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

He laughed. ‘Anyway, the question is academic. We old mzungus are dying out. Soon we’ll all be gone.’

I was thinking of South Africa, I said.

‘Ah, yes,’ he said.

When he got up I saw again how tall and thin he was. He leaned on a stick and walked with painful slowness while Meshack fluttered anxiously around. The cancer had left Daudi unsteady on his feet and in one bad fall recently he had broken a wrist. Long and gnarled, he might have been a bit of debris, an old tree, washed up on the beach.

We made our way down to the sea, passing the deserted hotel. In the late afternoon the sun had fallen behind a hill, casting a deep shadow across the building, now crumbling and streaked with decay. ‘Used to be pretty lively round here,’ Daudi said, ‘all night parties, that sort of thing. I prefer it like this.’ A solitary fat woman sat under one of the palm-thatched beach shelters, as if waiting for the party to resume. Beyond the shadow, the sea was pure and luminous. At the edge, a waste-pipe debouched into the shallows. For that moment all the ambiguities of the figure beside me were reconciled in the paradoxes of Africa itself – the white man, patrician yet humble, enduring in a place cruel but forgiving.

Before leaving I asked if there was anything he needed. He waved the idea away. ‘I’ve got a nice library. I get the odd visitor. And Meshack lets me win at backgammon every now and again. It’s just a pity he’s hopeless at chess.’

As the car pulled away, heading back to Dar, the driver turned to me. ‘I know him,’ he said. Then he added, almost fiercely as if I might deny it: ‘He is a good man.’

1. The Island (#ulink_ba7153d6-a359-51ae-976d-db29dda04d64)

St Monica’s Hostel, Zanzibar: Sunday, 9 March

I AWAKE IN AN enclave of Christendom to the muezzin’s call. My room at the old missionary hospital is appropriately bare but spacious as well, with shuttered windows opening on to a sun-blasted courtyard and a lone palm tree beside Christ Church Cathedral. The cool, smooth floor offers more by way of relief than the fan, which wobbles and creaks alarmingly overhead. Even at dawn the air feels thick and moist beneath the mosquito net.

I can remember no Anglican building which has moved me more than the cathedral. The pale pink mortar of the exterior has been blackened by tropical mould, giving to the whole vastness of the structure the gaunt magnificence of an ancient ruin. The interior, showing similar signs of decay, is full of the incongruities and misunderstandings born out of a fusion of alien cultures. The materials combine African and Mediterranean elements – local coral and mortar for the walls, and twelve marble pillars at the rear of the nave which were shipped here from Europe and so confused the local builders that they were erected upside down. The apse strives for further classical effect, raised on a marble floor and lined behind the high altar by a ring of seats carved in African style from local wood.

Beneath a slab between the altar and seats lies the cathedral’s builder and first bishop, Edward Steere. Above all, though, the place is a monument, and an apt one, to David Livingstone – big, flawed and craggily grand. As building began on Christmas Day in 1873, the missionary-explorer’s embalmed body was being borne down to the coast by his companions, Chuma and Susi, on his most famous journey of all. The arrival of this touching little cortège in Zanzibar three months later captured the British public’s imagination as no single act had during Livingstone’s lifetime. On a pillar at the entrance to the sanctuary is a symbolic relic which encapsulates the whole episode, a crucifix made from the tree at Chitambo in Zambia under which his servants buried Livingstone’s heart.

His work as a missionary had been a hopeless failure, but Livingstone’s mission in the grander sense was complete. A month before his death, the Sultan of Zanzibar had submitted to pressure and signed a decree abolishing the slave trade in his dominions. Christ Church Cathedral, named after St Augustine’s first cathedral in England, arose on the site of the old slave market. The altar was on the spot where once the whipping-post stood.

The service began with gusto, Rock of Ages sung in Swahili. The sermon that followed was barely audible. At an English parish church it tends to be the other way round – congregations singing softly, vicars talking loudly. Here the hymns are fortissimo throughout, unaccompanied but instinctively reaching for three-part harmony. Women and children sit on the left of the aisle in bright print frocks that challenge the sombre interior. Men and the older boys sit on the right. All efforts to break down this custom from the Islamic past have failed but neither side has any other inhibitions. They come and go, the well-off clattering noisily on leather-soled shoes, the humble passing soundlessly on bare feet.

Afterwards, a young man named Denis asked if I had found the old slave cells below my room. He guided me down steps descending from the courtyard of St Monica’s to a subterranean chamber. We had to duck low to enter, and once inside remained in a crouch. In the dark I could just make out a cavern about 30 feet long and 12 feet wide. On either side was a raised ledge on which slaves had lain, chained to the wall. The clearance between ledge and ceiling was less than 2 feet. I tried to clamber on to a ledge but was almost physically repulsed by claustrophobia.

Crouching and breathing heavily, I was struck by a thought obvious but compelling. The profligacy of the slavers was one of the puzzles of the ™ like the ships on which the slaves were transported, this chamber created conditions so atrocious that their mere survival was a wonder. But what if the suffering was not incidental, was instead intrinsic to a design intended to crush those it did not kill? The slavers’ reckless disregard for their merchandise made a perverse sense only if their ultimate concern was to extinguish the last flicker of the human spirit.

We are not used to coming across such crucibles of suffering intact. This death chamber of innumerable souls lies directly beneath the spot where I lie, under a mosquito net and a lazily turning fan.

‘WHAT YOU HAVE to remember about Zanzibar,’ said the Deputy Chief Justice, ‘is that it might be Africa, but it is not of Africa. Persian, Arab, Indian – even British to some extent – but it is not African.’

After just a few hours, I could see what he meant. That morning I had walked the mile or so to Dar es Salaam harbour, hefting the unfamiliar weight of the rucksack and already regretting bringing so many books. Dar was raw African metropolis, raucous, ramshackle. On seething streets lined by general stores offering cheap, gaudy trifles, traffic was reduced to a boiling gridlock. Sweating and floundering along, I nevertheless felt a momentary sense of liberation for having foresworn a taxi. Now, ferried less than thirty miles out into the Indian Ocean, I was brought to the Orient.

Zanzibar belonged in that realm of the traveller’s imagination occupied by phantasms, a destination from an opium dream. From a childhood stamp collection, that most potent of geographical stimulants, I recalled images of minarets and dhows, and bearded, turbaned potentates. To this world, the British were merely the last, and least tenacious, of the imperial powers to be carried on the trade winds.

The east coast was known to the geographers of Greece and Rome, most notably Ptolemy whose Geography referred to the region as Azania. Arab travellers called it Zenj, and were the first to explore it, al-Masudi in the tenth century, and the great ibn-Batuta on his voyage from Aden to Kilwa around 1330. The Shirazis brought the religion of Arabia and the culture of Persia. Reaching out across the Indian Ocean, they linked Africa with India, China and the Malay peninsula, trading slaves and ivory for glass and porcelain. The Portuguese came and went. Then, under the Omani sultans, Zanzibar entered its pomp.

No longer now did the traveller come to Zanzibar by dhow. These majestic and sinuous craft, the great jehazi of the Gulf trade and the cheeky little mashua plying the inshore waters, their lateens scything the sky like the crescent of Islam, were going the way of the transatlantic liner. Busy harbourside kiosks below the Lutheran church in Dar sold passage by motorised ferries which swept the visitor out to Zanzibar in hours.

At first sight the fabled shoreline was also disappointingly prosaic. Imagination prepared the visitor for a scent of cloves and ambergris coming off the sea, and a Sultan’s palace – bombarded by the British in 1896 in the briefest of all colonial conflicts – worthy of the name. The old Stone Town sat at the water’s edge, white and flat, just a few stubby minarets rising above the line of red-tile roofs. The harbour, once teeming with dhows, was deserted.

Feigning deafness to the imprecations of porters and hotel touts, I struck out towards the heart of the old quarter. Along Creek Road, lined with mango trees, the town sprang to life. At the market a crowd was gathered around a very large dead shark. Children gazed, transfixed, while men in skull caps negotiated noisily for cuts from the leviathan; even the flies seemed to abandon salted fish drying pungently in the sun for this new attraction.

Down in the Stone Town, alleys wandered among high lattice balconies. Along these narrow lanes, domestic and community life merged. Children tumbled from doors at the feet of a passer-by. Women gossiped from behind bright veils. Mysteries and intrigue seemed to lurk among the maze of lanes, although the reality was that in this intimate jumble no household could retain its secrets.

The Deputy Chief Justice’s house lay along one of the alleys. From Wolfgang Dourado’s door hung the emblem of Amnesty International, as though it were a crucifix to ward off evil. Dourado, indeed, was a Catholic of Goanese descent, but the cool, darkened living-room that lay beyond the door was furnished in the Arab manner.

‘So you’re an Aussie, eh?’ he said. Before I could correct him he went on, ‘in that case you’ll want a beer.’ He returned with an icy can. I gulped gratefully and in the hope of being offered another decided against correcting the misunderstanding.

He was a tiny bobbing figure with a high-pitched voice and a gleam in his eye, one of that breed of combative lawyers with their origins in the Indian subcontinent, who have devoted themselves in Britain’s ex-colonies to a good scrap and free speech with almost equal relish. For a member of the bench his pronouncements on his political masters were startlingly injudicious. ‘Nyerere? That bastard. Never liked him – utter hypocrite. Karume was another matter. A peasant and a madman, but with a humane side. I pray for his soul but I fear he’s sizzling like a kebab these days.’

Dourado had known both embrace and rejection by the British. On a legal scholarship in London, he learnt to love the collegiate rituals and stimulus, but was quickly reminded on his return that the same people who had invited him to their homes in London would not be seen with him socially in Zanzibar. ‘The thing about the Brits was that they had a good eye for the best sites. Where there was a good view, there you’d find the British club. Our clubs had to be tucked away. We found it baffling because in Goa, the Portuguese assimilated. One never knew what the Brits were afraid of – did they really think we might roger their wives?’ His eyes gleamed wickedly at this subversive thought.

‘More beer? Forgive me if I don’t join you, I’m getting over a bout of malaria.’

Other racial currents had drifted around the island. Under Omani Arab rule for centuries and a British protectorate for seventy years, Zanzibar was infiltrated in the last years of British control by mainlanders hungry for the island’s prosperity. In 1964, within months of independence, an Africanist revolution saw the eclipse of the Arabs. The Sultan fled and thousands of Arabs and Asians were massacred. Zanzibar was united politically with the mainland.

Nyerere’s attempts to graft socialism onto an island culture rooted in enterprise were doomed. Dourado, then attorney-general and one of nature’s Tories – ‘absolutely dyed in the wool, old chap’ – spoke out against the union and was first flogged, then detained. ‘Three months, fifteen days. Not very long, but vile conditions. After I came out I said I would rather have been detained in South Africa.’ He paused, then added with profound satisfaction: ‘That really got up Nyerere’s nose.’

For the time being, he was riding high again. ‘I’m writing my memoirs. I think I’ll call them From Cell to Bench.’ He crowed delightedly. ‘Boy, I’m a cocky bastard.’

BLACK IVORY WAS intrinsic to Zanzibar’s rise. For centuries the rival Arab and Portuguese slaving empires maintained their strongholds along the coast, at Kilwa and Mombasa. Then in 1832, left supreme by the eclipse of the Portuguese, Seyyid Said, the Sultan of Oman, moved his seat from Muscat to Zanzibar. He had no territorial ambitions on the interior; his aim was simply to make the island the hub of a commercial network based on slavery. Within a few years, 40,000 slaves were being sold at Zanzibar’s market annually.

Said was a man of high intelligence, but prosperity evidently stimulated no yearning in him or his successors to emulate the achievements of Arab and Persian culture. The town that grew up at the ocean’s edge was functional rather than imaginative, with mosques as sturdy and unadorned as Said’s fortress down by the harbour. Zanzibar’s sole concession to the aesthetic traditions of Isfahan and Damascus were the ornately carved wooden doors of the merchants’ houses.

Then, in December 1856, two British officers arrived on a sloop borne down from Bombay by the south-west monsoon. Richard Burton and John Speke were the first of a new wave of visitors to Zanzibar. From the quest for the Nile’s source flowed everything else – the mission to Uganda, the opening up of East Africa and in due course the settlement of Kenya. Speke and Burton’s expedition to the Great Lakes and, that same year, Livingstone’s clarion call to the students of Oxford and Cambridge which summoned a generation to service in Africa – these were the first steps in the ‘Scramble’ for Africa itself.

Burton was in the full flush of his early brilliance and, in the six months he and Speke spent preparing for their journey, acquired enough information for a two-volume study of Zanzibar. His fascination with Islamic culture, and with matters outlandish or lubricious, had been kindled on army service in Sind and travels in Egypt, Arabia and Somaliland. Yet even he found Zanzibar strong meat. The port was ‘a filthy labyrinth, a capricious arabesque of disorderly lanes, and alleys, and impasses, here broad, there narrow; now heaped with offal, then choked with ruins’. Of local sexual practices he was even more disapproving: gonorrhea was ‘so common it is hardly considered a disease’; the Arabs were ‘weak, effeminate and degenerate’ due to ‘excessive polygamy and unbridled licentiousness’.

Burton had been fired some years before by the talk of a German missionary, Johann Krapf, at Shepherd’s Hotel in Cairo. Little more was known of the African interior at this time than had been advanced by Ptolemy 1,700 years earlier in a map showing the Nile taking its rise in two great lakes watered by the Lunae Montes, the Mountains of the Moon. From Krapf, the Englishman heard about a snow-capped mountain far inland, virtually on the Equator. Now, doing his rounds among the Zanzibari traders, he was given similar accounts and also of a great lake lying at the end of the main caravan route to the interior.

Many others were to be drawn to Zanzibar, which became the starting-point for all subsequent exploration. Livingstone made his first visit in 1866 when entering the lists to find the Nile; the newspaperman, Henry Stanley, followed five years later to find Livingstone, and again in 1887 to find Emin Pasha; the missionary, Alexander Mackay, passed through in 1877 on his way to find souls to save in Uganda, and was even more mortified than Burton: ‘Zanzibar is an island no greater than a county of Scotland but as great in crime as the Babylon of the Apocalypse’, he declared fervently; above all, perhaps, there was Sir John Kirk, the British Resident in Zanzibar.

Kirk was one of Livingstone’s acolytes, a member of his Zambezi expedition who had been shattered by what he had seen of slavery. From the whitewashed and shuttered British consulate beside the Sultan’s palace, Kirk worked to advance Livingstone’s mission to eradicate the trade and replace it with the three Cs of Christianity, commerce and civilisation. It was Kirk who issued the Sultan with an ultimatum to close the slave market. And when Susi and Chuma brought Livingstone’s body back from Chitambo, Kirk was there to receive it, and carry it back to triumphant burial in Westminster Abbey.

So many spirits to be found, then, in Burton’s arabesque of disorderly lanes. But how remote they now seemed. Zanzibar’s old buildings suffered a fate common in rundown but historic places discovered by tourism: structures not terminally dilapidated were being hastily done up and turned into hotels. Kirk’s consulate had become the headquarters of a state corporation. The Beit el-Ajab, or House of Wonders, the first palace of the sultans, was occupied by the ruling party.

The ghosts of a later era lingered in another crumbling pile. Africa House Hotel used to be the English Club, a Zanzibari mansion in traditional style. A pair of cannons at the door led to a broad staircase from which a moth-eaten buffalo head glowered down and which led to a balcony overlooking the sea. Forty years earlier, men in khaki and white duck loitered here over clinking glasses as the sun set. The sight was just as spectacular now and by late afternoon the balcony was congested with tourists. As the pyrotechnics of a sunburst unfolded and the Indian Ocean turned from gold to black, the crowd fell silent. It was as Wolfgang Dourado said: the British always had a good eye for the best sites.

‘I COULD TAKE you on the motorcycle,’ Canon David said brightly.

It was not an option I had considered. Canon David, as his congregants called him, was the vicar of Zanzibar, a missionary priest from Wiltshire in his mid-seventies who had some difficulty ascending to the pulpit. The question of how I might get to the village of the freed slaves had not entailed being his passenger on two wheels.

The machine was Chinese-made and as noisy as a new year firework show in Shanghai. Canon David manoeuvred it into position like a maribou stork caught astride a fence. Climbing on to the pillion, I realised that neither of us had a helmet. The first test was infiltrating the traffic on Creek Road. Matatu taxis, scooters and buses flew in either direction. We lurched out, Canon David sounding his hooter in admonition. Astonishingly, as if realising that he was not to be trifled with, the traffic parted. As we proceeded, he waved airily about him while steering with one hand and providing a running commentary over his shoulder. ‘Old cricket ground,’ he shouted, pointing towards an overgrown maidan set about with orange-blooming spithoedea trees. ‘State house – used to be the governor’s residence.’ Groves of mango trees and coconut palms flashed past until our hectic pace slowed at the village of Mbweni. Canon David dropped me and wobbled jauntily off on his rounds. I walked down a path to St John’s.

At first it seemed too English a scene for pathos: a small country church, more appropriate to a parish in the shires. But the red roof was corrugated iron, the square bell tower had been weathered to grey-black and the wooden door was carved in the florid Zanzibari style. The churchyard was a sunbaked square of dirt surrounded by a jungle of palm trees. Here Caroline Thackeray and her ladies were buried.

The venture had begun with all the absolute certainty and high-mindedness of the Victorian church. In 1871, the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, the body formed in response to Livingstone’s appeal, bought thirty acres of land from the Sultan, five miles or so from the town. It was a tranquil spot, set against the background of a milky opal sea. There was an air of the retreat about the place and both the Sultan and Kirk maintained country residences here. The first freed slaves were brought to Mbweni in February 1874. Bishop Edward Steere wrote thankfully: ‘We begin our village with seven men and fifteen women.’

This new colony grew rapidly as Royal Navy vessels continued to trawl the coastal waters for illicit slavers and frequently intercepted dhows bound for Muscat. Two years later Steere baptised eight couples, Mbweni’s first converts. An even more ambitious project was in hand. Soon afterwards he set off for the Yao country, 400 miles inland, with a party of thirty-one men, twenty-one women and two children, to restore those plucked by the slavers from Africa to their own. Meanwhile, Caroline Thackeray, East Africa’s first woman missionary, arrived as a teacher at Mbweni’s school.

Caroline was a cousin of the author, William Makepeace Thackeray, and one of those indomitable spinsters of Empire who, with level gaze and firm chin, set out for corners of the world of which they had no comprehension, if not blithely, then at least with conviction. She found the makings of a model community. Steere recorded Mbweni’s progress, ‘a village free and independent, the houses all numbered on little plates of tin in green paint, and the shop stands at the cross-roads’. Soon he was expressing appreciation for Caroline’s success at ‘making the adults and the girls into real Christians’.

She stayed for the rest of her life and by the time she died was the grand dame of the British community, a formidable figure who, though she might have inspired little love, had yet found a purpose and her place in the world. She was steely to the last, even her grave in the parched patch at St John’s betraying no hint of emotion: ‘For 48 years a member of the UMCA. Died Jan 30, 1926.’ Beside her are two young assistants whose deaths from fever are recorded even more dispassionately: ‘Alice Marion Gay, Fell asleep, January 19, 1894’ and ‘Eleanor Mary Barnett, Jan. 8, 1856 – May 16, 1893.’