Untitled chapter
Ever so slowly, and still, far quicker than I would have wished, The white-washed, cheaply constructed buildings blended like a fog into the backdrop of lively, colourful botanical growth, and dull, yet strikingly shaded granite formations. As the durable engine shifted into the smooth release of a higher gear, all of these sights haze, and I find myself staring my reflection in the eye. My scrutiny is lax, for one who has lived through much learns to tolerate much, yet the definition of much varies in individual minds to proportions as vast in difference as this giant bus in comparison to the Chinese-made bicycles that tugged their far-too-heavy loads and waited patiently for their turn to be overtaken by the far superior power of the bus. The bus, in turn, was outdone by the smaller, faster cars and four-wheel-drives, the rubber tires of which flung clay-red dust from the road, through the slightly opened window, and into my eyes and mouth. Running my tongue across the inside of my jaw, I savoured the delicate flavours of life once lived, aromas of former flowers, former stones, and former men.
It always astounds me, the number of thoughts and activities that one can focus on and yet enjoy. My eyes glided across their phantom in the tempered glass, and the ghost of the tears that filled them. Whether those tears existed in the real world, or only in my mind, made precious little difference, they were there, and with them the bland, yet vivid array of feelings and emotions that gave birth to them. These, like my reflection, will be my constant companions in life. For although some misfortune might rob me of my eyes, my face will, along with the faces of all of those whom I have loved, always be etched on my heart. Why my own face? So out of company with the rest of them, and so undemanding of my love, I cannot say. Another shifting of gears, another metre wedged between me and my heart, another step further away from my past, from my life, from my dreams.
Beyond the glass, a young Bantu child ferried a basket of mangoes on her head. Supporting her smile was a spine badly arched from months, perhaps years, of hauling loads that were far too heavy for bones so young, yet she walked on in her ignorance. A smile played across her face as the bus roared past her, showering her with aggregate, and a rare view of a white man. The sight of a mzungu could plaster a grin on the face of most any African child, in like manner that the white smile and coloured face of a black man would make me laugh inside, if not audibly, when I was a child. One’s first glimpse of something new, a thing that he has not seen before, never fails to produce a ridiculous effect within him.
But as unbending a fact as this may be, I somehow knew that whatever novelty life would throw my way, I would most likely treat it with indifference. Like the salmon, which meets every challenge that river, ocean, and then river again, places in its way, I had lived my life, my destiny, I had found my way to the spawning grounds, I had fulfilled my life, and all that I would live through in the years to come would be trivial. Was there any truth in this knowledge? Both sense and experience brushed these thoughts off as juvenile, my heart disagreed with them. In the end, of course, the heart is forced into the mold of agreement, for sense is born of experience, both past, present, and future. Whatever the case, I was not myself, not my whole self. I had left a part of me behind, and whether that would be for my good or for my hurt, only time would tell.
Pressing my cheek up against the fingerprints and decapitated insects on the chilled window, I breathed slowly onto the smooth glass, blurring my vision with the condensation of my breath. Oddly enough, at times such as this, when my being shudders with the sobs that rack it from the inside out, I find it impossible to cry, and therefore share my feelings with others. This failure to communicate serves to make the world a more stable place. Drawing my mobile telephone from my pocket, I passed my time playing cheap, boring games. The new Nokia was useless for anything else. Here, halfway between the political capital and Morogoro, a gap was left in the mobile network that none of the five mobile service providers in the country had, as yet, decided to fill. Ironically, in a world filled with devices designed to accommodate any and all communicational needs, communicating with others on a level above that of business, or other such nonsense, is quite as difficult now as it was one hundred years ago, perhaps even more.
Growing bored of silly games, I returned my gaze to the forest, savannah, straw-roofed, mud huts, and countless brick-kilns that made up the astounding scenery for which this country was famous. Gradually the rolling hills fell beneath a backdrop of high mountains, and the sparsely sprinkled signs of civilisation grew more and more common, as the bus rolled into the outskirts of Morogoro. Traffic grew denser, which on these roads means passing more than one vehicle in five minutes of driving, and before I knew it, I was no longer in the bush, nor between rows of sisal, but I was now surrounded by every sign of town life, from painted houses to street lights, from banana vendors to elegant curio shops for tourists. Now the bus was pulling into a parking lot of deep rutted, dried out mud. And now, as expected, I was being harassed by a score of vendors, whose light palms, and dark heads, were living display stands advertising everything from grilled goats liver, to barbecued chickens. Others begged me to buy fruit, curios, boiled eggs, or small plastic bottles of local chemicals. It is a lovely town, though most people in these parts would call it a city. Surrounded by mountains and bordering game reserves, it is a city of boarding schools, farming, and tourism.
I do not know why I got off of that bus, most likely it was out of desperation to rid myself of the throbbing pain in my back side, though my mind was too distant from my body to have noticed the pain. Shaking off the beggars with a curse, or an equally cruel promise of help on some better day, I regretted each word that I said. Africans cannot tell a white man with money from one without. I looked on as the ageing mama that had occupied the seat in front of mine on the equally ageing Scandinavian bus, assembled in a plant outside of Dar Es Salaam, was ripped off five hundred shillings for a small bunch of five yellow bananas. A bunch of some eighty bananas could be purchased for one and a half thousand more, but if one only had five hundred, he must be content with five. Without stopping to scrape the mud from my shoes, I entered the make shift building that lay beneath a sun bleached restaurant sign. In keeping with my nature, and my purse, I ordered the cheapest meal, the coastal regular of ugali with goats’ joints. The small, sturdy Arab man shouted my order in the direction of a scrawny, equally Arabic boy, who began to scoop the hideous white porridge from a large pot. Not wishing to lose my appetite to the appalling hygiene standard that this kitchen entertained, I turned to face the one decorative ornament on the peeling, water-logged wall, a large mirror, and therefore to face myself. The mirror was fogged with grease, yet surprisingly free of cracks and chips.
Just why I appeared so much younger than my age was a mystery that I did not care to solve. This was how I had always remembered myself: a full head of tightly-cropped dark brown hair, and bright dark eyes. A smooth face was marked by a characteristic beard shaved tightly to follow my mouth and chin. This was me, and that was the cross that I had always worn, dangling from a thin black string hung around my neck. The mindless confusion of three-dozen diners competing for first place on the scale of decibels, octaves, and the like, was fading slowly into the background of unconsciousness, as I fixed my focus on the black ebony and the thin strips of brass that were embedded into it on both sides. That cross was not there, I had lost it twenty years ago, and yet it was there, and would always be there, in my memory, that mental picture that was engraved on my heart. Now that picture was back, and with it came others, many others, for in a long life one loves many, but then, the meaning of long, as of many, is subject entirely to personal definition.
Slumping back into my chair, or rather, into the nearest of the moulded plastic chairs, I lifted the cross in my hand, and ran the black string through my fingers. Had the young boy with his tan skin and curly black hair ever delivered the desired food to the table, I would not have noticed it, for I did not desire it. Only now, looking up from my refrain, did I realise that this was not the first time that I had sat beneath these corrugated iron sheets, the bodies of which were so badly rusted that, where it not for the knowledge that they had survived at least twenty years already, I would not have entered this place for fear of their collapse. How different it had been then, how new and beautiful this place had appeared, although whether it had been that way, or like myself, only appeared that way in my memory, was far beyond my ability to guess at. But with every moment that passed, the need to guess became less pressing. Time is a beautiful, cruel, and vicious master, yet so easily tampered with, such a breeze to cheat on her. More than I belonged to the present, I belonged to the past, as is the case with most things African. And now, in the depths of my heart, and the shutting down of my mind, the past was reclaiming me, reclaiming what was its own. With every moment that passed between time and I, the line that divided what was present from what had gone before was pulled further and further from my being, and now, quite alone, although a crowd surrounded my body, I cheated time once more. Now I ran my hand over my left arm, which was free from the scars, the tattoos, and the thick hair that I knew were there.
Raising my gaze from my own arm, I was surprised by how new everything looked, at how beautiful this place appeared to me, and most of all, I was surprised to see Swaleh sitting across the table from me. Now the chatter returned, yet it was not the mindless rage of the present, but instead, the more controlled conversation of the past. I turned to face Swaleh, who returned my surprised expression with one of his “I am a typical Tanzanian Arab” sort of smiles. He was not there, I knew, but he had been there once, on that long ago day. When a man spends more thought on the past than he does on the present, he is said to be getting old. I was forty-one, yet I knew that I was getting old. How young I was then, when Swaleh and I had entered this place for sodas that day, when we had traveled here in my then new Peugeot to take his younger brother home from the boarding school for the holidays. I had been invited by Swaleh to spend Eid with him and his wife. Having nothing better to do at the time, I obliged. It had not been my idea of a party, but an abundance of ghat, and samples of the array of illegally imported luxury goods that were Swaleh’s livelihood, or rather his goldmine, combined with Swaleh’s good humour, and the beautiful figure of his wife, to make the feast of the crescent a memorable occasion. After eating myself silly, a poor substitute for drinking myself into that state, I joined Swaleh and about a dozen of his relatives, all of them Arabs, although some of them were so thoroughly interbred with Africans as to render them difficult to see in the poor kerosene lighting, in the recreational activity of inhaling smoke from a communal water-pipe. Times may have been hard, but no amount of socialist initiative could discourage Tanzanians from exercising their right to smoke, and tobacco, along with coffee and regular tea, was still an important cash-crop.
It was through the floating clouds of thick, white smoke that I first looked at her in that way; Fahrida, a rare flower among the bed of less-than-beautiful Arabic weeds. Had one of the bearded men tossed a spoonful of hashish into the pot, I may have had a fine excuse for staring at the veiled woman like a starving tiger. The cloth clung to her face so closely, and yet so distant, revealing black, wiry, yet smooth, silky strands of hair. The fate of one who lusts after an Arab’s wife may be compared to the fate that a thief might expect, were he to gaze upon an item of jewellery in the duka’s window. Had Swaleh and all of his relatives not shared a common laugh possessed by their family long before their ancestors arrived from Yemen to seek a better life in the slave trade, I would likely have found myself in a painful, if not remorseful state by morning. Rather than angry, Swaleh seemed flattered. Fahrida was embarrassed in her own coy sort of way, that silent timidity which shouts in your ear, calling its own bluff. In the shrill mystery of Taarab and Arabic music, which squealed its way out of low-quality speakers, both my stamina and the kerosene that fed the flickering flames drained quickly. In the laying on of a newly refurbished couch, the evening passed on from a present reality to a past one, and as the city slept, I slept with it.
Perhaps sleep could be described as the most perfect waste of life. Dreams of the bush morphed into the mornings hunt, as if two realities had finally met, and combined to create the perfect holiday. Had I not been expecting it, I might have been angered by the sharp nudges of a leather boot, but to become angry at an African is like becoming angry with a baby. In few words, it is pointless. Now it was Swaleh jabbing me with his heel, and now I became angry. He just laughed my shouts off with a joke and the slapping of my palm. The day would be a pleasant one. Down the dark stairwell, the household mechanic was carrying out the routine inspection of the vehicles. Rumours, second hand magazines, small toy cars from China, and the occasional peek into the driveways of the rich, the government officials, foreigners, and businessmen, betrayed the fact that the world of automobiles had left these nineteen-fifties Land rovers in the dust. Not even the sponging, so violently carried out by the mechanic, could remove that dust. All the same, a car is a car, and all the more so in Africa. We who were born here, whose parents were born here; we could understand that, for we were Africans.
With all of the ease that the old, badly lubricated truck motor would afford, the mechanic cranked the motor until it sprung to life, releasing jets of wicked-smelling fumes from multiple points, least of all the exhaust pipe. It would last the hunt, and another twenty years of abuse after that, it would have to. The second vehicle was of the same blood, and once it had been awoken, Swaleh’s brother, Abub, joined the mechanic and me in a conglomeration of bodies on the far-less-than-adequate front seats. Luckily for the mechanic and I we were thin, for Abub was anything but lean. As the mechanic come chauffeur engineered the mumbling machine out of the dingy little street, passed shops whose odours revealed every secret as to the origin, culture, and class of their owners, my nose was filled with the smells of the city. The bitter, soapy scent of the beetle nut, the equally nauseating smell of the water-pipe, faint drifts of alcohol in the air round the African shops, and the stench of cheap tobacco lingering round the rare mzungu enterprise. Were I stricken with cataracts, still I could find my way through Dar by following my nose. I could find the musty little shop where Swaleh sat most of the month, soaking up shade and rat-hairs, waiting for an occasional customer, some driver needing a spare part so desperately that they would pay insane prices for third rate Asian imitations. One could make a living there, like he could make a living selling samosas on the street, or hawking second-hand Red-cross clothes on the sidewalk, but nobody could prosper in a place like that. It was this desire to prosper that was bringing the nation down. That longing for a taste of the good things in life, that lust for better quality, better flavours, better fashion, was running local companies into the sun-baked African soil. It was these same villains to whom Swaleh, and his extended family, owed their prosperity. Now the winds had changed, and the fresh tastes that flew on the breeze awakened me to the new world around me.
The rising sun had converted everything north of that crumbling road into a stunningly black silhouette, which, like our cars and ourselves to anyone that stood southwest of us, contrasted in near perfection to the thousand colours that filled the sky. All the while, the warm wind filled my nostrils with hints of wild fruit and the flowers of the bush, tainted, on occasion, by the pungent, musky odours of natives, wart hogs, and other mammals. Such occasions filled me with the reasons that my grandparents may have had, when they packed their sizeable fortune, gained not through hard work, but rather a healthy streak on the stock market, with my old gramps (I say old because that is the way in which I remember him) promise to turn that fortune into a nation of our own. Time told the truth. If my father was pleased when the country gained independence from England, he was less pleased when he, like Nyerere’s government, and the bulk of the population, was unable to turn a utopian dream into an earthly reality. Now, in the looming menace of economic collapse, there was only one way out. I would form a nation of my own, with my own laws, and my own government. On occasion I would form alliances with other nations of one, such as Swaleh, but never would I subject myself to the government of others. Logic let me know that this idea was, like the socialist dreams of my father, little more than a utopian dream. But dreams keep a man alive, and therefore can be justified as necessary to a healthy psychological condition.
A jolt of the vehicle’s chassis, a punch at the suspension, woke me from my mental introspection as we bounced and scraped through a series of potholes. If efficient transport was a requirement to economic health, then this nation was sick in its bones. There was no need to complain. Soon we would be in the bush, where roads are wherever and whatever you make them. More important than rutting nature, however, is the need to quench one’s thirst, and Chalinze, with its maji baridi, soda baridi, and every other member of the baridi family, came as a relief to our dry, sticky mouths, and our aching lower backs and arses, which throbbed with the pains of the shock-absorbing task that nature had forced them into. My fingers numbing from the cold absorbed from the plastic bag, which had, in turn, absorbed its frigidity from the old, generator powered freezer, I sipped slowly of the sugary juice mixture. It was watery, unhealthy, and refreshing. Seating myself alongside Abub and the mechanic, I call him by his title because, being that he was a servant, I never took the time to learn his name, I cringed as the vehicle’s hood warped yet further under our shared weight. All the while we drank we exchanged jokes and tales, some less fictional then others, with Swaleh, his uncle, and the cook, who were seated likewise on the Land-rover across from us.
When it came my turn I disgusted everyone with detailed, first-hand accounts of cannibal natives stirring human hands in a vegetable and milk sauce. True to his nature Swaleh stole the drama with a more recent event. Two years before this one, they had been out on yet another hunt. This time the occasion was the visit of a distant uncle from Yemen. Luckily for this man, he had enjoyed the hunt, as it would be the last thing of importance that he would do. While sitting atop the left rim in the back of the uncovered vehicle, the fifty-five caliber hunting rifle, which he had proudly bought and licensed back in Dar in the extravagant manner that only foreigners to this place make use of, triggered by a sharp jolt of the Land-rover as it struck a thin tree, had torn a bullet right through his head! Though none of us believed these tall tales, not a man held his rifle butt-down on the rest of the trip, and all seemed cautious before accepting the generous invitations to food that prevail in the bush, for we all knew that the tales were true.
