Read Online The Magic of Saida by M. G. Vassanji - Free Book Online Page A

she said kindly, “Come here, you. So the two of you went out for a walk together?”
    He did not reply.
    “The sea holds many secrets, you understand? Kilwa is an old town. Slaves were brought here, from the south. Many died. Others?—sent off to Zanzibar, Bagamoyo. Arabia. India. Know this. Those are the bones of our ancestors.”
    So she told him. Know this. Eyes fixed into his. But before she said “India,” she had drawn a long breath.
    There were African slaves in India? Slaves everywhere?
    “Mama, what is your tribe?”
    She eyed him angrily.
    “Mama, were you a slave?” A mtumwa.
    “Do I look like a mtumwa to you? Whose slave, eti—yours? Do you see chains on me, like this—?” She circled her neck with her fingers, making a funny face, tongue sticking out, then clutched at her ankles, pretending to cry out. “Do you see minyororo on me—clinking,
cheng-cheng, cheng-cheng
?” She looked at his hands. “Where is your whip, you Swahili?”
    He slapped her behind, and they burst out laughing.
    “You want to know my tribe.”
    “Tell me, Mama!”
    “I am a Matumbi. You want to know how. Do you know the Matumbi? The bravest of people, who live on those hills in the distance. Once upon a time in the days of kalé they defeated the fierce Ngoni warriors who had come from all the way in the south. The Ngoni. Even now they think they are something. How did the Matumbi defeat the Ngoni? They set bees upon them. Don’t laugh. The little people find all sorts of ways. And later they defeated the Germans. Now you ask, how could they defeat those white men with their guns. I am telling you. When the Germans came with their askaris carrying bastolas, the Matumbi rolled pumpkins on them from their hills. Those Germans!—I’m telling you they didn’t come back soon.
    “You have heard of Makunganya. Also known as Hassan bin Omari. He was of the Yao people, and a wealthy businessman. Compared to them these Indians of Kilwa are nothing. His agents went to Dar es Salaam; they went to the south; they went into the interior of the country where the barbarians lived. They brought gold, they brought ivory. But they also captured slaves and sold them at the market, here in Kilwa. One day his men captured my grandmother, who was a Matumbi. Makunganya sold her to an Indian.
    “And God knows the rest. I am not going to tell you more. Go away.”
    He was a descendant of a Matumbi slave. Did the African genes call out in his children’s interest in African American pop culture? He laughed at his own question. Of course not. The whitest Canadian kid blared out rap from his car.
    I reminded him that rap was ubiquitous, you have it everywhere in East Africa too, even among the Asians.
    In spite of his evident African features, there was no way he could make his wife, Shamim, acknowledge his Matumbi origins. “Whydo you want to bring this hypothetical connection into our lives?” she asked bitterly. The very thought caused her anguish, and he could well be guilty of mental cruelty. “The kids have enough handicaps as it is without your Matumbi complex.”
    After all their training in violin, voice, and piano, it was not Bach or Beethoven but 50 Cent and Beyoncé they went for, and he had muttered cynically that that surely was the subversive Matumbi gene wreaking havoc on a mother’s ambitions.
    That day, when Mama informed him of her Matumbi origins, he had surreptitiously examined himself in the mirror. Nothing different. What did he expect? Something else in the nose, the lips? And after that argument with Shamim he would see her examining the children for any vestiges of Africa.
    It was easy to get sentimental and recall those drawings from the histories and see your mother’s grandmother chained in a train of slaves, then in the market picked by an Indian merchant. Your great-grandfather. What does it matter now? Go and make your future, as Mama said. And he had made it. Do we owe anything to the past? A silly