The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War

‘Always use socks,’ Buchi warned me later. A ‘sock’ was a condom. We all knew what AIDS was, although these were the days when the prostitutes of Dar es Salaam still hung their socks out to dry before reusing them.

‘Never nyama kwa nyama, flesh on flesh,’ Buchi lectured. He made a piston movement of one forefinger sticking into the hole of his left fist. I took his advice, but even after using the condoms I’d stay awake at night for weeks, staring at the overhead fan and praying that I was sorry and I’d never do it again. Until the next time I did it.

One day the janitor knocked on our door and Buchi answered it. The man complained loudly that our condoms had blocked the apartment building’s drains. Buchi drew himself up to his full height.

‘And what would you have us do, my brother? Endanger lives by not wearing socks?’ He waggled his belly in a characteristic display of indignation.

‘It poses a threat to the public health!’

I’d rise at seven and wash in a bucket of cold water with a bar of red Lifebuoy soap. Over a breakfast of samosas, a filterless Rooster and bubblegum, I cracked open the Daily News. In time, the door to Buchi’s bedroom swung open. Buchi emerged with a bath towel wrapped around his great middle, gave out a thunderous sneeze and complained of his thumping hangover. ‘Oooh my bratha! I’m hanging,’ Buchi would say. ‘I’m hanging all over!’

Me the mzungu, the white man, in my tyre sandals. Buchi waddling along in his pinstripe suit, mopping his thick neck with a handkerchief. We must have seemed an odd pair in the streets of Dar, thronging with men in crisp white shirts, ladies in glittering ball gowns or kanga wraps, all tiptoeing among broken pavements, puddles, sucked mango pips and goat bones.

But Buchi and I made a splendid double act. My white skin got us in to see the Brits or Yanks. Except that they let on nothing because, I sensed, they knew little about the local situation. Buchi’s black skin opened the doors of government ministers or the chiefs of state utilities. Except that they were never in. We’d rouse secretaries who lay slumped over typewriters of monstrous size. ‘He’s not around. Try tomorrow,’ said the secretaries with heavy-lidded eyes.

Rarely, the official was ‘around’ and we were shown in. He’d be sitting in his Mao suit beneath a portrait of Nyerere, commonly known as Mwalimu, or ‘the Teacher’. After thirty years he was still the undisputed leader of the Revolutionary Party.

‘Shikamu, Ndugu,’ we’d say. ‘I hold your feet, Comrade.’ This combined the traditional greeting for elders that dated back to the days of slavery with the modern socialist form of address.

‘Marahaba,’ he’d reply. ‘You’re too kind.’

Further pleasantries were exchanged for some minutes. It was considered ill form in Tanzania to get straight to the point. Finally we all fell silent. Only then would Buchi ask for information. This roused the official to open and close his desk drawers, stare at the ceiling, or look at us and politely demur. Even the simplest of subjects, such as the figures for coffee exports, appeared to be matters of national security. In fact, we suspected it was for a more mundane reason. He didn’t know and, more to the point, the figures didn’t exist.

Things had once been different for Tanzania, as the Cuban ambassador told us at open-air lunches over roasted meat. He had been here since Che Guevara had travelled to the Congo in ‘65. He said those days and the later, heroic wars of the seventies were now just memories.

‘What hope had existed at independence from colonial rule! What ambitions we had,’ said the Cuban.

Nyerere had imposed his personal philosophy of African socialism in the 1967 Arusha declaration.

‘In our country work should be something to be proud of,’ Nyerere had said in the sixties. By the eighties, many white expatriates in Dar still reverently called him the Teacher. So did the Africans, but sunk in a poverty brought about by Nyerere’s dreams they were being bitterly ironic. The joke was now that Tanzanians pretended to work, while the state pretended to pay them.

The Cuban ambassador said the presidents of Africa like the Teacher, once liberators, had grown into a group of old crocodiles. Africa was their wallow. It was a still, hot pool into which nothing fresh had run for years.

‘Now when the Teacher saw a herd of giraffe grazing in a coffee estate, even he had to admit his revolution had failed,’ said the ambassador.

‘But some of us still believe in the ideas of socialism and self-reliance.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Buchi in his baggy suit and moccasins. ‘La lutta continua. The struggle goes on, my brothers.’

I wandered off to hike along the Lake Victoria Nyanza shore. I tramped from one mission station hospital to another, dossing on the dirt floors of peasant huts in villages with the banana groves sewn with freshly dug AIDS graves. I crossed by dhow to Zanzibar, where I interviewed dissidents while sipping glasses of tamarind juice and slept on the beach in coconut palm leaf huts. I languished in bars with Buchi.

At a roundabout in downtown Dar, a monument stands to the askari African soldiers and porters who died in terrible numbers in East Africa during the Great War. One day while Buchi and I were walking in the street, he pointed up at this and said, ‘We’ve been screwed ever since you whites came into this continent. You came with a Bible in one hand and a shovel in the other, to dig our minerals and fuck our women. Then you made us fight your wars.’

I became lazy, forgetting that, despite my relaxed Dar es Salaam timetable, my London newspaper had deadlines to maintain, pages to fill. I filed so little, so late that eventually my editor Michael Holman kindly said he had to let me go. An achievement, I thought, since I didn’t even have a proper job to lose.

Life in Dar es Salaam was a financial struggle, but had I not left I would have been able to survive on odd stringer jobs probably for the rest of my life. There would have been no end to the beers, the rumba dancing and the sensuality. But it all came to an abrupt end one day. I remember my last evening in Dar. We were at the radioman Jim’s place. Fela Kuti was playing on an old gramophone. I sat on the window ledge, gazing across rusty tin rooftops, pied crows and swallows wheeling through the sky, antique Morris Minors clattering down the street, lines of laundry and palm trees waving in the evening breeze.

‘Hey, punk,’ said Jim. He stared at me as he puffed on his pipe. ‘Have you heard the news from Khartoum?’

Jim told me that the military had overthrown the democratically elected prime minister. There was nothing special in this and Jim was simply making conversation. Sudan was always having coups. Yet I immediately saw that this was an opportunity I could not squander. I went back to the flat in Cotton Road, found a number for The Times in London, called and asked for the foreign editor. To my astonishment he came on the line and said yes, by all means he would take copy from me. The paper’s Cairo correspondent had not been able to get to Khartoum. I could file until he made it, if he ever did. I thought it was worth the chance. Next morning, I raised cash up to the maximum limit on my American Express card and bought a flight to Sudan.

My Khartoum flight connected via Nairobi, where a gang of foreign correspondents came on board. They stuck together in a group, chain-smoked cigarettes and continually ordered drinks from the stewardesses, with whom they flirted. The flight left Nairobi but in midair the captain announced that the military junta that had seized power in Khartoum had closed Sudan’s airspace. We were diverted to Addis Ababa, where the Ethiopians kept us in the departure lounge. We were among large numbers of West African pilgrims bound for Mecca. I sat in my plastic chair nursing a stale sandwich. I had grown used to the friendly company of Buchizya and the African press corps in Dar es Salaam, but I was too shy to introduce myself to these foreign correspondents. It was like arriving in a new school.

The hours turned into evening. The pilgrims crowded into the bathrooms to wash, spraying water through their noses, sticking their feet and bottoms in the basins. They came out and lined up for evening prayers. I watched them and envied their sense of faith and community. I was confused about which was the correct way to live my life and saw no greater purpose in it than to live it to the full. After praying they settled into circles, telling their beads and chatting over ginger coffee poured from thermoses. I pictured them at home in villages and tents under Saharan night skies. At last they wrapped their turbans around their heads to cut out the fluorescent glare and slept on the dirty linoleum floors. Picking their way through this sea of supine hajjis I saw a young English correspondent with the features of Dennis the Menace chatting to a handsome American. Both were my age. They held out their hands.

‘Julian Ozanne of the Financial Times,’ said the Englishman. I recognized the name. He was my Nairobi counterpart working for Michael.

‘Eric Ransdell. U.S. News & World Report,’ said the American. ‘You?’ I introduced myself and confessed I didn’t work for anybody, but that I might file to The Times if the Cairo correspondent didn’t make it first.

‘Why wouldn’t he make it?’ asked Eric. He gave me a friendly pat on the arm. ‘Look, tell me if I can help with anything.’

We waited in that airport lounge for three entire days. By the time Khartoum’s airspace opened up and the flight departed Addis I was dishevelled, unshaven and in need of a bath. The lounge café had charged high prices in dollars and a big dent had already been made in my funds. We landed in Sudan’s capital and exited the aircraft to a blast of hot desert air. In the arrivals building a gigantic officer with blue-black skin checked my passport and said, ‘No visa. You cannot enter Sudan. You must get back on the aircraft.’ The flight was headed for Cairo. I remonstrated with the officer, but he shook his head. He didn’t look like a man who’d accept a bribe. The only payment he needed was the power his uniform gave him. He nodded to two soldiers who herded me to one side. Julian was next in line. The officer checked his passport, found a valid visa and waved him through.

‘And what about my colleague?’ Julian said, fixing the man with a determined stare. ‘The general has personally called for the international press to come to Sudan. I have an appointment to see him tomorrow morning with my colleague here. The general’s not going to be happy if you deport any of us.’ The officer looked doubtful. ‘Where is your letter of invitation?’ he asked. ‘At the foreign minister’s office,’ Julian replied. ‘Telephone if you like.’ The lines were clearly down. Julian’s bluff worked. The officer called me back to his desk and stamped my passport.

Most of the journalists were staying at the Hilton. I couldn’t afford that and so I checked into the Acropole, a shabby Greek-run place with a friendly atmosphere, despite the damage from a recent bombing by Islamic militants. Already the shooting was over in Khartoum and the story had, after several days, gone completely cold. It was downpage news, but I reminded myself that at least I had a string. But what to write about? I felt out of my depth and so I decided to pay my colleagues a visit. On the banks of the Nile, the Hilton had its own cool microclimate, food supply, piped music and soaps in the lavatories. It was an American spaceship that had landed on the dusty planet of Sudan. Walking into the lobby, I encountered a man in a white suit and a jet-black toupee dictating copy down the lobby phone.

‘Stop! New par! Tanks rumbled through streets, as civilians dived for cover like stray cats…No! T for Tommy…Tanks!…No! N is for nuts…’

He had lots of quotes, from Western diplomats and ‘Sources close to the military…’. Not for the last time, I felt like I was a step behind the action, because I hadn’t seen any such military displays or panicked civilians. To my eyes, a pall of inertia hung over the city. In fact I could barely even see Khartoum. Sandstorms locally known as the haboob whipped the streets in the daytime, producing an ominous twilight. Haboobs were famous for the confusion they produced. A Boeing pilot had once ditched on the Nile, mistaking it for the airport runway. ‘Taxi?’ I’d ask at reception, to which the concierge would shake his head. ‘Haboob!’ By evening, the haboob would settle into sand drifts at every street corner, ready to go airborne again in the heat of the next day. Before dusk, I observed everybody scampering home. A bobbing mass of them swathed in white turbans and leopard-skin slippers, they looked like workers toiling in some gigantic laundry. ‘Taxi?’ I asked in the street. They shook their heads. ‘Curfew!’

Eric was in the Hilton lobby, smoking. I went over to him and asked who the man in the white suit and toupee was.

‘The Cairo Times correspondent,’ he said. ‘Listen, you can still try writing for the specialist magazines like Africa Confidential.’

I told him I knew little about Sudan, certainly not enough to write for the kind of publications read by diplomats and spies. Eric advised me to bluff it. I realized I’d have to. The cash from my credit card was now half gone and I had no prospect of making any more. I spent more precious dollars telephoning Africa Confidential from the Hilton foyer, despite the fact that I knew the lines were tapped, and to my astonishment the editor commissioned me.

Shrouded by the curfew and the haboob, the junta’s new generalissimo, Bashir, had yet to reveal himself. Nobody knew anything about him, since until now he had been isolated in a jungle garrison several weeks’ boat journey up the Nile. In a transcript of his only statement so far, I thought I detected a motive for his coup d’état, cryptic though it was. ‘We will no longer eat bitter aloes on the frontiers,’ he had said. On state TV, the junta repeatedly broadcast pictures of the ousted prime minister’s garage. It was stacked with tins of tomato puree. Puree certainly seemed to be a vital ingredient in much of the local food. Apparently the prime minister had purchased his mountain of tins with diverted state funds. They looked rusty and past their sell-by date to me. I saw that this hardly made a news story. What was I to say? That the Islamic fundamentalists were up in arms over a variation on Lord Acton’s dictum? ‘Puree tends to corrupt and absolute puree corrupts absolutely.’

One respected correspondent, meanwhile, did not appear to budge from the Hilton foyer, but seemed to be always parked on a sofa next to a trolley piled with cakes. To remain here and still have so much to file made me think he must be a true expert. ‘How long have you covered the Sudan?’ He winked at me. ‘This is my first time here!’ He jerked his head towards the dining hall. ‘What a dump, eh?’

My mounting panic was partly due to the fact that I knew that if I didn’t file, I would have no way of retrieving the costs of the telex, hotel or flights. I told Eric and Julian that all was going well. At hotel mealtimes, I claimed to have a bad stomach and refused ordering from the menu, but waited until I could secretively nip along to a roadside-shack café to order an aluminium plateful of foul beans and coriander with a wheat chapatti.

It was my first opportunity to observe up close the other foreign press corps on a story. I noticed that as soon as they began socializing they forgot their rivalries. I sat straining to overhear something useful about the Sudanese coup, but the correspondents made no mention of it. Instead they swapped scurrilous anecdotes about great former colleagues. (‘Said he could get laid anywhere, right? So then the desk sends him to Red China during the Cultural Revolution. Nobody thinks he can do it. Six weeks later a postcard arrives with nothing on it but the words “Gobbled in the Gobi!”’) I learned that correspondents were strangely sentimental about the past. Today’s stories seemed to be small beer compared to the momentous events of even a few years ago, when titans had walked the earth. The trade of journalism also appeared to have gone into some kind of terminal decline.

A Reuters correspondent covering fascist Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 sent a cable to Fleet Street headquarters to complain about the quality of the water in Addis Ababa. The solution, he proposed, was to send him crates of champagne. Even today, correspondents conformed to long-held customs. Fiddling expenses or making outrageous claims was a matter of professional pride to the foreign correspondent. It was still a subtle but vital part of a journalist’s credentials. A good stringer, particularly, had to be clever at massaging claims, since he or she was paid far too little in ‘wordage’ fees to keep body and soul alive. One had to resort to a mass of tricks to which editors, who had been in the field themselves, were honour-bound to turn a blind eye. Bogus receipt books, forged signatures, black-market cash transactions all came in handy. As long as you wrote down a claim on a receipt and had it stamped all over in purple you’d be all right. Years later I made an expense for a thousand dollars, itemizing it as payment for the services of two prostitutes for a banker I wanted to interview and management never questioned it.

At the end of the meals, I saw them tip the waiter to give them extra blank receipts. One explained to me how it worked.

‘Every trip, I try to make enough to buy myself a nice piece of electronics, see? A video, or some speakers…’

I was astonished to see one of them rummaging through a waste-paper bin full of discarded receipts at the restaurant entrance.

I became desperate. I knocked on doors, pleading with the other correspondents to tell me where I was going wrong.

‘Please tell me what’s happening?’

‘No, I’m not going to help you just like that,’ said the BBC correspondent Lindsey Hilsum.