Shinkolobwe
For Fahad Bishara
All day long we crawled in holes; thousands of us, tens of thousands, swarming like termites in a split log. We had turned a hill into a hole and kept digging, searching for the black rocks from which they made their yellow powder. They bought everything we dug up, all the rocks, all the black rocks, these men from Malindi, from Mombasa, from Kilwa, with their Portuguese guns and their flying machines. They seemed so rich to us, and so hungry for the powder. It was strange. It was a strange time to be alive. The world was changing with incomprehensible speed, yet every day we did exactly the same thing we had done the day before. I did not see the sun for two years. All day sweating in the darkness, sweating from the heat and the fear. At night, by the fires in the dormitory squares, a bowl of ugali, maybe some chicken, or what they said was chicken, what Old Mwanza said was chicken. Old Mwanza, the cook, the housekeeper. They allowed no women in that place, no women to take care of us, only old men who could no longer dig. Old Mwanza told stories to us, us young men who had seen nothing before we came to the mines. He would smoke his dagga and tell us his stories: how he had marched with Tippu Tip on Nyange and thrashed the Belgians; how one evening he had seen the great city of Zimbabwe from an airship and tried to count the countless cooking fires; how he had seen the colossal tower Bargash bin Said had built on Kilimanjaro – the Sultan’s Tower, the bridge to the stars.
“It looked like nothing when you first saw it,” he said. “A thread pinched taut between your fingers, a strand of a spider’s web stretched tight from the peak to the very crown of the sky.”
But up close, he said, its base was a great stone fortress and you could not see the top. The iron cars shuttled up and down the cables all day long, carrying cargo to the heavens: tea, coffee, cocoa, maize. The slaves in the engine room worked in endless shifts shoveling coal into the engines.
—
When I got sick Old Mwanza looked after me. He talked the whole time, more and more stories. All the wonderful things he had seen and done. Wonderful things from the world that existed before I was born.
—
“They built so many dams across the Zambezi,” he said. “It became a string of lakes.”
I lay on my side coughing. Sometimes nothing came up. Sometimes phlegm. Sometimes blood. My head ached. My bones ached. My heart ached.
“You must eat,” he said. “Think of your mother at home. Your brothers. Your sisters.”
I would swallow a mouthful of pap. Drink tea sweetened with sugar from his secret stores.
“From the air this string of lakes made it seem the stitching of the world was coming undone. Seams were splitting and the shining blue water was hiding beneath. I imagined it was not water but a blue sky on the other side.”
—
He would sing as he worked. As he mopped the floors. Did the laundry. Cleaned the toilets Arabic; Swahili; Shona; Bemba.
—
“I worked once for a Scottish missionary,” he said. “A stupid man with no aptitude for language. He would tell the people the Holy Spirit was the bad breath of God. And I would tell him they were laughing with joy at the good news of the Gospels.”
He told me this missionary did not convert a single African. He was such a poor missionary he lost his own faith and so there were fewer Christians when he finished than when he began. He died at Bangwuleu, in the swamps.
—
“They use the yellow powder to make bombs,” said Old Mwanza. “The British dropped one on the Boers at Stormberg Valley. I was there watching from a hill. A big bomb was carried up over the Boers by a balloon and then dropped. A hot, blinding light like a wind washed over the world and there was a roar like the earth was being split in two. And when I could see again the valley was bare. Clean. The humans that had been there were gone.”
—
He convinced me to let him write a letter home but I could think of nothing to say so he filled the page with his own words.
—
He talked and talked. I did not know the words he used. They were from many places: Maputo, Dar Es Salaam, eThekwini. They were about many things: baobab forests at night; the bark of a leopard; telegraph poles; Newcomen engines; radio telescopes.
—
One morning I sat outside with a blanket around my shoulders. He swept the compound square. My whole life was spent in such compounds: cracked whitewash, wood smoke, mealies on the fire. My whole life. My whole life was just a few moments for Old Mwanza. He remembered a world from before I was born. He would live in a world from which I was gone.
I felt myself reduced to a sequence of words, an anecdote, a story to tell.
One day he would say: “There was a boy from Bukama who inhaled the dust in the mine. Yellow powder filled his lungs, yellow powder pumped through his veins. He could not write so I wrote to his mother for him: ‘I have died here. I am sorry I do not have more money to send.’”
I imagined myself in an airship above the Zambezi. So many dams the river had become a string of lakes. Each lake a mirror. Each lake a window. In each lake I saw the sky of another world but they all looked the same. I could not tell them apart. I would be dead soon and they would bury me. They would bury me in the earth which I had come to dig up, they would bury me in Shinkolobwe.
