Owen Sheers: The Dust Diaries

‘This is where the island’s slave market stood.’ Frank gestured to the bare dusty earth around the Cathedral. As they walked towards the Cathedral’s entrance, he continued over his shoulder, ‘Together with the trade in ivory, it was this market that ran the island.’

Frank was still explaining the history of the site when they entered the Cathedral’s nave through a heavy carved door, stepping into the relief of the building’s cool darkness from the rising heat of the day outside. Impatient to show him the peculiar features of the building, Frank didn’t wait for Arthur’s eyes to adjust to the dim light, and immediately began his well-rehearsed tour. In the nave, the huge font made from Italian marble shipped in from the Apuan Alps, and next to this, twelve pillars, all upside down, mistakenly erected that way by the local workmen while the Bishop was off on safari. In the body of the cathedral he drew Arthur’s attention to the elegant Moorish windows, and a dark crucifix made from the wood of the tree under which Livingstone’s servants had buried his heart. At the altar a single round piece of white marble was inlaid where the whipping post of the slave market had stood. Around this, to represent the blood that had fallen there, were slabs of grey marble veined with red as if that blood had just been shed and was still unfurling in the stone’s frozen water.

Behind the altar itself was the grave of the Cathedral’s founder, Bishop Steere, buried there in 1882, two years after the building was completed. Behind this again was the entrance-way down into the old slave chambers, into which Frank crouched with a lit candle. Arthur followed, bending down low to avoid the stone of the door frame above him.

The chambers were low-ceilinged dungeons of disturbingly small proportions. Frank continued his tour, his soft voice falling like ash in the bare rooms. This, he explained, was where fifty men or seventy-five women and children were chained and kept for three days. One deep channel for faeces and urine ran through the centre of each chamber, and one narrow slit at the level of the street outside provided a dusty ventilation. There was nothing else. It was a culling ground. The weak did not survive, and the strong emerged back into the light barely human.

♦

After their visit to the Cathedral Frank had left Arthur to his own devices and he’d taken a walk through the town again. This time, walking through the streets alone, he found the strangeness of the place he’d felt that morning had begun to settle into a rhythm of its own. A rhythm he could identify and feel a part of. He talked to some of the traders in the tiny, cool shops that punctuated the narrow streets, and even bought himself a new khaki safari suit from one of them. It was a little short at the sleeves, but he was pleased with his rare purchase. Then he had lain down for a few hours in the cool of his lodgings, listening to the town outside, the distant roll of the port’s noise and the nearer quick talk of women and children, in both Arabic and Swahili. Eventually he slept, shedding his body of its sea weariness, until he was woken in the early evening by the muezzin’s call to prayer, skittering across the sky from one of the minarets that rose above the town’s bustle of people, plaster and dust.

♦

That evening he and Frank took a pony and trap out to the British Governor’s house for dinner. His sleep, seeing Frank again, the impressive Cathedral, feeling the foreignness of the town ebb about him, all of these had left Arthur with a sense of contentment that he hadn’t felt for years, either in England or on his journey south. Lying with his eyes closed in his bed on the Hertzog outside Beira Bay, feeling the gentle rock and swell of the ship, he remembers now how that short trip out to the Governor’s house had seemed so perfect, as if just momentarily he and his surroundings were in harmony. The sun blinked, low and orange, between the coconut palms at the side of the road and dazzled in the sea beyond them. Through the trees he’d been able to make out the dhows coming home from the evening catch, each with its single sail, a white wing of wind. Beyond these the reef turned on itself like a seam in the sea, while on the beach he’d caught a glimpse of a boy and a girl playing under a stranded dhow’s dropped rigging. Even the swirls of dust thrown up by the pony’s hooves had appeared to turn and wheel as part of a greater synthesis with which he was in tune. For the first time since departing from England he had felt he was no longer leaving, but going somewhere instead.

But that was before the dinner. The dinner which had, for some reason, so unsettled him, and sent him off kilter as easily as the pieces of driftwood he’d seen that afternoon caught up against the harbour wall, turned and swayed on the wilful motion of the waves.

♦

The British Governor’s residence was a large coral limestone house on the coast a few miles north of Stonetown. Again, Frank fulfilled the role of guide as they rode out there, explaining that the building had once belonged to Princess Salome of the Omani.

‘Quite a woman apparently, marvellous gardener. You’ll see when we arrive, extraordinarily beautiful,’ he said, shaking his head in admiration as he spoke.

Walking through the Princess’s gardens, with the scent of jasmine and honeysuckle in the air and the evening light of a sinking sun, Arthur saw what Frank meant. The house and the grounds were both of a remarkable, exotic beauty. A long, open veranda ran the length of the ground floor, with only a few potted plants and one large round table occupying its generous space. At the centre of the back wall a pair of dark wooden carved doors stood open, giving a view into a large room with a window open onto the sea. White drapes beat over the window, blown pregnant by the wind off the water. The first floor was also open on the front of the house: a long covered balcony on which Arthur could make out an African in a white robe walking the length of it, lighting the candles that stood in tall holders around its edge. He could also see that a wooden table occupied the centre of this balcony and that a group of Europeans stood at its furthest end, holding drinks and talking. One of them, wearing the white uniform of the Colonial Service, saw them approaching and came to the balcony railings. ‘Father Weston! Good evening! Do come up and join us. If you hurry, you’ll catch the sun!’

The company at that dinner comprised Arthur, Frank, the British Governor, his almost silent wife, Mr Beardsley, a merchant from Essex, Charlotte, his timid and much younger female companion, and a man who introduced himself to Arthur as’S. Tristam Pruen, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society’. As they watched the sun sink into the sea a servant brought a tray of pink gins and a bottle of quinine. Arthur declined the gin, but still took his five grains of quinine. The medicine was bitter on his tongue and he wondered briefly if he wouldn’t rather suffer malaria than this taste lingering in his mouth every evening.

They ate at the large dark wood table, its surface softened by the touch of hands over time, and were served crab, red snapper and rice by wordless, effortless Africans dressed in the same simple white robes as the candle-lighter. Ol the guests, Mr Beardsley, the merchant, was by far the loudest. When he laughed Arthur watched the tips of his ginger moustache tremble and he thought he saw the girl by his side visibly wince at his volume. She looked worried, her strained smiles failing to convince Arthur of anything other than her anxiety. The merchant, however, seemed oblivious and was having far too interesting a time quizzing S. Tristam Pruen to notice his companion’s apparent distress.

S. Tristam Pruen (he never said what the S. stood for) was a writer of some repute among the European community in Africa, though the party only had his word to go on for this. A few years earlier he had published The Arab and the African , which he described to the assembled company as ‘a handbook of my own experience written down to help and introduce others to the dangers and excitements of this dark continent’.