26

—

The killing of the lion gave caravan members a new sense of hope and determination, their first good break since Goma was mangled. Through the hot blaze of the afternoon sun, they surged ahead toward the mountains, emboldened by their momentary victory. Everyone now believed they just might live. If they could kill a lion, they could do anything.

The procession came together in tighter formation, a more compact line. Now, the children, along with Janet, walked in the front. Not only could the girls keep up, but they were setting the marching pace, almost running, with Shali in front. They looked like child soldiers dashing forward to the front lines of a battle, leading their men on to victory. Even Chichi, who usually straggled, walked with a new sense of purpose. The porters, too, walked faster with their thirty-pound packs on their heads. And Goma, who remained on his stretcher, balled his fists and held on.

Toward evening, they were within range of the Mbarika Mountains, medium peaks with lush green vegetation. Henry raised his hands and called out. The caravan stopped. He took out his spyglass and looked ahead. Then he turned to Janet and Asmani.

“Up ahead, if we can get to the forest, there will probably be a stream. Also, I think I can see the outlines of fruit trees. The growth is very thick. That might keep the lions out. We’ve got to get there before dark.”

The next morning, the caravan woke up. Dew dripped from the trees. Insects crawled—beetles, centipedes, worms, ants, even lizards. The night before they had made it to the mountains and crashed to the ground, exhausted, at the first clearing. They felt like they had slept for twenty hours. With the morning sun hidden behind dense jungle growth, they felt the first signs of relief. They had made it.

As the caravan awakened, Henry walked ahead through the dense foliage alone. Using a hatchet, he chopped away vines, branches, thorns, and dwarf trees, forging forward and clearing the way. Soon he discovered a thin footpath that zigzagged farther into the brush. He followed it for a half mile. When he returned, he found Janet talking to Asmani using sign language and one-word syllables. If she got stuck, she turned to Baraka to convey her meaning. Goma lay next to them on his stretcher, listening.

Then Janet turned to Henry. “Asmani says we’re close to the river.”

Henry used his hands to ask Asmani the exact distance. “How far away is the river?”

Asmani shook his head. “I don’t know. River close.”

From his pocket, Henry pulled out an unripe mango. “I found some fruit trees ahead, bananas, papaya.” He gave the mango to Janet, who gave it to Chichi. She devoured it until nothing was left.

“They could be planted,” Henry said. “We could be close to a village.”

Soon, the entire caravan followed the zigzagging path to the fruit trees that grew inside a small grove—four trees laden with bananas, some of them riper than others. Everyone climbed up to pick and eat. They ate greedily until their stomachs were full, so full that some of the girls threw up. Janet pulled down a few bananas to feed Goma, and then she fed bananas to the donkeys.

The fruit helped, but still, the group was hungry. They had eaten just enough to sustain their energy and keep walking. More vigor was produced because everyone’s hopes had been revived—the footpath and fruit trees were signs of human life close by, so the caravan furiously chopped its way through the thick growth that blocked the path as it twisted and turned. The going was rough but steady, the vegetation so thick it blocked the sun. Monkeys and birds screamed high overhead, announcing to the forest that they were coming.

At the bottom of a hill, Henry spotted a sign on the path, a straight stick that poked up from the ground about five feet with the skull of a buffalo with horns, clearly put there by someone. With renewed momentum, he pushed on.

Within minutes, they came to a young African who stood on the path, calmly as if he were waiting for them. He was tall and thin with long, wiry ringlets hanging down his back. He wore a green wrap-around cloth that covered his torso. “Jambo,” everyone said as they smiled and waved. Even Henry was on his best behavior.

“Do you speak English? Swahili? Portuguese?” Henry asked.

The young man shook his head no and bypassed Henry, walking down the line of the caravan, taking care to carefully examine each person and the packages they carried. He smiled at the girls, who smiled back. He looked at the bales of calico and cloth. He fingered the canvas tents, glass beads, equipment, and utensils. To Janet, he looked like a customs official checking the baggage of travelers.

He continued to walk until he reached the very end, all the while being addressed with smiles and jambos. Finally, he came to Goma. They stared at each other. Goma nodded his head with conviction and authority. The young man turned, walked to the front, and gestured for Henry to follow him.

They came to a village gate, a wooden entranceway with a high fence on each side that spanned about twenty feet across. More skulls stood on top of the posts that held the fence together. Upon crossing through the entranceway, a wooden statue appeared anchored on a wooden box in front. The statue was the face of a man painted white with blacks eyes and Negroid features. The young man bent down before the statue and folded his hands in tribute and proceeded to lead the caravan into his village. Everyone knew they were going into a tribal village with traditional ways, neither Christian nor Muslim.

They entered a clearing with about fifty brown huts arranged in an irregular pattern, conical in shape and made of wood with dried mud or clay to keep the walls firmly in place. Dozens of villagers came out to greet them. When the villagers saw the utensils and tools, the hatchets, guns, spades, and ropes, the bales and boxes of cloth and other goods, when they saw the faces of the caravan members, emaciated and lean, worn from hunger and thirst, they turned around and came back with food for trade, baskets of ground nuts and cassava, millet, bean pies, and an assortment of cakes. They also brought out carved masks, hoes, and knives, anything that they thought they could barter. They looked like they were used to trading.

They beseeched the weary travelers, offering their goods for food, for whatever items they saw and liked, until a tall, imposing African man came over with long, unruly hair flaring out like a bush. He was in his late forties, and, across his shoulders, a blue calico toga was tied, and he carried a long walking staff elaborately carved and decorated.

“Get back!” he yelled in Swahili. “Get back!”

As he pushed them farther, the villagers retreated in deference. The caravan members surrounded him in a semicircle. Janet stood next to Henry but also looked at Goma, still lying in his stretcher tied to the donkey. She wanted to see his face in case his eyes flashed danger signals. She anxiously squeezed Baraka’s hand.

“I am Zaid.” The man addressed Henry. “I am griot. Mimi sema Klingereza. I speak a little English. Also Portuguese.”

“What’s a griot?” Janet whispered to Henry.

“A storyteller.”

Then Zaid frowned, raised his hand, and shouted, “No slave here. No brutu!”

Henry gestured by waving his hand. “No slave. No brutu! We come in peace.” Henry bowed and folded his hands, imitating the young man who paid tribute to the statue at the entrance gate. “Peace. No brutu! We hungry. We trade.” He gestured with his hand the act of putting food into a mouth. Then he pointed to the bales of cloth and beads.

Zaid understood and relaxed. He brought his arms down. “This Wanyamwezi tribe. Mbariki.” Then he moved toward Henry, stretching his arms. Henry responded by holding his out. As the two men drew closer, they interlocked, grabbing each other’s forearms in a tight embrace. Zaid bowed slightly and said, “Wakey, wakey, wakey. Waku, waku,” a kind of chant or ritualized greeting.

Henry, still holding firmly to Zaid’s arms, bowed his head and chanted back, not knowing what he was saying, “Waku, waku.” He had been in Africa long enough to hear the rhythm and sound of words to figure out their meaning. Zaid smiled broadly and released his hold on Henry’s arm, and then he grunted twice. “Huh, huh.”

Henry also grunted twice. “Huh, huh.”

When the introductory ceremony ended and the villagers and caravan members exchanged similar salutations, everyone scattered into small groups. Food and water were brought out, and they ate for the first time since they killed the lion: fish, goat meat, sweet potato, corn cakes, millet, fruits, and vegetables. They were also served a thick porridge made of garden leaves, cucumber plants, and beans mashed up with ghee, which they wolfed down with their fingers and hands.

As they ate voraciously, the Wanyamwezi villagers stared at them, wondering why they were here. Because of their isolated location, the Wanyamwezi people rarely received any visitors. They did most trading by traveling to other tribes or lands. They carried their goods from one place to another and brought back their proceeds after a few weeks or months. Their young men were known all over Tanganyika as traveling salesmen. Their specialties included iron products, especially hoes and ax blades. They also traded in musical instruments and dyed cloth.

The Wanyamwezi was a very large tribe scattered throughout Tanganyika, with many subtribes and branches of various names, such as the Ukongo, Usukuma, and Ukawedi. Most famous among them was the Ruga, a group of mostly teenagers well trained in warfare. They sold themselves to the highest bidder as mercenary soldiers and were known for their ferocity. Mirambo had employed many of them in his army that attacked Tabora and Henry’s group in Kwihara, but the Ruga were hired by others throughout the region as long as they got paid, except by the Arabs, whom they hated.

Other offshoots of the Wanyamwezi tribe hired themselves out as porters to various caravans, including the Arabs. The Wanyamwezi were found in all of the major towns in east-central Africa—Bagamoyo, Kunduchi, Dar es Salaam, and Kilwa. Sometimes, they waited to be hired as sailors on ocean voyages.

The present king of the Wanyamwezi was Mkasiwa, who lived far away. Zaid was not only a griot, but he was also the chief of this small village, and he had a hierarchy of sub-kings and chiefs to whom he had to answer in the region. Within his realm, he governed his people according to mutual consent. Everything they did was by consensus. If a dispute emerged that required a judge, he would make the final decision but not without consulting the entire village, unlike other chiefs who only consulted a small group of elders. Anything of importance was put to a vote with the majority ruling accepted. As a result, the village was a model of democracy, free from the ugly effects of slavery and despotism.

After caravan members finished eating, everyone dispersed. Many of the porters and guards, including Selim and Saburi, went off with the men to see their iron smelting operation. The villagers also showed them how they made musical instruments from bamboo, exquisite flutes and drums, guitars that looked like a small bowl with one or two tight strings and a long handle. They also made a variety of horns. Among other things, the Wanyamwezi men were well known for their musical abilities and traveled to distant villages to play.

Asmani and a few others were shown the public assembly, or Wanza. Here, men gathered to socialize and talk, smoke pipes filled with strong tobacco and other substances, and discuss regional politics, war, and social events, such as the fighting near Tabora, the white man, and the Arab slave caravans. It was here that the caravan members heard about the fate of the deserted village it passed a week ago in the Kilombero Valley, the burned-out village with bleached bones.

“That was a Wanyamwezi village,” one of the village men said in Swahili.

“What happened to them?” asked Asmani.

“They were attacked one night by slave kidnappers. They killed all of our men and anyone who couldn’t walk and took just the women and children. One of these women was my sister. They took her a few days after her wedding day. Now she’s gone.”

“But why did they live way out there, cut off and separated, without defense?” Asmani asked.

The village man replied, “They were a renegade village. They argued with us and with the big chief here in the mountains. We told them not to go, but they did.”

The women went off by themselves to drink tea and gossip. Janet and the girls watched them, as each mother sat on a stool while one of her daughters fixed her hair by plaiting it or turning kinky locks into ringlets and twisting them. The Wanyamwezi women were heavily ornamented with red, blue, white, and green beads hanging from necklaces or wrapped around their waists like a belt. Brass and copper wire dangled from their wrists or accentuated their ankles. Some of them nursed babies while little girls ran around in short, cow-skinned kilts.

As with the men, the women usually talked—not about politics or war, but about family matters and personal experiences. But now, the women plied Janet with many questions in Swahili, Baraka translating.

“Where do you come from?” one of them asked.

“From Scotland,” Janet replied, looking at Baraka.

“Where is your family?”

“In Scotland.”

“Where is this Scotland?”

“Far away. You reach it by sailing ship.”

“We have sailing ship, too,” another woman said.

“You have ships?” Janet was surprised, and for a moment, she didn’t believe her.

“Yes, long ago. We have ships on the coast. They row boats all the way to islands in the sea, far away. To trade. Now not so much.”

Janet had read about how blacks in the South Sea Islands in the Pacific could row large canoes for thousands of miles using nothing but the stars to guide them, but not in Africa. She hadn’t read that Africans could sail ships, too.

“How do girls get married in Scotland?” a third woman wanted to know.

“In a church.”

“What do you mean church?”

“By a priest. The girls get married by a priest.”

“Oh, priest. Like medicine man.”

“Yes. Like medicine man.”

“How many wives each man can have?” asked a fourth woman. As she sat on her stool, a young girl combed out her hair.

“Just one.”

“Only one wife?”

“Only one.”

“Do you have bride price?” she asked.

“No, but the groom always pays.”

“How does he pay?”

“In fedha, money.”

The woman smiled at Janet. They both understood.

Everyone else who was not with the women or the men, including Henry and Ferrari, stood inside the center of town, trading cloth and beads for food: grain and dried goat meat, groundnuts, corn, and potatoes. Henry made sure the caravan had plenty to eat, at least enough food to feed them for a week. The Wanyamwezi were also curious about tools and gadgets such as scissors and can openers, needles, thread, candles, and matchboxes, and they also sought to trade their goods for these items.

The day rolled on, the sun still hidden behind a thick jungle canopy that surrounded them above. Janet stayed close to the children, who began to play with the Wanyamwezi young girls. For the first time since they left Ujiji, they were laughing and smiling, enjoying themselves and having fun, as they swung on enormous vines suspended from tall trees. She watched as Shali wrapped her long legs around a vine and lowered her body to swing upside down. More Wanyamwezi girls joined them, and they soon became such a large group that they broke into two. Some of them continued to swing on the vines. Others began to carry each other on top of their shoulders.

They would take one of the girls and place her on the shoulders of two others where she would sit between them with outstretched arms. With a small crowd surrounding the sitting girl, the girls would travel around the village, stopping before each hut to sing a pretty song about oranges and bananas while the rest of the girls clapped their hands.

Ndizi machungwa

Ndizi machungwa

Nani yutaka

Nani yutaka

Ndizi machungwa

Nani yutaka

Janet was pleasantly shocked that they chose Chichi to sit on top of their shoulders. She remembered when she first saw Chichi in Ujiji, sitting on a log by herself. Now she smiled and waved her hands above a small group of children. For a moment, Janet almost wept.

How many times had these girls faced certain death? Now look at them. And what about the others, like Makeda, those who didn’t make it this far? No, I will never let that happen again.

Late afternoon arrived. It was time to think about the next day. Janet slowly turned away from the girls and spotted Zaid talking to Henry, Asmani, and Goma next to his stretcher, which by now had been raised on a steep incline where they could see his face. They were examining a map, so Janet walked over.

“One march away. Rufiji River, in Mbariki.” Zaid held up one side of the map and pointed.

Henry gestured with his arms the action of using poles to steer a raft. Zaid nodded yes. “Yes, boat allow. Must get from chief. Big chief.”

“You take?” Henry asked.

“Yes. We go tomorrow.”

Goma raised his hand to try to speak. Zaid saw him and bent down his head to listen. While they were talking, Henry turned to Janet. “Zaid says we have to get permission from their chief to build rafts. He says the river is in their territory.”

“So we go to their chief tomorrow?”

“Yes. Zaid will take us there. It’s not far. We have to paddle by canoe downstream.”

“What do you think?”

“I think it’s okay. Zaid will help us.”

In the background, Zaid and Goma faced each other, communicating through gestures, written pictures, and occasional sounds. Since the caravan arrived, Goma had spent much time with Zaid, who communicated with him through animated motions, and Goma was even smiling again. They seemed to instantly take to each other. Zaid made sure that Goma was comfortable by lifting his stretcher up almost to shoulder height and leaning it on a tree or any upright structure so that Goma looked like he was standing up, almost like his normal self, except for his bandages and splints. Both Janet and Henry were delighted to see him making progress.

“Goma’s beginning to speak again,” said Henry.

“Really? That’s wonderful.”

“Well, he’s able to speak in small words, a little.”

“Maybe the Lord is answering our prayers, Mr. Stanley.”

“It’s about time,” Henry replied, with a look of scorn on his face.

They both turned from Goma and Zaid and began to walk. As they moved, strolling in silence, Janet kept trying to think of something to say to him but could not. She couldn’t engage in minor conversation with him. When she tried to do so at the beginning of their journey, he had told her, I’m not here to make friends or chitchat. Go do that with the Africans. Ever since then, most of their conversations were decidedly hostile. What could she say now after everything they had been through? That’s why she refused to call him anything but Mr. Stanley.

He is not my friend.

Meanwhile, a young African woman came up to them. She saw Janet’s necklace and pointed to it. She touched the silver chain. Janet pulled out the crucifix so the woman could see it better. The woman wanted to trade.

“No, I am sorry. I can’t. No trade.”

The woman persisted. She took Janet’s hand and put her own necklace into it, a polished stone at the end of a leather string. Then she pointed to Janet’s crucifix again. She wanted it badly, but Janet shook her head no. The necklace was the reason why she had come, and it was her only physical connection to her deceased brother. The woman smiled and pointed again. Janet was about to say no again but stopped.

The necklace was the means, the vehicle that spurred this trip, but now she had accomplished her mission, and David was no longer alive. She had the African girls to keep his memory alive. David had always said true Christianity was not expressed through symbols but only inside the human heart, only inside the human soul. Faith and actions, not words or empty deeds or outward symbols for display.

Janet took her necklace off and gave it to the Wanyamwezi woman, who put it around her neck and ran off, smiling with glee. Janet put the leather string around her neck and fingered the polished stone, which looked like turquoise but with a deeper color, and it was heavy, a material she had never seen before. The stone seemed to cling to her skin.

Henry nodded. “Never thought I’d live to see you do that.”

“There’s a lot of things I’ve done here I never thought—”

He stopped and looked at her directly in the eyes, something he seldom did. “Why did you come here?”

Janet wavered, surprised by his sudden question. She knew what he meant but decided to evade him. “I’ve told you many, many times before, Mr. Stanley.”

Henry knew she knew she was dodging him. “I mean, why aren’t you like most other women?”

“I was once someone’s fiancée. That’s what you really want to know. Why I’m not married.”

In one moment, it all came back to her, her years in Blantyre, her relationship with boys. She was not an unattractive girl when she was growing up, and as she got older, young men did try to flirt with her, even try to kiss her, but she was always so devoted to her religion, which turned the men off, and she kept close to David’s side. This caused those same men to whisper among themselves. Many people thought her devotion to David was unnatural, including Agnes, but that’s the way she felt. She couldn’t help it. All the young men of her town she couldn’t respect. They had no ambition, no desire to learn, no sense of destiny.

When she got older, once David had gone away to Africa, she did court one of David’s friends from medical school, Jonathan Younger. She met him through David when she attended some of his classes. Indeed, he was David’s best friend. He, too, was a devoted Christian and a serious medical student, though he had no desire to be a missionary. He and David would often study together, and he supported David when others criticized him. She and Jonathan drew even closer together in part because many had pressured her to find someone to get married to before it was too late. After she and Jonathan got engaged, and it looked like they actually would get married, she realized she was living through the expectations of others and not herself.

As Janet’s mind wandered back through the years, Henry continued to stare at her. “Something is driving you, Miss Livingstone. Something I don’t understand.”

“You’re driven by your ambition,” she said. “That’s why you’re not married. I’m driven by my belief.”

“Just like your brother.”

Mr. Stanley, at last, is beginning to get it.

“That’s what my sister says all the time.”

“And what do you tell her?”

“When I was younger, David and I made a pact. We dedicated ourselves to ending suffering in the world. We gave up normal lives to do God’s work and, like you, I couldn’t do both.” She continued to walk ahead, hoping she didn’t need to say anymore. As she walked, she left Henry behind, looking at the ground, deep in thought.