No New Land (3 page)

The Germans, in their time, had a standard punishment for offences, called simply “Twenty-five,” for the number of strokes of a whip. The British later made their standard an even two dozen, though administered only through the courts. Haji Lalani would sometimes, for example, tell his sons of how a famous Pir punished his only son with one hundred strokes which he completed well past the death of the son, who had dared to consume alcohol. With the lover Akber, Haji Lalani took the German option and beat his son senseless using a schoolmaster’s cane. Young Shamshu was whisked to the female quarters, and middle-son Nurdin stood glued, tearfully watching from behind a shelf, muttering “Please, please,” wishing his father would stop.

Narandas moved away with his family. Akber was married off to a local girl, and a year later moved to Tabora, inland. Later he went to Belgian Congo.
Fifty years after the store first opened in Dar, business seemed to be waning. Substitutes for what it sold were vast in number, and shops were opening up all over town to sell them. Monkey Brand charcoal tooth powder had to compete with Colgate and Pepsodent; Shikakai soap, by which girls with long thick tresses had sworn for decades, yielded to Lux and Palmolive, advertised by the likes of Sophia Loren at the cinema. To top it all, after the British left, import licences became scarce. Haji Lalani, entering his seventies, did not have the energy to diversify or expand his business, a job for a younger man. Of the two sons who still lived with him, Nurdin withered to ineffectualness under his father’s eye and Shamshu was simply a loafer. The shop remained open to give the old man something to do, for which the elderly who had come to depend on it over the years were grateful. His one remaining pleasure was to discuss religion, which he did with others of his age and inclination, and with Missionary, a younger man who had come to Africa during the Second World War.

Of his son, Nurdin – who had survived without giving offence and without special protection – Haji Lalani did not think much. If anything at all, he thought him a good-for-nothing, a bumbler, one likely to drop a cup of tea when serving a guest. But in school and among friends Nurdin Lalani was a middling kind of boy. Neither short nor tall, somewhat skinny, he was not one to take risks but was always game for mischief or a laugh, always with
spare change or comic books to lend. He was prone to be the butt of jokes of the rowdier boys, the gang leaders, but these, as he grew older, he learned to manipulate, simply by sharing prudently his generous allowance.

After Nurdin finished school, failing his Junior Cambridge Certificate as many boys did, he tried his hand at various jobs, even at running a business, but with no success. At the prospect of working with his father, he sulked and complained to his mother and sisters. His father finally asked Missionary to find him a job. Missionary, a charismatic, fiery speaker whose fame had spread countrywide, after a few inquiries announced a job for Nurdin: sales representative for the Bata Shoe Company, in Central Province. The job required travel by train and car up-country, and Nurdin was finally free of his father’s sceptical eye.

Finally it came time for the young man to get married. Here too Missionary was approached. He ran a class for religion teachers, and he proposed for Nurdin nothing less than his star pupil, Zera. Nurdin acquiesced. His father operated like Fate. To oppose him even for the sake of a gesture would have been to unleash a fury and a storm he had no desire to face. If he probed his innermost desires, then the girl of his dreams was smart and fair, with boy-cut hair, who was comfortable in high heels, spoke English nicely, and perhaps even had been abroad. What hope did he have of that? Zera had none of these qualities. But she looked after and spoke up for him.
And Haji Lalani was elated because he had someone he could make religious talk with, at home.

The place where Haji Lalani died, at Oyster Bay, was a peaceful spot under the gently swaying branches and rustling leaves of two neighbouring trees. They had discovered it together once, he and Missionary, and came whenever they could. It was, according to Missionary’s calculation and sure knowledge, one of precisely forty such spots on the face of this earth, whose heavenly bliss, especially after a recent rainfall, was incomparable. Angels, he said, danced in the sunbeams that fell on this sacred place.

When Missionary and Mr. Fletcher placed Haji Lalani’s body carefully in the back seat of the car, they placed his fez cap beside him. It was forgotten in the car, and Mr. Fletcher one day returned it to one of Missionary’s sons in school. Missionary saw his teenagers playing with the fez, each trying it on, and he retrieved it, sending them away with a few slaps. He kept the red fez as a memento of his dead friend.

It was as if with Haji Lalani a whole era died, a way of life disappeared. Some would say it was the onset of the new era that killed him. Certainly the changes that took place only two years later would have been beyond his wildest dreams.

A few years before, British Prime Minister Macmillan, speaking in southern Africa, hailed the winds of change then sweeping over Africa; in effect, by this very speech unleashing the winds that would accomplish the changes in British East Africa, beginning with independence. By the time Missionary and Haji Lalani’s two sons buried the old man, the winds of change had turned into a hurricane. It was a sign of the changing times that Haji Lalani was buried at the new cemetery, an inland site chosen by the new, independent government. At the old, venerated cemetery facing the Indian Ocean, the earth had already been turned, spirits and jinns exposed and rendered powerless, the bones of the Asian dead transplanted to the new site. The only redeeming feature of this new spot, it was said, in the wry humour that usually follows a funeral, was the presence close by of the new Drive-in Cinema, to which the unsettled souls could go to watch India’s Rajesh Khanna frolic in the grass with a sari-clad beauty, or America’s Charles Bronson mow down his enemies with a machine gun.

The idea of empire was relinquished slowly in the Asian communities. Right up until independence, letters would arrive addressed ostensibly to someone in the “British Empire” or “British East Africa.” The Asians had spawned at least two knights of the empire in their slums, they had had Princess Elizabeth in their midst, greeted Princess Margaret with a tumultuous welcome. They spoke proudly of Churchill and Mountbatten, fondly of
Victoria. What schoolboy or girl had not heard over the radio the reassuring chimes of Big Ben before falling asleep, or the terrified voice of Dickens’s Pip, the triumphant voice of Portia, the Queen’s birthday message.

Independence came suddenly but not cruelly. The police and army stayed on, the governor spoke kind words and stayed on as governor general for a year, “Godspeed” said the colonial secretary, Prince Philip waved goodbye. Above all, in the first few days, the newspaper was reassuring, educating people in their new role as citizens of a new country on the world stage, a member of that brotherhood the United Nations, a nonaligned country. It all was fun and excitement, like growing up, being allowed to go out at night, standing up with the adults.

But the winds had only now gathered strength; the fury soon began. The governor general duly left after a year and a republic was declared. On the island of Zanzibar, some twenty-five miles from Dar, a coup finally toppled Arab rule in a bloody revenge by the descendants of the slaves. If it could happen in sleepy Zanzibar, it could happen anywhere. As if confirming the worst fears, within a few weeks followed army mutinies in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika, quelled, embarrassingly enough, with the help of British commandos. During the short-lived mutiny in Dar, looking out, frightened, through their windows, Asians witnessed their shops being looted. Zanzibar, in British and American eyes, became the Cuba of Africa. Cubans were, in fact,
rumoured to be on the island, as were Russians, East Germans, and Chinese. Africa is ripe for revolution, said Chou En-lai. Now you could see Chinese men on Dar streets and buy Chinese goods, such as imitations of Parker pens, in the stores. Finally, a new dawn was proclaimed, the beginning of a new era of cultural integrity and economic self-reliance: banks were nationalized, English was replaced as the medium of instruction in primary schools, students underwent army training and political indoctrination, and tilled farms.

They, who had looked to London for the time of day, accepted the changes, the initial ones that came with popular, attractive slogans. Their children, third- and fourth-generation Africans, were taking readily to the new identity. What the government said made sense to the youth. Independence did open up new vistas, intellectually. Swatches of history became available, which had so far been hidden from them. They were not enamoured of the British as their elders were. Not after they had heard or read about Nehru and Tito and Nasser, not to mention Ben Bella and Nkrumah. The future was theirs, they were its masters, and the street fruit-vendor, the shopkeeper, the elderly sheikh all looked upon the schoolchild, black or brown, with pride. Youths would march proudly in support of African socialism in Youth League uniform, under a scorching sun. But as the changes became more extreme, as newer and stranger Ways were imposed, the idyll of a new Africa began to appear as shaky to those of the
younger generation as it had always appeared to the older.

There were two more disruptive swoops the winds had in store for them, after which they could be said to have done their work.

In Uganda, General Idi Amin, who had over-thrown an elected government, had a dream. In this dream, Allah told him that the Asians, exploiters who did not want to integrate with the Africans, had to go. It was said, in an attempt to discredit the revelation, that the general had a few weeks before made an unsuccessful overture to an Asian woman. In Amin’s “final solution” the Asians, their citizenships stripped, were expelled – to whatever country that would take them, or else to refugee camps; in effect, they became orphans awaiting adoption. Many of them would wind up in Canada and the United States.

Weeks later, in Dar, rental properties, most of them Asian, were nationalized. There were those whose final act of faith in the new country was to put the savings of two generations of toil to develop a mud-and-limestone dwelling into a two-storey brick building. These buildings lined Dar’s main streets, each a monument to a family’s enterprise, proudly bearing the family name or else that of a favourite child. When they were taken, that was the final straw. Cynicism replaced faith, corruption became a means.

The “Uganda exodus” showed a way out for Dar’s Asians. Canada was open and, for the rich, America too. Thus began a run on Canada.

It was the rich, the hardest hit by the takeovers, who started the movement. Not everyone joined initially, but soon a chain reaction set in, drawing more and more people, fuelled by insecurity, fear, competition, greed, love. Everyone felt the pull. On one hand to see your children using hoes and spades and brooms during schooltime and not learning English when English was one constant you could not deviate from: English education, the one pillar of success, tenet of the faith as it were, becoming more and more inaccessible in the country. On the other hand lay the wealth, the stability of Canada and the Western world. Ten years hence, would your children forgive you when they saw their friends return as wealthy tourists waving dollars and speaking snappy English? The way you spoke English determined who you were. Nurdin remembered: the boys and girls who went to England for their education and returned a class apart – in speech, in clothes, in bearing and manner – in everything. His dream girl had been such a person.

He had been a good employee of Bata. He had developed his market in Central Province patiently, town by town, store by store. He would drive out with his African assistant, Charles, to Morogoro, Dodoma, and towns in their vicinity, trunk and back seat crammed with shoe boxes. He rather enjoyed being on the road. Sleeping in the car, or the backyard in a strange bed in the humble home of a Bata agent; eating in a dimly lit restaurant, under a tree, or at a
table under the overwhelming generosity of his host and hostess. There would be the occasional breakdown on the road. In the rainy season you could drive into a ditch. Then you waited hours for help to arrive, on the long-deserted road, or spent a nervous night in the jungle, in the thick impenetrable darkness, encased in the car, straining to hear the distant roar or the closer scratch or rustle, keeping eyes well averted from the window lest a glance outside lock into the ferocious eyes of a devil or an animal. It was always good to have someone with you, and in the morning you felt the stronger for the experience.

With Charles he developed a friendship and came to learn of African ways. Charles, he learned, had about the same education as he had, but was some years younger. Charles too had had a tyrannical father, who was now dead. Most of his life he had spent in a village. He had got the job at Bata through influence, as had Nurdin. Charles had a girlfriend, a university student. In this developing familiarity, Nurdin felt, with some satisfaction, a new experience, a breaking of walls. He let the experience develop its own sure course, take its time. Back home he had two children, a boy and a girl, and a wife who respected him, was affectionate. It was always good to return to them. He looked forward to a permanent return and promotion in Dar, but was hesitant about living under his father’s grim rule. This was his life, his lot.