The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War

As the descendants of soldiers and farmers I never heard my parents express an opinion either good or bad about journalists. The only relative of mine who became a foreign correspondent was Donald Wise, my raffish first cousin, once removed. South African-born Don was captured by the Japanese in Singapore during the Second World War. He was a POW in Changi jail and worked on the Burma railway, where seven thousand men died. After the war he tracked communists in Malaya, then settled in Nairobi, where he wrote for the Daily Express and, later, the Daily Mirror. Don was my stuff of legend. He had done it all, from covering the big stories – Mau Mau, Biafra, Katanga, Idi Amin’s Uganda, Aden, Cyprus, Vietnam – to hanging out with Hemingway, whom he tracked down after the author had survived a plane crash on a hunting safari. Don had a sense of humour and energy that was so well loved that colleagues said the effect of his arrival on a story, sporting a splendid moustache and impeccably dressed however grim the dateline, was like that of a champagne cork being popped. In the days when news dispatches carried a proper dateline, identifying both the place and the day from which the report was filed, Don traversed the Congo to the Atlantic port of Banana and carefully timed his story so that it would read ‘Banana, Sunday’.

On graduating from the School of Oriental and African Studies in 1988, I had watched some of my friends enter careers in which their sole aim was to make lots of money. Others vanished on adventures. I had renewed my love of Africa’s history and began to plot my return to my homeland. I telephoned Michael Holman, the Africa editor of the Financial Times. He called me into his office overlooking Blackfriars Bridge on the Thames and I came away feeling I had met my mentor. Michael was a white Zimbabwean and a respected elder in the world of African journalism. He had stood trial for refusing to serve in Ian Smith’s white military during the Rhodesian civil war and afterwards had fled to Zambia, where he began to work for the FT. From there he moved to London, but he had never lost his dedication to Africa.

‘You have a one in ten chance of making a living out of it,’ Michael told me that day. ‘If you do, you won’t have to prove yourself in any other way.’

‘What happens then?’ I asked.

‘One day, you get to be me,’ he replied, gesturing at his cubicle office with its window looking out at the diagonal rain of England.

He gave me a short briefing and within half an hour I had been appointed a stringer for the FT. In the jargon of the news world, being a stringer meant I had a loose loyalty to the newspaper as their ‘man on the ground’, though the organization would pay me only for what was published, per thousand words. I had wanted a job that would get me home to Kenya, which was also the hub for the East Africa press corps. But Michael told me there was already a correspondent in Nairobi, so he offered me a spot in neighbouring Tanzania.

Journalist Plus Plus

AFTER EGYPT AND SUDAN I overlanded southwards until I got to the Indian Ocean port of Dar es Salaam, where in 1929 my father had landed at the same age as I was then. I had mixed feelings about Tanzania, associating it not only with all my father’s early adventures but also with the unhappiness caused by the expropriation of my family’s ranchland in west Kilimanjaro. But at the same time I had grown to admire Julius Nyerere, together with the other great black nationalists such as Fanon, Cabral, Nkrumah and Lumumba. I was transformed during my year at SOAS, when I buried myself in the library reading books by and about these men. I grew ashamed of my British colonial past and believed that the only way I might atone for my presence in Africa would be to openly confess the wrongdoings of my people and to rail against the continuing exploitation of the continent by the ‘rich world’.

It swiftly dawned on me that I had fetched up in a place that was off the map in terms of news. Dar es Salaam means ‘haven of peace’. Translated another way, it could also be ‘backwater’. I was too wet behind the ears to appreciate the colour copy just begging to be written here: tales of man-eating lions from Songea; insurrections on the spice islands of Zanzibar; the vanishing glacial snows of Mount Kilimanjaro. No news meant no money. I was reduced to sleeping on the roof of a derelict house near the beach. An unvaried diet of maize or rice takes its toll on a man who’s not used to it, but what the poorer citizens thrived on in roadside kiosks was all I could afford. And since I rarely got near a tap to bathe, my crazed appearance at interviews with diplomats or bureaucrats caused them sufficient alarm not to invite me back. At any other time, I would have written home with news of Lillian’s health. Lillian was from among the ranks of our deceased spinster aunts, known in the family as the Grenadiers because they were straight-backed and haughty. My mother had miraculously resurrected Lillian to become the family code for ‘please send money’. In the paranoia of postcolonial Africa, Mum had coined a glossary of such code words to maintain privacy in telegrams. Waycott was ‘the police’. Toad was the ‘immigration department’. Never was a letter written to say Aunt Lillian was in rude health. Once Dad was tramping about the Danakil desert when a runner appeared, having travelled far from Addis Ababa. By his grave face, the runner clearly knew about the tragedy described in the telegram from my mother that he handed over. How scandalized he must have been to see my father erupt into laughter when he read:

LILLIAN DYING STOP SCHOOL FEES UNPAID STOP.

I could have written home now, but I didn’t because I was out to prove myself. I often think I should have just stayed on that roof and my life would have taken a different path. Instead, I met a man named Buchizya Mseteka. Buchizya, Buchi to his friends, was a big Zambian with a wooden fetish face, professorial glasses, luminous white teeth and a tufted goatee. Born his father’s first son after seven daughters, he claimed his name translated into English meant ‘the Unexpected One’. To me, this is exactly what he was. He dressed in snakeskin moccasins and flash suits roomy enough for his generous buttocks and a belly that, he said, proved he was a man of prestige. A Big Man. I on the other hand, as he pointed out almost as soon as I had met him, resembled a hippie with my copy of Africa on a Shoestring, sandals made from old car tyres, tatty jeans, tousled hair and heat-fried pink skin.

Buchi was the Dar es Salaam stringer for the wire agency Reuters. Two young men, our ways were bound to cross, since there were so few members of the local press corps. Most local African journalists worked for the Daily News and Shihata, the state news agency. Some of them were good writers and had a nose for stories. But as employees of the great, flabby system of Chama Cha Mapinduzi, the Revolutionary Party, they were required to toe the line. There was a TASS correspondent, who ignored the news and threw himself into attempting to rehabilitate two Russian ladies who had defected from the Soviet Union to become whores. There was an Indian stringer, who owed his modest wealth not to journalism but to selling secondhand clothes out of his office on Samora Machel Avenue. Then there was Jim, a radioman who smoked a pipe and wore glasses with thick black frames, a pork pie hat and a bow tie.

When Buchi invited me over to eat at his place, I gratefully accepted. The Zambian’s huge frame suggested that he ate well. Indeed he did. Come lunchtime of the following day, Buchi and I were seated in easy chairs. His Zambian girlfriends laid out on doily-covered side tables bottles of beer and plates of delicate maize meal, fried cabbage and kapenta fish. After they had served us, they withdrew to the kitchen, eyes down, gently clapping their hands.

A series of drinking bouts in open-air bars followed, with us shouting above the blurred racket of Lingala music. Tanzania’s breweries, on the rare occasions that they produced anything, served up lager that tasted of stale piss. Our drink of choice was Tusker, imported from Kenya. It is the oldest beer brewed in East Africa and is named after the elephant that in 1912 killed one of the company’s founders. No drink in the world slakes one’s thirst so perfectly after a day in the heat than a well-chilled Tusker. Buchizya and I used to drink until we could barely stand. At the end of an evening we staggered away down pungent-smelling, potholed streets, Buchi warbling in his melodic Bantu voice the tune that was on every pair of lips at that time in Africa about how ‘we will sing our own song’.

One day, in an offhand manner, Buchi invited me to share his apartment on Cotton Road, rent free. After that I slept on his sofa beneath the churning overhead fan, or on the balcony under the clothesline. Below the apartment was a bar. From morning until night, one could hear happy voices, flip-flopped feet shuffling to music, the squawks of chickens and goats being slaughtered and the aroma of roasting fat wafting up the stairs. In the middle of Buchi’s living room sat a big deep freezer, more of a status symbol than a place to cool our beer since it had the capacity to store more than we could drink in a fortnight. The heat of the days in Dar es Salaam was so moist that the air was viscous. It was as if time itself slowed. Some days it got so hot we gave up hunting stories and fled back to the apartment, where we took turns climbing into Buchi’s deep freezer to cool down with the door closed. It smoked as one emerged refreshed, but the torpor returned within seconds.

Buchi also had a video cassette recorder, but only three tapes: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a hard-core porn flick and poorly recorded coverage of a socialist nations’ athletics event that had taken place in Yugoslavia sometime in the early 1980s. We watched each of those videos more times than I can count. When guests dropped by I had to move from the sofa and this happened at all times of the day and night. Buchi would spread out onto the couch and ostentatiously put a tape on. We’d all have to sit there and watch. It didn’t seem to matter who the guest was or which video played, just so long as people knew Buchi’s TV was top of the line.

I soon fell in among Buchi’s friends. Most of them were South African guerrillas, who had fled apartheid. Tanzania was a Frontline State, although not much fighting was in progress. Pretoria was thousands of miles away. The guerrillas were township kids, not peasants, yet they were housed in camps deep in the bush, where they were expected to grow vegetables and attend ideology classes. They preferred town, where they came drinking with us. During these sessions they happily taught me, a white son of colonialism, a chant whose refrain went: ‘One settler! One bullet! SETTLER, SETTLER! BULLET, BULLET!’

The guerrillas and I had one common struggle, which was chasing women. In this we were in awe of Buchi, who led a life more sexually complicated than I considered possible. Females came and left Cotton Road at all times of the day and night. To the guerrillas, he’d boast about his conquests as if he were winning wars.

‘First, intelligence: find the target. Next, send in the flowers to soften her up. Then I say, Okay boys, it’s time to go in with the infantry and air force and pound, boom boom, until she begs for a cease-fire!’

Buchi would stand up to do an obscene jig, snapping his fingers to a rhythm, imitating a female’s howls of pleasure.

‘Tchwa! Ooooh! Tchwa! Mercy!’

He’d also crow about his victories with white women, which he described as redressing the wrongs of European colonialism.

‘They get to experience the mysteries of the African man, whereas me, I’m on a one-man crusade to punish as many white women in bed as possible. Tchwa! Mercy!’

The men sitting with us would splutter into their beers at this. I’d struggle to put up a defence, but Buchi was relentless.

‘I think we’ll all agree you white boys are sexually the weaker race, licking toes and reading stories and then it’s all over? I get the job done properly!’

Dar was as licentious as Byron’s Venice. Everybody, whether married or single, seemed to be caught up in a web of sexual intrigue. Foremost among the voluptuaries were the Zambians who worked at the local railway corporation. They threw bacchanalian parties, where they drank brandy and danced the rumba. The floor would be packed with bodies – lissome typists with senior controllers, the young clerks with fat managers’ wives in explosively hued, shimmering cocktail dresses. The bands were large ensembles of singers, toasters, brass sections, ranks of guitarists and percussionists, together with girls who’d grind their hips and flash their plump, brown buttocks. The lead vocalist might be in a loud Congolese shirt, dabbing his brow with a hanky, eyes rolling, lips pouting, crooning in his soft bass lyrics of poor men falling in love.

Malaika, nakupenda malaika! Angel, I love you my angel!

On these nights I’d try to dance like my African friends and end up sweating and leaping about happily whooping. I’d look across the floor and see how Buchi was barely moving. He displayed an intense rhythmic energy with a wonderful economy of movement, mesmerizing his partner with half-closed cobra eyes, a slight rocking of the pelvis, and a positioning of the hands and elbows.

The working day lasted from dawn until two in Dar. It was a hangover from the colonial era. Siesta time was given over to fornicating. Nobody asked questions. The answers were both too obvious and therefore too dangerous. As a result the entire scene was shrouded in secrecy. To commit adultery was expected. To be caught, I sensed, would lead to extravagant violence.

I remained a bemused spectator in all of this, until one day I found myself seduced by a railwayman’s wife from the golf club. Buchi was out at the airport, so we sneaked into his room and flipped on the air-conditioning system. Her braided hair revealed itself to be a wig, which to my consternation she removed. Naked, she was like shiny rubber to touch. I produced a condom.

‘Don’t worry about that,’ she said.

‘We must,’ I stammered.

‘You will like it better without,’ she said.

‘Always use socks,’ Buchi warned me later. A ‘sock’ was a condom. We all knew what AIDS was, although these were the days when the prostitutes of Dar es Salaam still hung their socks out to dry before reusing them.

‘Never nyama kwa nyama, flesh on flesh,’ Buchi lectured. He made a piston movement of one forefinger sticking into the hole of his left fist. I took his advice, but even after using the condoms I’d stay awake at night for weeks, staring at the overhead fan and praying that I was sorry and I’d never do it again. Until the next time I did it.

One day the janitor knocked on our door and Buchi answered it. The man complained loudly that our condoms had blocked the apartment building’s drains. Buchi drew himself up to his full height.

‘And what would you have us do, my brother? Endanger lives by not wearing socks?’ He waggled his belly in a characteristic display of indignation.

‘It poses a threat to the public health!’

I’d rise at seven and wash in a bucket of cold water with a bar of red Lifebuoy soap. Over a breakfast of samosas, a filterless Rooster and bubblegum, I cracked open the Daily News. In time, the door to Buchi’s bedroom swung open. Buchi emerged with a bath towel wrapped around his great middle, gave out a thunderous sneeze and complained of his thumping hangover. ‘Oooh my bratha! I’m hanging,’ Buchi would say. ‘I’m hanging all over!’

Me the mzungu, the white man, in my tyre sandals. Buchi waddling along in his pinstripe suit, mopping his thick neck with a handkerchief. We must have seemed an odd pair in the streets of Dar, thronging with men in crisp white shirts, ladies in glittering ball gowns or kanga wraps, all tiptoeing among broken pavements, puddles, sucked mango pips and goat bones.

But Buchi and I made a splendid double act. My white skin got us in to see the Brits or Yanks. Except that they let on nothing because, I sensed, they knew little about the local situation. Buchi’s black skin opened the doors of government ministers or the chiefs of state utilities. Except that they were never in. We’d rouse secretaries who lay slumped over typewriters of monstrous size. ‘He’s not around. Try tomorrow,’ said the secretaries with heavy-lidded eyes.

Rarely, the official was ‘around’ and we were shown in. He’d be sitting in his Mao suit beneath a portrait of Nyerere, commonly known as Mwalimu, or ‘the Teacher’. After thirty years he was still the undisputed leader of the Revolutionary Party.

‘Shikamu, Ndugu,’ we’d say. ‘I hold your feet, Comrade.’ This combined the traditional greeting for elders that dated back to the days of slavery with the modern socialist form of address.

‘Marahaba,’ he’d reply. ‘You’re too kind.’

Further pleasantries were exchanged for some minutes. It was considered ill form in Tanzania to get straight to the point. Finally we all fell silent. Only then would Buchi ask for information. This roused the official to open and close his desk drawers, stare at the ceiling, or look at us and politely demur. Even the simplest of subjects, such as the figures for coffee exports, appeared to be matters of national security. In fact, we suspected it was for a more mundane reason. He didn’t know and, more to the point, the figures didn’t exist.

Things had once been different for Tanzania, as the Cuban ambassador told us at open-air lunches over roasted meat. He had been here since Che Guevara had travelled to the Congo in ‘65. He said those days and the later, heroic wars of the seventies were now just memories.

‘What hope had existed at independence from colonial rule! What ambitions we had,’ said the Cuban.

Nyerere had imposed his personal philosophy of African socialism in the 1967 Arusha declaration.

‘In our country work should be something to be proud of,’ Nyerere had said in the sixties. By the eighties, many white expatriates in Dar still reverently called him the Teacher. So did the Africans, but sunk in a poverty brought about by Nyerere’s dreams they were being bitterly ironic. The joke was now that Tanzanians pretended to work, while the state pretended to pay them.

The Cuban ambassador said the presidents of Africa like the Teacher, once liberators, had grown into a group of old crocodiles. Africa was their wallow. It was a still, hot pool into which nothing fresh had run for years.

‘Now when the Teacher saw a herd of giraffe grazing in a coffee estate, even he had to admit his revolution had failed,’ said the ambassador.

‘But some of us still believe in the ideas of socialism and self-reliance.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Buchi in his baggy suit and moccasins. ‘La lutta continua. The struggle goes on, my brothers.’

I wandered off to hike along the Lake Victoria Nyanza shore. I tramped from one mission station hospital to another, dossing on the dirt floors of peasant huts in villages with the banana groves sewn with freshly dug AIDS graves. I crossed by dhow to Zanzibar, where I interviewed dissidents while sipping glasses of tamarind juice and slept on the beach in coconut palm leaf huts. I languished in bars with Buchi.

At a roundabout in downtown Dar, a monument stands to the askari African soldiers and porters who died in terrible numbers in East Africa during the Great War. One day while Buchi and I were walking in the street, he pointed up at this and said, ‘We’ve been screwed ever since you whites came into this continent. You came with a Bible in one hand and a shovel in the other, to dig our minerals and fuck our women. Then you made us fight your wars.’

I became lazy, forgetting that, despite my relaxed Dar es Salaam timetable, my London newspaper had deadlines to maintain, pages to fill. I filed so little, so late that eventually my editor Michael Holman kindly said he had to let me go. An achievement, I thought, since I didn’t even have a proper job to lose.

Life in Dar es Salaam was a financial struggle, but had I not left I would have been able to survive on odd stringer jobs probably for the rest of my life. There would have been no end to the beers, the rumba dancing and the sensuality. But it all came to an abrupt end one day. I remember my last evening in Dar. We were at the radioman Jim’s place. Fela Kuti was playing on an old gramophone. I sat on the window ledge, gazing across rusty tin rooftops, pied crows and swallows wheeling through the sky, antique Morris Minors clattering down the street, lines of laundry and palm trees waving in the evening breeze.

‘Hey, punk,’ said Jim. He stared at me as he puffed on his pipe. ‘Have you heard the news from Khartoum?’

Jim told me that the military had overthrown the democratically elected prime minister. There was nothing special in this and Jim was simply making conversation. Sudan was always having coups. Yet I immediately saw that this was an opportunity I could not squander. I went back to the flat in Cotton Road, found a number for The Times in London, called and asked for the foreign editor. To my astonishment he came on the line and said yes, by all means he would take copy from me. The paper’s Cairo correspondent had not been able to get to Khartoum. I could file until he made it, if he ever did. I thought it was worth the chance. Next morning, I raised cash up to the maximum limit on my American Express card and bought a flight to Sudan.

My Khartoum flight connected via Nairobi, where a gang of foreign correspondents came on board. They stuck together in a group, chain-smoked cigarettes and continually ordered drinks from the stewardesses, with whom they flirted. The flight left Nairobi but in midair the captain announced that the military junta that had seized power in Khartoum had closed Sudan’s airspace. We were diverted to Addis Ababa, where the Ethiopians kept us in the departure lounge. We were among large numbers of West African pilgrims bound for Mecca. I sat in my plastic chair nursing a stale sandwich. I had grown used to the friendly company of Buchizya and the African press corps in Dar es Salaam, but I was too shy to introduce myself to these foreign correspondents. It was like arriving in a new school.

The hours turned into evening. The pilgrims crowded into the bathrooms to wash, spraying water through their noses, sticking their feet and bottoms in the basins. They came out and lined up for evening prayers. I watched them and envied their sense of faith and community. I was confused about which was the correct way to live my life and saw no greater purpose in it than to live it to the full. After praying they settled into circles, telling their beads and chatting over ginger coffee poured from thermoses. I pictured them at home in villages and tents under Saharan night skies. At last they wrapped their turbans around their heads to cut out the fluorescent glare and slept on the dirty linoleum floors. Picking their way through this sea of supine hajjis I saw a young English correspondent with the features of Dennis the Menace chatting to a handsome American. Both were my age. They held out their hands.

‘Julian Ozanne of the Financial Times,’ said the Englishman. I recognized the name. He was my Nairobi counterpart working for Michael.

‘Eric Ransdell. U.S. News & World Report,’ said the American. ‘You?’ I introduced myself and confessed I didn’t work for anybody, but that I might file to The Times if the Cairo correspondent didn’t make it first.

‘Why wouldn’t he make it?’ asked Eric. He gave me a friendly pat on the arm. ‘Look, tell me if I can help with anything.’

We waited in that airport lounge for three entire days. By the time Khartoum’s airspace opened up and the flight departed Addis I was dishevelled, unshaven and in need of a bath. The lounge café had charged high prices in dollars and a big dent had already been made in my funds. We landed in Sudan’s capital and exited the aircraft to a blast of hot desert air. In the arrivals building a gigantic officer with blue-black skin checked my passport and said, ‘No visa. You cannot enter Sudan. You must get back on the aircraft.’ The flight was headed for Cairo. I remonstrated with the officer, but he shook his head. He didn’t look like a man who’d accept a bribe. The only payment he needed was the power his uniform gave him. He nodded to two soldiers who herded me to one side. Julian was next in line. The officer checked his passport, found a valid visa and waved him through.