Owen Sheers: The Dust Diaries

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Zanzibar had come as a welcome break from life on board ship. They had made a double stop there and Arthur had taken the opportunity to catch up with his college friend Frank Weston, who was a missionary on the island. The voyage down from Aden had not been easy. Just two days after leaving port the Hertzog ran into the south-west monsoon, a curtain of storms and high winds that lasted for three days. They were so fierce that when they finally abated and he emerged from his cabin he saw that the two black funnels rising above the centre of the deck had been turned a dull grey⁄white, coated with a layer of brine from the waves that had broken into and over the ship. The hull bore marks of the storm too. Immediately below the railings of the lower decks he could see it was streaked with long pale splashes of dried vomit, fanning out down to the waterline. Like the other passengers he had not had a good time of it, feeling the sea beat itself against the outer wall of his small cabin through long, sleepless nights, so it was a relief when the clustered white buildings of Zanzibar’s capital, Stonetown, came into view.

The strong smell of cloves and spices carried on a warm trade wind had heralded the presence of the island hours before anyone on board could see her shores. The captain told them this would be so. But there had been another smell too, equally strong, coming in gusts, that puzzled Arthur. He enquired of it to a passing crew member. The boy (he looked no older than sixteen) told him simply, ‘Oh, that’s shark, sir. They salt ‘em in vats on the shore before selling them to the niggers on the mainland.’ Shark and spices. Not for the first time on that voyage, Arthur felt he was inhabiting someone else’s life, a Rider Haggard-type fiction, and not his own at all.

As the Hertzog steamed nearer through a flat, hot morning with heatwaves tricking the eye, the buildings of Stonetown became clearer. A broad white palace with pillars and grand steps dominated the immediate ground behind the port and its frilling of palm trees. Part of its façade was covered in a crude scaffolding and half-naked workmen clambered over its stone like animated hieroglyphs. Arthur realised it must be Beit el Ajaib, the House of Wonders that Frank had written to him about, and on closer inspection he saw he was right. There, behind the scaffolding, the white walls gave to a shattered dark hole, the last remaining damage of the British shells that had thudded into the palace back in 1896 in what turned out to be the world’s shortest war. Just forty minutes long, Frank had said. To the south of the House of Wonders the massive bastioned walls of the old fort rose from a packed confusion of smaller, square coral-rag buildings, their wooden carved doors of red, green and blue the only colours in the white and dull fawn of the new and old stucco plasterwork. Behind these, the towers of minarets and the domes of mosques were the only buildings tall enough to be seen. Arthur had expected to be able to see the spire of the Anglican Cathedral that Frank had also written to him about, but however much he scanned the on dine of the town, he couldn’t find it. There were just the delicate minarets, wavering in the haze against an African sky so blue he felt the colour as a sensation in his chest.

As the Hertzog came into port both the town’s buildings and the noise of the place came into focus. A crowd of hundreds of people were shouting from the quayside, woven baskets offish and fruit carried on their heads. After the flat emptiness of the sea and then the cramped conditions of his cabin Arthur had been disorientated by the crush of them about him as he disembarked from a launch onto the harbourside. The dull familiarity of the ship fell away and suddenly everything was strange again: men with bloodshot eyes appearing close to his face asking questions in broken English that sounded more like demands; the musty stench of goats wandering among the crowd; children tugging at his jacket, softly chanting ‘Meester, meester’; the smells and colours of the fish, nuts and fruit they carried in their baskets.

Frank was there waiting for him. Arthur spotted him through the crowd, jogging towards him, his arms outstretched as far as the crush of people would allow and his voice a welcome foothold of familiarity, ‘Arthur! Who’d have thought it? God bless YOU for coming, God bless you!’ Arthur held out his own hand but his friend dodged it and embraced him instead.

Frank was soon guiding him out of the port area and into the narrow alleys and passageways behind the main coastal road. It had been three years since they had seen each other, and he saw Frank had changed. His pale complexion was now tanned a dark brown, and the broad face of his youth was leaner, narrower in appearance. He were a light safari suit with a clerical shirt and collar and the same wire-rimmed spectacles he had worn in England. He looked older. There were flecks of grey in his neatly-parted dark hair and Arthur thought again of the white brine on the black funnels, the signature of the storm. But he was still the Frank he had known at college: energetic, nervy, excited, with hands that explored the air around him as he talked, and a face that managed to express both a frown and a smile as he listened to you.

This morning he was as excitable as ever, anxious to show Arthur his world on the island and what he had done there. He walked ahead, one arm out in front finding a way through the flow of people pressing against them, talking to Arthur over his shoulder, asking questions about home, their old tutors, their mutual friends.

‘And what of old Gore?’ he asked, breathing heavily in the heat and looking back at Arthur.

‘No, unfortunately I didn’t manage to see him,’ he replied, ‘but I wrote to him and he answered. I have his blessing it would seem.’

‘Of course you have, of course you have,’ said Frank. ‘Why on earth shouldn’t you?’

Arthur tried to cont inue the conversation as best he could, but he was distracted, still coming to terms with his new surroundings. Smells came to him like colours, distinct and pure, while his eyes tried to keep up with the onrush of new sights after the boredom of the ship at sea. Thin, leathered old men crouched in groups, dicing or smoking on tall hookahs, children played at the edges of the passageways, throwing marbles at tins, and women passed by quietly, obscured in purdah, their heads averted as if they would rather be invisible or a part of the walls they kept so close to. All of this seemed to wash over Frank like the air he breathed, but for Arthur everything struck him for the first time, as if his senses had been recharged. He had hardly ever left England before, except for a couple of trips to the continent, and now, just weeks after sailing from Southampton, he was walking through the morning life of a world completely alien to him, and yet so established in itself, comfortable with its own weight of history (and this is what, on looking back from his bunk in the Hertzog , he realised had shocked him the most), a world so Arabic. Frank had told him in his letters about Zanzibar’s Sultans and Arthur himself had read of the Arabic influence on the island, but somehow he hadn’t expected this to be so pervasive, so ingrained in the lifeblood of the place. And yet it was, and its existence there, in Africa, in the reality of this unreal life he was leading, focused his newly sharpened senses on his own situation. As he followed Frank through the narrow streets, a thin showing of blue sky between the close buildings, he felt the pressure of history at his back and he felt small in its presence.

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Later that day, after Frank had settled Arthur in his own quarters at Kiungani, he took him to see the Anglican Cathedral which had eluded him from the deck of the ship. It was an impressive building, solid and imposing among the shacks and crumbling stucco of the surrounding houses. ‘The first Anglican cathedral built in East Africa,’ Frank had said proudly, as they approached its broad plastered walls and tall spire that tapered into the clear sky above a blank patch of ground.