A lantern came into view, and its carrier shouted a number from a decent distance. Since it wasn’t theirs, they ignored the waiter’s cry. When everything was quiet, she asked “What’s your Afro-American friend’s name?”
“Zawadi is her African name, Sarah her American given name.”
“Is Zawadi a Hausa name?”
“Swahili.”
“And how long did the two of you live together?”
He pondered for a long moment.
“You don’t have to answer if you do not want to.”
He shook his head vigorously. “It’s not that I don’t want to answer your question, it is that our living together had two phases, the first being simply flat-sharing, in that I was her tenant, then half a year or so later we began sharing more and more of the responsibilities of house-keeping and emotional aspects of our lives, including her two children.”
“What age were they?”
“They were much smaller then, of course, the girl eight, the boy six. This was thirteen years ago, when I first started working with a UN agency, based in New York, a year after taking my PhD.”
“And what work did she do?”
“She’s a community worker,” he said, pausing only to continue a second later. “You see, I don’t mind living by myself, but eating alone is something I cannot bear. As it happened I would cook larger portions and would invite the children to share the food with me, given that their mother would seldom come home to feed them. The children would play with the neighbourhood kids, and all I did was ask them to take a break, come and eat, and they would do so.”
Duniya was reminded of her own situation with Taariq, just before they married, with Taariq looking after her twins and her hospital assignments frequently keeping her out of the house. She was about to ask him if he had considered marrying her, when she saw a lantern approaching quietly. A waiter shouted their number, to which they responded simultaneously The tall waiter entered their acacia-tent with his head bent, smiling. He placed the food before Duniya, and pushed the bill, “which must be paid before consumption of item”, as he put it, in front of Bosaaso. Duniya insisted that they each settle half the bill, but Bosaaso wouldn’t hear of it, saying he was taking her out this evening, and requesting her not to spoil a pleasant night out by debating about petty sums such as these — after all, he had always accepted her generosities.
The bill settled, the waiter left, Duniya wondered if Bosaaso had been generous with the tip.
Silent, they took turns rinsing their fingers in the warm water the waiter had brought for that purpose. In the half-dark, she thought that Bosaaso was smiling like someone about to make a mischievous remark. She has the calm confidence to wait, and he the good breeding not to interrupt her eating.
“If Zawadi had said yes, I would have married her,” he said.
Duniya took a deep breath, but said nothing.
They ate in silence, Duniya affecting disinterest in the reasons why Zawadi wouldn’t marry him. She took care not to munch noisily, lest this interfered with their quiet thinking. Once or twice, their fingers collided, and each apologized to the other. When this happened a few more times Duniya chuckled. Bosaaso went on, “Basically, Zawadi mistrusted men as husbands, not as lovers, or even platonic friends. She loathed being taken for granted, which, she said, was how black men behaved, no matter where in the world they lived, the USA, Africa, the West Indies, men who considered women their rightful property. Some of the black men she knew came into a woman’s place with their flies bulging with unfulfilled lust. It was as though they were entering a urinal, she would say, their trouser fronts undone, at the ready, prepared for action.”
He gave himself time to eat a morsel in silence.
“Will you tell me how someone like Kaahin has entered your life?” she asked. “It seems to me that he doesn’t belong in your years of childhood spent in the town G. Or does he?”
“Zawadi brought him into my life.”
“How’s that?”
“In one of her community work projects, Zawadi stumbled upon Kaahin, living in a commune off Harlem, with no papers authorizing him to be in the US, and not doing what he had gone to do, take a degree. She took him into her able social worker’s hands and within a year he was straightened out, capable of going back to Harvard.”
Duniya said with feeling, “What an amazing woman, this Zawadi.”
“She is a gift. You should meet her.”
They fell silent, both thinking that Zawadi and Duniya would get along splendidly.
Then Duniya said, “What I don’t understand, after all this, is why Zawadi is not here, living with you or paying you occasional visits. Surely there’s the Afro-American myth and wish on the part of many of them to return to their mother-continent. Or did you discourage her from joining you?”
“On the contrary. When Mire came to pay us a visit in New York and he and I began toying with the idea of returning home and volunteering our services, Zawadi made encouraging remarks about the project we were embarking on, that’s all. Of course she was only too ecstatic for us, but she wouldn’t come. It was she who contacted Kaahin, convincing him that his lot lay with ours.”
“All this remains a mystery to me,” she confessed.
“Zawadi quoted a variation of an English proverb, giving it a slight twist: ‘It is at home that charity is bred like a stallion of Arabian nobility.’ She urged that there was no point to her coming to Africa to do volunteer work when her home-grown people, the Blacks in the USA, needed her just as desperately ‘Besides,’ she added, ‘Africa is not ready for my Black American way of life, and I am too old to unlearn all I’ve learned.’ But she promised that one day she would pay Africa a deserved visit.”
Neither spoke for a good while, and they ate quietly and selfconsciously When both had eaten enough, each helped the other to wash and rinse their hands by holding the soap, giving the towel and pouring out the water.
Anxious, their conversation travelled no further than immediate, mundane questions responded to with short answers. Somehow Abshir’s name came into their talk, and Bosaaso remembered that a friend of his was leaving for Rome on the Somali Airlines flight in a couple of days. Would she want him to carry Abshir’s letter?
“Let’s find out if Miski is on that flight,” suggested Duniya, “because she has always been our courier and she and Abshir have an established way of reaching each other.”
BRUSSELS (AFP/REUTER)
After economic and political pressures (and no doubt some delicate negotiations), the European Community has finally imposed its mighty will on the Ethiopian President Mengistu Haile Mariam by making him accept that a team of EC officials oversee the distribution of food aid in the country’s northern provinces of Tigray and Eritrea. The Ethiopian government has communicated its acceptance of these conditions to the EC Development Commissioner based in Addis Ababa. The European Community has been preoccupied over the possibility that food aid might not reach the two northern rebel-held provinces. Preparations are presently under way for the team to fly to Addis Ababa.
To date, the Community has granted food aid worth 260 million dollars. In addition, it has also given some long-term development aid amounting to about 100 million dollars for the Marxist-led government of Ethiopia to carry out reforms in its land and agricultural policies.
13
In which Duniya is given her first driving lesson.