Ilyas arrived in the town just before Amur Biashara’s sudden death. He had with him a letter of introduction to the manager of a large German sisal estate. He did not see the manager, who was also part-owner of the estate and could not be expected to make time for such a trifling matter. Ilyas handed in his letter at the administration office and was told to wait. He was offered a glass of water by the office assistant who also made probing conversation with him, assessing him and his business there. After a short while, a young German man came out of the inner office and offered him a job. The office assistant, whose name was Habib, was to help him settle in. Habib directed him to a school teacher called Maalim Abdalla who helped him to rent a room with a family he knew. By the middle of the afternoon on his first day in the town, Ilyas was employed and accommodated. Maalim Abdalla told him, I’ll come by for you later so you can meet some people. Later that afternoon he called at the house and took Ilyas for a stroll through the town. They stopped at two cafés for coffee and conversation and introductions.
‘Our brother Ilyas has come to work at the big sisal estate,’ Maalim Abdalla announced. ‘He is a friend of the manager, the great German lord himself. He speaks German as if it’s his native language. He is lodging with Omar Hamdani for the moment until his lordship finds him accommodation suitable for such an eminent member of his staff.’
Ilyas smiled and protested and bantered back. His effortless laughter and self-deprecating manner made people comfortable and won him new friends. It always did. Afterwards Maalim Abdalla took him towards the port and the German part of the town. He pointed out the boma and Ilyas asked if that was where they hanged al Bushiri and Maalim Abdalla said no. Al Bushiri was hanged in Pangani, and anyway, there was not a big enough space here for a crowd. The Germans made a spectacle of the hanging and probably had a band and marching troops and spectators. They would have needed a big space for that. Their walk ended at Khalifa’s house, which was the teacher’s regular baraza, where he went most evenings for gossip and conversation.
‘You are welcome,’ Khalifa said to Ilyas. ‘Everyone needs a baraza to go to in the evening, to stay in touch and catch up with the news. There is nothing much else to do after work in this town.’
Ilyas and Khalifa became good friends very quickly and within days were speaking freely with each other. Ilyas told Khalifa about how he had run away from home as a child and wandered around for several days before he was kidnapped by a schutztruppe askari at the train station and taken to the mountains. There he was freed and sent to a German school, a mission school.
‘Did they make you pray like a Christian?’ Khalifa asked.
They were strolling by the sea and could not be overheard but Ilyas was quiet for a moment, his lips clamped together uncharacteristically. ‘You won’t say anything to anyone if I tell you, will you?’ he asked.
‘They did,’ Khalifa said delightedly. ‘They made you sin.’
‘Don’t tell anyone,’ Ilyas said pleadingly. ‘It was either that or leave school, so I pretended. They were very pleased with me and I knew God could see what was really in my heart.’
‘Mnafiki,’ Khalifa said, not yet ready to give up tormenting him. ‘There is a special punishment for hypocrites when you get there. Shall I tell you about it? No, it’s unspeakable and you will have it coming to you sooner or later.’
‘God knows what was in my heart, in there under lock and key,’ Ilyas said, touching his chest and smiling too now that Khalifa was making a joke of it. ‘I lived and worked on a coffee farm belonging to the German who sent me to school.’
‘Was there still fighting up there?’ Khalifa asked.
‘No, I don’t know how much fighting there was before, but it was all over when I was there,’ Ilyas said. ‘It was very peaceful. There were new farms and schools, new towns as well. Local people sent their children to the mission school and worked on the German farms. If there was any trouble it was the work of bad people who like to make an uproar. The farmer who sent me to school, he wrote the letter that got me the job in this town. The manager of the estate is a relative of his.’
Later Ilyas said, ‘I’ve never been back to the village where we used to live. I don’t know what happened to the old people. Now that I’ve come to live in this town, I realise that I am not very far from there. Actually I knew before I came that I would be close to my old home but tried not to think about it.’
‘You should go and visit,’ Khalifa said. ‘How long is it since you’ve been away?’
‘Ten years,’ Ilyas said. ‘Go there for what?’
‘You should go,’ Khalifa said, remembering his own neglect of his parents and how badly it made him feel afterwards. ‘Go and see the family. It will only take a day or two to get there if you get a ride. It’s not right to keep your distance. You should go and tell them that you are well. I’ll come with you if you want.’
‘No,’ Ilyas said defensively, ‘you don’t know what kind of a mean and miserable place it is.’
‘Then you can show them what a success you have made of yourself. It’s your home and your family is your family, whatever you think,’ Khalifa said more firmly as Ilyas was weakening.
Ilyas sat frowning for a moment or two and then his eyes slowly brightened. ‘I’ll go,’ he said, becoming excited about the idea. He was like that, Khalifa was to find out. When he was taken by a plan Ilyas threw himself at it. ‘Yes, you’re talking sense. I’ll go on my own. I’ve thought about it many times but managed to put it off. It takes a big mouth like you to force the issue and make me do it.’
Khalifa arranged for a cart driver who was headed in the direction of the village to give Ilyas a lift part of the way. He also gave him the name of a trading contact who lived on the main road not very far from his destination. He could stop there overnight if necessary. A few days later Ilyas was a passenger on a donkey cart headed on its bumpy way south on the coast road. The driver was an old Baluchi man who was taking supplies to the country shops along the route. He did not have a great deal to deliver. He stopped at two shops after which they turned inland on a better road, jogging along at such a good pace that they arrived at the contact Khalifa had provided in mid-afternoon. The contact turned out to be an Indian trader in fresh foodstuffs whose name was Karim. He bought food from local people and sent it to the market in the town: bananas, cassava, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, okra – hardy vegetables that could survive a day or two on the road. The Baluchi man fed and watered his donkey and then seemed to have a whispered conversation with her. He said that it was early enough for him to make a start on the return trip and stop overnight at one of the shops he had delivered to earlier, and that the donkey was willing. Karim supervised the loading of produce on the Baluchi’s cart, writing the figures in his ledger and copying the numbers on a rough scrap of paper for the driver to take to his buyer in the market in town.
After the driver’s departure, Ilyas explained what he was after and Karim looked dubious. He looked around him at the light, pulled a watch out of his waistcoat pocket, clicked open the cover with a flourish and waggled his head mournfully.
‘Tomorrow morning,’ he said. ‘Today is not possible. It’s only an hour and a half before maghrib, and by the time I arrange a driver for you it will be approaching dusk. You don’t want to be on the road at night. Looking for trouble. You could easily get lost or run into bad people. Tomorrow morning, first thing, you shall go. I will speak to a driver tonight, but for now you will rest and let us welcome you here. We have a room for visitors. Come.’
Ilyas was shown to a small room with an earthen floor adjoining the store. Both the store and the room had rickety doors of rusty corrugated-metal sheets kept closed by iron padlocks which looked more ceremonial than secure. Inside the little room was a rope bed covered with a mat, certain to be crawling with bedbugs, Ilyas thought to himself. He noticed at once that there was no mosquito net and sighed with resignation. These were guest quarters for hardy itinerant traders but there was no choice. He could not expect Karim to invite a male stranger into his family home.
Ilyas hooked his canvas bag on the door frame and went out to look around. Karim’s house was in the same yard and was a solidly built structure with two barred windows facing front, one either side of the door. It had a raised patio three steps from the ground. Karim was sitting on a mat on the patio, and when he saw Ilyas he waved him over. They sat talking for a while, about the town, about news of a devastating cholera epidemic in Zanzibar, about business, then a young girl of seven or eight came out of the house with two small cups of coffee on a wooden tray. As dusk approached, Karim pulled out his watch again and glanced at the time.
‘Maghrib prayers,’ he said. He called and after a moment the girl came out again, this time struggling with a bucket of water, which Karim laughingly relieved her of. He took the steps to the ground and put the bucket to one side, on a platform of stones arranged for washing feet. He gestured for his guest to come and make his ablutions first but Ilyas demurred energetically, so Karim went ahead and performed the cleansing in preparation for prayer. Then it was Ilyas’s turn and he did what he saw Karim do. They went back up to the patio where the prayer was to take place, and as was customary and polite, Karim invited Ilyas to lead the prayer. Once again he energetically demurred and Karim stepped forward to lead.
Ilyas did not know how to pray, did not know the words. He had never been inside a mosque. There was not one to go to where he lived as a child, and there was not one on the coffee farm where he spent so many years later. There was a mosque in the nearby mountain town but no one at the farm or the school told him he should go there. Then at some point it was too late to learn, too shaming. By then he was a grown man working at the sisal estate and living in a town thronged with mosques, but there too no one asked him to go to the mosque. He knew that sooner or later something embarrassing was likely to happen. Karim’s invitation to pray was the first time he had been caught out and he faked it as best he could, copying his every gesture and muttering as if he was speaking sacred words.
As promised, Karim arranged for another driver to take Ilyas to his old village, which was not far away. After a restless night, he came out as soon as he heard movement in the yard and was offered a banana and a tin mug of black tea for breakfast while he waited for the driver to turn up. He caught sight of the little girl sweeping the patio but there was no sign of her mother. The driver this time was a teenager who was happy to go on an outing and talked all the way about recent escapades he and his friends had engaged in. Ilyas listened politely and laughed when he was required but thought to himself: Country bumpkin.
They reached the village in an hour or so. The driver said he would wait on the main road because the path to the village was too narrow for the cart. It was only a short walk down the path he had pulled up beside. Yes, I know, Ilyas said. He took the path that led to where their old house used to be, and everything seemed as disorderly and familiar as if he had only left a few months before. It was not much of a village, a straggle of thatched houses with small cultivated fields behind them. Before he reached their old house he saw a woman whose name he could not remember but whose face was familiar. She was sitting in the cleared space outside her frail-looking wattle-and-mud house, weaving a mat from coconut leaves. A pot warmed on a trio of stones beside her feet and two chickens were pecking at the ground around the house. As he approached, she straightened her kanga and covered her head.
‘Shikamoo,’ he said.
She replied and waited, looking him up and down in his town clothes. He could not guess her age but if she was who he thought she was then she was the mother of children his age. One of them was Hassan, he remembered suddenly, a boy he used to play with. Ilyas’s father’s name was also Hassan, that was why the name came back to him so easily. The woman was sitting on a low stool and made no attempt to rise or smile.
‘My name is Ilyas. I used to live up there,’ he said, giving her his parents’ names. ‘Do they still live up there?’
She made no reply and he was not sure if she heard or understood him. He was about to move on and see for himself when a man came out from inside the house. He was older than the woman and walked haltingly up to Ilyas and looked at him closely as if his sight was poor. His face was lined and unshaven and he looked frail and unwell. Ilyas said his name again, and the names of his parents. The man and woman exchanged a look and then it was she who spoke.
‘I remember that name Ilyas. Are you the one who was lost?’ she said, and covered her head briefly with both hands in commiseration. ‘Many terrible things were happening then and we all thought you had suffered a misfortune. We thought you were kidnapped by the ruga ruga or the wamanga. We thought the Mdachi killed you. I don’t know what we didn’t think. Yes, I remember Ilyas. Is that you? You look like a government man. Your mother passed on a long time ago. No one lives up there now, their house has fallen down. She had such bad luck no one wanted to live there. She left a little baby for your father to look after, fifteen or sixteen months old, and he left her for other people.’
Ilyas thought about this for a moment then he said, ‘Left her for other people. What does that mean?’
‘He gave her away.’ The man spoke now, his voice weak and rasping with effort. ‘He was very poor. Very ill. Like all of us. He gave her away.’ He raised his arm and pointed in the direction of the road, too weary to say more.
‘Afiya, that was her name. Afiya,’ the woman continued. ‘Where have you come from? Your mother is dead. Your father is dead. Your sister is given away. Where have you been?’
It was somehow what he had expected, that they would be dead. His father had been ill with diabetes all Ilyas’s young life, and his mother was often unwell from unnameable ailments that afflicted women. In addition her back hurt, breathing was a struggle, her chest was thick with water and she was often retching from endless pregnancies. It was what he had expected but it still shocked him to have their deaths announced so abruptly. ‘Is my sister here in the village?’ he asked at last.
The man spoke again and in his tortured voice told him where the family who had taken Afiya lived. He accompanied Ilyas to the main road and gave directions to the young cart driver.
*
The small roadside village where she grew up was overlooked by a dark conical hill covered in scrub. It was always there whenever she stepped out of the house, leaning over the houses and yards across the road, but she did not see it when she was a very small child and only became aware of it later when she learned to give meaning to habitual sights. She was told that she was never to go up there but was not told why, so she populated the hill with all the terrors she was learning to imagine. It was her aunt who told her she must never go up the hill, and also told stories about a snake that could swallow a child, and a tall man whose shadow flitted across the roofs of houses when the moon was full, and a dishevelled old woman who roamed the road to the sea and sometimes took the form of a leopard who raided the village for a goat or a baby. Her aunt did not say so but the girl was sure that the snake and the tall man and the dishevelled old woman all lived on the hill and came down from there to terrorise the world.
Behind the houses and the backyards were the fields and beyond those rose the hill. As she grew older it seemed that the hill loomed even larger over the village, especially at dusk, shouldering over them like a discontented spirit. She learned to avert her gaze if she had to go out of the house at night. In the deep silence of the night she heard soft hissing whispers creeping down and sometimes they came around and behind the house as well. Her aunt told her these were the invisibles which only women heard, but however sad and insistent their whispers she was not to open the door to them. Much later she knew that the boys went up the hill and came back safely, and they never spoke of a snake or a tall man or a dishevelled old woman, and never mentioned whispers. They said that they went hunting on the hill, and if they caught anything they roasted it over a fire and ate it. They always came back empty-handed so she did not know if they were making fun of her.
The road past the village ran on to the coast in one direction and to the deep interior in the other. It was mostly used by people on foot, some of them carrying heavy loads, and sometimes by men on donkeys or on ox-carts. It was wide enough for the carts but uneven and bumpy. In the distance behind them the silhouette of mountains ran across the horizon. Their names were strange and made her think of danger.
She lived with her aunt and uncle and her brother and sister. Her brother was called Issa and her sister Zawadi. She was expected to rise at the same time as her aunt, who shook her awake and gave her a sharp little slap on her bottom to make her get up. Wake up, mischief. Her aunt’s name was Malaika but they all called her Mama. The girl’s first chore after she was up was to fetch the water while her aunt lit the braziers, which were cleaned and packed with charcoal from the night before. Water was not in short supply but it had to be fetched. There was a bucket and a ladle outside the bathroom door for use in there. There was another bucket by the sluice that led to the outside gutter, which was where they washed the pots and dishes, and where they poured away the water after washing clothes, but for her uncle’s bath and for making tea she had to fetch the water from the huge clay tank, covered and kept under an awning to stay cool. It had to be clean water for her uncle’s bath and for his tea, and the water in the buckets was only for dirty work. Sometimes the water made people ill, which was why she had to warm clean water for her uncle’s bath and for the tea.
The tank was high and she was small so she had to stand on an upturned crate to be able to reach the water, and when the level was low or if the water-seller had not come to replenish the tank, she had to reach so far in that half her body was in the slippery tank. If she spoke while her head was in the tank her voice had a demonic sound, which made her feel enormous. She did that sometimes even when she was not fetching water, put her head into the tank and made gloating, groaning sounds as if she was huge. She ladled the water into two pans but only half-filled them because otherwise they were too heavy for her to carry. She took them one by one to the two braziers her aunt had started, then topped up the pans with repeated trips to the tank until the water in the pans was the right amount, one for her uncle’s bath and the other for the tea.
The first she knew of anything in the world was living with them, her aunt and uncle. The brother Issa and sister Zawadi were older than her, maybe five or six years older. They were not her brother and sister, of course, but she still thought of them like that even though they teased her and hurt her as part of their games. Sometimes they beat her very deliberately, not because she had done anything to provoke them but because they liked to do it and she could not stop them. They beat her whenever it was only the children in the house and no one was there to hear her cries, or if they were bored, which was often. They asked her to do things she did not like and when she cried or refused they slapped her and spat at her. There was not much to do after her chores but if she followed them when they went out to play with their friends or to steal fruit from the neighbours’ trees, they did not always like it nor did their friends. The girls called her dirty names to make the boys laugh and sometimes they chased her away. It was for different reasons but her brother and sister beat her or pinched her or stole her food, every day. She did not feel very sad that they beat her and pinched her and stole her food. It did not hurt very much and other things made her feel more sad, made her feel small and a stranger in this world. Other children were also beaten every day.
From a very young age she was required to do chores. She did not remember when it started, but she was always called to do something, sweeping or fetching water or running to the shop for her aunt. Later she washed clothes and chopped and peeled as required, and warmed the water for her uncle’s bath and the household’s tea. Other children in the village were required to do chores for their uncles and aunts too, in the house and in the fields. Her uncle and aunt did not have a field or even a garden, so all her chores were in the house or the backyard. Her aunt spoke to her sharply at times, but more often she was kind and told her stories. Some of these stories were terrifying, like the one about a ragged bloated man with long dirty fingernails who walked on the road at night, dragging an iron chain behind him, looking to capture a little girl and take her to his burrow underground. You can always hear him coming because of the chain dragging on the ground. Many of her aunt’s stories were about dirty old people who stole little girls. When she saw Issa or Zawadi mistreating the child she rebuked or even punished them. Treat her like your sister, the poor girl, she told them.
Her mother was dead, she knew that, but she did not know why her aunt and her uncle were the ones who took her in. One day when she was in her sixth year her aunt told her, ‘We took you in because you were orphaned and your father was sickening. Your mother and father lived further along the road and we knew them. Your poor mother was unlucky with her health and she died when you were very small, about two years old. Your father brought you to us and asked us to take you until he was better, but he did not become better and God took him away too. These things are in God’s hands. Since then you have been our burden.’
Her aunt told her this as she was oiling and plaiting her hair after washing it, which she did every week to keep away the lice. She was sitting between her aunt’s knees and could not see her face but her voice was gentle, even tender. After she was told this, she knew that they were not really her uncle and her aunt, and that her father was also dead. She did not remember her mother but it still made her sad to think of her. When she tried to imagine her she could only see one of the village women.
Her uncle did not speak to her very much, nor she to him. He frowned when she did so, even when it was only to deliver a message from her aunt. When he wanted her to come to him, he snapped his fingers or called out: You! His name was Makame. He was a big man, with a round face and a round nose and a large round stomach. He was satisfied when everything was as he wanted it. When he spoke sharply to one of his children, the house trembled and shook with his rage and everyone fell silent. She avoided his eyes because they were often hot and frightening in his glowering face. She knew he did not like her but she did not know what she had done to make him feel that way. His hands were large and his arm was as thick as her neck. When he slapped her on the back of her head she staggered and felt dizzy.
Her aunt had a habit of nodding several times when she wanted to say something firmly, and because her face was narrow and drawn and her nose was pointed, she looked as if she was pecking at something in the air when she did so. ‘Your uncle is a very strong man,’ her aunt told her. ‘That’s why he is employed as a security guard at the serikali depot. He opens and closes the gates to keep the vagrants out. The government chose him. They are all afraid of him. They say, Makame has a fist like a club. If it was not for him they would behave like hooligans and steal things.’
From her earliest memory she slept on the floor just inside the entranceway to the house. When she opened the door in the morning she saw the hill, and even when the door was closed at night she knew it was there, looming over them all. The dogs barked in the night and mosquitoes whined around her face and insects rattled and screeched just the other side of the flimsy and cracked door. Then they fell silent when the whispers began to descend from the hill all the way to the back of the house. She kept her eyes tightly shut in case she saw discontented eyes peering at her through the cracks in the door panels.
It was a small house made of mud bricks and whitewashed inside and out. There were two small rooms divided by the entranceway and a back door that opened on to the yard. A cane fence ran around this, and out there were the washroom and kitchen. The other four slept in the larger of the two rooms, mother and daughter in one bed and father and son in the other. Sometimes the younger people slept in the smaller room, which was used during the day for a sitting room or as somewhere to store things or to eat or to receive neighbours when they called. The village was a long way into the country, so there was no running water, which was why she had to fetch the water for her uncle’s bath and for the tea from the huge clay tank the water-seller filled up every time it was low. The water-seller fetched the water from the village well a short distance away then he went from house to house, pulling his cart himself, and filled up the tanks of the people who paid him. Many people went to the well themselves or sent a child but her aunt and uncle could afford to pay.
One day she was in the yard helping her aunt with the washing when they heard someone calling out from the front door. Go and see who it is, her aunt said. At the door she found a man dressed in a long-sleeved white shirt and khaki trousers and thick-soled soft-leather shoes. He stood on the step, just up from the road, holding a canvas bag in his right hand. He was obviously a man from town, from the coast.
‘Karibu,’ she said, speaking the polite word of welcome.
‘Marahaba,’ he said, smiling. Then after a moment he said, ‘Can I ask your name?’
‘Afiya,’ she said.
He smiled more widely and sighed at the same time. Then he went down on his haunches so their faces were level. ‘I am your brother,’ he said. ‘I have been looking for you for so long. I did not know if you lived, or if Ma and Ba lived. Now I have found you, thank God. Are the people of the house inside?’
She nodded and went to call her aunt, who came out wiping her hands with her kanga. The man, now standing tall again, introduced himself by name. ‘I am Ilyas, her brother,’ he said. ‘I went to our old home and found that my people were passed away. Neighbours told me my sister was here. I didn’t know.’
Her aunt seemed perturbed by what he had said for a moment, and perhaps also by his appearance. He was dressed like a government man. ‘Karibu. We did not know where you were. Please wait while Afiya goes to fetch her uncle,’ she said. ‘Quick, go now.’
She ran to the depot and told her uncle that her aunt said he was to come and he asked what it was about. My brother has come, she said. From where? he asked, but she just ran on before him. When they reached the house, he was a little breathless but he was polite and smiling, which was not how he usually was at home. Her brother was in the small room, cramped and cluttered as usual, and her uncle joined him there, shaking hands and beaming with delight. ‘You are welcome, our brother. We thank God for keeping you safe and for leading you to our house so you can meet your sister. Your father told us that you were lost. We did not know what to do to find you. We have done our best to look after her. She is like one of ours now,’ he said, left hand on heart while his right arm was extended wide in a gesture of welcome.
‘I don’t know if you remember me, but I can assure you I am who I say I am,’ her brother said.
‘I can see the family resemblance,’ her uncle said. ‘There is no need for assurances.’
When Afiya came back a few minutes later with two glasses of water on a tray, she found them deep in conversation. She heard her brother say, ‘Thank you for looking after her for so long. I cannot thank you enough but now that I’ve found her, I would like to take her to live with me.’
‘We will be sorry to lose her,’ her uncle said, his face shiny with dried sweat. ‘She is our own daughter now, and her living with us is an expense we gladly bear, but of course she must live with her brother. Blood is blood.’
They talked together for some time before they called for her to come in. Her brother gestured for her to sit while he explained that she was to come and live with him in the town. She was to gather her things and be ready to leave with him in a short while. She collected her little bundle and was ready within minutes. Her aunt watched her closely. Just like that, not even thank you, goodbye, she said reproachfully. Thank you, goodbye, Afiya said, ashamed of her own haste.
She did not even know she had a real brother. She could not believe he was here, that he had just walked in off the road and was waiting to take her away. He was so clean and beautiful, and he laughed so easily. He told her afterwards that he was angry with her uncle and aunt but he did not show it because it would have seemed that he was being ungrateful when they had taken her in although she was not a relative. They had taken her in, that was not nothing. He gave them some money as a gift for their kindness but he did not need to, because she was in filthy rags when he found her as if she was their slave. ‘If anything they should have paid you for having made you work for them like that for so long,’ he said. It did not feel like that to her at the time, only afterwards, after she started living with him.
That same morning he found her, he took her away with him on the donkey cart to Karim’s shop. She had never travelled on a donkey cart before. They waited at the shop for a lift back and then the next day they went on another donkey cart where she sat among baskets of mangoes and cassava and sacks of grain while her brother shared the driver’s bench. He took her to the small town on the coast where he lived. In the town, he rented a downstairs room in a family home, and when they arrived he took her upstairs to meet the people who lived up there. The mother and her teenaged daughters were in and they said she was to come upstairs whenever she wished. During the time Afiya lived with her brother she slept on a bed for the first time in her life. She had her bed at one end of the room under her own mosquito net and he had his at the other. There was a table in the middle of the room where every afternoon he made her do lessons when he came back from work.
One morning, a few days after he brought her to the town, he took her to the government hospital near the seashore. She had never seen the sea. A man in a white coat scratched her arm and then asked her to urinate in a small pot. Ilyas explained the scratching was to prevent her from falling ill with fever and the urine was to test if she had bilharzia. It’s German medicine, he said.
When Ilyas went to work in the morning, she went upstairs with the family and they made room for her without any effort. They asked questions about her and she told them what little there was to tell. She helped in the kitchen because that was work she knew how to do or sat with the sisters while they talked and sewed, and sometimes they sent her on errands to the shop down the street. Their names were Jamila and Saada and they became her friends from the start. Later, she had her meal with them when their father came home. She was told to call their father Uncle Omari, which made her feel she was part of the family. In the afternoon, after her brother came back from work and had a wash, she took his lunch to him downstairs and sat with him while he ate.
‘You must learn to read and write,’ he said. She had not seen anyone read or write although she knew what writing was because it was on the tins and boxes in the village shop, and she had seen a book on a shelf above the shopkeeper’s stool. The shopkeeper told her it was a holy book you should not touch without first washing yourself as if you were preparing for prayer. She did not think she would be able to learn a book that holy but her brother laughed at her and made her sit beside him while he wrote out the letters and made her say them after him. Later she practised writing the letters herself.
One afternoon, when the people upstairs were out, he took her with him as he went to call on one of his friends. His name was Khalifa, and Ilyas said this was his best friend in the town. They teased each other and laughed and then after a while her brother said they would continue with their walk but he promised to bring her to visit again. Most mornings she went upstairs and sat with Jamila and Saada while they cooked and talked and sewed, and sometimes in the evenings when Ilyas went to the café or to be with his friends, she went upstairs and practised reading and writing her letters under the sisters’ admiring eyes. Neither of them could read, nor could their mother.
Her brother did not always go out, though, and some evenings he stayed in and taught her card games or songs or talked to her about his experiences. He told her: ‘I ran away from home while Ma was pregnant with you. I don’t know if I really meant to run away. I don’t think I did. I was only eleven. Our Ma and Ba were very poor. Everyone was poor. I don’t know how they lived, how they survived. Ba had sugar and was unwell and could not work. Perhaps the neighbours helped them. I know my clothes were rags and I was always hungry. Ma lost two of my younger sisters after they were born. I expect it was malaria but I was only a child and I would not have known about things like that at the time. I remember when they both came. After a few months they fell ill and cried for days before they passed away. Some nights I could not sleep because I was so hungry and because Ba was groaning so loudly. His legs were swollen and smelled bad, like meat that was rotting. It was not his fault, that was the sugar. Don’t cry, I can see your eyes are getting wet. I am not saying this to be unkind but to explain to you that perhaps these were the things that made me want to run away.
‘I don’t think I really meant to run away but once I was on the road I just kept walking. No one took very much notice of me. When I was hungry I begged for food or stole some fruit, and at night I always found somewhere to creep into and sleep. Some of the time I was very frightened but at other times I forgot myself and just looked at what was happening all around. After several days I arrived in a big town on the coast, this town. I saw soldiers marching through the streets, music playing, heavy boots thudding on the road and a crowd of young people marching alongside, pretending to be soldiers too. I joined them, thrilled by the display of the uniforms and the march and the band. The march ended at the train station and I stood there to watch the big iron coaches as large as houses. The engine was groaning and puffing smoke, just like it was alive. I had never seen a train before. A troop of askari stood on the platform waiting to board the train, and I was loitering around them, just watching and listening. The Maji Maji fighting was still going on then. Do you know about that? I didn’t know about it then either. I’ll tell you about the Maji Maji later. When the train was ready, the askari began to board. A Shangaan askari pushed me on the train and held my wrist and laughed while I struggled but he did not let me go. He told me I was to be his gun boy, to carry his gun for him when they marched. You will like it, he said. He took me on the train until the end of the line, or as far as they had built the line at that time, and then we marched for several days all the way to the mountain town.
‘When we arrived there we were made to wait in a yard for a while. I think the Shangaan thought I was no longer trying to escape him because he was not even holding my wrist. Perhaps he thought there was nowhere for me to run. I saw an Indian man standing over some cargo, giving instructions to the porters and making a note on a piece of board. I ran to him and told him that the askari had stolen me from my home. The Indian man told me, go away, you filthy little thief! I must have looked very dirty. My clothes were nothing but rags, shorts made of sacking and a torn old shirt I did not bother to wash any more. I told the Indian man, my name is Ilyas and that big Shangaan askari standing there staring at us stole me from my home. The Indian man looked away at first but then he asked me to repeat my name. He made me say it twice more then he smiled and said it too. Ilyas. He nodded and took me by the hand’ – Ilyas took Afiya’s hand as he said this, smiling like the Indian man and getting to his feet – ‘walking towards the German officer in his white uniform who was also there in the yard. He was the chief of the askari and was busy with his troops. He had hair the colour of sand and his eyebrows were the same. That was the first German I stood close to and that is what I saw. He frowned at me and said something to the Indian man who said I was free to go. I said I had nowhere to go and when the chief of the askari heard this he frowned again and called for another German man.’
They sat down again, Afiya still smiling and her eyes rapt with pleasure at the story. Ilyas put on a scowling expression and continued.
‘This other German was not an officer in a beautiful white uniform but a rough-looking man who was directing workers loading cargo, which the Indian man was counting off. When the officer finished speaking to him he summoned me to him and said sharply, What’s your story? I told him, my name is Ilyas and an askari stole me from my home. He repeated my name and smiled. Ilyas, he said, that’s a nice name. Wait here until I finish. I did not, but followed him in case the Shangaan askari came back for me. The man worked on a coffee farm a little way up the mountain. It belonged to another German. He took me back to the farm with him and gave me work in the animal pen. They had several donkeys and a horse in her own stable. Yes, it was a she-horse, very large and scary to a little boy. It was a new farm and there was a lot of work to do. That was why the rough German took me there, because they needed people to work.
‘The farmer saw me in the pen clearing donkey dung or something like that, I can’t remember exactly. He asked the man who had brought me from the station who I was. When he found out that I was stolen by an askari he was angry. We don’t have to behave like savages, he said. That is not what we have come here to do. I know that was what he said because he told me later. He was pleased with what he did and liked to talk about it to me and to other people. He said I was too young to work, that I should first go to school. The Germans did not come here to make slaves, he said. Then I was allowed to attend church school, which was for converts. I stayed there on the farm for many years.’
‘Was I born then?’ Afiya asked.
‘Oh, yes, you must have been born a few months after I ran away,’ Ilyas said. ‘I was on the farm for nine years so that means you must be about ten years old. I really liked living there. I worked on the farm and went to school and learned to read and write and to sing and speak German.’
He broke off and sang some verses of what must have been a German song. She thought his voice was beautiful and got to her feet to applaud him when he stopped. He was grinning with pleasure. He loved to sing.
‘One day, not so long ago,’ he continued, ‘the farmer called me over for a talk. He was like a father to me, that man. He looked after all the workers, and if anyone fell ill he sent him to the mission clinic for medicine. He asked me if I wanted to stay on at the farm. He said I now had too many talents for a farm labourer and was I not curious to move back to the coast where there were many more opportunities? He gave me a letter to take to a relative of his here in this town who has a sisal factory. In the letter he wrote that I was trustworthy and respectful, and could read and write in German. He read the letter to me before he sealed it. That is why I have a job as a clerk in a German sisal factory, and that is why you will learn to read and write too, so that one day you will know about the world and learn how to look after yourself.’
‘Yes,’ Afiya said, not ready to think about the future just yet. ‘Did the farmer have sandy hair like the other German in the white uniform?’
‘No, he didn’t,’ Ilyas said. ‘He had dark hair. He was slim and deliberate, never shouting at or abusing his workers. He looked like a … a schüler, a learned man, a restrained man.’
Afiya gave the description of the farmer a moment’s thought and then asked, ‘Did our Ba have dark hair?’
‘Eh, probably. It was all grey when I left but I suppose it would have been dark earlier, when he was younger,’ Ilyas said.
‘Did your farmer look like our Ba?’ Afiya asked.
Ilyas burst into laughter. ‘No, he looked like a German,’ he said. ‘Our Ba …’ Ilyas stopped and shook his head and said no more for a moment. ‘Our Ba was unwell,’ he said.
*
‘I don’t want to speak ill of the dead so soon after,’ Khalifa said to Ilyas, ‘but that old man was a pirate. As for the young tajiri, well, I have known him for years. He was a little boy of nine, I think, when I started working for Bwana Amur. Now he is grown into a young man of panicky spirit – and who wouldn’t be with a father who kept him so much in the dark? Then all of a sudden here he is, presiding over a robbery as the creditors move in. He lost a lot in the chaos that followed his father’s death. He knew nothing about the business and those other pirates robbed him. All he is really interested in is wood. He even persuaded his father to let him open that timber yard and furniture workshop. That is what he loves to do – hang around the timber yard and smell the wood. In the meantime, everything else is going to hell.
‘I told you about the house. Well, we thought he was not made of the same ugly material as his father, and perhaps he would listen more kindly to Bi Asha’s plea for her house, but he is greedy just like his father. He does not have any right to this house. He should have returned it to its proper owner but he firmly refuses to give it up, even though he too was surprised to discover it does not belong to Bi Asha. He could ask us to leave, I suppose, but I think he’s too afraid of my wife. They are cousins, you know, almost like brother and sister, but he refuses to return the house that rightfully belongs to her family. He is just another greedy scoundrel.’
The two men took to meeting late in the afternoon or early in the evening for an hour or two at the café. They joined the general talk, which was the main purpose of gathering there, and Khalifa, who knew many people, introduced Ilyas to others and pumped him for his stories, which were often about his time in the German school in the mountain town and the German farmer who was his benefactor. Other people also had stories to tell, some of them quite improbable, but that was the café style: the broader the better. Khalifa was a well-known connoisseur of stories and gossip and was at times consulted to arbitrate between competing versions. When they had enough of the café talk, they strolled along the seashore or went back to Khalifa’s porch where in the evening some of his friends came for a baraza. They were preoccupied at the time with rumours of the coming conflict with the British, which people were saying was going to be a big war, not like the small ones before against the Arabs and the Waswahili and the Wahehe and the Wanyamwezi and the Wameru and all the others. Those were terrible enough but this is going to be a big war! They have gunships the size of a hill and ships that can travel underwater and guns that can bombard a town miles away. There is even talk of a machine that can fly although no one has seen one.
‘They don’t stand a chance, the British,’ Ilyas said, and a murmur of agreement went through the group. ‘The Germans are gifted and clever people. They know how to organise, they know how to fight. They think of everything … and on top of that they are much kinder than the British.’
His listeners hooted with laughter.
‘I don’t know about kindness,’ said one of the café experts, a man called Mangungu. ‘For me it’s their sternness and the viciousness of the Nubi and Wanyamwezi askari that are going to take care of the British. There is no one as stern as a German.’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Ilyas said. ‘I have met with nothing but kindness from them.’
‘Listen, just because one German man has been kind to you does not change what has happened here over the years,’ another man, Mahmudu, said, addressing him. ‘In the thirty years or so that they have occupied this land, the Germans have killed so many people that the country is littered with skulls and bones and the earth is soggy with blood. I am not exaggerating.’
‘Yes, you are,’ Ilyas said.
‘You people here don’t know what happened in the south,’ Mahmudu continued. ‘No, the British don’t stand a chance, not if the fighting is on land, but it won’t be because of German kindness.’
‘I agree. Their askari are ferocious and complete savages. God alone knows how they have become like that,’ said a man named Mahfudh.
‘It’s their officers. They learn their cruelty from their officers,’ said Mangungu, speaking in a tone of authority intended to settle the argument as he liked to do.
‘They were fighting an enemy who was just as savage in retaliation,’ Ilyas said, undaunted. ‘You haven’t heard half of what those people did to the Germans. They had to be harsh in retaliation because that’s the only way savage people can be made to understand order and obedience. The Germans are honourable and civilised people and have done much good since they have been here.’
His listeners were silent in the face of such vehemence. ‘My friend, they have eaten you,’ Mangungu said eventually, having the last word as usual.
Despite such encounters it was still a great surprise to Khalifa when Ilyas announced that he planned to volunteer for the schutztruppe. ‘Are you mad? What has this to do with you?’ his friend asked. ‘This is between two violent and vicious invaders, one among us and the other to the north. They are fighting over who should swallow us whole. What has this to do with you? You will be joining an army of mercenaries renowned for their cruelty and brutality. Didn’t you hear what everyone was saying? You might be badly hurt … worse even. Are you thinking straight, my friend?’
Ilyas was not to be dissuaded and refused to defend his decision. His only concern, he said, was to make arrangements for his little sister.
*
A whole year had raced past. For Afiya it had felt like the happiest time of her life ever since her brother came back and found her and filled her days with laughter. He really did, he was always laughing and she could not help laughing when he did. Then all of a sudden, or that was how it seemed to her, he said ‘I have joined the schutztruppe. Do you know what that is? It means protection troop, jeshi la serikali. I will be an askari. I will be a soldier for the Germans. There is a war coming.’
‘Will you have to go away? Will it be for a long time?’ she asked him, speaking calmly although she felt alarmed by his news.
‘It won’t be for long,’ he said, smiling reassuringly. ‘The schutztruppe is a powerful and invincible army. Everyone is terrified of them. I’ll be back in a few months.’
‘Will I stay here until you come back?’ she asked.
He shook his head. ‘You are too young. I can’t leave you here on your own. I’ve asked Uncle Omar if you can stay with the family but he does not want the responsibility, in case … We are not related,’ Ilyas said and then shrugged. ‘You can’t stay here and you cannot come to war with me. I don’t want to send you back to them, your aunt and uncle in the country, but there is no other choice. Now they will know I am coming back for you and they will treat you better.’
She did not know how he could send her back there, after all he had said and after he had taught her to see the cruelty of her life with them. She could not stop crying for a long while. Ilyas held her in his arms and stroked her hair and whispered reassurance. That night he let her share his bed with him and she fell asleep while he talked about the time he was at school in the mountain town. She knew he was in a hurry to leave, and she did not want him to dislike her and not come back for her so she stopped crying when he said to stop. The sisters made a dress for her as a goodbye present, and their mother gave her one of her old kangas. I’m sure you’ll be very happy there in the country, the sisters said, and Afiya said yes. She had not told them anything about her uncle and aunt there – Ilyas said not to – and she did not tell them how much she dreaded going back. They also went to say goodbye to Khalifa and to Bi Asha. Ilyas knew that he was posted to Dar es Salam for training.
Her brother’s friend Khalifa said to the girl, ‘I don’t know why your elder brother is going to war instead of staying here to look after you. This fight is nothing to do with him. And he’s doing it in the company of murdering askari whose hands are already covered in blood. Listen to me, Afiya, until he returns, you must let us know if ever you need anything. Send a message to me at my workplace, care of the merchant Biashara. Will you remember that?’
‘She can write,’ Ilyas said.
‘In that case, send me a note,’ said Khalifa, and the two friends laughed as they said goodbye.
Everything was done in a few days and she was soon back with her aunt and uncle in the country. Her few belongings were in a small cloth bundle: the dress the sisters made for her, the old kanga their mother gave her, a small slate tablet and a packet of scrap paper that her brother had brought back from work for her to practise her writing on. She was back to sleeping on the floor in the entranceway, in the shadow of the hill. Her aunt treated her as if she had only been away for a few days and expected her to return to her chores as before. Her uncle ignored her. The daughter Zawadi sneered and said, our slave has come back. She was not good enough for the big brother in town. The son Issa snapped his fingers under her nose as his father did to summon her. Everything was a little worse than before and it hurt more. She warned herself to put up with it because her brother said to do so until he came back for good. Her aunt grumbled at her more than she used to, about how slow she was with her chores, about the expense of taking her back even though her brother gave them money for her upkeep. The son was now sixteen and sometimes he pressed himself against her and squeezed her nipples when no one was around and she was not quick enough to escape.
In the hot, dead mid-afternoon hours a few days after she came back to live with them, her aunt saw her sitting in the backyard, practising writing on the slate tablet. Her aunt had just risen from her after-lunch sleep and was on her way to the washroom. She looked on without a word at first and then came closer. When she saw that the marks were not just squiggles, she pointed to the slate and asked harshly, ‘What’s that? Are you writing? What does it say?’
‘Jana, leo, kesho,’ Afiya said, pointing to each word in turn. Yesterday, today, tomorrow.
Her aunt looked perturbed and disapproving but did not say anything. She proceeded to the washroom and Afiya hurried to put her slate away, cautioning herself to practise discreetly in future. Her aunt did not mention the slate again but she must have told her husband. The next day after he had his lunch, during which she felt an unusual tension among the family, he snapped his fingers at Afiya and pointed to the small room. As she turned to obey she saw a smile of anticipation on the face of the son. She was already in the room, facing the door, when her uncle came in with a cane in his right hand. He bolted the door and gazed at her for a moment with an expression of disgust. ‘I hear you have learned to write. I don’t have to ask who has taught you to do this. I know exactly who it is – someone with no sense of responsibility. No, someone with no sense at all. Why does a girl need to write? So she can write to a pimp?’
He stepped forward and slapped her on her temple with his left hand, then he swapped the cane and slapped her on the face and head with his right hand. The blows made her stagger and she reeled back as he shouted and snarled at her. Then after a long silent pause he lashed at her with the cane, deliberately missing at first but coming ever closer. She yelled with terror and did her best to escape but it was a small room and he had bolted the door. There was nowhere for her to hide so she ran and ducked and took what blows she had to. Most of them landed on her back and shoulders and made her shudder and cry out, and in the end she stumbled and fell. As she did so she put out her left hand to protect her face, and the stick landed on it with crushing force. The pain took her breath away and she gasped with shock before a scream tore through her. She lay at his feet, screaming and sobbing, while he raged at her and no one came to stop him. When he had satisfied himself, he opened the door and left the room.
Afterwards, through her tears and sobs, she knew that her aunt came to her and took her soiled dress off and wiped her down. Then she covered her with a sheet and murmured to her until she passed out. It could only have been momentary because when she came to light still glared through the window and the room throbbed with heat. She lay there all afternoon in a tearful delirium, conscious at times that her aunt was sitting against the wall nearby. In the evening she took the girl to the herbalist to have her hand bound, and the mganga told the woman: ‘You should be ashamed of yourself. Everybody in the village heard him shouting and beating the child. It’s as if he is out of his mind.’
‘He did not mean to hurt her like this. It was an accident,’ her aunt said.
‘Do you think no one is keeping account?’ the mganga said.
The herbalist did all she knew how to do but the hand did not heal properly. Afiya had another hand, though, and a few days after the beating she wrote a note on a scrap of paper to the man her brother had befriended in the town. She addressed the note care of Bwana Biashara as he had instructed she was to do if she needed help. She wrote: Kaniumiza. Nisaidie. Afiya. He has hurt me. Help me. She gave the note to the shopkeeper, who read it and folded it in half and gave it to a cart driver headed for the coast. Her brother’s friend came back with the cart driver who delivered her note. He paid him to return the following day. She was still sore all over from the bruises and the fractured hand, and was sitting on the doorstep staring out at the hill when they pulled up outside the house. The shopkeeper had told them where to go. Her uncle was at work but he did not come back. He must have known who had arrived. It was only a small village. When she saw her brother’s friend she rose to her feet.
‘Afiya,’ he said, and came to her and saw how she was. He took her good hand, walked her to the cart without saying a word.
‘Wait,’ she said. She ran inside and picked up her bundle, which was in the entranceway where she slept.
For a long time Afiya did not like to go anywhere in case they came looking for her. She was afraid of everyone except for her brother’s friend who had come for her and whom she was now to call Baba Khalifa, and Bi Asha, who fed her wheat porridge and fish soup to build her strength, whom she was now to call Bimkubwa. She was sure that if her Baba had not come, her uncle would have killed her sooner or later, or if not him then his son. But Baba Khalifa came.