The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War

As a boy I looked at the faces of my grandfathers and grandmothers, and in those eyes staring back at me through fading paint and sepia I observed a common determination. They were from a tribe absorbed by loyal duty, like my soldier forefather who, starving in the 1688—9 Catholic siege of Londonderry, held off eating his last tallow candle in order to use it to seal his military dispatches. We were indigo planters along the Ganges at the time of the Indian Mutiny. We fled for our lives down the river, but sailed into an ambush on the banks. In a hail of musket fire, the women and children threw themselves into the flood because they preferred to drown than be captured by their ‘inhuman enemies’. Between the Indian Mutiny and the Boer War, Britain fought twenty-nine small colonial wars from Ashanti to the Boxer Rebellion in China. My family fought and perished in a great many of them. One warrior sums up all of them. He was great-great-grandfather Colonel William Temple, who fought against the Maoris in New Zealand. In 1863, during the Waikato War on North Island, Temple won a Victoria Cross, the empire’s highest military decoration for courage. This was in recognition of his bravery while tending his wounded comrades under a hail of intense fire from the ramparts of Rangiriri Pa, a fort of the tattooed Maori rebels. Temple married the magnificent-looking Theodosia, daughter of Major-General T. R. Mould, governor of New Zealand, and she bore him twelve children. Much later, in India, my great-grandfather Gerhardt L’Honneur Sanders, who was to fight in the Boer War siege of Ladysmith, asked Temple’s permission to marry my great-grandmother Mabel. The ageing colonel, all braid and waxed moustaches, expressed his consent by declaring, ‘Better for her to be your widow than my unwed daughter!’

Our women certainly led hard lives. At Mabel’s wedding, her seventeen-year-old sister Ethel was one of the bridesmaids. Ethel caught the eye of the best man, another army officer named Beames. Beames was a friend of Rudyard Kipling, who based The Story of the Gadsbys, his 1899 Indian ‘tale without a plot’, on their courtship. They married and emigrated to Canada, where they became pioneers. Beames turned to drink, abandoning Ethel to raise three children in a remote log cabin. One of her sons grew up to become a sculptor and moved to the United States, where one of his commissions was a monument to the American Indian wars that stands in Washington. My grandfather Colonel Reginald Sanders proposed to my grandmother Eileen after meeting her on home leave at a piano recital before returning to duty in India. By the time her ship arrived in Bombay she had forgotten what he looked like. They met up somehow and married within hours. He took her into the hills to his new married-officer’s quarters, carried her across the threshold and proudly asked her what she thought of it. She burst into tears.

When the colonial peoples had been conquered, we were the rulers, the civil servants, the collectors, the engineers, the planters. We added to the store of scientific knowledge and indulged our national obsession with the classification of nature. Professor James Sanders was a principal of Calcutta University, who died of fever on the ship home in 1871 and is buried in Gibraltar. Douglas Sanders discovered new butterfly species in the hills inland from Chittagong, and his lepidoptera collections can be found in the British Museum. Great-grandfather James Wise worked for the Crown Agents on Cecil Rhodes’s unrealized dream of the Cape-to-Cairo railway.

We fed the Great War and the Second World War too. Great-grandfather Pickard was a shipping magnate who lost his fortune to German U-boats. Great-uncle Bertram was an Indian civil servant, but he died in Flanders. Uncle Alfred Hartley fought at Jutland. Uncle Percy Hartley died in Mesopotamia. Yet another uncle survived the dysentery of that same campaign because, he believed, he had put his trust in a talisman given to him by an Arab friend. In the Second World War another one sank in the Hood. Uncle Mike was in Burma. Uncle Norman crashed his Spitfire fighter aircraft and was crippled for life. Noel was a member of the forces that liberated Belsen. Another was a POW of the Japanese and worked on the Burma railway.

In time, the peoples my ancestors ruled won us over to their ways and their nations became more of a home to us than England. Long before the hippies went in search of gurus, my great-uncle Claude acquired a Sikh master in India and founded a society in England to promote his teachings. My grandfather Colonel Sanders devoted forty years of his life to the 48th Dogras, Rajput regiment, and fought alongside his soldiers in the Northwest Frontier, in Aden and Palestine during the Great War, and finally against the Japanese. In photographs he appears in jodhpurs, always with a pipe sticking out of his mouth and a perfectly clipped moustache, painting a watercolour of distant hills, or standing, rifle in hand, with the ‘mugger’ crocodile he has just shot. When Grandpa retired from the Dogras in 1947, at India’s independence, he was bereft.

My mother loved India more than anywhere else. She was born in 1925 while my grandparents were on a shopping trip to Lahore. She spent the first week of her life wrapped in cotton wool. Her earliest memories are of waking up at dawn under a tree of blossoms in the garden, in which the family took refuge during an earthquake; of a house on a river, where at night, beyond the garden, jackals howled; eating chapattis in the ayah’s quarters; the sight that made her sad of Indians doubled up under the weight of the huge blocks of ice they carried to the European clubs, and of large, cool rooms with fans and cool drinks, regimental displays and wide, green lawns. Even after half a century in Africa, my mother still said, ‘Africa is nothing compared to India.’

As a boy I asked my mother why our great-grandpas and our great-grannies from families of Yorkshire farmers and Scottish doctors felt the need to leave home and travel all over the world.

‘Oh, to get out of the rain, dear,’ Mother replied.

After several centuries, our British Empire came to an end. Most of my tribe returned to where they had once come from. As a child I used to meet my British relatives on visits in England. We all loved ancient Aunt Connie, who had been married once but recalled little about her husband because it had been so long since he was killed in the First World War. Connie lived with Aunt Vi, a spinster and self-sufficiency enthusiast who kept sheep, a pack of Chihuahuas and fermented raspberry wine in bottles that exploded in her corridors. But most of the rosy-cheeked cousins I met at weddings and funerals were as strange to me as the country of Britain itself.

My parents were almost the only family members I knew who refused to go back to England. We who had been in India, the Far East, the Antipodes, the Americas and the South Sea islands stayed on where we had made our last landfall, in East Africa. Once the colonial rulers, our status was now simply that of an appendix to history: powerless, few in number, and, most of all, extremely happy to remain in exile.

Britain was known as ‘home’, yet for us it was a distant island, where after all these years it was still raining. It was almost entirely through BBC radio that we kept in touch with an idea of England, which was cleansed by the frequencies of short wave and my parents’ vaguely remembered sense of patriotism. England greeted us each dawn with the BBC World Service signature tune, ‘Lero Lero, Lilli-Burlero’. Wherever we were, Big Ben tolled the hour and Dad, doing his yoga while drinking his early morning tea, gazed out at our adopted landscape, at a rising desert sun, or at the fishermen punting their outrigger canoes into the surf.

At the centre of this world was my father. In my eyes, Dad was like an Old Testament patriarch. He was mightily handsome and strong. He had been in the sun so long that his legs, heads and arms were blackish brown, but underneath where he had worn his short-sleeved shirts and shorts his skin was still pale white. He was huge, leather-backed, barrel-chested, larger than mortal, with a large nose, big earlobes, hair of jet and on the cusp of sixty when my mother gave birth to me. I have a strong mental image of my father as I write this, as a man walking. He walked with big swinging strides. He had walked across entire lands in his day. As an old man he walked too, daily, stopping ever more frequently to survey the view. When he walked a natural euphoria came over him. That is all one can say. It made him happy. It made him remember all the other walks of his life, before cars and aircraft made us rush about and pollute the world. He looked around him and saw the beauty of the land, and saw that he was moving through it at the pace that he wanted, filling his lungs with air, greeting loudly the people he passed on his way.

He was a great storyteller, who came home in his dusty veldskoens with presents that spoke of his travels. He’d produce from his duffel bag a curved Afar dagger in a goatskin sheath, a wooden Somali camel bell, or a gold star brooch for my mother. I remember once he also came home with his Land Rover punctured by three bullet holes. When he slammed the car door and strode off for a cup of tea, I hung back and stuck my fingers into the gashed aluminium. The rare times I ever found Dad sitting down, I’d climb up on his lap and he’d enfold me with one brawny arm, Tusker beer cradled in his other hand. We could be out in the bush but even if we were in a city, the way Dad told a tale in his voice as deep as a drum made it seem as if we were around a campfire out under the stars, in a pool of light cast by flames and encircled by the darkness of a million square miles of imagination.

My paternal grandfather, John Joseph, grew up on the island of Islay, where the Scottish children called him a ‘Sassenach’. He married Daisy, from Queenstown in South Africa’s Cape. He worked as a government official and they settled in the Leicestershire village of Kegworth, in a rambling house called Claremont. My father was born at home on 31 July 1907. His earliest memories revolved around ordinary English village family life. Opposite Claremont was the church, where he used to steal pigeons’ eggs from the belfry. On Sundays the bells rang out ‘Nine Tailors Make a Man’. In the garden was an ancient mulberry tree, planted during the reign of Charles I, and an old pavement from the ruins of a Roman villa. At the bottom of the garden was the River Soar, where my father and his siblings learned to swim, sail and fish. England’s countryside was still quiet and motor cars were unknown. In summer, one could hear the corncrake and lapwings. Noise arrived only with the outbreak of the Great War, when my father heard the sound of marching boots and horse-drawn equipment echoing through the streets for days on end. He remembered cold winters at his grammar school in Loughborough, and frost-bitten potatoes for lunch. Each week a fresh list of names was added to a scroll of honour in the assembly room to commemorate the Old Boys killed on the Western Front. He saw zeppelins bombing Nottingham and once the horizon was illuminated by the explosions at Chilwell, a munitions factory where hundreds of women worked. He remembered an elderly spinster aunt’s only comment when she heard the detonation: ‘Oh, what is Cook doing in the kitchen?’ He was haunted by his memory of the faces of soldiers coming home from the war, still in their trench coats and shouldering their rifles.

Dad recalled later in life that he had not enjoyed school and focused his mind elsewhere, ‘in the woods and along the river’s reedy banks’. His one desire was to roam the countryside. In time he went to agricultural college, where horses were still used for haymaking, ploughing and haulage. He learned to stook sheaves of corn, and he built turnip clamps, cut and laid hedges, topped and tailed mangles, hoed root crops and went turd knocking. A new era in agriculture was beginning, however, and my father studied soil analysis, artificial fertilizers, hybrid improvements of crops and livestock, pesticides, chemicals and tractors and combine harvesters. In 1927 he was offered a Colonial Service scholarship to Oxford University.

At Oxford, my father said he learned there was more to the world than the ‘bullocks, sheep and crops’ of his childhood and he ‘talked of politics and everything under the sun’. He began to read about Africa and in Blackwell’s he bought a signed first edition of Sir Richard Burton’s First Footsteps in East Africa. After Oxford he went to study at the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture in St Augustine, on the island of Trinidad. When not studying cotton or coffee, he went out with his Creole friends shark fishing or iguana hunting. Until now, the only time he had gone abroad in his life was to France on a cycling tour. In Trinidad, he was fascinated by the mix of foreign races he encountered.

My father could have made his life in almost any part of the empire. Many of his generation went overseas, including his brother Ronald. I remember Uncle Ronald, a ukulele-playing, agricultural college principal in Fiji who had his singing Bulgarian wife shave him before he turned out of bed each morning. At college in Trinidad, notices went up offering jobs in everything from rubber in Malaya and tea planting in Ceylon to ranching in Australia. My father chose Africa because of his mother, Daisy, who told him stories of life in the Cape in the nineteenth century and remembered trekking across the veld in an ox wagon when she was still a little girl. My father was also inspired to live overseas by his paternal uncle Ernest, whom he loved. Ernest was a businessman in India, a keen sportsman and a raffish character with a great sense of humour, whose daughter grew up to become the actress Vivien Leigh. During the summer of 1928, Ernest and his wife Gertrude leased the house of the Earl of Mayo in Galway and Dad went to join them for a summer’s fishing. He fell a little in love with the precocious, adolescent Vivien. ‘Everybody knew it,’ a gossipy aunt told me. She gave him a book of poems by Banjo Paterson, signed ‘To my favourite cousin, with love from Viv’. My father adored ‘The Man from Snowy River’ for the rest of his life.

On 10 October 1928 he received a letter from the secretary of state for the colonies. It gave news of his appointment as agricultural officer in the Tanganyika Territory and was signed, ‘I have the honour to be, Sir, your most obedient servant’. My father’s generation was from a new type of empire builders who were quite different from their predecessors. Before, the British in Africa had pursued an economy of simple extraction and it was as if they believed progress could not involve the mass of black people who lived in their colonies. Thin on the ground, we governed by the system of ‘indirect rule’, via traditional or appointed local chiefs. The surface of East Africa was barely disturbed at first. But in the years after the Great War, the British determined to ‘develop’ the colonies by ensnaring Africa’s native peoples in the modern world economy, at the less advantageous end to be sure, as growers of cash crops and payers of tax. This was the mission my father was asked to play a role in and, no doubt, at first he believed that it was a noble one, in which the destiny of Africa’s remote people would for their own benefit at last be joined with that of the outside world.

I have an early memory from home. In the dead of night I am blasted awake by an otherworldly sound. The ocean tide is a distant roar beyond the reef. The house is silent. I call out, and my mother comes into my bedroom. At breakfast next morning, we laugh about the nocturnal disturbance. Dad tells me it was the shout of a honey badger startled by the lights on the veranda. For days and years, I wondered, ‘Do honey badgers make that noise?’ But I have always known that it was my father.

When my mother first met him, my father made his bed point east each night so that he rolled with the world headfirst as he slumbered. He had his ankles tied securely to his bed with strips of bandage, to prevent him from walking in his sleep. Once, in a desert village prone to earth tremors, he slept on the flat roof of a house to get the cool evening breeze. At the dead of night he leapt off the top, landing in the alley below and only woke up when he hit the ground. The villagers, believing Armageddon was upon them, cried out and prayed to Allah. He used to tuck his revolver under the pillow at bedtime during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya and when visiting Nairobi he would stay at my godfather Judge Birkett Rudd’s home. One night in the early hours the household was roused by gunfire. Dad was discovered standing, wide awake, peppered in ceiling plaster and staring at the pistol in his hand. In a bad month he had three or four nightmares. During such episodes he gained superhuman strength, enough to hurl himself through high windows. He threw hurricane lamps, tore mosquito nets to shreds, strode about and bellowed the way I had heard that night of the honey badger. He never hurt himself or anybody else. He’d leap clean over my mother as she slept without touching her. When she spoke to him he answered in a voice that was not his own, as if his unconscious body had been possessed. But she grew familiar with this other strange voice and knew that if she kept talking calmly to the sleepwalker, he would after some minutes climb back into the bed they shared. He used to then fall back into a deep sleep, and wake at dawn unaware of all his struggles in the night gone by.

My father began suffering nightmares soon after he came to Africa. I imagine him setting foot in Dar es Salaam in East Africa for the first time, the aromas of coffee, groundnuts, sesame, coconut oil and cloves wafting up from the dockside godowns. He had been loaded with piles of items from a Piccadilly tropical outfitters called Griffiths, MacCallister and Crook: solar topee, spine pad, tin bath, lavatory seat, potted shrimps, herring roes and a double-barrelled twelve-bore shotgun thrown in. He was twenty-two.

In Dar es Salaam, he boarded a train that chugged upcountry into the night, the steam locomotive spewing showers of sparks that illuminated the thick bush on either side. After two nights and a day they reached Lake Victoria, where my father’s predecessor was at the station to meet him. The official gave him a single sheet of paper of jotted notes describing what the job was all about and boarded the same train, which now returned to the coast. Dad was in charge of a district as large as Ireland and the only way to get around was on foot with porters, or by canoe, or on horseback. My father saw an Africa that was barbaric but at the same time noble, exotic and yet familiar to a young Englishman who had grown up among farmers, self-contained yet also worldly – and that Africa is now but a memory pulverized by history.

The local chief wore a crown of pangolin scales and lived in a palace complex of elaborate grass huts. His wives were adorned with copper bands and beads and their skin was cicatrized with zigzags, crescents and paisley whorls. The chieftain was protected by warriors armed with black-powder Tower muskets and spears, carved bows and well-feathered arrows, leather helmets encrusted with cowry shells and zebra manes, ornaments of glass beads and crocodile teeth. But war between neighbours was limited to defence, since it was believed that a leader would die if ever he crossed his own frontiers. True authority rested not in the temporal power of the chief but in the ancestors who resided inside an ornamental elephant’s tusk called the dawa, or medicine. A naked maiden carried the dawa ahead of the chief whenever he walked out and about. The king makers were the women, since legitimacy in the family line passed from mother to daughter, not father to son. The firstborn princess and heiress made a chief out of her husband when she married him. By these means the misrule of leaders never got out of hand. The younger daughters in the ruling families were considered illegitimate and became the mistresses of outsiders. My father learned all this because soon after he arrived in the country the outcast princess Binti Mwalimu appeared in his bed and stayed with him for seven years. The other whites said he had ‘gone native’, but not only did he not care about that, I think he liked it.

The peasants lived in constant struggle with nature: locusts, armyworm, crop-raiding elephants and baboons, drought, floods and disease. ‘I saw a long, dark, ragged cloud appearing,’ my father wrote of his first sighting of a locust swarm. ‘It seemed to wave and undulate and to my surprise it was coming closer at a fast pace. The great brown mass darkened the sky above me. I could hear the light, rustling sound of the flight of millions of insects and the sound they made as they collided…I remember seeing a whole valley filled with crops reduced to nothing within minutes. I saw an old man sitting in the middle of the remains of his sorghum field, which had been reduced to short stumps. The man had his head bowed and he was weeping. There would be no crop and no store of food for him that season. He was completely ruined.’

My father’s orders were to make Africans grow cotton. The cash crop was sold, with the prices from Liverpool cabled daily as a guide, and with this money the Africans became part of the wider world and paid their taxes to the government in Dar es Salaam. On the orders of the British the colonial chiefs’ overseers flogged Africans who refused to grow cotton. The commodity was so important that my father’s local nickname was Bwana Cotton. In time, he negotiated with a local chief to establish a research station breeding new cotton hybrids at a spot called Ukiriguru. This grew up into an institution that is famous in Africa today. The only problem at the time was that the land where the station was to be located was home to two hundred families who would have to be resettled elsewhere.

Dad set off to find a place where the families could be moved further along the southern lakeshore, intending to look on the shores between the Gulf of Emin Pasha and Speke Sound. For this journey the local chief lent my father his war canoe, crewed by sixteen paddlers who shovelled at the oily water and chanted ‘Kabule, kabule, keiga, kabule, kwa Majo pshagula, nizere! Tongaka, keiga, kabule, kwa majo: pshagula, nizere!’ ‘Wind, wind take me home to Mama, I’m coming! Go ahead wind and take me home to Mama, I’m coming!’ The spear-thin bowsprit, hung with feathery tassels and antelope horns, sliced through the water. The boat left a foaming white wake and skimmed ahead of hippo bulls that charged them under big bow waves. They passed islands ringed by flat rocks that shuddered as dozens of crocodiles that had been basking with their jaws open in the sun bolted and slithered into the depths.

The shores had once been populated, but they were now deserted. Coffee bushes grew as tall as trees and herds of feral goats wandered about. On the island of Zilagora they met a man dressed in motley rags and skins and carrying a black-powder Tower musket with a horn and shot satchel. He said some of his fellow villagers had been devoured by crocodiles waiting in the shallows to swipe at the victims with their tails, who they would then seize and drag back into the water.

The man also talked of an epidemic of sleeping sickness. This had wiped out almost the entire population along the shores of Lake Victoria after the Europeans opened up the heart of Africa and people began to migrate and clear forest land for cultivation. In his time even Dad contracted the sickness and was cured by an Indian vet in Mwanza who injected him with a Bayer drug for cattle.

East African numbers had already been weakened by the nineteenth-century Arab slave trade. With the Europeans also came sand flies, brought by the Portuguese from Brazil to the port of Luanda, which infected Africa’s soils with jigger worms that rotted the feet off the barefoot peasants. Colonial forces invading Sudan and Ethiopia imported cattle infected with rinderpest from the Black Sea and Arabia. The disease spread in a wave from the Horn to Southern Africa, destroying multitudes of cloven-hoofed animals in its path. Smallpox, syphilis and a battery of plagues from the outside world followed. The Africans who survived, decimated by famine, went to war over what resources remained. East Africa is dotted with monuments to the conflicts and pestilence of that time, such as the Rift Valley town of Eldoret, which means ‘the place of killing’. As the Europeans ventured further into the interior they discovered swathes of territory where few people survived. My ancestors beheld this scene and assumed that it had always been like this – with the Africans living in a benighted state of perpetual war, pestilence and famine. They decided the local people were incapable, childlike, vicious and primitive. The Nile explorer Samuel Baker complained there were ‘no ancient histories to charm the present with memories of the past; all is wild and brutal, hard and unfeeling’. Frederick Lugard, among the architects of imperialism in East Africa, claimed that on the cusp of the scramble into the continent, ‘Europe had failed to realize that throughout the length and breadth of Africa inter-tribal war was an ever present condition of native life, and that extermination and slavery were practised by African tribes upon each other’. And this view inevitably led to exhortations by men like Captain Ewart Grogan, a father of colonialism in East Africa, that ‘occupation of Africa with a view to sound colonization, that is, to fit the country as a future home for surplus population, is the obvious duty of the nations which form the vanguard of civilization…to make new markets and open up country for coming generations; to suffer temporary loss for the future benefit of overcrowded humanity’. And so my forebears confiscated this sparsely populated land for themselves and put its original inhabitants to work on it.