Aidan Hartley - The Zanzibar Chest - A Memoir of Love and War

Buchi was the Dar es Salaam stringer for the wire agency Reuters. Two young men, our ways were bound to cross, since there were so few members of the local press corps. Most local African journalists worked for the Daily News and Shihata, the state news agency. Some of them were good writers and had a nose for stories. But as employees of the great, flabby system of Chama Cha Mapinduzi, the Revolutionary Party, they were required to toe the line. There was a TASS correspondent, who ignored the news and threw himself into attempting to rehabilitate two Russian ladies who had defected from the Soviet Union to become whores. There was an Indian stringer, who owed his modest wealth not to journalism but to selling secondhand clothes out of his office on Samora Machel Avenue. Then there was Jim, a radioman who smoked a pipe and wore glasses with thick black frames, a pork pie hat and a bow tie.

When Buchi invited me over to eat at his place, I gratefully accepted. The Zambian’s huge frame suggested that he ate well. Indeed he did. Come lunchtime of the following day, Buchi and I were seated in easy chairs. His Zambian girlfriends laid out on doily-covered side tables bottles of beer and plates of delicate maize meal, fried cabbage and kapenta fish. After they had served us, they withdrew to the kitchen, eyes down, gently clapping their hands.

A series of drinking bouts in open-air bars followed, with us shouting above the blurred racket of Lingala music. Tanzania’s breweries, on the rare occasions that they produced anything, served up lager that tasted of stale piss. Our drink of choice was Tusker, imported from Kenya. It is the oldest beer brewed in East Africa and is named after the elephant that in 1912 killed one of the company’s founders. No drink in the world slakes one’s thirst so perfectly after a day in the heat than a well-chilled Tusker. Buchizya and I used to drink until we could barely stand. At the end of an evening we staggered away down pungent-smelling, potholed streets, Buchi warbling in his melodic Bantu voice the tune that was on every pair of lips at that time in Africa about how ‘we will sing our own song’.

One day, in an offhand manner, Buchi invited me to share his apartment on Cotton Road, rent free. After that I slept on his sofa beneath the churning overhead fan, or on the balcony under the clothesline. Below the apartment was a bar. From morning until night, one could hear happy voices, flip-flopped feet shuffling to music, the squawks of chickens and goats being slaughtered and the aroma of roasting fat wafting up the stairs. In the middle of Buchi’s living room sat a big deep freezer, more of a status symbol than a place to cool our beer since it had the capacity to store more than we could drink in a fortnight. The heat of the days in Dar es Salaam was so moist that the air was viscous. It was as if time itself slowed. Some days it got so hot we gave up hunting stories and fled back to the apartment, where we took turns climbing into Buchi’s deep freezer to cool down with the door closed. It smoked as one emerged refreshed, but the torpor returned within seconds.

Buchi also had a video cassette recorder, but only three tapes: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a hard-core porn flick and poorly recorded coverage of a socialist nations’ athletics event that had taken place in Yugoslavia sometime in the early 1980s. We watched each of those videos more times than I can count. When guests dropped by I had to move from the sofa and this happened at all times of the day and night. Buchi would spread out onto the couch and ostentatiously put a tape on. We’d all have to sit there and watch. It didn’t seem to matter who the guest was or which video played, just so long as people knew Buchi’s TV was top of the line.

I soon fell in among Buchi’s friends. Most of them were South African guerrillas, who had fled apartheid. Tanzania was a Frontline State, although not much fighting was in progress. Pretoria was thousands of miles away. The guerrillas were township kids, not peasants, yet they were housed in camps deep in the bush, where they were expected to grow vegetables and attend ideology classes. They preferred town, where they came drinking with us. During these sessions they happily taught me, a white son of colonialism, a chant whose refrain went: ‘One settler! One bullet! SETTLER, SETTLER! BULLET, BULLET!’

The guerrillas and I had one common struggle, which was chasing women. In this we were in awe of Buchi, who led a life more sexually complicated than I considered possible. Females came and left Cotton Road at all times of the day and night. To the guerrillas, he’d boast about his conquests as if he were winning wars.

‘First, intelligence: find the target. Next, send in the flowers to soften her up. Then I say, Okay boys, it’s time to go in with the infantry and air force and pound, boom boom, until she begs for a cease-fire!’

Buchi would stand up to do an obscene jig, snapping his fingers to a rhythm, imitating a female’s howls of pleasure.

‘Tchwa! Ooooh! Tchwa! Mercy!’

He’d also crow about his victories with white women, which he described as redressing the wrongs of European colonialism.

‘They get to experience the mysteries of the African man, whereas me, I’m on a one-man crusade to punish as many white women in bed as possible. Tchwa! Mercy!’

The men sitting with us would splutter into their beers at this. I’d struggle to put up a defence, but Buchi was relentless.

‘I think we’ll all agree you white boys are sexually the weaker race, licking toes and reading stories and then it’s all over? I get the job done properly!’

Dar was as licentious as Byron’s Venice. Everybody, whether married or single, seemed to be caught up in a web of sexual intrigue. Foremost among the voluptuaries were the Zambians who worked at the local railway corporation. They threw bacchanalian parties, where they drank brandy and danced the rumba. The floor would be packed with bodies – lissome typists with senior controllers, the young clerks with fat managers’ wives in explosively hued, shimmering cocktail dresses. The bands were large ensembles of singers, toasters, brass sections, ranks of guitarists and percussionists, together with girls who’d grind their hips and flash their plump, brown buttocks. The lead vocalist might be in a loud Congolese shirt, dabbing his brow with a hanky, eyes rolling, lips pouting, crooning in his soft bass lyrics of poor men falling in love.

Malaika, nakupenda malaika! Angel, I love you my angel!

On these nights I’d try to dance like my African friends and end up sweating and leaping about happily whooping. I’d look across the floor and see how Buchi was barely moving. He displayed an intense rhythmic energy with a wonderful economy of movement, mesmerizing his partner with half-closed cobra eyes, a slight rocking of the pelvis, and a positioning of the hands and elbows.

The working day lasted from dawn until two in Dar. It was a hangover from the colonial era. Siesta time was given over to fornicating. Nobody asked questions. The answers were both too obvious and therefore too dangerous. As a result the entire scene was shrouded in secrecy. To commit adultery was expected. To be caught, I sensed, would lead to extravagant violence.

I remained a bemused spectator in all of this, until one day I found myself seduced by a railwayman’s wife from the golf club. Buchi was out at the airport, so we sneaked into his room and flipped on the air-conditioning system. Her braided hair revealed itself to be a wig, which to my consternation she removed. Naked, she was like shiny rubber to touch. I produced a condom.

‘Don’t worry about that,’ she said.

‘We must,’ I stammered.

‘You will like it better without,’ she said.