Wandering the city of Mombassa. Wonderful place. Ancient port on the Indian Ocean, black Islamic Swahili people. Minarets, souks, mullahs, donkey carts, dhows made of reeds. Graceful angular men in white gowns selling painfully sour lemonade for relief from the dizzying heat and humidity, the thick soupy ocean air. Narrow twisting labyrinth of alleys, choked in with centuries-old multistory houses, with stucco walls two feet thick and wooden doors carved to an intricacy beyond reason.
One of the great crossroads of the world. Arabs, Indians, Goanese, Portuguese, Swahilis, upcountry Africans; well-fed kids of every shade and hue in this relaxed languid air of intermarriage and procreation.
Best of all, everyone is dignified and happy in a way that people never are in the inland African towns. Inland, the town is some artificial place that started as a colonial railroad depot half a century before. Everyone there has left their farm and is embarrassed by their past; half the people are stuck in the shantytowns on the edge of town without work in the cash economy and are embarrassed by their present. No one knows who they are and everyone is trying to become something new, and you are inundated with the twitches of it—the guys demanding you give them your watch, sell them your blue jeans, the ones who practice their bad American slang and wear the Bruce Lee Kung Fu T-shirts and act cool and don’t know why. In Mombassa, instead, everyone seems to know who they are and no one is embarrassed or trying to change. It’s not an artificial city—it’s been there for centuries. There’s no disconnected urban alienation; families have lived in their homes for centuries. Plus something else that as a native New Yorker I recognize—it’s the almost arrogant indifference, the superiority and self-containment of the port dweller. The Portuguese and their domination came and went. As did the Omani Arabs, the British Empire. As will whoever is hot this week; and afterward, there will be the same dhows and minarets and carved doors. No one is going to overvalue you just because you have a digital watch, and for once, you are left alone.
So it was particularly odd when, one afternoon, the woman began to speak to us in the street. She was from one of the scary, more alien sects, dressed in black robes and veil, one of those who glide through silent and detached from us infidels. And now she was speaking to us, in marginal English. Americans? Yes. So now you will come to my house for tea.
She led us through the alleyways, with a purposefulness that began to make Lisa and me nervous. The house was ancient, dark, leaden, reeked of roasted goat and prayers murmured five times a day for aeons. We were seated in an anteroom filled with children who studied us from a safe distance. She removed her veil, revealing nose rings and henna and a no-nonsense face. She plied us with cups of insanely sugared tea and began questioning us—So, how are your parents now? They are very fine and send salamias. You will be having children soon, yes? If it is to be. You will bring them here to receive my greetings? Of course. She was not interested in our answers or her questions; it was something else, she was working up the nerve. The transparency of this unsettled us. Was she awaiting the signal from the berobed men to pour in with their scimitars and hack us to bits? It seemed perfectly plausible, as some noodly Arabic singing from next door floated over our fourth glass of tea.
She had decided. So now you come to the back, grabbing our wrists. We did not protest; we would face our fate bravely.
The next room, underneath the domed roof, was illuminated by a single bare lightbulb. There was an old, venerated table at which, no doubt, countless family councils had been held concerning wars, uprisings, births, deaths, betrothals, potential heresies, feuds, festivals, infidelities, financial schemes. And on the ancient table sat this object. It was some sort of combination ice cream maker/food processor/rotisserie oven/salad slicer dicer and shooter/sausage maker. Her brother, who was studying in Germany, had sent it a year ago and it had sat on the table, honored and untouched, ever since. No one knew how to use it, what it was even for.
“You are Americans, you must speak German.”
There was a profusely detailed brochure with it, filled with umlauts and “achtungs” concerning the many sharp blades, and numerous exploding diagrams showing the electrical innards of the thing. A cabal of neighboring women had magically gathered, to see if anything was going to come of this object.
The refrigerator was unplugged from the sole outlet, the monstrosity was fired up, and for the rest of the afternoon, surrounded by increasingly demonstrative kids and tureens of unavoidable sugar tea, we toiled ineffectually, knowing nothing of German, electricity, or sausage making. It turned out neither did the woman, nor did she particularly care much either about making creamy smooth ice cream, frying chicken all around equally, shooting salad straight into the bowl, or making potato jubilees. We got the knife blades to whir around dangerously at one point to much acclaim, were pressed into tossing in a nondescript chunk of meat, which was minced and flung about the room for lack of our having placed some sort of catchment bowl in position, and the woman’s status in the neighborhood was thus assured. All were impressed, the woman grasped our meat-soaked hands in hers in gratitude and dignified pleasure. We returned to the winding alleyways of this ancient city, picking our way in the twilight over debris tossed there half a millennium ago.