The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War

‘And what about my colleague?’ Julian said, fixing the man with a determined stare. ‘The general has personally called for the international press to come to Sudan. I have an appointment to see him tomorrow morning with my colleague here. The general’s not going to be happy if you deport any of us.’ The officer looked doubtful. ‘Where is your letter of invitation?’ he asked. ‘At the foreign minister’s office,’ Julian replied. ‘Telephone if you like.’ The lines were clearly down. Julian’s bluff worked. The officer called me back to his desk and stamped my passport.

Most of the journalists were staying at the Hilton. I couldn’t afford that and so I checked into the Acropole, a shabby Greek-run place with a friendly atmosphere, despite the damage from a recent bombing by Islamic militants. Already the shooting was over in Khartoum and the story had, after several days, gone completely cold. It was downpage news, but I reminded myself that at least I had a string. But what to write about? I felt out of my depth and so I decided to pay my colleagues a visit. On the banks of the Nile, the Hilton had its own cool microclimate, food supply, piped music and soaps in the lavatories. It was an American spaceship that had landed on the dusty planet of Sudan. Walking into the lobby, I encountered a man in a white suit and a jet-black toupee dictating copy down the lobby phone.

‘Stop! New par! Tanks rumbled through streets, as civilians dived for cover like stray cats…No! T for Tommy…Tanks!…No! N is for nuts…’

He had lots of quotes, from Western diplomats and ‘Sources close to the military…’. Not for the last time, I felt like I was a step behind the action, because I hadn’t seen any such military displays or panicked civilians. To my eyes, a pall of inertia hung over the city. In fact I could barely even see Khartoum. Sandstorms locally known as the haboob whipped the streets in the daytime, producing an ominous twilight. Haboobs were famous for the confusion they produced. A Boeing pilot had once ditched on the Nile, mistaking it for the airport runway. ‘Taxi?’ I’d ask at reception, to which the concierge would shake his head. ‘Haboob!’ By evening, the haboob would settle into sand drifts at every street corner, ready to go airborne again in the heat of the next day. Before dusk, I observed everybody scampering home. A bobbing mass of them swathed in white turbans and leopard-skin slippers, they looked like workers toiling in some gigantic laundry. ‘Taxi?’ I asked in the street. They shook their heads. ‘Curfew!’

Eric was in the Hilton lobby, smoking. I went over to him and asked who the man in the white suit and toupee was.

‘The Cairo Times correspondent,’ he said. ‘Listen, you can still try writing for the specialist magazines like Africa Confidential.’

I told him I knew little about Sudan, certainly not enough to write for the kind of publications read by diplomats and spies. Eric advised me to bluff it. I realized I’d have to. The cash from my credit card was now half gone and I had no prospect of making any more. I spent more precious dollars telephoning Africa Confidential from the Hilton foyer, despite the fact that I knew the lines were tapped, and to my astonishment the editor commissioned me.

Shrouded by the curfew and the haboob, the junta’s new generalissimo, Bashir, had yet to reveal himself. Nobody knew anything about him, since until now he had been isolated in a jungle garrison several weeks’ boat journey up the Nile. In a transcript of his only statement so far, I thought I detected a motive for his coup d’état, cryptic though it was. ‘We will no longer eat bitter aloes on the frontiers,’ he had said. On state TV, the junta repeatedly broadcast pictures of the ousted prime minister’s garage. It was stacked with tins of tomato puree. Puree certainly seemed to be a vital ingredient in much of the local food. Apparently the prime minister had purchased his mountain of tins with diverted state funds. They looked rusty and past their sell-by date to me. I saw that this hardly made a news story. What was I to say? That the Islamic fundamentalists were up in arms over a variation on Lord Acton’s dictum? ‘Puree tends to corrupt and absolute puree corrupts absolutely.’

One respected correspondent, meanwhile, did not appear to budge from the Hilton foyer, but seemed to be always parked on a sofa next to a trolley piled with cakes. To remain here and still have so much to file made me think he must be a true expert. ‘How long have you covered the Sudan?’ He winked at me. ‘This is my first time here!’ He jerked his head towards the dining hall. ‘What a dump, eh?’

My mounting panic was partly due to the fact that I knew that if I didn’t file, I would have no way of retrieving the costs of the telex, hotel or flights. I told Eric and Julian that all was going well. At hotel mealtimes, I claimed to have a bad stomach and refused ordering from the menu, but waited until I could secretively nip along to a roadside-shack café to order an aluminium plateful of foul beans and coriander with a wheat chapatti.

It was my first opportunity to observe up close the other foreign press corps on a story. I noticed that as soon as they began socializing they forgot their rivalries. I sat straining to overhear something useful about the Sudanese coup, but the correspondents made no mention of it. Instead they swapped scurrilous anecdotes about great former colleagues. (‘Said he could get laid anywhere, right? So then the desk sends him to Red China during the Cultural Revolution. Nobody thinks he can do it. Six weeks later a postcard arrives with nothing on it but the words “Gobbled in the Gobi!”’) I learned that correspondents were strangely sentimental about the past. Today’s stories seemed to be small beer compared to the momentous events of even a few years ago, when titans had walked the earth. The trade of journalism also appeared to have gone into some kind of terminal decline.

A Reuters correspondent covering fascist Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 sent a cable to Fleet Street headquarters to complain about the quality of the water in Addis Ababa. The solution, he proposed, was to send him crates of champagne. Even today, correspondents conformed to long-held customs. Fiddling expenses or making outrageous claims was a matter of professional pride to the foreign correspondent. It was still a subtle but vital part of a journalist’s credentials. A good stringer, particularly, had to be clever at massaging claims, since he or she was paid far too little in ‘wordage’ fees to keep body and soul alive. One had to resort to a mass of tricks to which editors, who had been in the field themselves, were honour-bound to turn a blind eye. Bogus receipt books, forged signatures, black-market cash transactions all came in handy. As long as you wrote down a claim on a receipt and had it stamped all over in purple you’d be all right. Years later I made an expense for a thousand dollars, itemizing it as payment for the services of two prostitutes for a banker I wanted to interview and management never questioned it.

At the end of the meals, I saw them tip the waiter to give them extra blank receipts. One explained to me how it worked.

‘Every trip, I try to make enough to buy myself a nice piece of electronics, see? A video, or some speakers…’

I was astonished to see one of them rummaging through a waste-paper bin full of discarded receipts at the restaurant entrance.

I became desperate. I knocked on doors, pleading with the other correspondents to tell me where I was going wrong.

‘Please tell me what’s happening?’

‘No, I’m not going to help you just like that,’ said the BBC correspondent Lindsey Hilsum.

‘Pleeeaaase.’

‘No.’

Finally, I went to Julian and Eric and they tried to calm me down. Short of writing my copy, however, they could do little. Up in my room, as my filing deadline loomed, I scribbled a first paragraph. Crossed it out. Screwed the paper into a ball. Wrote another. Screwed it into a ball. And so on, until I had no pages left in my notepad and began work on the hotel stationery. What could I write, when I saw nothing The Times man did? Nobody had agreed to speak to me, so I had no quotes, facts or figures. My taxi driver was the only Sudanese who gave me any comment on the political situation. He said: ‘Army bad! Army bad!’

I was close to despair, when there was a knock on my door. It was Eric, with a camera slung over his shoulder. ‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘All right,’ I said gratefully. The foyer doors parted with an electric sigh and we emerged into the haboob and clambered into a battered taxi.

I never saw Eric hot, ruffled, unkempt, or miss a story, no matter which jungle or slum or refugee camp he fetched up in. He made covering Africa look easy. And when a day’s journalism was done he’d tell you unprintable tales full of laconic humour, between heavy exhalations of cigarette smoke and always a crazy laugh at the end. Eric had been raised in St Joseph, Missouri, and I think he’d grown up wanting adventure thanks to the example of his father, William Ransdell, who had joined up with the USAF at eighteen. As a navigator in the nose of a B-17 bomber his old man had flown thirty-five daylight missions over Germany, through ribbons of flak and Nazi fighters, with engine shutouts, two crash landings and raids so perilous that on one sortie two-thirds of the bomber group got shot down. By the time Eric was at journalism school he had travelled all over Asia and Australia but he found his cause when he learned what was happening in apartheid South Africa. ‘The more I read, the more I came to feel that what was happening in South Africa was one of those pure evils, utterly black and white, just like the one my father had fought in Germany,’ he told me. He touched down in Johannesburg in 1985, soon after the townships exploded. The sudden rush of being in this place – comrades toyitoyi-ing around burning tyre barricades, Casspirs filled with soldiers in riot gear, witnessing Desmond Tutu’s church sermons – changed his entire life. Back at home he wrote an article about what he’d seen that won a William Randolph Hearst award. But when he attempted to return to South Africa Pretoria rejected his visa, so he had no choice but to head for ‘liberated’ black Africa, and now here we were.

Minutes later our taxi stopped at the gates of army headquarters. We got out next to a large Soviet tank and Eric moved off a few steps to speak with a sentry. To my astonishment, the guard nodded and called an officer, who marched us into the heavily fortified military complex until we entered a dark office, where a man sat behind a huge desk. By the spade-sized epaulets on his shoulders, I knew him to be an officer. By his shy and deferential manner, I took him for a lowly fellow in the chain of command. We engaged in a little small talk. The officer had a habit of blinking very fast so that his eyelids fluttered.

‘You are English?’ he asked me with a smile. I said I was, but that I had been raised in Africa.

‘Ah, I love England very much,’ the officer said, disregarding my claim to an African identity. ‘Manchester United is my team. What is your team?’ I have no opinion about football but I wanted to put him at his ease. ‘Chelsea,’ I ventured.

‘You are a Christian?’ I said I was, deciding to go along with this quietly.

‘You must know that I myself attended the Oxford University,’ the officer said complacently. Blink blink.

‘Oh? Which college?’

‘Ah, Oxford Street,’ he replied, blinking faster as he smiled so widely that he exposed his gums.

After some minutes of this I saw it was time for me, the Eyes and Ears of the World, to seize control of the situation. It was time for me to begin my career in earnest. I was being nudged forwards by the ghost of my great predecessor, the twenty-three-year-old war correspondent Winston Churchill, who had been in this place when he covered Kitchener’s defeat of the Mahdist forces at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898.

With just the right tone of firmness I thought appropriate, I asked, ‘And when do we get to interview His Excellency the President?’

There was an embarrassed silence. Eric stared at me agape. The Sudanese with the giant gold epaulets had stopped blinking. Somewhat apologetically, he replied, ‘I am the President.’

It’s 11 July 1989, and we are belted in as the Kenya Airways flight taxis for the runway. We’re homeward bound for Nairobi after the military coup in the Sudan. We’re tired and dirty after an eighteen-hour delay out of Khartoum due to sandstorms followed by a technical hitch stopover at Addis Ababa’s Bole airport. The aircraft is half-empty. Eric is next to me and across the aisle is Julian, pulling on a fag after the no smoking lights have come on. The three of us barely know one another, but what’s about to happen will bind us together forever. This moment is when it all really begins. This is why years later I like to fancy that the people who make up my story, even the ones who are not on the plane that day, fill all the vacant seats. And so I look down the aisle and see, half turning to look at me, the faces of Jonathan, Buchi, Hos, Dan, Afrah, Carlos, Bald Sam, Shafi, Lizzie. And among them are dozens of other ghosts and fellow travellers we met along the way.

Our Boeing 707 accelerates and lifts off. Within seconds it becomes clear that we are failing to gain altitude. Julian rests his head against the seat in front of him and exclaims dolefully, ‘We’re not going to make it!’ The aircraft banks in a tight circle. Through my porthole the wing is vertical, skimming peasant huts and fields. We hit the ground halfway down the runway. The jets scream in reverse thrust. Overhead compartments crash open, spilling bags and tubes and yellow masks. We spin, tilt, the wheels give way as the fuselage torpedoes down a mountainside. The port wing buckles and rips away. Din of turbines, tearing metal, electronics and then silence.

My panic is over before it even had a chance to begin. In the hush that follows we crouch in the brace position, like churchgoers. Eric cackles, ‘Are we home already?’

Across the way, a passenger with zigzag tribal scars across his forehead points out of his porthole and yells, ‘It is burning! We are burning!’

Orange flames billow from the smashed portside wing. The passenger cabin fills with fumes and black smoke. I begin to choke as I struggle to rip off the safety belt. We are all suffocating.

Julian heads downhill towards the aircraft’s nose. Instinct tells me to vault up the steep incline to the starboard rear emergency exit. I can see through the smoke that Eric has the same idea as he moves up ahead of me. At the exit, a flight attendant blocks our path. His skin has gone a tinge of green. ‘Take your seats!’ he yells. He is rooted to the spot, as if paralysed.

Eric punches the flight attendant in the face and pushes past. He turns the emergency handle and wrenches open the door, causing the inflatable chute to billow out to the hillside below. Both of us grab the steward and push him out of the plane headfirst, then follow ourselves. The whole scene’s in slow motion as I slide down. I see black smoke, red flames, a fountain of white foam lathering up over the prone aircraft. Walking up the gashed muddy slope I see, in amongst the debris of orange life jackets and clothes and paper cups, an old man moaning, clutching at his bloody leg out of which sticks a jagged bone. Stretcher crews are skidding down the hill. Off to one side, the Ethiopian soldiers are using the butts of their AK-47S to keep back a crowd of peasants in rags intent on looting the crash site.

We regroup back on the tarmac apron, where an airport bus is waiting for us. ‘Bloodyfuckinghell’ we all agree and light up our fags. Once out of the airport, we rush to file our stories. Only when we talk to our desks do we realize that our harrowing experience in the heart of Africa is not news. It means nothing to anybody but us, yet the crash brings us together as comrades, in a way that no pleasant experience could do.

The flight to Nairobi next day feels like the safest I’ve ever taken. I’m buoyed up and borne along by the laws of probability on my side that I couldn’t be in a plane crash two days in a row. Ever after, Julian’s way of coping with air travel is to start talking very loudly just before takeoff about the time he crashed in Africa, until the stewardesses come to ask him to desist because he’s frightening the other passengers. Eric claims he has no fear of flying. ‘Doesn’t bother me in the least,’ he says. ‘In fact, I feel blessed by the great airline gods, which is why I think I’m always getting bumped up to business or first class.’ I walk away and forget for years how afraid I am. But on a takeoff hundreds of flights later, every second of the crash comes back to haunt me. I am transformed into one of those unsettling passengers next to you: palms sweating, bare-toothed with fear and possessed of a high-altitude belief in God. And so it is with many of my memories.

At the end of the nineteenth century the British constructed a railway from Mombasa on the Indian Ocean to Lake Victoria. The project acquired the name the Lunatic Express, being hugely expensive and built for no ultimate reason other than for the vague objective of securing the headwaters of the Nile. The most challenging section of this incredible feat of engineering was to cross the Great Rift Valley. On the last staging post before the precipitous Rift escarpment, the British ordered their workforce of Indian coolies and soldiers to pitch their lines of white tents in neat rows on the black cotton soil. Here the flat plains, which teemed with wildlife, suddenly rose up like a wave to break over the Rift near the Ngongs, a ripple of volcanic hills that looked like a giant fist. The staging post quickly became Nairobi, named for Ngare Nairobi, or the Cold River, which snaked across the plains. Having built a railway, the British had to justify its cost. The bureaucrats arrived in Nairobi. A stone magistrate’s court was constructed and the trading houses and banks that followed went up along muddy streets wide enough to allow a wagon and eight span of oxen to turn a full circle. The Africans were ordered to pay poll taxes to the bureaucrats. To do this, the Africans came to work and live in shanties. The white settlers arrived to establish plantations and ranches so that the railway would have something to transport. And so the foundations of modern Kenya were laid, created by white men, then worshipped by the mission-raised blacks after they took power following their independence.

I was born within sight of Nairobi’s railway terminus, at the Mater Misericordia hospital in the Industrial Area. The midwife Sister Assunta delivered me and cooed over me for my name, Aidan, was that of the saint who had converted the heathens of the Western Isles of Scotland. My mother gave the hospital a jacaranda tree that grows in the garden to this day. My birth came just after Kenya’s independence from Britain in 1963, when postcards showed a city with lush gardens and wide, tree-lined avenues with only the occasional car travelling on them. ‘Jambo from the Green City in the Sun’ said the postcards and the tourist brochures. Even in the Technicolor memory of my childhood, I remember Nairobi was still small enough for people to say hello as one strolled the pavement.

If you live in a place you hardly notice the changes. You have to return after a long absence, as I did in 1989. In the gap since my boyhood, Nairobi had been transformed into a dirty, crime-ridden place, surrounded by slums. I heard that when it rained in the shantytowns, the poor people’s shacks slid down the muddy hillsides. Nobody knew what the population was except that it was rising. The hacks nicknamed it ‘Nairobbery’ (derelict Dar es Salaam was ‘Dar-Is-the-Slum’ and Uganda’s war-devastated capital Kampala was known as ‘Kampothole’). But with the crowding and danger came a vibrant urban atmosphere as fizzy as a chilled Tusker with its cap popped off.

I remember walking into the Chester House press centre on Koinange Street for the first time. Downtown was still defined by the little grid of streets from the colonial era. Concrete structures rose around me, nosing up through the slum smog: ministries, multinationals, agencies of the United Nations. From a street corner, I watched the teeming scene: office workers in their frayed shirt collars and cheap suits stepping over beggars, shoeshine boys, vendors selling spreads of newspapers. Drum magazine splashing the headline ‘Luo Girls are Best in Bed.’ The white plutocrats in their short sleeves, the youngish European females we called leatherettes because the tropical sun had ravaged their white skin, the hippies, the Kenya Cowboys, the Somali café crowd, Asians in their banks and trading houses, the young black middle-class kids in their baggy trousers and wet-look coifs, the Big Shiny Men in their air-conditioned BMWs, or the processions of tourists in khaki safari hats, window-shopping for taka taka souvenirs from Eden. Rising above the chaos of downtown’s Uhuru Highway was a string of giant advertising billboards. ‘Tusker’, they read. ‘My Country, My Beer.’

Julian and Eric both worked at the Chester House foreign press centre and they were the ones who showed me around. It was in a shabby block, up a dark staircase, past a florist that offered special bouquets for funerals and a drink shop that gave a discount on production of a press card. Delegations of rebels, dissidents and sundry sinister creatures turned up daily to address press conferences. They spoke about distant wars, stuffed ballots, ethnic cleansings and cattle raids from places far off the map. Others were on missions more personal. Shaka Zulu Assegai, a black American, gave frequent pressers, declaiming in jive how the government should recognize his claim to be an African. A variety of men declared that they had a cure for AIDS, one a date for Armageddon. Or they needed help. Torture victims came in off the street to show their scars from prison. An ageing Tutsi king announced to the world that he was looking for a wife.

Julian walked me down a passage that was stuffy and dark because the lights were broken. Grimy yellow doors bore the plaques of famous names, from the BBC to Japan’s Asahi Shimbun. Julian was a figure like the Artful Dodger: he knew everybody and he seemed to be involved in every scam going. The way he explained it to me, the Nairobi press corps had a subculture all its own, like a school or prison with arcane rules, slang and legends. I thought of my great cousin Donald Wise, who had long since moved on, though little seemed to have altered since his day. Reporters still punched out their reports on telex tape and photos were sent on analogue barrel transmitters. Julian took me to meet the new doyen of the Chester House pack, Mohamed Amin.

‘So you’re an Africa boy,’ Mo said when we met. He was among the few journalists I ever knew who acknowledged how important my adopted home was to what I did, because I believe we shared the same complex emotions about the place. What we had in common was rooted in two entirely different family histories in the British Empire. Mo had been born in poverty, the son of a Muslim stonemason who was among the indentured labourers shipped in from India to construct the Lunatic Express. Mo had bought his first box camera as a boy in Dar es Salaam and a few years later he started Camerapix. At first it was a little photo studio of the type one sees all over Africa, but Mo saw his opportunity in the political upheavals of the day and went into news. His first scoop was to cover Zanzibar’s 1964 revolution that overthrew the sultan. Camerapix had since then grown to be one of the largest TV and photo agencies in Africa. Mo had covered every big story on the continent in the past three decades, often working a stills camera and film camera at the same time: the heady days of independence from colonial rule; Africa’s ‘winds of change’; the clowning of Idi Amin, who had expelled seventy thousand Asians and led Uganda into darkness; Central Africa’s coronation of Emperor Bokassa, modelled on Napoleon Bonaparte’s. His greatest triumph was his TV footage, voiced over by the BBC’s Michael Buerk, of the first pictures to break the 1984 Ethiopian famine, which would eventually kill a million people. Mo’s pictures whipped up publicity, rock songs and concerts that raised funds for food that probably saved a further two million from hungry deaths. He may have seemed diffident but he was as conceited as hell and never let you forget about his fame.