The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War

‘Come, my friends!’ he’d boom, with a raised glass of red wine in one hand, a raw onion or hunk of cheese in the other, commanding silence while he recited his favourite lines of Tennyson, ‘’Tis not too late to seek a newer world!’

He missed what Africa had once been. When we drove through sprawling towns he would describe how a few decades before this had been a savannah of swaying grass teeming with game. But the environmental destruction was still taking place, before our very eyes. At sixteen I remember visiting the Cherangani Hills in western Kenya, where the forest was so thick the sunlight barely pierced the canopy of mighty trees to the track along which we drove. A few months later we passed down the same road and for miles around the trees had been felled and burned and the view was bruised, eroding earth to the distant horizon.

After sixty years in the continent, my father had come to believe that the Europeans had committed an unforgivable error by sweeping away the traditional culture and economy that Africans had evolved over centuries. The nomad who valued nothing more than his cattle stayed on the move because he knew that to settle would mean death. And yet wherever we went, we saw the new independent African governments, backed by white ‘development experts’, repeating the mistakes of the long past colonial rulers, forcing the nomads into sedentary lives, to put up fences, live in tin huts, to swap their magnificent beads and togas for the cast-offs and ragged clothes of the ‘civilized’ West. The missionaries did their damage too and one Sunday I recall arriving in a northern Kenyan hamlet where nomads were gathering in the hope of food handouts from the foreigners, having lost most of their livestock to drought. As they trekked in the American Baptists’ overseers were handing out polyester trousers and T-shirts with slogans that were meaningless to their wearers. Some of the proud warriors were stalking around in flowery blue plastic bath caps. The missionaries had surrounded the village with loudspeakers rigged up onto tall poles and when it came time for a church service the sermon was broadcast at full volume, so that no matter where the nomads were, they would be harangued and cajoled to convert to Christianity and turn their backs on their past lives in return for the food and clothes they were receiving.

For all my father’s enthusiasm his attempts to assist people by enhancing, rather than destroying, their traditions were almost certainly in vain. What he showed me on those road trips had more of an effect on me than anything I learned at school. I had witnessed real injustices, poverty, the arrogance of power, the ignorance of the foreigners, the obliteration of proud cultures and beautiful landscapes.

I should have become an Englishman after sixteen years of education. Instead I was like a homing pigeon. After three happy years at Oxford, I went to the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), formerly a famous training ground for those who wanted to make their lives elsewhere, and now a hotbed of dissidents from the Third World. I set off for Africa almost on the day I had graduated with my Master’s. I hitched down through Europe and met a friend in Cairo. We did Egypt the whole summer: ruins, bazaars and beaches, all fuelled by arak, across-the-counter diazepam and hashish from vendors down in the souk who sold bitten-off measures spat out onto balanced scales. Before I headed south we took a taxi out to Giza, where we dodged the tourist police and gully-gully men and clambered up the great limestone blocks of the Mycerinus pyramid. We reached the summit and there among the graffiti of generations I scratched my name next to another one etched in copperplate. Pickard. Perhaps he had been one of Napoleon’s soldiers, but Pickard had also been my grandmother’s maiden name. Had we been here before? From the top of that monument, 4,500 years old, we watched the sun sink into the desert. A hot wind whipped over the pyramid’s stones with the roar of myriad voices. Darkness fell. The tungsten lights of the son et lumière show flipped on, illuminating us like prisoners in a gaol break for the audience of package-tour holidaymakers. We descended the dark side of the tomb, sliding from one block to the next, scared of slipping and dashing our brains out on the fall down.

I took a train to Aswan, where I embarked on a ferry across the lake to Wadi Halfa and from there on up the Nile by steamer. Lashed alongside the boat, port and starboard, were barges, so that we became a sailing village of backpackers, Sudanese, livestock, market goods, and kiosks serving foul beans and tea. The crew were constantly drunk on arak. When they weren’t under the influence, they assembled to pray on the flat roof of the boat five times daily, leaving the vessel to churn on unguided. It was the dry season upriver in East Africa and we ran aground for hours at a time on sandbanks. I sat on the deck enclosed in mosquito mesh, daydreaming. We continued southwards past little sailboats and fellahin and desert hills dotted with acacias and the Nubian ruins at Meroë. At Dongola I disembarked and took a market truck to Khartoum across a desert called the Belly of Rocks and out there the Milky Way was clearer than I remembered seeing it since I was a child.

On the journey I sat next to a very black man in a brilliant white turban. He touched me on the arm and said, ‘From here on my friend, this is Africa…’

He asked me where I came from. Without pausing I proudly said, ‘Here. Africa is where I was born.’ He smiled.

One evening I lay on my bed in some fleapit village hotel on the Nile riverbanks, woozy from the last of my Cairo supply of diazepam. A song was playing on the radio downstairs in the hotel café. It wafted up the dirty concrete stairs and under the door to where I lay. The hubbub of men’s voices fogged the Arabic lyrics, but as I sweated on my bed and listened I distinctly heard the words:

Hopeless journey, hopeless journey,

Nothing but a

Hopeless, hopeless, hopeless journey…

When I was growing up, my father only gave me a few pieces of advice. I asked him where I should live, what I should do.

‘Make your life somewhere else other than Africa, a place where there’s lots of space,’ he wrote in a letter to me. I asked where he had in mind.

‘Canada,’ he replied. My father was a colonial settler, who had been searching for new frontiers his whole life.

I was looking for a home, not a Canada. And the only home I had ever really had was as a boy in Africa. The memory of that time still had a compelling power over me. As an adult it came back to me in sounds, colours and smells: a mango’s diesel taste, the smell of dust after rain, and the sounds of a picking guitar on the radio. A lost time when the sun shone, before life grew complicated.

My father’s second piece of advice was that he thought I should ‘never work for anybody except yourself’. This contradicted everything he had done himself and indeed whatever my ancestors had done, which involved selfless service to monarch and country. In previous generations I might have served in the empire’s army and fought a string of rebellious potentates, or enrolled as a colonial officer to be posted to a remote station, or struck out as a pioneer. But however much I might dream of my opportunities in Africa, this was the 1980s – not the 1880s – and if I wanted to have the same adventures in East Africa as a European, I had few choices about what I might do. I could run safaris for tourists into the ever smaller areas of bush to show them dwindling herds of wildlife. I could be a pilot, flying anything from contraband to oil prospectors into unmarked dirt airstrips. I might become a missionary or a humanitarian aid worker, which was often the best-paid option. Or I might be able to run a small business manufacturing something like car parts in the industrial areas of Nairobi, Dar or Kampala. I could pursue any of these activities just as long as I didn’t make so much money that I would attract the envy of a politician. I should also keep my mouth shut about the steady decline of the nation going on around me. Since I would live under a brutal dictatorship just about wherever I lived in Africa – and on account of my white skin, which disqualified me from participating in the politics of my own homeland – I must be blind to the corruption, killings and general misrule. Alternatively, I might become a journalist and confront these things head on, which is what I decided to do.

As the descendants of soldiers and farmers I never heard my parents express an opinion either good or bad about journalists. The only relative of mine who became a foreign correspondent was Donald Wise, my raffish first cousin, once removed. South African-born Don was captured by the Japanese in Singapore during the Second World War. He was a POW in Changi jail and worked on the Burma railway, where seven thousand men died. After the war he tracked communists in Malaya, then settled in Nairobi, where he wrote for the Daily Express and, later, the Daily Mirror. Don was my stuff of legend. He had done it all, from covering the big stories – Mau Mau, Biafra, Katanga, Idi Amin’s Uganda, Aden, Cyprus, Vietnam – to hanging out with Hemingway, whom he tracked down after the author had survived a plane crash on a hunting safari. Don had a sense of humour and energy that was so well loved that colleagues said the effect of his arrival on a story, sporting a splendid moustache and impeccably dressed however grim the dateline, was like that of a champagne cork being popped. In the days when news dispatches carried a proper dateline, identifying both the place and the day from which the report was filed, Don traversed the Congo to the Atlantic port of Banana and carefully timed his story so that it would read ‘Banana, Sunday’.

On graduating from the School of Oriental and African Studies in 1988, I had watched some of my friends enter careers in which their sole aim was to make lots of money. Others vanished on adventures. I had renewed my love of Africa’s history and began to plot my return to my homeland. I telephoned Michael Holman, the Africa editor of the Financial Times. He called me into his office overlooking Blackfriars Bridge on the Thames and I came away feeling I had met my mentor. Michael was a white Zimbabwean and a respected elder in the world of African journalism. He had stood trial for refusing to serve in Ian Smith’s white military during the Rhodesian civil war and afterwards had fled to Zambia, where he began to work for the FT. From there he moved to London, but he had never lost his dedication to Africa.

‘You have a one in ten chance of making a living out of it,’ Michael told me that day. ‘If you do, you won’t have to prove yourself in any other way.’

‘What happens then?’ I asked.

‘One day, you get to be me,’ he replied, gesturing at his cubicle office with its window looking out at the diagonal rain of England.

He gave me a short briefing and within half an hour I had been appointed a stringer for the FT. In the jargon of the news world, being a stringer meant I had a loose loyalty to the newspaper as their ‘man on the ground’, though the organization would pay me only for what was published, per thousand words. I had wanted a job that would get me home to Kenya, which was also the hub for the East Africa press corps. But Michael told me there was already a correspondent in Nairobi, so he offered me a spot in neighbouring Tanzania.

Journalist Plus Plus (#ulink_b07feb0d-c999-533b-bed5-6efebc63fe97)

AFTER EGYPT AND SUDAN I overlanded southwards until I got to the Indian Ocean port of Dar es Salaam, where in 1929 my father had landed at the same age as I was then. I had mixed feelings about Tanzania, associating it not only with all my father’s early adventures but also with the unhappiness caused by the expropriation of my family’s ranchland in west Kilimanjaro. But at the same time I had grown to admire Julius Nyerere, together with the other great black nationalists such as Fanon, Cabral, Nkrumah and Lumumba. I was transformed during my year at SOAS, when I buried myself in the library reading books by and about these men. I grew ashamed of my British colonial past and believed that the only way I might atone for my presence in Africa would be to openly confess the wrongdoings of my people and to rail against the continuing exploitation of the continent by the ‘rich world’.

It swiftly dawned on me that I had fetched up in a place that was off the map in terms of news. Dar es Salaam means ‘haven of peace’. Translated another way, it could also be ‘backwater’. I was too wet behind the ears to appreciate the colour copy just begging to be written here: tales of man-eating lions from Songea; insurrections on the spice islands of Zanzibar; the vanishing glacial snows of Mount Kilimanjaro. No news meant no money. I was reduced to sleeping on the roof of a derelict house near the beach. An unvaried diet of maize or rice takes its toll on a man who’s not used to it, but what the poorer citizens thrived on in roadside kiosks was all I could afford. And since I rarely got near a tap to bathe, my crazed appearance at interviews with diplomats or bureaucrats caused them sufficient alarm not to invite me back. At any other time, I would have written home with news of Lillian’s health. Lillian was from among the ranks of our deceased spinster aunts, known in the family as the Grenadiers because they were straight-backed and haughty. My mother had miraculously resurrected Lillian to become the family code for ‘please send money’. In the paranoia of postcolonial Africa, Mum had coined a glossary of such code words to maintain privacy in telegrams. Waycott was ‘the police’. Toad was the ‘immigration department’. Never was a letter written to say Aunt Lillian was in rude health. Once Dad was tramping about the Danakil desert when a runner appeared, having travelled far from Addis Ababa. By his grave face, the runner clearly knew about the tragedy described in the telegram from my mother that he handed over. How scandalized he must have been to see my father erupt into laughter when he read:

LILLIAN DYING STOP SCHOOL FEES UNPAID STOP.

I could have written home now, but I didn’t because I was out to prove myself. I often think I should have just stayed on that roof and my life would have taken a different path. Instead, I met a man named Buchizya Mseteka. Buchizya, Buchi to his friends, was a big Zambian with a wooden fetish face, professorial glasses, luminous white teeth and a tufted goatee. Born his father’s first son after seven daughters, he claimed his name translated into English meant ‘the Unexpected One’. To me, this is exactly what he was. He dressed in snakeskin moccasins and flash suits roomy enough for his generous buttocks and a belly that, he said, proved he was a man of prestige. A Big Man. I on the other hand, as he pointed out almost as soon as I had met him, resembled a hippie with my copy of Africa on a Shoestring, sandals made from old car tyres, tatty jeans, tousled hair and heat-fried pink skin.

Buchi was the Dar es Salaam stringer for the wire agency Reuters. Two young men, our ways were bound to cross, since there were so few members of the local press corps. Most local African journalists worked for the Daily News and Shihata, the state news agency. Some of them were good writers and had a nose for stories. But as employees of the great, flabby system of Chama Cha Mapinduzi, the Revolutionary Party, they were required to toe the line. There was a TASS correspondent, who ignored the news and threw himself into attempting to rehabilitate two Russian ladies who had defected from the Soviet Union to become whores. There was an Indian stringer, who owed his modest wealth not to journalism but to selling secondhand clothes out of his office on Samora Machel Avenue. Then there was Jim, a radioman who smoked a pipe and wore glasses with thick black frames, a pork pie hat and a bow tie.

When Buchi invited me over to eat at his place, I gratefully accepted. The Zambian’s huge frame suggested that he ate well. Indeed he did. Come lunchtime of the following day, Buchi and I were seated in easy chairs. His Zambian girlfriends laid out on doily-covered side tables bottles of beer and plates of delicate maize meal, fried cabbage and kapenta fish. After they had served us, they withdrew to the kitchen, eyes down, gently clapping their hands.

A series of drinking bouts in open-air bars followed, with us shouting above the blurred racket of Lingala music. Tanzania’s breweries, on the rare occasions that they produced anything, served up lager that tasted of stale piss. Our drink of choice was Tusker, imported from Kenya. It is the oldest beer brewed in East Africa and is named after the elephant that in 1912 killed one of the company’s founders. No drink in the world slakes one’s thirst so perfectly after a day in the heat than a well-chilled Tusker. Buchizya and I used to drink until we could barely stand. At the end of an evening we staggered away down pungent-smelling, potholed streets, Buchi warbling in his melodic Bantu voice the tune that was on every pair of lips at that time in Africa about how ‘we will sing our own song’.

One day, in an offhand manner, Buchi invited me to share his apartment on Cotton Road, rent free. After that I slept on his sofa beneath the churning overhead fan, or on the balcony under the clothesline. Below the apartment was a bar. From morning until night, one could hear happy voices, flip-flopped feet shuffling to music, the squawks of chickens and goats being slaughtered and the aroma of roasting fat wafting up the stairs. In the middle of Buchi’s living room sat a big deep freezer, more of a status symbol than a place to cool our beer since it had the capacity to store more than we could drink in a fortnight. The heat of the days in Dar es Salaam was so moist that the air was viscous. It was as if time itself slowed. Some days it got so hot we gave up hunting stories and fled back to the apartment, where we took turns climbing into Buchi’s deep freezer to cool down with the door closed. It smoked as one emerged refreshed, but the torpor returned within seconds.

Buchi also had a video cassette recorder, but only three tapes: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a hard-core porn flick and poorly recorded coverage of a socialist nations’ athletics event that had taken place in Yugoslavia sometime in the early 1980s. We watched each of those videos more times than I can count. When guests dropped by I had to move from the sofa and this happened at all times of the day and night. Buchi would spread out onto the couch and ostentatiously put a tape on. We’d all have to sit there and watch. It didn’t seem to matter who the guest was or which video played, just so long as people knew Buchi’s TV was top of the line.

I soon fell in among Buchi’s friends. Most of them were South African guerrillas, who had fled apartheid. Tanzania was a Frontline State, although not much fighting was in progress. Pretoria was thousands of miles away. The guerrillas were township kids, not peasants, yet they were housed in camps deep in the bush, where they were expected to grow vegetables and attend ideology classes. They preferred town, where they came drinking with us. During these sessions they happily taught me, a white son of colonialism, a chant whose refrain went: ‘One settler! One bullet! SETTLER, SETTLER! BULLET, BULLET!’

The guerrillas and I had one common struggle, which was chasing women. In this we were in awe of Buchi, who led a life more sexually complicated than I considered possible. Females came and left Cotton Road at all times of the day and night. To the guerrillas, he’d boast about his conquests as if he were winning wars.

‘First, intelligence: find the target. Next, send in the flowers to soften her up. Then I say, Okay boys, it’s time to go in with the infantry and air force and pound, boom boom, until she begs for a cease-fire!’

Buchi would stand up to do an obscene jig, snapping his fingers to a rhythm, imitating a female’s howls of pleasure.

‘Tchwa! Ooooh! Tchwa! Mercy!’

He’d also crow about his victories with white women, which he described as redressing the wrongs of European colonialism.

‘They get to experience the mysteries of the African man, whereas me, I’m on a one-man crusade to punish as many white women in bed as possible. Tchwa! Mercy!’

The men sitting with us would splutter into their beers at this. I’d struggle to put up a defence, but Buchi was relentless.

‘I think we’ll all agree you white boys are sexually the weaker race, licking toes and reading stories and then it’s all over? I get the job done properly!’

Dar was as licentious as Byron’s Venice. Everybody, whether married or single, seemed to be caught up in a web of sexual intrigue. Foremost among the voluptuaries were the Zambians who worked at the local railway corporation. They threw bacchanalian parties, where they drank brandy and danced the rumba. The floor would be packed with bodies – lissome typists with senior controllers, the young clerks with fat managers’ wives in explosively hued, shimmering cocktail dresses. The bands were large ensembles of singers, toasters, brass sections, ranks of guitarists and percussionists, together with girls who’d grind their hips and flash their plump, brown buttocks. The lead vocalist might be in a loud Congolese shirt, dabbing his brow with a hanky, eyes rolling, lips pouting, crooning in his soft bass lyrics of poor men falling in love.

Malaika, nakupenda malaika! Angel, I love you my angel!

On these nights I’d try to dance like my African friends and end up sweating and leaping about happily whooping. I’d look across the floor and see how Buchi was barely moving. He displayed an intense rhythmic energy with a wonderful economy of movement, mesmerizing his partner with half-closed cobra eyes, a slight rocking of the pelvis, and a positioning of the hands and elbows.

The working day lasted from dawn until two in Dar. It was a hangover from the colonial era. Siesta time was given over to fornicating. Nobody asked questions. The answers were both too obvious and therefore too dangerous. As a result the entire scene was shrouded in secrecy. To commit adultery was expected. To be caught, I sensed, would lead to extravagant violence.

I remained a bemused spectator in all of this, until one day I found myself seduced by a railwayman’s wife from the golf club. Buchi was out at the airport, so we sneaked into his room and flipped on the air-conditioning system. Her braided hair revealed itself to be a wig, which to my consternation she removed. Naked, she was like shiny rubber to touch. I produced a condom.

‘Don’t worry about that,’ she said.

‘We must,’ I stammered.

‘You will like it better without,’ she said.