And Home Was Kariakoo by M.G. Vassanji Read Free Book Online Page A

fought?
    Taveta was a sprawling village surrounded by hills and mountains. We found a decent hotel, from the terrace of which we could look upon a vista: the Pare Mountains before us on the left, Kilimanjaro directly in front, Chala Crater to the right. Behind us a stone church on a small hill, and behind that, Salaita Hill, whose occupation by a small party of Germans in 1915 had been the cause of so much British frustration. The hotel manager, a man in his forties wearing a Kaunda suit—a collared short-sleeved shirt of linen worn over matching pants—was a former schoolmaster and a history buff to whom I took instantly. He was delighted at my interest. Nobody knows about the war here, he rued; all that history, now lost. The church-on-a-hill behind us was relatively new, from the 1930s, but there was a cemetery, not very far, on the site of an old church destroyed in the war. There was a 1904 grave there, of a white woman.
    He gave me a car with driver to go and have a look. The cemetery was a short distance away from the modern town, but I couldn’t find the old grave. The place was lovely, however, shaded with mango trees and utterly quiet and peaceful. The graves seemed to have been reused, and even the gravestones. On our way back, a surprise awaited. Across the road from the church rose a site that made my heart race: old brick ruins crowning the top of a rise. We stopped so I could walk around. What remained of the original structure—a rectangular bunker—were the ruins of the outer walls, and in one corner an almost intact room with crenelated walls, a square opening in each of them, used presumably to fire down on the enemy. There was no roof, and the room was now used as a kitchen. The restof the building had been patched up crudely with cement and brick and housed the church offices. Stones were scattered on the sides of the hill, debris that presumably had rolled away from the old structure. As we drove on, alerted, we noted occasional heaps of rubble that could very possibly—very hopefully—be signals from times past.
    You have to go and see Lake Chala, the manager insisted, and the next morning we did just that.
    The lake is inside a crater and invisible from the road, so that you have to walk up a hill to see it. And when you do so you come upon a sight of such pristine beauty it leaves you helpless. The sky blue, the leaves green, the dirt road an insignificant thin line. The lake below, crystal-clear blue, mysterious, deep; tiny ripples on the surface played by the wind like light fingers on a harp. You have no word to say; you walk away from the others. You think, This could be the site of Creation itself. And you want to hoard away this moment, so that years later you can say, I was at Lake Chala. When the tourists had not arrived and only a privileged few knew about it.
    You can, if you try, climb down to the water. We meet two Masai youths who have done just that. We go halfway down, but the climb is steep, and without a stick (the Masai each have one) it does not seem wise to proceed farther. But at the top of the crater is a stone fortification, a wall, some nine feet high and twenty wide. This is where the South Africans had dislodged the Germans.
    It takes some feat—amidst this spell-binding natural beauty that surrounds us—to imagine here tens of thousands of troops, animals, guns, motor vehicles. Dust, petrol fumes, animal odour in the air. They came, fought, and left, leaving only these stone clues behind, like men and beasts from another planet.
    Lake Chala is fed by a stream from Kilimanjaro running underground. It runs, we are told, all the way to Lake Jipe, emergingonce at the Njoro Springs. From the terrace of our hotel later we could see a green belt apparently following that path.
    Now here I was in Moshi a week later perusing the names of the war dead: J. Watson of the Machine Gun Corps, and Private S.H.V. Palmer of the 12th Regiment of the South African Infantry, and D. Scott