They talked about the war in Tanga for many weeks up and down the coast, but for most of them it was quiet after the disastrous attack. It was as everyone had anticipated: the British were no match for the schutztruppe. As word travelled down the coast from Tanga, rumour expanded and embellished the ferocity and discipline of the askari and the shambolic panic of the Indian troops, who it was assumed must have led the panic. Khalifa said they were bound to hear from Ilyas about this German victory – he would not be able to resist singing the praise of the schutztruppe – but they heard nothing from him.
The British reply to their defeat was a Royal Navy blockade of the coast. No trade was possible with Zanzibar or Mombasa or Pemba across the way, let alone the long-distance trade across the ocean. Overnight, shortages appeared as merchants hurried to hoard their merchandise, both to conserve supplies and to wait for prices to rise while keeping their goods out of the hands of the German authorities, who were sure to want to confiscate everything for themselves and their troops. Nassor Biashara, whose business had been slowly recovering from the collapse and near ruin of paying off the creditors after his father’s death, now found himself in even more dire straits. He had committed himself to buying several items for wholesale distribution among customers in the interior: Indian sugar, wheat for flour-milling, sorghum and rice, all paid for and awaiting delivery. He thought he could make good his losses to the creditors with one ambitious enterprise, but the blockade caught him out.
It was not only business people like Nassor Biashara who felt the consequences of the blockade. Many things became scarcer than before: rice, coffee and tea – even though all these were grown in the country – sugar, salt-fish, flour. The schutztruppe fed themselves off the land whenever they could, and now they were at war all provisions were at their disposal. Fish was still plentiful and coconuts and bananas and cassava still grew despite the Royal Navy and the schutztruppe. For a while people bought by offering something else: a shirt for a basket of mangoes, a roll of cotton material for a ram. No one bothered much about money, just for a while. Where appropriate items of exchange were not to be had, there was always jewellery. Most families possessed some little bit of jewellery which came as dowry and was passed down the generations. Merchants and traders knew the durable value of gold and gems and could not resist them when they came on offer. For a while the panic of scarcity took over.
They had very little news of the war in the interior and what they had came through the German administration. It seemed that the experience of Tanga was enough to deter the British from making another landing anywhere on the coast, and as the period of quiet extended even though they were under blockade, so people adapted and coped, and in the greater chaos they were able to avoid paying the German authorities the taxes they normally imposed on them. Business and trade began to pick up, although Nassor Biashara’s affairs were still in trouble.
‘Nothing came out of your cleverness but ruin,’ Khalifa said to him.
The merchant disliked the tone that Khalifa sometimes used with him, as if he were still a novice at his work. It was evident that he attempted to control his anger when Khalifa said this. He glared back with lips pressed tightly together, then looked away for a moment before he began speaking slowly. He was not yet ready for a confrontation. ‘There was no cleverness in it. I just thought that we needed to do something to repair the business. How was I to know about the war and the blockade?’
‘To put everything in one venture like that,’ Khalifa said, ‘did not show good business sense.’
‘What did you expect me to do, just wait until I was impoverished? I did not put everything into that venture. We still have the timber business,’ Nassor Biashara said angrily. Then he took a deep breath and after a moment continued in a more measured tone. ‘And anyway, if you know so much about business, where were you when all the debts were piling up in my father’s time? Why did you not say something like that to him instead of grumbling at me now?’
‘I did not know all his business dealings. I told you that,’ Khalifa said.
‘You were his clerk. You should’ve known,’ Nassor Biashara said. ‘You should have been keeping records.’
‘Are you blaming me for your father’s secrecy?’ Khalifa asked mildly, smiling his disdain.
Nassor Biashara lowered his glasses, which were perched on his forehead during this exchange, and returned to the ledger he was once again checking through for evidence of his father’s transactions, just in case he had missed something in his earlier perusals. He did not speak to Khalifa for the rest of the day and avoided eye contact. He continued in this taciturn way for a few days, speaking politely but only when it was necessary. There was not much business to do. Nassor Biashara spent more and more of his day in the tiny office he had in the timber yard. Most of the time they sat in the office and talked with whoever dropped by. They did not have another conversation like that but one day Nassor Biashara announced that he had found a tenant for the office downstairs who was going to turn it into a provisions shop, a duka. ‘I am moving the paperwork to the timber yard and selling all the furniture. From now on, you will look after the warehouse as there are no books for you to keep, and what paperwork there is I will do myself. You’ll also have to take a cut in pay. We all will while things are as they are.’
He delivered this announcement with some asperity, discouraging conversation. As soon as he was done with saying what he had to say, he put on his cap and went upstairs.
‘He’s trying to get rid of you,’ Bi Asha said. ‘That miserable ungrateful wretch, that small-boned thieving hypocrite, after all you’ve done for him and his father.’ She went on in that vein for a long time while Khalifa listened gratefully to her outrage. He knew that Nassor Biashara had no choice but to cut back but he still enjoyed hearing the little tajiri being torn to pieces. It surprised him that the young man he had always known as a shy or even timorous boy was able to act so decisively. He even smiled secretly at the thought. Renting out the office was a bit of a panic measure but not very important in the end as it could always be reversed. What was there for him to do in a warehouse that was almost empty? He was afraid that Bi Asha was right, that the merchant was easing him out and soon there would be no salary. Perhaps soon there would be no merchant. Who needed a clerk in these straitened times?
But the merchant did not get rid of Khalifa. As the war receded into rumours of fierce fighting in the interior, Nassor Biashara invested in timber for the repair and reconstruction that was bound to be necessary once the conflict was over. Surely it could not continue for much longer now. He made the decision without consulting or asking for advice from Khalifa, and he kept his own records and did not wait for an incompetent clerk to do so. Khalifa, in the meantime, cleaned out and organised the warehouse to receive the timber that the merchant purchased. He too kept his own records just in case the future brought accusations of incompetence or worse.
One of Amur Biashara’s old business contacts, Rashid Maulidi, who was the nahodha of a boat lying idle at the wharf, had a word with Nassor Biashara about a venture he had in mind to bring in rice and sugar from Pemba. The merchant knew without knowing the precise details that Rashid Maulidi was part of the dubious network of traders his father had patronised. He said no, it was too dangerous. If the British caught him, they would sink his boat and perhaps lock him up for years. If the Germans knew he had smuggled in supplies of rice and sugar, they would take it away for themselves and whip him with a kiboko for hoarding. Rashid Maulidi went to Khalifa who was more familiar with the kind of dealings he had in mind and explained his plan, and Khalifa listened carefully and asked Rashid Maulidi if he could bring in a consignment on credit. Was that possible? He said that his credit was good in Pemba, which was his homeland, but he was not sure if he wanted to take the entire risk himself. If something went wrong, he did not have the means to put it right and would lose his boat. Khalifa said that the merchant was a nervy young man who needed persuading. He suggested that Rashid Maulidi should get a small consignment on credit, just to demonstrate that the scheme was viable, and then they would speak to the merchant again. Rashid Maulidi brought in a modest consignment of rice and sugar as agreed, and when it was safely stored away in the warehouse, they brought Nassor Biashara to see it.
‘You don’t know this is here,’ Khalifa said. ‘You give me the money to pay for this in my name and then I sell it. After that the business pays for itself. We use the proceeds to buy more supplies. There is no need for you to be involved. Whatever profit we make, we divide four parts to you, four parts to Rashid Maulidi, two parts to me. You don’t need to know anything further about it.’
There was still some haggling to do, but despite arguments back and forth that was how it ended up. Throughout the remaining years of the blockade, Rashid Maulidi brought in small supplies of whatever he could purchase in Pemba and Khalifa hid them away in the warehouse where trusted traders came to do business. It was not riches but it kept the business going and allowed Khalifa to find a new role for himself as a trader in contraband as well as a warehouse keeper. He dealt with Nassor Biashara politely, if at times irritably, and they largely left each other alone.
*
The British forces entered Tanga on 3 July 1916, nearly two years after the disastrous attempt in 1914. A small force of a few hundred Indian troops took the port without firing a shot. They found a town still bearing the scars of the Royal Navy bombardment, and the port and the Customs House buildings and jetty were in ruins, blown up by the Germans before they left. German forces in the area went to join their commander in the interior who was regrouping his forces before retreating further south. It was the end of the war for that part of the coast, though there was still the struggle for Bagamoyo and Dar es Salam to come in August. It was also the end of the blockade and a slow return to commerce with Mombasa and Pemba and Zanzibar. They now began to have more detailed news of the war in the interior. Everyone was sure the war was going to be over very soon. It will not last beyond the monsoons, they said.
Afiya was thirteen years old when the British took control of the coast. It was now more than two years since Ilyas left for Dar es Salaam and in all that time they had heard nothing from him. Baba Khalifa told her that the news from the interior was there was fighting everywhere with many casualties, German, British, South African, Indian, but most of them African. Schutztruppe askari, KAR, West African armies, many Africans are being killed to settle this European quarrel, he said. Maalim Abdalla persuaded Habib, Ilyas’s fellow clerk on the sisal estate, to make some enquiries. He learned what they already knew: that Ilyas was sent to Dar es Salaam for training, but they also found out that he was trained as a signalman and posted to the Lindi District in the south. Habib could not find out any more and there was no one left to ask because the German manager was now interned by the British.
Khalifa had heard that Tabora was taken by the Belgian Force Publique and that it had been a terrible battle. The worst of the fighting had then moved south and was now in the Lindi region, exactly where Ilyas was supposed to have been posted as a signalman. He did not say so to Afiya, but he was beginning to think there was something ominous about her brother’s long silence. Instead he tried to understate his concern when he spoke to her. ‘A signalman is a peaceful kind of duty,’ he said to her. ‘He will be fine. His work will be to stand on a hill a long way from trouble and send messages on his mirrors. Don’t worry, we’ll hear from him soon.’
*
Afiya was now no longer a girl but a kijana, a maiden, and beginning to understand the endless resentments that were part of the sequestered lives of women. She did not call on Khalida as often as she used to, because Bi Asha said she was not to. They were scoundrels in that family, she said, and the empty-headed women friends Khalida associated with liked nothing so much as to gossip and to tear people to shreds, shame on them. Afiya knew that Bi Asha’s prevailing topic of conversation was her neighbours, whose shortcomings she relished and repeatedly described. She did not make any protest at this new prohibition but when she visited her friend she did not tell Bi Asha about it, nor did she tell Khalida what was said about her and her husband or about the slander of her women friends. Apart from her visits to Khalida and to Jamila, Afiya was shut up at home day and night, or shrouded in a buibui when she went out. She could feel something in her shrinking and turning edgy as if constantly expecting a scolding. There was so much that she was now not allowed to do because it was improper. She was not to touch a boy’s or a man’s hand even in greeting. She was not to speak to a boy or a man in the street unless he spoke to her and was someone she knew. She was not to smile at a stranger, and always to walk with her eyes cast slightly downwards to avoid accidental eye contact. Bi Asha policed her movements, or tried to, advising her firmly on her behaviour and who she was not to see and what she was not to do.
Her friend Jamila was still unmarried and Bi Asha pronounced that the match was likely to be called off. That was what usually happened when a betrothal went on for this long. It meant someone was having second thoughts. Jamila’s fiancé lived in Zanzibar and planned to move to join her after the wedding, which did not surprise Bi Asha. Who would not want to leave Zanzibar? Every disease you could name was to be found in Zanzibar, including sin and disappointment. Afiya shrugged and let the bitterness wash over her. Jamila’s family did not seem to be troubled by the delay and even talked about it openly and carried on in their easy-going ways, welcoming Afiya whenever she called on them and telling her about their plans. The room downstairs that Ilyas had rented was to be Jamila’s new home after the wedding and she was having it decorated in preparation.
Visiting her was not yet prohibited but Afiya sensed Bi Asha’s mounting disapproval of her old friend. ‘How old is Jamila now? She must be nearly nineteen. They had better get her married before she gets up to mischief. You don’t know how tricky men can be and how foolish young women are. You mark my words, little girl, they are making trouble for themselves.’
I am not a little girl, Afiya said to herself and tried not to mind. In all her time with Bi Asha she had not been defiant of her wishes and the small wiles she practised for getting her own way only concerned matters of little importance. Keeping silent about her visits to Khalida was her greatest act of defiance, otherwise it was things like hiding a banana from her market shopping so she could eat it in the evening when she was sometimes hungry, or concealing a cowrie necklace that Jamila and Saada found in their mother’s jewellery box and gave to her as a gift. Bimkubwa did not approve of adornments. When Bi Asha caught her out in these instances she smiled, not minding such small deceptions. Unakuwa mjanja we, she told the girl. You are becoming cunning. Baba came to her assistance at times but Bi Asha kept her sternest instructions for when she and Afiya were on their own.
When the merchant closed the office and moved to the timber yard, Baba managed to save an almost clean ledger, which he brought home for her. The pages were thick and shiny, and the cover was marbled in grey and pink. It seemed a pity to write her clumsy scribble in the beautiful pages. He also brought home past copies of Kiongozi wherever he found them. There were no more issues after the arrival of the British but there were still old copies circulating. Khalifa also found some copies of Rafiki Yangu through Maalim Abdalla. Those newspapers were her reading matter and afterwards she copied whole paragraphs for writing practice. Bi Asha was suspicious of these publications because she said they were the words of unbelievers, intended to convert people with their lies. Their desire to do evil was relentless. Sometimes Bi Asha recited a qasida while she worked, and when she was in the mood she dictated a verse and watched indulgently as Afiya wrote out the lines. Later she read the verses back to her and Bi Asha said, let me see and smiled at her cleverness. Afiya was pleased too but it was not really cleverness because she could only read slowly and her writing was laborious and clumsy when Baba’s was so graceful.
‘You just need to practise,’ he said. ‘Make a real effort.’
‘You don’t need to write like him,’ Bi Asha said. ‘He is a clerk. You are not going to become a clerk, little girl.’
I’m not a little girl.
*
In her fifteenth year, on the first day of Idd that year, Afiya wore a dress that her friends Jamila and Saada made for her as a present. The bodice was made of blue satin and fitted snugly. The neckline was round and fringed with white lace. The skirt was full and pleated, and made from a light blue poplin material with a design of tiny green blossoms. The material came from their mother who had saved it from other dresses they had made in the past. Jamila had a gift for designing dresses from odd materials and it was she who came up with the design. When Afiya tried it on at their house, the sisters smiled at each other in self-congratulation and told her it fitted very nicely. It was the most beautiful dress she had ever had. When she took it home, she hid it under her buibui and put it away in a cupboard in her room. Some instinct warned her to do so because she expected disapproval.
Most people had new clothes made for Idd: a new dress or a kanga for the women, a new kanzu and kofia or even a jacket for the men. Times were still hard though the blockade was over and she knew she was to have a dress from Bimkubwa. It was not new but one Bimkubwa had made for herself some years before and now altered so it fitted Afiya in some fashion. Afiya was slim and still growing, and the dress hung loose and baggy on her, which Bi Asha said was not a problem. You’ll grow into it. When she tried it on on the eve of Idd and paraded round the house in it, Baba made a face behind Bi Asha’s back, a small grimace and then a smile of sympathy.
On the first morning of Idd, Afiya did her chores and helped prepare the festival breakfast in her work clothes. At mid-morning, when they were done and just before they were ready to sit down to breakfast, she went to her room to change. She knew it was expected she would come out in the dress Bi Asha altered for her. Instead she changed into the one her friends made for her, about which she had told neither Bi Asha nor Baba. When she came out a few minutes later, Baba nodded and smiled and then silently applauded.
‘That is lovely,’ he said. ‘Now you look like a princess instead of an orphan. Where did you get that from?’
‘Jamila and Saada made it for me,’ Afiya said.
Bi Asha looked on without a word for a moment, and just when Afiya thought she was going to be instructed to go back to her room and change, she too managed a smile. ‘She is a young woman now,’ she said.
The full weight of Bi Asha’s words became slowly evident in the months that followed. Whenever Afiya made ready to go out, Bi Asha asked her to say where she was going and what she was going there for. When she returned, Bi Asha asked for an account of who she had seen and what was said. By degrees, without even realising what she was doing at first, Afiya found herself asking Bi Asha’s permission before she went out. Bi Asha commented on what she wore, commending or reproving as seemed appropriate to her. The Idd dress was long-since condemned because it was too small for her, Bi Asha said. Too tight in the chest, too brazen. Afiya was even required to cover herself with a kanga when Baba was around, leaving only her face uncovered. Bi Asha seemed to know when Afiya’s periods were due and always asked about them. Afiya had not yet quite got over the distaste for what happened to her during her period and she found it humiliating to be forced to describe the colour and volume of the mess.
Bi Asha’s tone with her was often grating, as if a low mutter ran underneath her words. She only seemed satisfied with Afiya when she joined her in prayers or when she sat to read the Koran with her in the afternoon. To prepare for a visit to her friends, Afiya put in a lengthy spell of piety beforehand, and sometimes did so just to win some respite. She felt hemmed in and under scrutiny all the time, as if she were secretly contemplating sins. Afiya was sure that Bi Asha searched her room when she was out. She was by now resentful and guilty at the same time because she reminded herself of the kindness Bi Asha had showed her when she was a wounded and frightened child. She wanted to say to Bimkubwa that she was not a child any more but she did not dare. She did not even know how old she really was because no one had bothered to record her birth.
When she said this to Baba, he said, ‘Let’s work it out. You know what year you were born because that was the year Ilyas ran away. So now select the date of your birth. Not everyone has this privilege. Mine was written down by my father. Bi Asha’s was recorded in an accounts ledger belonging to Bwana Amur Biashara. You can choose your own date of birth. Please yourself.’
Afiya selected the sixth day of the sixth month – mwezi sita wa mfungo sita – because she liked the cadence. So from now on you’ll know exactly how old you are, Baba said. Some months into her sixteenth year, the full weight of the words Bi Asha had spoken on that first day of Idd when Afiya wore the dress her friends made for her, descended on her.
‘You’re a young woman now,’ Bi Asha said as they sat together after breakfast on another Idd day a year later. ‘It’s time to find you a husband.’
Baba chuckled, assuming that Bi Asha was teasing Afiya about being grown up. Afiya smiled too, thinking the same.
‘I am not making a joke,’ Bi Asha said dryly, and Afiya instantly realised what she should have realised in the first place. No, she wasn’t. ‘We can’t have a grown woman sitting around the house with nothing to do. She will only get up to mischief. She needs to have a husband.’
‘A grown woman! She is only a girl,’ Baba said incredulously, and with such feeling that Bi Asha breathed in sharply in surprise. ‘You’re always calling her little girl and now she is suddenly a woman.’
‘Not suddenly,’ Bi Asha said. ‘Don’t pretend that you haven’t noticed.’
‘Let her have her youth before burdening her with children. What’s the hurry? Has someone asked for her?’
‘No, not yet, but someone will very soon, I expect. You have worked it out for yourself. She is sixteen,’ Bi Asha said stubbornly. ‘It’s a perfectly normal age for a girl to be married.’
‘It’s ignorance and narrow-mindedness,’ Baba said vehemently, and Bi Asha puckered her mouth in temporary retreat.