The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War. Aidan Hartley
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father’s canoe party left the man on Zilagora. He refused to leave his island. ‘I will die here,’ he said. Some hours later my father’s canoe came ashore in the Gulf of Emin Pasha, where he engaged a train of porters and trekked inland. The imperial Germans had imposed their rule over this part of Africa by massacring and starving many thousands. The local BaZinza people told my father that the last Caucasian they had seen before him was an officer of the Schutztruppen who had ordered the village chief to be buried alive simply as a warning to others to behave. These people appeared unaware that the British had been their new rulers since Germany’s defeat in the Great War. Despite the ravages of disease little had altered the integrity of their culture for centuries. My father passed isolated hamlets of fishermen and stands of millet, tobacco and plantains. People buried their dead beneath their hut floors and worshipped ancestors who lived in miniature beehive shelters to which they brought gifts of beer and honey. They were also members of a secret cult called the Bachwezi and claimed that their founder, Liangombe, had spoken to the spirits during a spell in the wilderness. His followers entered into trances to commune directly with their ancestors and were able to exorcise spirits from troubled souls.
My father was superstitious. In Tanganyika he knew of a woman who had died of hiccups and because of this, every time he got them he verged on hysteria. He got the shakes when he had to help carry the corpse of a man who had died out in the bush. When I was a child he told me about the terrifying BaFumo witches, who wore black cloaks and carried umbrellas and groaned like zebu bulls. Their job was to sniff out the causes of misfortunes that befell the tribe, like poor harvests or epidemics, and a scapegoat was always found among the hapless peasants. Or the wizards who read the entrails of chickens for omens. There was his story about a witch who transformed her male disciples into hyenas after dark so that when Dad baited zebra meat with poison to kill the scavengers that were harassing local cattle, she declared that he had murdered her sons and cursed him for it. A few days later he was awoken by a loud snuffling and a hyena bolted from under his bed and out of the window.
In those days people along the shores of Lake Victoria practised cults that had various beasts as their inspiration: members of the porcupine society went into a trance state and danced like their totem animal, trembling under sheaves of spines on their backs. My father became involved in a society that held serpents in great reverence. His English comrades were scandalized when they heard that my father participated in such practices. The cult order trained him to catch snakes by spitting the poisonous juice of a foxglove into their faces. These were kept in pits. Each cult member pared down his snakes’ fangs and cut the nail of one of his thumbs at the same time. It was believed that the thumbnail grew at the same pace as the fangs, and when it reached a certain length the thumbnail and the fangs were cut together. Dad used to tell me how snakes sing at night. I never believed him until we were camping in the desert and he said shush! Out on the volcanic plain there was a soft moan, like either a frog or a bird. It was a familiar sound, to which I had just never put a name. It was said that snakes also breathed fire like dragons when they sang, and I was sure that out in the desert I could see faint, bluish will-o’-the-wisps. Dad said snakes would not harm him. Once, when he was sitting on a long-drop latrine, a cobra shot out from between his legs. He said he stared it down until it slithered off under the door. I have seen Dad pick up a serpent by the tail, nonchalantly swing it around his head and launch it into the bush. I once saw him shake a snake out of his bedroll in the bush when he got up in the morning.
Continuing on his journey along Lake Victoria’s shores, my father and his train of porters arrived at the outskirts of a hamlet. Ordering the porters to carry on, he went off with a tracker to shoot meat for the pot. They came on two impala rams, standing on an ant hill and facing each other. With two clean shots of his rifle, my father killed both stone dead. A clamour erupted in the nearby village. Men, women and children came running towards the kill. Some elders appeared and became very excited. They announced that my father had carried out an act of great importance. I picture him, a young man trying to comprehend what was being said. Something about totems and prophecies. I have tried to understand what it can be that they told him. I imagine the tableau: the white man with his gun, the two horned beasts, almost heraldic, up on their hind legs, antlers pointing at each other, the moment of killing, blood splashing from a hole blasted in each heart onto the earth of the termite hill, the fading light, the peasants chanting kusinga rugaba, kusinga wombecha: ‘I see you, I see the sun.’
Singing merrily, men butchered the impala rams and bore the meat back to the village. As my father followed, he heard drumming. Great fires were lit. Darkness fell, the meat was cooked and eaten, and my father was asked to be seated. He watched a large circle of people gather to dance. Women beat a rhythm on their rawhide skirts and shook pebble-filled gourds, drummers hammered on lizard-skin tom-toms, while for two hours boys and maidens gyrated violently in a ring. Suddenly a mournful dirge began and two wizards appeared with wildebeest flywhisks. They whisked at the youths who one by one fell to the ground in a trance and began to moan, jerk and tremble. They began to speak and my father knew enough of the local language to know that they talked in a completely foreign tongue. The youths were using the language of the BaChwezi ancients, having become the oracle between the world of the ancestors and the villagers under that night sky. Questions were asked and translated and the answers came back again. Communing with the dead caused the villagers mirth, but also sorrow and anxiety. The seance over, the dance erupted once more and was still going on when my father went off to sleep. That night he slumbered fitfully. He felt troubled. The next day when he got up, he remembered the purpose of his trip to this hidden corner of Africa, which was to begin opening it up for the resettlement of the two hundred families to make way for the Ukiriguru research station. The elders quickly agreed to make enough land available – there was plenty of space – and allowed my father to survey the site and mark it out with white stones laid in tidy, straight colonial lines.
Until the day Dad entered the village, the ancestors had held sway over the living. The spirits offered Africans a set of certainties through the endless cycle of the years in a perilous Eden. Rain, harvests, children, disease, drought and death. In return, the only obligation of the living was to honour the dead. The prophecy was not just that the antelope were to be killed, but that it was my father doing it that day, as a young man of just twenty-three, becoming the agent of irreversible change in that remote corner of Africa. Soon after he walked away from the village the land was cleared. Cotton was planted. Vast deposits of diamonds and gold were discovered. Mines were opened up. Roads, aircraft, politics, wars and AIDS followed. The rule of the ancestors was buried and forgotten. The new rulers were men who sat in faraway cities. They communicated with the people not via the spirit mediums but by telegram cables and telephones.
He walked out of BaZinza country and returned to his lake post at Mwanza. From there, he took the train down to Dar es Salaam to attend a friend’s wedding as best man. The night of the party, my father had his first nightmare. In his dream there appeared a shadow at his side. A man, but not a man. It threatened my father, who felt he had to attack the apparition before it harmed him. For most of the rest of his life, the dream came back repeatedly to haunt him.
Mother was full of theories to explain the nightmares. They were mild epileptic fits. Or Dad ate too much cheese at night. Or he had never outgrown his childhood terror of ‘Mrs Hicksey’, a ghost in Claremont, the English village house where he was brought up, that groaned in the attic and was in all probability a faulty water pipe. Nonsense, he said. My father believed he had been bewitched. For half my life I wondered what on earth he meant by that, until I grew to learn that I had fallen under a very similar spell.
My mother used to sit on my bed on Sunday mornings when I was small, telling me about the Burma war. As she spoke she painted her nails and I used to drink in the scent of varnish and picture her in my mind as a young woman on the jungle battlefields. When I urged her to she would go and fetch her box of keepsakes with its photos of her with her comrades in the women’s auxiliaries, bullet casings, folded parachute silk, Chindit griffon badges, a captured Japanese rising sun flag and a little silk wallet containing a Shinto poem praising the emperor, which a British soldier had looted from a dead man.
After spending her early years in India, my mother and her sister, Beryl, were sent to boarding school in Sussex. When the Blitz began Grandpa decided to bring them home to