forth, chanting, “Allahoo, Allahoo.” The name of God. Such is the absorption, such is the collective murmur, a humming and a buzzing, that it holds me spellbound. Against the front wall before them stands an ancient-looking, frail man with two companions. He is, I guess, the khalifah, the master of the order here. Occasionally someone comes and kisses his hand. The chanting gets louder, the swaying energetic. It becomes apparent in time that one of the men is leading the dhikri, and soon he enters the circle and is joined by another, and the two conduct the chanting and swaying, gliding in long strides from one end of the circle to the other. A group of young boys, perhaps eight years old, have meanwhile formed a smaller circle of their own.