The Book of Secrets

7 July, 1988

They called it the book of our secrets, kitabu cha siri zetu. Of its writer they said: He steals our souls and locks them away; it is a magic bottle, this book, full of captured spirits; see how he keeps his eyes skinned, this mzungu, observing everything we do; look how meticulously this magician with the hat writes in it, attending to it more regularly than he does to nature, with more passion than he expends on a woman. He takes it with him into forest and on mountain, in war and in peace, hunting a lion or sitting in judgement, and when he sleeps he places one eye upon it, shuts the other. Yes, we should steal this book, if we could, take back our souls, our secrets from him. But the punishment for stealing such a book is harsh — ai! — we have seen it.

They were only partly right, after all, those wazees — the ancients — who voiced wonder-filled suspicion and mistrust at the book and its writer, the all-powerful European whiteman administrator who had appeared in their midst to govern. They could
not know that this mzungu first and foremost captured himself in his bottle-book; and long after it left his side — taking part of him with it — it continued to capture other souls and their secrets, and to dictate its will upon them. Even now it makes protagonists of those who would decide its fate.

Because it has no end, this book, it ingests us and carries us with it, and so it grows.

But it began simply, the story of this book, an unusual discovery put into the hands of an out-of-work schoolteacher, who at last found his calling and began to work with an industry and enthusiasm he had not mustered since his apprentice days.

I am that former schoolteacher. In my time I taught a generation or more of schoolboys. I have watched this place grow from a small colonial town into the bustling city that it is now. Many of my students have left, gone abroad to different corners of the world. Professors, businessmen, and engineers now, who left during the trying times that gripped us in the last decade, or even earlier. They’ve gone beyond me, so many of them, but I carry no regrets. They are proof of my success. Wistfully sometimes I wish I had been born later than my time, so as to be able to make the leap from this periphery into that centre, where all the important and exciting things seem to happen. But as I am, I have never desired to leave.

When I complain — and who doesn’t? we’ve lived through trying times as I said — Feroz laughs at me. When I mention how I miss my old Morris to transport me around, he says with his shopkeeper’s logic, “Sir, if you had left, with your talent and experience you would own ten cars!”

They still call me Sir, or Mr. Fernandes.

Three years ago, officialdom caught up with me and discovered that I had passed retirement age. I was given no option. Spending idle days since then was not easy, in this city where I had no family or close friends and was after all an immigrant. A few
months ago in the beginning of March, I had found myself treading along the footpaths of Dar es Salaam’s back alleys when by accident I met Feroz. It was not the first time that a former student had come to my aid. He is not what I would count as one of my successes, and he knows it (I mention too frequently and indiscreetly my prize achievements). His once muscular body now distends, and the loose mouth gives him a friendly look that I suspect hides bad teeth and a nervousness about what he says. Financially he has not done so badly. Mixed with that Eastern respect for the guru, there is in him, I know, also some of the shopkeeper’s contempt for the low-paid teacher and self-styled thinker who ultimately does not seem to amount to much. But he came to my aid. I must confess, so straitened was my circumstance that I had been reduced to searching for a pair of shoes at the open-air mnada in Congo Street. It was as I emerged from the madness of the mnada, pushing my way through the solid throng of shoppers, raucous vendors, and jostling thieves, clutching my parcel and hastening away surreptitiously into Uhuru Street, that I bumped into him. He had, it appeared, stopped his car to give me a lift, and then got out and watched my sorry little sojourn into discount shopping.

When he heard my story, Feroz’s sense of propriety was offended. He was outraged. The very next day he took me on a round to see some people of means and influence in the city. He even telephoned a few people upcountry, he lent me money. And, failing finally to find me the kind of job he. believed I deserved, he offered me a flat to live in, here at the corner of Uhuru and Viongozi streets.

What is it like to step back into a tomb? The name on this building where I’ve been put up is Amin Mansion 1951. Downstairs, outside the corner shop, the partly obliterated sign “Pipa Store,” at the intersection nicknamed Pipa Corner, brings to mind the one possible image when I think of the name Pipa: a plump
wheezing man in singlet and loincloth inside a produce shop, perched atop a tire-seat in the middle of all his wares, his fingers constantly at work folding and refolding squares of paper into packets of spices, dropping them in one fluid motion into a basket at his side, measuring time as it were with grains of turmeric, coriander, chillies.… A man with a reputation for stinginess, dirtiness of his store and person, the shadiness of some of his dealings. The store now belongs to Feroz, who uses it as a secondary business place, selling shoes, radios, and watches, his primary sphere of action being the bustle of Msimbazi, just beyond Congo Street where he found me.