Dr. Doyle’s staff consisted of two people, who did everything: they cleaned, gave injections, and for the next part directed the flow of traffic, admitting some of the sick, and for reasons unclear to me, chasing others away before they so much as got to the door (suspicions of corruption did not apply here — none of the prospective patients had any money).
The older and heavier one was called Edu, the younger, shorter, and muscular one Abdullahi. In many African societies, children are named for an event that occurred on the day of their birth. Edu is an abbreviation of “education,” for on the day he came into the world, the first school was opened in his village.
In places where Christianity and Islam had not yet become deeply rooted, there was an infinite richness to given names. They were expressions of the poetry of adults, who called a child Brisk Morning (if he was born at dawn), or Shadow of the Acacia (if he came into the world beneath an acacia tree). In societies without a tradition of written history, names were used to affix in memory the more important events, long past or recent. If a child was born as Tanganyika was obtaining its independence, it was called Independence (Uhuru in Swahili). If the parents were supporters of President Nyerere, they might name their child Nyerere.
Thus a historical record, albeit a spoken one, was created over centuries, and being highly personal, one with a particularly strong claim on the individuaclass="underline" I am at one with my community because my name celebrates a deed inscribed in the collective memory of the people to whom I belong.
The introduction of Christianity and Islam reduced this exuberant world of poetry and history to several dozen names from the Bible and the Koran. From then on there were only Jameses and Patricks, or Ahmeds and Ibrahims.
Edu and Abdullahi had hearts of gold. We quickly became friends. I tried to create the impression that my life was in their hands (and it was, actually), and they were tremendously impressed by this fact. When I needed help, they dropped everything. I arrived every day after four, when the afternoon heat was waning, the clinic was already closed, and the two of them were sweeping the old wooden floors, raising unimaginably large clouds of dust. Everything proceeded just as Dr. Doyle had ordered. In a glass cabinet in his office stood an enormous metal can (a gift from the Danish Red Cross) full of large gray pills, a drug called PAS. I took twenty-four of those a day. As I was counting them out into a bag, Edu would remove a massive metal syringe from boiling water, snap on the needle, and draw two centimeters of streptomycin from a bottle. Drawing his hand far back, as if to hurl a spear, he would then drive the needle into me. I would leap — with time this became part of the ritual — and emit a sharp hiss, at which Edu and Abdullahi (who was observing everything) would explode with homeric laughter.
Nothing creates a bond between people in Africa more quickly than shared laughter — for example, at a white man jumping up because of a little thing like an injection. So I began to play the game with them, and despite the pain from the needle that Edu plunged into me with such dreadful force, I laughed with them.
In the disturbed, paranoid world of racial inequality, in which everything is determined by the color of one’s skin (calibrated by shades of difference), my illness, while physically incapacitating, had an unexpected benefit. Rendering me weak and defective, it diminished my prestigious white status — that of someone formidable, untouchable — and put me on a more even footing with the black men. Now a diminished, disowned, flawed white man I could be treated with familiarity, although I was still a white man. A warmth entered my relations with Edu and Abdullahi. It would have been unthinkable had they met me as a strong, healthy, imperious European.
First of all, they started to invite me to their homes. I gradually became a habitué of the African districts of the city and came to know their life as never before. In African tradition, the guest is treated with the utmost consideration. The saying “Guest in the house, God in the house” has a nearly literal meaning here. The hosts prepare a long time for the occasion. They clean, they cook the best possible meal. I am referring to the home of someone like Edu — an attendant at a city clinic. When I met him, his position was relatively good. Good, because Edu had a steady job, and there are few of those. The majority of the city’s inhabitants work sporadically and rarely, or not at all for long periods of time. Perhaps the greatest riddle of Africa’s cities is how these masses of people earn a living. How, and from what? They are here not because there was a demand for them, but because poverty expelled them from the villages — poverty, hunger, and helplessness. They are fugitives seeking rescue, refugees cursed by fate. When a group of such people finally reaches the outskirts of town, driven from areas affected by drought or famine, you will notice the fear in their eyes. They must now search among these slums and mud houses for their El Dorado. What will they do now? How will they proceed?
So it was with Edu and several cousins from his clan. They belong to the Sango-speaking people from the interior. They had been farmers, but their land grew barren, so several years ago they came to Dar es Salaam. Their first step: to find other Sango-speaking people. Or people from communities who are affiliated with the Sango through ties of friendship. The African is well versed in this geography of intertribal friendships and hatreds, no less critical than those existing today in the Balkans.
Following a ball of yarn, they will finally arrive at the house of a countryman. The neighborhood is called Kariakoo, and its layout is more or less planned — straight, perpendicularly aligned sandy streets. The construction is monotonous and schematic. The so-called swahili houses predominate, a type of Soviet-style housing — a single one-storied building with eight to twelve rooms, one family in each. The kitchen is communal, as are the toilet and the washing machine. Each dwelling is unbelievably cramped, because families here have many children, each home being in effect a kindergarten. The whole family sleeps together on the clay floor covered with thin raffia matting.
Arriving within earshot of such a house, Edu and his kinsmen stop and call out: “Hodi!” It means, in effect: “May I come in?” In these neighborhoods the doors are always open, if they exist at all, but one cannot just walk in without asking, so this “Hodi!” can be heard from quite a distance. If someone is inside, he answers, “Karibu!” This means: “Please come in. Greetings.” And Edu walks in.
Now begins the interminable litany of greetings. It is simultaneously a period of reconnaissance: both sides are trying to establish their precise degree of kinship. Concentrated and serious, they enter the primevally thick and tangled forest of genealogical trees that is each clan and tribal community. It is impossible for an outsider to make heads or tails of it, but for Edu and his companions, this is a critical moment of the meeting. A close cousin can be a great help, whereas a distant one — significantly less so. But even in this second instance, they will not go away empty-handed. Without a doubt, they will find a corner under the roof here. There will always be a little room for them on the floor — an important consideration, since despite the warm climate it is difficult to sleep outside, in the yard, where one is tormented by mosquitoes, by spiders, earwigs, and various other tropical insects.
The next day will be Edu’s first in the city. And despite the fact that this is a new environment for him, a new world, he doesn’t create a sensation walking down the streets of Kariakoo. It is different with me. If I venture far from downtown, deep into the remote back alleys of this neighborhood, small children run away at the sight of me as fast as their legs can carry them, and hide in the corners. And with reason: whenever they get into some mischief, their mothers tell them: “You had better be good, or else the mzungu will eat you!” (Mzungu is Swahili for the white man, the European.)