by M G Vassanji
We pass a stretch of road called Uwanda wa Ndege, or “airport,” a downhill bend where speeding vehicles would fly off the curve into the valley below; now there are speed bumps to prevent such deadly accidents. Another patch of road is the site of a recent oil tanker crash; the local residents rushed to the toppled tank to help themselves to the oil, while someone thought it smarter to steal the battery, which sparked. Some forty people were killed in the explosion. As a reporter Felix had to go and view the gruesome remains of charred bodies; for months afterwards the mere sight of meat turned his stomach. He points to a coal-mining site in the distance, developed by the Chinese, subsequently sold to a politician’s relative, and now more or less defunct. It would have generated 3MW of power. It has been proposed now to let the Chinese run it. Finally we are down inside the valley, and arrive at Kyela and get off on the main road, where Felix’s brother runs a hotel and restaurant. We find him inside a large barnlike hall, relaxing at a table with two other men. Business looks dull. It’s around noontime, the place is empty. I’m asked if I wish to stay the night, and I say no. We have sodas, the talk is politics. The local MP has been investigating corruption, and the men believe there have been attempts on his life.
Kyela is a thriving rice market. In the milling area, a large and busy square surrounded by shops, rice is spread out on the ground to dry, people free to walk on it, trucks to pass over; heaps of bags wait to be taken away, while a loud and cheerful bunch of women wait around for their rice to return from the mills. The town is compact, with a frontier feel to it. The Malawi border is close by and easily crossed. Kyela is known for Malawi marijuana—the best, they say—and sugar, and street vendors walk by calling out biscuits from Blantyre. On the main road, buses come and go, and the side streets are busy with shops, restaurants, guest houses, and hotels. After walking around the town, and treating ourselves to a simple meal of soda and roasted muhogo, we depart on one of several buses clamouring for custom; but not before witnessing a fight between competing bus conductors.
You think the constant police presence on the highways is an irritant, placed there by a harassing government; but when your bus stops on the highway and you are summarily transferred to another one, which then keeps piling up passengers and dropping them off regardless of space and safety, and it’s getting late and dark and there’s no electricity anywhere, you feel you need them to check the runaway overcrowding and violation of contract—but where are they now, these police? One of them finally appears at a stop, gets in, looks around; the conductor quietly takes him outside to the side of the bus and returns, and we are off. A bribe has been paid. Of course, to be fair, this overcrowded bus in the dark, chickens included, unsafe as it is, is the only means by which many people can get home.
We departed Kyela at four, arrive at the Mbeya bus station at close to nine; a car ride would have taken us not more than two hours.
An SMS from Mpeli says there’s no electricity at the Karibuni, there’s a blackout, and therefore I should go to the Mbeya Hotel, which is what I do. I find him sitting near reception with his laptop, preparing notes for the TEKU board meeting the next day. Such are the frustrations of getting things done.
In 1958, a “tourist” arrived in Mbeya, and wrote about it as follows:
Mbeya is a little English garden-suburb with no particular reason for existence. It was built in the 1930s as a Provincial capital at the time when gold was mined there. Now there is a little aerodrome and a collection of red roofs among conifers and eucalyptus trees, a bank, a post office, a police station. There is also an hotel, named after a non-existent railway, where at that time, it was reputed, there lurked some disgruntled English journalists who had been forbidden entrance to Nyasaland.…
The visitor was Evelyn Waugh, travelling from Mombasa to Rhodesia, mostly by road. He had already visited Tanga, Dar, and Kilwa. Back in Dar, he was driven to Iringa in a Mercedes, and from there came to Mbeya in a Land Rover, where he stayed with a Mrs. Newman, who forbade him to stay at the Railway Hotel with its disreputable clientele.
That hotel was posh and European by local standards, serving such exotic delectables as oxtail soup, roast beef, and peas. It is now called the Mbeya Hotel and is owned by Khoja Ismailis—a large photo of the Aga Khan is displayed in the office—who’ve done well with it. There’s a porch, parking, and a garden. The bar is decent, the food is mostly Indian and excellent; no wonder it’s crowded this evening. The manager looks like a recent immigrant, speaking Hindi or Urdu with the owners, who are themselves Gujarati-speakers. At a table nearby sit some foreign construction workers; at another some young Indian men discuss schools, safety, the virtues of Mbeya compared with those of Arusha as places to settle. These are the new Indian entrepreneurs, a world apart from my ancestors who came in dhotis and turbans a hundred years ago; these young men are trim and fit, they wear smart casuals and carry laptops and briefcases and represent the multinationals of a new India. And they are the foreigners.
The next day, starting from Mbeya Hotel I take a walk through the old town. It’s quaint and quiet, with the typical strips of one-storey buildings with businesses; a plain Hindu temple, the priest or caretaker sitting idly outside—infinitely remote from the bustle of India. On the other side of Karume Avenue are the wealthy houses, where the Europeans, and perhaps Waugh’s Mrs. Newman, must have stayed. The Khoja prayer house has nothing to distinguish it, yet it’s impossible to miss on Jamatkhana Road.
A few years ago, that intrepid American traveller Paul Theroux came by Mbeya. He found it “a habitable ruin.” In his travelogue Dark Star Safari, he went on to write,
In a town like Mbeya I understood the sense of futility.… In such towns I felt: no achievements, no successes, the place is only bigger and darker and worse. I began to fantasize that the Africa I travelled through was often like a parallel universe, the dark star image in my mind, in which everyone existed as a sort of shadow counterpart of someone in the brighter world.
In other words, a dark continent. How do you explain to a fleet-footed traveller, who speeds through a place like the Road Runner, ignorant of the language and knowing nobody locally, and with naive arrogance reports to his brighter world about it, that there is life here, and all that living entails? That the people who live here are not shadows or mere creatures but human; all you need to do is touch them.
My session at the Mbeya Club goes well. The club was once exclusive, of course, and one easily imagines the snooker table, the card tables, liveried waiters, the bar. Mpeli repeats that it once had the best golf course south of the Sahara. What remains now is an underutilized stub of a building. There are some forty to fifty people present, which is surprising for this dark, cool night when the town looks essentially dead; the food has been donated, as have the drinks. Among the audience are a handful of foreign workers in the medical field, including a young Ethiopian American woman, who explains to me why she is rootless and back in Africa. I read for the audience a story about the trauma of a boy leaving home to go to America; it’s an old one, set at a time when going away was a daunting process portending a perhaps permanent exile, but it has a completeness, and a relevance even today, I think. It tells in fictionalized form how I myself went away. Then I say what I have said many times before, why it’s important to tell our own stories, write our own history. I prove my credentials because I don’t come as an outsider, or speak as one; I am from Uhuru Street, now living in Canada. The Street runs through my veins.
There are many questions, there is overall a great deal of satisfaction. We should have more meetings like this one, goes out the cry.
Early the next morning Mpeli takes me to the bus station; on the way he gives me a tour of the town. We are early and take breakfast at a stall, tea and chapati—which is fried and what I would call a paratha—then we say goodbye, and I leave for Dar.
The bus is an “express,” which means that it does not stop on the way, except for a few rest stops beside bushes, and a quick sto
p for meals, when we are told to be back in ten minutes, to bring the food with us if necessary. We rush back with fried chicken, cassava, rice, chips. As usual, a candy and a bottle of water from the conductor, and later a soda. There are two television screens to show movies; the intrusion is annoying on one hand, but the local productions are also instructive and amusing, with a very distinctive local humour, and therefore easily engage the passengers. In one, a blustering, bullying man learns that he cannot push around his office-working wife anymore; by the time she’s finished with him, he’s begging her for attention. The characters live wealthy lifestyles in well-furnished homes, though far from the opulent extravaganzas of Indian film and TV. The women are young and pretty, wear western dresses and have straightened hair. On the other hand many of the women and girls I have seen in Dar and on this trip have beautiful and intricate corn-rows, displaying a fashion taking off in just the opposite direction.
It takes thirteen hours to get to Ubungo station in Dar. And then two more hours of traffic to get to my host’s house.
17.
Book, Medicine, and Spirit
IN DAR ES SALAAM ONE MORNING, the Asian owner of the hotel in Oyster Bay where I happened to be staying, Mr. Solanki, asked me if I wished to consult a mganga—there was an African wunderkid who had shown amazing powers in solving all kinds of problems and bringing good luck. I would be well advised to see him.
Ashok Solanki, a short rotund man in his forties, wearing a grey Kaunda suit, belonged to the Kumbhad, or potter—a so-called “lower”—Indian caste, whose community used to live in the poor, self-contained neighbourhood of Dar es Salaam called the Kumbhad wadi. Here in an enclosed compound in a corner of downtown they had their rather basic residences, no more than shacks, where they produced assorted earthenware, which they would take around in pull-carts to sell in the Asian streets of the city. Their red clay pots were used for storing boiled water for drinking, and their rounded, shallow pans—the tawas—for baking chapatis. As children we would sometimes be cajoled during the holidays to go to Kumbhad wadi and fetch clumps of wet clay to play with and keep ourselves busy. In the heyday of socialism, the late President Nyerere paid a visit to this Kumbhad village and praised its communal, self-help style of living. The daily paper printed a photo of that visit and the potters became famous. Where other Asians were often caricatured as capitalist exploiters, bloodsuckers with long straws (though most eked out a living in small trade), here were the true and exemplary socialists living right in our midst.
Since that time, I discovered, many of the potters had done well economically and moved into other, more profitable businesses; some became mechanics, others drove taxis. The old Kumbhad wadi neighbourhood was now occupied by a few apartment buildings, though it was still set apart. Solanki himself was in construction and owner of the Karibu, one of the leading hotels in the city, in Oyster Bay; his daughter attended the exclusive International School, which had invited me to Dar and put me up at the hotel. That morning, Solanki, having introduced himself, had taken me to his office and treated me to chai. He had proudly pointed to the photo, hanging on a wall, of that famous presidential visit to the Kumbhad wadi. After some chitchat, he recommended to me the wunderkid, the boy-mganga, whose name was Sheikh Sharriff. All my troubles would go away. Did I look so troubled? But I was curious. Was it from such help that Ashok Solanki had gone from potter’s son to local tycoon? He had already consulted Sheikh Sharriff before, he told me, now he needed more advice before starting on a new venture.
The next morning when I came down, Solanki had already left; obviously his business with Sheikh Sharriff was urgent, not to mention too private for my ears. But later his driver was ready with a Mercedes to take me. On the way, on a tape recording I was treated to the life story of the boy—his ominous birth, the miracles he had performed. He had begun to speak when he was only nine months old, all of a sudden, when he reminded his mother of a vow she had made when pregnant with him, that she would take him to a mosque. Both his parents were Christians, his father was a former policeman. The boy refused the name they gave him, Fidelis. He also refused the names that various Muslim sheikhs offered, and preferred to call himself Sheikh Sharriff. He had since gathered a large following.
The driver took me to Temeke, into a neighbourhood with houses of the traditional type—plastered mud walls, tin roof, a front porch supported by an upright or two. Coconut and mango trees were scattered over the neighbourhood, giving shade from the sun; the ground was sand. We parked under a tree, and as we approached a house, a gathering of about thirty people was being dismissed outside with a prayer; the driver pointed out Sheikh Sharriff, a little boy of about seven wearing kanzu and cap and barefoot, trotting away by himself. The driver spoke to the father, a tall and burly man, who replied brusquely, “Wait,” and strode away to the house, which had two entrances. We followed and were told by someone to sit and wait in one of the two corridors leading inside, where we met the boy’s two older brothers, attired traditionally like the father and the boy. After a while we were instructed to proceed into the second corridor, which we did through the backyard and entered one of the rooms. It was empty, but soon two charcoal braziers were brought and placed on the ground. This was going to be a private session. It occurred to me that the family wouldn’t want too many Asians to be seen here: Asians meant money, and presumably corruption.
Sheikh Sharriff shuffled in, preoccupied with two toy cars he was clutching in his hands. Very much a shy little boy. Behind him walked his father. I could sense that my beard perturbed the father—he seemed suspicious, perhaps, that I was an orthodox Muslim (nothing could be further from the truth) who might denounce his prodigy and call out the sheikhs. The boy’s lack of attention embarrassed him.
A small number of men had now come inside to watch the proceedings.
“Sharriff,” said the dad, “these are the people who help us. Pray for them.”
Sharriff was playing with the cars. One of his brothers stepped up and took them from him. Then the father told the driver and me to reflect on our problems and needs, and he opened two of the packets of incense we had brought and sprinkled the contents onto the braziers. A scented smoke arose. The other packets were emptied into a partly full bottle. There was something remarkably bare-bones about this ritual, as though this were the mere outline, a postmodern enactment of an opera ordinarily more elaborate and complete.
Sharriff was asked to begin. Looking distractedly at the ground, he mumbled the name of a sura of the Quran, and either “three” or “five.”
This was hardly the articulate precocious child I had been told about and heard about in the cassette recorder, the wonderful young African Jesus who carried out serious discussions with elders in the mosques and performed miracles. As a brother recited the prescribed Quranic verse, all the men having raised both their hands in prayer, the boy began playing with a timing mechanism he had produced from somewhere, pressing it to move the digits. After three recitals, the men stopped, and the mechanism was taken away from the boy, who commanded, “More.” “You said three times,” said the brother. “Two more,” the child replied, sounding wilful. The verse was recited, and the litte sheikh named another sura, which was also recited. The session was over.
The driver put some money into the boy’s hands, who without looking at it gave it to his father. I put a bill into the little hands, and it too went to the father.
There was something to ponder in that small episode; from the outset it reflected comprehensively the complexities of Dar es Salaam’s multicultural, multiracial society, throwing up as well some delicious ironies and coincidences. Solanki’s resorting to the Temeke boy’s famous powers broke at once the traditional barriers to Asian-African and Hindu-Muslim interactions. Perhaps his “lower” caste background made that easy. Caste discrimination was still very much in existence in Dar, as I was soon to find out. The boy’s family itself combined Christian and Muslim faiths, the boy having been fashioned by hi
s minders into a caricatured Muslim Jesus. When I was asked during my session with him to think about my “shida,” my problem, I had brought to my mind a recent injury, which had recently received the services of a young Toronto physiotherapist of Tanzanian background. Did I believe in the boy’s powers? Hardly. I had long put my faith entirely on the rational. I could afford to, of course; others had to rely on miracles.
As we drove back from Temeke to Oyster Bay in the Mercedes, I saw displayed on the sides of bus shelters garish posters announcing a revival meeting, to be attended by pastors from Kenya, Uganda, and Canada, and calling on the public to bring their sick, blind, and lame to be prayed for.
I never found out if Sheikh Sharriff’s prayers had helped Solanki in his endeavours. In fact I never saw the hotel-owner again. But soon after that episode, when I had moved from his luxury hotel to the familiar and cheap, though mean-spirited Flamingo Guest House in Gaam, I came across an angry letter in the national daily that named Ashok Solanki and a few others as members of an Asian “mafia” that had “bought” the government but whose days were surely numbered. He had made his millions, it was said in the city, using the goodwill that the potter caste had gathered in the past due to their exemplary “socialist” living and the famous presidential visit. These days, as I had found out, he resorted to other help. Perhaps he ended up in England, where part of his family had already moved.
