The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War

Richard was dispatched to a school in Scotland, where it was felt that he might grow up tough doing outward-bound courses, mountain rescue and skiing. My sister Bryony went to where Mum and Granny had both been educated. Kim attended a school in Berkshire where boys wore First World War navy uniforms, complete with brass buttons, whitened belts and spit-and-polished boots. So began our long separation from both Dad and Africa, the years of being knocked into shape on a rainy little island. It is impossible to exaggerate the effect that British schools had on my siblings. They had been raised in wild liberty and happiness. They were now rootless and appeared exotic to the local children. They were confronted by petty, brutal school discipline and the unfamiliar British class system. Already from an unorthodox background, the counterculture of the sixties and seventies swept them off their feet and they were always climbing over walls to abscond for parties in London.

I remember Richard with shoulder-length hair and sideburns, a sheepskin coat and flares. He came home with languid, older girlfriends and freaks in clapped-out cars. I recall fighting over the gramophone when I wanted to play my record of ‘Elephants on Parade’ from The Jungle Book instead of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway To Heaven’. Bryony had big eyelashes and puppy fat and she wore lime-green and bright yellow miniskirts and knee-length boots. For a time she lived in a bedsit above a coin-operated laundrette off Elgin Crescent in London. Later, Kim got into disco and grew an Afro.

I remember my first day at school, aged six, when I held my mother’s hand and walked up the gravel driveway, past the big stone pillars topped by griffons at the school gates. In front of us was the Victorian Gothic edifice of Ravenswood, on the edge of Exmoor. I looked up at Mum and said, ‘I’m not going to cry…’

The headmaster invited us into his study and asked us to sit down. ‘You are most welcome to Ravenswood. Do you have any questions?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am told that the planet Pluto has vanished. Could you please explain why?’

Mum went back to Africa to see my father and sent me postcards of elephants and landscapes with colourful stamps. I used to stare into those pictures for hours at a time and long for home in Kenya. School was a hard place to which I became completely adapted. The terms unfolded into years and I recall friends and times that were happy. Still, the memories of Ravenswood and its cold dormitories, with names like Drake and Ivanhoe, still get me like the chilblains.

When Mum was overseas, I’d visit my grandparents and Grandpa sympathized with me about school because he’d hated it too. He joked that if I survived Ravenswood I’d be able to easily deal with being a POW, if there was ever another war, or as a convict if I ever did anything wrong. It’s true I never felt I had to put on such a tough act as I did there. In the playground we played chicken, seeing how close a knife could be thrown at our feet without flinching. The masters beat us regularly but we didn’t much care. We’d stuff sheets of blotting paper down our Y-fronts – to absorb the impact – and after a thrashing show off our welt-reddened bare bums to our classmates. The food was inedible but one couldn’t ‘get down’ until one had finished one’s plate. When I went home for the first time, Mum asked me what we were given to eat. ‘Munched-up meat and hardened potatoes,’ I told her. We had greyish fish that floated in scum; mashed orange swede; pickled purplish beetroot; toad-in-the-hole and semolina and tapioca pudding.

We were the first generation after the end of the British Empire, but in geography class our ageing school atlases still showed large parts of the world coloured red. The masters were mostly ex-military or police types like our geography teacher, an Indian Army major who reminisced about ‘when I was in the Punjab’. To our delight, he ran our class like his old regiment and barked out parade-ground commands in Hindi. He could throw a piece of chalk with deadly accuracy across the classroom at a daydreaming boy. And if you got an answer wrong he’d yell ‘balderdash!’.

I quickly learned about Britain by watching television when my mother took me home to the farm in Devon. We had no TV in Kenya, but so much of what the boys talked about at Ravenswood came from kids’ shows and sport on the box. I watched it to find common ground with my peers, among whom one needed to be able to speak and act like Scoobie Doo and Mutley the Dog. The programme I genuinely liked most was The Magic Roundabout. After that came the news. My mother insisted on watching this and so I would stick around because once in front of the box it was hard to unglue my eyes.

I remember one news night very clearly. The pictures were of troops on the move, refugees, rice paddies and palm trees. A young American soldier was crying. ‘I want to go home. I want to go home.’ My mother looked cross and said, ‘They’re always so emotional. The British never behaved like that.’

‘Maybe they’re scared,’ I remember saying.

‘Of course they’re scared,’ Mum said. ‘But you should never show it.’

A reporter did a piece to camera, speaking into a big handheld microphone. A roar suddenly grew audible. The camera lurched away from the correspondent and zoomed in across the paddies to get a shot of a fighter jet plunging into the earth a mile away. The shot held for a few seconds, the sound of the impact explosion distorted above the muffled shouts off camera. The reporter came back in frame and resumed his story as a column of black smoke rose from the crash site behind him. From that moment on, I think my bags were packed and I was ready for a life in news.

My father took little active interest in my schooling and he seldom read my end-of-term reports. But once he visited me at school to deliver a lecture about the Danakil Depression, which became amazingly detailed about the Afar and their livestock in the deserts along the Red Sea coast. On that occasion, I suppose my African background was so exotic to my peers that a child said to me after Dad had driven away, ‘That wasn’t your father!’

I promised the boy that he was.

‘How can that be?’ the boy jeered. ‘He’s very old. And anyway, I thought your father came from Africa.’ I replied that he did.

‘Well then, why isn’t he a black man?’

At the end of term, I longed to break up like any other boy, anxious to leave that dungeon for a spell. In summer or sometimes at Christmas, I’d fly home to Kenya on a special BOAC flight packed with schoolchildren called the Lollipop Special. Down at the beach house, I’d kick off my squeaky black shoes and socks and feel the sand between my toes again.

At thirteen I went up to Sherborne School, in Dorset. The town was Saxon, built on a scire burne, a clear stream; the school had been founded by the boy king Edward VI, and for generations it had fed the ranks of England’s soldiers and administrators. In my memory, I seem to have spent a large amount of time in church. During the sermons in the Abbey, I’d gaze up at the old flags that hung in lines above our pews, Union Jacks and regimental colours torn by cannonballs and stained by battles in the four corners of Britain’s empire. I filed out of chapel a thousand times with the organ striking up Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. As I descended the steps I’d look up at the walls of names memorializing all the school’s Old Boys who had been killed in the succession of wars, always bringing my eyes to rest on one, Cowan, whom my mother had known in Burma.

As a teenager, I spiked my hair and bleached it with peroxide, and learned to smoke, drink snakebite and take poppers and speed. I quickly found the Africans again at Sherborne and together with two Nigerian brothers I formed a rock band. Our keyboardist was from the Cayman Islands. The Nigerians played drums and lead guitar. At first we called ourselves Vic Virus and the Exploding Parasites. Our lyrics were cascades of punk nihilism fused with a Commonwealth beat. We wanted our music to have a message, so we changed our band name to The Starving Millions. At our only concert, I came on stage wrapped head to foot in red ink-soaked hospital bandages and sang about world poverty.

Out in Africa, I think my father grew lonely and perhaps felt burdened by the responsibility of a family from which he was separated for so much of the time. On the rare occasions I saw him in England or Africa, he never took me in hand. He wasn’t one to dispense fatherly advice, nor to listen to fears or dreams. He could have had authority over me, if only he had wanted to. He was a stranger to me, though I was in awe of his greatness. It was my mother who laid down the rules and did all the bringing up. Dad paid the bills and came home once in a blue moon. When he was with me he wasn’t much good at football, cards or games. I never went with him to a museum and rarely to the cinema, which in Malindi had films projected into a big white wall under the stars.

The year my puberty kicked in, I was a bomb primed to go off. I had grown to be happy in England. That summer, I spent my days playing in the fields and along the streams with boys from the neighbouring farms. My skin was as brown as an impala’s. At home I had persuaded a girl named Alice to take her breasts out and let me kiss them while we played in the hay barn. In school dormitory that summer term, we had run about the sloped rooftops naked, and cut lead from the guttering.

My confidence that all was well was shattered one day when I found my mother by herself in the kitchen weeping. At first she would not tell me what was wrong. She stopped crying, but over the coming days, she sank into a state of depression, sitting alone in her darkened room for hours at a time. She stopped taking care of the house or cooking meals. I recall foraging in the larder myself. My mother’s moods took on a frightening pattern. She was fine in the morning. By eleven o’clock she become listless. If I spoke to her, she didn’t answer. If she bothered to reply at all, she spoke slowly and her voice had a disembodied, metallic tone. Instead of disciplining me if I misbehaved, she became sarcastic. Her face sagged. On her rare shopping trips, she would buy several bottles of Martini.

For nearly a year I had not seen my father, who was in Ethiopia. By now I was used to his absence. Our Father who art in Africa. But now Mum told me Dad had taken an Ethiopian mistress.

Mother said that before they were married, she knew the wife of another man who used to look at Dad ‘like a snake’. There had been others, some situations embarrassing, most of them absurd. In most cases my mother had handled the problem with style.

‘He’s been doing it for years,’ she shrugged.

It reminded me of the story of my aunt Gertrude, wife of my father’s favourite uncle Ernest Hartley. When they lived in Calcutta, Gertie learned about Ernest’s constant philandering with other women. Being a Catholic, divorce was not an option and perhaps she loved him enough not to leave him, but she did not let his behaviour go unpunished. One evening she held a lavish dinner party and when Ernest entered the room he realized all the female guests were the married women with whom he had had his affairs.

In my father’s case, though, what was much worse on this occasion was that he had fathered a child with his Ethiopian girlfriend.

I panicked. Would this mean that my father would leave us, that we’d lose our home in Devon? Would I have to leave school? I imagined my mother having to struggle to care for us with no money. Worst of all, I worried that we would never return to Africa. We would be condemned to a life with no exits in cold, grey England. I knew I had to protect my mother, but I didn’t know how. I felt guilty that I could not do something to help her. I began hating both of my parents for ending my childhood in this way. I had expected an adolescence as carefree and irresponsible as those of my elder siblings. But suddenly the limelight was snatched away from me. I remember thinking the family had become a TV soap opera. My mother would fly into a terrible rage if ever even the word ‘Ethiopia’ was mentioned. For months I did not want to see my father ever again. At the same time I was terrified that this might come to be true. I pictured the Ethiopian as more beautiful than I could imagine in the real world. How else could my father have left my beautiful mother? There were times when I could not believe that he had been disloyal. But my mother showed me proof, in the form of letters written to lawyers in Addis Ababa.

The next time I did see him, it was back at the Kenya coast. I can’t express how awkward it was. I remember we were walking together down the beach. Those evening walks to Leopard Point in the monsoon breeze almost always succeeded in blowing away anxiety. Our minds were distracted by the fish in the coral pools, the flotsam and jetsam along the high-tide mark, or the plovers and ghost crabs lurking about their holes on the wide, white arc of rippled sand. But this evening was different and the heated quarrels of the day did not vanish but instead formed a heavy silence between us. My father strode out in the way he normally did: shoulders back, chest out, arms swinging. He was no longer a young man, but he was still much stronger than me.

Along the way we met a neighbour out strolling with her dogs. We stopped to talk, and the woman spoke proudly about how her children were doing in their studies, travels, marriage plans. At this, Dad grabbed my brother and I each by the shoulder and declared, ‘These are my useless sons.’ I wanted to fight him. Right there on the beach, I sized him up and considered my chances. We were both shirtless and we stood facing each other when I spoke to him. ‘One day, I’ll be stronger than you.’

For that, he dragged me halfway up the path from the beach to the house, pulled the ‘whacker’ plant out of the ground and thrashed me with it. For a time I hated my father, and I jeered at him for being ‘a dirty old man’. But instead of ending our relationship, his failings became the first reason we’d ever had for intimacy. At the age of fifteen, I saw that he was full of faults and in many ways a failure. He became a great deal more human thanks to the absurdity of his position, and as a result of this we had our first real conversations. My mother remained the head of the house and our figure of authority, while I became friends with my father.

Our first family reunion for about a decade took place on Dad’s birthday in 1980. We camped at Lake Naivasha, in Kenya’s Rift Valley, and the whole family fought all weekend. Mum called it the Third World War Weekend. Dad must have suffered confusion about what best to do about his two families, but he capitulated completely to my mother. They were reunited. I remember Mum going around the house, inscribing every book with both his and her names. The farm in Devon was sold and Mum moved back to Kenya. In time the entire crisis blew over; my parents returned to being a double act as they had always been, on the road, like mechanized gypsies.

On my mother’s insistence, Dad took us along on some of his long road trips, so that many of my school holidays were spent on magical safaris along dusty red roads into deserts and forests. Along the way my father’s fascination with the people and places of Africa rubbed off on me. He frequently pointed out of the car window at trees or hills and after hours of driving he would break into singing Slim Dusty’s ‘The Pub With No Beer’, weaving the car from side to side on the corrugated dusty track. Around the campfire at night he continually spoke of the future, of his ambitions and hopes and schemes with the energy of a young, idealistic man.

‘Come, my friends!’ he’d boom, with a raised glass of red wine in one hand, a raw onion or hunk of cheese in the other, commanding silence while he recited his favourite lines of Tennyson, ‘’Tis not too late to seek a newer world!’

He missed what Africa had once been. When we drove through sprawling towns he would describe how a few decades before this had been a savannah of swaying grass teeming with game. But the environmental destruction was still taking place, before our very eyes. At sixteen I remember visiting the Cherangani Hills in western Kenya, where the forest was so thick the sunlight barely pierced the canopy of mighty trees to the track along which we drove. A few months later we passed down the same road and for miles around the trees had been felled and burned and the view was bruised, eroding earth to the distant horizon.

After sixty years in the continent, my father had come to believe that the Europeans had committed an unforgivable error by sweeping away the traditional culture and economy that Africans had evolved over centuries. The nomad who valued nothing more than his cattle stayed on the move because he knew that to settle would mean death. And yet wherever we went, we saw the new independent African governments, backed by white ‘development experts’, repeating the mistakes of the long past colonial rulers, forcing the nomads into sedentary lives, to put up fences, live in tin huts, to swap their magnificent beads and togas for the cast-offs and ragged clothes of the ‘civilized’ West. The missionaries did their damage too and one Sunday I recall arriving in a northern Kenyan hamlet where nomads were gathering in the hope of food handouts from the foreigners, having lost most of their livestock to drought. As they trekked in the American Baptists’ overseers were handing out polyester trousers and T-shirts with slogans that were meaningless to their wearers. Some of the proud warriors were stalking around in flowery blue plastic bath caps. The missionaries had surrounded the village with loudspeakers rigged up onto tall poles and when it came time for a church service the sermon was broadcast at full volume, so that no matter where the nomads were, they would be harangued and cajoled to convert to Christianity and turn their backs on their past lives in return for the food and clothes they were receiving.

For all my father’s enthusiasm his attempts to assist people by enhancing, rather than destroying, their traditions were almost certainly in vain. What he showed me on those road trips had more of an effect on me than anything I learned at school. I had witnessed real injustices, poverty, the arrogance of power, the ignorance of the foreigners, the obliteration of proud cultures and beautiful landscapes.

I should have become an Englishman after sixteen years of education. Instead I was like a homing pigeon. After three happy years at Oxford, I went to the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), formerly a famous training ground for those who wanted to make their lives elsewhere, and now a hotbed of dissidents from the Third World. I set off for Africa almost on the day I had graduated with my Master’s. I hitched down through Europe and met a friend in Cairo. We did Egypt the whole summer: ruins, bazaars and beaches, all fuelled by arak, across-the-counter diazepam and hashish from vendors down in the souk who sold bitten-off measures spat out onto balanced scales. Before I headed south we took a taxi out to Giza, where we dodged the tourist police and gully-gully men and clambered up the great limestone blocks of the Mycerinus pyramid. We reached the summit and there among the graffiti of generations I scratched my name next to another one etched in copperplate. Pickard. Perhaps he had been one of Napoleon’s soldiers, but Pickard had also been my grandmother’s maiden name. Had we been here before? From the top of that monument, 4,500 years old, we watched the sun sink into the desert. A hot wind whipped over the pyramid’s stones with the roar of myriad voices. Darkness fell. The tungsten lights of the son et lumière show flipped on, illuminating us like prisoners in a gaol break for the audience of package-tour holidaymakers. We descended the dark side of the tomb, sliding from one block to the next, scared of slipping and dashing our brains out on the fall down.

I took a train to Aswan, where I embarked on a ferry across the lake to Wadi Halfa and from there on up the Nile by steamer. Lashed alongside the boat, port and starboard, were barges, so that we became a sailing village of backpackers, Sudanese, livestock, market goods, and kiosks serving foul beans and tea. The crew were constantly drunk on arak. When they weren’t under the influence, they assembled to pray on the flat roof of the boat five times daily, leaving the vessel to churn on unguided. It was the dry season upriver in East Africa and we ran aground for hours at a time on sandbanks. I sat on the deck enclosed in mosquito mesh, daydreaming. We continued southwards past little sailboats and fellahin and desert hills dotted with acacias and the Nubian ruins at Meroë. At Dongola I disembarked and took a market truck to Khartoum across a desert called the Belly of Rocks and out there the Milky Way was clearer than I remembered seeing it since I was a child.

On the journey I sat next to a very black man in a brilliant white turban. He touched me on the arm and said, ‘From here on my friend, this is Africa…’

He asked me where I came from. Without pausing I proudly said, ‘Here. Africa is where I was born.’ He smiled.

One evening I lay on my bed in some fleapit village hotel on the Nile riverbanks, woozy from the last of my Cairo supply of diazepam. A song was playing on the radio downstairs in the hotel café. It wafted up the dirty concrete stairs and under the door to where I lay. The hubbub of men’s voices fogged the Arabic lyrics, but as I sweated on my bed and listened I distinctly heard the words:

Hopeless journey, hopeless journey,

Nothing but a

Hopeless, hopeless, hopeless journey…

When I was growing up, my father only gave me a few pieces of advice. I asked him where I should live, what I should do.

‘Make your life somewhere else other than Africa, a place where there’s lots of space,’ he wrote in a letter to me. I asked where he had in mind.

‘Canada,’ he replied. My father was a colonial settler, who had been searching for new frontiers his whole life.

I was looking for a home, not a Canada. And the only home I had ever really had was as a boy in Africa. The memory of that time still had a compelling power over me. As an adult it came back to me in sounds, colours and smells: a mango’s diesel taste, the smell of dust after rain, and the sounds of a picking guitar on the radio. A lost time when the sun shone, before life grew complicated.

My father’s second piece of advice was that he thought I should ‘never work for anybody except yourself’. This contradicted everything he had done himself and indeed whatever my ancestors had done, which involved selfless service to monarch and country. In previous generations I might have served in the empire’s army and fought a string of rebellious potentates, or enrolled as a colonial officer to be posted to a remote station, or struck out as a pioneer. But however much I might dream of my opportunities in Africa, this was the 1980s – not the 1880s – and if I wanted to have the same adventures in East Africa as a European, I had few choices about what I might do. I could run safaris for tourists into the ever smaller areas of bush to show them dwindling herds of wildlife. I could be a pilot, flying anything from contraband to oil prospectors into unmarked dirt airstrips. I might become a missionary or a humanitarian aid worker, which was often the best-paid option. Or I might be able to run a small business manufacturing something like car parts in the industrial areas of Nairobi, Dar or Kampala. I could pursue any of these activities just as long as I didn’t make so much money that I would attract the envy of a politician. I should also keep my mouth shut about the steady decline of the nation going on around me. Since I would live under a brutal dictatorship just about wherever I lived in Africa – and on account of my white skin, which disqualified me from participating in the politics of my own homeland – I must be blind to the corruption, killings and general misrule. Alternatively, I might become a journalist and confront these things head on, which is what I decided to do.