The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War

Mo proudly showed me his office. Covering the walls were framed snaps of Mo with Bob Geldof, Queen Elizabeth giving Mo his MBE medal, Mo with Sidney Poitier, Mo with sundry Third World despots, honorary degrees, TV awards and a platinum disk of the song ‘We Are The World’.

‘If you don’t publicize yourself, nobody else will,’ he told me.

Mo’s right-hand man was Brian Tetley, a white Kenyan who had grown up in England’s north. Brian was a tabloid man out of central casting: crumpled, boozy, a chain smoker, a bankrupt with chronic woman problems. Brian had been crafting snappy leads in Africa since colonial times. He was always kind to the likes of me, young correspondents just starting out. ‘Lovely story! You should be proud of yourself!’ he’d say when one did something right. ‘Let’s go and have a steak and drink some Tuskers!’ Tetley drank so much that Mo was rumoured to often pay his bar bill instead of a salary. But he was a survivor. His scallywag charm got him out of endless scrapes. Once Tetley was staggering home in the early hours and a mugger materialized with a knife and demanded money.

‘Do you honestly think a white man walks through Nairobi at three in the morning if he has any money?’ asked Brian. The thief lowered his knife and walked Brian home, saying that he would protect him from other muggers. Brian invited his new friend in for a nightcap. They parted three days later after a marathon drinking binge, the best of friends.

Then there were the war heroes, men who were believed to be so full of lead that they triggered airport metal detectors. Reid Miller of the Associated Press kept a sliver of shrapnel encased in Perspex on his desk as a paperweight. The metal was flecked with dried blood, Reid’s blood, and had been extracted from a wound he had suffered in a Nicaragua bomb outrage. The UPI stringer Miles Bredin had once dealt antique lace in England, where he had bought and sold an evening dress once made for Napoleon III’s wife, the Empress Eugenie. TV’s Nick Hughes wore collarless shirts of an identical design every day of his life, and when the factory was going out of business he went out and bought four hundred of them. There was a long-haired, dope-smoking cameraman from Southern Africa I called the Rock Spider, who had served as a conscript in the apartheid army and fought in Angola. There were white linen-suited eccentrics still stuck in the colonial era, angry campaigners we called the Laptop Bombardiers and sundry burned-out cases, sunk by drink or running from divorces. And then there were guys like Duke, a boyishly handsome German kid, blond with a tan and freckles, like a model in a Ralph Lauren Safari perfume advert. He made sure he looked good on a battlefield, loved guns, read Soldier of Fortune and kept up with the latest gadgets: a flak jacket with a specially designed personal logo, a GPS navigator, multiblade knives, night-sight goggles.

As it turned out there was work for me in Nairobi with The Times. The paper’s regular correspondent was losing interest in his string but was passionately interested in marlin fishing in the Indian Ocean. I encouraged him to go off with his tackle and sun lotion, leaving me to cover an inquest into the death of Julie Ward, a young British woman. The victim was an attractive blonde white female who had been kidnapped out on safari, held for days by her African captors, in all likelihood gang-raped, then hacked to pieces with a machete and burned on a petrol-soaked bonfire. Despite overwhelming evidence for this, Kenya’s police claimed she had committed suicide. The authorities suggested she had climbed an acacia thorn tree, hacked off her own head and limbs and thrown her dismembered self into a campfire below. They were taken aback when the woman’s father, John Ward, questioned their version of events. It was a perfect British newspaper story, especially given the regime’s incompetence at managing a cover-up. In court, Chief Justice Mango rolled us in the aisles with his banter. ‘Who the hell are you?’ he demanded of the Wards’ family lawyer Byron Georgiadis well into the inquest. ‘Oh,’ said Mango when Byron reminded him. ‘All whites look alike to me.’ When we weren’t in court, I joined the tabloid hacks on their death knocks, when we pestered poor John Ward for quotes. My salacious reports went down well in London and my hopes soared that I’d get The Times string when the correspondent got sacked for taking too many angling trips. In time, this happened and the correspondent retired to write a book he called Fishing in Africa.

But my ambitions to become the new Times man in Nairobi were quickly dashed. I heard that the paper had appointed an old friend of mine named Sam Kiley. Sam had also been born at Nairobi’s Mater Misericordia hospital. We had met at Oxford, where he’d run the university’s dramatic society. He had toured Africa with his student actors, performing Shakespeare in village squares and slum bus parks. I recalled that as an undergraduate he had dyed his hair green. But in the period between Oxford and Kenya, during which Sam had attended Sandhurst and done a spell in the Gurkhas before taking up journalism, he had lost most of his hair. He shaved off the rest and wore a black turban against the sun, so that he resembled a handsome pirate. I think that all his life he’d wanted to be a movie actor, but although one of his nicknames was ‘Yul’, as in Brynner, he never made it into that world. Being a foreign correspondent was probably the next best thing. He had a whip-like wit and spoke in machine-gun bursts. To me, Sam was Bald Sam. In return he called me ‘Aidey Boy Baby’. Or, more unfortunately, ‘AIDS’.

After The Times I managed to get a string for the Time-Life bureau chief, a white-haired Vietnam veteran. This man kept his head down and filed a story so seldom that I wondered if the magazine’s correspondents were advised to think very carefully about telling the editors in New York about Africa’s dramas because it might only irritate them. A decade of Time’s covers hung in frames on the bureau chief’s office walls. The continent of Africa had graced the cover about three times in ten years and I seem to recall one of the stories was about mountain gorillas. I greatly admired the Vietnam vet, whom I recall sitting in a rocking chair smoking marijuana – he’d had to give up the booze after some embarrassing behaviour – as he lectured me about my work ethic. When I told him I was going out on a date with a girl he yelled, ‘A girl? Go out and get some stories, for chrissakes! When I was your age I was chasing stories, not pussy!’

In time the Vietnam vet was posted to Istanbul. His replacement was a woman who had previously been a Roman Catholic nun. She kept me on but asked me to work together with a stringer nicknamed ‘Grumbling Bones’. A silver-bearded ex-Reuters correspondent, Grumbling Bones never spoke of his past. There was also a photographer who sometimes worked for Time. Jo Louw was a South African from Kimberley. He had started out in the sixties photographing the jazz scene in Soweto, then escaped apartheid to arrive in America at the time of the civil rights movement. Years later he had washed up in Nairobi. Jo didn’t make a lot of money and I asked him how he lived. ‘My wife has a chicken farm,’ he said with a twinkle in his sad eyes. One day over beers we were talking about our favourite news pictures of history and I brought up the photo of Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination. In the picture, an aide kneels over the dying man on a motel balcony while others point to from where the shot was fired. It’s no masterpiece, but I said whoever took it was in the right place at the right time. ‘That’s my picture,’ Jo said. ‘You’re bullshitting me,’ I said. No, he went on, he was standing next to King that day in Memphis, Tennessee, 4 April 1968. And here we were, I thought in awe, having a beer in Kenya two decades later.

I used to get roaring drunk with Grumbling Bones, who was an aficionado of Spanish culture and also an Irish republican. When well oiled he held forth about rizo negro, went on to bullfighting and finished the evening by singing Irish freedom songs. Late one night he said to me, ‘What the fuck are you wasting time for on a magazine like this? Go and do something that’s fun, full of passion, don’t piss your life away on a weekly fucking magazine.’

The Bunker was in a ghastly concrete tower that rose above the exhaust and slum-fire smog of downtown Nairobi. The lift didn’t have a thirteenth floor so the one I exited claimed to be the fourteenth. Up on the wall next to the door hung a plaque of the agency’s ticker-tape logo and a portrait of the founder, the Baron Julius Reuter. The Bunker became my base for the better part of my twenties. Entering for the first time I observed a scene of bedlam. Two women sat in front of big typewriters, humming hymns, reciting the Gospels with loud amens.

Passing deeper into the room, I found reporters with their feet up on desks, swearing and groaning over the din of chattering machines. Curtains of green text on screens shimmered in the gloom. A stench of chemicals and greasy food hung in the air. A large black-and-white photo of a policeman whipping a crowd of children hung on the wall. A man sat in the corner twiddling the knob on a big radio, monitoring broadcasts in African vernaculars.

A photographer shambled out of his darkroom. His name was Hos Maina and he had a fearful bruise on his forehead, slurred his speech and fumbled as he handled his camera or tried to roll a print onto the barrel transmitter. He looked like a drunkard. ‘Car crash,’ I was later told. ‘Brain damage.’ I advanced on through to the far corner of the office to a glass cubicle. Inside, a big map of the region hung on the wall. It was an expanse of green and sandy yellow, most of it quite empty. The pink lines of frontiers were arbitrarily straight, drawn by men from all over Europe who had met a century before to carve up the continent with pencils and rulers. On the desk was a photo of a woman and two girls and also a cartoon of the type sold in kiosks in the city’s slums. In grotesque detail, the drawing depicted what was described in the caption:

IF A DOG BITES A MAN, THATS NOT NEWS

BUT IF A MAN BITES A DOG THATS NEWS

Behind the desk, with his feet up on it, was a man shouting into a telephone. He was handsome and swarthy, with a shaggy black haircut in the style of a seventies footballer, large sensuous lips and great arms and shoulders that he kept shrugging in crab-like gestures. His name was Jonathan.

He was the Welsh son of a wartime Spitfire hero and economics professor, George Clayton. After the London School of Economics, he started out on a local paper writing about cats stuck up trees and when he finally secured his post at Reuters nothing had ever made him so happy.

Jonathan was an excellent journalist and my mentor in the trade. I first met him at a Nairobi nightclub called Lips. Three sheets to the wind, he had his arms out wide and seemed to be buying the entire bar a beer. I asked for his card. A few days later we met at the Delamere Terrace. It was at the end of the dry season, when jacarandas scatter their purple blossoms along University Way. ‘Drinking in excess doesn’t make you sexier,’ said a notice above the bar. ‘Or richer,’ I read, ‘or more sophisticated.’ Friday-night drinkers milled around: Kenya Cowboys, businessmen, hacks, whores and tourists in pith helmets. ‘Just drunk,’ the notice concluded.

‘But look laddy, the story in this place…’ Jonathan said to me, squinting cross-eyed over a bottle of Tusker. He shrugged and made curious circular gestures with his hands. ‘…Africa!’ he roared. ‘It’s wide open for a beach bum like you. You’re young! You’re hungry!’

He stopped, looked around in surprise. Almost as if he was pinning a medal to my chest, then and there, he awarded me a string.

‘Dream job, my lad. What you want to do is get out there, to where there’s nothing but warm beer and smelly pussy, and bring us back some real stories.’

He painted my destiny for me. What he wanted was to have me cover the huge zones on the African map that were under rebel control. There was no way of doing it except to be there for long periods. Remote and pulverized by war, these areas were almost entirely cut off from the outside world, and lacked twentieth-century gizmos like phones or telexes. To travel in to those places was to enter a topsy-turvy universe, where the warriors, who could be Maoists by day or naked aboriginals who followed witch doctors and prophets by night, were armed to the teeth with Cold War weaponry.

‘See, I can’t lose a staffer on full pay for more than a few days. Out of the question, unreasonable. I need all the help I’ve got in the office…All hands on deck…No, no, no,’ Jonathan tutted. He pointed at me like Lord Kitchener.

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