And Home Was Kariakoo (25 page)

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 only 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.

I ask the mukhi about his business. It’s slow, he says, but will pick up. He sells plastic goods; periodically he takes them in a truck to sell in Congo. Isn’t that risky? Yes, but we have to do it. He is a small, soft-spoken man with cropped hair, wearing a dark grey Kaunda suit. A man trapped by circumstance, in a geography he doesn’t belong to anymore; time passed, took his lifestyle with it, and here he is. The trade he does has a continuity back to the
times of Tippu Tip and Stanley, his truck an extension of the caravans; but what future for his boys?

Before heading home we take a drive to Ujiji. We pass Mwanga first, a village where the highway becomes hectic with shopping and street life, shadows fleeting or standing around among lights dim and occasional. There seem to be no bars here. We drive on at a leisurely pace. To our right is the lake, a dull black space with a chain of glowing lights running through it like a strip of gold. These are the fishing boats. The fish will be sold at markets at the ports, some bound for Congo. But there is banditry on the lake too, Congolese pirates robbing fishermen of their outboard motors.

Ujiji is quieter, the nightlife here is of a subdued sort—men gathered or sitting outside their doorways. The streets are dark, people saving on electricity.

We turn around. As we approach Kigoma on the dark road, a row of closed shopfronts to our right, Shabir tells me, “All these shops were owned by Asians once. Every night they would be sitting outside, relaxing, chatting. It was the perfect life, of having enough, wanting little. A few hundred Khojas, a few hundred others.”

“What happened?” I ask. “Why did they leave?”

The tale goes back to the late 1960s.

Tejpar Lalji, the town’s most prominent businessman and a community elder, Shabir relates, had exceptionally lovely daughters, the eldest just out of her teens. The Regional Commissioner had his eye on her. When Tejpar got wind of this, he sent all his daughters off to Dar. One day Tejpar’s nephew happened to cross the road in front of the RC’s car as it was passing. The RC came out in a fury, told off the young man, and straightaway had him put behind bars. When the young man’s father went to inquire about his son, he too found
himself behind bars. Finally, Tejpar Lalji himself paid a visit to the RC, who told him plainly that he wanted to marry his eldest daughter. But my daughters are all in Dar, Tejpar said, which immediately landed
him
in jail. This sounds like an incident from a spaghetti western. There was at that time no free press to resort to, of course, and always fear of intimidation by some political bigwig, especially in the smaller centres of the nation. Dar es Salaam was always far, and every Regional or District Commissioner was a local sultan. Tejpar Lalji decided to move his entire family to Dar, and thus began the exodus.

What amazes me now is how easily, how readily a complete way of life was picked up and folded away like the props of a travelling show. Now in this pitch-dark Kigoma night as we arrive through the gates in Shabir’s SUV, as I hear the gates clang behind us and a dog bark and watch the two women precede us to the oversize door of the house, cheered by the family’s outing, a gloomy epiphany descends on me. The elegant salwar-kameezes reveal only a longing for elsewhere, where the Laljis have gone. The only place in Kigoma they can wear these bright, beautiful costumes is within the confines of that desolate, gated little khano with its fourteen people that is only a sad reminder of a thriving, hopeful past. Shabir on the other hand completely belongs in the local scene—early tomorrow he heads off by road and lake to the villages for party meetings, and for a few days will brave all the discomforts of rural existence. Meanwhile his wife spends her days at home watching Indian dramas by herself, and at night watches them with her daughter, the two daily discussing the vicissitudes in the lives of Priya or Ram, or some other young Punjabi fantasy creature dreamed up in Bombay, keeping Indian women enthralled from Kigoma to Nairobi to Vancouver. They are a lonely people, with no social life, no friends in town save for that decimated community. The daughter must marry. The frustration
and cynicism that the man of the house occasionally throws up fails to convince entirely—I recall the smile on his face as we landed in Kigoma and he jumped out, and I recall how he knows everybody, and they in turn know not only him but remember his father as well. The negativity is contrived perhaps to prepare him to yield to the desires of his family and depart to a future with grandchildren.

E
ARLY MORNING AT SIX IN
D
AR
, I am waiting anxiously in the front compound of the Serena for Joseph to join me. This is a convenient meeting spot, though all is quiet at this hour, except for the bus traffic slowly picking up outside on Ohio Street. With me is Kumar’s impatient driver. Just about when I’ve given up on Joseph, wondering if it’s worth taking on the journey south—to Lindi and farther—on my own, he arrives in a bajaji, calm as ever, and we head off to the bus terminal. It’s not Ubungo, as on previous journeys out, but Temeke—a muddy patch of ground with only one other bus waiting to depart. Kumar got me the tickets, not well in advance obviously, because our seats are at the very back, and every speed bump and rough patch is sheer torture. The bus, bearing the woman’s name Najma, is old and dark inside, the seats partly torn, and carries a strong body odour. It’s not been washed since arriving last night—we are going to a neglected part of the country, after all. Joseph has a smart phone this time, so our chats are shorter, I have to share time with news arriving from Nairobi. It’s no surprise he’s been so hard to get hold of. Staying close to the coast, we cross a bridge over the mighty Rufiji, which is muddy and swirling, bypass Kilwa, and arrive at Lindi midafternoon.

Our local contact here is Abbas, courtesy of Kumar, and we find him in the cluttered back office of the local petrol station, from where he runs his little empire. He has a spare white beard on the chin, wears a plain bush shirt and trousers, and is ensconced permanently—it appears—in his stuffed chair before a large and ancient wooden desk, dealing with business over the phone as it arises and despatching one of his waiting assistants to take care of it when necessary.

In answer to a query, he tells us cashews are abundant here in the south, the problem is distribution. He gives us the typical Asian story about local inefficiency and waste. During the days of socialism, the government in its wisdom acquired five cashew processing and packaging plants, instead of an experimental one to test the market. The factories could not compete with Indian products and now lie abandoned. He himself runs a water-bottling plant that supplies water to the entire region. He is wealthy, but appears modest and straitened.

His driver gives us a tour of the town. Lindi consists of a lovely beach, behind which is the meagre town centre, and beyond that are the hills. One of the hills is called Mtanda, where the Europeans once lived. Abbas’s son has a beautiful house here, but the area looks rather barren, the vegetation consisting of trees and scrub. We pass through Wireless Hill, where the government offices were moved in anticipation of the sea level eventually rising and washing over the old town. Of the town itself there is not much besides small shops and houses on mostly unpaved streets.

Abbas has made reservations for us at a hotel called Adela. My room is called Mosko (for Moscow), Joseph has Cuba, reflecting an outdated political culture. Abbas also tipped us with the name of a restaurant which makes good biriyani, and that’s where we head for dinner. The streets are dark and quiet, but for the occasional pedestrian and a lamp in a house or shop. The restaurant is run by a
Somali woman, and she tells us they have run out of biriyani and pilau, so we have rice and curry instead.

What does one do at night in a town like this? From what I know, there used to be a healthy Asian population here; their activities would have centred around the prayer houses. There was an excellent high school in town, with a cricket team to match. Now the few Asians here spend what time they can in Dae. That is where Abbas is headed tomorrow.

In the middle of the night the power goes out, the room turns black and feels unbearably hot and claustrophobic. The next morning at seven we take a bus called “Happy” to Mtwara. On the way, after a stretch of mangrove swamp, we arrive at the town of Mikindani, overlooking a beautiful bay. Mikindani is ancient, and it seems a good idea to stop and look around. We go for chai and chapati at a roadside restaurant and make it known to the boy waiter our interest in the local historical sites. He looks nonplussed, says he’ll ask around, but then an elder, neatly dressed in shirt and trousers and a kofia, who’s also having chai, offers to take us around.