The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War. Aidan Hartley
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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.
‘Always use socks,’ Buchi warned me later. A ‘sock’ was a condom. We all knew what AIDS was, although these were the days when the prostitutes of Dar es Salaam still hung their socks out to dry before reusing them.
‘Never nyama kwa nyama, flesh on flesh,’ Buchi lectured. He made a piston movement of one forefinger sticking into the hole of his left fist. I took his advice, but even after using the condoms I’d stay awake at night for weeks, staring at the overhead fan and praying that I was sorry and I’d never do it again. Until the next time I did it.
One day the janitor knocked on our door and Buchi answered it. The man complained loudly that our condoms had blocked the apartment building’s drains. Buchi drew himself up to his full height.
‘And what would you have us do, my brother? Endanger lives by not wearing socks?’ He waggled his belly in a characteristic display of indignation.
‘It poses a threat to the public health!’
I’d rise at seven and wash in a bucket of cold water with a bar of red Lifebuoy soap. Over a breakfast of samosas, a filterless Rooster and bubblegum, I cracked open the Daily News. In time, the door to Buchi’s bedroom swung open. Buchi emerged with a bath towel wrapped around his great middle, gave out a thunderous sneeze and complained of his thumping hangover. ‘Oooh my bratha! I’m hanging,’ Buchi would say. ‘I’m hanging all over!’
Me the mzungu, the white man, in my tyre sandals. Buchi waddling along in his pinstripe suit, mopping his thick neck with a handkerchief. We must have seemed an odd pair in the streets of Dar, thronging with men in crisp white shirts, ladies in glittering ball gowns or kanga wraps, all tiptoeing among broken pavements, puddles, sucked mango pips and goat bones.
But Buchi and I made a splendid double act. My white skin got us in to see the Brits or Yanks. Except that they let on nothing because, I sensed, they knew little about the local situation. Buchi’s black skin opened the doors of government ministers or the chiefs of state utilities. Except that they were never in. We’d rouse secretaries who lay slumped over typewriters of monstrous size. ‘He’s not around. Try tomorrow,’ said the secretaries with heavy-lidded eyes.
Rarely, the official was ‘around’ and we were shown in. He’d be sitting in his Mao suit beneath a portrait of Nyerere, commonly known as Mwalimu, or ‘the Teacher’. After thirty years he was still the undisputed leader of the Revolutionary Party.
‘Shikamu, Ndugu,’ we’d say. ‘I hold your feet, Comrade.’ This combined the traditional greeting for elders that dated back to the days of slavery with the modern socialist form of address.
‘Marahaba,’ he’d reply. ‘You’re too kind.’
Further pleasantries were exchanged for some minutes. It was considered ill form in Tanzania to get straight to the point. Finally we all fell silent. Only then would Buchi ask for information. This roused the official to open and close his desk drawers, stare at the ceiling, or look at us and politely demur. Even the simplest of subjects, such as the figures for coffee exports, appeared to be matters of national security. In fact, we suspected it was for a more mundane reason. He didn’t know and, more to the point, the figures didn’t exist.
Things had once been different for Tanzania, as the Cuban ambassador told us at open-air lunches over roasted meat. He had been here since Che Guevara had travelled to the Congo in ‘65. He said those days and the later, heroic wars of the seventies were now just memories.
‘What hope had existed at independence from colonial rule! What ambitions we had,’ said the Cuban.
Nyerere had imposed his personal philosophy of African socialism in the 1967 Arusha declaration.
‘In our country work should be something to be proud of,’ Nyerere had said in the sixties. By the eighties, many white expatriates in Dar still reverently called him the Teacher. So did the Africans, but sunk in a poverty brought about by Nyerere’s dreams they were being bitterly ironic. The joke was now that Tanzanians pretended to work, while the state pretended to pay them.
The Cuban ambassador said the presidents of Africa like the Teacher, once liberators, had grown into a group of old crocodiles. Africa was their wallow. It was a still, hot pool into which nothing fresh had run for years.
‘Now when the Teacher saw a herd of giraffe grazing in a coffee estate, even he had to admit his revolution had failed,’ said the ambassador.
‘But some of us still believe in the ideas of socialism and self-reliance.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Buchi in his baggy suit and moccasins. ‘La lutta continua. The struggle goes on, my brothers.’
I wandered off to hike along the Lake Victoria Nyanza shore. I tramped from one mission station hospital to another, dossing on the dirt floors of peasant huts in villages with the banana groves sewn