World, Meet World
World, Meet World is the title of this brief intervention. When considering what to call this, I was thinking of that quip I heard retold by a weary African thinker leaving a forum: ‘China comes to Africa to talk about trade, culture, and investment. The West comes to Africa to talk about China.’ I enter this Africa–China dance through my work in a coming-of-age novel The Dragonfly Sea, which situates itself in a sliver of older, deeper, more complex Africa–Asia, Africa–China relationships linked to our global monsoon complex and the Silk Road—both imaginative and maritime—an exploration of transoceanic belonging, identities, and intersections, or what a friend, the scholar Alvin Pang, has defined as ‘confluences’.
The novel is a Bildungsroman. An isolated little girl, Ayaana, growing up on an island in the Swahili Sea, is selected to travel to China as a figurative emissary of a lost history: the mystery of the sailors who survived the storm that destroyed one-third of Admiral Zheng He’s fleet. It is based on a 2005 event, when a young girl from Pate Island, Mwamaka Sharifu, was selected for a scholarship to study in China based on DNA analyses that revealed she had a person of Chinese origin among her ancestors.
The book itself, as with my other works, is also about African worlds in dialogue with worlds: Global Africa, or rather Pluriversal Africa. Pluriversal, as defined by Walter Mignolo, entails the coexistence of worlds, worlds within worlds, the epistemological grandmother of multipolarity, multilocality, and pluricentrism. All of this is rooted in Africa’s immense and deep history; I say ‘history’, not the ‘past’, referring to transtemporal, trans-spatial, and transboundary history. Pluriversal Africa speaks to itself and then to other pluriversal worlds—primarily, Global and Pluriversal Asia—in an exchange that is mediated by our pluriversal waters, those Swahili Seas, or Ziwa Kuu, Afrasian waters, Western–Eastern Ocean, temporarily still known as the ‘Indian’ Ocean.
One day in 2005, I stood in one of Moscow’s metro stations surrounded by people and noise, aware of both my blindness and my muteness although I could see and speak. The destinations were spelled out in Russian Cyrillic in shapes of words I did not recognise, sounds of words I did not know. There was no-one to whom I could turn in a place where even the idea of English felt alien. So, I waited, aware of my foreignness, yet not afraid of it. I was there. A new experience of lostness waiting to be found. To be surrounded by the shape, sense, and sound of words and not be able to understand anything. Isn’t this similar to the world and time in which we find ourselves now, particularly with regard to the re-emergence of China as an intergalactic pluriversal power? (As you can see, I am overtly not saying ‘Global China’.) This is the epoch of a new dispensation, a new hermeneutics of our being, a summons to another lexicon of the world and of geopolitics, of struggling (and waiting) to understand the character of what is slowly emerging as the old order reluctantly retreats. This is the context in which I make this intervention: in the consciousness of not knowing, of waiting for the patterns to make themselves coherent.
A European interviewer once asked me whether The Dragonfly Sea was a nod to the figurative return of Admiral Zheng He and the host fleet as emissaries to the nations. ‘Mhh,’ I replied. I should have said, not a return, but a navigational correction by a people who made a fatal mistake in turning their backs on the seas and the world and creating room for an occupation of the world by others. A historical correction—this is what I would say now with certainty and a touch of schadenfreude.
The Asia–Africa, China–Africa re-engagement is not a new phenomenon. Discoveries like those by Kenyan underwater archaeologist Caesar Bita remind us how a major portion of our shared history lies within our underwater wreckages. The myriad forces of this age have expedited so much of the fascinating recovery work happening through East Africa–Asia collaborations, yielding some important finds that affirm the depth, complexities, and reach of Eastern African peoples into the world before the great European invasion of the area, and the subsequent amputations and erasures. In so many of these new conversations, the impact of Pluriversal Africa on China is rarely mentioned. Cases in point: the 2017 Chinese ban on ivory and trade in elephant products, the caravans of Chinese students who travel to Kenya as part of their curriculum in understanding wildlife conservation, and our wilderness ethos, the Chinese-owned safari camps and outfitters, and conservation filmmakers and photographers, the cultural and artistic influences, the technology engagement particularly in Fin-Tech, where Kenya is a global leader.
The story in The Dragonfly Sea was motivated by multiple factors. It inserts a figurative East African stake into the space of emerging Africa–Asia narratives that try so very hard to frame the effect of the growing closeness between these worlds, which for a certain portion of the world only about geopolitical competition and the consolidation of power and wealth, as a threat. The anxious posturing we now see is all about who owns the future, isn’t it? Who gets to control the levers of imagination, energy, transportation, technology, food, and security. The Dragonfly Sea centres on the Swahili Seas, those ‘Indian’ oceans, because as before, so today, the area has become the centre among centres where global futures are being fought over, negotiated, and decided in this epoch in flux—an unravelling, a time of foment, integrating the new forces of technology, when our beliefs and assumptions about the world and what it is are subject to drastic transformation.
The Kenyan and African perspectives are so very disparate, complex, and nuanced; there is much that inspires in the story of the ascendance of China. And in most Global South/majority world spaces the hope of a twenty-first-century Bandung Redux often makes its presence felt.
I remember when Kenya was sending donations of tea to China after an earthquake in the 1970s. And to think that in 1999 my very worthy social development class almost travelled to China to do that helping/empowerment thing. The area we targeted is now a grand technopolis. We had Chinese playmates in our Nairobi neighbourhood; it did not occur to us that they were anything other than rivals in our game of marbles. In class, there were students of mixed African and Chinese heritage. We felt that everyone was just part of the complicated, mercurial and mixed ecology that was our city. We would fight the way children fight, with our casual prejudices, which we delivered and received without too much consciousness. But we were also in awe of those who could legitimately lay claim to China because of their proximity to the monks of the Shaolin temple, kung-fu, and Bruce Lee. To this day, the mythology attracts attention, affection.. So many of our youthful superpower stories were predicated on our imitation of the superlative Bruce Lee, and not Superman or Batman, versions of which were lurking on the fringes of the imagination at the same time.
The looming figure of Mao Zedong was a feature in our news cycles. His death in 1976 was televised in Kenya. We received regular updates on the developments of the Tanzania–Zambia railway, which was a topic in our geography classes. On weekends, we contemplated treats in the many Chinese restaurants in our city, which we thought of not as Chinese but as Nairobian.
Later, living in Zanzibar, I was confronted with the long resonance of East African entanglement with Asia and China, and the tangibility of untold stories. In this port city with its seaward gaze, stories abound like that of Zanzibari Howingkao Howa, whose multigeneration Sino-Zanzibari family is the custodian of some of Zanzibar’s China-influenced culinary delights. Haji Gora Haji, the late de facto poet laureate of Zanzibar, who inspired a character in my novel, once reminded me: tides ebb and flow, what is new about the flow of water? What is new about China–Africa encounters?
Why Dragonfly Sea? Our Afrasian seas are a greatly contested site subject to the violence of others’ interpretations. There’s a daft neologism doing the rounds, ‘Indo-Pacific’, into which a certain hegemonic force is pushing itself as a main protagonist of our ancient waters. Dragonflies are one of the oldest of Earth’s creatures; they predate the dinosaurs. Their traverse of those seas precedes our politics, and few can dispute their figurative authority over our waters.
In 2005, Mwamaka Sharifu, the young Kenyan who descends from one of the surviving sailors who washed ashore after Zheng He’s ship capsized, was selected to go to China almost as an emissary from lost worlds and was received as such. The character of Ayaana in my book is modelled after her story, although it is not her story. Mwamaka’s story is far more compelling, dramatic, and beautiful, as is her meeting of those with whom she shared DNA. She was received in many places in China as one who had finally brought a lost ancestor home—but that is her story, which I hope you get to hear one day.
Now, here are two excerpts from The Dragonfly Sea, supported by images from Pate Island, the ‘point zero’ of this story and, arguably, the hidden spiritual disembarkation point of Africa–Asia renewals, engagements and futures.
Chapter 1: 2–7
To cross the vast western ocean, water-chasing dragonflies with forebears in Northern India had hitched a ride on a sedate October matlai, the ‘in-between seasons’ morning wind, one of the monsoon’s introits. Under dark blue-purplish clouds, these fleeting beings settled on the mangrove-fringed south-west coast of a little girl’s island. The matlai conspired with a shimmering white full moon to charge the island, its fishermen, prophets, traders, seamen, seawomen, seafarers, healers, ship builders, dreamers, merchants, tailors, madmen, teachers, mothers and fathers with a fretfulness that mirrored the slow churning turquoise sea. A storm-dimmed dusk stalked the Lamu Archipelago’s largest and sullenest island, trudging from Siyu on the North coast, upending the fishing fleets of Kizingitini before swooping into a Pate town that was already mouldering in that malaise of unrequited yearnings. Frayed in its old soul, bone weary of cobwebbed memories, robbed of a succession of keepers by endless deeds of guile, siege, war and seduction, Pate town, like the island that contained it, marked melancholic time. A leaden sky poured dull red light over a mob of petulant ghosts, dormant feuds, forfeited glories, invisible roads, festering amnesia, history’s debts, and congealing millennia-old conspiracies. Weaker light leached into crevices, tombs and ruins, and signalled to a people who were always willing to cohabit with tragedy, trusting that time transformed cataclysms into whispers.
Deep within Pate, a cock crowed, and elsewhere a summons, the Adhan, crescendoed. Sea winds tugged at a little girl’s lemon green headscarf revealing dense, black curly hair that blew into her eyes. The scrawny six-year old, wearing an oversized blue-yellow-pink floral dress that she was supposed to grow into, from within her mangrove hideout, watched dark clouds surge inland. A rumble. She decided that these were a monster’s footsteps, a monster whose strides created pink streaks of light on the sky. Seawater lapped at her knees, and her bare feet sank into the black sand as she clutched onto another scrawny being, a dirt-white purring kitten. She was betting that the storm—her monster—would reach land before a passenger-laden dau muddling its way towards the cracked wharf in front of her.
She held her breath.
‘Home comers,’ she called all passengers. Wajio. The child could rely on home comers like these to be jolted like marionettes whenever there was a hint of rain. She giggled as the mid-sized dau, ‘Bi Kidude’ painted in flaking yellow on its side, eased into the creek in synchrony with the grumble of thunder.
Scattered, soft rain drops. The extended thunder rumble caused every home comer to raise his or her eyes skyward, and squawk like startled hornbills. The watching girl sniggered and she stroked her kitten, pinching its fur in her thrill. It mewled.
“Shhh.” She whispered.
As she peered through her mangrove hideout to better study the passengers’ rain-blurred faces—a child looking for and collecting words, images, sounds, moods, colours, conversations, and shapes, which she could store in one of the shelves of her soul, to later retrieve and reflect upon in quieter moments. Everyday, in secret, she went to and stood by the portals of her sea.
She was waiting for Some One.
Her home was steeped in vast eloquent silences transformed by her imagination into garbled idioms that would one day merge to make sense. She stuck words into whatever structures of language and dialects she encountered and tried to guess why on seeing her, many shivered. Others’ eyes would glint and their mutterings would evaporate as she approached, and she would read the pity in their gazes, she might hear the sigh, “Ahh, maskini.” Poor thing. Nothing was ever actually said to her and she knew not to ask.
The girl moved the kitten from her right to her left shoulder. Its extra-large, slanted blue eyes followed the dance of eight golden dragonflies hovering close by.
Thunder.
The dau drew parallel to the girl, and she fixated on a man with a burgundy-tinged face and a cream suit who was slumped over the vessel’s edge. She was about to cackle at his discomfort when a high and harried voice intruded:
“Ayaaaan!”
Her surveillance of the man was interrupted as lightning split the sky.
“Ayaaaan!”
It was her mother.
“Ayaaaan!”
At first, the little girl froze. Then she crouched low and stroked the kitten. She whispered, “Haidhuru.” Don’t mind. “She can’t see us.”
Ayaan was supposed to be recovering from a dawn asthmatic fit. Bi Munira, her mother, had rubbed clove oil over her tightened chest and stuffed the all-ailment-treating black kalonji seeds into her mouth. They had sat together naked under a blanket while a pot of steaming herbs, which included eucalyptus and mint, decongested their lungs. Ayaan had tried hard. She had gulped down air and blocked her breath to swallow six full tablespoons of cod-liver oil. She had gurgled a bitter concoction and been lulled to sleep by her mother’s dulcet ‘do-do-do.’ She had woken up to the sounds of her mother at work: the tinkle of glass, brass, and ceramic; the smells of rose, langilangi, and night jasmine; and the lilts in women’s voices inside her mother’s rudimentary home-based beauty salon. Sensing Ayaan was awake, Bi Munira had served her a chicken biryani lunch. Ayaan had pecked at her rice and consumed half a chicken leg. “Sleep, lulu,” her mother had murmured before returning to pamper, paint and gild her clients.
Ayaan had tried.
She had pinned herself to the bed until the persistent beckon of far-off thunder proved irresistible. She had rolled out of bed, arranged extra pillows to simulate a body, and covered these with her sheets. She then squeezed out of a high window and shimmied down drainpipes clamped to the crumbling coral wall. On the ground, she found the kitten she had rescued from a muddy drain several days ago stretched out on their doorstep. She picked it up. Planting it on her right shoulder, she had dashed off to the sea front before swinging north to the mangrove section of the creek from where she could spy on the world unseen.
“Ayaaaan!”
The wind cooled her down. The kitten purred. Ayaan watched the dau. A cream-suited elderly stranger lifted his head.
Their eyes connected.
Ayaan ducked, pressing into mangrove shadows, her heart racing. How had that happened?
“Ayaaaan!” Her mother’s voice was closer. “Where’s that child? Ayaaan? Ah! Must I talk to God?”
Ayaan looked towards the boat and again at the blackening skies. She would never know what landed first, the boat or the storm. She remembered the eyes that had struck hers. Would their owner tell on her? She scanned the passageway, looking for those eyes again. The kitten on her shoulder pressed its face into her neck.
“Ayaaaan! As God is my witness … that child … when I find you …! A threat-drenched sing-song contralto that came from the bushes to the left of the mangroves.
The little girl abandoned her mangrove cover. She splashed through the low-tide water to reach the beach area that was opposite to the direction her mother was headed. She scrambled over jagged brown rocks, leaping from stone to stone with the kitten clinging to her neck.
And Ayaan dropped out of sight.
The passenger was an elder, a visitor from China. He glimpsed the small creature whose eyes had earlier unsettled him. He saw her soar against a black sky backdrop, hover and then fall like a broken-off bough.
A chortle tumbled out of him.
His fellow passengers, already sympathetic about the chronic seasickness that had afflicted him on this boat journey, glanced at him. They were nervous about him now. It was not uncommon that seasickness had turned previously sane persons into cackling lunatics. But the elder was focused on the land. The cataracts of his right eye gave it a blue-ish luminosity. His face was set off by a balding head on a tendon-lined neck that perched on a medium height body that was scraggly, as a former muscle man on a late-life ascetic path might come to look.
The boat docked.
He listened as a woman’s voice sang, from inside the island, Ayaaaan! Ayaaaan!
Minutes later, ill-fitting clothes aflutter in a storm wind, the man stepped off the boat to wade through shallow water to reach the black-sand shore. Anonymous hands urged him forward. He stumbled. He touched the soil. He gulped down air. All his senses sizzled as if intoxicated by the fresh air, and they were, but there was more. Here was the beckon of home-country ghosts he had travelled so far to console. Here did he hear humming of those who had lived and died far from home, and waited six hundred years for someone to acknowledge them.
Then, laughter.
A hand dangled in front of his face.
He took it.
It was the boat’s navigator helping him up, handing over his single, grey bag. “Itifaki imezingatiwa.” The seaman said, faking solemnity, but then he laughed. And the elder laughed with him.
His next footstep into Pate.
He was assailed by redolent evening scents, an incense spattered enchantment. He caught his breath. Vanilla, musk, sweet balsamic and sea sweat in the thickening air. He inhaled. He tilted his head towards the hubbub; human arrivals. He listened to the familiar music of a rolling cobalt tide. He glanced upward, wondering if the sky was as it was back home. Like the child in the mangroves, he saw the storm surging in. In his will, he urged it to break. Thunder.
Human mumbling.
But what was that scent; its flavour touched his tongue.
What was this place?
He turned. He ambled forward, heels rotating as if his toes had acquired roving eyes. Pale light shone on a pink petal falling from a brown-stemmed, solitary and slender wild rose bush that popped from the place where black sand became dark red soil. The man faltered. He watched the petal settle on the ground. Only after, did he reach for it. He lifted it to his lips. He would enclose it in one hand while the other adjusted the condensed contents of a life that now fit into the grey canvas bag dangling from his shoulder.
Chapter 62: 286–90
There were seventeen others in her class in the nautical science studies program, and they represented different maritime countries. Chinese and Malaysians, two Indians, two Pakistanis, one from Singapore, two from the Philippines, one Turk, the rest from Indonesia. There were two other women, both Chinese, one of them from Hong Kong. Ayaana was the only Kenyan and African. With her “Descendant” tag, her lanky height—she was taller than most of the men—and her dark-skinned but Chinese looks, she had to contend with extra curiosity. She shrugged this off, focused on her work, and passed her continuous assessment tests with good marks.
Ayaana was surveying the longest line on the globe’s three-dimensional grid, the equator, the first line of latitude. Her special point zero, 40,075 kilometers long; 78.7 percent across water, 21.3 percent over land, zero degrees, all the Kenya equator places she had never imagined to claim as her own: Nanyuki, Mount Kenya. The invisible equator line crossed only thirteen countries—Kenya, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Sao Tome and Principe, Gabon, Republic of the Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Somalia, Maldives, Indonesia, and Kiribati—thirteen countries that were the center of the world, and hers was one of them. She vowed she would one day go and walk the spaces for herself. Ayaana turned her gaze to the blue area on the globe, to the 78.7 percent of equator that she was supposed to reflect on. Deluged, and at sea. Far too many forces to contend with. Yesterday’s celestial navigation session had introduced her to quasars, those remote, energy-producing constants from which GPS devices framed their reference. The week before, the class had focused on active and passive sonars. The sea had many sources of noise, she had learned; she had been surprised that something so obvious was treated as news.
Today Ayaana scowled at an enhanced image of the oceans. Earlier, the class had been reviewing electronic navigation systems while she had been daydreaming about Mehdi’s and Muhidin’s stars, or night boat rides from Pate to Lamu with a nahodha who watched skies, monitored winds, and read sea surfaces. She blinked and returned to the work at hand, disappointed to imagine that getting from point A to point Z now required so many beeping and burping units that governed the waters on behalf of real navigators. She was studying the data from her Geographic Information System readings and toying with other buttons to try to make a map of her own imagining of the seas. Ayaana moved the navigational computer’s cursor before pushing a button that revealed the latitude and longitude of a longed-for waypoint: “Pate Island: 2.1000ºS, 41.0500ºE.” Ayaana would learn that there seemed to be no absolutes in the world, only codes and questions and a guarantee of storms. In realizing this, she excavated echoes of a childhood conversation: She had asked Muhidin, “What is good about water?” Muhidin had said, “Storms.” She then asked, “What is bad about water?” He had answered, “Storms again.” Now, in class, Ayaana stared miserably at her accumulation of the technical instruments with which she would analyze and eviscerate the unknowable sea. She raised her hand. She lowered it. What had she been about to ask? A matter of distances, the place of intimacy: What was the story of a human being within the epic that was the sea? She chewed on a finger and looked around and chose silence. She would have to relinquish her feeling for water to the power of numbers, navigational compasses, Napier’s Rules, coordinates, and geopolitics. She watched her lecturer. Could she propose that the sea sweats differently depending on the time and flavor of day and night? That there are doorways within the sea and portals in the wind? That she had heard the earth and moon and sea converge to sing as a single storm-borne wind, and these had called her to dance, and that she had danced at night with them under a fecund moon? A secret grin. She would be deported.
A shuffle of papers, a different image on the projector. The lecture on sea routes was proceeding with another elaboration of “the One Belt, One Road.” They were reviewing the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. Suddenly the lecturer called out Ayaana’s name: “Baadawi xiăo jiě.” Ayaana jumped as the lecturer gestured. “Shared future destiny, yes?” The class turned to gaze at Ayaana. Ayaana shrank into her seat, focusing on the sound of the slogans: “Honor in trade, prosperity for all.” The lecturer continued, “Our Western Ocean is our gateway to mutual greatness.” In the retelling of the life of her sea, Ayaana saw that the Maritime Silk Road initiative had gobbled into Pate’s place in the Global Monsoon Complex. By her very presence, Ayaana felt implicated, as if she were betraying her soul. She sank into her seat, also overwhelmed by this infinite land of infinite armies and infinite words, and the machinery that at a signal could roll over skies, waters, and earth to reach her home and cause it to disappear. She had come to school wanting to enter into the language of the seas through a people she was to imagine were her own. Instead, she was learning how the world was reshaping itself and her sea with words that only meant energy, communications, infrastructure, and transportation. Storm warning. Neither Pate nor the Kenya she had rarely thought about had acquired a vast enough imagination to engulf the cosmos that was writing itself into their center. Ayaana suppressed a sigh and eavesdropped on the snipings of the other foreign students, who had resorted to petty territorial snipings that changed nothing, her thoughts in turmoil.
One hot and humid day, Ari, a student of marine engineering from India, observed that the Maritime Silk Road initiative ceded the Indian Ocean—he had emphasized “Indian”—to “others.” “It is not for nothing that the ocean is called Indian,” he noted.
Ayaana retorted, “Ziwa Kuu?”
Ari turned to her. “Oogle Boogle?”
“Ziwa Kuu.” Ayaana refused to cede territory.
Ari said, “We’ll discuss that with your good self the day your country acquires a motorboat to start a navy.”
Ayaana said, “Ziwa Kuu, and we have a navy.”
“Doubtless its fish bounties are commendable, but what else?”
Titters.
“Ratnakara,” said an Indonesian.
“Indian Ocean,” emphasized Ari.
“Ziwa Kuu,” repeated Ayaana.
“Indian Ocean.”
Two Pakistani students chimed in: “Ziwa Kuu!”
The class slipped into an uproar that did not change Chinese foreign policy. The lecturer, who had watched the disintegration of order in his class in disbelief, his face becoming blotchy, at last screamed, “The Western Ocean! You are in China.”
“Western Ocean,” murmured Ayaana, looking at Ari from beneath her fringe as she doodled the words “Ziwa Kuu” on her notepad, thinking about a Kipate toponym, her heart pleased about the meaningless skirmish she had stirred.
The lecturer was shouting out his points. Ayaana returned to jotting down notes of another nation’s imagination for her sea. “One belt, one road,” she wrote. She would have to ask Muhidin what the different Kipate names for her sea were. The debate re-emerged outside, and more positions were taken, which then split into nation-states and cultural attachments. Ayaana was in the middle of the argument, standing on the shifting water of history, her memory, and the silences of men like Mehdi. She was still astounded by the delusions built over the debris of the lives of her people, stories razed and reacquired by others, the strangenesses—that, for example the dau belonged elsewhere. She did not have the lexicon, and she knew the fear of an inability to explain, reclaim, and possess. She tried to speak of the poetry of sea lives, of the ceaseless ebb and flow of her people to other worlds—as traders, seekers, and teachers; as navigators, shipbuilders, archivists, and explorers—and their return.
“Slaves,” Ari added.
Ayaana glared at Ari. She had never spoken so much to her classmates. In slow-drip mischief, she told Ari, “We want our maharaja back.” Ari gestured at her. “Sardar Singh of Jodhpur, Ari.” Her voice was cool.
Ari spluttered.
Then, just as quickly as her ire had risen, Ayaana was overcome by the languageless-ness of the present, the silenced and ruined who inhabited the present, the terror that there would be nobody left to salvage the ocean’s Kipate name.
She walked away. What was the point?
In this country, they spoke of the sea’s future in Mandarin and English, not in Kiswahili, or Gujarati or Malay or Kipate. Ayaana walked toward the shimmering water, scanning for patterns. Dark blue clouds in southwestern skies—a cold front was approaching.
