Religion, Science, and Superstition Defining Modernism

Hussein wore a woolen suit on the day of his wedding in 1937. He was probably sweating in the new colonial fashion trend. Fatma was wearing a long dress donned with a pacheri or large cotton scarf.

The British culture was already making inroads in the colonized world. Imam Sultan Mohamed Shah had expressed in the firman that the jamat should not continue to wear Indian dresses in countries of their migration. Be like a Roman in Rome.

Hussein and Fatma were made to sit on the chairs in front of the jamat or members of the Ismaili community. The ceremony was attended by Hussein’s stepfamilies, Juma Laljis and Kanji Laljis; Hussein’s sister Remi; Fatma’s brothers, Badru, Fateh, Mohammed, Shamshuddin, and Hassanali; and Fatma’s sisters Khatti (Khatoon) and Nooru (Noorbanu).

The nikah or marriage ceremony was officiated by mukhi, the official in charge, and kamadia, the secretary and treasurer. As soon as they were pronounced as husband and wife, Hussein tried to hold the tears from trickling down his cheeks as he strongly felt the absence of his own mother and father. Flashes of his childhood memories exploded in his mind for a few seconds before his glance fell on Fatma. At that moment, his mental posture realigned from being single to being attached in the journey of responsibility. He had made it to being self reliant and approved of being able to support a wife.

Fatma pulled her pacheri over her forehead as if to block her past and her singular identity, to becoming a dedicated accompaniment to her future journey with her husband. Her childhood memories started flashing in her mind.

As a little girl, Fatma would wait for hours for her dad, Walji Sumar, to come home carrying a basket, intricately woven from palm leaves, full of fruits, like durian and mangoes, and rose fruit (madhufa). She would skip the meals for the fruit. Her father meant everything to her. She was the youngest of the daughters; the first two were Khatun and Noorbanu.

While Walji had many children, and his focus was not on Fatma alone, Fatma’s total focus was on her dad. She would dance away with joy and sing at the top of her voice to draw his attention. She wanted to learn the trade from her dad, but in the context of Omani Arab traditions in Zanzibar, women’s roles were somewhat limited. So, she substituted her passion not only with skipping ropes and racing other girls down the street but also watched her dad conduct the duka through the door left intentionally ajar by him.

Fatma’s father had a small duka attached to a small house in a narrow street in Membe Ladoo, which he operated for seven days from dusk to dawn. Narrow streets characterized Zanzibar and offered shade in the scorching heat. They also helped build pressure, thus causing the air to flow. This cool breeze made living amidst the scorching heat bearable. The architectural landscape of Zanzibar reflected Omani Arab influence. Many fort-like structures were formatted with stones. Thus, Zanzibar came to be known as Stone City.

Fatma’s mother, Lirbai, was the second wife of Walji. She was a great cook and died at fifty-two. Walji lived longer. Fatma was short but very pretty, with almond-shaped eyes. She had a sweet tooth and loved to indulge in sweets and varieties of fruit, which probably contributed to her getting type 2 diabetes later in life. She sang and memorized many ginans, or religious songs, and old long duas, or prayers.

Besides the two sisters, Fatma had five brothers and two stepbrothers from Walji’s first wife. All the siblings moved to mainland Tanganyika Colony in the thirties, due to the directives of Imam Sultan Mohamed Shah, Agha Khan III. The Imam’s decrees or directives acted as a vehicle for social change in the recently migrated Indian community. One of the firmans stated that the able members of the community settle on the mainland of Tanganyika, where there were more opportunities for economic growth than on the tiny island. In retrospect, this is seen as a sign of prophecy by the Imam leading to the economic prosperity of the community at large.

Soon after the wedding, Hussein and Fatma hurried back to the duka in Kikombo, a small village, about thirty-six kilometers from Dodoma and about five hundred kilometers from the Port of Dar es Salaam.

In April of 1938, Fatma woke up sweating with abdominal pain. She woke up Hussein and urged him to accompany her to Dar es Salaam by train. They hurried to catch the steam powered train that took about twelve hours to reach the destination. On arriving at the clinic, she delivered her first baby boy, she named Nizar at the bay’ah or baptizing ceremony. Joy for Fatma and Hussein was short lived due to Hussein’s departure to Kikombo. Fatma joined him after a few weeks.

Nizar was hardly over a year old and had just started walking. He was hyper and tried to test his physical limits by trying to walk faster. His twinkling eyes and curiosity led him to fiddle with everything he could lay his hands on. Fatma could not fathom the genetic permutations blending her and Hussein’s physical and mental traits in this child. She was just beginning to enjoy the baby and its playfulness when Hussein and Fatma had to hurriedly reenact the journey to deliver a second baby boy, Firoz. He was a big baby. Fatma did not realize that her attention to the first born was overwhelming. It was a new experience. Every cry and scream scurried her to respond. With the second one, she was already cognizant. She was more at ease. Firoz did not seek attention as he grew to watch Nizar and used his observations to meander his own behaviour. When he was less than two, he started making and breaking things; listening to the music; and mingling with native wagogo children. He was growing unrestricted due to the lack of fear in Hussein and Fatma based on their experiences with Nizar.

Mansoor was born in 1942. The baby boy was very fair and cute. Fatma wondered who in her or Hussein’s family had such a fair complexion and had such an accelerated pace of learning. Being a third child of Fatma, he was more sensitive. The first one had so much attention. The second was laissez-faire. Did the third feel ignored? He did things differently as a child that drew not only his parent’s attention, but also that of his elder siblings. While all three were articulating their own personality traits and differences, Hussein and Fatma were enriching their own selves watching and learning bringing them up. Were they also adding more elements to their changing identities? They were growing up as parents at the same time as their babies were growing up, but in different ways.

With the birth of Shiraz in December of 1943, Hussein and Fatma felt that they were also getting older in dragging themselves, with their small children, to Dar es Salaam. It was also getting riskier. While they were contemplating to shift to the town of Dodoma which had one dispensary, a small Ismaili community, and a small Jamatkhana, Hussein’s decision was augmented by his conversation with mtemi (chief) John Mbogoni of wagogo tribe. He used to frequent Hussein’s store to buy cooking oil, soap, molasses, tea leaves, etc.. He had a small dwelling to rent in Dodoma.

Dodoma, in the local Kigogo dialect, meant a bowl, because it was surrounded by hills on all sides. There were three main hills within walking distance. They were Chui (cheetah) Hill, Simba (lion) Hill, and Mirembe (peace) Hill.

Adjoining to the last hill, the British built an institution for mentally challenged people called Mirembe. This institution was built on the Christian Church’s superstitious belief system, which postulated that mentally ill people were possessed. Its function was to purge the mental patients from demonic or satanic hold. This purge required physical torture to declutch the satanic grip.

With all the emerging sciences, technologies, and military finesse, the British soldiers and administrative staff seemed completely ignorant of psychology and the causes of mental illnesses. The British built a quarry and a dam at Chui Hill, but they also built a swimming pool near Mirembe exclusively for the Whites.

One year after Hussein and Fatma moved to Dodoma, their first baby girl, Parin, was born. Hussein was delighted to have a baby girl in the family after four boys. He believed that she would bring a lot of prosperity to the family. Fatma’s ecstasy could not match up with Hussein’s as she was conscious of a female’s role in the man’s world. As much as she was limited in her access to freedom in choosing her passion growing up, she felt that a girl’s circumvented wings by the social and cultural limits would not let her fly to freedom.

Hussein’s house was a first-corner house on 5th Avenue, from where he could see the street’s end. The Dodoma society was the epitome of all the towns in Tanganyika, divided into three areas along racial lines. European Bazaar for Europeans only; the Indian commercial enclave; and the Majengo, or outskirts, where local Africans lived.

Hussein’s family lived in the vicinity of Majengo. This racially divided habitat became the norm, and the children grew up accepting it. This placed Hussein and his family in an odd position. They were Asians but lived and mingled with the local wagogos. They were more likely perceived as being at a lower tier of Indian social class. Yet, unlike the Indians, Hussein was more African than Asian. He learnt and spoke Kiswahili and Kigogo fluently. The latter was a locally spoken dialect used by the Wagogo tribe in central Tanzania. The locals began calling him Mtemi, or Chief. They sought his advice related to family issues and small trade startups. Hussein started buying agricultural products, including goat and cow hides, from them.

After the end of Second World War, the British consolidated their political and economic hold further in the colonized world. The escalated procurement of raw materials vigorously increased the industrial output and prosperity in England. With that, the encroachment of British culture and ideas began to permeate every aspect of colonized people, such as dressing, eating with fork and knives, availability of baked and processed foods, medicines. agriculture tools that hastened harvesting and tilling, etc..

Parin was hardly a year and a half old, when Fatma gave birth to a baby boy, Mohamed in 1947, followed by another son, Diamond, in December of 1948. The last of the eight children was a girl, she named Nargis, in 1952. By this time Fatma’s health had already begun to deteriorate. She was weak, exhausted, and severely diabetic.

Hussein was at a loss to understand what was happening to Fatma. He sought the help of physicians and sorcerers. The physicians referred her to a mental hospital run by British priests who believed that she was possessed. To free her from being possessed, she was starved and fed with small pieces of rocks, besides being beaten and tormented, to rid her of the encroached satanic forces.

There were also unemployable individuals, like Shanti, a Hindu priest, who claimed to know the main reason behind her illness. He claimed that he could see a satanic family living in the house who were causing her to behave erratically. To prove that he had extra sensory perception to see them, he would put his hands in boiling oil. This convinced Hussein about Shanti’s supernatural powers. His regular visits were accompanied by his gestures, such as incense burning, aimed at getting rid of satan’s hold on her. His visits always ended with Hussein paying large sums of money.

Unable to take care of the children, Fatma further spiralled down the mental conflict between wanting to tend the needs of the children and her mental and physical health. Hussein felt being pulled to divert his focus from business to domestics. He watched his first four sons aimlessly wandering. He heard from some Ismailis that a community boarding school was being set up in Dare salaam. He sent Firoz, Mansur, and Shiraz to the boarding school, where children from various parts of Tanganyika arrived to learn and be cared for. The teachers were quickly recruited from the community in Dar es Salaam. These teachers lacked qualifications. They were more like preachers than secular professional teachers, whose language of instructions was generating more fear and faith than maths and science.

Shiraz being younger, he was tasked with washing clothes of the elder siblings. The harsh boarding conditions distracted his attention to seeking adventure and testing the limits of sanity. He with other classmates pelted a killer beehive close to the school with disastrous consequences. As they ran toward the classrooms for refuge, the teachers locked the doors from inside to save those already inside. The distractors endured most the brunt of the killer bees. Luckily, they survived.

Fortunately, Hussein’s relatives were well established in Dar es Salaam. Just the thought that they were there was a great solace for his sons. Kanji Lalji’s wife Shirin and Saker Jivraj Abdullah, and others, at times, welcomed them home and even handed them some pocket monies.

Meanwhile, in Dodoma, a new batch of doctors from England who were setting up a hospital in the nearby town of Mwumi, attached to a church and school, diagnosed Fatma as diabetic and admitted her. They put her on a strictly sugar-free diet for a few weeks. This had a tremendous impact on her health. Hussein realized that the sorcerers like Shanti and church superstition-based claims were all fake. Fatma recovered and became a highly creative backbone of support for Hussein and her family.

She revived her interests in entrepreneurship denied to her before. She got busy again boiling eggs, roasting peanuts, packing spices, drying cassava, etc., to sell them side by side with Hussein in their small shop. She bought local products from the farmers, such as tomatoes, carrots, mangoes, tamarind, etc., and would resell them after converting them into small portions.

After a few years, the three boys came back from Dar Salaam for two reasons. Their mum was well. They had missed her love and warmth. She always cooked for the large family of ten three times a day. She would administer herbal medicines made from certain roots; one such root family was called bakwe. She made all the children drink bakwe for different ailments, such as constipation, headaches, and wounds or cuts. Her most outstanding motherly trait was that she would massage all her children’s scalps and limbs with oil made from herbs and coconut.

The other reason of their coming back was that the Indian community in Dodoma set up a school called, Indian Primary School. It was exclusive for Indians. No local Africans were allowed. The children nicknamed it, a phunda or a Donkey school. Same pattern of recruiting the teachers was adopted as in Dar es Salaam. These teachers created more fear than wisdom in the children’s minds.

The local African children, especially from the wagogo tribe, were recruited by the British missionaries to attend their Christian schools. Many, including, Swahili speaking children from other parts of Tanganyika, such as wachagas from the north, and sandavis from the east, attended madrassa or Muslim religious schools attached to the mosques. For Both Christian and Muslim schools, religious scriptures were a fundamental form of instruction. Their proselytizing tendencies were the raison d’être of the education platform.

Some children fell through the cracks of a broken education system. Mansur was more brilliant than most teachers whose canning language he could not tolerate. He, with other kids, would bunk the classes to avoid humiliation. They would end up picking cigarette butts and smoked them to kill time before going home to not arouse parents’ suspicion.

Thus, fear robbed many children of the colonized world of creativity. The fear was caused by the racial and religious inclinations of the teachers rather than love for science and technology. This teaching attitude most likely enhanced racial superiority of Indians over the local black Africans.

Since Hussein’s family did not live in the Indian enclave, there was intra racist underpinnings manifesting in the Indian teachers’ treatment of Hussein’s children. The prolonged prejudice and fear may have emboldened Hussein’s children to seek adventures and also stand up eventually against aggression. Climbing Simba and Chui hills was a favourite feat. More exciting distraction was to forage the farms for mangoes, watermelons, and cucubers, etc.. Somehow, they tasted better than what Fatma sold at her duka.

Until then, they would be caned and humiliated almost every day for not being good students. A teacher named, Ismail Master, who was a grade four graduate, would make them stand on the desk. He would take a long stick or cane called, netter ji soti, because it was flexible and made a whistling noise before it touched the bare skin just below the knees. This would leave a very visible mark, adding salt to the already wounded self. Before executing the punishment, he would say, “the singing of the cane will evoke the mind to seek knowledge”.

There was another teacher, Jessani Master, who taught maths. He punished the children by pinching the underarm just below the shoulder and would lift them up in air till they screamed and cried.

There were a couple of female teachers called Sakar Ben and Gulshan Ben. They literally terrorized the children if they made mistakes, and which would often be the case as fear likely caused and gripped their minds.

In one instance, a teacher named Bhaloo Master saw Mohammed and Diamond watching chanchundri or sparks flying off the fire lit by a night guard.  Next day he summoned Diamond and Mohamed to a class he was conducting.  He made them sit under his desk just to humiliate them. He then asked the class if they ever saw chanchundri emanating from a night guard’s fire pit.  His tone revealed his self patting expression of being a winning warrior.  All the indian children whispered, “no”. Their whisper was an indication of mental conflict between the unleashing of teacher’s wrath and the victims’ fury outside the school. He asked them to repeat it loudly, which they did. He then canned them and sent them back to their classes.   

Their beaten bodies were soothed by Fatma massaging their scalps with herbs cooked and concocted with coconut oil. Her tender care was like oasis in the scorching heat.

The other refuge was playing soccer. All the boys played soccer with the local Africans children. Soccer was very exhausting and an inexpensive game. They played with their naked feet and in more instances than not injuries were a norm. Nizar kicked a rock and fractured his toe. Firoz became a local soccer champion, while Mansur could kick the ball from one end of the field to the other and would shock all who watched him. He seemed to have a third eye or an extra sense of perception of the world around him. In a British structured system, he was a misfit. Neither Indians nor the British had categories to incorporate gifted children.

In the 1950s, the Ismaili community established the Aga Khan middle school open to all, while the British built a secondary school. Nizar loved to study. Firoz was more practical and liked to do things rather than read and do homework. The education system did not accommodate the likes of Firoz. While Firoz was kicked out of school for lack of interest, Nizar was accused of having access to the leaked exam papers. Nizar was devastated. His love for knowledge crumbled against the British zero tolerance policies. He could not hold his tears for many years.