Whoever Fears the Sea by Justin Fox (essential reading .txt) 📗

Dutch suggested a trip across the channel to visit the Takwa ruins on Manda Island, he was happy for the diversion. His friends were coming to the end of their stay in Kenya and he wanted to be close to Lorike, even if he couldn’t exactly be with her.

When he emerged from Kijani the next morning, the mashua Pernille, bearing the Dutch, was luffing in the shallows. He waded out to the dhow. Lorike sat on the gunnel looking beautiful in a grey T-shirt and yellow kikoi, her hair scraped into a ponytail.

‘One love, bruddahs and sistahs!’ shouted Pernille’s skipper as the South African pulled himself over the rail.

Oh dear, thought Paul, we’re back in Kingston Town with our Rasta brothers. Although the reggae fad was infectious, Paul couldn’t help feeling the locals were short-changing themselves. Kenyan and Swahili music and style had so much to offer. As for fashion, a faded Burning Spear T-shirt could hardly compare with local fabrics.

The crew cut into his thoughts with an off-key rendition of Bob Marley’s ‘Redemption Song’, which Paul found, despite himself, strangely poignant:

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery;

None but ourselves can free our minds.

Have no fear for atomic energy,

’Cause none of them can stop the time.

A northerly breeze had picked up and they sailed joshi, beating into the wind across the channel. The crew slid an outrigger plank into position, allowing a couple of lads to clamber outboard, like a Hobie Cat’s trapeze, but without the safety of a harness. The plank was loosely jammed between rib and thwart and wobbled precariously. The person at the end of the contraption had a rope to hold on to, but this would be of little use if he lost his footing. The Rastas were eager to please the Dutch, who’d become their regular taxi clients and seemed to have the lads wrapped around their fingers. Katja and Lorike asked to have a go on the trapeze and shimmied out. It required considerable agility, particularly in the fluky conditions: scrambling up the plank as the vessel heeled over in the gusts, sliding quickly inboard as it levelled in the lulls. If the gust died abruptly and they weren’t smart about it, they’d be dunked in the water or lost overboard.

Pernille slipped into the calm of a creek lined with mangroves whose leaves glittered in the sunlight. The dhow sailed up an ever-narrowing inlet and soon ran out of wind. Fortunately, it was shallow enough to use the pondo — the pole. ‘Jah man, we go poly-poly, ha, pole-pole!’ called one of the crew.

When the dhow touched bottom, they disembarked and waded up the creek to a walkway on stilts which led to the site entrance. Takwa had been a stone-town, abandoned three hundred years ago, possibly because the fresh water had become too saline. It was a typical Swahili settlement of tightly packed dwellings surrounded by mangrove swamps and encircled by a wall for protection. On its seaward side, tall sand dunes kept it safe from the prying eyes of passing ships.

Paul didn’t have much interest in Takwa. The town wasn’t important enough to feature in the movie and the ruins weren’t particularly impressive. He was there for Lorike. They wandered among the remains of houses until they came to the sultan’s palace. This was in better repair and still had a tower fashioned from coral blocks. He took a picture of Lorike with a provocative expression as she leant against a wall. In the cistern of the mosque, Paul spotted a blue-and-white Portuguese majolica plate bearing the cross of the Order of Christ. Ironic in this place of Muslim pilgrimage, he thought. Elephantine baobabs and acacia trees had sprung up among the ruins and goats clambered over the walls, hastening their destruction.

A pillar tomb stood all by itself at one end of the site. ‘Let’s go have a look,’ said Lorike.

The others had drifted off in another direction. It was a chance to be alone for a few minutes.

Lorike gave him a meaningful glance and disappeared behind a wall. They were in an isolated part of the ruin complex and there was no one about. She leant against the grey coral wall of the tomb, eyes smouldering. He took both her hands in his, she lifted her chin and they kissed.

Paul sat on Ali’s couch. Herat was in the process of being bombed. Cut to images of food packages being dropped from C-17s; cut to warships in the Gulf. There were whistles of awe from the crowd in front of the television as F16s swept off a carrier deck and Apache helicopters attacked in formation. Cut to Muslim bodies at a bomb site, which brought silence and a few mutters of anger.

Footage of the military’s ‘shock and awe’ tactics was interspersed with advertisements for dotcom companies and Sheraton hotels. Then the viewer was whisked back to American talking heads giving their version of events to the world, to Lamu, to Ali’s crew. The format was similar to a post-football-match assessment by a team of studio experts, but how to reconcile AT&T access with Kabul ack-ack fire?

Mary, a forty-something guest at Kijani, joined them for the twelve o’clock news. She was a vacationing music teacher from San Francisco who worked at an international school in Nairobi. Like Paul, she was happy to be in Lamu at this time and experienced no animosity from locals. She, too, was embarrassed by the tenor of the CNN reporting.

‘On the morning of the first bombing, an angry man stopped me in the street,’ she said. ‘He blocked my path with arms folded and legs apart, shouting, “You, lady, are American!”’

‘Must have been scary.’

‘Sure was. So I replied: “Yes, and I didn’t drop any bombs last night.”’

‘What did he say?’

‘Nothing. He just put his arms around me, gave me a hug and walked on.’ She tossed