And Home Was Kariakoo (38 page)

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T
HEY SOUND WISTFUL OR CYNICAL
, disappointed or resigned, the aging leftists of Dar who engaged with zeal with the new Africa, indeed the new world that had emerged in the 1960s; now passing middle age most are doing very well, for who in his right mind—there are a few—would try to live by their old idealist codes now that socialism is gone and there’s a free-for-all? For this meeting with some of them, I requested less food and more chat, having observed that those who can afford to, eat and eat. We meet at the Patel Brotherhood Club, an assortment of Asians—the term is too broad, just as “African” is—on the lawn of the old club house, which has been converted into an open-air restaurant. Of the club—tucked away in the midst of Gaam—a vestige remains. It had snooker and card tables, a dart board, and tennis courts; the cricket team was respectable. There are five of us today, the other four being Nadir, Harko, Chauhan, and Muzu. Nadir and Harko met in England in the 1970s, radicals ripened in Tanzania and coming out for African causes. Harko regales us with a humorous tale in which he stood before an almost all-black audience in London, to speak out against Idi Amin, when the audience evidently supported the dictator and
his anti-Asian rhetoric. Against all advice, Harko spoke his mind. His message was that Amin was bad for Africa and Africans, leave aside the Asians (who had been told to leave the country). Much to his bewilderment he received a standing ovation. He is an ebullient, quick-witted personality, who adventured in India—spending time with the Naxalite-Maoists—and the U.K., before returning to socialist Tanzania, where he became the English-language editor of the state-owned Tanzania Publishing House (TPH). This is where the question of race comes in.

There was a hint of it when I happened to mention earlier that in German times a few Asians had been hanged for supporting African resistance. And Harko said, briefly, “That should come in handy in the future.”

I remind Muzu, a professional photographer and an artist, about my first meeting with him, more than a decade ago, when I had been invited to Dar to spend two weeks at the International School, where his wife was employed. One afternoon I was asked to speak to a group of professionals in town, and at the meeting I had noted, indiscreetly and perhaps ungraciously, my surprise to see that all of them were Asians and no African was present. There was an uproar—who was I to judge them, coming from abroad. I still debate with myself if I should have been more prudent and refrained from that comment. I was being naive, but I had also hit a nerve. My offence was that these were the educated, progressive elite, and I had embarrassed them.

Now Nadir says, “How come when Africans talk of integration they only speak of intermarriage. It all comes down to fucking.”

“There is the attraction of the exotic,” I mention.

But Harko’s daughter is marrying an African Tanzanian, whom she met in the U.S., and the couple are returning home for
the wedding. “We explained to them the possible problems, and then it was their wish,” says the father.

Still on the subject of intermarriage, Chauhan, who is a businessman, and his wife are from different castes. There was so much opposition to their union, they had to elope. This was forty years ago. Now one of their sons is married to a Swede.

The subject is dropped.

Nadir is an architect. “We are all controlled by our wives,” he says. “But I don’t mind. And my wife doesn’t follow me around, doesn’t ask where I’ve been. Today I feel like drinking.” He is also an artist; one occupation gives him a handsome living, the other his passion.

We start with beer and move on to Scotch. They like to talk of wines here and drink it, but their expertise is beer and Scotch. The food is prawns, mishkaki, chicken, naan. Abundance.

The race question. Harko says, when an opening came up for the general manager at the TPH, he was the obvious choice. But he knew he would not get the post. There were rumblings against that idea. An Asian in a top publishing post, a sensitive one at the gates of culture in a socialist African country. And so he himself suggested the name of Walter Bgoya, who was working in the foreign office at the time, having just been sent down from the embassy in Addis Ababa for misbehaving. Harko went into business. And thus began Walter’s long career in publishing, and Harko’s rise in wealth.

We’ve perhaps had too much, it’s almost midnight, and ours is the only table left occupied. But Nadir wants to make a long night of it, therefore three of us decide to go to Harko’s house. Muzu, always in control, decides he has had enough and goes home.

Harko lives in Oyster Bay, behind the Canadian high commissioner. We drive to his house in a large SUV with all possible extras,
a car like which only one other person owns in Dar, he tells me. But, “Frankly,” he continues, “I was happier when I was younger.” When he returned to Tanzania, he was one of a political discussion group that met regularly, and included the country’s future president Benjamin Mkapa, as well as Walter Bgoya. Now he owns one of the country’s biggest fish-processing and exporting companies, and is on the way to moving into the chicken business. He does not quite fit into the role of a chicken and fish magnate, doesn’t much talk about the business. He obviously still thinks left, which is what’s responsible for his cynical humour. He visits India frequently, the music on the car is Indian—there is now in our generation an unabashed acceptance of Indian heritage without a feeling of betrayal. We arrive at the house, which as befits the area has a forbidding gate with guards, but there are no German shepherds. It’s a large, modern house with a pool, and was designed by Nadir. We sit outside by the pool so as not to disturb Harko’s wife and continue our imbibing until 3 a.m., when Harko, still remarkably alert, drives me to my hotel.

Harko is a Hindu, his wife is Ithnasheri Muslim. Nadir is a Khoja Ismaili, his wife is also Ithnasheri, sister of the leftist intellectual Hassan at Makerere. Hassan’s former wife is Fawzi; his current wife is a famous film director. Hassan, Shivji, and Abdul of Zanzibar are long-standing friends. And so they are all connected.

Nadir’s house, where I visit him one evening a few days later, is also in an exclusive area by the sea, and is designed by himself, naturally. He is a tall, soft-spoken man, who makes the cutting remark without Harko’s bite or exuberance. All the walls of the house are covered in paintings, his and others’. There’s a terrace on the first floor where we sit for a while under the stars, listening to the sound of waves, the swish of branches overhead. After a while we go up a level to his studio
where he shows me his art. The paintings tend to be abstract renderings of the political and mystical. The political ones depict the despair of the intellectual humanist. One of his series is in black and white and shows sections of the human body in various postures of power; it is a commentary on the oppression of the weak. Another series shows the human head and torso defaced and rendered grotesque with abrupt and haphazard-looking brushstrokes. Man turned beast.

Adjacent to the studio is his library. I met someone in Toronto who had visited Nadir’s house in Moshi when they were both in their teens. And what she remembered were the books, Nadir’s pride in them. He had shown her his books as he now does to me. The pride of place here is taken by his first editions. From him I learn that there is actually an archaic law in place that forbids importing or owning indecent pictures, sometimes as innocuous as simple nudes, and therefore he’s had struggles to release art books from Customs. In one instance his office assistant had to seek help from a relative in the security services.

People like him, educated abroad and living on the edges of society, find camaraderie with a few like-minded souls and a few expatriates. The latter are his patrons, those who seem to understand his art and encourage him. There is no other patronage of the arts in town. No one would understand his madness. And yet the same would be true if he were to move overseas, I reflect to myself, having observed Chinese, Pakistani, and Punjabi artists floundering in neglect in Toronto. When all’s said and done, despite foreign influences, he belongs here, where he has a context.

Later we sit on the terrace and have dinner as a gentle breeze blows in.

I first met Walter Bgoya at a dinner party in Issa Shivji’s house.

Shivji is an institution in the country. If you say you know Shivji, they—almost everyone, it seems—look at you with respect. He is consistent, he speaks his mind, he is honest. I lay a claim to him because we went to the same high school, he three grades higher than I.

I remember him as a founder of a student representative body in our school, called the Pupils’ Own Council (POC); it was a radical idea, allowed perhaps because the principal was an Irishman who loved our school where, he told us once, the attitude to learning was so much better than in British schools. POC created great excitement, and I recall Shivji on the stage with others giving a spiel. He was also involved in a movement called Moral Rearmament (MRA)—which was at the time making a push in Asia and Africa. This was an embarrassing episode, I believe, in Shivji’s life. He would have been sixteen or seventeen. Those were the days of our idealism, and these involvements reflected that idealism. One day some MRA representatives from England or America came to our school and made a big impression, selling a lot of books, which we could barely afford. But MRA was not heard of much again. Perhaps it was banned by the government, which also banned POC for supporting a student protest at the university. Shivji was a brilliant student and went on to study law. From all that I have heard, often with envy, the University of Dar es Salaam was a place throbbing with radical new ideas and optimism. It was where Uganda’s future president Museveni, and Tanzania’s, Mkapa, studied. Mahmood Mamdani of Uganda was here, as were Walter Rodney of Guyana and the Kenyan Swahili poet Abdilatif Abdalla (who became a jailmate in Kenya of the author Ngũgĩ). Professors of a liberal bent converged from all over the world, including Canada. Later Shivji became a professor
here, writing books and opinions, keeping in mind always the interests of the common people.

When I first returned to Tanzania, after a long absence and having just finished my first book, I went to meet Shivji—a person I had come to admire from a distance for his consistency, against what I saw as my own inconstancy and betrayal. I had never spoken to him before. We became friendly, though not quite friends, for he is a private person. He lived in Upanga in the same area and in the same kind of flat I had lived in during high school, and he has continued to stay there when anyone else with his influence would long ago have moved on to Oyster Bay.

It was at a dinner party at his modest home that I met Walter. At the end of the evening Walter drove me and another guest back. All I recall of that other passenger is that she was an Asian and had returned from the United States for a visit; when we dropped her off on India Street—the Bohra area—she quickly produced a black veil, put it on, and quite nonchalantly went on her way. The Bohra mulla in India had recently decreed stricter orthodox observances for his followers. Then Walter dropped me off nearby at the Flamingo on the perpetually potholed Jamat Street; it’s always surprised him whenever I stay there, but it’s at the heart of the Dar I grew up in.

During my next visit to Dar, I was a guest of the International School, which put me up in Oyster Bay. I had been asked to meet the pupils of every grade in the school. This was the first time I had stayed in that beautiful, breezy area by the ocean, and the sense I had then was of how times had changed. Oyster Bay was still lovely, though a bit more crowded; egalitarian. One evening when I returned to my hotel, a note was waiting for me, from Walter, chiding me for not having informed him that I was in town. We met several times during that visit; once we ate at an Indian vegetarian restaurant; a
few days later he took me to his home in Gaam, like Shivji’s a modest place, where I met his wife, Frida, and his young son, Mkuki, who made a drawing of me—which he showed me years later when he had returned from the U.S., a professional designer.

Walter had just left TPH, Tanzania Publishing House, and was now a dedicated independent publisher of Swahili books in a sliver-thin market. When I left Dar after high school, there were several bookstores in town, some of them new—the book business was booming. Now there was one belonging to a church and another, a meanly stocked, dusty one run by TPH. Life could not have been easy, and one could not help but admire Walter’s dedication. His office was in Kariakoo, behind Msimbazi Street—whose hustle and bustle becomes ever more forbidding with the years. It was where my grandmother, an uncle, and an aunt had their shops once, when my family moved to Dar from Nairobi. From Msimbazi, at the intersection of my aunt’s provision store, I walked three blocks on an unpaved street through a residential neighbourhood, passing bungalow-style traditional homes with sloping iron roofs, inquiring here and there for Bwana Bgoya, until I arrived at the house that was his office. There was an outer room, with a secretary, and an inner room where he sat surrounded by books—all that he would need, but it was not downtown where a professional business should be. The very site of a publishing firm in that humble neighbourhood spoke of resolve and rebellion. He told me how hard it was to sell books in the local market, spoke of everything he had tried, including book vans. There was an international collective based in London on which he relied to distribute abroad.

Since then he seems to have done well, though there have been snide remarks—the barest hints—I have heard about him and his old pal, former president Ben Mkapa. Perhaps the president put in a
word or two in his favour. Perhaps it’s the economic boom, however selective it is. But surely he deserves some reward for the essential but very thankless service he has performed for the country. There is no other publisher like him in East Africa. His new office is in a smart new business complex on the airport road, and occupies a good portion of the ground floor, the several rooms separated by glass walls. He has also bought the old TPH bookstore—which was one in name only—on Samora Avenue and converted it into a unique outlet for African titles. But Walter is not a businessman, not a good investment. A venture into a restaurant—an excellent one—is bound to fail because it is in an area where expats don’t go out to dine. He needs to move it, but where to find investors? His wealthy friends, Harko is one, know that Walter Bgoya is not a businessman. Still, even as he plans to move—office rent is too high—he thinks of new ventures. He organizes an annual book fair. And every month his son holds an open mike with book readings and jazz at the office premises.