The Zanzibar Chest. A Memoir of Love and War

364 Pages·2010·1.39 MB·English

by  Aidan Hartley

The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of
Love and War
Aidan Hartley
Copyright
Harper Perennial
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
77–85 Fulham Palace Road,
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
www.harpercollins.co.uk
This edition published by Harper Perennial 2004
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2003
Copyright © Aidan Hartley 2003
PS section copyright © Johnathan Clayton 2004
Photo credits: All chapter frontispiece photos courtesy of the Hartley family collection except: ‘Feeding the
Beast’ frontispiece photo by Jim Hollander; ‘The Sound of Freedom in the Air’ frontispiece photo by Sam
Ouma, courtesy Reuters; ‘Lazarus’ frontispiece photo by Aidan Hartley, courtesy Reuters; ‘Herograms’
frontispiece photo by Judy Walgren.
Lyrics from ‘I Whistle a Happy Tune’ by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Copyright © 1951 by
Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Copyright Renewed. WILLIAMSON MUSIC owner of
publication and allied rights throughout the World. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.
Used by Permission.
Aidan Hartley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN 978000651210
Ebook Edition © APRIL 2010 ISBN: 9780007380268
Version: 2014–09–08
Dedication
To my wife and my mother
Epigraph
From time to time, God causes men to be born – and thou art one of them – who
have a lust to go abroad at the risk of their lives and discover news – today it
may be of far-off things, tomorrow of some hidden mountain, and the next day
of some near-by men who have done a foolishness against the State. These souls
are very few; and of these few, not more than ten are of the best.
Rudyard Kipling, Kim
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Beyond the Rivers of Ethiopia
Take Me Home to Mama
Journalist Plus Plus
The Zanzibar Chest
Feeding the Beast
Going Native
The Sound of Freedom in the Air
Empty Quarter
Lazarus
One Moment, of the Well of Life to Taste
Herograms
Postscript
P.S. Ideas, interviews & features…
About the author
Profile of Aidan Hartley
SNAPSHOT
Top Twenty Favourite Reads
About the book
A Critical Eye
Journalism and Death in East Africa
Read on
If You Loved This, You’ll Like…
Find Out More
Acknowledgements
Praise
About The Publisher
Beyond the Rivers
of Ethiopia
M
Y FATHER WAS THE closest thing I knew to the immortal. ‘Our Father, who art
in Africa,’ I prayed as a child of six. He’d always been there. When he died I
couldn’t believe it. I had moments when I felt haunted by him in ways that were
almost physical. They were a comfort to me. At home on the Indian Ocean coast,
I swam off the beach and felt he was in the water all around me. On the
upcountry plains, I imagined his bones were billowing up in the dust behind the
nomads’ herds of cattle. I clung on but I felt him slipping away. In my stricken
state I longed to pluck something back from oblivion.
The day came for us to go through Dad’s belongings. His private territory at
home was a coconut-thatched veranda overlooking the beach. He kept his
writing desk there and a single bed made of mountain cedar, lashed with thongs
of rawhide from an oryx shot many years before. Some of his clothes were still
hanging up in there, which described a life of sadhu-like simplicity: a few khaki
bush shirts and shorts, the kikoi wraps we wear in Kenya like sarongs, as well as
several pairs of camel-skin sandals.
In the corner of the veranda was a Zanzibar chest, carved with a skill
modern Swahili carpenters have forgotten. The old camphor box bore a design of
lotus, paisley and pineapple and it was studded with rivets tarnished green in the
salty air. When I opened the chest lid, cobwebs tore and something scuttled into
a corner. In the chest was the skin of a lion Dad had tracked down after it had
killed one of his best bulls, a hunting horn, a flute of apricot wood and a stack of
files. These last contained reports on missions to southern Sudan, livestock
projects for the tribes of Karamoja, botanical studies and copious notes about
camels. Always restless himself as a younger man, Dad had spent his last years
devising schemes to help Africa’s nomads remain on the move, beyond the reach
of those who wanted to settle them.
Inside one file were my father’s handwritten memoirs on which he had been
working for years. I opened a second file and reached down to grasp the pages.
The instant I touched them they began to crumble in my hands. Time, heat and
the drenching humidity had ravaged them. Mildew dusted the covers, giving off
that scent of the forgotten. The translucent geckos that roam our walls had laid
their soft, ivory eggs along the spines of the notebooks. White ants and silverfish
had eaten into the papers, leaving a web of brown capillaries. Their tracks
threaded through written words and underlined paragraphs and burrowed into
months and years of recollection. I began to read the papers. I quickly realized I
had stumbled on a secret that had been buried for half a century. Here were the
diaries of the man named Peter Davey, my father’s good friend. Ever since I was
a boy, the story of Davey had crept in and out of conversation at home in vague,
half-finished sentences. The tale had always been there, yet my father never
properly talked about it. Davey was a silence, a shadow that moved constantly
out of the corner of one’s eye. And now, as if it had been deliberately dropped
into my lap, here was the full and tragic rendition of Davey’s life.
What I found in the Zanzibar chest was a story of lives so utterly different
from my own, so exotic, set in another part of the world and in another time. I
had never believed in any great cause, I was sent to fight no wars. What I
admired most about my father, Davey and those like them is that they were men
of action, whereas I was ever the observer, not the participant, which is the main
reason I’m able to be here to tell this story.
On my flight back to Rwanda I recognised the man who had guided me during
the genocide. To be certain of it I looked at his right hand and, sure enough, he
had no thumb. It had been shot off in the days when he used to wear a red beret
and ragged fatigues. Now he appeared in a sharp grey suit carrying a briefcase.
As he walked down the aisle past me, our eyes met and his face brightened.
‘Frank.’
We sat together. Frank, I was reminded from years ago, could talk non-stop.
He was one of those men who has suffered immensely, but enjoys the fact that
he has lived to tell you all about it. As we flew back to Rwanda, he spoke of
battles, massacres and dreams. He recalled the time we marched together on a
journey that would haunt us forever. Listening to him speak, I was transported
back to those terrible days and felt dizzy to see that here we were, suspended in
ether above Africa and toasting each other with little bottles of whisky served up
by air stewardesses.
I descended from the aircraft and felt against my face a blast of hot air
carrying familiar smells. I found the faint marks of a mortar bomb impact on the
runway tarmac as I walked to the terminal. Inside, the soap statue of the gorilla
was back in his glass case. The roads edged by brick red earth and low huts the
same. The ‘Guinness is Good for You’ advertisements the same. Guava trees the
same. Faces the same. The same, when the truth is that it was changed. Only in
our minds, myself, Frank and all the other survivors, did we see a ghost town
superimposed on the real city of today. But there were no piles of severed hands
by the roadside. No monkey in a bow tie and tuxedo perched in a tree.
I checked into the same room at the Meridien hotel where we had slept
under our flak jackets. I tried to remember. But it was as if nothing had
happened. The hotel was back to being what it had been before the fighting. A
hotel.
The pool terrace was the place to be these days. This is where the Patriotic
Army top dogs and intelligence chiefs drank beer all afternoon. I sat,
maintaining a smile, nursing a cold beer, looking over towards the swimming
pool. I remembered that the pool had been empty in the war. The UN troops had
used it as their water supply when the taps ran dry and they drank every drop.
Today, as I watched from the terrace, the Tutsi children of the Patriotic Army
leaders, their plump black bodies glistening with wet, were leaping about in a
game of water volleyball. For years I had lived in my own museum of horrors in
which the Meridien swimming pool had remained empty. Meanwhile in the real
world the kids were playing in the chlorinated water as white-gloved waiters
carried trays of ice-cold beers to the war veterans and their wives.
From Kigali I drove to Goma, where Lazarus is buried in a mass grave
somewhere. I was on the back of a motorbike taxi when two policemen in
banana yellow helmets stopped us and shook down the driver for a bribe. Further
up the road that morning Hutu militias had ambushed a truck and killed three
traders. The sun was beating down. The volcano on the horizon was smoking,
ready to erupt any moment. I stood there watching a passing Congolese girl with
hair braided into six-inch spikes and crowds of hustlers striding along in garish
pyjama suits. Bicycle taxis with tinsel wound into the spokes. Guerrillas in
mirror shades with radios clamped to their ears. And my cell phone rang. I
answered and it was my wife Claire, calling from home. ‘I love you,’ I said and
she replied, ‘I love you.’ She told me that at that very moment, when I picked up
and she heard my voice on the phone, our baby daughter kicked inside her
womb.
At any one time we had six wars, a couple of famines, a coup d’état, and a
natural disaster like a flood or an epidemic or a volcanic eruption, all within a
radius of three hours’ flight from Nairobi. You could take off at sunrise,