Livingstone’s Tribe: A Journey From Zanzibar to the Cape

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Preface (#ulink_4fc988f5-470d-5007-a5ed-7e8c47f10bd7)

THIS IS AN ACCOUNT of a journey in search of a dying tribe. Even at the time I was travelling, in 1997, it was clear that whites as an ethnic minority were doomed in most parts of Africa. It seemed as though the colonial era had belonged to another century rather than to the previous generation. In Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi and Zambia the whites had all but disappeared; in Kenya they clung on diffidently. In Southern Africa, however, there remained hope. Although politically redundant, their economic influence appeared to assure them a future.

My interest in the whites who stayed on in what used to be rather quaintly known as ‘Black Africa’ dates back to the imperial retreat. From the bastion of South Africa, I grew up in the 1960s observing what became a familiar process. As each new African state acquired its independence, the old colonial hands would decamp. Some returned to Britain, but most flinched from the prospect of rationed sunlight and costly alcohol. Ultimately, much of this human debris was borne by the winds of change to South Africa.

The fact that the withdrawal coincided with the seemingly unstoppable rise of apartheid helped shape my own response to these events. When self-styled refugees from African rule came among us, bursting with the same racism as the dour, resentful xenophobes in charge of our own society, it seemed only natural to identify with those they had left behind. Even when the promise of uhuru gave way to cupidity, corruption and worse, the whites who continued to identify with African aspirations to the extent of sharing their fate acquired a certain defiantly heroic status.

At the same time I confess my own attitude to the continent was ambivalent. When I felt compelled to leave South Africa, in the 1970s, it was not to the black states to the north that I looked to make my home but to the motherland of my British antecedents. Only in 1980, and the coming of independence to Zimbabwe, did I feel the summons to test years of conviction by going to live in an independent African state. In the end I stayed for four years.

Since the first publication of this book, Zimbabwe has returned to the headlines. On page 203 I describe visiting a farmer friend, Alan. His efforts had brought him prosperity and his workers conditions that were the envy of all who knew them. I was intoxicated at the time by a heady fusion of landscape and memory, wondering whether I might not yet return to Africa again. Alan – sceptical and pragmatic – was, however, more alive to the precarious status of whites. His words were to be prophetic. The tide of venomous racism whipped up by Robert Mugabe in the election campaign of June 2000 led to almost a thousand white farms being invaded by squatter gangs. Alan and his family were among hundreds forced to flee their homes. His workers paid a severe price for their loyalty; a third had their homes razed.

The land seizures in Zimbabwe had an eerie echo of events in post-independence Tanzania and Uganda. There too white farmers and planters were dispossessed in the name of agricultural and political reforms that proved to be disastrous. In Uganda, at least, lessons were learnt. In the midst of the turmoil in Zimbabwe, an official Kampala daily newspaper said that Uganda needed commercial growers and proposed that land be offered for white Zimbabweans to settle.

Nevertheless, the overall effect was devastatingly harmful. Africa watched helpless as one of its last productive economies was ruined by the same instincts, and the same methods, that had proved so self-destructive in the past.

At the end of my journey I reflected that only time will tell whether whites are capable of enduring in Africa. In just three years the prospects look less auspicious than they did even then. Increasingly parents, not only in Zimbabwe but also in South Africa, see their children attempting to make lives abroad. Inevitably, it is those with abilities and qualifications who are best able to leave. And as the brightest and most adventurous depart, the chasm between Africa and the developed world continues to widen.

PART ONE GOING OUT (#ulink_be95bed5-887a-5a0f-996b-d32a1f380d17)

THE DIRT ROAD FROM Dar es Salaam petered out at a hedge of bougainvillea. Off to one side lay the shell of a deserted hotel amid palm trees that hung darkly at the edge of the Indian Ocean like bats. Beyond the purple blossoms, on the verandah of a cottage, stood a tall, grizzled white man in a T-shirt, sarong and sandals made from car tyres. ‘And you must be Stephen,’ he said.

He motioned to a seat on the verandah which looked out over the pale sea. A pot of pitch-like coffee was produced and served, in the Muslim manner, in tiny cups. He looked at me intently, a rather forbidding figure with the head of a patrician, a great beak of a nose, thinning white mane and beard, and watchful eyes. I felt apprehensive. My letters had gone unanswered and my presence was unbidden. Now I was expected to explain myself.

I was interested, I said, in whites who had stayed on in Africa. I was starting a journey in the footsteps of the explorers, missionaries and settlers, along the routes of imperial advance and retreat, looking for those who had made their home in post-independence Africa, who had lived through coups and wars, and learnt to live with the corruption, the collapse of services and the generally miserable lot of the African citizen. In particular, I was interested in those who had faith in Africa and its people, and who believed it still had something to offer the world. And now that the last protective white laager had fallen, I was looking for lessons on how they might endure in South Africa.

It sounded desperately earnest.

‘Well,’ he barked. ‘It helps to be a little mad.’

I had heard of Daudi Ricardo long before the flight landed me that morning in Dar es Salaam. In Britain, where old district officers reminisced in their twilight on exotic human specimens who had crossed their paths, and in tales of post-colonial diehards, Daudi’s name had resonance. Once an English grandee, born David Ricardo, he had sacrificed everything on the pyre of Tanzania’s hopelessly inept experiment with socialism. Now in his seventies, he lived in genteel poverty in a shanty beside the beach twenty miles north of Dar es Salaam.

A single large palm tree stood in front of the whitewashed cottage. I took in the interiors of two adjacent rooms. They were of incongruous, almost paradoxical, character: a bedroom of missionary simplicity; and a book-lined study with a roll-top desk and leather chair. The shelves contained a near-complete set of G. A. Henty novels in the original gold-embossed covers.

‘Meshack, more coffee,’ ordered Daudi.

Once there had been a few other whites living in a ragged little colony at Kunduchi beach. But the major who used to see non-existent thieves in the dark and shout ‘I’ve got my artillery, Sir, and I won’t hesitate to use it’, had died, and the couple who smuggled birds and small creatures to foreign zoos had been forced to make a run for it. Daudi was the last mzungu at Kunduchi, sharing his roof with Meshack, a smiling-faced young man, his wife and their baby.

In the days I spent there it became apparent that Daudi had a variety of roles. To Meshack, he was paterfamilias and opponent in hard-fought games of backgammon and Monopoly. To his neighbour, Saidi, he was friend and confidant. To most local folk he was simply the mzee, an ancient revered as sage and occasional benefactor.

One evening, I related two stories about whites in South Africa.

In 1686, a richly laden Dutch vessel, the Stavenisse, was wrecked off the south coast. For many months nothing was heard of the ship and it was concluded that it had gone down with all hands. Then, three years later, another ship called on this storm-blasted stretch of coast and found Stavenisse survivors, living contentedly among an African people. The Europeans returned to the tiny Dutch settlement at the Cape of Good Hope with elegiac accounts of life in an Eden among peaceful and generous folk, having left behind a Portuguese mariner, shipwrecked in the same place forty years earlier, who had acquired a wife and children and declined to leave his idyll. ‘He spoke only the African language, having forgotten everything else, his God included,’ wrote a would-be rescuer.

Almost a hundred years later, in 1782, an East Indianman the Grosvenor was wrecked along the same stretch of coast on a return voyage from India. This time, however, the survivors were not welcomed. Out of 123 men, women and children to reach the shore, fewer than twenty eventually got back to the Cape, bearing harrowing tales of murder and persecution by pitiless savages.

These two accounts represented for me a characteristic of the European experience of Africa: arcadia or inferno – it seemed always to be one or the other, as if the place chose to reveal only a benign face to some, and a malign aspect to others. Rarely had the world seen a more baleful side of Africa than now, over the horizon in Rwanda. Yet here was a modern equivalent of the shipwrecked mariner, loved and enfolded by a kinship network. His other family – his wife, Lady Barbara Montagu-Stuart Wortley, daughter of the Earl of Wortley, and children – lived in England.

‘Africa has been kind to me,’ he agreed. ‘I won’t be going back to England to die. My life is short now. I have cancerous waterworks. Collapsed recently and spent two days on the floor in the local hospital.’ I knew enough about Tanzanian hospitals to marvel that, in the face of this final test, he had not submitted to the National Health Service.

The ambiguities were baffling: a white man who loved Henty, yet lived among blacks; a former settler serenely awaiting death in a land which old colonials saw as the final word in African failure. I asked him to start at the beginning.

DAUDI’S ANCESTOR WAS David Ricardo, the nineteenth-century economist whose prosperity built Gatcombe Park in Gloucestershire. The family was famously well-connected. ‘I have an early memory of being given a hiding by George V. Grumpy old chap. He’d come to lunch and afterwards he was dozing in a comfy chair. I wondered if the beard was real, so I gave it a tug. He woke up quick enough. Queen Mary was very nice though.’

At the outbreak of war, then himself named David, he joined the family regiment, the Irish Hussars, suffered fearful wounds in the desert campaign and went to Tanganyika to convalesce. There, in the Southern Highlands, he turned to ranching, founding Matanana, a fabled homestead in the bush adorned with touches of Gatcombe – Sèvres porcelain, portraits by Sir Peter Lely, and green and gold livery for the African footmen.

Then he began to act oddly. He had always been considered an eccentric but when he started to consort with Africans, to dress in native garb and disappear into the bush for weeks at a time, even the relatively unconventional settler society of the Southern Highlands took notice. He announced his conversion to Islam and with it a change of name from David to Daudi. At uhuru, he took Tanzanian citizenship and became a member of Julius Nyerere’s party. He handed over Matanana to his workforce and went to work for the people.

We mostly sat on the verandah because Daudi said it had a happy feeling about it. So it did, but I liked the study, with the sturdy oak desk, the swivel chair, its leather crackled and crisped by the tropics, and the walls of foxed and weathered books which ranged well beyond Henty. When he heard that I had written a biography of F. C. Selous, the Victorian hunter and adventurer, his face lit up. He dived into a pile of books and emerged delightedly with a distinctive green Bentley first edition of Selous’s A Hunter’s Wanderings, one of the great rarities of hunting literature.

I looked for other memorabilia – the odd picture, perhaps a piece of porcelain – in vain. ‘All gone,’ he said. Only one object did he mourn, a bronze of an Irish Hussar presented to his father by Edward VII. It had been stolen years ago, along with anything else of value. ‘The burglars don’t bother any more. They know there’s no money.’ He smiled with wry satisfaction.

Actually, there was not much food either. Once we ate fish and prawns at a small place down the beach and another time Meshack made a chocolate cake which fed five people, although one of them was Rodda, the baby. Daudi was down to his last fiver until he was paid some money owed to him. Not that there was anywhere to shop. Provisions came from Dar once a week.

‘Thank God there’s enough coffee,’ he said. By then, however, there was no water. The rains had failed and the borehole had expired. There was also no electricity. His last luxury was a cheap, pungent snuff which he took from a plastic film canister.

Once, sitting on the verandah in his customary attire of T-shirt and sarong, he produced an old photograph album. A yellowing snap showed the master of Matanana at the Tanganyika Cattle Breeders’ fair in 1958, a striking figure in plus fours, top hat and cravat. Now the homestead where liveried footmen had waited on guests was crumbling and Matanana had been reclaimed by the bush. ‘I went back recently. It was a bit melancholy. But there were still some of the old families and we had a few laughs.’

After leaving the ranch, he worked for twenty-five years among peasants, a field worker for development projects. Most were doomed by incompetence and corruption. Yet he had found the work personally fulfilling.

‘Well it opened up so many more possibilities,’ he said. ‘Getting involved, I mean. There were colonials who were frightened of the place. Before independence they would say to me, “Do you think we’re going to be all right?” What I always said was “Only you can answer that. I know that I am going to be all right.” Then there were others who got involved. They cared for their people – some really loved ’em. They enjoyed the country and themselves. I did the same thing, in a different way.’

Had his work achieved anything? ‘I’ve often doubted, and I still do, whether we have any business being here. All this advising and cajoling of people – who are we to say? But can we get out? No. It’s gone too far for that. And there are instances where, yes, I think we did improve things.’

I went back to paradoxes. Just as Europeans had tended to see Africa as either Elysium or an abyss, it had often brought out in our kind extremes of either idealism or cynicism. What, I wondered, did Africans make of us; I was not talking about any of those trite old clichés about colonialism. What did Africans really think about us?

In answer to this absurd question he told a story.

Germany’s colonial wars were harbingers of the Holocaust. In 1904, the Herero people rebelled in German South-West Africa, killing about a hundred colonists. The authorities’ response was to issue an order for the Hereros’ extermination. Over the next year, General Lothar von Trotha hunted down the civilian population, driving them and their livestock further and further into the eastern desert. Of 80,000 Hereros, fewer than 16,000 survived. A year later, across the continent in what is now Tanzania, the Maji Maji rising began. Its suppression was equally pitiless. About 75,000 died of wounds or starvation.

In the aftermath of these terrible little wars, statues were erected in both territories to the power of German arms and the colonial dead. The hill in Windhoek, the arid but strangely appealing little capital of South-West Africa, was dominated by the triumphalist bronze of a rampant Teutonic cavalryman. Another monument was set up in the Southern Highlands, not very far from the Ricardo ranch at Matanana.

When uhuru came, Daudi anticipated the early removal of the statue. For more than fifty years it had stood as a grotesque affront to local sensibilities. Now, surely, it would be toppled, perhaps to be melted down and refashioned as a likeness of Mkwawa, the rebel leader. Time went by without any action, however. Eventually Daudi asked a local chief, a grandson of Mkwawa.

‘Oh no,’ said the chief, ‘it is staying there. It is now our memorial, to our dead.’

A similar process, I recalled, had taken place more than twenty years later when South-West Africa became Namibia. To the astonishment of everyone, the Teutonic rider was left to flaunt his empty triumph from the hill above Windhoek.

Was that it? Was it that, even at our worst, we were recognised simply as a fact, an inescapable part of existence?

‘Africans are endlessly tolerant but those of us who stay face a challenge. We have to learn a new cultural language and that can be very painful. Then, at some point, it just happens. We wake up to find we have been absorbed.’