And Home Was Kariakoo by M.G. Vassanji

Author:M.G. Vassanji [Vassanji, M.G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-67144-6
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2014-10-13T16:00:00+00:00

I walk up the highway, and after a short while turn right—as directed—into a road that’s rather unusual in that it has been paved with cut stones; it’s intact and hardly used by vehicles. The walk is long and straight, a line of houses on either side. A white SUV passes me. On the way people stare curiously and some children call out, “Bye-bye!” assuming I’m a mzungu. Who else but a white man would take a hike by himself in the sun to see Livingstone? I respond in Swahili: “Do I look like a mzungu to you?” “Mwarabu!” a boy replies with a knowing grin. An Arab. “Mhindi,” I correct him and continue on my way. Finally I arrive at a fenced compound with a flag mast outside a large single-storey white building. In the outer hall of the building two women sit at a table; there is no one else around. I pay one of them a fee and she comes out with me and indicates the spot on top of a rise where I can see the Livingstone monument. She calls out to someone that one more visitor is arriving.

I climb the rise to come upon three westerners and an Arab girl in hijab sitting attentively on one of two benches before a gesticulating guide. Behind the man is a circular, slightly raised island of lawn contained by a brick border, at the centre of which is the monument to the missionary—a modest white brick structure some four feet high with a plaque. I go and sit on the second bench and pay attention.

In a peculiarly accented English, the man sings out what he must have recited a few thousand times by rote, the story of David Livingstone: birthplace and date, first voyage, marriage, second journey, and the third. He was sitting in his veranda when his faithful servants came running to him, shouting, “Bwana, a white man and a caravan!” Stanley arrived and greeted Dr. Livingstone. The monument marks that meeting place.

According to Stanley, Livingstone was in the company of “the great Arab magnates of Ujiji” and had come out of the veranda to await him. The house is described as having been in the town then. The site now stands isolated, closer to the lakeshore and a little away from Ujiji’s present location.

After the recital we prepare to leave. A short distance away from the Livingstone monument is a stone with a plaque on it to commemorate the arrival in Ujiji of Burton and Speke on February 14, 1858. I ask the guide where Tippu Tip (the slave and ivory trader) lived. He says there are some ruins close by in an area called Usagara, at the mango trees. We are invited to see the museum, which is in the inner room of the main building. The museum can kindly be called modest, but it reflects the prevailing attitude to the past: negligent, perfunctory, ignorant. There stands a grotesque, amateurish sculpture of the “I Presume” moment, and there are some paintings on a wall that could only have been done by school children.

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