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

‘Always use socks,’ Buchi warned me later. A ‘sock’ was a condom. We all knew what AIDS was, although these were the days when the prostitutes of Dar es Salaam still hung their socks out to dry before reusing them.

‘Never nyama kwa nyama, flesh on flesh,’ Buchi lectured. He made a piston movement of one forefinger sticking into the hole of his left fist. I took his advice, but even after using the condoms I’d stay awake at night for weeks, staring at the overhead fan and praying that I was sorry and I’d never do it again. Until the next time I did it.

One day the janitor knocked on our door and Buchi answered it. The man complained loudly that our condoms had blocked the apartment building’s drains. Buchi drew himself up to his full height.

‘And what would you have us do, my brother? Endanger lives by not wearing socks?’ He waggled his belly in a characteristic display of indignation.

‘It poses a threat to the public health!’

I’d rise at seven and wash in a bucket of cold water with a bar of red Lifebuoy soap. Over a breakfast of samosas, a filterless Rooster and bubblegum, I cracked open the Daily News. In time, the door to Buchi’s bedroom swung open. Buchi emerged with a bath towel wrapped around his great middle, gave out a thunderous sneeze and complained of his thumping hangover. ‘Oooh my bratha! I’m hanging,’ Buchi would say. ‘I’m hanging all over!’

Me the mzungu, the white man, in my tyre sandals. Buchi waddling along in his pinstripe suit, mopping his thick neck with a handkerchief. We must have seemed an odd pair in the streets of Dar, thronging with men in crisp white shirts, ladies in glittering ball gowns or kanga wraps, all tiptoeing among broken pavements, puddles, sucked mango pips and goat bones.

But Buchi and I made a splendid double act. My white skin got us in to see the Brits or Yanks. Except that they let on nothing because, I sensed, they knew little about the local situation. Buchi’s black skin opened the doors of government ministers or the chiefs of state utilities. Except that they were never in. We’d rouse secretaries who lay slumped over typewriters of monstrous size. ‘He’s not around. Try tomorrow,’ said the secretaries with heavy-lidded eyes.

Rarely, the official was ‘around’ and we were shown in. He’d be sitting in his Mao suit beneath a portrait of Nyerere, commonly known as Mwalimu, or ‘the Teacher’. After thirty years he was still the undisputed leader of the Revolutionary Party.

‘Shikamu, Ndugu,’ we’d say. ‘I hold your feet, Comrade.’ This combined the traditional greeting for elders that dated back to the days of slavery with the modern socialist form of address.

‘Marahaba,’ he’d reply. ‘You’re too kind.’

Further pleasantries were exchanged for some minutes. It was considered ill form in Tanzania to get straight to the point. Finally we all fell silent. Only then would Buchi ask for information. This roused the official to open and close his desk drawers, stare at the ceiling, or look at us and politely demur. Even the simplest of subjects, such as the figures for coffee exports, appeared to be matters of national security. In fact, we suspected it was for a more mundane reason. He didn’t know and, more to the point, the figures didn’t exist.

Things had once been different for Tanzania, as the Cuban ambassador told us at open-air lunches over roasted meat. He had been here since Che Guevara had travelled to the Congo in ‘65. He said those days and the later, heroic wars of the seventies were now just memories.

‘What hope had existed at independence from colonial rule! What ambitions we had,’ said the Cuban.

Nyerere had imposed his personal philosophy of African socialism in the 1967 Arusha declaration.

‘In our country work should be something to be proud of,’ Nyerere had said in the sixties. By the eighties, many white expatriates in Dar still reverently called him the Teacher. So did the Africans, but sunk in a poverty brought about by Nyerere’s dreams they were being bitterly ironic. The joke was now that Tanzanians pretended to work, while the state pretended to pay them.

The Cuban ambassador said the presidents of Africa like the Teacher, once liberators, had grown into a group of old crocodiles. Africa was their wallow. It was a still, hot pool into which nothing fresh had run for years.

‘Now when the Teacher saw a herd of giraffe grazing in a coffee estate, even he had to admit his revolution had failed,’ said the ambassador.

‘But some of us still believe in the ideas of socialism and self-reliance.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Buchi in his baggy suit and moccasins. ‘La lutta continua. The struggle goes on, my brothers.’

I wandered off to hike along the Lake Victoria Nyanza shore. I tramped from one mission station hospital to another, dossing on the dirt floors of peasant huts in villages with the banana groves sewn with freshly dug AIDS graves. I crossed by dhow to Zanzibar, where I interviewed dissidents while sipping glasses of tamarind juice and slept on the beach in coconut palm leaf huts. I languished in bars with Buchi.

At a roundabout in downtown Dar, a monument stands to the askari African soldiers and porters who died in terrible numbers in East Africa during the Great War. One day while Buchi and I were walking in the street, he pointed up at this and said, ‘We’ve been screwed ever since you whites came into this continent. You came with a Bible in one hand and a shovel in the other, to dig our minerals and fuck our women. Then you made us fight your wars.’

I became lazy, forgetting that, despite my relaxed Dar es Salaam timetable, my London newspaper had deadlines to maintain, pages to fill. I filed so little, so late that eventually my editor Michael Holman kindly said he had to let me go. An achievement, I thought, since I didn’t even have a proper job to lose.

Life in Dar es Salaam was a financial struggle, but had I not left I would have been able to survive on odd stringer jobs probably for the rest of my life. There would have been no end to the beers, the rumba dancing and the sensuality. But it all came to an abrupt end one day. I remember my last evening in Dar. We were at the radioman Jim’s place. Fela Kuti was playing on an old gramophone. I sat on the window ledge, gazing across rusty tin rooftops, pied crows and swallows wheeling through the sky, antique Morris Minors clattering down the street, lines of laundry and palm trees waving in the evening breeze.

‘Hey, punk,’ said Jim. He stared at me as he puffed on his pipe. ‘Have you heard the news from Khartoum?’

Jim told me that the military had overthrown the democratically elected prime minister. There was nothing special in this and Jim was simply making conversation. Sudan was always having coups. Yet I immediately saw that this was an opportunity I could not squander. I went back to the flat in Cotton Road, found a number for The Times in London, called and asked for the foreign editor. To my astonishment he came on the line and said yes, by all means he would take copy from me. The paper’s Cairo correspondent had not been able to get to Khartoum. I could file until he made it, if he ever did. I thought it was worth the chance. Next morning, I raised cash up to the maximum limit on my American Express card and bought a flight to Sudan.

My Khartoum flight connected via Nairobi, where a gang of foreign correspondents came on board. They stuck together in a group, chain-smoked cigarettes and continually ordered drinks from the stewardesses, with whom they flirted. The flight left Nairobi but in midair the captain announced that the military junta that had seized power in Khartoum had closed Sudan’s airspace. We were diverted to Addis Ababa, where the Ethiopians kept us in the departure lounge. We were among large numbers of West African pilgrims bound for Mecca. I sat in my plastic chair nursing a stale sandwich. I had grown used to the friendly company of Buchizya and the African press corps in Dar es Salaam, but I was too shy to introduce myself to these foreign correspondents. It was like arriving in a new school.