And Home Was Kariakoo (28 page)

We drive back up and pause at the ruins. Situated atop a rise, overlooking the lake, this is where the German colonialists first set
up in the area. It’s a good, scenic location for an administrative headquarters, were it not for the mosquitoes. Parts of the original red-brick structure have been built over and extended, and show signs of occupation. The original walls, where present, are thick, the windows and doors are arched. This is it, a bit of local history.

Back in Tukuyu we sit out on the porch of a rather pleasant but empty restaurant on the main street and have instant coffee, with roasted corn brought to us by a street vendor. Before us are the former Indian buildings with their stucco facades that date them to the 1960s. Their names, which would have been at the top, have been erased—evidence of the venom that socialism could release—but I can read “Ladha” faintly on one of them. I wonder if it belonged to the family whose son came to study at my high school in Dar, and whom I met in London recently after several decades. Upon his arrival at our school he had introduced himself as the most handsome boy of Tukuyu, causing a ripple of merriment and teasing. There is also the Makanji Mansion, the only name that has been allowed to stay, because the letters stand up on the top edge of the terrace wall to become a decorative landmark. The town is quiet, with low-energy activity—the muhogo seller, the corn seller, the newspaper vendor, and our quiet café. The sun shines brightly and it’s still a beautiful day.

Early morning at the house, sitting outside at the porch set—round table, four chairs—I am reminded of the casual style of life we termed or thought of as “European.” Who in today’s frantic Dar, European or otherwise, can afford this leisure? It takes all one can do simply to keep up a lifestyle, even a modest one. Leisure is bought and timed, parcelled. It rained all last night, vigorously, and this morning the outside looks engorged. Some worker singing nearby, a
birdcall, insect chirps. And this is the dry season, Mpeli says with satisfaction. But Mbeya, an hour away, can get really dry, they’ve seriously cut down trees there, including something called the Mbeya Forest. I tell him of the area in Dar es Salaam behind our former primary school, which was all woods once, with mango and coconut trees and lantana bushes. Not a tree left now.

Mpeli and I often talk of “then” and “now,” how the spirit of Uhuru (independence) is gone, how it’s every man and woman for themselves. It’s by now an old African complaint, of course—the betrayal after independence—and the subject of several important novels, but that doesn’t make it less real. There is a contradiction here, also, for it was the enthusiasm of the post-independence period followed by socialist zeal that destroyed much, including the education system and the lamented Mbeya Forest.

The Moravian Christian mission is a large property off the highway and on the slope of Rungwe, not far from Tukuyu. The road is rough but thankfully short. As soon as we park and alight, under a large tree, out of the vehicle that’s been following us emerges a tall, sharply dressed man in black trousers, black jacket, and white pointed shoes. He could be mistaken for a night club operator but is in fact the chief executive of the mission. He looks anxious because his wife collapsed in the bathroom earlier this morning and he has to head back; but first he takes us to his office, inside a long, white, iron-roofed house. He tells me he recently visited Canada and gives me a brief history of the mission. He points out on the wall the framed photos of all the previous executives of the Moravian mission, starting with the Germans who founded it, followed by the British, and then the Africans. One of his predecessors left him a sword symbolizing, I suppose, his role as a soldier of Christ. Was it ever used as a weapon?
I don’t ask. After more polite talk, the executive takes me to the new Rungwe Archive and Museum Centre building next door.

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Photo Caption 15.1
)

The Moravian Church, according to a 1957 handbook at the museum, is a Protestant order officially called the Church Order of the Unitas Fratrum. It was founded in 1457 in Bohemia (in the present-day Czech Republic). In 1620 or thereabouts when Roman Catholicism was in its ascendancy, the Moravian Church was completely suppressed; its members went underground and dispersed. It re-emerged a hundred years later in present-day Germany.

On March 31, 1891, four missionaries left the Moravian centre in Herrnhut, Germany, and arrived at the mouth of the Zambezi River (in present-day Zimbabwe), from where they embarked on a long journey north. The Berlin conference under the auspices of Bismarck had recently taken place and the scramble for Africa was well underway. The missionaries had to take the longer route because
of troubles on the coast in German East Africa (Tanganyika), then seething with resistance. They stopped at Kapugi, at the Free Church of Scotland mission (which does not seem to exist now), where Dr. Kerr Cross who was in charge welcomed them and recommended that they go up to Rungwe. Two of the missionaries, Meyer and Richard, arrived at Rungwe Hills and were welcomed by thirteen-year-old Chief Mwakapalila on August 21, 1891. The place was consecrated and a church built. Richard stayed here until 1903, Meyer until 1916. The vision which that wandering German missionary, Johann Krapf, dreamt only fifty years before, of Christian missions “spreading the Gospel throughout the benighted region round Lake Niassa,” and beyond, it would appear, has came true. The Moravian mission proselytizes actively, and currently Tanzania boasts the largest number of Moravians in the world. The Rungwe Mission oversees activities on the coast and in Zanzibar, as well as in Malawi. There are a high school in Rungwe, a new university in Mbeya, and three girls’ hostels built specifically so that schoolgirls do not have to travel long distances and suffer molestation.

The Archive and Museum Centre is a new red-brick building with a pretty garden in front. The archivist is a young man, a bony lad called Mohamed Ayub Junior. It turns out, however, that records from German times are missing; it is possible that the missionaries removed them during the First World War. In fact there is nothing here from before 1927 that I can see. Junior—as the archivist calls himself—is aware of this lacuna. When the director comes around to inquire how I’m doing, I inform him of the missing years and he makes a show of mild surprise. Details such as these don’t appear to bother him. He repeats that he was in Canada not long ago, and later asks if I can find something for his son there. On a small shelf in the office there is a
Life of Bismarck
, a German–Nyamwezi dictionary a
hundred years old, and a Latin word book from the same period. Among the correspondence, a long and polite letter from a young man to the Church in the 1950s asks it to prepare for the country’s independence, in its outlook and its leadership. The young man turns out to be Mpeli’s father.

A walking tour with Junior. It’s still pleasantly cool and sunny outside, in the distance are the hills and forests, and in this haven in their midst all is neat, picture-clean, and quiet; the gardens are tended and the lawns mowed, the few small buildings are well preserved. We cross a stream over a quaint bridge of cut logs, walk past the modern church, a red-brick affair, then past the site of the first church, where there’s only a little shop now with a few young men sitting around, and reach the old cemetery. There are not more than twenty headstones on an uneven ground, some recently placed. But there are some child graves from German times. Most of the European expatriates, it would seem, were able to return home, but some had to leave their dead offspring behind. We proceed to the place where Meyer and Richard first pitched their tents, but the path is steep and covered with wet leaves, so we turn back. There’s a natural spring which supplies free water to the area. It was used to run a generator not long ago, supplying the area with electricity, before the national electric company convinced the Church authorities to switch over; the generator fell to disuse and pillage. Now the mission has to deal with outages, like the rest of the country, and not everyone gets electricity, as they used to.

I ask Junior if he had trouble getting his job, with a name like Mohamed. He says his father is a Muslim, his mother a Christian. And he himself? He has a choice. And he’ll choose to be a Christian? Yes, but he’s not yet told his father, who’s travelling. And his name—has he picked a new one? He’s the first-born, he says, so he
can’t change his name, which is why he’s adopted “Junior.” Ingenious, though what will the Church fathers say? Christian–Muslim coexistence in a family is not unusual; it’s in the nature of Tanzanian society to accept and live with others’ beliefs. The animosity and suspicion of recent times is due to outside influence—the Christian evangelists from America promising miracle cures, the Muslim fundamentalists promising the same, while also proliferating mosques.

The museum, housed in a single room, is small but impressive. The display consists of Nyakyusa weapons (mostly spears), traditional constumes, and historical photographs. Men and women, when the Europeans first came, wore a metal ring around the waist from which a cloth went around the crotch. The history of the Church is told pictorially by means of the photographs and detailed captions. There’s no mention of the boma—now the district office—down the road, though I understand that the grandfather of the chief executive was shot to death by the Germans.

What was the relationship of the Church to the boma? How did they each respond to the European War? What was the Nyakyusa response to the Church initially? A large number joined it. Membership did bring benefits, in the form of schooling and good jobs, and the Church has been ready to go with the times. It’s a pity that critical information about the early, formative years is missing; it could not all have been destroyed, perhaps it lies scattered around in foreign archives. Mpeli is of the opinion that recent foreign visitors have been pilfering papers. It’s not hard to do so. The century-old Nyamwezi–German dictionary waits to be taken home by some bibliophile.

T
HE ROAD TO
M
BEYA IS SMOOTH AND HILLY AND LIVELY
, the wayside markets more densely packed the closer we get to the town. There’s an abundance of carpentry shops, since wood is aplenty. We see heaps of bananas and tomatoes for sale, we pass stands of eucalyptus and fir trees. The police checkpoints are an irritant, and surely there to keep the force occupied, and take bribes, as many people will say; they do let you know that the government is always watching. Mbeya is a dusty, sprawled-out town; the side roads for the most part are dirt-surface and back-breaking. In the past, I’m told, there was a large golf course in town belonging to the Mbeya Club—but in the interest of egalitarianism when capitalist “bloodsuckers” were despised, it was put to disuse and sold, and now, with capitalism back in favour again, the land is commercial and residential. There are an impressive number of colleges in Mbeya, including the new Moravian university, Teofilo Kisanji University (
TEKU
), at the outskirts. It is our first stop.

The campus, tucked behind neat boundary walls, is small but impressive; the road to it is rough, the ride pure torture. The programs offered by the university are education, business, technology,
and theology. A class has been let out, and a rush of young people emerges outside into the sunshine, the scene is heartwarming and familiar. I’m not sure why Mpeli has brought me here, except for me to look at the campus and for us both to pay respects to the vice-chancellor. There’s a lull in the day’s activity in the administrative block, due to a power outage, and the place is dark when we arrive. The vice-chancellor’s office is modest; we meet a tall and very urbane man with whom we talk about this and that—my event the next day at the Mbeya Club, books, and publishing.

The road into Mbeya clamours with business. This is the “new,” booming Mbeya, outside the older town. We stop at a liquor store in a two-storey building, whose owner is the sponsor of my event. An unassuming man with a brisk manner and a sense of humour, not a Nyakyusa, I guess. He studied in the Soviet Union and is married to a Ukrainian. He gives me his take on why academics are inept at business: they follow rules without sense. He comes to stand with us outside his store as we depart, and he points to a tall building under construction next door. It will soon be completed, he says, though without the necessary permits; an academic would still be waiting for permission. There is a lesson or two in this example that I cannot quite untangle.

We put up at a decent but modest hotel called the Karibuni, run by a European evangelical Christian who broke away from the Rungwe Moravians. Part of the premises is rented out to another European group, on a mission to translate the Bible into all the languages of Tanzania. “God speaks your language!” proclaims the back of one of their white four-wheelers. The Christians have targeted this and other areas with all the ardour of the space race of a few decades ago, but I am also reminded of the ardour and ambition of the intrepid German missionary Johann Krapf who came long before
them. My room is clean and efficiently furnished, though the overhead lamp is hidden behind the mosquito-net canopy, and the towel provided would make a horse flinch—a form of Christian penitence perhaps.