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

A short way off, the crumbling walls of the school told their own tale of ruin: a stone stairway overgrown by weeds; stucco cracked and peeling from walls sloping drunkenly askew; passageways to classrooms now open to the sky and piled high with rubble. All that high endeavour, hope and self-sacrifice come to this – a picturesque ruin at the edge of the Indian Ocean, a dilapidated church and three lonely graves.

I dismissed these melancholy thoughts. After all, the fact that the colony had dispersed indicated that Caroline and her ladies had succeeded in equipping the slaves’ descendants for reintegration into the world. That, surely, was no small legacy. In fact, it was only later, when I came across the accounts by Steere’s successor, Frank Weston, that the full extent of Mbweni’s failure became apparent.

Weston arrived in 1908, a very different character from his predecessor. Where Steere was imperious, Weston was diffident. While Steere offered authoritarian leadership, Weston sought to involve Africans in decision-making. It was not long before old hands, and most notably Caroline, were comparing the new bishop unfavourably with Steere. The truth is that Weston was an unusually far-sighted and astute man and had quickly comprehended Mbweni’s real problem. The place looked charming with its well-kept roads, coconut plantations and neat houses; but the forcefulness of the mission leadership, far from equipping its dependants to live beyond its boundaries, had institutionalised them. Left to their own devices, they lacked initiative and motivation. Moreover, proselytising had made little impact. Far from being Christians, most of Mbweni’s inhabitants had reverted to the practice of witchcraft.

Weston tried to confront the challenge. When a woman was accused of leading a devil-worshipping cult of ghouls who dug up the bodies of Christians to eat them, he arranged to have one of her supposed victims exhumed. The body, a child’s, was found intact. Weston put it on show to demonstrate the woman’s innocence. The villagers were unconvinced. Weston himself had cast a spell over the body to restore it, they said. The failure was heart-breaking. ‘Of all workers, none, I think, need so much sympathy as those who work at Mbweni,’ he wrote.

Though painful, the lesson was valuable. The settlement had been an artificial creation and there could be no real community where there were no elders, no social traditions and no sense of common origin. Unusually for a missionary, Weston recognised that for Africans to benefit from European influence, rather than be damaged by it, the institutions of tribe, family and custom needed to be nurtured, not destroyed. But his was a lonely voice and it was, in any event, too late for Mbweni.

I walked back past the church, up the dirt road and at the end found a wooden kiosk. A few men stood around with soft drinks. They paused to greet the mzungu, curious, friendly. I motioned down the road. Did anyone go to the church any more? They shook their heads. ‘People here are Muslims,’ said one.

It was a pretty irony: the slave masters’ faith had endured better than that of their liberators.

I ASKED MY new friend Denis about witchcraft. He nodded enthusiastically. ‘We have many witches,’ he said. ‘Like Pepo Bawa.’

Pepo Bawa was a creature of Pemba, an island twenty-five miles north of Zanzibar and a place even more notorious than Mbweni as a nest of the black arts. Sorcerers from all over central Africa visited Pemba to refine their skills, while the victims of their spells came to be exorcised. Cannibalism, as a form of demonic ritual, persisted; babies were sometimes killed because they cut their top teeth before the bottom ones and were therefore thought to be possessed. It was not only Africans who feared the doings on Pemba. As recently as the 1950s, the Universities Mission to Central Africa published a cautionary booklet by Eleanor Voules, who lived for twenty-five years on the island, in which she related dispassionately accounts of possession and power which she believed to be authentically demonic. When I mentioned Pemba to Canon David, he all but shuddered. ‘A dreadful influence,’ he muttered.

The origins of Pepo Bawa, like accounts of its manifestations, had many versions. According to the most common, however, it was a demon which had taken the form of a fruit bat and tormented the people of Pemba until a powerful spirit medium cast it out and Pepo Bawa crossed the sea to Zanzibar. For years the island had been afflicted. Sometimes the demon was an invisible presence, a malign force which terrorised individuals. Often its victims, both men and women, reported being seized in an embrace and then sexually violated. In some instances, entire neighbourhoods had been reduced to hysteria and although Pepo Bawa had not been active for some months now, and was thought to have moved to the mainland, Denis said most people expected it to return.

We were sitting on the balcony of the Africa House. Denis intrigued me, for although he evidently had no doubts about Pepo Bawa’s existence, he evinced none of the fear which he described with such relish. ‘That is because I am a Christian,’ he said proudly. He looked round. ‘But you can speak to my friend.’ And he called out to another youth.

The young man walked over smiling. Denis motioned to me. ‘Tell him about when Pepo Bawa came to you,’ he said. The smile was dashed, and it appeared to me that the young man’s face actually went from a healthy shiny brown to grey. He shook his head sickly. We offered him a drink but he was clearly shaken and soon left.

Demons apart, Zanzibar appeared to be in something of a spiritual ferment. Christians and Muslims were engaged in a battle for souls and an assertive new breed of missionary had arrived on the island. At St Monica’s, I encountered Frank, a blazing-eyed evangelist from Kent who declared that if only Christians realised the power they had within them, the Gospel would sweep the world. Among his acolytes was a tall Swahili youth of striking presence who had recently been baptised and christened Zephaniah. Born into a Muslim family, Zephaniah had become an outcast, forced to take sanctuary at the cathedral.

Denis interpreted: ‘He says he will stay in Zanzibar to make converts. But there is danger. He has been stoned.’

‘Stoned?’

‘Four times. When preaching. But the Bible tells us this is not a new thing.’

Between Denis and Frank, there was no lack of fervour to see Zephaniah achieve martyrdom. Only Canon David appeared to regard the competition for converts with misgivings. David Bartlett and his wife, Marion, were missionaries of the old school with more than ninety years in Africa between them, he as priest, she as a surgeon. A frail, shy woman also well into her seventies, Marion’s contribution to African well-being was in fact the more tangible. When polio was still a dreaded disease, she had been the only surgeon in the bush performing a relatively simple operation to release contracted leg tendons in children. Many Tanzanians were only able to walk because of the skills of this small, unassuming woman. Yet with their simple devotion and faith, the Bartletts had become almost anachronisms.

They had retired once, to the West Riding of Yorkshire, until receiving an appeal to return for one last spell of service in Africa. ‘The people were ever so nice,’ Marion said. ‘But one hated the supermarkets.’

I TOOK MY leave of Zanzibar seated on the balcony of the Sultan’s palace, cooled by a breeze coming off the harbour below. It was called the People’s Palace now, a monument to the revolution, but few among the masses appeared interested in coming to gaze on the decadence of the past. There were more ghosts than visitors and that afternoon I had the place, in all its mournful tawdriness, to myself.

In 1964, as the revolutionaries stormed through the alleys of Stone Town, the last of the Omani sultans, the amiable Khalifa II, fled to his yacht out in the bay and escaped to Mombasa, and thence to exile in Bournemouth. The sultans had long since ceded their authority to Britain and, since the declaration of a protectorate over Zanzibar in 1890, had withdrawn to the shadows to enjoy the grace and favour of imperial servitude. They welcomed the pomp bestowed by an avuncular colonial regime, presenting themselves on ceremonial occasions in robes encrusted with CBEs, KCMGs and even, in the case of Khalifa, a GCMG, as well as lesser gewgaws and Omani daggers. Year had succeeded year in what a biographer of another contemporary monarch, George V, described as ‘benign verisimilitude’.

Most spirited of the lot was not a sultan, but a princess. Salme, a sister of Sultan Bargash, eloped with the local German agent and lived the rest of her life in Jena as his wife with the name Emily Ruete, bearing him numerous offspring. She died in 1924, having written poignantly about her double life. Her apartment aside, the mood of the palace was glum. One of Bargash’s favourite objects, a large grandfather clock, tolled ponderously beside a life-size oil painting of Sultan Hamid KCMG. The furniture was ornate, heavy, the antithesis of the Arab design virtues of lightness and simplicity. Most depressing of all were the Sultan’s living quarters, where a fine writing desk and chest stood beside a formica wardrobe and a cheap black dressing-table with chipped and peeling lacquer. Here the unmanned monarchs lay abed at night, listening to the Indian Ocean lapping among the dhows, all power and vigour gone.

The balcony, at least, was a grander theatre of Zanzibar’s decay. A polished blue sea slid away to three small islands glittering green and white. Down at the waterside palm trees brushed the whitewashed fortifications of the palace and the road curled past the honeyed walls of the Beit el-Ajab. For a moment it was possible to imagine the great jehazi down from Arabia, the clamour in the harbour as they were loaded with cloves and ivory, the whisper of the south-west monsoons; and to recall the words of James Elroy Flecker …

I have seen old ships sail like swans asleep

Beyond the village which men still call Tyre …

2. The Coast (#ulink_5dcd1caa-6d7e-5f8b-a34e-cb638ca0d182)

BAGAMOYO, THEY CALLED IT, which in Swahili means ‘lay down your heart’. The town, a dishevelled ruin of slow loveliness, lies at the beginning of the 800-mile Arab trade route to the Great Lakes. This was the terminus from which caravans set out for the interior, and where the returning journey ended before the crossing to Zanzibar. Lay down your heart, said the grateful porters, returned to family and home after months, years, away in the perilous interior. But the words might as easily have been spoken by the millions who passed here in chains, pausing perhaps to look back for the last time on their native land before the voyage into bondage.

A whitewashed plaque marked the place where the Nile quest began in earnest: ‘On 25 June 1857 Burton and Speke set out from near this site on their expedition to Lake Tanganyika.’ Having been brought across from Zanzibar in the Sultan’s corvette Artemise, with the consul Hamerton who came to bid them farewell, the Nile explorers haggled in the bazaar of Bagamoyo to find porters before a party of 132 set out on the march westwards into the fearful green void. Twenty-one months were to elapse before Burton and Speke saw the sea again, and by that time the seeds of a famous enmity, and a celebrated geographical feud, had been sowed.

The plaque was among the better preserved of Bagamoyo’s structures. A dirt road carved through a town composed of buildings similar to those of Zanzibar, but whereas the island’s flourishing tourist industry had led to a good deal of restoration, Bagamoyo was a forgotten backwater, overgrown with weeds and lichen. The avenues of spithoedea trees planted during colonial times held the crumbling town in an embrace of green foliage and flaming orange blossom. Among the old houses left standing, the carved doors were splintered and awry and the great latticed balconies sagged like drunks.

Most of these derelict hulks were not even inhabited. In its heyday Bagamoyo’s population had numbered about 5,000, including the Indian trader Sewa Haji, who built an empire on supplying the caravans and endowed Bagamoyo with fine buildings like the Customs House. There followed the Germans who built the fortress and Liku House, the old administration block. Now the Indians and Germans were gone and their old quarters were abandoned. Such profligacy is rare in Africa where squatters are apt to take up neglected property but here the Swahili folk preferred their own rudimentary huts.

I walked down the dirt road, grandly named India Street, to Liku House. It was another picturesque ruin, whitewash streaked with green mould, the shuttered windows hanging, broken and skewed, from their moorings. There was no plaque, but there could have been for Liku had a piquant place in the footnotes of imperial history. In December 1889, Henry Stanley – who had come a long way since finding Livingstone thirteen years before – emerged at Bagamoyo from the interior with a new prize. Emin Pasha was a protégé of General Gordon who made him governor of Equatoria in southern Sudan. After Gordon’s murder in Khartoum in 1885 during the Mahdist uprising, a campaign was raised to rescue his gallant lieutenant, cut off in the south. Nothing would do but that this enterprise should be led by Stanley, whose implacable resolve had earned him the African sobriquet, Bula Matari, or ‘Smasher of Rocks’.

In fact, Emin had no great need of rescue and was reluctant to leave. He was, indeed, one of nature’s ditherers; a slight, scholarly figure in glasses and fez, he could never decide whether he was Turkish or Egyptian, though he was actually born Eduard Schnitzer, a German Jew. Stanley, however, was not a man to be denied, still less after a hellish forced march through the Ituri rain-forest of the Congo in which he had lost two-thirds of his men to disease and desertion. So, after months of wriggling, Emin consented to leave and was finally brought to Bagamoyo as the last and most costly of the journalist/explorer’s great scoops. Crossing Africa from west to east had taken almost three years and cost more than 200 lives.

Once in Bagamoyo, at Liku House, a celebratory banquet was held in an upstairs room. After years of privation, there was to be no stinting and a German chef produced a feast of seafood, roasts and champagne. In the streets below, the Zanzibari porters held their own revels with drumming and dancing. Emin, having decided at last that he was pleased to have been rescued, gave a speech of thanks. Then he disappeared from the room. Some time later he was found lying outside in a pool of blood. Always shortsighted, he had fallen from the balcony in the dark and now, it appeared, was critically injured with a fractured skull.

Emin recovered in due course and promptly returned to the African interior, this time as an agent of the Kaiser, only to have his throat cut by Arab traders. It was a bleakly appropriate end for a man hailed in his lifetime as a mystic and an enigma but whose life in truth was more black farce than riddle. Beside the ruin of Liku House, a giant spithoedea tree shrouded the spot where he fell. The banquet room was silent and bare.

The German fortress had stood the test of time better. In the courtyard four young men sat around listlessly. Even my feeble attempt at Swahili was enough to establish that they were not locals but, it turned out, visiting Zambians. ‘We are staying in this place,’ said one, gesturing at the deserted fortress.

I commiserated. It was in better shape than most places in Bagamoyo but not much and now, on a weekend, there seemed little in town to divert four young men. They nodded in mournful agreement.

‘We are here on a United Nations course,’ the same man explained. ‘We have come to learn about preserving our historic buildings.’

Was it my imagination, or did I detect a hint of mockery here? I had spent some time in Zambia and had never thought of it as having a great deal to preserve.

‘You mean like the museum at Livingstone?’

‘Ah, you know our country. No, not Livingstone, Lusaka.’

‘State House,’ said another of them. They giggled.

I had not been wrong. Here, indeed, was irony.

‘The Pamodzi,’ put in a third, in a reference to the capital’s top hotel, a bit of modern grotesquerie. They nudged each other and chortled. This was a routine.

‘Cairo Road’ – Lusaka’s grossly rundown main thoroughfare. They hooted.

‘The bus station’ – perhaps the most blighted on the continent. They roared.

‘And … and …’ the first picked up the thread again, ‘and we are learning about preserving this heritage …’ he struggled to control himself, ‘… in Bagamoyo.’

They shrieked.

We compared dates, but they were still to be in Bagamoyo when I expected to reach Lusaka. It was a big disappointment. I had not met ironic Zambians before.

I started back for town to catch the bus for Dar es Salaam, still savouring the encounter. The truth is, I had been feeling a bit apprehensive. The guidebook had prepared me for trouble in Bagamoyo. ‘[There is] a real possibility of being violently mugged,’ it said. ‘This can happen at any time of the night or day and your assailants will usually be armed with machetes which they won’t hesitate to use even if you don’t resist.’

Just when I was thinking my anxiety had been misplaced, there was a terrific thud to one side, as if from a rock falling from a great height. This was not far from the case. A coconut weighing perhaps 10 lb had dropped from the top of a palm tree and landed just a few feet away. If it had hit me, my skull would have been crushed. This was not as remote a possibility as it might have seemed. I had once read an intriguing item of trivia about some tropical paradise where the highest incidence of accidental death was due to falling coconuts.

Suddenly, an urchin was flying across my path towards the fallen object, an expression of fixed intent on his face. Too late. A young woman on the other side of the road was already swooping. She collected up her prize, chirruping delightedly, and bore it off. The urchin grimaced, then noticed me watching and grinned.