The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War. Aidan Hartley
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awake, peppered in ceiling plaster and staring at the pistol in his hand. In a bad month he had three or four nightmares. During such episodes he gained superhuman strength, enough to hurl himself through high windows. He threw hurricane lamps, tore mosquito nets to shreds, strode about and bellowed the way I had heard that night of the honey badger. He never hurt himself or anybody else. He’d leap clean over my mother as she slept without touching her. When she spoke to him he answered in a voice that was not his own, as if his unconscious body had been possessed. But she grew familiar with this other strange voice and knew that if she kept talking calmly to the sleepwalker, he would after some minutes climb back into the bed they shared. He used to then fall back into a deep sleep, and wake at dawn unaware of all his struggles in the night gone by.
My father began suffering nightmares soon after he came to Africa. I imagine him setting foot in Dar es Salaam in East Africa for the first time, the aromas of coffee, groundnuts, sesame, coconut oil and cloves wafting up from the dockside godowns. He had been loaded with piles of items from a Piccadilly tropical outfitters called Griffiths, MacCallister and Crook: solar topee, spine pad, tin bath, lavatory seat, potted shrimps, herring roes and a double-barrelled twelve-bore shotgun thrown in. He was twenty-two.
In Dar es Salaam, he boarded a train that chugged upcountry into the night, the steam locomotive spewing showers of sparks that illuminated the thick bush on either side. After two nights and a day they reached Lake Victoria, where my father’s predecessor was at the station to meet him. The official gave him a single sheet of paper of jotted notes describing what the job was all about and boarded the same train, which now returned to the coast. Dad was in charge of a district as large as Ireland and the only way to get around was on foot with porters, or by canoe, or on horseback. My father saw an Africa that was barbaric but at the same time noble, exotic and yet familiar to a young Englishman who had grown up among farmers, self-contained yet also worldly – and that Africa is now but a memory pulverized by history.
The local chief wore a crown of pangolin scales and lived in a palace complex of elaborate grass huts. His wives were adorned with copper bands and beads and their skin was cicatrized with zigzags, crescents and paisley whorls. The chieftain was protected by warriors armed with black-powder Tower muskets and spears, carved bows and well-feathered arrows, leather helmets encrusted with cowry shells and zebra manes, ornaments of glass beads and crocodile teeth. But war between neighbours was limited to defence, since it was believed that a leader would die if ever he crossed his own frontiers. True authority rested not in the temporal power of the chief but in the ancestors who resided inside an ornamental elephant’s tusk called the dawa, or medicine. A naked maiden carried the dawa ahead of the chief whenever he walked out and about. The king makers were the women, since legitimacy in the family line passed from mother to daughter, not father to son. The firstborn princess and heiress made a chief out of her husband when she married him. By these means the misrule of leaders never got out of hand. The younger daughters in the ruling families were considered illegitimate and became the mistresses of outsiders. My father learned all this because soon after he arrived in the country the outcast princess Binti Mwalimu appeared in his bed and stayed with him for seven years. The other whites said he had ‘gone native’, but not only did he not care about that, I think he liked it.
The peasants lived in constant struggle with nature: locusts, armyworm, crop-raiding elephants and baboons, drought, floods and disease. ‘I saw a long, dark, ragged cloud appearing,’ my father wrote of his first sighting of a locust swarm. ‘It seemed to wave and undulate and to my surprise it was coming closer at a fast pace. The great brown mass darkened the sky above me. I could hear the light, rustling sound of the flight of millions of insects and the sound they made as they collided…I remember seeing a whole valley filled with crops reduced to nothing within minutes. I saw an old man sitting in the middle of the remains of his sorghum field, which had been reduced to short stumps. The man had his head bowed and he was weeping. There would be no crop and no store of food for him that season. He was completely ruined.’
My father’s orders were to make Africans grow cotton. The cash crop was sold, with the prices from Liverpool cabled daily as a guide, and with this money the Africans became part of the wider world and paid their taxes to the government in Dar es Salaam. On the orders of the British the colonial chiefs’ overseers flogged Africans who refused to grow cotton. The commodity was so important that my father’s local nickname was Bwana Cotton. In time, he negotiated with a local chief to establish a research station breeding new cotton hybrids at a spot called Ukiriguru. This grew up into an institution that is famous in Africa today. The only problem at the time was that the land where the station was to be located was home to two hundred families who would have to be resettled elsewhere.
Dad set off to find a place where the families could be moved further along the southern lakeshore, intending to look on the shores between the Gulf of Emin Pasha and Speke Sound. For this journey the local chief lent my father his war canoe, crewed by sixteen paddlers who shovelled at the oily water and chanted ‘Kabule, kabule, keiga, kabule, kwa Majo pshagula, nizere! Tongaka, keiga, kabule, kwa majo: pshagula, nizere!’ ‘Wind, wind take me home to Mama, I’m coming! Go ahead wind and take me home to Mama, I’m coming!’ The spear-thin bowsprit, hung with feathery tassels and antelope horns, sliced through the water. The boat left a foaming white wake and skimmed ahead of hippo bulls that charged them under big bow waves. They passed islands ringed by flat rocks that shuddered as dozens of crocodiles that had been basking with their jaws open in the sun bolted and slithered into the depths.
The shores had once been populated, but they were now deserted. Coffee bushes grew as tall as trees and herds of feral goats wandered about. On the island of Zilagora they met a man dressed in motley rags and skins and carrying a black-powder Tower musket with a horn and shot satchel. He said some of his fellow villagers had been devoured by crocodiles waiting in the shallows to swipe at the victims with their tails, who they would then seize and drag back into the water.
The man also talked of an epidemic of sleeping sickness. This had wiped out almost the entire population along the shores of Lake Victoria after the Europeans opened up the heart of Africa and people began to migrate and clear forest land for cultivation. In his time even Dad contracted the sickness and was cured by an Indian vet in Mwanza who injected him with a Bayer drug for cattle.
East African numbers had already been weakened by the nineteenth-century Arab slave trade. With the Europeans also came sand flies, brought by the Portuguese from Brazil to the port of Luanda, which infected Africa’s soils with jigger worms that rotted the feet off the barefoot peasants. Colonial forces invading Sudan and Ethiopia imported cattle infected with rinderpest from the Black Sea and Arabia. The disease spread in a wave from the Horn to Southern Africa, destroying multitudes of cloven-hoofed animals in its path. Smallpox, syphilis and a battery of plagues from the outside world followed. The Africans who survived, decimated by famine, went to war over what resources remained. East Africa is dotted with monuments to the conflicts and pestilence of that time, such as the Rift Valley town of Eldoret, which means ‘the place of killing’. As the Europeans ventured further into the interior they discovered swathes of territory where few people survived. My ancestors beheld this scene and assumed that it had always been like this – with the Africans living in a benighted state of perpetual war, pestilence and famine. They decided the local people were incapable, childlike, vicious and primitive. The Nile explorer Samuel Baker complained there were ‘no ancient histories to charm the present with memories of the past; all is wild and brutal, hard and unfeeling’. Frederick Lugard, among the architects of imperialism in East Africa, claimed that on the cusp of the scramble into the continent, ‘Europe had failed to realize that throughout the length and breadth of Africa inter-tribal war was an ever present condition of native life, and that extermination and slavery were practised by African tribes upon each other’. And this view inevitably led to exhortations by men like Captain Ewart Grogan, a father of colonialism in East Africa, that ‘occupation of Africa with a view to sound colonization, that is, to fit the country as a future home for surplus population, is the obvious duty of the nations which form the vanguard of civilization…to make new markets and open up country for coming generations; to suffer temporary loss for the future benefit of overcrowded humanity’. And so my forebears confiscated this sparsely populated land for themselves and put its original inhabitants to work