Haditha kwa makaburi

I've always been partial to a good graveyard. The Kaole cemetary has quite a lot going for it- graves from the thirteenth century onwards, of the Persian traders who set up in the Kaole port before the mangroves swallowed it up. There is a touching double tomb of two lovers who drowned on the same day and were buried together. How do they know? Oh, never mind, it's a good story. There is also Sherifa's grave - allegedly a direct lineal descendant of the Prophet. She is supposed to be very effective at answering the prayers of women and others who come to pray at her grave and there are usually lots of small offerings, but when I saw it there was only a small oil lamp container. I did hear this long story about how before Independence, Nyererere had to go to London, and the local waganga - medicine men - gathered at Sharifa's grave with him, ( a devout Catholic) and for 6 nights they circled the grave reciting the Koran, and at the end of it, the mats he was sitting on had become so tiny you could hardly see them. I think the inference was that he also could become that small, and so sneak on the plane without paying. Handy, if true, as he spent a lot of the 50's going round fundraising for his air fares etc.
The crossover between Islam and magic is seamless here, and in the ruins of the mosque, there is an ancient well whose water is deemed holy by observant Muslims and highly esteemed also for the making of efficacious spells.
If you need a really good spell, the Bagamoyo region is where you go, and the creme de la creme of the local spellmakers are to be found in Kaole.
When we had our barbecue a couple of weeks ago, I reminded Saloum of a story he had spun me when we had our spot of trouble in 2001. The Trade Union leadership had, it was well known, gone to Bagamoyo to have spells put on the senior management. In fact, when everything was finally settled, the GOM, as an unwritten side-bar to the main agreement, secured undertakings that the spells would be lifted. Despite all their protestations to the contrary, his managers needed that reassurance.
The story Saloum told was that there had been a spell put on the GOM also. The Leaders returned to the mganga to protest that the GOM showed every sign of being as fit and healthy as ever. "No, he's dead" was the reply -"see it says so on my computer."
One graveyard not satisfying my appetite, I went to the small but very well maintained German cemetary near Badeco, a monument in stone to the Scramble for Africa. Mostly very young German soldiers died in a series of battles in the 1890's because the local African tribes could not understand the concept of lebensraum, and quite fancied hanging onto their land. Their cemetary including the graves of those hanged for such presumption is a little way further up the hill. It didn't take long for the Germans to establish home from home: by 1900, even though the Germans had decided Dar es Salaam had a better port and downgraded the importance of Bagamoyo, there is the grave of a 6 day old baby born in the colony. In one corner of the cemetary there is the isolated but best kept grave of all - that of the British Regional Commissioner, who committed suicide in 1939, just before the outbreak of the Second World War. I guess that even the disgrace of a suicide would not have allowed the British colonialists to bury him away from his own kind in the German cemetary, if he had killed himself a few months later. He apparently shot himself 3 times in the chest when his wife left him for another man. It sounds a most incompetant if not impossible way to commit suicide. I'm certain there is more to the story than that. Which is why I like graveyards....