The Book of Secrets (23 page)

We walk around, in different directions, pulled separately and privately by the awesome panorama that surrounds us.

Down below us, the mundane and gross world of the town is slowly but assuredly coming to life: the street with the sparse human traffic, the four-wheel-drive that’s just arrived and parked downstairs, the video place with the double feature now with the
radio on, blaring news interrupted by the jingle of an ad from Nairobi. Behind our hotel, rails of a defunct line that once carried an army; next to it a group of houses sharing a common backyard. A child emerges from an outhouse that is obviously doorless, a woman with a can of water goes in. I look away, into the distance.

Straight ahead, rising upon a bare round hill, an impressive church built of rough stone. Towards it, on a trail through bush and plantations, well-dressed but simple folk make their way to service. Could that be the
CMS
church, or its site, I wonder.

Towards the east, in the near distance, a quite distinguished feature of the local geography: a low circular hill, a gentle bump in a flatland. It would not take long to walk to it, just out of town where the thorny desert terrain is beginning to take over. “Salaita,” James says, coming over to my side. “Here a famous battle was fought.” He corrects himself: “
Three
battles. It was captured by the British after the last one.”

Does anybody care about the history, I ask: does it matter?

“Ah, not to the local public, alas. But from time to time there are visitors like you. Last month there was a German expedition from Tanga — a man and a woman. They took photographs of Salaita Hill.”

He has had a brochure prepared, he says, describing the local attractions for tourists. He would like them to visit this place for its history, as well as the wildlife and the mountain. “Why do you think I’m paying you so much attention? I like you, you are my brothers from across the border. But I also want you to tell people about us.”

As part of his overwhelming hospitality James drives us to the church in the four-wheel-drive. A padre and a flock of his congregation come to greet us as we get out of the jeep.

“When was this church built?” I ask anxiously after an exchange of greetings.

“In the thirties,” says the padre, a trifle disappointed we will not be joining him for the service. “After a fire,” he adds.

“And before that? There was a
CMS
station here a long time ago.”

“Ah,” he says. “Long before my time. It wasn’t on this site. I believe it was where the cemetery is.”

He sends a girl with us, who does not seem too keen to miss the morning service. She looks committed, must be a favourite. In the middle of a mango grove, we find a graveyard. The graves have all been reused, very recently. Ancient carved gravestones, new graves, five, ten years old.

On our way back to the hotel, Young Jamali points to the old brickwork of what looks like a relic chimney. We stop. It is a surprising, somewhat startling sight on top of a bare mound identical to the one on which the church stands, directly across the road from it. The chimney rises next to a dull rectangular structure with grey concrete exterior. No one saw fit to mention it to us, yet it is a decidedly old structure; there is nothing else of that brick we’ve seen. The grey building is the parish office, partly rented out. A bent old woman interrupts her sweeping of the yard to show us the chimney, which is attached to an ancient kitchen now used as a storehouse; it doesn’t have a roof. As far as she knows the chimney has always been here. The newer building has been put up on an older, larger site, whose outer brick walls are just visible flush with the ground, and from one of whose corners rises the chimney, scant reminder of the past.

Unlike Alfred Corbin we do not have Masai guides to take us up to Lake Chala. But on seeing this secluded jewel I concur with Corbin: this must be the sight of the Creation itself … so blue the lake surrounded by hills, so crystalline pure its water, so cool and gentle the breeze rippling its surface, so unspoiled the site. The vegetation all around the lake — thorn, bramble, small trees — not obtrusive. Nothing man-made here, except, on the lip of the crater, and only just noticed as we prepare to depart, is the remains
of an old brick wall. This must be one of the emplacements for the machine-guns now long silenced. It takes a feat of imagination to people this terrain with the actors of war, to hear it echo with the boom of guns. What manner of men would let these slopes be covered with guns, blood, guts? Alien, I say; then remind myself of the carnage our own leaders have wrought on the land. As we go back we see a car from Nairobi driving away from a picnic site, leaving pizza boxes behind, Masai youths picking them up.

We drive part way on the unsurfaced Taveta-Voi road. It is a hazardous journey, the road is often not visible for the dust that rises, and the opposing traffic is frighteningly swift.

Mbuyuni, once a city of military tents, is now a gate to the Tsavo National Park. There is a sideroad that goes northwards, that takes us to a town on a site where Kikono perhaps stood. This one is called Glory: neat square church, tiny neat houses in immaculate rows. Under the only mbuyu tree (not remotely resembling a hand) a class is underway. I look around for a cliff and see a hill in the distance. Could this be the site of the
MCA
station? We have not seen a single wild animal on our journey.

“Please return,” James tells us back at the hotel as we prepare to depart. “I have stories for you. I have talked to the wazees … including the old priest at the church — the one you met was his son. And the people of Lake Chala — believe me there is a tribe there — have a story about why and when the lake sank.”

Young Jamali did not tell me his father was alive, was in Moshi, until my last day there.

He is a bent old man, in his eighties I guess, thin — grey hair, gummy eyes — wearing a wrap round his waist and an open shirt. I sit facing him, in the backyard of the house in which he has a room. His son, Young Jamali, stands uncomfortably beside us. The backyard is bare earth, stockaded, and there is a dark
dilapidated shed at the end, which is a kitchen. The old man sits on a stool, chewing a piece of cassava, spitting out the hard bits and the fibres on the ground. Next to him is a pan of water. When he’s finished with the cassava, he picks up the pieces from the ground and throws them to the far and littered end of the backyard. He picks up the pan of water, walks to the middle of the yard, and carefully pours the liquid out, spreading it about on the earth, which drinks it up. Then he comes and sits down on his stool.

“My father was a chief,” he says. “In Kenya.”

He has a confused memory of the war. He mentions it with the Maji-Maji uprising. But he was born after Maji-Maji, I quickly tell Young Jamali, who shrugs. Are you sure he is your father? I say exasperated. He is amused. Maybe not, he says.

The old man recalls a brother. He was stolen.

“Come,” he says.

We follow him inside to a room so dark-we stand still for a while to let our eyes get used to it. Young Jamali and I sit down uncomfortably on what looks like a bench. But the old man quickly tells us to get up. He removes the cloth which covers it, revealing an old wooden trunk, its sides carved in the coastal fashion. He opens it, motions for me to come and look. I kneel down beside him.

There are all kinds of knick-knacks: pieces of cloth; a mirror; a Swahili newspaper without a date but apparently from colonial times; coins, including a heller from the German period. There are photographs, including a framed one of himself and his wife. She is sitting on a chair, he is standing beside her. He wears a coat and kofia, she a dress. The photo was taken in a studio a good forty years ago or so. Then he pulls out a postcard-size one of an old African woman — his mother, Khanoum. I pick up the photograph, which I see was taken at the same time and studio as her son’s. She’s standing, staring directly at the camera; a short determined-looking woman. Her son picks out a scrap of aged yellow
paper printed with an Indian script I cannot decipher. Then a remarkable thing happens: he starts singing in a low voice, watching me with amused eyes, moving his head a bit as I stare at him unable to tell the language. But very soon I know what it is: an Indian hymn. Young Jamali, obviously angry and embarrassed, says we must go.

“What was all that about?” I ask Jamali once we are outside. “Why did you get cross with him, your father.”

“He’s an old fool.”

I ask him about the brother who was stolen.

“The story is that he had a fair-skinned brother once. He had been given to the family. Then he was taken away to Dar es Salaam.… That is why I don’t like the old man speaking the Indian language, singing their song. For what the Indians did to my grandmother. They did not recognize her when her husband died, they took away her adopted son and let her die in poverty.”

“And the boy — this fair-skinned boy,” I ask.

“Yes, Pipa’s …”

We go then to see the old graveyard. This part of town, shaded by large trees, is where the Europeans lived in colonial times. The old high-roofed red-tiled bungalows bear testimony to that period. The library search has been useful; Corbin’s memoir has been found, and we’ve brought it along. The graveyard is fenced, surrounded by trees and park, and well-tended, probably due to foreign funds. We walk around.

To one side a monument to “Hindu, Sikh and Mohamedan soldiers,” some small child graves. They don’t tell us anything we don’t know, but are worth a look as something tangible from the past.

We sit at the monument to the Indian soldiers. I think of the spy, the Sufi Hamisi, and ask Young Jamali if he knew what became of his family.

“Oh — they stayed in Moshi for a long time, until the sixties.… 
A son, called Seif, ran a religious school, which closed at that time. Seif’s sons went to the Old Moshi School. I knew them. Clever. Later, one went to Sweden, another to America.”

In silence we share some food, brought for us by the graveyard caretaker, who joins us. In the ten days I have spent with Young Jamali I’ve come to know him well, I think, though I would be hard put to say exactly as what or in what way. I can describe this best by saying that there is an understanding, a mutual respect that transcends verbal communication. In his quiet fashion he has taken me around, told me things, and so shown his support for my endeavours. And finally he gave up his privacy, first by taking me to see his father, then by the verbal outburst that revealed to me his buried anger against the Indians. I don’t quite know to what I owe this friendship — certainly to no gregariousness on my part, but perhaps to a need in him for communion with a like spirit.

“What about the albino, Fumfratti …” I say. “Did they execute him?”

Young Jamali is quiet, brooding. And then he blurts it out, a complete piece of information. “My grandmother used to talk about them — Hamisi and Fumfratti — the war, her husband. She was a bitter old woman but her memories were fond. Five years after the war, Fumfratti was seen in Mombo — on the Tanga route. He had a shop close to the railway station. He was seen by one of his own men, who had become a policeman in Moshi. He was hanged. Here, in Moshi.”

The next day at the bus-stop, Young Jamali and I embrace. “We’ll meet,” I say.

“We’ll meet,” he says. And we part.

(1) There are three chapters on the early years in East Africa in Alfred Corbin’s memoir,
Heart and Soul.
In the first of these the
travails of a young Assistant District Commissioner are described in a somewhat dry fashion.

(2) Intelligence Supplement 117/16

Notes on the officers serving with the Enemy Forces in German

East Africa (with specimen signatures)

Compiled by the Intelligence Section: General Staff

Dar es Salaam 17 October 1916

Introductory Note by F. Maynard, Captain.

(pg.11)

Hamisi ibn Arab (no rank). Master of the Karimiya Sufi order in Moshi, which had maintained links with seditious elements in Egypt and the Sudan. Hamisi escaped from the Sudan in 1904.… The Karimiya order has engaged in intelligence operations against the British in East Africa since at least 1912, and after the outbreak of hostilities has been involved in hostile military operations.… Agents involved in bombing the Voi-Taveta Railway 4 miles East of Maktau on 29/7/15. Again derailed 4 trucks with a contact mine at Mile 36 on 22/8/15. Etc. Deceased.

From the personal notebook of Pius Fernandes
April 1988, Dar es Salaam

I return to Dar to find that Rita is already in town, somewhat earlier than we expected. Feroz is frantic, he wants me to return his diary. Clearly he wants to be the one to show it to her. I tell him I would like to keep it until my work is finished, and that I will not lose it. What can he expect to do with it — it has no monetary value … could it be that he simply wants it as a keepsake …

But Rita, who’s left a message with him that I meet her at her hotel tomorrow … how do I respond to this phenomenon from
my own
past? Feroz tells me, again, that she’s anxious to see me. I for my part would have preferred my tranquillity undisturbed; but it’s already shattered and I, too, am anxious to see her.

She is Pipa’s daughter-in-law — how much does she know of his story, how much will she tell? And of all the questions that the diary has churned up, does she have any answers?
Why
is she here? — not for me, certainly; but not as a tourist either.

The war, from what the boy had been told about it, would appear to him always in the same scene of utter chaos: dust churned up into a clinging choking mist; fires — a house burning, a garbage dump smouldering, smoky campsites dotting the grassland; people rushing about, bare feet thumping the ground; shouts of people and honking car horns and tinkling bicycle bells, whistling trains, bleating goats … and himself lost, abandoned, in knickers and singlet, running in and out between people’s feet, crying. Kindly large hands picking him up and carrying him home. He had been a baby then, far too young to remember the war as it trampled and roared and clunked its way through Mwatate and Maungu, then Mbuyuni and Kikono, and beyond towards the mountain. But this picture of a lost child Aku carried within him always, having fashioned it as his own impression of those fateful days in the town of his birth.