by M G Vassanji
An overjoyed Stanley arrived here with his caravan on November 10, 1871, some fifty guns firing in celebration, the American flag (“bendera kizungu”) in the lead, the Zanzibari red banner bringing up the rear, having reached at last the end of his quest for Livingstone. “We had awakened Ujiji to the knowledge that a caravan was coming, and the people were witnessed rushing up in hundreds to meet us.”
Then we were surrounded by them: by Wajiji, Wanyamwezi, Wangwana, Warundi, Waguhha, Wamanyuema and Arabs, and were almost deafened with the shouts of “Yambo, yambo, bana! Yambo, bana! Yambo, bana!” To all and each of my men the welcome was given.
Stanley pushed through the crowd and went to greet Livingstone outside his house.
The town as it appears today could hardly muster that crowd or level of excitement.
Shabir drops me off at a dingy-looking shop on an unpaved side street. It has an open front, partly blocked, with a step up leading inside, and sells daily essentials to the neighbourhood at the barest retail level—a cup of rice, an onion, a shot of cooking oil. There are items hanging from the lintel, including, rather incongruously, a pair of boy’s shorts. What desperate mother would buy a pair of shorts here? There’s no room—except to squeeze through—inside the dark interior, but there is a small patio in front. The owner is Mzee Salum, a small, tired-looking man of Omani Arab ancestry with very likely some African blood. He wears a cap, a msuri—a wraparound of soft checked cotton—at the waist, and a shirt, a style of dressing outmoded in Dar by at least a couple of decades, and speaks in that typical high-pitched broken tone as though the native Arabic accent were struggling with the Swahili, which of course he most likely speaks better. Just as Shabir prepares to depart, a largish elderly man hobbles in, Mzee Memedi, partly blind, feet swollen, escorted by Mzee Salum’s shop assistant. This is a daily morning chitchat at which I have arrived. Mzee Memedi, because of his age, would be the fount of wisdom. People drop in and leave after respectfully greeting the two men. One of them, however, stays; his help has been sought. I—or Shabir on my behalf—have presented him with a conundrum.
I have been made to sit on a small chair to one side of the patio, Mzee Memedi sits on the ground close to me, and Mzee Salum is on the step at the shop entrance. The third visitor, a younger man, stands.
Mzee Salum, having posed the problem to his friends, now inquires: “Now this historia, how come we don’t have it, we were not given it?”
Mzee Memedi in his wiry low voice says: “Our Wazees [elders] only sat us down and told us stories. Or if we cried, they’d look outside and say, ‘Fisi [hyena]—where are you?’ to scare us …”
I find myself in a quandary, squirming as I listen to this exchange kindly put on for my benefit, not knowing how to explain to them my interest—which is not to collect “historia,” but to gather anything peripheral to the actual history, for instance how the place—Ujiji—looks today, how people relate to the past, what and how they remember.
The third man puts in: “Nani; nani-nani-nani—I’m racking my brains to think who has this historia …”
Finally, having scratched his head, he comes up with a name, “Hababu!” Hababu is Mzee Salum’s son and apparently a teacher. Who else would have the historia? But Hababu today does not pick up his phone.
The ancient Mzee Memedi of the thick foot is a smart one. He is a big man with a large head. He has a wry smile on his face, and he seems to know, or at least thinks he knows, exactly what interests me. He is a Manyema, he answers to my query. The Manyema came from eastern Congo, from a region also called Manyema, the etymology of which term is said to imply “flesh-eater” or cannibal. Whether this was true of the Manyema themselves or not, cannibalism was observed in the region at the time. (One of Livingstone’s deserters was killed and eaten.) The Manyema region was a lucrative source for slaves and ivory for the Arab and Swahili merchants, such as Tippu Tip, and many Manyema men naturally also joined the forces of the slave traders. The devastation of that area of the Congo has been described by many visitors, and one cannot help but recall the devastation the region has suffered in our own time.
I ask Mzee Memedi, then, “Didn’t the Manyema come to Ujiji with Tippu Tip? Where did he put up?”
“You have to ask someone who knows. I’m not going to say what may be half true.” He looks around before adding, referring to me with that same wry smile, “He knows what he’s looking for, he has to go and find it.”
Mzee Salum sounds hopeless as he says, “We need someone with historia.”
The wazees finally ask me first to go and have a look at the Livingstone site nearby, while I presume they will continue to rack their brains.
I walk up the highway, and after a short while turn right—as directed—into a road that’s rather unusual in that it has been paved with cut stones; it’s intact and hardly used by vehicles. The walk is long and straight, a line of houses on either side. A white SUV passes me. On the way people stare curiously and some children call out, “Bye-bye!” assuming I’m a mzungu. Who else but a white man would take a hike by himself in the sun to see Livingstone? I respond in Swahili: “Do I look like a mzungu to you?” “Mwarabu!” a boy replies with a knowing grin. An Arab. “Mhindi,” I correct him and continue on my way. Finally I arrive at a fenced compound with a flag mast outside a large single-storey white building. In the outer hall of the building two women sit at a table; there is no one else around. I pay one of them a fee and she comes out with me and indicates the spot on top of a rise where I can see the Livingstone monument. She calls out to someone that one more visitor is arriving.
I climb the rise to come upon three westerners and an Arab girl in hijab sitting attentively on one of two benches before a gesticulating guide. Behind the man is a circular, slightly raised island of lawn contained by a brick border, at the centre of which is the monument to the missionary—a modest white brick structure some four feet high with a plaque. I go and sit on the second bench and pay attention.
In a peculiarly accented English, the man sings out what he must have recited a few thousand times by rote, the story of David Livingstone: birthplace and date, first voyage, marriage, second journey, and the third. He was sitting in his veranda when his faithful servants came running to him, shouting, “Bwana, a white man and a caravan!” Stanley arrived and greeted Dr. Livingstone. The monument marks that meeting place.
According to Stanley, Livingstone was in the company of “the great Arab magnates of Ujiji” and had come out of the veranda to await him. The house is described as having been in the town then. The site now stands isolated, closer to the lakeshore and a little away from Ujiji’s present location.
After the recital we prepare to leave. A short distance away from the Livingstone monument is a stone with a plaque on it to commemorate the arrival in Ujiji of Burton and Speke on February 14, 1858. I ask the guide where Tippu Tip (the slave and ivory trader) lived. He says there are some ruins close by in an area called Usagara, at the mango trees. We are invited to see the museum, which is in the inner room of the main building. The museum can kindly be called modest, but it reflects the prevailing attitude to the past: negligent, perfunctory, ignorant. There stands a grotesque, amateurish sculpture of the “I Presume” moment, and there are some paintings on a wall that could only have been done by school children. Nothing else. No exhibits from the past, no explanations, no history. I ask the white group—an older NGO worker and two interns—for a ride in their vehicle to the main road.
At the road, I pause for a soda before finally arriving back at Mzee Salum’s, where I sit down again on the chair. The old man, Mzee Memedi, is more at ease. They all talk about historia, it has gripped their imagination. Hababu can still not be found. I tell the men I saw Livingstone and am satisfied, and listen to them as they recall some past incidents.
Mzee Salum: “That man exposed himself right there and showed us where the Germans whipped his behind. Ah! Viboko!”
Mzee Memedi: “Men were taken to fight
[in the First World War], not here but in the south.… The slaves were landed at Bangwe [nearby] and brought here where they planted the mango trees.”
Mzee Salum, of Omani Arab parentage, looks away, visibly discomfited. Mzee Memedi has that twinkle in his eyes.
The next morning I return in a taxi to Ujiji. The driver has been instructed by Shabir to look after me, and at first he annoys by pointing out the obvious sites along the highway: a girls’ school, select government buildings. We pass the formidable-looking headquarters of the security services, away from the road, about which he doesn’t say any more. Refugees and illegals are of course a problem here. Finally we reach Ujiji and, passing the Livingstone road, turn right onto the next one, and then left into a trail towards miembeni—the mango trees.
We come to a small cemetery, where I convince a reluctant driver to stop; we alight and ask a passing woman about the graves. Some locals are buried here, she says, but the graves are being moved. According to the headstones they date from the 1970s, which is ancient enough for the driver. When I say, Not quite, he asks when I was born, and whistles in amazement at my answer. Obviously, to him anyone over thirty is an ancient. We ask the woman about older sites, from the days of slavery. About Tippu Tip the slave trader. She says nothing. But just then an older woman carrying a panga (machete) arrives, wearing an amused look. She knows exactly what I want. “The slaves passed there,” she says bluntly, pointing behind her, and we follow her to a shaded area crowded with dark green mango trees and scattered with Swahili-type settlements—houses behind stockades of thatch. The entire neighbourhood looks dark and is eerily quiet, a few women have come out to observe us. And it takes a few moments before I understand, and notice the dirt road that is heading out in front of me straight into the horizon east—to where? “Bagamoyo,” the woman says, and grins. The great slave market at the end of the trail.
(Photo Caption 13.2)
This, then, is the slave road, planted periodically with mango groves where the caravans rested. It is a stirring site.
We walk back to an area where there is a school. Boys and girls in blue and white uniforms stop their recess play to banter with us. I am called mzungu again, but protest only mildly this time. I have come to the area of the old Arab settlement, where Tippu Tip would have put up, and there are the remains of ruins here—partial walls, brick stumps. Consciously or unconsciously, it’s been determined that no trace of the Ujiji Arabs remains. But the canny Tippu Tip did leave a written memoir.
Slavery is not an easy subject to deal with. No one who has seen photographs or read descriptions of a slave raid, and of slaves yoked together in their long march to the market, can fail to be moved by the enormous injustice and cruelty of the practice; or even to feel a trace of guilt—some ancestor could have been involved in the capture or trade of slaves, or owned one or more. But perhaps it’s also too easy and safe to invoke these reactions. Slavery, even in Africa, was not always a black-and-white affair. It involved the Indian creditor in Zanzibar, the Arab—and Swahili—trader in the interior, the African tribesmen who captured and sold each other. The freed slave often became a trader himself. Even the European explorer who heartily condemned it in his writings relished the hospitality of the trader—witness Stanley feasting with the Arabs in Tabora and Ujiji. The explorers’ caravans included bought slaves. Stanley himself went on to claim Congo in the name of the Belgian king; the horrors of the colonial rule that followed there are now well known.
The life of the famous slave and ivory trader Tippu Tip well illustrates these many facets.
In his portrait, taken in the balcony of his house in Zanzibar, Tippu Tip sits in stately manner, wearing a black robe with embroidered trim over a white kanzu and a turban over his head; there is a ceremonial dagger tucked at the waist, and he supports with one hand a long sword against one leg. He has a full white beard but no moustache. His features are black. A proud man with an ironic smile, shrewd in business, brave and ruthless in battle, he could at once charm and awe his European critics, who had no qualms asking for his assistance.
Tippu Tip, whose actual name was Hamed bin Mohammed, was born in Zanzibar in the first half of the nineteenth century, of Muscati-African parents. He was called Tippu Tip perhaps because his eyelids would twitch, a mannerism sufficient enough in the culture of the coast to garner a mischievous nickname. His mother, daughter of a prosperous Muscat family, was the second wife of his father, Mohammed, whose first wife was the daughter of Fundikira, the Nyamwezi sultan of Tabora and ancestor of the future government minister of independent Tanganyika. The family was thus well connected in both Zanzibar and Tabora. The dreaded Mirambo (“Bonaparte of Africa”), who almost brought the western caravan trade to a halt with his attacks and demands, was his friend and refused to harrass him.
Tippu Tip’s grandfather was an enterprising and well-known trader, and so was his father. At the age of eighteen Tippu Tip joined his father in Tabora, and at his insistence was given charge of his own caravan to take from Ujiji across Lake Tanganyika to the Congo. Starting from this apprenticeship he went on to travel extensively from Zanzibar through Ugogo, Tabora, and Ujiji and on to eastern Congo. These journeys lasted several years, criss-crossed large tracts of land, and involved wars and alliances, theft and disease, extortions and payoffs; one of his uncles and some of his men were “devoured” by the natives. All this hardship was undertaken in the name of trade—in slaves, ivory, and anything else—though surely there was also the underlying urge to travel. The caravans could include as many as a few thousand people.
For his last major trading journey, so much prestige had the man already acquired in Zanzibar that the Indian businessmen, the likes of Ladha Damji and Tharia Topan, were falling over their feet to give him credit. That journey lasted more than twelve years, during which Tippu Tip became sultan of a vast area of eastern Congo known as Utetera. When he finally returned to Zanzibar, having been called by the sultan, he was already acknowledged the “uncrowned King of Central Africa.” Colonization was in full swing, and soon after his arrival the Belgian government, seeking his influence in their African colony, requested him to return to Central Africa as governor of the province known as the Congo State. Tippu Tip accepted, at the advice of the sultan, who was desperate to maintain some influence in the interior. This time Tippu Tip travelled to the Congo in a ship, via South Africa, and with him was Stanley.
The European explorers are justly renowned for exploring Africa under great hardship; Tippu Tip, however, travelled greater distances for longer periods, and except for his last voyage home, from Tabora to the coast, he travelled on foot. He was a trader, disdaining the vanity and idealism of the explorers and missionaries. Nevertheless he came to the assistance of Livingstone in dire straits, accompanied Stanley on his way to the west coast, as well as Verney Lovett Cameron, on his way to become the first person to cross equatorial Africa, and Hermann von Wissmann, the first German to do so and later the subduer of the coastal insurgencies against the Germans and Governor of Tanganyika.
From Ujiji the driver takes me to a place he finds more interesting, where a spring emerges from the ground and the authorities have installed a tap for people to draw water. From here we go to Bangwe, where Mzee Memedi said the slaves were brought from Congo across the lake. Bangwe now is a large beach market, from where boats cross the lake with goods.
I get off on the main street in Kigoma. Mobile-phone booths are scattered about, selling “vocha”—prepaid vouchers—and there are the idle taxi drivers. As I have noticed in Dar, they are an educated, sprightly bunch. How long will these friendly exteriors last, if conditions don’t improve? Business is slow on the street, though much of it is wholesale; mattresses are on garish display, ready to be taken away in boats to the Congo, across the lake, where apparently nothing seems to be produced.
On the broken porch of a dingy little restaurant, its interior too dark to be inviting, a man is busy selling kahawa, and I sit down on a bench, if on
ly to view the street bathed in sunlight, watch the slow pace of commercial life. The kahawa is thick and opaque—the coffee is boiled thoroughly in an old, dented saucepan—but it’s fresh coffee, not always easy to find, and grown in the region. My newspaper gets shared around, the upcoming new constitution gets discussed. The fellow next to me, looking rather unkempt, and who could be from Burundi, I gather, cannot afford the kahawa—fifty cents. I order for him and he accepts with a casual dignity: I can afford it, he can’t, I treat him. He tells me he cannot find a job. He’s had eight children, of which four were boys and died; the four girls are prostitutes. And there’s a little one, he adds as an afterthought.
Finally I make my way uphill to my host’s house—all the time the long slave traders’ road to Bagamoyo on my mind. How to respond authentically at this remove in time; yet the image persists, demands. My way to Shabir’s is winding and quiet, the road rough, the vegetation mostly grass. In better times this hill would be developed. Down below is the blue water of Lake Tanganyika, the MV Liemba waiting to go to Zambia. At a fork I ask a man my way. He walks with me. Everybody knows Shabir.
That evening I go to khano with the family; I do want to see what the Khoja community here is like. It turns out to be tiny, a fragment of the glory it once was. There are fourteen people present, yet a lot of effort has been taken to set up the place, with flowers and incense and food offerings. Three women, including Shabir’s wife and daughter, are in salwar-kameez, which is a sign of status but never was the traditional outfit for Asian women in this country. One woman has had her hair dyed a dirty blond. The men are in the traditional casuals of the nation, the Kaunda suit. There are three youths present, all belonging to the mukhi. Afterwards the men and women sit outside in the veranda and banter; Shabir throws in a double entendre. These people have known each other always, have grown up together, and with sinking hearts seen their numbers dwindle. And so the humour is spiked with their unexpressed anxieties.
