The Magic of Saida Read Free

How could he see clearly the dots and curves of his script? Distinguish
te
from
nun
, or
be
from
ye
? Didn’t his lines run into one another? It was widely believed, it was said with awe that his djinn held his elbow and guided his hand steadily as he wrote. And so those four-line verses, those utenzi, had power, they had truth.
    Having been treated to a mandazi and a shot of kahawa by the poet’s friends sitting outside on the front porch, and taking onesteaming roll of mandazi for his mama wrapped in a newspaper scrap, as he rounded the house on his way home Kamal decided to take a peek through the old man’s little window. Perched with both legs on a stone lying next to the wall, hanging on by the single window bar, he peered inside and stared at Mzee Omari scribbling slowly and intently on the paper with nib and holder. No djinn there. Suddenly Kamal felt a stinging slap on the side of his face and went flying to the ground. He stood up, eyes teary, and picked up the mandazi and dusted it with his hand. There was no one around, but he knew it to be Idris the djinn who had so violently slapped him.
    Kamal never peeked through that dark little window again. But he would listen to the old man recite his verses to listeners outside on the porch, or at the square on the beachfront, seated on his favourite tree trunk; and once the Tanganyika Broadcasting Corporation came and recorded him, and the following Sunday his voice was heard on the radio to great acclaim throughout the town.

• 2 •
    He had returned. But the Kilwa that Kamal saw, as he stepped off the bus at the busy crossroad and looked around, wrung his heart. It was to see a beloved again, now aged; a mother, a lover. Every eye was upon him, it seemed, as he abruptly sighted then took the few steps to the old German monument around which he had played as a child. It stood now forlorn amidst a dump and parking space, a tall white stone memorializing two foreign gentlemen, Herr Krieger and Herr Hessel, who had died in 1888, both in their thirties. They had meant nothing to him. That they were beheaded in Kilwa, during a brief insurrection against its colonization, he discovered much later. He turned around and walked across the road to the tea shop, sat down and ordered chai rangi—black tea—and mandazi and steeled himself. Calmer, he strolled to the end of the road, turned at the boma, the great fortress and administrative headquarters of former times, now, he saw, a hideous ruin of exposed brick punctured with gaping holes. He came to stand at the edge of the town square overlooking the sea.
    Try to be cold, objective, he admonished himself, things change, you’ve changed; but he couldn’t stop the images flitting through his mind, couldn’t suppress the outrage. This plaza would fill with people come to relax and catch the breeze on an evening or a Sunday afternoon. Vendors went around selling goodies to eat. In the morning, the sun just peeping out from the horizon, the town’s Indian men came in their singlets to do their exercises. Some evenings Mzee Omari would sit on a tree trunk (Kamal couldn’t see it now) and recite to an audience of rapt admirers in the dark, a solitary lamp beside him. This sanctified ground, now brutalized by encroachment:a cow pen, a bar, a government shed built centre stage at water’s edge so as to steal the sea view … five minutes from what had been his home, a short walk along the creek from the lagoon where he would meet her, where he last saw her. What hope could it give him, this memory’s violation? We leave so many things behind, why not this one, why not her? Why relive the guilt? Did he want to take this road, wherever it led to—disappointment, heartache? But he was already on it, he had waited a long time.
    The town had long possessed him, he mused; always known as a home to spirits, it let loose a spirit to come and haunt him. As he stood looking out at the ocean, the Island, Kisiwani, loomed distantly