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YOUNG WOMAN IN LOVE 

The Blessed Princess loved the scents of the marketplace, particularly the fermented coconut when the breeze mixed it with the scent of cloves, fresh ginger, and lemon, and carried it to her delicate nose. She loved the colours of mangoes: rich yellow, green, gold, pink. They reminded her of her childhood of endless frolicking. They also reminded her of the strange discoloration on her growing breasts. The princess could trace each scent back to the kiosk it came from. The market was divided into eastern and western sections, with vegetable kiosks on one side and perfumes and oils on the other, ending at the slave market. But it was the smell of burning sulphur she could not help but follow to the kiosk of the Indian goldsmith.

Since her revelling husband had agreed to sever his relations with all his concubines – the Romanian, the two Ethiopians, the voluptuous Ungujan, the mercurial Copt, the Indians with the perky breasts who never stopped talking, the strange Sicilian recently bought from Oman, who some suspect is a jinn because an old Omani slaver claimed to have captured her from the Indian Ocean – she had developed an obsession with spending the money he had sold them for to buy all the jewellery she could get her hands on.

She fantasised about making them drink her urine, so deep was her hatred for them.

Whores. Vulgar thighs of all colours filling the house with their clamour.

Her ultimate aim was to lure her husband; not because she loved him but because she wanted to captivate him, to overpower him, knowing perfectly well that he loved nothing but the throne.

He can wait all he wants. My father won’t die any time soon.

The princess loved the din of the market: the pedlars' cries, the slavers’ auction bells, the call to prayer, the braying of donkeys, the hammering of ironsmiths, the shrieking of saws on wood, the roaring of mills operated by heavyset slaves whose hands grew sore and cracked, the bleating of goats being led to slaughter. But her favourite sound was that of the young Unguja singer Uhuru, which she preferred even to the ensemble her father had sent to Egypt for training and whose music she found odd and lifeless. She loved Uhuru’s songs. Uhuru was the only free negro on Unguja, save for the old people begging and picking rotten fruit and vegetables off the streets, emancipated only once they became a burden on their masters: too old to work and in need of care.

She loved the discordant rhythm of Uhuru’s three-legged drum. From behind her diaphanous veil, the princess cast covetous, envious glances at her naked breasts, which Uhuru carelessly displayed like forbidden fruit tainted by darkness. No one dared touch her, no human nor jinn, not even the princess’s reckless husband. The singer often stood at the corner between the slave and gold market where the turbaned goldsmiths sat, their heads full of numbers and one-liners to draw money out of purses. She wore a goatskin loincloth and sang “My Homeland is Heaven for the Occupiers and Hell for the Natives”. The princess found the song somewhat hostile; or rather it made her feel a tinge of shame. She preferred the rhythm of another, far more brutal song, which described the day slavers had attacked Uhuru’s village. Uhuru had memorised it in her native Swahili, spoken in the dialect of the Kaimondi tribe.

As I was hiding among the trees

The slavers came to Nyamwezi

From my post, I watched them leave

In the house were women galore

A bad man came, and then one more

Forced one to bed, forced them all

The only one left behind

Was the woman heavy with child

As Uhuru started to dance, Sondus, the castrated slave and the princess’s personal servant, urged on the donkey that carried the princess, who sat majestically in a flowing Wakingo gown, drenched in glittering jewels, like a Kushite queen of King Solomon’s era. The princess did not neglect to throw a handful of Maria Theresa thalers for Uhuru, taking care to keep her distance, for it was widely believed that anyone who came into physical contact with Uhuru would be struck by black magic. This was one of the reasons the slave hunters, who only saw people in terms of their market value, stayed clear of her. Uhuru picked up the coins hastily and put them in a secret pocket inside her tattered loincloth. “Asante sana,” she said.

The princess hated the way Uhuru lost herself when she danced, exposing even her genitals and drawing out the most despicable men: bleary-eyed, drunk old fools who believed seeing a woman’s sex improved their eyesight. She spun out of control, like a crazed dervish or an animal in the midst of attack.

She acts this way so no one dares go near her. I can’t stand it.

The myth Uhuru had invented protected her from merchants and insatiable men, fuelled by their excessive intake of ginger and cloves, who took advantage of a law and social order that encouraged them to own for pleasure as many women and young boys as they liked.

The myth went as follows:

A mighty, faceless jinn will latch on to anyone who dares touch me. No one banish it, not even the most renowned sorcerers who fast all year and live in caves at the edge of the world.

I dare them to try.

I dare them to try to sell me to the ships bound for the land of the whites.

I dare them to untie the goatskin round my waist.

I will dance the devil’s dance, the devil you fear like nothing else, the devil that will consume your souls as swiftly as fire consumes dry grass.

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