The town welcomes you with the smell of seaweed and rotten algae. How that hits your nose depends on where you’re coming from. For her, the first question was, “which one of my ancestors carried that body odour?” She knew some of them were buried there, in that ocean. They were taken off the coast of Lake Nyasa, a place called Malindi, driven all the way up in chains to land on that small island in a town built like a maze. As she traversed the tiny, suffocating alleyways, Zinha couldn’t help but imagine them being dragged there – bodies sweating, hearts heaving; cargo for the ship.
It was amazing how the town had maintained its identity as a trade center over the years: spices, fish, ornaments, and bodies, of course – it was a tourist town. As she walked down from Beach House Hotel where the airport minibus dropped them, she recalled that she had made no plans of having a tour guide. She assured herself that she was African and did not need to be guided in Africa. The good thing with being on the continent was that you could easily blend in and disappear. But before the streets could swallow her, a tall, dark man somehow saw the foreignness on her face. He approached her, his face beaming like they had met before.
“Jambo,” he said, and offered to carry her bag.
Zinha told him she was alright and made as if to excuse herself. The man did not budge and towered over her, almost blocking her way. After carefully considering the possibilities in front of her, she concluded that he was no threat and resigned to walk with him through the tangled corridors of Stone Town.
“This is where life happens,” he told her.
She looked at him and nodded. She imagined her head growing bigger as she did so.
“Sama, that’s my name. Wewe?”
“Zinha.”
“Karibu Sinnah!” The man had a heavy Swahili accent.
“No. Z-i-n-h-a,” she enunciated the name she always thought of as borrowed from another culture – foreign – and that somehow made her shrink.
“Sawa, rafiki. Karibu!”
They somehow found common ground in their misunderstanding as they disappeared into the narrow bazaars of a town whose ancient stone walls shone red in the bright sunshine.
She could tell he did not register the look on her face when he talked about life happening there. For her, this was a place of death. It was a world surrounded by water, and water kills. Whatever was celebrated in the town was either dead or dying. The fish on restaurant menus, the octopus grilled on the roadside, the spices, and the people who built the town – all dead. And a tourist town like that can kill you in so many different ways. But after an hour with this mystery man, she realised how overthinking could make you miss the ephemeral beauty the world has to offer while you still breathe. She told herself to forget about death and feast on this small island. It was not every day that she got to leave her life behind and become what she was. Then she remembered she was on this island looking for a part of her – a piece of stone that if not filled into the hole in her soul would create a disaster, a hollowing chasm she may never get to fill until it swallowed her whole.
That evening when she went back to the hotel, she decided to take a quick shower and head back out where the looming darkness didn’t seem to bother the people going about their business. Washing her skin with a piece of jagged stone she found on the windowsill of the bathroom felt like an attempt at sloughing. But the stone biting her skin also felt like some strange massage and it reminded her that she had not been touched in a long time. She liked it rough. But she shook the thought off her mind and quickly rinsed the soap off her body with the salty water that made her feel unclean. Back home in Malawi, the water was always fresh and warm. It was amazing how different things could be just across the border. As if the world was not connected. As if all water did not come from the same mouth.
She went down to the bar, which stood right on the beach front, and ordered a cocktail she had never tasted before. It was a concoction called dawa, a mixture of sugarcane gin with something exotic. It tasted like poison. They did not have this gin back home. But even if they had it, what were the chances she would have tasted it by now? Lately, her grandparents had been watching her so closely that she felt like she was in prison. She was surprised that her grandfather, whom she fondly called Baba, had allowed her to go on this trip to Zanzibar. The old man had sponsored the trip with his “hard-earned money,” which he never wanted to spend. What were the odds?
Baba was known across the lakeshore as one of the richest men, but he did not look like money. He was one of those men who wore a kufi, a faded and spent kanzu, and some old sandals that had assumed the hue of red dust. Now in his old age, he spent most of his time on their baraza watching the fishermen make their trips to the beach and back, dragging with them dozens of fish in their makhoka. There was a time he used to be one of those men – a fisherman. And he was the best of them in those parts. His father before him and his father before him had all lived their lives at the mercy of the lake. Their family had made a fortune and Zinha could tell that people still respected them as they lowered their gazes whenever she or other members of her family passed by. But she was baffled that her grandfather never wanted to spend that fortune. Or could it be that the people avoided her eyes because of something else she was not aware of?
She was angry at Baba for choosing to live like a beggar. She was sorry for her granny for being his unwilling victim. For all she knew, Bibi was unhappy. She was one of those women who had the demeanour of the proverbial beast of burden. She looked like she carried the sins of all the women who lived before her on her shoulders. On her head, under the hijab she never took off in public, was tied a load of everything that could go wrong with the generation she had helped bring into this world. And Zinha was one of them. She knew the old woman was constantly worried about her. The fact that her only daughter – Zinha’s mother – had sailed off with an Arab trader when Zinha was only three, made it worse. She never understood why she had brought a troublesome daughter into this world. What is it that the gods had against her to not only deny her a son but also give her a daughter who would get pregnant out of wedlock and then run off with another strange man? They were Muslims for God’s sake! Muslim women were supposed to be clean. Kept. Muslim women possessed certain qualities: faith and devotion. Modesty and decency. Strong moral character. Respect and honor. Connection with Allah. And yet Bibi had spent her whole life wrestling with delinquents.
Zinha was convinced that Baba resented Bibi because the old man felt that the woman had failed him. With all the money he possessed, she failed to give him a son who would inherit his wealth and the trade when he was old and frail, like he was now. Maybe he worried about dying and leaving everything in the hands of women. But what surprised Zinha was that despite being a devout Muslim, Baba never married another woman. He was allowed four by his faith. His Yao culture, on the other hand, gave him the freedom to marry as many women as possible for as long as he wanted to quench the fire in his loins. The culture did not care about how one would take care of all those women or the children that would possibly follow. It was a culture of men, and there were many along the lakeshore who failed to take care of their families but went on to soil girls as young as their youngest daughters. Zinha was only lucky because she came from a wealthy family. Otherwise, she would have been good bait for the dowry.
In her years of naivety, Zinha thought that Baba never married another woman because he loved Bibi. But as she grew older and the tensions in the compound started registering in her mind, she felt that the old man feared his wife. Then as she began to understand the world better, she noticed that her grandfather behaved as if he owed his wife something. There was always a deep-seated apology in his eyes that bordered on regret. It was only later, when she was in her early twenties, that Zinha finally understood the tensions that brewed storms in their home.
In Nkhotakota, where they had lived their entire lives, families still lived together in their compounds. No matter how rich they were, there was no such thing as a nuclear family. Everything belonged to the clan and everybody belonged to the clan. Sometimes when she failed to control herself and thought about her mother – about why she left – Zinha believed that the woman she never got to know must have been fed up with that life. Her mother was the first woman from that village to attend formal education.
“That white man’s school changed her,” Bibi always complained. “It stole my daughter from me.”
Perhaps this was why Zinha also felt trapped – because she too went to school. Communal life was also not for her. Too many rules. So many restrictions. Too many expectations from a life she never even truly owned.
It was from the gossip of the village women that Zinha began to understand why there was always a cloud of resentment in their compound. Those who had no money had nothing to do but talk about those who had it, and her family was the subject of gossip. Her grandfather may have resented his wife for reasons married couples hated each other, but there was another woman in their family who hated Bibi with a passion that surpassed profound reverence for an imaginary God. That was her great aunt, Maryam, Baba’s only remaining sister. Zinha always wondered why women that old would resent each other. Were they planning on carrying their daggers to the grave? Time was yet to undo the threads she failed to untangle.
Bibi’s face reminded Maryam of things she would have rather forgotten. Maryam and Baba were not the only children in their family. They had had a brother, Abdul, who was younger than them. In those days, their father was so ambitious he thought he could buy the world. Apart from his fishing business, he was well-known as a poacher in the entire region – selling ivory to Swahili-Arab traders who came all the way from Zanzibar on ships that looked like they could break apart with the slightest of winds. It was one of those traders, Mahmood bin Said – a man known for bringing the best spices to the shore – who brought Bibi into their lives. Mahmood knew that Abdul was one of the best boatwrights on the coast of Lake Nyasa, and he wanted him to himself. Mahmood had a growing business across the lakes and oceans that surrounded them, and he wanted the services of someone who knew how to work with water vessels. Abdul was the one. Maryam overheard the whole conversation between their father and Mahmood, and it replays in her mind, in the nightmares that continue to torture her even towards the end of her life.
“My friend, I cannot trade my son for spices,” their father had said.
“Mzee, I’m not asking you to trade your son. I cannot do that. I want him to assist me in my business,” Mahmood had responded.
“How can you assure me that I will not lose him to the ocean?”
“You can have my word.”
“I don’t take words,” there was a more serious tone to their father’s voice.
“Tell me what you want me to do. Your son can be of good use.”
And indeed, Abdul could be of good use to a trader like Mahmood – a man whose life was about water. A man who brought to the house the smell of seaweed.
“What if I said you bring me your daughter so that my other son can marry her? I can also do with some mixed blood in my family.”
Their father had said this and chuckled; perhaps failing to convince himself. Is this how far he was willing to go in his trade? This game of exchanging goods and services?
For a moment, Mahmood was shocked by this suggestion. He considered the weight of his demand.
“That way we can become family. Your daughter will visit Zanzibar at intervals and I will also get to see my son.”
It took some time for Mahmood to respond to the proposal, but in the end, an agreement was reached and he was going to bring his daughter in exchange of Abdul. In a couple of weeks, Bibi sailed down different bodies of water from Zanzibar to settle in Nkhotakota where she married Baba. She brought with her spices and other ornaments from that small island, but none of these impressed Maryam. To Maryam, Bibi was the person who took her brother away. The only brother she was fond of.
As days turned into weeks, Mahmood never showed up with his spices again. As weeks swelled into months, news from other parts of the coast started reaching their village. The rumours had it that some of the traders who came from Zanzibar were dealing in human flesh.
“People are selling our people to unknown lands,” they said.
“They’re being taken across the Indian ocean,” some added.
“It’s the work of the devil.”
The news hit the family like death to their ears. It all started making sense now. Baba looked at his wife in new light. This woman with a fair complexion perfectly tanned under the heavy sun suddenly became something else in his eyes. She was the harbinger. Maryam’s reaction was silence. She never talked to anyone about how she felt. She only acted: resentment, anger, frustration. Their father had something else on his mind.
“Are you really Mahmood’s daughter?” He had asked Bibi.
She did not answer him.
“Are you?” He asked again only to be met by a deafening silence and distant sobs slowly choking the young woman. He left her alone.
That is how Bibi recoiled from the family to spend all her time in the kitchen. She had always loved to cook, but it now became an obsession. The kitchen became her hiding place away from wagging tongues and eyes that bore holes in her soul. It was as if cooking was the only thing she could do in a world that resented her. Even when she was heavily pregnant with Zinha’s mother, she still left the house, dragging her numb and swollen feet across the village, looking for spices she could use for her curries.
On one of those days, she left for the spice shop clad in a black abaya and black hijab, looking for fish masala. Black had become the pigment of her new life. She wanted to prepare some fish curry for her husband and whoever else wanted to eat her dishes. She would slice some red onions, crush a handful of tomatoes from her garden, and trim some parsley and rosemary for the masala. Upon mixing the ingredients, she would simmer the gravy in a clay pot so as not to tamper with the flavours. She always preferred batala for her fish curries, a rare gem from the lake that oozed too much oil when searing she had to drain most of it. Her favourite herb was bay leaf, which she always added to the mix when she was almost done cooking, like an afterthought. She came back from that hunt laid on a stretcher, holding a tiny baby who had blood smeared all over her body. No one wanted to touch the baby.
*
On her second morning in Stone Town, Zinha felt heavy and she did not want to leave her bed. She was not sure whether the heaviness was from the drinking the previous night or if it was something else. Come to think of it, she had been carrying this stone inside her for a long time. This was not a weight that could be laid on a body by as light a spirit as Konyagi, which she had drunk last night. It was a weight that sometimes turned into a void. It was something she carried since finding out the truth about her family – why there was no peace; why there was so much missing, so much love lost between them. This was the heaviness that made her stop attending college without giving any explanation.
After she dropped out of college, her grandfather was angry and avoided her. And although Bibi was sad, she somehow drew closer to her grandchild. Zinha was the only person in the family she felt she belonged to, and she did not want to lose her. Every morning, Bibi pushed the door to Zinha’s bedroom, its hinges yawning against her frail body, to leave the Chai Masala she had prepared for her. Zinha knew the taste of the tea before she even put the liquid on her tongue. She was used to her Bibi’s hands. She imagined her waking up that early to prepare the tea. She saw her in the eye of her mind grating ginger, picking mint and lemon grass from the small garden behind their house, and chopping the herbs on the big wooden board curved from the trunk of a dead tree. She would then search the shelves for some dried cinnamon, which she mixed with black tea and cardamom. The milk was always brought in fresh every morning by the village farmer who never grew old from peddling his bicycle in the sand. Zinha was always grateful.
When Baba finally exhaled the steam of his anger towards her, he called her to the baraza and demanded to know what she wanted to do with her life.
“I want to find the missing pieces of this family. I want to go to Zanzibar,”
She was surprised by her own response. She had not known that this was what she was longing for when she fell into that deep state of feeling nothing and not wanting to do anything. Now that she was in Stone Town, at the heart of Zanzibar, she felt uneasy. She thought that this trip would make things better but it only brought more confusion to her wandering mind. She did not know where to start looking or who to look for first. Her mother could be any of the almond-skinned women laughing and basking in the sunshine of Stone Town. Or was she to go around asking for the whereabouts of Mahmood bin Said? He was long dead by then – probably murdered by the people he stole from distant lands, or swallowed by the ocean.
Or did she have to try and look for Abdul, a man whose face she only imagined? Probably very dark-skinned, not like most of these people here. Definitely bald-headed. Baba was bald-headed with a beard he never shaved. If he ever made it as a boatwright on this island, then the hotel she was staying in may have been Abdul’s. Maybe Abdul’s son was the man in the kitchen at the hotel who bragged about how his pilau was unique.
“I add something – something different,” he said.
Zinha only gave him a knowing smile and savoured the pilau, thinking about Bibi the whole time. She thought of how, if it were her cooking the meal, Bibi would be very careful with the heat when browning the red onions and fresh garlic. Of how her granny cut her beef into even and precise cubes. Bibi hated any bones around her meat. She would then stir in the pilau masala and some serrano pepper, before adding in the tomato paste, which she crushed herself. Sometimes Bibi would doze off while the pilau was slowly simmering and Zinha had to turn off the gas and wait for her to wake up and eat.
After spending seven days in Stone Town, in that expensive hotel where Baba told her she could stay for as long as she wanted, Zinha decided she no longer wanted to spend her grandfather’s money in that place. She had been around this island and saw how everyone was busy getting on with their lives. She may have been the only one who was there trying to awaken ghosts better off left lifeless. Dead things never bothered anyone. Dead people held no grudges. Perhaps there was a beautiful side to death.
In all the days she spent crisscrossing the maze that was Stone Town and tasting this and that creature from the ocean, she never called Sama, although he had given her his number on that first day they met. She truly did not need a guide in an African town. She was African. She reassured herself. She only called him on the evening before she left, asking him to meet her by the bar at Beach House Hotel to say her goodbyes. From the way he sounded on the other side of the line, Sama had not expected her call, although she promised to call. He must have been used to the lies and promises of tourists who frequented this town. Tourists were people who lived in transience and you didn’t have to expect anything from them. They were fleeting.
When he arrived, she hugged him so tightly she thought she would break his bones. On second thought, she saw how well-built and muscular he was and she laughed at herself.
“What are you laughing at?” He asked, surprised.
“I’m sorry,” she blushed. “Don’t mind me… How are you?”
She had a bottle of Konyagi, which she had already drained half-way. It had become her favourite drink on the island. She asked Sama to join her and he did. They drank down the bottle to his endless stories, most of which Zinha knew were laced with lies to entertain and keep the tourists excited. When darkness came and they could no longer see the ocean, they walked to the edge of the water. She wanted to bid farewell to this huge force that had transformed the world in ways unknown. There, under the watch of heavy stars and a lazy moon, she grabbed Sama and bit his lips with such force he almost fell to the ground. He kissed her back with hunger and dragged her onto the sand. They held on to each other against the biting sand as if they had both lost something. She felt her bones crushing in the arms of this strange man who could as well have been carrying her blood in his veins. The only thing on her mind were the waves of the ocean roaring and crashing against the beach, drowning her moaning.
Glossary
Jambo: A Swahili word that means “hello.”
Karibu: A Swahili word that means “welcome.”.
Wewe: A Swahili word for “you.”
Sawa: A Swahili word meaning “okay” or “fine.”
Rafiki: A Swahili word for “friend.”
Kufi: A brimless, rounded cap traditionally worn by men in Muslim communities.
Kanzu: Robe or tunic.
Baraza: Living room.
Makhoka: Chichewa word for “fishing nets.”
Hijab: A head covering worn by Muslim women.
Abaya: A loose over-garment mostly worn by Muslim women.
Pilau: A rice dish popular in East Africa.
