Departures and Arrivals

 ‘Zamani is not limited to what in English is called the past. Zamani overlaps with Sasa (the present) and the two are not separable. Sasa feeds or disappears into Zamani.’

(John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy, 1969.)

                  We’re flying east, out of darkness into light. Twenty thousand feet below it’s still night on the savannah, but here above the clouds it’s dawn. The plane banks and levels out, and suddenly there it is. The mountain, so long a buried memory, materialises in the window, impossibly near. We drift alongside it as it floats above the rose-tinged clouds, its snowy summit glowing in the early morning sun. Not a memory but as real as rock, as magma from the earth’s core. All the years I’ve been away it’s been here, waiting.

               Between the mountain and me there’s the gulf of years, but I’m the one that’s changed. Sitting in this plane, suspended between leaving and arriving, my whole life boils down to this – a woman staring out of a window, looking for confirmation that the past exists. It’s dropping behind us now as we drift eastwards, slowly falling out of sight, the way the present endlessly recedes into the past.

               The last time I saw Kilimanjaro I was not quite seventeen and flying back to school in England, sick with misery and already longing for home. I had no idea that within six months my parents would be deported and it would be a lifetime before I made my way back here. In Swahili philosophy, Sasa, the present, and Zamani, the past, are inseparable; they swim together in the great sea of time. For twenty years I’ve lived on an island in the Caribbean, swimming in another sea. Now I’m diving deep into Zamani, but Sasa is the lifeline that will keep me from drowning. As strongly as the past pulls me down I’m always aware of the ocean’s sparkling surface, the present. In coming back to Tanzania, the land of my birth, I hope I’m going forward, open to whatever I may meet; in my luggage, a parcel of memories.

                   I grew up in Moshi, a small town on the plains at the foot of Kilimanjaro. During the day, when it was shrouded in cloud, life went on as if it wasn’t there. But in the evening the mountain would emerge shining and afloat on its raft of white. When it was hot and dry and everyone was irritable, sometimes our parents would take me and my sisters to Marangu, a magical place on the mountain, where it was always cool and green and everywhere you went there were streams and waterfalls and the emerald green of banana trees. The turning to Marangu was marked by an ancient baobab on the main road, so vast that an entire family couldn’t get their arms around it. People said the first baobab had been uprooted by God for daring to complain about something and made to grow upside down with its roots in the air. A tree that size would be at least five hundred years old, my father said. Five hundred years of growing upside down, its branches buried in the ground, unable to see. You could live off its bark and the water it contained if you were lost in the savannah. And people were buried in the trunk sometimes, so spirits lived in it. Tree of life and death.

                       After the tree, the road started to climb. The air became clearer and caressed your face, carrying the faintest hint of moisture to revive you after the dust and drought lower down. In Marangu, the two peaks, Kibo and Mawenzi, seemed lower, almost at eye-level. The drama of distance was replaced by the intimacy of connection, so that all the elements were redolent of the mountain - earth dark and rich, air cool and thin, water cold and sparkling like liquid sunlight.

                        Before the white man came the coastal people had known of the mountain for centuries as a mysterious place, populated by djinn. They called it the Land of Djagga, and though they made long perilous journeys there in search of elephant tusks and people to sell in the slave markets of Bagamoyo and Zanzibar, they regarded it with dread. Trudging across the plain for days on end, a winding caravan of merchants and pack animals, porters and guards would catch a glimpse of something impossibly white rising high on the horizon, and shiver. The wisps of vapour that clung to the peak were the visible sign of spirits.

                        Though the Chagga had lived there for hundreds of years, for a long time its upper reaches remained a mystery. People believed the mountain was a sacred site, inhabited by supernatural beings which caused death to those who approached. To the Chagga, it wasn’t even a single thing, but two peaks embodying distinct personalities. The name Kilimanjaro didn’t exist until slave and ivory traders from the coast started to pass that way and the name emerged out of different languages: kyaro, a kiChagga word for god, kilima, kiSwahili for little mountain. For a long time, white men from different places quarrelled over who owned it; eventually it became an icon, a sign for Africa itself. When independence finally came to Tanganyika – as it was then – a local man was entrusted with carrying the Uhuru torch to the summit, where its flame was a beacon of freedom to the rest of Africa.     

                     Staring out of the plane window, the mountain already out of sight, I wonder why this homecoming has taken so long. All my adult life I’ve written and taught about Africa without ever coming back to Tanzania; when I got a Commonwealth scholarship to study for a PhD, I chose Nigeria and lived there for five years. I’ve since been in many other countries on the continent, including Kenya - just next door. But I didn’t cross the border. Was I afraid of losing all I had so carefully stored in memory? That somehow the past that haunts me, with its peculiar feeling of groundedness in a certain time and space, would have ceased to exist?

                    In the Caribbean, ‘Back to Africa’ is a longed-for return to a site of myth, a place of origin beyond the reach of history. For the twenty years I’ve worked as a lecturer at the University of the West Indies, I’ve tried through literature and film to connect African descendants with the continent as it is today. I’ve organised a film festival, brought African directors to show their work and talk to local audiences, and created a dialogue between African and Caribbean film-makers. For my students, who have never heard African languages or music, experienced its frantic cities or witnessed its contradictions, cinema is a portal to a lived reality. Now, it’s brought me here, far away from the Black Atlantic, to the Zanzibar International Film Festival, to immerse myself in an Indian Ocean cultural world. To stand in the centuries-old Arab Fort in Stonetown listening to a taarab orchestra, eat the spicy food of the Swahili coast, walk with festival goers from all over Africa through narrow winding streets past crumbling palaces. Zanzibar is, for me, the bridge between memory and whatever this country has become in all the years it’s carried on without me.

                   The plane is crossing the water between the city of Dar es Salaam and the islands of Zanzibar, which united with the Tanganyika mainland in 1964 under the new name, Tanzania. Since then, Zanzibar has become a fantasy destination for foreigners in search of the exotic; but I’m not looking for paradise. Beneath the thrum and hustle of today’s Tanzania, I’m pursuing a ghostly trail that only I can see. That trail leads back to my parents, to their meeting and their fateful posting to Tanganyika in 1949. Before I am even born, the story starts there.