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

The hours turned into evening. The pilgrims crowded into the bathrooms to wash, spraying water through their noses, sticking their feet and bottoms in the basins. They came out and lined up for evening prayers. I watched them and envied their sense of faith and community. I was confused about which was the correct way to live my life and saw no greater purpose in it than to live it to the full. After praying they settled into circles, telling their beads and chatting over ginger coffee poured from thermoses. I pictured them at home in villages and tents under Saharan night skies. At last they wrapped their turbans around their heads to cut out the fluorescent glare and slept on the dirty linoleum floors. Picking their way through this sea of supine hajjis I saw a young English correspondent with the features of Dennis the Menace chatting to a handsome American. Both were my age. They held out their hands.

‘Julian Ozanne of the Financial Times,’ said the Englishman. I recognized the name. He was my Nairobi counterpart working for Michael.

‘Eric Ransdell. U.S. News & World Report,’ said the American. ‘You?’ I introduced myself and confessed I didn’t work for anybody, but that I might file to The Times if the Cairo correspondent didn’t make it first.

‘Why wouldn’t he make it?’ asked Eric. He gave me a friendly pat on the arm. ‘Look, tell me if I can help with anything.’

We waited in that airport lounge for three entire days. By the time Khartoum’s airspace opened up and the flight departed Addis I was dishevelled, unshaven and in need of a bath. The lounge café had charged high prices in dollars and a big dent had already been made in my funds. We landed in Sudan’s capital and exited the aircraft to a blast of hot desert air. In the arrivals building a gigantic officer with blue-black skin checked my passport and said, ‘No visa. You cannot enter Sudan. You must get back on the aircraft.’ The flight was headed for Cairo. I remonstrated with the officer, but he shook his head. He didn’t look like a man who’d accept a bribe. The only payment he needed was the power his uniform gave him. He nodded to two soldiers who herded me to one side. Julian was next in line. The officer checked his passport, found a valid visa and waved him through.

‘And what about my colleague?’ Julian said, fixing the man with a determined stare. ‘The general has personally called for the international press to come to Sudan. I have an appointment to see him tomorrow morning with my colleague here. The general’s not going to be happy if you deport any of us.’ The officer looked doubtful. ‘Where is your letter of invitation?’ he asked. ‘At the foreign minister’s office,’ Julian replied. ‘Telephone if you like.’ The lines were clearly down. Julian’s bluff worked. The officer called me back to his desk and stamped my passport.

Most of the journalists were staying at the Hilton. I couldn’t afford that and so I checked into the Acropole, a shabby Greek-run place with a friendly atmosphere, despite the damage from a recent bombing by Islamic militants. Already the shooting was over in Khartoum and the story had, after several days, gone completely cold. It was downpage news, but I reminded myself that at least I had a string. But what to write about? I felt out of my depth and so I decided to pay my colleagues a visit. On the banks of the Nile, the Hilton had its own cool microclimate, food supply, piped music and soaps in the lavatories. It was an American spaceship that had landed on the dusty planet of Sudan. Walking into the lobby, I encountered a man in a white suit and a jet-black toupee dictating copy down the lobby phone.

‘Stop! New par! Tanks rumbled through streets, as civilians dived for cover like stray cats…No! T for Tommy… Tanks!… No! N is for nuts …’

He had lots of quotes, from Western diplomats and ‘Sources close to the military…’. Not for the last time, I felt like I was a step behind the action, because I hadn’t seen any such military displays or panicked civilians. To my eyes, a pall of inertia hung over the city. In fact I could barely even see Khartoum. Sandstorms locally known as the haboob whipped the streets in the daytime, producing an ominous twilight. Haboobs were famous for the confusion they produced. A Boeing pilot had once ditched on the Nile, mistaking it for the airport runway. ‘Taxi?’ I’d ask at reception, to which the concierge would shake his head. ‘Haboob!’ By evening, the haboob would settle into sand drifts at every street corner, ready to go airborne again in the heat of the next day. Before dusk, I observed everybody scampering home. A bobbing mass of them swathed in white turbans and leopard-skin slippers, they looked like workers toiling in some gigantic laundry. ‘Taxi?’ I asked in the street. They shook their heads. ‘Curfew!’

Eric was in the Hilton lobby, smoking. I went over to him and asked who the man in the white suit and toupee was.

‘The Cairo Times correspondent,’ he said. ‘Listen, you can still try writing for the specialist magazines like Africa Confidential.’

I told him I knew little about Sudan, certainly not enough to write for the kind of publications read by diplomats and spies. Eric advised me to bluff it. I realized I’d have to. The cash from my credit card was now half gone and I had no prospect of making any more. I spent more precious dollars telephoning Africa Confidential from the Hilton foyer, despite the fact that I knew the lines were tapped, and to my astonishment the editor commissioned me.

Shrouded by the curfew and the haboob, the junta’s new generalissimo, Bashir, had yet to reveal himself. Nobody knew anything about him, since until now he had been isolated in a jungle garrison several weeks’ boat journey up the Nile. In a transcript of his only statement so far, I thought I detected a motive for his coup d’état, cryptic though it was. ‘We will no longer eat bitter aloes on the frontiers,’ he had said. On state TV, the junta repeatedly broadcast pictures of the ousted prime minister’s garage. It was stacked with tins of tomato puree. Puree certainly seemed to be a vital ingredient in much of the local food. Apparently the prime minister had purchased his mountain of tins with diverted state funds. They looked rusty and past their sell-by date to me. I saw that this hardly made a news story. What was I to say? That the Islamic fundamentalists were up in arms over a variation on Lord Acton’s dictum? ‘Puree tends to corrupt and absolute puree corrupts absolutely.’

One respected correspondent, meanwhile, did not appear to budge from the Hilton foyer, but seemed to be always parked on a sofa next to a trolley piled with cakes. To remain here and still have so much to file made me think he must be a true expert. ‘How long have you covered the Sudan?’ He winked at me. ‘This is my first time here!’ He jerked his head towards the dining hall. ‘What a dump, eh?’

My mounting panic was partly due to the fact that I knew that if I didn’t file, I would have no way of retrieving the costs of the telex, hotel or flights. I told Eric and Julian that all was going well. At hotel mealtimes, I claimed to have a bad stomach and refused ordering from the menu, but waited until I could secretively nip along to a roadside-shack café to order an aluminium plateful of foul beans and coriander with a wheat chapatti.

It was my first opportunity to observe up close the other foreign press corps on a story. I noticed that as soon as they began socializing they forgot their rivalries. I sat straining to overhear something useful about the Sudanese coup, but the correspondents made no mention of it. Instead they swapped scurrilous anecdotes about great former colleagues. (‘Said he could get laid anywhere, right? So then the desk sends him to Red China during the Cultural Revolution. Nobody thinks he can do it. Six weeks later a postcard arrives with nothing on it but the words “Gobbled in the Gobi!”’) I learned that correspondents were strangely sentimental about the past. Today’s stories seemed to be small beer compared to the momentous events of even a few years ago, when titans had walked the earth. The trade of journalism also appeared to have gone into some kind of terminal decline.