The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War

‘Pleeeaaase.’

‘No.’

Finally, I went to Julian and Eric and they tried to calm me down. Short of writing my copy, however, they could do little. Up in my room, as my filing deadline loomed, I scribbled a first paragraph. Crossed it out. Screwed the paper into a ball. Wrote another. Screwed it into a ball. And so on, until I had no pages left in my notepad and began work on the hotel stationery. What could I write, when I saw nothing The Times man did? Nobody had agreed to speak to me, so I had no quotes, facts or figures. My taxi driver was the only Sudanese who gave me any comment on the political situation. He said: ‘Army bad! Army bad!’

I was close to despair, when there was a knock on my door. It was Eric, with a camera slung over his shoulder. ‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘All right,’ I said gratefully. The foyer doors parted with an electric sigh and we emerged into the haboob and clambered into a battered taxi.

I never saw Eric hot, ruffled, unkempt, or miss a story, no matter which jungle or slum or refugee camp he fetched up in. He made covering Africa look easy. And when a day’s journalism was done he’d tell you unprintable tales full of laconic humour, between heavy exhalations of cigarette smoke and always a crazy laugh at the end. Eric had been raised in St Joseph, Missouri, and I think he’d grown up wanting adventure thanks to the example of his father, William Ransdell, who had joined up with the USAF at eighteen. As a navigator in the nose of a B-17 bomber his old man had flown thirty-five daylight missions over Germany, through ribbons of flak and Nazi fighters, with engine shutouts, two crash landings and raids so perilous that on one sortie two-thirds of the bomber group got shot down. By the time Eric was at journalism school he had travelled all over Asia and Australia but he found his cause when he learned what was happening in apartheid South Africa. ‘The more I read, the more I came to feel that what was happening in South Africa was one of those pure evils, utterly black and white, just like the one my father had fought in Germany,’ he told me. He touched down in Johannesburg in 1985, soon after the townships exploded. The sudden rush of being in this place – comrades toyitoyi-ing around burning tyre barricades, Casspirs filled with soldiers in riot gear, witnessing Desmond Tutu’s church sermons – changed his entire life. Back at home he wrote an article about what he’d seen that won a William Randolph Hearst award. But when he attempted to return to South Africa Pretoria rejected his visa, so he had no choice but to head for ‘liberated’ black Africa, and now here we were.

Minutes later our taxi stopped at the gates of army headquarters. We got out next to a large Soviet tank and Eric moved off a few steps to speak with a sentry. To my astonishment, the guard nodded and called an officer, who marched us into the heavily fortified military complex until we entered a dark office, where a man sat behind a huge desk. By the spade-sized epaulets on his shoulders, I knew him to be an officer. By his shy and deferential manner, I took him for a lowly fellow in the chain of command. We engaged in a little small talk. The officer had a habit of blinking very fast so that his eyelids fluttered.

‘You are English?’ he asked me with a smile. I said I was, but that I had been raised in Africa.

‘Ah, I love England very much,’ the officer said, disregarding my claim to an African identity. ‘Manchester United is my team. What is your team?’ I have no opinion about football but I wanted to put him at his ease. ‘Chelsea,’ I ventured.

‘You are a Christian?’ I said I was, deciding to go along with this quietly.

‘You must know that I myself attended the Oxford University,’ the officer said complacently. Blink blink.

‘Oh? Which college?’

‘Ah, Oxford Street,’ he replied, blinking faster as he smiled so widely that he exposed his gums.

After some minutes of this I saw it was time for me, the Eyes and Ears of the World, to seize control of the situation. It was time for me to begin my career in earnest. I was being nudged forwards by the ghost of my great predecessor, the twenty-three-year-old war correspondent Winston Churchill, who had been in this place when he covered Kitchener’s defeat of the Mahdist forces at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898.

With just the right tone of firmness I thought appropriate, I asked, ‘And when do we get to interview His Excellency the President?’

There was an embarrassed silence. Eric stared at me agape. The Sudanese with the giant gold epaulets had stopped blinking. Somewhat apologetically, he replied, ‘I am the President.’

It’s 11 July 1989, and we are belted in as the Kenya Airways flight taxis for the runway. We’re homeward bound for Nairobi after the military coup in the Sudan. We’re tired and dirty after an eighteen-hour delay out of Khartoum due to sandstorms followed by a technical hitch stopover at Addis Ababa’s Bole airport. The aircraft is half-empty. Eric is next to me and across the aisle is Julian, pulling on a fag after the no smoking lights have come on. The three of us barely know one another, but what’s about to happen will bind us together forever. This moment is when it all really begins. This is why years later I like to fancy that the people who make up my story, even the ones who are not on the plane that day, fill all the vacant seats. And so I look down the aisle and see, half turning to look at me, the faces of Jonathan, Buchi, Hos, Dan, Afrah, Carlos, Bald Sam, Shafi, Lizzie. And among them are dozens of other ghosts and fellow travellers we met along the way.

Our Boeing 707 accelerates and lifts off. Within seconds it becomes clear that we are failing to gain altitude. Julian rests his head against the seat in front of him and exclaims dolefully, ‘We’re not going to make it!’ The aircraft banks in a tight circle. Through my porthole the wing is vertical, skimming peasant huts and fields. We hit the ground halfway down the runway. The jets scream in reverse thrust. Overhead compartments crash open, spilling bags and tubes and yellow masks. We spin, tilt, the wheels give way as the fuselage torpedoes down a mountainside. The port wing buckles and rips away. Din of turbines, tearing metal, electronics and then silence.

My panic is over before it even had a chance to begin. In the hush that follows we crouch in the brace position, like churchgoers. Eric cackles, ‘Are we home already?’

Across the way, a passenger with zigzag tribal scars across his forehead points out of his porthole and yells, ‘It is burning! We are burning!’

Orange flames billow from the smashed portside wing. The passenger cabin fills with fumes and black smoke. I begin to choke as I struggle to rip off the safety belt. We are all suffocating.

Julian heads downhill towards the aircraft’s nose. Instinct tells me to vault up the steep incline to the starboard rear emergency exit. I can see through the smoke that Eric has the same idea as he moves up ahead of me. At the exit, a flight attendant blocks our path. His skin has gone a tinge of green. ‘Take your seats!’ he yells. He is rooted to the spot, as if paralysed.

Eric punches the flight attendant in the face and pushes past. He turns the emergency handle and wrenches open the door, causing the inflatable chute to billow out to the hillside below. Both of us grab the steward and push him out of the plane headfirst, then follow ourselves. The whole scene’s in slow motion as I slide down. I see black smoke, red flames, a fountain of white foam lathering up over the prone aircraft. Walking up the gashed muddy slope I see, in amongst the debris of orange life jackets and clothes and paper cups, an old man moaning, clutching at his bloody leg out of which sticks a jagged bone. Stretcher crews are skidding down the hill. Off to one side, the Ethiopian soldiers are using the butts of their AK-47S to keep back a crowd of peasants in rags intent on looting the crash site.

We regroup back on the tarmac apron, where an airport bus is waiting for us. ‘Bloodyfuckinghell’ we all agree and light up our fags. Once out of the airport, we rush to file our stories. Only when we talk to our desks do we realize that our harrowing experience in the heart of Africa is not news. It means nothing to anybody but us, yet the crash brings us together as comrades, in a way that no pleasant experience could do.

The flight to Nairobi next day feels like the safest I’ve ever taken. I’m buoyed up and borne along by the laws of probability on my side that I couldn’t be in a plane crash two days in a row. Ever after, Julian’s way of coping with air travel is to start talking very loudly just before takeoff about the time he crashed in Africa, until the stewardesses come to ask him to desist because he’s frightening the other passengers. Eric claims he has no fear of flying. ‘Doesn’t bother me in the least,’ he says. ‘In fact, I feel blessed by the great airline gods, which is why I think I’m always getting bumped up to business or first class.’ I walk away and forget for years how afraid I am. But on a takeoff hundreds of flights later, every second of the crash comes back to haunt me. I am transformed into one of those unsettling passengers next to you: palms sweating, bare-toothed with fear and possessed of a high-altitude belief in God. And so it is with many of my memories.

At the end of the nineteenth century the British constructed a railway from Mombasa on the Indian Ocean to Lake Victoria. The project acquired the name the Lunatic Express, being hugely expensive and built for no ultimate reason other than for the vague objective of securing the headwaters of the Nile. The most challenging section of this incredible feat of engineering was to cross the Great Rift Valley. On the last staging post before the precipitous Rift escarpment, the British ordered their workforce of Indian coolies and soldiers to pitch their lines of white tents in neat rows on the black cotton soil. Here the flat plains, which teemed with wildlife, suddenly rose up like a wave to break over the Rift near the Ngongs, a ripple of volcanic hills that looked like a giant fist. The staging post quickly became Nairobi, named for Ngare Nairobi, or the Cold River, which snaked across the plains. Having built a railway, the British had to justify its cost. The bureaucrats arrived in Nairobi. A stone magistrate’s court was constructed and the trading houses and banks that followed went up along muddy streets wide enough to allow a wagon and eight span of oxen to turn a full circle. The Africans were ordered to pay poll taxes to the bureaucrats. To do this, the Africans came to work and live in shanties. The white settlers arrived to establish plantations and ranches so that the railway would have something to transport. And so the foundations of modern Kenya were laid, created by white men, then worshipped by the mission-raised blacks after they took power following their independence.

I was born within sight of Nairobi’s railway terminus, at the Mater Misericordia hospital in the Industrial Area. The midwife Sister Assunta delivered me and cooed over me for my name, Aidan, was that of the saint who had converted the heathens of the Western Isles of Scotland. My mother gave the hospital a jacaranda tree that grows in the garden to this day. My birth came just after Kenya’s independence from Britain in 1963, when postcards showed a city with lush gardens and wide, tree-lined avenues with only the occasional car travelling on them. ‘Jambo from the Green City in the Sun’ said the postcards and the tourist brochures. Even in the Technicolor memory of my childhood, I remember Nairobi was still small enough for people to say hello as one strolled the pavement.

If you live in a place you hardly notice the changes. You have to return after a long absence, as I did in 1989. In the gap since my boyhood, Nairobi had been transformed into a dirty, crime-ridden place, surrounded by slums. I heard that when it rained in the shantytowns, the poor people’s shacks slid down the muddy hillsides. Nobody knew what the population was except that it was rising. The hacks nicknamed it ‘Nairobbery’ (derelict Dar es Salaam was ‘Dar-Is-the-Slum’ and Uganda’s war-devastated capital Kampala was known as ‘Kampothole’). But with the crowding and danger came a vibrant urban atmosphere as fizzy as a chilled Tusker with its cap popped off.

I remember walking into the Chester House press centre on Koinange Street for the first time. Downtown was still defined by the little grid of streets from the colonial era. Concrete structures rose around me, nosing up through the slum smog: ministries, multinationals, agencies of the United Nations. From a street corner, I watched the teeming scene: office workers in their frayed shirt collars and cheap suits stepping over beggars, shoeshine boys, vendors selling spreads of newspapers. Drum magazine splashing the headline ‘Luo Girls are Best in Bed.’ The white plutocrats in their short sleeves, the youngish European females we called leatherettes because the tropical sun had ravaged their white skin, the hippies, the Kenya Cowboys, the Somali café crowd, Asians in their banks and trading houses, the young black middle-class kids in their baggy trousers and wet-look coifs, the Big Shiny Men in their air-conditioned BMWs, or the processions of tourists in khaki safari hats, window-shopping for taka taka souvenirs from Eden. Rising above the chaos of downtown’s Uhuru Highway was a string of giant advertising billboards. ‘Tusker’, they read. ‘My Country, My Beer.’

Julian and Eric both worked at the Chester House foreign press centre and they were the ones who showed me around. It was in a shabby block, up a dark staircase, past a florist that offered special bouquets for funerals and a drink shop that gave a discount on production of a press card. Delegations of rebels, dissidents and sundry sinister creatures turned up daily to address press conferences. They spoke about distant wars, stuffed ballots, ethnic cleansings and cattle raids from places far off the map. Others were on missions more personal. Shaka Zulu Assegai, a black American, gave frequent pressers, declaiming in jive how the government should recognize his claim to be an African. A variety of men declared that they had a cure for AIDS, one a date for Armageddon. Or they needed help. Torture victims came in off the street to show their scars from prison. An ageing Tutsi king announced to the world that he was looking for a wife.

Julian walked me down a passage that was stuffy and dark because the lights were broken. Grimy yellow doors bore the plaques of famous names, from the BBC to Japan’s Asahi Shimbun. Julian was a figure like the Artful Dodger: he knew everybody and he seemed to be involved in every scam going. The way he explained it to me, the Nairobi press corps had a subculture all its own, like a school or prison with arcane rules, slang and legends. I thought of my great cousin Donald Wise, who had long since moved on, though little seemed to have altered since his day. Reporters still punched out their reports on telex tape and photos were sent on analogue barrel transmitters. Julian took me to meet the new doyen of the Chester House pack, Mohamed Amin.

‘So you’re an Africa boy,’ Mo said when we met. He was among the few journalists I ever knew who acknowledged how important my adopted home was to what I did, because I believe we shared the same complex emotions about the place. What we had in common was rooted in two entirely different family histories in the British Empire. Mo had been born in poverty, the son of a Muslim stonemason who was among the indentured labourers shipped in from India to construct the Lunatic Express. Mo had bought his first box camera as a boy in Dar es Salaam and a few years later he started Camerapix. At first it was a little photo studio of the type one sees all over Africa, but Mo saw his opportunity in the political upheavals of the day and went into news. His first scoop was to cover Zanzibar’s 1964 revolution that overthrew the sultan. Camerapix had since then grown to be one of the largest TV and photo agencies in Africa. Mo had covered every big story on the continent in the past three decades, often working a stills camera and film camera at the same time: the heady days of independence from colonial rule; Africa’s ‘winds of change’; the clowning of Idi Amin, who had expelled seventy thousand Asians and led Uganda into darkness; Central Africa’s coronation of Emperor Bokassa, modelled on Napoleon Bonaparte’s. His greatest triumph was his TV footage, voiced over by the BBC’s Michael Buerk, of the first pictures to break the 1984 Ethiopian famine, which would eventually kill a million people. Mo’s pictures whipped up publicity, rock songs and concerts that raised funds for food that probably saved a further two million from hungry deaths. He may have seemed diffident but he was as conceited as hell and never let you forget about his fame.

Mo proudly showed me his office. Covering the walls were framed snaps of Mo with Bob Geldof, Queen Elizabeth giving Mo his MBE medal, Mo with Sidney Poitier, Mo with sundry Third World despots, honorary degrees, TV awards and a platinum disk of the song ‘We Are The World’.

‘If you don’t publicize yourself, nobody else will,’ he told me.

Mo’s right-hand man was Brian Tetley, a white Kenyan who had grown up in England’s north. Brian was a tabloid man out of central casting: crumpled, boozy, a chain smoker, a bankrupt with chronic woman problems. Brian had been crafting snappy leads in Africa since colonial times. He was always kind to the likes of me, young correspondents just starting out. ‘Lovely story! You should be proud of yourself!’ he’d say when one did something right. ‘Let’s go and have a steak and drink some Tuskers!’ Tetley drank so much that Mo was rumoured to often pay his bar bill instead of a salary. But he was a survivor. His scallywag charm got him out of endless scrapes. Once Tetley was staggering home in the early hours and a mugger materialized with a knife and demanded money.

‘Do you honestly think a white man walks through Nairobi at three in the morning if he has any money?’ asked Brian. The thief lowered his knife and walked Brian home, saying that he would protect him from other muggers. Brian invited his new friend in for a nightcap. They parted three days later after a marathon drinking binge, the best of friends.

Then there were the war heroes, men who were believed to be so full of lead that they triggered airport metal detectors. Reid Miller of the Associated Press kept a sliver of shrapnel encased in Perspex on his desk as a paperweight. The metal was flecked with dried blood, Reid’s blood, and had been extracted from a wound he had suffered in a Nicaragua bomb outrage. The UPI stringer Miles Bredin had once dealt antique lace in England, where he had bought and sold an evening dress once made for Napoleon III’s wife, the Empress Eugenie. TV’s Nick Hughes wore collarless shirts of an identical design every day of his life, and when the factory was going out of business he went out and bought four hundred of them. There was a long-haired, dope-smoking cameraman from Southern Africa I called the Rock Spider, who had served as a conscript in the apartheid army and fought in Angola. There were white linen-suited eccentrics still stuck in the colonial era, angry campaigners we called the Laptop Bombardiers and sundry burned-out cases, sunk by drink or running from divorces. And then there were guys like Duke, a boyishly handsome German kid, blond with a tan and freckles, like a model in a Ralph Lauren Safari perfume advert. He made sure he looked good on a battlefield, loved guns, read Soldier of Fortune and kept up with the latest gadgets: a flak jacket with a specially designed personal logo, a GPS navigator, multiblade knives, night-sight goggles.

As it turned out there was work for me in Nairobi with The Times. The paper’s regular correspondent was losing interest in his string but was passionately interested in marlin fishing in the Indian Ocean. I encouraged him to go off with his tackle and sun lotion, leaving me to cover an inquest into the death of Julie Ward, a young British woman. The victim was an attractive blonde white female who had been kidnapped out on safari, held for days by her African captors, in all likelihood gang-raped, then hacked to pieces with a machete and burned on a petrol-soaked bonfire. Despite overwhelming evidence for this, Kenya’s police claimed she had committed suicide. The authorities suggested she had climbed an acacia thorn tree, hacked off her own head and limbs and thrown her dismembered self into a campfire below. They were taken aback when the woman’s father, John Ward, questioned their version of events. It was a perfect British newspaper story, especially given the regime’s incompetence at managing a cover-up. In court, Chief Justice Mango rolled us in the aisles with his banter. ‘Who the hell are you?’ he demanded of the Wards’ family lawyer Byron Georgiadis well into the inquest. ‘Oh,’ said Mango when Byron reminded him. ‘All whites look alike to me.’ When we weren’t in court, I joined the tabloid hacks on their death knocks, when we pestered poor John Ward for quotes. My salacious reports went down well in London and my hopes soared that I’d get The Times string when the correspondent got sacked for taking too many angling trips. In time, this happened and the correspondent retired to write a book he called Fishing in Africa.

But my ambitions to become the new Times man in Nairobi were quickly dashed. I heard that the paper had appointed an old friend of mine named Sam Kiley. Sam had also been born at Nairobi’s Mater Misericordia hospital. We had met at Oxford, where he’d run the university’s dramatic society. He had toured Africa with his student actors, performing Shakespeare in village squares and slum bus parks. I recalled that as an undergraduate he had dyed his hair green. But in the period between Oxford and Kenya, during which Sam had attended Sandhurst and done a spell in the Gurkhas before taking up journalism, he had lost most of his hair. He shaved off the rest and wore a black turban against the sun, so that he resembled a handsome pirate. I think that all his life he’d wanted to be a movie actor, but although one of his nicknames was ‘Yul’, as in Brynner, he never made it into that world. Being a foreign correspondent was probably the next best thing. He had a whip-like wit and spoke in machine-gun bursts. To me, Sam was Bald Sam. In return he called me ‘Aidey Boy Baby’. Or, more unfortunately, ‘AIDS’.

After The Times I managed to get a string for the Time-Life bureau chief, a white-haired Vietnam veteran. This man kept his head down and filed a story so seldom that I wondered if the magazine’s correspondents were advised to think very carefully about telling the editors in New York about Africa’s dramas because it might only irritate them. A decade of Time’s covers hung in frames on the bureau chief’s office walls. The continent of Africa had graced the cover about three times in ten years and I seem to recall one of the stories was about mountain gorillas. I greatly admired the Vietnam vet, whom I recall sitting in a rocking chair smoking marijuana – he’d had to give up the booze after some embarrassing behaviour – as he lectured me about my work ethic. When I told him I was going out on a date with a girl he yelled, ‘A girl? Go out and get some stories, for chrissakes! When I was your age I was chasing stories, not pussy!’

In time the Vietnam vet was posted to Istanbul. His replacement was a woman who had previously been a Roman Catholic nun. She kept me on but asked me to work together with a stringer nicknamed ‘Grumbling Bones’. A silver-bearded ex-Reuters correspondent, Grumbling Bones never spoke of his past. There was also a photographer who sometimes worked for Time. Jo Louw was a South African from Kimberley. He had started out in the sixties photographing the jazz scene in Soweto, then escaped apartheid to arrive in America at the time of the civil rights movement. Years later he had washed up in Nairobi. Jo didn’t make a lot of money and I asked him how he lived. ‘My wife has a chicken farm,’ he said with a twinkle in his sad eyes. One day over beers we were talking about our favourite news pictures of history and I brought up the photo of Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination. In the picture, an aide kneels over the dying man on a motel balcony while others point to from where the shot was fired. It’s no masterpiece, but I said whoever took it was in the right place at the right time. ‘That’s my picture,’ Jo said. ‘You’re bullshitting me,’ I said. No, he went on, he was standing next to King that day in Memphis, Tennessee, 4 April 1968. And here we were, I thought in awe, having a beer in Kenya two decades later.

I used to get roaring drunk with Grumbling Bones, who was an aficionado of Spanish culture and also an Irish republican. When well oiled he held forth about rizo negro, went on to bullfighting and finished the evening by singing Irish freedom songs. Late one night he said to me, ‘What the fuck are you wasting time for on a magazine like this? Go and do something that’s fun, full of passion, don’t piss your life away on a weekly fucking magazine.’

The Bunker was in a ghastly concrete tower that rose above the exhaust and slum-fire smog of downtown Nairobi. The lift didn’t have a thirteenth floor so the one I exited claimed to be the fourteenth. Up on the wall next to the door hung a plaque of the agency’s ticker-tape logo and a portrait of the founder, the Baron Julius Reuter. The Bunker became my base for the better part of my twenties. Entering for the first time I observed a scene of bedlam. Two women sat in front of big typewriters, humming hymns, reciting the Gospels with loud amens.

Passing deeper into the room, I found reporters with their feet up on desks, swearing and groaning over the din of chattering machines. Curtains of green text on screens shimmered in the gloom. A stench of chemicals and greasy food hung in the air. A large black-and-white photo of a policeman whipping a crowd of children hung on the wall. A man sat in the corner twiddling the knob on a big radio, monitoring broadcasts in African vernaculars.

A photographer shambled out of his darkroom. His name was Hos Maina and he had a fearful bruise on his forehead, slurred his speech and fumbled as he handled his camera or tried to roll a print onto the barrel transmitter. He looked like a drunkard. ‘Car crash,’ I was later told. ‘Brain damage.’ I advanced on through to the far corner of the office to a glass cubicle. Inside, a big map of the region hung on the wall. It was an expanse of green and sandy yellow, most of it quite empty. The pink lines of frontiers were arbitrarily straight, drawn by men from all over Europe who had met a century before to carve up the continent with pencils and rulers. On the desk was a photo of a woman and two girls and also a cartoon of the type sold in kiosks in the city’s slums. In grotesque detail, the drawing depicted what was described in the caption:

IF A DOG BITES A MAN, THATS NOT NEWS

BUT IF A MAN BITES A DOG THATS NEWS

Behind the desk, with his feet up on it, was a man shouting into a telephone. He was handsome and swarthy, with a shaggy black haircut in the style of a seventies footballer, large sensuous lips and great arms and shoulders that he kept shrugging in crab-like gestures. His name was Jonathan.

He was the Welsh son of a wartime Spitfire hero and economics professor, George Clayton. After the London School of Economics, he started out on a local paper writing about cats stuck up trees and when he finally secured his post at Reuters nothing had ever made him so happy.

Jonathan was an excellent journalist and my mentor in the trade. I first met him at a Nairobi nightclub called Lips. Three sheets to the wind, he had his arms out wide and seemed to be buying the entire bar a beer. I asked for his card. A few days later we met at the Delamere Terrace. It was at the end of the dry season, when jacarandas scatter their purple blossoms along University Way. ‘Drinking in excess doesn’t make you sexier,’ said a notice above the bar. ‘Or richer,’ I read, ‘or more sophisticated.’ Friday-night drinkers milled around: Kenya Cowboys, businessmen, hacks, whores and tourists in pith helmets. ‘Just drunk,’ the notice concluded.

‘But look laddy, the story in this place…’ Jonathan said to me, squinting cross-eyed over a bottle of Tusker. He shrugged and made curious circular gestures with his hands. ‘…Africa!’ he roared. ‘It’s wide open for a beach bum like you. You’re young! You’re hungry!’