The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War. Aidan Hartley
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‘Tusker’, they read. ‘My Country, My Beer.’
Julian and Eric both worked at the Chester House foreign press centre and they were the ones who showed me around. It was in a shabby block, up a dark staircase, past a florist that offered special bouquets for funerals and a drink shop that gave a discount on production of a press card. Delegations of rebels, dissidents and sundry sinister creatures turned up daily to address press conferences. They spoke about distant wars, stuffed ballots, ethnic cleansings and cattle raids from places far off the map. Others were on missions more personal. Shaka Zulu Assegai, a black American, gave frequent pressers, declaiming in jive how the government should recognize his claim to be an African. A variety of men declared that they had a cure for AIDS, one a date for Armageddon. Or they needed help. Torture victims came in off the street to show their scars from prison. An ageing Tutsi king announced to the world that he was looking for a wife.
Julian walked me down a passage that was stuffy and dark because the lights were broken. Grimy yellow doors bore the plaques of famous names, from the BBC to Japan’s Asahi Shimbun. Julian was a figure like the Artful Dodger: he knew everybody and he seemed to be involved in every scam going. The way he explained it to me, the Nairobi press corps had a subculture all its own, like a school or prison with arcane rules, slang and legends. I thought of my great cousin Donald Wise, who had long since moved on, though little seemed to have altered since his day. Reporters still punched out their reports on telex tape and photos were sent on analogue barrel transmitters. Julian took me to meet the new doyen of the Chester House pack, Mohamed Amin.
‘So you’re an Africa boy,’ Mo said when we met. He was among the few journalists I ever knew who acknowledged how important my adopted home was to what I did, because I believe we shared the same complex emotions about the place. What we had in common was rooted in two entirely different family histories in the British Empire. Mo had been born in poverty, the son of a Muslim stonemason who was among the indentured labourers shipped in from India to construct the Lunatic Express. Mo had bought his first box camera as a boy in Dar es Salaam and a few years later he started Camerapix. At first it was a little photo studio of the type one sees all over Africa, but Mo saw his opportunity in the political upheavals of the day and went into news. His first scoop was to cover Zanzibar’s 1964 revolution that overthrew the sultan. Camerapix had since then grown to be one of the largest TV and photo agencies in Africa. Mo had covered every big story on the continent in the past three decades, often working a stills camera and film camera at the same time: the heady days of independence from colonial rule; Africa’s ‘winds of change’; the clowning of Idi Amin, who had expelled seventy thousand Asians and led Uganda into darkness; Central Africa’s coronation of Emperor Bokassa, modelled on Napoleon Bonaparte’s. His greatest triumph was his TV footage, voiced over by the BBC’s Michael Buerk, of the first pictures to break the 1984 Ethiopian famine, which would eventually kill a million people. Mo’s pictures whipped up publicity, rock songs and concerts that raised funds for food that probably saved a further two million from hungry deaths. He may have seemed diffident but he was as conceited as hell and never let you forget about his fame.
Mo proudly showed me his office. Covering the walls were framed snaps of Mo with Bob Geldof, Queen Elizabeth giving Mo his MBE medal, Mo with Sidney Poitier, Mo with sundry Third World despots, honorary degrees, TV awards and a platinum disk of the song ‘We Are The World’.
‘If you don’t publicize yourself, nobody else will,’ he told me.
Mo’s right-hand man was Brian Tetley, a white Kenyan who had grown up in England’s north. Brian was a tabloid man out of central casting: crumpled, boozy, a chain smoker, a bankrupt with chronic woman problems. Brian had been crafting snappy leads in Africa since colonial times. He was always kind to the likes of me, young correspondents just starting out. ‘Lovely story! You should be proud of yourself!’ he’d say when one did something right. ‘Let’s go and have a steak and drink some Tuskers!’ Tetley drank so much that Mo was rumoured to often pay his bar bill instead of a salary. But he was a survivor. His scallywag charm got him out of endless scrapes. Once Tetley was staggering home in the early hours and a mugger materialized with a knife and demanded money.
‘Do you honestly think a white man walks through Nairobi at three in the morning if he has any money?’ asked Brian. The thief lowered his knife and walked Brian home, saying that he would protect him from other muggers. Brian invited his new friend in for a nightcap. They parted three days later after a marathon drinking binge, the best of friends.
Then there were the war heroes, men who were believed to be so full of lead that they triggered airport metal detectors. Reid Miller of the Associated Press kept a sliver of shrapnel encased in Perspex on his desk as a paperweight. The metal was flecked with dried blood, Reid’s blood, and had been extracted from a wound he had suffered in a Nicaragua bomb outrage. The UPI stringer Miles Bredin had once dealt antique lace in England, where he had bought and sold an evening dress once made for Napoleon III’s wife, the Empress Eugenie. TV’s Nick Hughes wore collarless shirts of an identical design every day of his life, and when the factory was going out of business he went out and bought four hundred of them. There was a long-haired, dope-smoking cameraman from Southern Africa I called the Rock Spider, who had served as a conscript in the apartheid army and fought in Angola. There were white linen-suited eccentrics still stuck in the colonial era, angry campaigners we called the Laptop Bombardiers and sundry burned-out cases, sunk by drink or running from divorces. And then there were guys like Duke, a boyishly handsome German kid, blond with a tan and freckles, like a model in a Ralph Lauren Safari perfume advert. He made sure he looked good on a battlefield, loved guns, read Soldier of Fortune and kept up with the latest gadgets: a flak jacket with a specially designed personal logo, a GPS navigator, multiblade knives, night-sight goggles.
As it turned out there was work for me in Nairobi with The Times. The paper’s regular correspondent was losing interest in his string but was passionately interested in marlin fishing in the Indian Ocean. I encouraged him to go off with his tackle and sun lotion, leaving me to cover an inquest into the death of Julie Ward, a young British woman. The victim was an attractive blonde white female who had been kidnapped out on safari, held for days by her African captors, in all likelihood gang-raped, then hacked to pieces with a machete and burned on a petrol-soaked bonfire. Despite overwhelming evidence for this, Kenya’s police claimed she had committed suicide. The authorities suggested she had climbed an acacia thorn tree, hacked off her own head and limbs and thrown her dismembered self into a campfire below. They were taken aback when the woman’s father, John Ward, questioned their version of events. It was a perfect British newspaper story, especially given the regime’s incompetence at managing a cover-up. In court, Chief Justice Mango rolled us in the aisles with his banter. ‘Who the hell are you?’ he demanded of the Wards’ family lawyer Byron Georgiadis well into the inquest. ‘Oh,’ said Mango when Byron reminded him. ‘All whites look alike to me.’ When we weren’t in court, I joined the tabloid hacks on their death knocks, when we pestered poor John Ward for quotes. My salacious reports went down well in London and my hopes soared that I’d get The Times string when the correspondent got sacked for taking too many angling trips. In time, this happened and the correspondent retired to write a book he called Fishing in Africa.
But my ambitions to become the new Times man in Nairobi were quickly dashed. I heard that the paper had appointed an old friend of mine named Sam Kiley. Sam had also been born at Nairobi’s Mater Misericordia hospital. We had met at Oxford, where he’d run the university’s dramatic society. He had toured Africa with his student actors, performing Shakespeare in village squares and slum bus parks. I recalled that as an undergraduate he had dyed his hair green. But in the period between Oxford and Kenya, during which Sam had attended Sandhurst and done a spell in the Gurkhas before taking up journalism, he had lost most of his hair. He shaved off the rest and wore a black turban against the sun, so that he resembled a handsome pirate. I think that all his life he’d wanted to be a movie actor, but although one of his nicknames was ‘Yul’, as in Brynner, he never made it into that world. Being a foreign correspondent was probably the next best thing. He had a whip-like wit and spoke in machine-gun bursts. To me, Sam was Bald Sam. In return he called me ‘Aidey Boy Baby’. Or, more unfortunately, ‘AIDS’.
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