The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War

In the Secretariat, a big colonial building of arched windows, latticework and wide timber verandas, my mother used to have to sort the flow of intelligence reports for the governor. They came in from the senior political officer, Basil ‘Cloak and Dagger’ Seager, a man with a sharp nose, tight lips, pedantic rasping voice and quick, poor Arabic. He adored intrigue and by telegraph he sent messages in code or en clair in French, Latin or using obscure literary allusions that took hours to decipher. Or spies in flowing robes arrived at her office with envelopes marked CONFIDENTIAL, inside of which were smaller ones that said SECRET, inside of which were yet smaller ones that said MOST FRIGHTFULLY SECRET.

From these reports and general gossip, Mother began to notice my father’s movements. She waited for him. He didn’t appear for weeks on end. Then one day after a long time, she heard the heavy step of desert boots ascending the Secretariat’s timber stairs. Clump, clump they came down the veranda. The next day the boots were gone again. This happened several times. The months passed. She sometimes saw him on her morning rides when she went to the stables at Khormaksar. On the tennis court she found herself opposite him in a game of mixed doubles. At a party to celebrate the King’s birthday, she saw him arm in arm with the Sultan Sharif Hussein of Beihan, a magnificent figure she knew from the intelligence files, both of them standing in a flower bed and heaving with laughter at some private joke. And in her office when she heard his boots climb the stairs her heart beat faster. Clump, clump, clump. One day, my father’s face appeared at her office door.

My mother was beautiful and young, but I’ve heard it said that Dad fell in love with her when she told him that, as a girl, she had milked a cow called Bumble. He took her horse riding along the beach at Khormaksar, or east along the desert coast to the Abyan Delta where he was growing vast acres of cotton. On overnight trips to the coastal village of Zingibar she stayed with a British married couple to prevent gossip. They went riding in the desert, stopped for picnics, and he fed her polony sausage with mustard and schnapps. Odd combination, she thought. Once they got lost driving across the desert back to Aden, and he wrapped her in his sheepskin cape, waited for the clouds to clear, and navigated his way back by the stars. Mum lived at Steamer Point, Dad on the other side of the colony in the Arab village of Sheikh Othman. One day he said, ‘Let’s get married. We’ll save on petrol.’

Mum fell in love with Dad because she was a romantic. She was fascinated by stories and wanted to live out an exotic tale herself. She might not have endured as much in the years ahead had she not felt that the adventures he promised to take her on would be worth all the sacrifices she made. She was so slim my father could nearly join his hands around her waist. A Somali woman named Sara stitched her white wedding dress. A handsome RAF padre called them in for a chat and gave them a book entitled Man, Woman and God. A riding partner of Dad’s named Quill, who had been a POW in Changi, threw a stag party. On 27 January 1951 they married in the garrison church at Steamer Point with a reception to follow. Dad was forty-three, my mother twenty-five. The flowers came from Asmara by plane. The wedding cake was ordered from the Crescent Hotel. The governor laid on his Rolls-Royce to transport the bride. The telegrams were read out:

CAN NOT GET OVER NEWS STOP EMPIRE BUILDER

LOST STOP MY CONGRATULATIONS TO YOU AND

COMMISERATIONS FOR THE UNFORTUNATE WOMAN

After the English ceremony my mother changed into an Aertex shirt and slacks. They climbed into a hired car and the Arab driver got angry when he learned the guests had tied tin cans to the rear bumper. Later they drove down the beach to Abyan.

Their first night together they slept in the fort on Khanfar Rock, a promontory overlooking the whole of Abyan. After breakfast next morning, Dad told my mother to change into her riding clothes. They got on their horses; Dad on his stallion al-Qatal, my mother on al-Azraq. They rode their horses to the bottom of the rock, where the mounted Sultan Hussein al-Fadhli and his slave boy on a donkey beside him were waiting. They saw a mass of camel and horseback riders advancing towards them from the village of Zingibar, followed by a great plume of dust. Dad’s horse could sense the great crowd and stamped and snorted. The hum of many people became audible. The party rode out in a line and as they approached through clouds of dust a crowd of people on foot and on horses and camels came into view. Turbaned riders, their skin glistening with oil and blue woad, galloped towards them as they fired off salutes with rifles and muskets. ‘The bullets missed us literally by inches. I felt my hair blow up once from the blast’, Mum wrote to her parents. A circle formed and the bride and groom cantered around it as the riders shot in the air, then a cavalcade formed behind them and the whole mass of horses and camels wheeled about in the dust, horses springing and leaping. A bullock was led out into the circle and a swordsman hacked off the beast’s head. First my father, then my mother, jumped their horses over the bullock’s carcass. They dismounted and were ushered into an enormous tent lit by gas lamps. Inside, they were shown two ornate chairs where they sat, drinking glasses of tea, as a bard sang his blessings for their future together.

‘That was a good party,’ Dad said later, when they had returned to sleep on Khanfar Rock. ‘I enjoyed that,’ he said, almost surprised.

My father stopped tying himself to the bed when he grew used to living with my mother. Nor did he make his bedroll headfirst with the revolution of the earth. My eldest brother Richard was born twenty months after they married and Dad retired from service in Arabia so that they could settle and raise a family back in his beloved Africa. On the eve of sailing, my mother wrote to Granny and Grandpa: ‘If ONLY we could be certain of peace, I can see the most perfect and exciting life ahead…’

My mother’s first glimpse of Africa was a stevedore pushing a wheelbarrow of ivory tusks down the dockside in Mombasa. As he went, he chanted, ‘Produce of the Congo! Produce of the Congo!’ From the coast they drove inland to Mweiga, on the slopes of Mount Kenya, where Dad had bought the farm En’nekeraka during the Great Depression. The farmhouse was a cedar log cabin and the newlyweds would sit in their dressing gowns, in front of a roaring fire eating fresh trout from the stream. From the windows in the morning, they saw the legs of a herd of buffalo below the raising blanket of mist as they moved back into the thick surrounding forest.

Soon after my parents settled on En’nekeraka, the Mau Mau emergency broke out. First my father’s cattle were hamstrung by the guerrillas. Then a gang chopped their neighbour into little pieces while he was taking his bath. My parents saw the way things were going and so decided to up sticks and move to Tanganyika. Soon after they left, police burned down the house on En’nekeraka, claiming that it was a late-night meeting house for terrorists.

I clearly remember, at about the age of three, trying to recollect what had happened up to that moment in my life. I looked back to oblivion, all apart from a single conscious moment. In this tiny phrase of time that is with me still, I am sitting up in my cot, crying, in a cool, bluish white room with windows opening out onto a vast, dry landscape. A sublime figure enters the room and, speaking softly, soothes me back to sleep, I suppose, because my memory stops there. My recollection is from my parents’ new Tanganyika farm, which they called Langaseni. My mother saved a handful of photographs and scratchy, heat-damaged film from the years at the farm. Otherwise, I have no sense of what Langaseni was like in those days, though I have heard about it all my life from everybody else in the family. From the stories, and they were almost lectures, I formed such a strong mental picture of this African paradise that I feel I could find my way around every single hill and tree of the place. I’d know the horses in the stable, the dogs sunning themselves on the veranda, my elder siblings with their hair flaxen blond, and my father on his horse, riding down the dusty track under thorn trees. As a man I’ve visited the farm and nothing of my idyll survives.

The ranch was in the dry, rocky plains, between the snowy sugarloaf of Kilimanjaro and the sharp, black mass of Meru. The farm’s western boundary was the Red River, coloured by fluorine that blackened teeth and bones. Along the east was the Cold River, glacial and blue, flowing among glades of fever trees. To the south was a moonscape of volcanic hillocks like bubbles, covered with sparse, wiry grass, or sands and stunted thorn. On hard red soils to the northwest grew thickets of wait-a-bit thorn and aloes. In the north, on the edge of a plain teeming with game, was Firesticks Hill, Ol Lekema Jipiparuk. My parents built their first huts here with horse stables made of split euphorbia trees. Later, they built a house with a flat roof like an Arab fort. The walls were of volcanic stone. The roof beams were giant cedar trees Dad had dragged down from Kilimanjaro’s forest by ox wagon. The doors and windows were made of camphor and they looked up at the mountains on either side.

At night, lions grunted and roared and the hollow volcanic hill rumbled as rhino cantered by. Coral-coloured snakes migrated across the plains en masse in season and in the glade below the home were dark-spotted giraffe, zebra and impala. In the dry open country were Grant’s and Thomson’s gazelles, oryx, wildebeest, cheetah, hunting dog, hyena and jackals. In the wait-a-bit thorn were long-necked gerenuk and lesser kudu. Flocks of sandgrouse drank at the salty rainwater pans at dawn and at dusk you could hear the rasping chatter of guinea fowl and partridges preparing to roost.

‘We were in a paradise,’ said my father, ‘that we can never forget, nor equal.’

By the time they arrived, my brother Richard was a baby and my sister Bryony was on the way. ‘It was good to start a new life on the ranch, with the thought of more children to come, and the great open air,’ my mother recalled. ‘I said we were going to be there a hundred years.’

They poured what little money they had saved into the farm and borrowed the rest. They started with a small herd of Boran cattle, including a cow that had been slashed on the face by Mau Mau, a truculent heifer that took exception to anybody wearing a hat, four hundred goats, two dogs, Silver the pony and Jamila, an Arab filly (my mother’s wedding present) with three centuries of pedigree, plus a Dodge nicknamed the Red, Red Car. Dad set about building up his herds and bought his stock from the Maasai and European farms in Kenya.

In the bone-dry country, the key to the farm’s survival was water. The fluorine in the Red River was slow poison, the Cold River was seasonal according to the rains and the drums of water they trucked down from pools at Ol Tulali on Mount Meru were thick with baboon shit. When Dad looked across the plains he reasoned there could be water in the ground at the foot of Firesticks Hill, which stood in the way of the line of the Cold River. Flor Visser, an old Boer who had arrived on the banks of Red River in 1904, said: ‘I tell you, Mr Hartley. You will never find water here.’

A plump Swede came to drill at thirty shillings a foot. At first the bit went down through red soil, then clay, then decomposed rock, then volcanic lava to 130 feet. No water. The Swede brought his wife and son down to move in with him in his caravan. The lava got harder and harder. Some days the drilling slowed to as little as eight feet a day. The bit reached 260 feet. No water. The Swede said he was surprised because he had never known a hole that was so completely dry. At 320 feet, no water. The bit went through layer after layer of the glacial mountain Kilimanjaro’s roots, the strata of millions of years. At one point, the drill brought up a chunk of timber from a prehistoric forest. Christmas came and went. At 400 feet, Dad announced that the hole was dry. They had failed. ‘Just one more week,’ Mum urged. ‘Please go to 500 feet.’

‘I told you, British,’ said Visser. ‘No water here.’ There were no wells for miles due to the porous volcanic rock. Everybody knew. And in the remote event of the drill striking water – what then? It would be salty or full of fluorine, you could be sure of that. At 460 feet, no water, and Dad said they were broke. What they would do with no money and no water, they didn’t know. It might have come to an end, but that day a car drove up and out got a man my father had known from Arabia. The visitor announced that the Arab farmers my father had worked with had raised the sum of two thousand pounds for him as a present after he had retired. To my mother’s horror, Dad said he could not accept the gift, saying the farmers should use it for their own irrigation works back in Arabia. The man said, ‘That is what they want you to do with it. They say that wherever you have gone, water has followed. And it’s time for you to find water with this money yourself.’

The next day drilling resumed. The work went on, day after day, until one morning there was an enormous spurt of water. A geyser exploded from the well hole. Clear water spouted in a fountain 160 feet into the air. The water spilled down onto the dry land. It flooded the plain in front of the hill like a flash flood. It gushed at fifteen hundred gallons an hour. There was neither telephone nor radio for miles, but that afternoon Flor Visser drove up in his old Ford truck and parked in front of the fountain of water. He switched off the engine and sat there for hours, staring at the water flooding down and no doubt thinking about the fifty years he had stayed on the arid plains where it had been so hard to make a life. Dad installed a wellhead that nodded like a huge bird. When the borehole was not pumping, strange humming noises came from the subterranean pipe. It was the thrumming of great Kilimanjaro’s volcanic innards. The geyser settled down to a flow of eleven hundred gallons an hour. The water was both fresh and pure.

Our neighbours were the Maasai tribal people and their beloved herds of cattle. Dad knew them well, traded stock at their bomas, but also played a cat and mouse game with them when they raided his cattle or poached his scarce grazing. From the top of the hill behind the house, he could see where the Maasai were on the plain, since plumes of dust followed their herds. He would then saddle up his horse and gallop after them like John Wayne with loud ‘Yehahs!’ The Maasai scattered in all directions, their red shuka togas flapping. If it was after dusk, Dad stalked them by moonlight and fired his rifle in the air to stampede the cattle off the property. Once a lion killed forty Maasai cattle. It also took Dad’s best big grey bull, so he hunted it down, shot it dead and kept the skin for evermore. A crowd of warriors appeared at the house and danced in front of the skin as it hung stretched out and caked with salt. They were in their full regalia of shields, assegai spears and ochre body paint. In a straight line they danced, stamping their feet, kicking up the dust, toasting ‘Bwana Harti’ and his deed.

Nearby there was a colony of Afrikaner smallholders, who had trekked up from South Africa after the second Boer war to escape the British and settle in German East Africa. They had been led by one of the Malan generals and the families were Pretorius, Van Venter, Lemmer, Visser, Van Rooyen and Bekker. In the Great War, they switched sides to help the British when Jan Smuts came up to attack the German East Africa commander Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck in 1916. Pretorius, a scout and hunter, caused havoc for the Germans at Longido when he used lion fat to spook their penned horses. They were picture-book peasants, with blond, barefoot sons, old men with bright red noses and matrons with huge, fat arms. They sat on the stoeps of their whitewashed houses, stirring sheep fat with ladles to make soap, as geese and Muscovy ducks waddled about the gardens. Their church doubled as a school and grace was recited over meals at long tables under blue-blossomed jacaranda trees. They ate giraffe-meat sausages and stew made from sheep feet and pig trotters with the hair still on. ‘You must beat the kaffirs. Else how will you get them to work property, eh?’ one of the mamas told Mother. ‘Beat them, Mrs Hartley. You British don’t know anything about Africans!’ Yet the Boers were themselves Africans, and grew up side-by-side with black children from whom they were inseparable. And everybody knew that old man Pretorius, father of the blue-eyed policeman Jerry, and another boy who drove his truck over the escarpment and was killed in Manyara, lived with his black mistress in a separate house from where his wife stayed in the next-door building, which looked like a railway station. And one of the teenage girls, Katrina, had fallen in love with an African boy and become pregnant by him.

My parents prospered and in time they bought Sarel du Toit’s place, Kisimiri, also known as the Top Farm, 7,000 feet up on the slopes of Meru. It was a white mansion with pillars and Dutch gables and a living room that was 99 feet long with big windows overlooking the plains to Kilimanjaro. The steep mountain slopes were carpeted in white pyrethrum flowers and the farm ran a fine herd of Jersey dairy cattle. Mother made butter in a big, hand-driven churn for sale to Europeans in Arusha. She also sold clarified butter, ghee, which was so popular among the Asians that they gave chase when they saw her car coming into town. And the skimmed milk and buttermilk were used for the farm workers’ rations. Nothing went to waste in those days.

My parents didn’t think too much about making money for its own sake, but years later they would muse that while living in this paradise they might also have become rich. Dad went into partnership with a friend, Peter Besse, a son of the great French tycoon Antonin Besse from Aden. Together they built the biggest ranching company in Tanganyika. They were beef barons who ran thousands of head of cattle, leased grazing from the slopes of Kilimanjaro to the coastal plains towards the ocean. With his profits, my father kept on reinvesting, buying land.

‘Your husband doesn’t just love Africa,’ a friend once told my mother. ‘He intends to own it.’

Ways of life can change gradually, or overnight. The end of British rule came in 1961. Black rule under the new president, Julius Nyerere, was intolerable to the Afrikaner settlers. En masse, they got back in their jalopies and bumped back south from where they had trekked up nearly six decades before. Visser and his wife crashed and died on the way, while old man De Wet had a heart attack two days after leaving the slopes of Meru, where he’d been raised. Many years later, as apartheid collapsed, some of the survivors joined the ranks of the white supremacist Eugene Terreblanche and his AWB brownshirts. They have never stopped running.

Meanwhile Nyerere flirted with the North Koreans, Chinese and Russians. In 1967, the president decreed a programme of African socialism. When it came down to brass tacks, this vague philosophy – promoted mainly by Nyerere himself in a series of slim volumes – was less a creed than a way of justifying national theft and vandalism, which in turn led to destitution across the board. The socialists began nationalizing white farms without any coherent plan of what should happen to the properties after they had been expropriated. Government men arrived and ordered Europeans out. The Lundgrens were given thirty minutes notice to leave a farm where they had lived for three decades. In contrast, the von Trutschlers were imprisoned in their house for days with no food but for the eggs the local peasant woman smuggled to them. Settlers’ bank accounts were frozen and they were allowed to pack only what they could transport on their one-way trip into exile. Some had been on their farms all their lives. They left behind workers, family graves, their possessions – all they had worked for and all they had loved.

Dad saw the way things were going and negotiated to sell his cattle and sheep to the state for cheap. He had done everything he could to avoid politics. At independence, he was not among the vociferous whites who rejected black rule. But nor did he join the Capricorn Society, which aimed to promote good relations between blacks and whites. ‘I don’t need to have little arranged meetings to learn how to get on with Africans,’ he said. His skill as a rancher was well known, and for this reason the government offered him the job of running all the expropriated ranches grouped in one big block. He stayed on and was allowed to live in his home as part of the deal. Beyond the farm’s borders, the transformation of the country was swift. All businesses were nationalized, from big factories to bicycle workshops. Peasants, nomads and hunter-gatherers alike were herded into collectivized ‘Ujamaa’ villages.

Meanwhile on the farm itself things began to quickly go wrong. A poacher named Hassan Jessa led patrols of policemen onto the land and machine-gunned wildlife, which they loaded onto Bedford trucks and sold to butchers in Arusha. Government officials and their Soviet, Chinese or Swedish foreign guests became frequent visitors to the farm, which they claimed was a showcase for socialist development. Not a week went by without a plume of dust appearing on the plains, heralding the approach of a convoy of expensive cars. Men with soft hands and collarless safari suits, the fashion inspired by Nyerere’s recent visits to North Korea, invited themselves into the home and demanded tours of the ranch, with big luncheons to follow. Dad could do nothing. He amused himself by greeting delegations and taking them off for marathon walks in the hot sun and dust to show them the cattle, the sheep, the spray races, the crushes and the farm buildings. He earnestly described the agricultural operations in detail, bringing the officials back home for a frugal lunch only when the sun was low in the sky. Once, leading a busload of dumpy Russians, he exclaimed, ‘Look! Lion spoor. Look’s like quite a large male and it’s only a couple of hours old.’ At this the Russians turned tail, puffing and wheezing at a swift pace back to their buses.

Nyerere’s disciples in his Revolutionary Party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi, were literally consuming the farm. The president declared that all workers should stand up for their rights, which in many parts of Tanzania resulted in labourers beating up their bosses, then looting their businesses. It all got to be too much when the money needed to run the farm was pilfered from the state ranching corporation. My father decided he had seen enough and so he resigned. The last night we were on the farm, a night I don’t remember because I was old enough only to crawl, two lions began roaring at the bottom of the hill. They kept it up until dawn. The Maasai said the animals had come to say goodbye, before the cars were packed up and the family drove away. We camped for one last night between the farm and the border with Kenya. Mum said it was a terrible time. My miserable brothers Richard and Kim and sister Bryony sat with their backs to the fire and against a strong wind blowing dust across the land.

‘I cried,’ my mother always told me. ‘And Dad cried too, the first time I had seen him cry since his mother died.’

‘The sequel to all this is so unpleasant to write about that I will try and put it on record and sort it out later,’ my father wrote as an old man. ‘It is something disastrous for that beautiful place and the land up on Meru and the house, and our improvements, and everything else. It needs a lot of careful thought.’ He never did write about it anymore, but he pondered what had happened long and hard. Nyerere’s policies collapsed and his books are read no longer. On the farm, what had been a small family business became a Scandinavian-funded aid project, staffed by expatriate experts on salaries paid in Oslo who drove around in gleaming white vehicles. And in time the aid project failed, as schemes of this kind in Africa tend to almost without exception.

Growing up, the loss of my family’s paradise was a festering wound, even though I had no personal memory of the thing that hurt me. I grew up feeling that I had been born too late to be part of our greatest adventure. And things were no longer as they had been in the family, down to the smallest detail. Dad never took me riding or deep-sea fishing. Instead I looked at snapshots of my elder brothers proudly holding up their catch. ‘That white vase,’ Mum said of an empty receptacle: ‘I used to fill it with sprays of purple agapanthus every day.’

The last I heard, an old caretaker and a gang of bats lived in the house on Firesticks Hill, the place of my first memory, and the roof leaked. The stock is lost, eaten, stolen or sold. Poachers have wiped out the wildlife. The elephants, the ostriches and the bullfrogs – the ‘elphanes’, ‘arse-stretches’ and ‘oggy goggies’, as we call them to this day in our intimate family vocabulary of childhood words – are gone. The trees have been hacked down for charcoal to supply the towns. The borehole machinery broke and stopped pumping eleven hundred gallons of clean water a day and the land returned to being a dry desert. My father’s beautiful horses, the ones he had imported from Arabia, with their centuries-old Bedu bloodlines, bolted their stables and ran feral across the plains between the mountains. For years afterwards, people encountered them, cantering like mustangs. Lions took some, while local peasants captured some of the others, either to eat them or put to them to work pulling carts like donkeys. Up on the slopes of Meru, squatters hamstrung the dairy cows, uprooted the pyrethrum, chopped down the big trees and replaced it all with fields of marijuana. They occupied the house and made fires on the parquet floors. They tore the tiles off the roof and ripped out the doors and windows, which they carried off to adorn mud huts. They didn’t manage to tear down the walls and pillars, and from down below on the plains I myself have seen the ruins gleam brightly like a beacon against the slopes of the mountain.

My father was not the type of man to give up and turn his back on Africa. Nor did he stay in order to retreat into bitterness, as had so many Europeans who found their hopes and dreams dashed but found it was too late for them to start again elsewhere. Instead, he embarked on a dramatic new direction. Having been a colonial officer, then a rancher, he now became a development aid worker himself, ultimately in the same game as the Scandinavian experts who had occupied the ranch on Kilimanjaro. The difference with my father was that he truly was an expert after more than forty years of working in Africa, his adopted home. And so he threw himself into working in the most remote areas of the continent he could find, assisting nomads with the husbandry of livestock and peasants with the growing of crops.

In my first coherent memories that run in sequence, in full-colour as it seems, I am often in the back of a four-wheel-drive among clanking kettles, piles of rations and dust, bumping across some drought-blasted plain. I am in camp where wild-haired men squat by the fire and chat with my father about rain and camels. I make my bed out in the open under the stars, or am woken in a village hut by bleating goats or mission hymns, or in a shabby border-town hotel with bare electric bulbs and blue gloss walls.

‘We’re like a tribe of mechanized nomads,’ says my mother. To hear this makes me happy. We are like gypsies, living out an adventure in Africa.

The problem was that we couldn’t always be on the road with Dad. The ways were dangerous. In Eritrea, Dad lost fifteen of his team to landmine explosions on the roads and it was typical of him that he used this as an excuse to dispense with vehicles in favour of trekking cross-country with pack mules. If only I had been old enough to join him. What walks we might have had together.

Instead, our new way of life was filled with goodbyes and absences and flights with my mother to see him wherever he was. These were long journeys with endless waits in airports. Our fellow passengers were often the new Soviet or Chinese officials who had appeared with Africa’s liberation from its European masters. I remember asking a group of men – my mother tells me they were Soviets – to read a story from my Disney comic book. They peered at the pages, looked worried and shook their heads.

We’d arrive in hot and sticky capitals and have to wait for Dad while he was traced out in his wilderness with his livestock and nomads. In Mogadishu, Somalia, we were invariably confined to whichever hotel compound we were checked into due to the upheavals outside. We stayed at the Croce del Sud, known as the Sweaty Crotch. Nearby was the Shebelle, a.ka. the Scratchy Belly. The city erupted in anti-Western riots when Apollo 11 landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon and the mosque preachers declared that it was either American lies or blasphemy.

Soon after the moon landings, the Somali president was assassinated and the army took over. Each afternoon I’d watch from the Sweaty Crotch as soldiers goose-stepped down the street. Many years later I worked out that this was when the dictator president Mohamed Siad Barre had seized power in a coup d’état. During one parade, while my mother and sister were out shopping at the bazaar, I filled a soda bottle from the tap, went back to the room’s balcony and emptied the contents onto the heads of the spectators below. The consequences were dire, for within a few minutes there were loud voices and a hammering at the door. I hid in the bathtub until Mother returned, when she had to promise a group of irate men that I had not pissed on them.

Finally we’d be summoned to desert reunions with my father. These trips survive in my mind only as a jumble of images like one of our heat- and dust-damaged family films. We flew for hours and so slowly that we could see the shadow of the Dakota propeller aircraft on the scrub below. On landing at a Somali airfield I broke loose from my mother and burrowed between the sandal-shod brown legs of men in turbans and women in flowing robes. I knew I would recognize him because he would be the only white man in the crowd. But how was I to behave when I met my father? How warmly would Dad kiss Mum and did they still love each other? And what was this strange life my father lived, among such fierce people?

On Sundays in Somalia, the cooks used to hack the chickens’ heads off with loud bismillahs, then allowed the headless bodies to dance about behind the kitchen. I have a sequence of other disjointed memories: of mosquito larvae in our table water, flexing like red commas magnified in the distorted bowl of the jug; playing Ping-Pong with pasty-faced Chinese commissars in the local hotel; the bleeding toes I got from barefoot soccer with the tough Somali boys; my brother Kim and I on Lido Beach, where camels were slaughtered so that guts lay in bluish puddles on the coral sand; the northern Somali highlands, on a mountain called Ga’an Libah, the Lion’s Fist, where Kim and I tried and failed to rescue a goat from our lunch table; a cave of prehistoric paintings of red handprints and herds of eland stalked by cats and men with alien heads. Once I stood on the banks of a dry riverbed, feeling wind on my face, hearing a rumble, then seeing a wall of brown water explode from around the corner as the flash flood approached.

Another time we visited Dad in a big white Arab fort on the Indian Ocean. His housemates were American hippies, young men and women my mother now tells me were from the Peace Corps. Dad wore a bandana, grew his hair down to his shoulders and listened to Led Zeppelin. He was learning yoga and at dusk he practised his asanas on the flat roof while looking out over the sea. It was the end of the 1960s, Timothy Leary was urging the world to ‘turn on, tune in, and drop out’, and Dad was sixty-two years old.

After Somalia came Ethiopia. In the summer that I was first taken to see my father there, rumours had been circulating of starvation among the peasants outside the capital, Addis Ababa. My teenage sister Bryony was with him, and together they filled the car with loaves of bread and Arabian dates packed in baskets. On the road to Bati, they found thousands of Oromo peasants whose crops had withered in drought and highland frost. When my sister stood at the back of the truck tossing out the bread and dates, the hungry mob rioted. After Bati, they drove down into the Rift Valley and Denkalia. The local Afar nomads, normally tough enough to inhabit the hottest and most inhospitable place on earth, were dying too, since their livestock was gone. A tragedy was unfolding due to all the usual causes: civil war, overpopulation and misuse of the land and rivers in the name of modern development.

On the edge of the Danakil Depression, the dead and dying all around him, Dad sat down and wrote a message, which he handed to a runner, who took it to the nearest post office for cabling to Addis Ababa. This was before the days when African famines were the news stories they are today. There were no rock concerts, T-shirts or advertisements in the paper. But with that message, news of what was happening soon reached Europe. A BBC team flew to Bati and their TV film exposed the truth. When the pictures were shown in Addis Ababa, it helped the tide of revolution that toppled the medieval dictatorship of Emperor Haile Selassie. Back on the plains of Bati Dad sat down by himself. ‘The camps lie broken down on hill and plain, / Skulls, bones and horns remain,’ he wrote. ‘No shouts, no songs of fighting, or of love, / But from the bare thorn tree above, / So sadly calls the mourning dove.’ ‘…Was this your ravaged land, / The work of God, or was it Man’s own hand?’ For me this just about sums up what happened all over Africa in the twentieth century.

The Addis Ababa I remember was, as usual, a place of waiting for days in a dark, smelly hotel. The TV broadcast almost back-to-back episodes of Sesame Street. In short slots between the programmes, the revolutionaries who had taken over the TV station showed footage of the emperor feeding his lapdogs fillet steak interspersed with images of stick figures, crying babies with distended bellies, flies cramming into their eyes and mouths. After a few minutes of this, the programming would return to Sesame Street.