—
The caravan stayed on an extra day, which gave them all a chance to rest. For those who were sick, it was a time to heal, and they received a visit from the Manyema medicine man. He gathered a group of them and told them to sit in a circle around a stool. Janet, who had an interest in medicine just like her missing brother, joined the group to observe. The medicine man pulled one of Henry’s sick porters up.
“Sit here,” he told him in Swahili. “Relax.”
With the sick man’s head already bent down, the medicine man draped a towel over it. Then he took a steaming bowl of liquid and placed it under the sick man’s nostrils with the towel acting to keep the vapors concentrated.
“Breathe in,” he instructed. “Breathe long.”
The sick man inhaled the murky cloud deep inside him. When the medicine man removed the towel, the sick man breathed out and smiled. He felt better already.
The medicine man looked around to see who would be next. This allowed Janet to move closer and see the vapors were caused by a root suspended in a pot of steaming water. Thinking that she was also afflicted, he gestured for her to step up.
“No sick. No sick.” She waved her hands back and forth. “No sick.” Another ailing porter got up instead, sat on the stool, and the process began again.
As the day continued, caravan members were free to wander around and interact with the Manyema villagers. Janet kept to herself, yet found her eyes once again drifting toward Goma, closely observing him. As in Bagamoyo and in the abandoned village they had left just days ago, she noticed a pattern in his behavior.
He always seemed to attract Africans by going out of his way to communicate with them, to smile and talk, and not only that. She saw that he seemed to cultivate attention to himself by individual acts of kindness, such as helping a child carry a bucket of water or fetching a walking staff for an elderly man. And when he was among any large group of Africans, he would always perform, sing, tell jokes, or dance. She wondered whether all this came naturally to him or whether he had some ulterior motive.
Janet wandered farther around the village. It was a small village by African standards, no more than a thousand residents. All the huts looked pretty much the same from the outside. Inside, she saw how Africans lived on tamped-down mud floors with blankets and mats. Chickens and goats came and went, and most huts were inundated with insects, especially ants that scurried on the floors and huge spiders in corners. She also saw rats and mice. In one hut, she confronted a young Manyema woman.
“This filth is appalling. You need to clean this hut.”
But the woman didn’t understand her. “Nini?”
“You should clean this dirt. It’s unhealthy. You need to learn proper hygiene.”
“Nini?”
“How can you live this way? Do you have a broom? To sweep?” Janet used her arms to suggest the sweeping motion of a broom.
But the woman just smiled and said, “Asante tafadhali. Asante.”
And then a goat wandered in and began to nibble at a leather bag. Janet seized the goat by the head to push it out and turned back to the woman. “No animals. No good. Keep goat outside hut.” She pointed. “Outside.”
The woman, who had by now lost her smile, still kept repeating, “Nini?”
Janet also noted that during the day, men and women were segregated and performed their daily tasks separately. She saw women cooking and washing or pounding corn in wooden mortars with sticks. Some were making baskets from strips of bamboo. Some were dyeing cloth by soaking it in red- and blue-stained water.
Many of the young men were absent, either hunting for meat in the countryside, searching for ivory, or passing caravans to pay tribute. In the village, men worked on projects, such as carving wood into stakes, poles, stools, masks, and mallets they used for pounding. She was intrigued by these carved objects, by their detailed complexity and beauty. Another group of men worked with ivory, stacking it to sell to passing caravans or cutting it into smaller pieces for necklaces and jewelry.
Men were also involved in iron making, where they took heated ore from charcoal burners underneath the ground and shaped it in various ways. Instead of a blacksmith’s hammer, they used two heavy, smooth stones, one that held the molten metal, the other used to shape it by pounding down with their hands encased in gloves. To Janet, it was a primitive process, but the finished products—mainly knives, hatchets, spearheads, and hoes—looked quite effective and accomplished.
She also observed the children. Young girls stayed with their mothers, helping them with their tasks, or they looked after the younger children. A few of them sat on stools while another girl twisted their hair into short cords that shot out in all directions from their heads. Boys, like the men, were not around, except the very young. She saw some boys with spears going into the bush. She saw others leaving to go out to the pasture to oversee goatherds.
At the end of the day, Queen Mother summoned Henry to talk. Janet saw them assembled with Goma, so she also went over. Queen Mother looked elegant with her mass of kinky hair combed straight back from her forehead, her full lips smiling. Around her, torches blazed. Shadow and light flickered. Her council of four elders flanked her near the elephant tusks.
In the background, Janet could hear sounds from horns and drums. She also heard a large group of women chanting a lyric. One voice would yell out a line, followed by a chorus who repeated it. This chanting went on and on without stop or variation. After a while, it seemed monotonous and repetitive. Soon, Henry and Goma sat down on a mat. Janet followed suit as Queen Mother began to speak in Swahili, Goma translating.
“You are welcomed, Mzungu, to stay for as long as you like. You are my guests.”
Henry smiled and nodded. “I thank you, Queen Mother, for your generous hospitality, for your food and drink, and helping our sick recover.”
As Henry spoke, Queen Mother leaned over to one of her elders, who whispered in her ear. She sat back up and gazed upon them somberly. “I have some news. There’s going to be war. Mirambo has assembled a large army.”
As soon as she mentioned the name Mirambo, Henry’s face dropped, and, for a moment, a flicker of anxiety crossed his face. “Mirambo?”
“You know him?”
Everyone who knew Mirambo considered him a military genius. For years, he had waged war successfully against the Arab caravans whom he blamed for taking power away from his father, the chief of his tribe, the Uyowa. When his father died, Mirambo assumed the throne. He accused the Arabs of encroaching on their lands and monopolizing the ivory trade upon which the Uyowa relied. The Arabs endeared themselves to other African tribes that competed with the Uyowa, and the Uyowa were slowly cut off from the trade. Additionally, he hated the Arabs for the slave trade, turning Africans against each other in order to sell slaves. The Uyowa, were forced into slave trading when they were cut off from ivory. Mirambo hated the disunity the Arabs had caused among the Africans and decided to unite his people and fight back. With growing numbers of fugitive slaves flocking to him, many of them teenagers, he had threatened the Arab strongholds and vowed to stop the caravan traffic altogether.
Goma, too, perked up when he heard Mirambo’s name. “They call him the black Napoleon.” Goma knew Mirambo had assumed his reputation from the number of victories he had garnered against all of his enemies.
Queen Mother turned to her elders and laughed. Then she became serious. “Soon he will attack Tabora. When he does, he’ll block the road to Ujiji.”
“Ujiji?” Janet uttered. “That’s where my brother is.”
Henry also shook when he heard the news. If Mirambo attacked Tabora, the caravan could not get to Ujiji and Dr. Livingstone. “When, Queen Mother, will he attack Tabora?”
She leaned once again to her elders and turned back. “Wood already touched by fire is not hard to burn.”
After their meeting with Queen Mother, Goma, Henry, and Janet assembled in a nearby hut to talk, hastened on by the new information. The three of them looked dark among the shadows now without torches or light. Insects swirled all around—fleas, flies, mosquitoes, gnats. The night was hot, their foreheads dripped sweat. Tensions began to rise.
Henry paced back and forth. “We’ll have to leave tonight and pray we can get to Ujiji before Mirambo launches.”
“Together,” Goma said.
“No. You keep your people here,” replied Henry.
“No, we leave together.”
“I agree,” Janet chimed.
Henry would have none of it. “Bad idea. We’ll be sitting ducks.”
“In Tabora, there’s money. The porters want their pay,” Goma said.
“If Mirambo attacks, no one gets paid.” Henry spoke with finality.
“If we stay here, they’ll run away.” Goma knew that without his porters, the entire caravan would be in jeopardy.
After a long pause, Henry made his decision. “All right, but when we get to Tabora, we split up again. I go ahead with my group to Ujiji. You follow.”
That night, the caravan moved out of the Manyema village, everyone now rested, those who were sick now recovered, the porters carrying their packs. Unlike Bagamoyo, this time there was no fanfare, no beating drums, no carrying of the American flag, no singing or shouting, no racket, no noise. As they left, with Henry at the helm once more, Queen Mother bade them farewell and good luck. Many of the Manyema villagers came out and lined the pathway that led to the surrounding dark hills. Some waved and smiled and shook hands, some continued to stare, some frowned before they turned and went back to their huts.
By morning, the caravan had made good time, Henry driving them at a very fast pace. At noon, they stopped to rest. The sun was blazing once again. They ate some food and made camp. Henry suggested they all try to sleep because they would soon resume the march, once the sun went down. Just before bed, Janet noticed Henry talking to a young African who then slipped away into the bush, but she dismissed it; she was too tired. Since the ground was dry, she did not put up her tent. For once, she slept in the open, just like the Africans. Soon everyone was wrapped in blankets and slept. All was quiet.
What she didn’t know was that they had camped in an area infested with snakes crawling through the low grass, one of which slithered toward her. She tossed to one side within her blanket away from the snake, now slinking closer to her. When she opened her eyes, she saw it on her chest, looking into her eyes, its tongue shooting out. She jumped up and screamed. She took out her pistol and fired it for the first time, killing the snake instantly. Henry rushed over. He looked at her. She looked at the smoking gun in her hand.
“Makes you feel powerful, doesn’t it?”
“What?”
“To shoot. It makes you feel—”
“No,” she cut him off. “It makes me feel empty.”
The next day, after they had been marching during the night, they reached the top of a knoll. Henry ordered everyone to stop. He took out his spyglass and climbed a tree. Through the lens, he could see an open plain surrounded by low hills in the middle of a vast irrigated field with gardens of corn, peas, cassava, tomatoes, cucumbers, and orchards of planted trees—mango, banana and pomegranate. He saw pastures with roaming herds of goats, cattle, and pigs, and a dirt road leading to a large populated town of dried-mud huts and houses with thick plastered walls, all of which was surrounded by a vast stockade of stout posts and stakes, an oasis in the middle of the wilderness. They had reached Tabora, the principal Arab settlement in central Africa.