The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War

Growing up, the loss of my family’s paradise was a festering wound, even though I had no personal memory of the thing that hurt me. I grew up feeling that I had been born too late to be part of our greatest adventure. And things were no longer as they had been in the family, down to the smallest detail. Dad never took me riding or deep-sea fishing. Instead I looked at snapshots of my elder brothers proudly holding up their catch. ‘That white vase,’ Mum said of an empty receptacle: ‘I used to fill it with sprays of purple agapanthus every day.’

The last I heard, an old caretaker and a gang of bats lived in the house on Firesticks Hill, the place of my first memory, and the roof leaked. The stock is lost, eaten, stolen or sold. Poachers have wiped out the wildlife. The elephants, the ostriches and the bullfrogs – the ‘elphanes’, ‘arse-stretches’ and ‘oggy goggies’, as we call them to this day in our intimate family vocabulary of childhood words – are gone. The trees have been hacked down for charcoal to supply the towns. The borehole machinery broke and stopped pumping eleven hundred gallons of clean water a day and the land returned to being a dry desert. My father’s beautiful horses, the ones he had imported from Arabia, with their centuries-old Bedu bloodlines, bolted their stables and ran feral across the plains between the mountains. For years afterwards, people encountered them, cantering like mustangs. Lions took some, while local peasants captured some of the others, either to eat them or put to them to work pulling carts like donkeys. Up on the slopes of Meru, squatters hamstrung the dairy cows, uprooted the pyrethrum, chopped down the big trees and replaced it all with fields of marijuana. They occupied the house and made fires on the parquet floors. They tore the tiles off the roof and ripped out the doors and windows, which they carried off to adorn mud huts. They didn’t manage to tear down the walls and pillars, and from down below on the plains I myself have seen the ruins gleam brightly like a beacon against the slopes of the mountain.

My father was not the type of man to give up and turn his back on Africa. Nor did he stay in order to retreat into bitterness, as had so many Europeans who found their hopes and dreams dashed but found it was too late for them to start again elsewhere. Instead, he embarked on a dramatic new direction. Having been a colonial officer, then a rancher, he now became a development aid worker himself, ultimately in the same game as the Scandinavian experts who had occupied the ranch on Kilimanjaro. The difference with my father was that he truly was an expert after more than forty years of working in Africa, his adopted home. And so he threw himself into working in the most remote areas of the continent he could find, assisting nomads with the husbandry of livestock and peasants with the growing of crops.

In my first coherent memories that run in sequence, in full-colour as it seems, I am often in the back of a four-wheel-drive among clanking kettles, piles of rations and dust, bumping across some drought-blasted plain. I am in camp where wild-haired men squat by the fire and chat with my father about rain and camels. I make my bed out in the open under the stars, or am woken in a village hut by bleating goats or mission hymns, or in a shabby border-town hotel with bare electric bulbs and blue gloss walls.

‘We’re like a tribe of mechanized nomads,’ says my mother. To hear this makes me happy. We are like gypsies, living out an adventure in Africa.

The problem was that we couldn’t always be on the road with Dad. The ways were dangerous. In Eritrea, Dad lost fifteen of his team to landmine explosions on the roads and it was typical of him that he used this as an excuse to dispense with vehicles in favour of trekking cross-country with pack mules. If only I had been old enough to join him. What walks we might have had together.

Instead, our new way of life was filled with goodbyes and absences and flights with my mother to see him wherever he was. These were long journeys with endless waits in airports. Our fellow passengers were often the new Soviet or Chinese officials who had appeared with Africa’s liberation from its European masters. I remember asking a group of men – my mother tells me they were Soviets – to read a story from my Disney comic book. They peered at the pages, looked worried and shook their heads.

We’d arrive in hot and sticky capitals and have to wait for Dad while he was traced out in his wilderness with his livestock and nomads. In Mogadishu, Somalia, we were invariably confined to whichever hotel compound we were checked into due to the upheavals outside. We stayed at the Croce del Sud, known as the Sweaty Crotch. Nearby was the Shebelle, a.ka. the Scratchy Belly. The city erupted in anti-Western riots when Apollo 11 landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon and the mosque preachers declared that it was either American lies or blasphemy.

Soon after the moon landings, the Somali president was assassinated and the army took over. Each afternoon I’d watch from the Sweaty Crotch as soldiers goose-stepped down the street. Many years later I worked out that this was when the dictator president Mohamed Siad Barre had seized power in a coup d’état. During one parade, while my mother and sister were out shopping at the bazaar, I filled a soda bottle from the tap, went back to the room’s balcony and emptied the contents onto the heads of the spectators below. The consequences were dire, for within a few minutes there were loud voices and a hammering at the door. I hid in the bathtub until Mother returned, when she had to promise a group of irate men that I had not pissed on them.

Finally we’d be summoned to desert reunions with my father. These trips survive in my mind only as a jumble of images like one of our heat- and dust-damaged family films. We flew for hours and so slowly that we could see the shadow of the Dakota propeller aircraft on the scrub below. On landing at a Somali airfield I broke loose from my mother and burrowed between the sandal-shod brown legs of men in turbans and women in flowing robes. I knew I would recognize him because he would be the only white man in the crowd. But how was I to behave when I met my father? How warmly would Dad kiss Mum and did they still love each other? And what was this strange life my father lived, among such fierce people?

On Sundays in Somalia, the cooks used to hack the chickens’ heads off with loud bismillahs, then allowed the headless bodies to dance about behind the kitchen. I have a sequence of other disjointed memories: of mosquito larvae in our table water, flexing like red commas magnified in the distorted bowl of the jug; playing Ping-Pong with pasty-faced Chinese commissars in the local hotel; the bleeding toes I got from barefoot soccer with the tough Somali boys; my brother Kim and I on Lido Beach, where camels were slaughtered so that guts lay in bluish puddles on the coral sand; the northern Somali highlands, on a mountain called Ga’an Libah, the Lion’s Fist, where Kim and I tried and failed to rescue a goat from our lunch table; a cave of prehistoric paintings of red handprints and herds of eland stalked by cats and men with alien heads. Once I stood on the banks of a dry riverbed, feeling wind on my face, hearing a rumble, then seeing a wall of brown water explode from around the corner as the flash flood approached.

Another time we visited Dad in a big white Arab fort on the Indian Ocean. His housemates were American hippies, young men and women my mother now tells me were from the Peace Corps. Dad wore a bandana, grew his hair down to his shoulders and listened to Led Zeppelin. He was learning yoga and at dusk he practised his asanas on the flat roof while looking out over the sea. It was the end of the 1960s, Timothy Leary was urging the world to ‘turn on, tune in, and drop out’, and Dad was sixty-two years old.

After Somalia came Ethiopia. In the summer that I was first taken to see my father there, rumours had been circulating of starvation among the peasants outside the capital, Addis Ababa. My teenage sister Bryony was with him, and together they filled the car with loaves of bread and Arabian dates packed in baskets. On the road to Bati, they found thousands of Oromo peasants whose crops had withered in drought and highland frost. When my sister stood at the back of the truck tossing out the bread and dates, the hungry mob rioted. After Bati, they drove down into the Rift Valley and Denkalia. The local Afar nomads, normally tough enough to inhabit the hottest and most inhospitable place on earth, were dying too, since their livestock was gone. A tragedy was unfolding due to all the usual causes: civil war, overpopulation and misuse of the land and rivers in the name of modern development.

On the edge of the Danakil Depression, the dead and dying all around him, Dad sat down and wrote a message, which he handed to a runner, who took it to the nearest post office for cabling to Addis Ababa. This was before the days when African famines were the news stories they are today. There were no rock concerts, T-shirts or advertisements in the paper. But with that message, news of what was happening soon reached Europe. A BBC team flew to Bati and their TV film exposed the truth. When the pictures were shown in Addis Ababa, it helped the tide of revolution that toppled the medieval dictatorship of Emperor Haile Selassie. Back on the plains of Bati Dad sat down by himself. ‘The camps lie broken down on hill and plain, / Skulls, bones and horns remain,’ he wrote. ‘No shouts, no songs of fighting, or of love, / But from the bare thorn tree above, / So sadly calls the mourning dove.’ ‘…Was this your ravaged land, / The work of God, or was it Man’s own hand?’ For me this just about sums up what happened all over Africa in the twentieth century.

The Addis Ababa I remember was, as usual, a place of waiting for days in a dark, smelly hotel. The TV broadcast almost back-to-back episodes of Sesame Street. In short slots between the programmes, the revolutionaries who had taken over the TV station showed footage of the emperor feeding his lapdogs fillet steak interspersed with images of stick figures, crying babies with distended bellies, flies cramming into their eyes and mouths. After a few minutes of this, the programming would return to Sesame Street.

In the square outside the hotel was a black stone statue of the Lion of Judah, the symbol of Abyssinia’s emperors. At the foot of it I found a boy, my age, with his hands out begging.

‘I am hungry,’ the boy whimpered. I tried not to look at him. ‘I have not eaten for three days.’

Even today I can picture the boy’s grimace and his outstretched hand. As we moved away a shout went up from the seething pedestrians at street level below the black lion’s statue. People were looking up. At the summit of a high building was a young man and I saw that he had a flag wrapped around his shoulders. He jumped. The flag flapped like a parachute that refused to open as he fell to the pavement. I heard a big sigh and a crowd formed where the man had landed, as figures in uniform appeared at the top of the building. These images fed my dreams of monsters: the starving boy, the man with the flag, the emperor’s dogs eating minced steak and the horrid Big Bird and the Muppets of Sesame Street.

When I look back now I also see us as the disaster family. I had only just learned to write when I sent my father this letter: ‘Dear Dad we had a good holidays. Come home now love from aidan xx.’ But family holidays were really only trips to accompany my father on an assignment to where the latest human catastrophes were being staged. I recall we went on a fishing trip to the Bale Mountains in southern Ethiopia. Dad vanished, while we caught amazing trout in a highland landscape of giant lobelias and fragrant African heathers. My father would join us some days and at night he told me not to wander too far from the tents in camp. The local hyenas had gained a taste for human flesh because there had been so many bodies scattered in the district and live infants were being carried off.

It was hard to know exactly where, or what, we could call home. Almost wherever we went, the newly free Africans warned my parents that for people of our sort the writing was on the wall. They associated us with an imperialist past they wanted to put behind them. Instead, they found we stubbornly refused to leave. Kenya was the one exception in all of East Africa. We had much to be thankful for as Europeans in Kenya. The founding president Jomo Kenyatta could have kicked us out or robbed us like Nyerere. He might have been inclined to do so, since we had imprisoned him during the Mau Mau rebellion prior to independence. Instead he waved an olive branch. At a rally of whites in the Rift Valley town of Nakuru in 1964 he had said: ‘We are going to forget the past and look to the future. I have suffered imprisonment and detention; but that is gone, and I am not going to remember it. Let us join hands and work for the benefit of Kenya…’ I was born a year after he made that announcement, and as I grew up all races lived alongside one another.

My parents at last found a family base on Kenya’s coast, south of the Swahili village of Malindi, on the white sandy beach near Leopard Point, so named because a column of dead black coral like a cat’s head stood out on the reef at the southern end. My mother oversaw the building of a small house, with walls of coral and a roof of makuti thatch made of coconut-palm fronds knotted on open mangrove pole rafters. Inside were Zanzibar chests, BaZinza tribal stools, David Shepherd prints of Aden, Bukhara carpets my father had haggled from dhow nakhoda captains at Mombasa’s Kilindini harbour, and cedar beds slung with rawhide thongs of oryx and zebra skins. The bathrooms and verandas were scattered with shells, fragments of coral, and Indian Ocean flotsam and jetsam. The cement floor was black and cool underfoot. Charo, our house servant, polished them each day with two halves of a fibrous coconut, then wrapped rags around his feet and buffed the surfaces until they shone like obsidian. At night we sat outside and gazed up at the blanket of stars. On the rare occasions he was home, Dad pointed up to the constellations that guided ships’ captains and Arab caravans, or the stars of the Africans, who used the constellations to tell them when to plant or harvest their crops.

Before I was old enough to read the books in my father’s library, kept off on a side veranda that served as his office, I knew each by their pictures, weight and smell. I remember the portrait of Burton’s scarred face, which so attracted me in the signed copy of First Footsteps in East Africa. Livingstone reminded me of my father, but I recoiled at the odour of Stanley’s In Darkest Africa and the man himself resembled a cruel schoolmaster in a silly hat. There was Joseph Thomson’s Through Masai-Land with the engraving of the author, his black-powder gun and helmet being tossed by a giant buffalo; Frederick Courteney Selous’s A Hunter’s Wanderings in Africa, the spine repaired with a heavy needle and thread, with a kudu head embossed in gold on the red cover; Captain Stigand’s The Land of Zinj, eaten into a honeycomb by white ants; the spewing volcanoes of Duke Adolphus Frederick of Mecklenburg’s In the Heart of Africa; the bugs in G. D. Hale Carpenter’s A Naturalist on Lake Victoria; the slaughtered lions laid out in J. H. Patterson’s The Man-Eaters of Tsavo; and the pygmies, tattooed warriors and men with filed teeth in Sir Harry Johnston’s The Uganda Protectorate.

Mum gave us each something to plant in the garden. My eldest brother Richard’s tree was a bombax, with a knobbly trunk that grew ever so slowly. Kim planted a Norfolk pine with crazy branches inside the circle of hibiscus next to the house. Bryony’s was a frangipani, fragrant and delicate. Dad scattered the seedpods of a Red Sea saltbush that grew into blue-grey fleshy clumps along the high-water mark. Mum loved her Adenium desert roses. This plant had a few plump branches that produced pinkish or dark, red blooms above ground. But like a vegetable iceberg, underground was a massive, tuberous bulb. Much later I, too, was given a tree. I can’t recall what it was except that it was dubbed the ‘whacker’ plant because Dad ripped it up to give me a thrashing with it on the only occasion he ever beat me.

At the north end of the beach was the sandy pool, where I learned to swim at eighteen months with my armbands on, bum in the air and my eyes open underwater. When I was older I joined my brother Kim and went out with the fishermen, who taught us the names for all the fish, shells and corals. Fragments of blue ceramic and celadon washed in with every tide, reminders of Chinese traders from six centuries before. On the southern end of the village bay stood a pillar dedicated to the Holy Ghost, erected by Vasco da Gama, who had sailed from here to India in 1498. Below the beachfront mosque, surrounded by tall phallus-shaped tombs of forgotten notables, townspeople haggled over the day’s catch. In the labyrinth of houses of coral and mud and wattle lived a rich mix of cultures from all over the Indian Ocean. Bajuni fishermen, Giriamas in grass skirts balancing pots and banana branches on their heads. The ironmonger was a Hadhramauti who served ginger tea and did not let my mother pay for bags of nails. Our tailoring was done by a bearded Bohra, who had a row of men working on foot-pedalled Singers outside his shop. The newsagent was a Pakistani we called Frankenstein, because his teeth were brown from chewing betel nut. There was Archie Ritchie, an old game warden who wore a lilac-breasted roller bird on his shoulder, and his wife, Queenie, whom the village Arabs called ‘the Queen’; Terence Adamson, who had had half his jaw torn off by one of his brother George’s lions, and who taught me how to divine for water with a forked stick; Laly, who took us snorkelling; Max, a German-Irish Baron, who was captured on the Eastern Front and survived years in Siberia as a POW, when snow blew in through his cell window; Max’s wife, Anna, a Seychellois beauty whose first husband had been killed by a charging elephant; Gigi, a singer at the Dhow Nightclub, famous for her rendition of ‘Malaika’, the most famous Swahili pop song, about a man too poor to marry his girl; Gigi’s boyfriend Knut, a Dane who had been a circus clown and could walk a straight line on his hands but not his legs when he was drunk. And there was Marujin, a Catalonian marquesa whom I held in awe. She wore heavy silver bracelets up each arm that click-clacked as she glided barefoot through her dark, cool house. On the walls were tantric designs and she had a huge copper tray piled with the ivory, smooth fragments of cowrie shells. For hours I listened to her speak as she sat cross-legged on her veranda.

‘One thing we know is that we’re not Europeans. We know that, but we’re also not Africans. What we are, I don’t know, but we’re not Europeans…’ Marujin said the mind was the ‘lunatic in the house’, the cricket in the cage relentlessly chirping ‘tchya-ko, tchya-ko, tchya-ko’. She said anything we learned came to us spontaneously, when the mind was still and serene.

As a small boy I had a string of fevers, but my parents were offhand about medical treatment. My mother had seen the inside of hospitals only to give birth and I grew up, barefoot and in shorts, to believe Dad’s superstitions that visiting a doctor might make an illness more critical rather than cure it. At home our first-aid box had been stocked with Mercurochrome, antiseptic powder, universal Chinese eye ointment, a few stuck-together bandages, and a blue bottle of milk of magnesia. Aspirins were rare, while antibiotics were banned. Home cures and local remedies were warmly approved of: hot cooking oil for earache, hot brine for a stomach ache and a poultice of pawpaw and honey for jigger worm boils, cuts, thorns or sea urchin spines in our feet. If we had fever Mum plucked leaves from the neem trees in our garden for hot infusions. When Charo suffered a stroke that paralysed one side of his body, Dad took him to a witch doctor who buried him alive for half an hour, with very positive effects. For me, only malaria had led to a visit to the dreaded Dr Zoltan Rossinger, a Viennese Jew who had escaped Hitler. The doctor charged Africans nothing and all others the normal price – except for Germans, from whom he demanded double.

My brother Kim and I spent a lot of my time with an old man named Mohamed. Polio had stunted one of Mohamed’s legs, which dangled useless and childlike, and he eked out a pittance hawking shells to the growing number of white tourists. He sat all day long on his coconut mat in town, resplendent among the mother-of-pearl of nautiluses, triton conches and the pink, pouting lips of spider shells. We sat cross-legged listening to him, as he told us stories about storms on the ocean, dugongs and the Glory of the Seas, rarest among all shells. As he spoke he paused to expertly spit quids of red betel nut juice for dramatic emphasis, or roll a fresh nut into a pan leaf and tuck it into his cheek to chew.

Some days, he would take us down to the beach where fishermen caulked their careened boats while buyers haggled over beached shark carcasses. The sand glittered with mica. It was the same beach from which Mohamed’s slave ancestors had been herded aboard dhows bound for Arabia. On land, he lurched about on crutches but out on the ocean from his outrigger canoe he flipped into the sea and swam like a merman. We used to hand-line in the waters beyond Vasco da Gama’s pillar, staring into the water, yanking the line, hoping for brilliant reef fish to bite. Mohamed tied his line to a horny big toe and dozed off, springing alert at the slightest nibble.

Once my brother pulled out a fish with a domed forehead and a sailfin. Mohamed gave it his Swahili name, filusi, fine to eat and very special. In English it is the coryphene. In Spanish it is more beautifully known as the dorado, meaning ‘gilded’, because of its iridescent gold flanks. Mohamed seized hold of the fish and told us to watch closely. As the dorado suffocated its pigment, sheathed with a patina of stippled green, was transfigured for a brief instant like a beam of sunshine on a church mosaic. Mohamed held the fish as its strength drained away. With it, the light in the dorado’s brilliance faded. When the process was complete, Mohamed picked up his knife and sliced open her belly, removed the guts and tossed the body to the bottom of the canoe, where it turned the colour of tarnished lead.

My mother decided it was time for us to be educated outside Africa with its revolutions and wars. My siblings were taken out of their Kenya schools. I remember the time they first left by plane to go to boarding school in England. They had to swap their African uniforms of gingham shirts and khaki shorts for thick socks and grey felt blazers that made them look cold even before they were out of the equatorial sunshine. They went on ahead to Europe and my mother followed with me. We settled on a small hill farm in Devon. It was a rugged, pagan spot: a thatched longhouse of whitewashed cob, a great barn with timbers like a ship, views over Dartmoor, oak and elm woods, blackthorn hedges, clover pastures, a millpond and a stream, granite troughs and rookeries. This was modern England, but our neighbour on one side still ploughed with horses, stooked his hay with a pitchfork and was unable to write apart from sign his name on a bank cheque. On the other side of us was the poet Ted Hughes. After we met him one day in the fields, Mum said he ‘looked like a man who has been struck by lightning’.

We had sheep, cattle, horses and a black dog called Bruce. My eldest brother Richard attempted rearing pigs but he grew to know each porker by name so he couldn’t face sending them to the butcher. I kept ducks and chickens, goats, rabbits and guinea pigs. Lambing started when it was still cold and muddy in spring as the first crocuses poked through the snow. May carpeted the wood floor with bluebells. In summer wildflowers dusted the meadows and we fished for trout in the little streams and the pond. Richard helped Mum run the farm. He ploughed and harvested and made hay, helped by a labourer who had a hook where his hand should have been. Richard was so strong he could pitchfork a bale of straw high onto a trailer. In autumn we had fights throwing apples and harvested bags of them for delivery to Mr Inch, the cider maker who said he threw in a rat to improve the flavour of his brew. In winter, it rained a great deal but some mornings you’d wake up and it was sparkling sunshine, with the entire landscape covered with hoarfrost or snow.