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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.
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.
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 (#ulink_b07feb0d-c999-533b-bed5-6efebc63fe97)
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.
