Territory and was signed, ‘I have the honour to be, Sir, your most obedient servant’. My father’s generation was from a new type of empire builders who were quite different from their predecessors. Before, the British in Africa had pursued an economy of simple extraction and it was as if they believed progress could not involve the mass of black people who lived in their colonies. Thin on the ground, we governed by the system of ‘indirect rule’, via traditional or appointed local chiefs. The surface of East Africa was barely disturbed at first. But in the years after the Great War, the British determined to ‘develop’ the colonies by ensnaring Africa’s native peoples in the modern world economy, at the less advantageous end to be sure, as growers of cash crops and payers of tax. This was the mission my father was asked to play a role in and, no doubt, at first he believed that it was a noble one, in which the destiny of Africa’s remote people would for their own benefit at last be joined with that of the outside world.
I have an early memory from home. In the dead of night I am blasted awake by an otherworldly sound. The ocean tide is a distant roar beyond the reef. The house is silent. I call out, and my mother comes into my bedroom. At breakfast next morning, we laugh about the nocturnal disturbance. Dad tells me it was the shout of a honey badger startled by the lights on the veranda. For days and years, I wondered, ‘Do honey badgers make that noise?’ But I have always known that it was my father.
When my mother first met him, my father made his bed point east each night so that he rolled with the world headfirst as he slumbered. He had his ankles tied securely to his bed with strips of bandage, to prevent him from walking in his sleep. Once, in a desert village prone to earth tremors, he slept on the flat roof of a house to get the cool evening breeze. At the dead of night he leapt off the top, landing in the alley below and only woke up when he hit the ground. The villagers, believing Armageddon was upon them, cried out and prayed to Allah. He used to tuck his revolver under the pillow at bedtime during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya and when visiting Nairobi he would stay at my godfather Judge Birkett Rudd’s home. One night in the early hours the household was roused by gunfire. Dad was discovered standing, wide awake, peppered in ceiling plaster and staring at the pistol in his hand. In a bad month he had three or four nightmares. During such episodes he gained superhuman strength, enough to hurl himself through high windows. He threw hurricane lamps, tore mosquito nets to shreds, strode about and bellowed the way I had heard that night of the honey badger. He never hurt himself or anybody else. He’d leap clean over my mother as she slept without touching her. When she spoke to him he answered in a voice that was not his own, as if his unconscious body had been possessed. But she grew familiar with this other strange voice and knew that if she kept talking calmly to the sleepwalker, he would after some minutes climb back into the bed they shared. He used to then fall back into a deep sleep, and wake at dawn unaware of all his struggles in the night gone by.
My father began suffering nightmares soon after he came to Africa. I imagine him setting foot in Dar es Salaam in East Africa for the first time, the aromas of coffee, groundnuts, sesame, coconut oil and cloves wafting up from the dockside godowns. He had been loaded with piles of items from a Piccadilly tropical outfitters called Griffiths, MacCallister and Crook: solar topee, spine pad, tin bath, lavatory seat, potted shrimps, herring roes and a double-barrelled twelve-bore shotgun thrown in. He was twenty-two.
In Dar es Salaam, he boarded a train that chugged upcountry into the night, the steam locomotive spewing showers of sparks that illuminated the thick bush on either side. After two nights and a day they reached Lake Victoria, where my father’s predecessor was at the station to meet him. The official gave him a single sheet of paper of jotted notes describing what the job was all about and boarded the same train, which now returned to the coast. Dad was in charge of a district as large as Ireland and the only way to get around was on foot with porters, or by canoe, or on horseback. My father saw an Africa that was barbaric but at the same time noble, exotic and yet familiar to a young Englishman who had grown up among farmers, self-contained yet also worldly – and that Africa is now but a memory pulverized by history.
The local chief wore a crown of pangolin scales and lived in a palace complex of elaborate grass huts. His wives were adorned with copper bands and beads and their skin was cicatrized with zigzags, crescents and paisley whorls. The chieftain was protected by warriors armed with black-powder Tower muskets and spears, carved bows and well-feathered arrows, leather helmets encrusted with cowry shells and zebra manes, ornaments of glass beads and crocodile teeth. But war between neighbours was limited to defence, since it was believed that a leader would die if ever he crossed his own frontiers. True authority rested not in the temporal power of the chief but in the ancestors who resided inside an ornamental elephant’s tusk called the dawa, or medicine. A naked maiden carried the dawa ahead of the chief whenever he walked out and about. The king makers were the women, since legitimacy in the family line passed from mother to daughter, not father to son. The firstborn princess and heiress made a chief out of her husband when she married him. By these means the misrule of leaders never got out of hand. The younger daughters in the ruling families were considered illegitimate and became the mistresses of outsiders. My father learned all this because soon after he arrived in the country the outcast princess Binti Mwalimu appeared in his bed and stayed with him for seven years. The other whites said he had ‘gone native’, but not only did he not care about that, I think he liked it.
The peasants lived in constant struggle with nature: locusts, armyworm, crop-raiding elephants and baboons, drought, floods and disease. ‘I saw a long, dark, ragged cloud appearing,’ my father wrote of his first sighting of a locust swarm. ‘It seemed to wave and undulate and to my surprise it was coming closer at a fast pace. The great brown mass darkened the sky above me. I could hear the light, rustling sound of the flight of millions of insects and the sound they made as they collided…I remember seeing a whole valley filled with crops reduced to nothing within minutes. I saw an old man sitting in the middle of the remains of his sorghum field, which had been reduced to short stumps. The man had his head bowed and he was weeping. There would be no crop and no store of food for him that season. He was completely ruined.’
My father’s orders were to make Africans grow cotton. The cash crop was sold, with the prices from Liverpool cabled daily as a guide, and with this money the Africans became part of the wider world and paid their taxes to the government in Dar es Salaam. On the orders of the British the colonial chiefs’ overseers flogged Africans who refused to grow cotton. The commodity was so important that my father’s local nickname was Bwana Cotton. In time, he negotiated with a local chief to establish a research station breeding new cotton hybrids at a spot called Ukiriguru. This grew up into an institution that is famous in Africa today. The only problem at the time was that the land where the station was to be located was home to two hundred families who would have to be resettled elsewhere.
Dad set off to find a place where the families could be moved further along the southern lakeshore, intending to look on the shores between the Gulf of Emin Pasha and Speke Sound. For this journey the local chief lent my father his war canoe, crewed by sixteen paddlers who shovelled at the oily water and chanted ‘Kabule, kabule, keiga, kabule, kwa Majo pshagula, nizere! Tongaka, keiga, kabule, kwa majo: pshagula, nizere!’ ‘Wind, wind take me home to Mama, I’m coming! Go ahead wind and take me home to Mama, I’m coming!’ The spear-thin bowsprit, hung with feathery tassels and antelope horns, sliced through the water. The boat left a foaming white wake and skimmed ahead of hippo bulls that charged them under big bow waves. They passed islands ringed by flat rocks that shuddered as dozens of crocodiles that had been basking with their jaws open in the sun bolted and slithered into the depths.
The shores had once been populated, but they were now deserted. Coffee bushes grew as tall as trees and herds of feral goats wandered about. On the island of Zilagora they met a man dressed in motley rags and skins and carrying a black-powder Tower musket with a horn and shot satchel. He said some of his fellow villagers had been devoured by crocodiles waiting in the shallows to swipe at the victims with their tails, who they would then seize and drag back into the water.
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