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