The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War. Aidan Hartley
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Somali airfield I broke loose from my mother and burrowed between the sandal-shod brown legs of men in turbans and women in flowing robes. I knew I would recognize him because he would be the only white man in the crowd. But how was I to behave when I met my father? How warmly would Dad kiss Mum and did they still love each other? And what was this strange life my father lived, among such fierce people?
On Sundays in Somalia, the cooks used to hack the chickens’ heads off with loud bismillahs, then allowed the headless bodies to dance about behind the kitchen. I have a sequence of other disjointed memories: of mosquito larvae in our table water, flexing like red commas magnified in the distorted bowl of the jug; playing Ping-Pong with pasty-faced Chinese commissars in the local hotel; the bleeding toes I got from barefoot soccer with the tough Somali boys; my brother Kim and I on Lido Beach, where camels were slaughtered so that guts lay in bluish puddles on the coral sand; the northern Somali highlands, on a mountain called Ga’an Libah, the Lion’s Fist, where Kim and I tried and failed to rescue a goat from our lunch table; a cave of prehistoric paintings of red handprints and herds of eland stalked by cats and men with alien heads. Once I stood on the banks of a dry riverbed, feeling wind on my face, hearing a rumble, then seeing a wall of brown water explode from around the corner as the flash flood approached.
Another time we visited Dad in a big white Arab fort on the Indian Ocean. His housemates were American hippies, young men and women my mother now tells me were from the Peace Corps. Dad wore a bandana, grew his hair down to his shoulders and listened to Led Zeppelin. He was learning yoga and at dusk he practised his asanas on the flat roof while looking out over the sea. It was the end of the 1960s, Timothy Leary was urging the world to ‘turn on, tune in, and drop out’, and Dad was sixty-two years old.
After Somalia came Ethiopia. In the summer that I was first taken to see my father there, rumours had been circulating of starvation among the peasants outside the capital, Addis Ababa. My teenage sister Bryony was with him, and together they filled the car with loaves of bread and Arabian dates packed in baskets. On the road to Bati, they found thousands of Oromo peasants whose crops had withered in drought and highland frost. When my sister stood at the back of the truck tossing out the bread and dates, the hungry mob rioted. After Bati, they drove down into the Rift Valley and Denkalia. The local Afar nomads, normally tough enough to inhabit the hottest and most inhospitable place on earth, were dying too, since their livestock was gone. A tragedy was unfolding due to all the usual causes: civil war, overpopulation and misuse of the land and rivers in the name of modern development.
On the edge of the Danakil Depression, the dead and dying all around him, Dad sat down and wrote a message, which he handed to a runner, who took it to the nearest post office for cabling to Addis Ababa. This was before the days when African famines were the news stories they are today. There were no rock concerts, T-shirts or advertisements in the paper. But with that message, news of what was happening soon reached Europe. A BBC team flew to Bati and their TV film exposed the truth. When the pictures were shown in Addis Ababa, it helped the tide of revolution that toppled the medieval dictatorship of Emperor Haile Selassie. Back on the plains of Bati Dad sat down by himself. ‘The camps lie broken down on hill and plain, / Skulls, bones and horns remain,’ he wrote. ‘No shouts, no songs of fighting, or of love, / But from the bare thorn tree above, / So sadly calls the mourning dove.’ ‘…Was this your ravaged land, / The work of God, or was it Man’s own hand?’ For me this just about sums up what happened all over Africa in the twentieth century.
The Addis Ababa I remember was, as usual, a place of waiting for days in a dark, smelly hotel. The TV broadcast almost back-to-back episodes of Sesame Street. In short slots between the programmes, the revolutionaries who had taken over the TV station showed footage of the emperor feeding his lapdogs fillet steak interspersed with images of stick figures, crying babies with distended bellies, flies cramming into their eyes and mouths. After a few minutes of this, the programming would return to Sesame Street.
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