The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War

My father’s canoe party left the man on Zilagora. He refused to leave his island. ‘I will die here,’ he said. Some hours later my father’s canoe came ashore in the Gulf of Emin Pasha, where he engaged a train of porters and trekked inland. The imperial Germans had imposed their rule over this part of Africa by massacring and starving many thousands. The local BaZinza people told my father that the last Caucasian they had seen before him was an officer of the Schutztruppen who had ordered the village chief to be buried alive simply as a warning to others to behave. These people appeared unaware that the British had been their new rulers since Germany’s defeat in the Great War. Despite the ravages of disease little had altered the integrity of their culture for centuries. My father passed isolated hamlets of fishermen and stands of millet, tobacco and plantains. People buried their dead beneath their hut floors and worshipped ancestors who lived in miniature beehive shelters to which they brought gifts of beer and honey. They were also members of a secret cult called the Bachwezi and claimed that their founder, Liangombe, had spoken to the spirits during a spell in the wilderness. His followers entered into trances to commune directly with their ancestors and were able to exorcise spirits from troubled souls.

My father was superstitious. In Tanganyika he knew of a woman who had died of hiccups and because of this, every time he got them he verged on hysteria. He got the shakes when he had to help carry the corpse of a man who had died out in the bush. When I was a child he told me about the terrifying BaFumo witches, who wore black cloaks and carried umbrellas and groaned like zebu bulls. Their job was to sniff out the causes of misfortunes that befell the tribe, like poor harvests or epidemics, and a scapegoat was always found among the hapless peasants. Or the wizards who read the entrails of chickens for omens. There was his story about a witch who transformed her male disciples into hyenas after dark so that when Dad baited zebra meat with poison to kill the scavengers that were harassing local cattle, she declared that he had murdered her sons and cursed him for it. A few days later he was awoken by a loud snuffling and a hyena bolted from under his bed and out of the window.

In those days people along the shores of Lake Victoria practised cults that had various beasts as their inspiration: members of the porcupine society went into a trance state and danced like their totem animal, trembling under sheaves of spines on their backs. My father became involved in a society that held serpents in great reverence. His English comrades were scandalized when they heard that my father participated in such practices. The cult order trained him to catch snakes by spitting the poisonous juice of a foxglove into their faces. These were kept in pits. Each cult member pared down his snakes’ fangs and cut the nail of one of his thumbs at the same time. It was believed that the thumbnail grew at the same pace as the fangs, and when it reached a certain length the thumbnail and the fangs were cut together. Dad used to tell me how snakes sing at night. I never believed him until we were camping in the desert and he said shush! Out on the volcanic plain there was a soft moan, like either a frog or a bird. It was a familiar sound, to which I had just never put a name. It was said that snakes also breathed fire like dragons when they sang, and I was sure that out in the desert I could see faint, bluish will-o’-the-wisps. Dad said snakes would not harm him. Once, when he was sitting on a long-drop latrine, a cobra shot out from between his legs. He said he stared it down until it slithered off under the door. I have seen Dad pick up a serpent by the tail, nonchalantly swing it around his head and launch it into the bush. I once saw him shake a snake out of his bedroll in the bush when he got up in the morning.

Continuing on his journey along Lake Victoria’s shores, my father and his train of porters arrived at the outskirts of a hamlet. Ordering the porters to carry on, he went off with a tracker to shoot meat for the pot. They came on two impala rams, standing on an ant hill and facing each other. With two clean shots of his rifle, my father killed both stone dead. A clamour erupted in the nearby village. Men, women and children came running towards the kill. Some elders appeared and became very excited. They announced that my father had carried out an act of great importance. I picture him, a young man trying to comprehend what was being said. Something about totems and prophecies. I have tried to understand what it can be that they told him. I imagine the tableau: the white man with his gun, the two horned beasts, almost heraldic, up on their hind legs, antlers pointing at each other, the moment of killing, blood splashing from a hole blasted in each heart onto the earth of the termite hill, the fading light, the peasants chanting kusinga rugaba, kusinga wombecha: ‘I see you, I see the sun.’

Singing merrily, men butchered the impala rams and bore the meat back to the village. As my father followed, he heard drumming. Great fires were lit. Darkness fell, the meat was cooked and eaten, and my father was asked to be seated. He watched a large circle of people gather to dance. Women beat a rhythm on their rawhide skirts and shook pebble-filled gourds, drummers hammered on lizard-skin tom-toms, while for two hours boys and maidens gyrated violently in a ring. Suddenly a mournful dirge began and two wizards appeared with wildebeest flywhisks. They whisked at the youths who one by one fell to the ground in a trance and began to moan, jerk and tremble. They began to speak and my father knew enough of the local language to know that they talked in a completely foreign tongue. The youths were using the language of the BaChwezi ancients, having become the oracle between the world of the ancestors and the villagers under that night sky. Questions were asked and translated and the answers came back again. Communing with the dead caused the villagers mirth, but also sorrow and anxiety. The seance over, the dance erupted once more and was still going on when my father went off to sleep. That night he slumbered fitfully. He felt troubled. The next day when he got up, he remembered the purpose of his trip to this hidden corner of Africa, which was to begin opening it up for the resettlement of the two hundred families to make way for the Ukiriguru research station. The elders quickly agreed to make enough land available – there was plenty of space – and allowed my father to survey the site and mark it out with white stones laid in tidy, straight colonial lines.

Until the day Dad entered the village, the ancestors had held sway over the living. The spirits offered Africans a set of certainties through the endless cycle of the years in a perilous Eden. Rain, harvests, children, disease, drought and death. In return, the only obligation of the living was to honour the dead. The prophecy was not just that the antelope were to be killed, but that it was my father doing it that day, as a young man of just twenty-three, becoming the agent of irreversible change in that remote corner of Africa. Soon after he walked away from the village the land was cleared. Cotton was planted. Vast deposits of diamonds and gold were discovered. Mines were opened up. Roads, aircraft, politics, wars and AIDS followed. The rule of the ancestors was buried and forgotten. The new rulers were men who sat in faraway cities. They communicated with the people not via the spirit mediums but by telegram cables and telephones.

He walked out of BaZinza country and returned to his lake post at Mwanza. From there, he took the train down to Dar es Salaam to attend a friend’s wedding as best man. The night of the party, my father had his first nightmare. In his dream there appeared a shadow at his side. A man, but not a man. It threatened my father, who felt he had to attack the apparition before it harmed him. For most of the rest of his life, the dream came back repeatedly to haunt him.

Mother was full of theories to explain the nightmares. They were mild epileptic fits. Or Dad ate too much cheese at night. Or he had never outgrown his childhood terror of ‘Mrs Hicksey’, a ghost in Claremont, the English village house where he was brought up, that groaned in the attic and was in all probability a faulty water pipe. Nonsense, he said. My father believed he had been bewitched. For half my life I wondered what on earth he meant by that, until I grew to learn that I had fallen under a very similar spell.

My mother used to sit on my bed on Sunday mornings when I was small, telling me about the Burma war. As she spoke she painted her nails and I used to drink in the scent of varnish and picture her in my mind as a young woman on the jungle battlefields. When I urged her to she would go and fetch her box of keepsakes with its photos of her with her comrades in the women’s auxiliaries, bullet casings, folded parachute silk, Chindit griffon badges, a captured Japanese rising sun flag and a little silk wallet containing a Shinto poem praising the emperor, which a British soldier had looted from a dead man.

After spending her early years in India, my mother and her sister, Beryl, were sent to boarding school in Sussex. When the Blitz began Grandpa decided to bring them home to India. They sailed on the troop ship Orion. As their convoy zigzagged south through the Atlantic, U-boats sank two of the vessels. The blackout rules were so strict the cabin portholes were painted black and nobody could even smoke a cigarette on deck after dark. What struck my mother most about her first glimpse of Cape Town was that it was a blaze of lights. In India, refugees were pouring in ahead of the Japanese advances on Malaya and Burma. Mother was sixteen when she volunteered at the Casualty Section of GHQ Simla, where she made bandages and filled out name cards recording the wounded, killed and missing in action. The next year, in early 1944, she joined the Women’s Auxiliary Service (Burma), based at Shillong, in Assam. Among their many tasks, the lady soldiers brewed tea in tin baths for the troops, typed letters and reports and sat on the beds of casualties, chatting about home or writing letters for those wounded who were blinded or had lost their hands.

The Allied forces at last turned back the Japanese advances at Kohima and Imphal. Thereafter they began to drive the enemy back eastwards. Mother’s unit followed the advance and she was never far behind the front lines. The auxiliaries’ CO, known as the General Memsahib, gave her a hand grenade – not to throw but to destroy herself with her honour intact in the event of being captured by the Japs. Even in the hospitals, patients had guns in case the Japs attacked and the medics had so many casualties to work on during a battle that Mother knew a young doctor whose hair turned snow white in a single day. During an air raid, she had to jump into a slit trench and she looked up at a dive-bombing Japanese Val that she told me ‘trembled like a silver leaf in the blue sky’.

For all that, what exotic places she saw. She travelled on trucks to Dohazari, in Arakan, Cox’s Bazaar, Cachar on the Bishenpur-Silchar track, where ‘Japs were hiding in the tea bushes’; then Dimapur, Kohima, Milestone 56 on the Manipur Road, and on up to Milestone 82 at Maram, then right into Burma. Blue mountains, tracks clinging to vertiginous valleys. ‘Hot,’ Mother said it was. ‘Sandy roads. Tall, tall, tall trees, going on forever. Long grass, green, green. No towns, no people, just camps and rivers…’ In her bathing suit and watched by commandos, she jumped into river pools to gather up fish stunned by cigarette-tin bombs. On the Manipur Road, ‘tuctoo’ lizards sang in the tall trees outside the basha huts where she slept. Bandicoots scuttled beneath her bed and in the darkness a gaur, a bison-like creature from the forest, tripped over her tent guy ropes.

She saw how battle had stripped the trees bare of branches and leaves. In one of her camps the path between the huts and the long-drop latrine was a line of shallow Japanese graves, half exposed by the monsoon rains. Out of one grew a beautiful blue orchid and my mother’s commanding officer’s only comment was ‘They’re good for the soil, dear’. In an American jungle base, she saw the dried heads of Japanese soldiers rammed onto the gateposts. It was here that she also saw her first movie in colour on the big screen: Esther Williams in Bathing Beauty, a synchronized-swimming extravaganza. Mother said the Americans were nice, but that the English soldier girls primly refused when the GIs asked them to play Postman’s Knock in the jungle in return for cans of pineapple juice and frozen chickens flown in from California.

Troops from all over the British Empire made up the Allied army in Burma. Mother encountered soldiers of the West African Division, such as the Nigerians who manned the anti-aircraft batteries. In an air raid once she saw them, illuminated by the muzzle flashes of their guns, dancing a jig after they had scored a hit. One evening the women heard the Africans humming and the sound grew to a crescendo of glorious, homesick singing. They sang, too, in deep voices that made Mother feel sorry for them:

Oh, when shall I see my home again?

My Mudda she is da,

My Fadda he is da

When shall I see my native land?

When will I see my home?

In 1943 she fell in love. She would never tell me much about him, only that his name was Peter and that he was a young British officer in Thirty-six Division. After he was wounded in the leg by a grenade, she was given compassionate leave to visit him. She flew in a troop transport and then drove through the jungles until she arrived at Shillong. Here she waited for days in a house in the forest with two other young women auxiliaries whose husbands had been killed in action. One of them was a friend named Alison, who opened her trousseau, never worn, and offered Mother anything she wanted to borrow. That evening, she went on to an old hotel where Peter was convalescing and asked for him. ‘I sat trembling for a long time by a huge cedar fire. And then at last he came and found me waiting for him.’

When Rangoon fell, her unit was assigned to process POWs being released from the Japanese prison camps. The CO told the women to talk about only home and happy things to the liberated men. But all they wanted to discuss was what had happened to them. They remembered their ordeals with nonchalance while Mum took down their testimonies in shorthand. She recognised an ex-POW from her father’s Indian regiment and invited him and his friends over to the unit’s quarters for tea and chocolate cake. Tears in their eyes, all the men could do was stare, unable to eat or drink because they were so used to starving. She saw Peter and was with him when they heard the news of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After Singapore, she turned down a posting in Japan to return to India. Grandpa was retiring from his regiment. As Mum, Beryl and Granny sailed for England from Bombay, the Royal Indian Navy was in the process of mutinying. It was the eve of India’s independence and my family had been in the subcontinent since the eighteenth century. Mum knew England only from boarding-school days cut short by the Blitz. She hated postwar London, with its whale meat and rationed eggs, but Peter was waiting for her. He was the true reason she went to London, to get married. But some time after the 1946 victory parade, he broke her heart and she cast about for an escape.

In 1938, my father transferred from the Tanganyika colonial service for an appointment as head of agriculture in the Aden Protectorates, southwestern Arabia. His heart was still in East Africa. During the Great Depression he had bought a small farm called En’nekeraka at Mweiga, on the western slopes of Mount Kenya. En’nekeraka in the language of the ancestral people who had lived there evoked the sound of pebbles knocking together in the stream below the farmhouse. He aimed to one day retire to the farm, but he was still only thirty-one when he took up his Arabian appointment and the next sixteen years were to be some of the most eventful of his life.

When Dad arrived, Aden was one of the most familiar if unsightly landmarks in the empire. The pocket-sized colony, huddled around the barren mountain of Jebel Shamsan, existed solely for the benefit of the sea port. Then as now, Aden was not so much a single city as a collection of unattractive towns clinging to the volcanic rocks. Imperial officials and shipping agents lived at Steamer Point. On the isthmus of Khormaksar were the military lines and Royal Air Force base and inland from that was the Arab village of Sheikh Othman, where the desert sands blew in from the Protectorates. The heart of Aden was Crater, the quarter for Arabs, Jews, Banyans and international eccentrics. The French poet Arthur Rimbaud had pitched up here on his ill-fated scheme to run guns to the Arabs and Ethiopians. The adventurous smuggler Henri de Monfreid passed through here. In the thirties, another Frenchman, the powerful businessman Antonin Besse – who later founded an Oxford college – had built his house on the rocks overlooking Crater and it was here that he entertained the travel writer Freya Stark. In the godowns of the shabby emporium of Crater was a trade in the exotic: Mocha coffee, mother-of-pearl from Abdel Kouri, civet, cinnabar and ambergris from the island of Socotra, also mass-produced goods, from wall clocks to universal embrocations to underwear from Liverpool. My father walked among crowds of Yemenis, short men from the hills with silver jambiya daggers in their belts, or Bedu visiting from the desert, decked out in kilts, snarling in surprise as they scrambled out of the way of passing cars. There were Banyan clerks and Jewish artisans, Bohra tailors, sallow Koranic students from Hadhramaut, Swahili sailors, Somali stevedores and Chinese exporters of sea slugs and shark fins.

As far as the British were concerned, to protect Aden they had to see what was going on in the wild hinterlands, if not to control them. The inhabitants beyond the borders of the colony were divided into an impossibly complicated mosaic of clan and caste. There were the Gabilis, gun-carrying tribesmen who covered their half-clothed bodies with sesame oil and indigo woad, the Seyyids and Ashraf who believed they were descended from the tribe of the Prophet Mohamed, the nontribal traders and artisans who lived within the walls of tiny hilltop villages, and finally low-caste black serfs and slaves.

In antiquity, the Romans called this land Arabia the Blessed because its inhabitants controlled the trade in frankincense and myrrh, which was harvested in the hills of Oman, the island of Socotra and in the Horn of Africa. The valuable resins were carried by camel across the desert, via Mecca and Petra, to Gaza and from there to Egypt, Greece and Rome. In the first century AD, a Roman legion under Gaius Aelius Gallus had set out to conquer Mareb, capital of the kingdom of Saba, also known as Sheba, and been defeated when the wily Arab guides led the invaders into the waterless deserts. Soon afterwards, with the opening of the sea route from India to the Red Sea, the land route fell into decline. The mighty cities built on the back of the trade fell prey to desert raiders and crumbled into the sands.

The British seized the port of Aden in 1837. It was a dirty little village, located on an ancient site and strategically placed. But in the next century, with the completion of the Suez Canal and the invention of coal-fuelled steamships, Aden grew as wealthy and as busy as Hong Kong, the key point midway on the passage to India. The interior had been left virtually unexplored, though the British created a buffer zone of treaties of protection with tribes in the hills and deserts surrounding the colony. In the process the British elevated various petty tribal chieftains to the status of sultans, treating them to gun salutes like Indian maharajas when they dropped into Aden to pick up their annual pay-offs of rifles and silver Maria Theresa dollars from Government House. In return for their stipends, the sultans agreed to show allegiance to the British Crown, rather than to the Imam, the sacerdotal ruler of the high Yemen to the north who coveted Aden port and the hinterlands. Otherwise they were left to their own devices, even to the extent that slavery existed under British rule.

On the eve of the Second World War, Britain finally decided on a new ‘forward policy’ to develop the hinterland. To do that, and to consolidate the Protectorate frontiers against incursions from the Imam’s Yemen to the north, they enrolled men like Dad to end tribal feuding and establish irrigation farming, police forces, schools and roads.

One of the first British officials Dad met in Arabia was Harold Ingrams, the Resident Adviser to the Hadhramaut, in the Eastern Aden Protectorates. Ingrams was among Britain’s most revered Arabists. He told my father he should at all times respect Arab customs, refrain from alcohol and dress in the local garb. Ingrams himself went in for the authentic look, fluttering about in a Saudi headdress, an Indonesian lungyi, a big belt and silver and ornaments and bracelets. Around his neck he wore a Bedouin leather necklace with a large agate stone. He wore boots and he limped, the result of a wound sustained on the Western Front. Ingrams was famous for negotiating a peace settlement between the warring Hadhramaut clans that was so complicated it involved separate truces to end two thousand long-standing blood feuds. Dad admired Ingrams but thought him somewhat pompous and much later he remembered a ditty about him.

They call me Headline Harold

In my home in Hadhramaut,

Where I toil all day for plenty of pay

In my simple Saudi suit.

My father adored his job and the fact that he was among just seven Englishmen covering a territory of a hundred thousand square miles. He was in Arabia for sixteen years, which he spent constantly on long journeys, on foot, on horseback, in rickety Vickers Vincent biplanes. He worked with the political officers in the colonial services whose task was to broker peace negotiations to end the perpetual clan conflicts. Refuse to declare a truce and the political officer could call in the Vickers Vincent to bomb a recalcitrant sheikh out of his fortress. Make peace and my father came in as the agriculture officer to reward the tribes and bolster peace by reviving irrigation systems and planting cotton, fruit trees and food crops. He introduced the husbandry of cotton, but also everything else from cabbages and apricots, to large red chickens to the unsuspecting tribes. He traversed an often hostile country with no more protection than a bodyguard and his skill in talking his way out of tight situations.

In 1949, my mother was offered a job as the governor’s confidential secretary in Aden. ‘How is Aden?’ she asked Grandpa, who had fought the Turks there in the Great War. ‘Bloody awful,’ he said. She took the job because a first-class ship’s passage was part of the deal. At the eleventh hour, they made her fly – because, she later discovered, the woman she succeeded had gone mad and the governor needed a replacement at short notice. When she first arrived in Aden, she stayed with a family in a house overlooking the harbour. The house had a pet ibex, called Jumper, that slept on her bed and trotted about, eating cigarettes. She encountered my father her very first night in Aden during a Scottish dance held at the governor’s residence. He was apart from the crowd of Englishmen sitting cross-legged on the floor, cracking walnuts by hurling them against the glass windows.

She did not take much notice of him in the early days, when various other younger suitors pursued her, including a pair of pilots from RAF Eight Squadron, who each had an MG sports car. They turned up in tandem to take her to dances at the Union Club, or picnics and swimming at Gold Mohur beach. There’s a black-and-white photo of her, lissome in a black bathing suit, hands on hips, head tilted, a sly smile and laughing eyes, ankle-deep in the surf, flicking water with her dainty foot towards the camera. She looks really quite naughty in the picture, though when I joked with her about this she said primly, ‘Nonsense – we were quite proper in those days.’