The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War. Aidan Hartley
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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