By the time she matured she was expert in weaving the mats which her mother took to market. Around this time her uncle, the one who carried his coffee-pot round the town, clinking the cups together in advertisement as nowadays the ice-cream man rings his bell on hot days, married a young wife who was expert in sewing and from her Fatuma – she was not yet Sophia – learned the art of needlework.
Her first marriage occurred at the time when the port grew dull for lack of business, sisal and coffee fetching so little that it was not worth buying sacks and putting them on the train. This did not prevent the customary ceremonies and the formal dowry payment. Fatuma made no objection to the match and, after the public proclamation that her virginity had been demonstrated, the couple were not reluctant to be enclosed for the seven days traditional fungate honeymoon. Ali had managed to keep his job as a clerk at the docks and had furnished a neat apartment for her, two upstairs rooms, where his friends would come to drink coffee and read the newspapers, one of them even to play the accordion. This surprised her, for it was generally considered to be a Christian instrument, used to accompany the seductive and debilitating beat of the waltz or quickstep. She was more accustomed to vigorous group dances, to the high wail of the long trumpet or massed drums, heard behind canvas screens when a ceremony was going on in the old town. But keeping a job was no joke in those days, and Ali was always having to pay out to assist some less fortunate colleague or sometimes, she suspected, to protect his seat in the rickety office where there were fewer and fewer invoices to write. (But in retrospect the old crafts and diets of the island survived in perpetual sunshine, as they had survived many another trial of history.)
Ali was lean and muscular, dressed ordinarily in white shirt and shorts, with the white embroidered cap pressed firmly on his curly hair. On Fridays he would expect his long white robe to be spotless and would take Hassan, similarly dressed, to the mosque while she stayed behind with the little girls. Before each Idd he would give her money for the fabrics, embroidery thread, whatever else she needed to turn them out smartly to his credit.
Indeed, the memory of her first marriage was punctuated not so much by births and miscarriages as by fragments of her art – a sailor suit she had made for Hassan to wear when some Governor or other was arriving at the port, a shimmering loose gown for carrying a baby that had slipped away when she was barely showing, a white-sprigged bed cover she had quilted for the wedding of a Goan teacher’s daughter.
In Sophia’s memory the strike seemed to be the beginning of the end. It was a good thing – Ali said so, and therefore she must believe it. Although they continued to live in the old town way, in which Muslims considered themselves a cut above the inland people, Christians or pagans, kaffirs all, except for a few who had seen the light and were beginning to follow civilised ways, Ali was one of those who resented the Arab feeling of superiority. This feeling had grown since the Arabs, despite all their talk in the Coast Arab Association, had kept the votes for a Legco member to themselves. So Swahilis had begun to talk about unity with inland Africans, and once one started to think about them as brothers it was impossible not to see that they were suffering. Their wages were extremely low for a place where you could not even partially apply the theory that food was coming free from the home place; a house, however overcrowded, was hard to get and sure to cost more than the small allowance paid to those who did not get a room in government quarters; worse than that, the casual labourers might not get more than a few days’ work a month. Disorders and riots had occurred before. Now, Ali said, it was time to show what organisation and solidarity could do.
It alerted government and employers to labour problems. It was not able to do much else. Only the Conservancy Department had given proper notice of their intention to strike. The Municipality therefore recognised a dispute and came up promptly with a very small offer. The night soil workers accepted it but the sweepers did not, so that although there was not a sanitary emergency, the rubbish piled up. Casual workers at the port were the first to come out but the ‘permanent boys’ had too much to lose: however when the strike spread to the African Marine Company police stopped all work in the port for fear that strikers would carry out their threat to invade the dock area. Pickets did their best to bring building to a halt and also to call out domestic servants, but some domestic employers and hotels were accommodating their staff or driving them home.
Permanent labourers on the railway did not actually strike – they presented their demands and were promised investigation. This greatly weakened workers’ co-operation, but even so about six thousand people were off work at the same time. The Texas Oil Company paid off their daily workers and brought staff from Nairobi. The Mombasa Electric Light and Power Company signed off strikers and engaged new staff locally. Dairy workers settled their dispute within a day. So unity was sabotaged and people drifted back to work. Only the very poorest got much out of the interim award, and the planned further investigations were postponed in the excitement of war breaking out.
To Fatuma it just seemed messy, outside forces spilling over in the untidy order of island life. Rubbish piled up in the streets and round the fish market, goods lay undelivered, some of them rotting, gangs of unemployed wandered about, no greater hazard to life and property than usual but irritating, the extra police making a great show of breaking them up while, as a result, new groups formed up like a wave behind them. It gave her a funny feeling, but she tried to believe Ali that it would make for improvement in the long run.
Then, almost before one was back in routine, war. Knowing as usual, Ali said the awards, the restraint on police action, had been to keep the people loyal in case they were needed to fight. There was no very promising alternative to be loyal to, from what one heard of the Italians in Ethiopia, but even so in 1940 the government managed to lock up some political activists on a charge of being in touch with the enemy, and to ban three political groups.
It was not what older people thought of as a war, with soldiers nipping across the boundary to shoot one another beside the railway while you stood back and waved flags. This war meant work – the port full of ships, carrying troops, carrying food, carrying mail, which sometimes failed to arrive and was always wanted in a hurry. Everyone was busy. Everyone was tired. There were long queues for goods in the authorised shops, high prices in the others. Routes, and so manifests, might have to be changed at the last minute, documents delayed to reduce the risk of careless talk. One morning a load slipped and crashed down from overhead. Ali was crumpled, reduced, died on the way to hospital. He was buried, as is customary, at sundown. Overnight, order was reversed, and all Fatuma’s faiths disintegrated.
Eleven years they were together, good years, until the disaster that in her mind marched always with the troubles of the Second World War, when you had to pretend to be an Arab to qualify for a rice ration and your menfolk were too busy in the port to come home to their beds. But all that was behind her now. . . .
The cement floor was chill and damp to the touch. Draughts reigned under a cloudy sky. One had to speak to these faded old ladies in simplistic terms, dull and devoid of ornament. Admittedly, she did not know their treasured languages, but they prided themselves on knowing hers, and drained it of cadence and colour as they spoke.
Sophia smoothed the new dress lovingly. Once she would have scorned to wear anything that had been on another woman’s body. But this was neutral. It held no perfume of other days, no fragment of shell or fish scales, no healthy smell of babies bathed at sundown, of hard soap or new cloth redolent of dress, of coconut oil and peppers, cloves or rough sticks of cinnamon that were good to chew. No kohl, no hennaed patterns on the skin, no moist, milky breasts, no mystery here behind neat curtained windows where clerks and technicians and their lumpy wives lived in bland discomfort as the whites had taught them. Selecting the gayest of her wrappers as an invocation to warmth, she cocooned herself under the blanket in the hope of dreaming herself away.
‘No, good, Soph-i-a,’ said Matron sharply. ‘You will complain to me again that