Читать книгу The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War - Aidan Hartley - Страница 8

MY FATHER’S ANCESTORS WERE Yorkshire farmers. My great-grandparent Hartleys, remembered chiefly for their habit of sitting up in bed together at home in the seaside town of Bridlington and arguing loudly over the morning newspapers, refused even to set foot outside Yorkshire. I sense the Hartleys’ love of home was as important to them as not meddling in the affairs of other peoples overseas. A Hartley was among those who initiated the debate on the abolition of slavery. And David Hartley, a staunch opponent of the American Revolutionary War and a friend of Benjamin Franklin, was Britain’s minister plenipotentiary and signed the Treaty of Paris in the autumn of 1783.

All this changed after Britain lost America and spread its empire in the East. My forebears were swept up in a saga that makes an exception of the Bridlington Hartleys. My mother has gathered our family history into a collection of haphazardly arranged scrapbooks. It is a chronicle of tragedy and conquest. Ours is a typical British story spanning generations, in which men, women and their children sank in ships on faraway oceans, succumbed to fevers in tropical bone yards and died in small wars, mutinies and rebellions fought across the crimson atlas of the British Empire. What survives of each of them in the albums may be only a picture, or an anecdote that fills a few lines. Whole lives are distilled to a single essence, like a well-cut gemstone. Commemorating the life of great-aunt ‘Horrible’ Hilda, and the love of her husband, is my mother’s ring of five Burma rubies. A big champagne diamond and other rings of opal used to set my grandmother off on yet more stories of Antipodean courtships.

As a boy I looked at the faces of my grandfathers and grandmothers, and in those eyes staring back at me through fading paint and sepia I observed a common determination. They were from a tribe absorbed by loyal duty, like my soldier forefather who, starving in the 1688—9 Catholic siege of Londonderry, held off eating his last tallow candle in order to use it to seal his military dispatches. We were indigo planters along the Ganges at the time of the Indian Mutiny. We fled for our lives down the river, but sailed into an ambush on the banks. In a hail of musket fire, the women and children threw themselves into the flood because they preferred to drown than be captured by their ‘inhuman enemies’. Between the Indian Mutiny and the Boer War, Britain fought twenty-nine small colonial wars from Ashanti to the Boxer Rebellion in China. My family fought and perished in a great many of them. One warrior sums up all of them. He was great-great-grandfather Colonel William Temple, who fought against the Maoris in New Zealand. In 1863, during the Waikato War on North Island, Temple won a Victoria Cross, the empire’s highest military decoration for courage. This was in recognition of his bravery while tending his wounded comrades under a hail of intense fire from the ramparts of Rangiriri Pa, a fort of the tattooed Maori rebels. Temple married the magnificent-looking Theodosia, daughter of Major-General T. R. Mould, governor of New Zealand, and she bore him twelve children. Much later, in India, my great-grandfather Gerhardt L’Honneur Sanders, who was to fight in the Boer War siege of Ladysmith, asked Temple’s permission to marry my great-grandmother Mabel. The ageing colonel, all braid and waxed moustaches, expressed his consent by declaring, ‘Better for her to be your widow than my unwed daughter!’

Our women certainly led hard lives. At Mabel’s wedding, her seventeen-year-old sister Ethel was one of the bridesmaids. Ethel caught the eye of the best man, another army officer named Beames. Beames was a friend of Rudyard Kipling, who based The Story of the Gadsbys, his 1899 Indian ‘tale without a plot’, on their courtship. They married and emigrated to Canada, where they became pioneers. Beames turned to drink, abandoning Ethel to raise three children in a remote log cabin. One of her sons grew up to become a sculptor and moved to the United States, where one of his commissions was a monument to the American Indian wars that stands in Washington. My grandfather Colonel Reginald Sanders proposed to my grandmother Eileen after meeting her on home leave at a piano recital before returning to duty in India. By the time her ship arrived in Bombay she had forgotten what he looked like. They met up somehow and married within hours. He took her into the hills to his new married-officer’s quarters, carried her across the threshold and proudly asked her what she thought of it. She burst into tears.

When the colonial peoples had been conquered, we were the rulers, the civil servants, the collectors, the engineers, the planters. We added to the store of scientific knowledge and indulged our national obsession with the classification of nature. Professor James Sanders was a principal of Calcutta University, who died of fever on the ship home in 1871 and is buried in Gibraltar. Douglas Sanders discovered new butterfly species in the hills inland from Chittagong, and his lepidoptera collections can be found in the British Museum. Great-grandfather James Wise worked for the Crown Agents on Cecil Rhodes’s unrealized dream of the Cape-to-Cairo railway.

We fed the Great War and the Second World War too. Great-grandfather Pickard was a shipping magnate who lost his fortune to German U-boats. Great-uncle Bertram was an Indian civil servant, but he died in Flanders. Uncle Alfred Hartley fought at Jutland. Uncle Percy Hartley died in Mesopotamia. Yet another uncle survived the dysentery of that same campaign because, he believed, he had put his trust in a talisman given to him by an Arab friend. In the Second World War another one sank in the Hood. Uncle Mike was in Burma. Uncle Norman crashed his Spitfire fighter aircraft and was crippled for life. Noel was a member of the forces that liberated Belsen. Another was a POW of the Japanese and worked on the Burma railway.

In time, the peoples my ancestors ruled won us over to their ways and their nations became more of a home to us than England. Long before the hippies went in search of gurus, my great-uncle Claude acquired a Sikh master in India and founded a society in England to promote his teachings. My grandfather Colonel Sanders devoted forty years of his life to the 48th Dogras, Rajput regiment, and fought alongside his soldiers in the Northwest Frontier, in Aden and Palestine during the Great War, and finally against the Japanese. In photographs he appears in jodhpurs, always with a pipe sticking out of his mouth and a perfectly clipped moustache, painting a watercolour of distant hills, or standing, rifle in hand, with the ‘mugger’ crocodile he has just shot. When Grandpa retired from the Dogras in 1947, at India’s independence, he was bereft.

My mother loved India more than anywhere else. She was born in 1925 while my grandparents were on a shopping trip to Lahore. She spent the first week of her life wrapped in cotton wool. Her earliest memories are of waking up at dawn under a tree of blossoms in the garden, in which the family took refuge during an earthquake; of a house on a river, where at night, beyond the garden, jackals howled; eating chapattis in the ayah’s quarters; the sight that made her sad of Indians doubled up under the weight of the huge blocks of ice they carried to the European clubs, and of large, cool rooms with fans and cool drinks, regimental displays and wide, green lawns. Even after half a century in Africa, my mother still said, ‘Africa is nothing compared to India.’

As a boy I asked my mother why our great-grandpas and our great-grannies from families of Yorkshire farmers and Scottish doctors felt the need to leave home and travel all over the world.

‘Oh, to get out of the rain, dear,’ Mother replied.

After several centuries, our British Empire came to an end. Most of my tribe returned to where they had once come from. As a child I used to meet my British relatives on visits in England. We all loved ancient Aunt Connie, who had been married once but recalled little about her husband because it had been so long since he was killed in the First World War. Connie lived with Aunt Vi, a spinster and self-sufficiency enthusiast who kept sheep, a pack of Chihuahuas and fermented raspberry wine in bottles that exploded in her corridors. But most of the rosy-cheeked cousins I met at weddings and funerals were as strange to me as the country of Britain itself.

My parents were almost the only family members I knew who refused to go back to England. We who had been in India, the Far East, the Antipodes, the Americas and the South Sea islands stayed on where we had made our last landfall, in East Africa. Once the colonial rulers, our status was now simply that of an appendix to history: powerless, few in number, and, most of all, extremely happy to remain in exile.

Britain was known as ‘home’, yet for us it was a distant island, where after all these years it was still raining. It was almost entirely through BBC radio that we kept in touch with an idea of England, which was cleansed by the frequencies of short wave and my parents’ vaguely remembered sense of patriotism. England greeted us each dawn with the BBC World Service signature tune, ‘Lero Lero, Lilli-Burlero’. Wherever we were, Big Ben tolled the hour and Dad, doing his yoga while drinking his early morning tea, gazed out at our adopted landscape, at a rising desert sun, or at the fishermen punting their outrigger canoes into the surf.

At the centre of this world was my father. In my eyes, Dad was like an Old Testament patriarch. He was mightily handsome and strong. He had been in the sun so long that his legs, heads and arms were blackish brown, but underneath where he had worn his short-sleeved shirts and shorts his skin was still pale white. He was huge, leather-backed, barrel-chested, larger than mortal, with a large nose, big earlobes, hair of jet and on the cusp of sixty when my mother gave birth to me. I have a strong mental image of my father as I write this, as a man walking. He walked with big swinging strides. He had walked across entire lands in his day. As an old man he walked too, daily, stopping ever more frequently to survey the view. When he walked a natural euphoria came over him. That is all one can say. It made him happy. It made him remember all the other walks of his life, before cars and aircraft made us rush about and pollute the world. He looked around him and saw the beauty of the land, and saw that he was moving through it at the pace that he wanted, filling his lungs with air, greeting loudly the people he passed on his way.

He was a great storyteller, who came home in his dusty veldskoens with presents that spoke of his travels. He’d produce from his duffel bag a curved Afar dagger in a goatskin sheath, a wooden Somali camel bell, or a gold star brooch for my mother. I remember once he also came home with his Land Rover punctured by three bullet holes. When he slammed the car door and strode off for a cup of tea, I hung back and stuck my fingers into the gashed aluminium. The rare times I ever found Dad sitting down, I’d climb up on his lap and he’d enfold me with one brawny arm, Tusker beer cradled in his other hand. We could be out in the bush but even if we were in a city, the way Dad told a tale in his voice as deep as a drum made it seem as if we were around a campfire out under the stars, in a pool of light cast by flames and encircled by the darkness of a million square miles of imagination.

My paternal grandfather, John Joseph, grew up on the island of Islay, where the Scottish children called him a ‘Sassenach’. He married Daisy, from Queenstown in South Africa’s Cape. He worked as a government official and they settled in the Leicestershire village of Kegworth, in a rambling house called Claremont. My father was born at home on 31 July 1907. His earliest memories revolved around ordinary English village family life. Opposite Claremont was the church, where he used to steal pigeons’ eggs from the belfry. On Sundays the bells rang out ‘Nine Tailors Make a Man’. In the garden was an ancient mulberry tree, planted during the reign of Charles I, and an old pavement from the ruins of a Roman villa. At the bottom of the garden was the River Soar, where my father and his siblings learned to swim, sail and fish. England’s countryside was still quiet and motor cars were unknown. In summer, one could hear the corncrake and lapwings. Noise arrived only with the outbreak of the Great War, when my father heard the sound of marching boots and horse-drawn equipment echoing through the streets for days on end. He remembered cold winters at his grammar school in Loughborough, and frost-bitten potatoes for lunch. Each week a fresh list of names was added to a scroll of honour in the assembly room to commemorate the Old Boys killed on the Western Front. He saw zeppelins bombing Nottingham and once the horizon was illuminated by the explosions at Chilwell, a munitions factory where hundreds of women worked. He remembered an elderly spinster aunt’s only comment when she heard the detonation: ‘Oh, what is Cook doing in the kitchen?’ He was haunted by his memory of the faces of soldiers coming home from the war, still in their trench coats and shouldering their rifles.

Dad recalled later in life that he had not enjoyed school and focused his mind elsewhere, ‘in the woods and along the river’s reedy banks’. His one desire was to roam the countryside. In time he went to agricultural college, where horses were still used for haymaking, ploughing and haulage. He learned to stook sheaves of corn, and he built turnip clamps, cut and laid hedges, topped and tailed mangles, hoed root crops and went turd knocking. A new era in agriculture was beginning, however, and my father studied soil analysis, artificial fertilizers, hybrid improvements of crops and livestock, pesticides, chemicals and tractors and combine harvesters. In 1927 he was offered a Colonial Service scholarship to Oxford University.

At Oxford, my father said he learned there was more to the world than the ‘bullocks, sheep and crops’ of his childhood and he ‘talked of politics and everything under the sun’. He began to read about Africa and in Blackwell’s he bought a signed first edition of Sir Richard Burton’s First Footsteps in East Africa. After Oxford he went to study at the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture in St Augustine, on the island of Trinidad. When not studying cotton or coffee, he went out with his Creole friends shark fishing or iguana hunting. Until now, the only time he had gone abroad in his life was to France on a cycling tour. In Trinidad, he was fascinated by the mix of foreign races he encountered.

My father could have made his life in almost any part of the empire. Many of his generation went overseas, including his brother Ronald. I remember Uncle Ronald, a ukulele-playing, agricultural college principal in Fiji who had his singing Bulgarian wife shave him before he turned out of bed each morning. At college in Trinidad, notices went up offering jobs in everything from rubber in Malaya and tea planting in Ceylon to ranching in Australia. My father chose Africa because of his mother, Daisy, who told him stories of life in the Cape in the nineteenth century and remembered trekking across the veld in an ox wagon when she was still a little girl. My father was also inspired to live overseas by his paternal uncle Ernest, whom he loved. Ernest was a businessman in India, a keen sportsman and a raffish character with a great sense of humour, whose daughter grew up to become the actress Vivien Leigh. During the summer of 1928, Ernest and his wife Gertrude leased the house of the Earl of Mayo in Galway and Dad went to join them for a summer’s fishing. He fell a little in love with the precocious, adolescent Vivien. ‘Everybody knew it,’ a gossipy aunt told me. She gave him a book of poems by Banjo Paterson, signed ‘To my favourite cousin, with love from Viv’. My father adored ‘The Man from Snowy River’ for the rest of his life.

On 10 October 1928 he received a letter from the secretary of state for the colonies. It gave news of his appointment as agricultural officer in the Tanganyika 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.

The man also talked of an epidemic of sleeping sickness. This had wiped out almost the entire population along the shores of Lake Victoria after the Europeans opened up the heart of Africa and people began to migrate and clear forest land for cultivation. In his time even Dad contracted the sickness and was cured by an Indian vet in Mwanza who injected him with a Bayer drug for cattle.

East African numbers had already been weakened by the nineteenth-century Arab slave trade. With the Europeans also came sand flies, brought by the Portuguese from Brazil to the port of Luanda, which infected Africa’s soils with jigger worms that rotted the feet off the barefoot peasants. Colonial forces invading Sudan and Ethiopia imported cattle infected with rinderpest from the Black Sea and Arabia. The disease spread in a wave from the Horn to Southern Africa, destroying multitudes of cloven-hoofed animals in its path. Smallpox, syphilis and a battery of plagues from the outside world followed. The Africans who survived, decimated by famine, went to war over what resources remained. East Africa is dotted with monuments to the conflicts and pestilence of that time, such as the Rift Valley town of Eldoret, which means ‘the place of killing’. As the Europeans ventured further into the interior they discovered swathes of territory where few people survived. My ancestors beheld this scene and assumed that it had always been like this – with the Africans living in a benighted state of perpetual war, pestilence and famine. They decided the local people were incapable, childlike, vicious and primitive. The Nile explorer Samuel Baker complained there were ‘no ancient histories to charm the present with memories of the past; all is wild and brutal, hard and unfeeling’. Frederick Lugard, among the architects of imperialism in East Africa, claimed that on the cusp of the scramble into the continent, ‘Europe had failed to realize that throughout the length and breadth of Africa inter-tribal war was an ever present condition of native life, and that extermination and slavery were practised by African tribes upon each other’. And this view inevitably led to exhortations by men like Captain Ewart Grogan, a father of colonialism in East Africa, that ‘occupation of Africa with a view to sound colonization, that is, to fit the country as a future home for surplus population, is the obvious duty of the nations which form the vanguard of civilization…to make new markets and open up country for coming generations; to suffer temporary loss for the future benefit of overcrowded humanity’. And so my forebears confiscated this sparsely populated land for themselves and put its original inhabitants to work on it.

My father’s canoe party left the man on Zilagora. He refused to leave his island. ‘I will die here,’ he said. Some hours later my father’s canoe came ashore in the Gulf of Emin Pasha, where he engaged a train of porters and trekked inland. The imperial Germans had imposed their rule over this part of Africa by massacring and starving many thousands. The local BaZinza people told my father that the last Caucasian they had seen before him was an officer of the Schutztruppen who had ordered the village chief to be buried alive simply as a warning to others to behave. These people appeared unaware that the British had been their new rulers since Germany’s defeat in the Great War. Despite the ravages of disease little had altered the integrity of their culture for centuries. My father passed isolated hamlets of fishermen and stands of millet, tobacco and plantains. People buried their dead beneath their hut floors and worshipped ancestors who lived in miniature beehive shelters to which they brought gifts of beer and honey. They were also members of a secret cult called the Bachwezi and claimed that their founder, Liangombe, had spoken to the spirits during a spell in the wilderness. His followers entered into trances to commune directly with their ancestors and were able to exorcise spirits from troubled souls.

My father was superstitious. In Tanganyika he knew of a woman who had died of hiccups and because of this, every time he got them he verged on hysteria. He got the shakes when he had to help carry the corpse of a man who had died out in the bush. When I was a child he told me about the terrifying BaFumo witches, who wore black cloaks and carried umbrellas and groaned like zebu bulls. Their job was to sniff out the causes of misfortunes that befell the tribe, like poor harvests or epidemics, and a scapegoat was always found among the hapless peasants. Or the wizards who read the entrails of chickens for omens. There was his story about a witch who transformed her male disciples into hyenas after dark so that when Dad baited zebra meat with poison to kill the scavengers that were harassing local cattle, she declared that he had murdered her sons and cursed him for it. A few days later he was awoken by a loud snuffling and a hyena bolted from under his bed and out of the window.

In those days people along the shores of Lake Victoria practised cults that had various beasts as their inspiration: members of the porcupine society went into a trance state and danced like their totem animal, trembling under sheaves of spines on their backs. My father became involved in a society that held serpents in great reverence. His English comrades were scandalized when they heard that my father participated in such practices. The cult order trained him to catch snakes by spitting the poisonous juice of a foxglove into their faces. These were kept in pits. Each cult member pared down his snakes’ fangs and cut the nail of one of his thumbs at the same time. It was believed that the thumbnail grew at the same pace as the fangs, and when it reached a certain length the thumbnail and the fangs were cut together. Dad used to tell me how snakes sing at night. I never believed him until we were camping in the desert and he said shush! Out on the volcanic plain there was a soft moan, like either a frog or a bird. It was a familiar sound, to which I had just never put a name. It was said that snakes also breathed fire like dragons when they sang, and I was sure that out in the desert I could see faint, bluish will-o’-the-wisps. Dad said snakes would not harm him. Once, when he was sitting on a long-drop latrine, a cobra shot out from between his legs. He said he stared it down until it slithered off under the door. I have seen Dad pick up a serpent by the tail, nonchalantly swing it around his head and launch it into the bush. I once saw him shake a snake out of his bedroll in the bush when he got up in the morning.

Continuing on his journey along Lake Victoria’s shores, my father and his train of porters arrived at the outskirts of a hamlet. Ordering the porters to carry on, he went off with a tracker to shoot meat for the pot. They came on two impala rams, standing on an ant hill and facing each other. With two clean shots of his rifle, my father killed both stone dead. A clamour erupted in the nearby village. Men, women and children came running towards the kill. Some elders appeared and became very excited. They announced that my father had carried out an act of great importance. I picture him, a young man trying to comprehend what was being said. Something about totems and prophecies. I have tried to understand what it can be that they told him. I imagine the tableau: the white man with his gun, the two horned beasts, almost heraldic, up on their hind legs, antlers pointing at each other, the moment of killing, blood splashing from a hole blasted in each heart onto the earth of the termite hill, the fading light, the peasants chanting kusinga rugaba, kusinga wombecha: ‘I see you, I see the sun.’

Singing merrily, men butchered the impala rams and bore the meat back to the village. As my father followed, he heard drumming. Great fires were lit. Darkness fell, the meat was cooked and eaten, and my father was asked to be seated. He watched a large circle of people gather to dance. Women beat a rhythm on their rawhide skirts and shook pebble-filled gourds, drummers hammered on lizard-skin tom-toms, while for two hours boys and maidens gyrated violently in a ring. Suddenly a mournful dirge began and two wizards appeared with wildebeest flywhisks. They whisked at the youths who one by one fell to the ground in a trance and began to moan, jerk and tremble. They began to speak and my father knew enough of the local language to know that they talked in a completely foreign tongue. The youths were using the language of the BaChwezi ancients, having become the oracle between the world of the ancestors and the villagers under that night sky. Questions were asked and translated and the answers came back again. Communing with the dead caused the villagers mirth, but also sorrow and anxiety. The seance over, the dance erupted once more and was still going on when my father went off to sleep. That night he slumbered fitfully. He felt troubled. The next day when he got up, he remembered the purpose of his trip to this hidden corner of Africa, which was to begin opening it up for the resettlement of the two hundred families to make way for the Ukiriguru research station. The elders quickly agreed to make enough land available – there was plenty of space – and allowed my father to survey the site and mark it out with white stones laid in tidy, straight colonial lines.

Until the day Dad entered the village, the ancestors had held sway over the living. The spirits offered Africans a set of certainties through the endless cycle of the years in a perilous Eden. Rain, harvests, children, disease, drought and death. In return, the only obligation of the living was to honour the dead. The prophecy was not just that the antelope were to be killed, but that it was my father doing it that day, as a young man of just twenty-three, becoming the agent of irreversible change in that remote corner of Africa. Soon after he walked away from the village the land was cleared. Cotton was planted. Vast deposits of diamonds and gold were discovered. Mines were opened up. Roads, aircraft, politics, wars and AIDS followed. The rule of the ancestors was buried and forgotten. The new rulers were men who sat in faraway cities. They communicated with the people not via the spirit mediums but by telegram cables and telephones.

He walked out of BaZinza country and returned to his lake post at Mwanza. From there, he took the train down to Dar es Salaam to attend a friend’s wedding as best man. The night of the party, my father had his first nightmare. In his dream there appeared a shadow at his side. A man, but not a man. It threatened my father, who felt he had to attack the apparition before it harmed him. For most of the rest of his life, the dream came back repeatedly to haunt him.

Mother was full of theories to explain the nightmares. They were mild epileptic fits. Or Dad ate too much cheese at night. Or he had never outgrown his childhood terror of ‘Mrs Hicksey’, a ghost in Claremont, the English village house where he was brought up, that groaned in the attic and was in all probability a faulty water pipe. Nonsense, he said. My father believed he had been bewitched. For half my life I wondered what on earth he meant by that, until I grew to learn that I had fallen under a very similar spell.

My mother used to sit on my bed on Sunday mornings when I was small, telling me about the Burma war. As she spoke she painted her nails and I used to drink in the scent of varnish and picture her in my mind as a young woman on the jungle battlefields. When I urged her to she would go and fetch her box of keepsakes with its photos of her with her comrades in the women’s auxiliaries, bullet casings, folded parachute silk, Chindit griffon badges, a captured Japanese rising sun flag and a little silk wallet containing a Shinto poem praising the emperor, which a British soldier had looted from a dead man.

After spending her early years in India, my mother and her sister, Beryl, were sent to boarding school in Sussex. When the Blitz began Grandpa decided to bring them home to India. They sailed on the troop ship Orion. As their convoy zigzagged south through the Atlantic, U-boats sank two of the vessels. The blackout rules were so strict the cabin portholes were painted black and nobody could even smoke a cigarette on deck after dark. What struck my mother most about her first glimpse of Cape Town was that it was a blaze of lights. In India, refugees were pouring in ahead of the Japanese advances on Malaya and Burma. Mother was sixteen when she volunteered at the Casualty Section of GHQ Simla, where she made bandages and filled out name cards recording the wounded, killed and missing in action. The next year, in early 1944, she joined the Women’s Auxiliary Service (Burma), based at Shillong, in Assam. Among their many tasks, the lady soldiers brewed tea in tin baths for the troops, typed letters and reports and sat on the beds of casualties, chatting about home or writing letters for those wounded who were blinded or had lost their hands.

The Allied forces at last turned back the Japanese advances at Kohima and Imphal. Thereafter they began to drive the enemy back eastwards. Mother’s unit followed the advance and she was never far behind the front lines. The auxiliaries’ CO, known as the General Memsahib, gave her a hand grenade – not to throw but to destroy herself with her honour intact in the event of being captured by the Japs. Even in the hospitals, patients had guns in case the Japs attacked and the medics had so many casualties to work on during a battle that Mother knew a young doctor whose hair turned snow white in a single day. During an air raid, she had to jump into a slit trench and she looked up at a dive-bombing Japanese Val that she told me ‘trembled like a silver leaf in the blue sky’.

For all that, what exotic places she saw. She travelled on trucks to Dohazari, in Arakan, Cox’s Bazaar, Cachar on the Bishenpur-Silchar track, where ‘Japs were hiding in the tea bushes’; then Dimapur, Kohima, Milestone 56 on the Manipur Road, and on up to Milestone 82 at Maram, then right into Burma. Blue mountains, tracks clinging to vertiginous valleys. ‘Hot,’ Mother said it was. ‘Sandy roads. Tall, tall, tall trees, going on forever. Long grass, green, green. No towns, no people, just camps and rivers…’ In her bathing suit and watched by commandos, she jumped into river pools to gather up fish stunned by cigarette-tin bombs. On the Manipur Road, ‘tuctoo’ lizards sang in the tall trees outside the basha huts where she slept. Bandicoots scuttled beneath her bed and in the darkness a gaur, a bison-like creature from the forest, tripped over her tent guy ropes.

She saw how battle had stripped the trees bare of branches and leaves. In one of her camps the path between the huts and the long-drop latrine was a line of shallow Japanese graves, half exposed by the monsoon rains. Out of one grew a beautiful blue orchid and my mother’s commanding officer’s only comment was ‘They’re good for the soil, dear’. In an American jungle base, she saw the dried heads of Japanese soldiers rammed onto the gateposts. It was here that she also saw her first movie in colour on the big screen: Esther Williams in Bathing Beauty, a synchronized-swimming extravaganza. Mother said the Americans were nice, but that the English soldier girls primly refused when the GIs asked them to play Postman’s Knock in the jungle in return for cans of pineapple juice and frozen chickens flown in from California.

Troops from all over the British Empire made up the Allied army in Burma. Mother encountered soldiers of the West African Division, such as the Nigerians who manned the anti-aircraft batteries. In an air raid once she saw them, illuminated by the muzzle flashes of their guns, dancing a jig after they had scored a hit. One evening the women heard the Africans humming and the sound grew to a crescendo of glorious, homesick singing. They sang, too, in deep voices that made Mother feel sorry for them:

Oh, when shall I see my home again?

My Mudda she is da,

My Fadda he is da

When shall I see my native land?

When will I see my home?

In 1943 she fell in love. She would never tell me much about him, only that his name was Peter and that he was a young British officer in Thirty-six Division. After he was wounded in the leg by a grenade, she was given compassionate leave to visit him. She flew in a troop transport and then drove through the jungles until she arrived at Shillong. Here she waited for days in a house in the forest with two other young women auxiliaries whose husbands had been killed in action. One of them was a friend named Alison, who opened her trousseau, never worn, and offered Mother anything she wanted to borrow. That evening, she went on to an old hotel where Peter was convalescing and asked for him. ‘I sat trembling for a long time by a huge cedar fire. And then at last he came and found me waiting for him.’

When Rangoon fell, her unit was assigned to process POWs being released from the Japanese prison camps. The CO told the women to talk about only home and happy things to the liberated men. But all they wanted to discuss was what had happened to them. They remembered their ordeals with nonchalance while Mum took down their testimonies in shorthand. She recognised an ex-POW from her father’s Indian regiment and invited him and his friends over to the unit’s quarters for tea and chocolate cake. Tears in their eyes, all the men could do was stare, unable to eat or drink because they were so used to starving. She saw Peter and was with him when they heard the news of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After Singapore, she turned down a posting in Japan to return to India. Grandpa was retiring from his regiment. As Mum, Beryl and Granny sailed for England from Bombay, the Royal Indian Navy was in the process of mutinying. It was the eve of India’s independence and my family had been in the subcontinent since the eighteenth century. Mum knew England only from boarding-school days cut short by the Blitz. She hated postwar London, with its whale meat and rationed eggs, but Peter was waiting for her. He was the true reason she went to London, to get married. But some time after the 1946 victory parade, he broke her heart and she cast about for an escape.

In 1938, my father transferred from the Tanganyika colonial service for an appointment as head of agriculture in the Aden Protectorates, southwestern Arabia. His heart was still in East Africa. During the Great Depression he had bought a small farm called En’nekeraka at Mweiga, on the western slopes of Mount Kenya. En’nekeraka in the language of the ancestral people who had lived there evoked the sound of pebbles knocking together in the stream below the farmhouse. He aimed to one day retire to the farm, but he was still only thirty-one when he took up his Arabian appointment and the next sixteen years were to be some of the most eventful of his life.

When Dad arrived, Aden was one of the most familiar if unsightly landmarks in the empire. The pocket-sized colony, huddled around the barren mountain of Jebel Shamsan, existed solely for the benefit of the sea port. Then as now, Aden was not so much a single city as a collection of unattractive towns clinging to the volcanic rocks. Imperial officials and shipping agents lived at Steamer Point. On the isthmus of Khormaksar were the military lines and Royal Air Force base and inland from that was the Arab village of Sheikh Othman, where the desert sands blew in from the Protectorates. The heart of Aden was Crater, the quarter for Arabs, Jews, Banyans and international eccentrics. The French poet Arthur Rimbaud had pitched up here on his ill-fated scheme to run guns to the Arabs and Ethiopians. The adventurous smuggler Henri de Monfreid passed through here. In the thirties, another Frenchman, the powerful businessman Antonin Besse – who later founded an Oxford college – had built his house on the rocks overlooking Crater and it was here that he entertained the travel writer Freya Stark. In the godowns of the shabby emporium of Crater was a trade in the exotic: Mocha coffee, mother-of-pearl from Abdel Kouri, civet, cinnabar and ambergris from the island of Socotra, also mass-produced goods, from wall clocks to universal embrocations to underwear from Liverpool. My father walked among crowds of Yemenis, short men from the hills with silver jambiya daggers in their belts, or Bedu visiting from the desert, decked out in kilts, snarling in surprise as they scrambled out of the way of passing cars. There were Banyan clerks and Jewish artisans, Bohra tailors, sallow Koranic students from Hadhramaut, Swahili sailors, Somali stevedores and Chinese exporters of sea slugs and shark fins.

As far as the British were concerned, to protect Aden they had to see what was going on in the wild hinterlands, if not to control them. The inhabitants beyond the borders of the colony were divided into an impossibly complicated mosaic of clan and caste. There were the Gabilis, gun-carrying tribesmen who covered their half-clothed bodies with sesame oil and indigo woad, the Seyyids and Ashraf who believed they were descended from the tribe of the Prophet Mohamed, the nontribal traders and artisans who lived within the walls of tiny hilltop villages, and finally low-caste black serfs and slaves.

In antiquity, the Romans called this land Arabia the Blessed because its inhabitants controlled the trade in frankincense and myrrh, which was harvested in the hills of Oman, the island of Socotra and in the Horn of Africa. The valuable resins were carried by camel across the desert, via Mecca and Petra, to Gaza and from there to Egypt, Greece and Rome. In the first century AD, a Roman legion under Gaius Aelius Gallus had set out to conquer Mareb, capital of the kingdom of Saba, also known as Sheba, and been defeated when the wily Arab guides led the invaders into the waterless deserts. Soon afterwards, with the opening of the sea route from India to the Red Sea, the land route fell into decline. The mighty cities built on the back of the trade fell prey to desert raiders and crumbled into the sands.

The British seized the port of Aden in 1837. It was a dirty little village, located on an ancient site and strategically placed. But in the next century, with the completion of the Suez Canal and the invention of coal-fuelled steamships, Aden grew as wealthy and as busy as Hong Kong, the key point midway on the passage to India. The interior had been left virtually unexplored, though the British created a buffer zone of treaties of protection with tribes in the hills and deserts surrounding the colony. In the process the British elevated various petty tribal chieftains to the status of sultans, treating them to gun salutes like Indian maharajas when they dropped into Aden to pick up their annual pay-offs of rifles and silver Maria Theresa dollars from Government House. In return for their stipends, the sultans agreed to show allegiance to the British Crown, rather than to the Imam, the sacerdotal ruler of the high Yemen to the north who coveted Aden port and the hinterlands. Otherwise they were left to their own devices, even to the extent that slavery existed under British rule.

On the eve of the Second World War, Britain finally decided on a new ‘forward policy’ to develop the hinterland. To do that, and to consolidate the Protectorate frontiers against incursions from the Imam’s Yemen to the north, they enrolled men like Dad to end tribal feuding and establish irrigation farming, police forces, schools and roads.

One of the first British officials Dad met in Arabia was Harold Ingrams, the Resident Adviser to the Hadhramaut, in the Eastern Aden Protectorates. Ingrams was among Britain’s most revered Arabists. He told my father he should at all times respect Arab customs, refrain from alcohol and dress in the local garb. Ingrams himself went in for the authentic look, fluttering about in a Saudi headdress, an Indonesian lungyi, a big belt and silver and ornaments and bracelets. Around his neck he wore a Bedouin leather necklace with a large agate stone. He wore boots and he limped, the result of a wound sustained on the Western Front. Ingrams was famous for negotiating a peace settlement between the warring Hadhramaut clans that was so complicated it involved separate truces to end two thousand long-standing blood feuds. Dad admired Ingrams but thought him somewhat pompous and much later he remembered a ditty about him.

They call me Headline Harold

In my home in Hadhramaut,

Where I toil all day for plenty of pay

In my simple Saudi suit.

My father adored his job and the fact that he was among just seven Englishmen covering a territory of a hundred thousand square miles. He was in Arabia for sixteen years, which he spent constantly on long journeys, on foot, on horseback, in rickety Vickers Vincent biplanes. He worked with the political officers in the colonial services whose task was to broker peace negotiations to end the perpetual clan conflicts. Refuse to declare a truce and the political officer could call in the Vickers Vincent to bomb a recalcitrant sheikh out of his fortress. Make peace and my father came in as the agriculture officer to reward the tribes and bolster peace by reviving irrigation systems and planting cotton, fruit trees and food crops. He introduced the husbandry of cotton, but also everything else from cabbages and apricots, to large red chickens to the unsuspecting tribes. He traversed an often hostile country with no more protection than a bodyguard and his skill in talking his way out of tight situations.

In 1949, my mother was offered a job as the governor’s confidential secretary in Aden. ‘How is Aden?’ she asked Grandpa, who had fought the Turks there in the Great War. ‘Bloody awful,’ he said. She took the job because a first-class ship’s passage was part of the deal. At the eleventh hour, they made her fly – because, she later discovered, the woman she succeeded had gone mad and the governor needed a replacement at short notice. When she first arrived in Aden, she stayed with a family in a house overlooking the harbour. The house had a pet ibex, called Jumper, that slept on her bed and trotted about, eating cigarettes. She encountered my father her very first night in Aden during a Scottish dance held at the governor’s residence. He was apart from the crowd of Englishmen sitting cross-legged on the floor, cracking walnuts by hurling them against the glass windows.

She did not take much notice of him in the early days, when various other younger suitors pursued her, including a pair of pilots from RAF Eight Squadron, who each had an MG sports car. They turned up in tandem to take her to dances at the Union Club, or picnics and swimming at Gold Mohur beach. There’s a black-and-white photo of her, lissome in a black bathing suit, hands on hips, head tilted, a sly smile and laughing eyes, ankle-deep in the surf, flicking water with her dainty foot towards the camera. She looks really quite naughty in the picture, though when I joked with her about this she said primly, ‘Nonsense – we were quite proper in those days.’

My father was a very different sort of man from the dashing young British servicemen. The second time she saw him was during a polo match. He was the team’s captain but he turned up late, in dusty clothes, mounted up, yelled a lot, and rode like a Tartar. She liked the look of him. Though he liked his beer and appeared at occasional parties, he was rarely in Aden and spent most of this time in the Protectorates among the Arab farmers.

In the Secretariat, a big colonial building of arched windows, latticework and wide timber verandas, my mother used to have to sort the flow of intelligence reports for the governor. They came in from the senior political officer, Basil ‘Cloak and Dagger’ Seager, a man with a sharp nose, tight lips, pedantic rasping voice and quick, poor Arabic. He adored intrigue and by telegraph he sent messages in code or en clair in French, Latin or using obscure literary allusions that took hours to decipher. Or spies in flowing robes arrived at her office with envelopes marked CONFIDENTIAL, inside of which were smaller ones that said SECRET, inside of which were yet smaller ones that said MOST FRIGHTFULLY SECRET.

From these reports and general gossip, Mother began to notice my father’s movements. She waited for him. He didn’t appear for weeks on end. Then one day after a long time, she heard the heavy step of desert boots ascending the Secretariat’s timber stairs. Clump, clump they came down the veranda. The next day the boots were gone again. This happened several times. The months passed. She sometimes saw him on her morning rides when she went to the stables at Khormaksar. On the tennis court she found herself opposite him in a game of mixed doubles. At a party to celebrate the King’s birthday, she saw him arm in arm with the Sultan Sharif Hussein of Beihan, a magnificent figure she knew from the intelligence files, both of them standing in a flower bed and heaving with laughter at some private joke. And in her office when she heard his boots climb the stairs her heart beat faster. Clump, clump, clump. One day, my father’s face appeared at her office door.

My mother was beautiful and young, but I’ve heard it said that Dad fell in love with her when she told him that, as a girl, she had milked a cow called Bumble. He took her horse riding along the beach at Khormaksar, or east along the desert coast to the Abyan Delta where he was growing vast acres of cotton. On overnight trips to the coastal village of Zingibar she stayed with a British married couple to prevent gossip. They went riding in the desert, stopped for picnics, and he fed her polony sausage with mustard and schnapps. Odd combination, she thought. Once they got lost driving across the desert back to Aden, and he wrapped her in his sheepskin cape, waited for the clouds to clear, and navigated his way back by the stars. Mum lived at Steamer Point, Dad on the other side of the colony in the Arab village of Sheikh Othman. One day he said, ‘Let’s get married. We’ll save on petrol.’

Mum fell in love with Dad because she was a romantic. She was fascinated by stories and wanted to live out an exotic tale herself. She might not have endured as much in the years ahead had she not felt that the adventures he promised to take her on would be worth all the sacrifices she made. She was so slim my father could nearly join his hands around her waist. A Somali woman named Sara stitched her white wedding dress. A handsome RAF padre called them in for a chat and gave them a book entitled Man, Woman and God. A riding partner of Dad’s named Quill, who had been a POW in Changi, threw a stag party. On 27 January 1951 they married in the garrison church at Steamer Point with a reception to follow. Dad was forty-three, my mother twenty-five. The flowers came from Asmara by plane. The wedding cake was ordered from the Crescent Hotel. The governor laid on his Rolls-Royce to transport the bride. The telegrams were read out:

CAN NOT GET OVER NEWS STOP EMPIRE BUILDER

LOST STOP MY CONGRATULATIONS TO YOU AND

COMMISERATIONS FOR THE UNFORTUNATE WOMAN

After the English ceremony my mother changed into an Aertex shirt and slacks. They climbed into a hired car and the Arab driver got angry when he learned the guests had tied tin cans to the rear bumper. Later they drove down the beach to Abyan.

Their first night together they slept in the fort on Khanfar Rock, a promontory overlooking the whole of Abyan. After breakfast next morning, Dad told my mother to change into her riding clothes. They got on their horses; Dad on his stallion al-Qatal, my mother on al-Azraq. They rode their horses to the bottom of the rock, where the mounted Sultan Hussein al-Fadhli and his slave boy on a donkey beside him were waiting. They saw a mass of camel and horseback riders advancing towards them from the village of Zingibar, followed by a great plume of dust. Dad’s horse could sense the great crowd and stamped and snorted. The hum of many people became audible. The party rode out in a line and as they approached through clouds of dust a crowd of people on foot and on horses and camels came into view. Turbaned riders, their skin glistening with oil and blue woad, galloped towards them as they fired off salutes with rifles and muskets. ‘The bullets missed us literally by inches. I felt my hair blow up once from the blast’, Mum wrote to her parents. A circle formed and the bride and groom cantered around it as the riders shot in the air, then a cavalcade formed behind them and the whole mass of horses and camels wheeled about in the dust, horses springing and leaping. A bullock was led out into the circle and a swordsman hacked off the beast’s head. First my father, then my mother, jumped their horses over the bullock’s carcass. They dismounted and were ushered into an enormous tent lit by gas lamps. Inside, they were shown two ornate chairs where they sat, drinking glasses of tea, as a bard sang his blessings for their future together.

‘That was a good party,’ Dad said later, when they had returned to sleep on Khanfar Rock. ‘I enjoyed that,’ he said, almost surprised.

My father stopped tying himself to the bed when he grew used to living with my mother. Nor did he make his bedroll headfirst with the revolution of the earth. My eldest brother Richard was born twenty months after they married and Dad retired from service in Arabia so that they could settle and raise a family back in his beloved Africa. On the eve of sailing, my mother wrote to Granny and Grandpa: ‘If ONLY we could be certain of peace, I can see the most perfect and exciting life ahead…’

My mother’s first glimpse of Africa was a stevedore pushing a wheelbarrow of ivory tusks down the dockside in Mombasa. As he went, he chanted, ‘Produce of the Congo! Produce of the Congo!’ From the coast they drove inland to Mweiga, on the slopes of Mount Kenya, where Dad had bought the farm En’nekeraka during the Great Depression. The farmhouse was a cedar log cabin and the newlyweds would sit in their dressing gowns, in front of a roaring fire eating fresh trout from the stream. From the windows in the morning, they saw the legs of a herd of buffalo below the raising blanket of mist as they moved back into the thick surrounding forest.

Soon after my parents settled on En’nekeraka, the Mau Mau emergency broke out. First my father’s cattle were hamstrung by the guerrillas. Then a gang chopped their neighbour into little pieces while he was taking his bath. My parents saw the way things were going and so decided to up sticks and move to Tanganyika. Soon after they left, police burned down the house on En’nekeraka, claiming that it was a late-night meeting house for terrorists.

I clearly remember, at about the age of three, trying to recollect what had happened up to that moment in my life. I looked back to oblivion, all apart from a single conscious moment. In this tiny phrase of time that is with me still, I am sitting up in my cot, crying, in a cool, bluish white room with windows opening out onto a vast, dry landscape. A sublime figure enters the room and, speaking softly, soothes me back to sleep, I suppose, because my memory stops there. My recollection is from my parents’ new Tanganyika farm, which they called Langaseni. My mother saved a handful of photographs and scratchy, heat-damaged film from the years at the farm. Otherwise, I have no sense of what Langaseni was like in those days, though I have heard about it all my life from everybody else in the family. From the stories, and they were almost lectures, I formed such a strong mental picture of this African paradise that I feel I could find my way around every single hill and tree of the place. I’d know the horses in the stable, the dogs sunning themselves on the veranda, my elder siblings with their hair flaxen blond, and my father on his horse, riding down the dusty track under thorn trees. As a man I’ve visited the farm and nothing of my idyll survives.

The ranch was in the dry, rocky plains, between the snowy sugarloaf of Kilimanjaro and the sharp, black mass of Meru. The farm’s western boundary was the Red River, coloured by fluorine that blackened teeth and bones. Along the east was the Cold River, glacial and blue, flowing among glades of fever trees. To the south was a moonscape of volcanic hillocks like bubbles, covered with sparse, wiry grass, or sands and stunted thorn. On hard red soils to the northwest grew thickets of wait-a-bit thorn and aloes. In the north, on the edge of a plain teeming with game, was Firesticks Hill, Ol Lekema Jipiparuk. My parents built their first huts here with horse stables made of split euphorbia trees. Later, they built a house with a flat roof like an Arab fort. The walls were of volcanic stone. The roof beams were giant cedar trees Dad had dragged down from Kilimanjaro’s forest by ox wagon. The doors and windows were made of camphor and they looked up at the mountains on either side.

At night, lions grunted and roared and the hollow volcanic hill rumbled as rhino cantered by. Coral-coloured snakes migrated across the plains en masse in season and in the glade below the home were dark-spotted giraffe, zebra and impala. In the dry open country were Grant’s and Thomson’s gazelles, oryx, wildebeest, cheetah, hunting dog, hyena and jackals. In the wait-a-bit thorn were long-necked gerenuk and lesser kudu. Flocks of sandgrouse drank at the salty rainwater pans at dawn and at dusk you could hear the rasping chatter of guinea fowl and partridges preparing to roost.

‘We were in a paradise,’ said my father, ‘that we can never forget, nor equal.’

By the time they arrived, my brother Richard was a baby and my sister Bryony was on the way. ‘It was good to start a new life on the ranch, with the thought of more children to come, and the great open air,’ my mother recalled. ‘I said we were going to be there a hundred years.’

They poured what little money they had saved into the farm and borrowed the rest. They started with a small herd of Boran cattle, including a cow that had been slashed on the face by Mau Mau, a truculent heifer that took exception to anybody wearing a hat, four hundred goats, two dogs, Silver the pony and Jamila, an Arab filly (my mother’s wedding present) with three centuries of pedigree, plus a Dodge nicknamed the Red, Red Car. Dad set about building up his herds and bought his stock from the Maasai and European farms in Kenya.

In the bone-dry country, the key to the farm’s survival was water. The fluorine in the Red River was slow poison, the Cold River was seasonal according to the rains and the drums of water they trucked down from pools at Ol Tulali on Mount Meru were thick with baboon shit. When Dad looked across the plains he reasoned there could be water in the ground at the foot of Firesticks Hill, which stood in the way of the line of the Cold River. Flor Visser, an old Boer who had arrived on the banks of Red River in 1904, said: ‘I tell you, Mr Hartley. You will never find water here.’

A plump Swede came to drill at thirty shillings a foot. At first the bit went down through red soil, then clay, then decomposed rock, then volcanic lava to 130 feet. No water. The Swede brought his wife and son down to move in with him in his caravan. The lava got harder and harder. Some days the drilling slowed to as little as eight feet a day. The bit reached 260 feet. No water. The Swede said he was surprised because he had never known a hole that was so completely dry. At 320 feet, no water. The bit went through layer after layer of the glacial mountain Kilimanjaro’s roots, the strata of millions of years. At one point, the drill brought up a chunk of timber from a prehistoric forest. Christmas came and went. At 400 feet, Dad announced that the hole was dry. They had failed. ‘Just one more week,’ Mum urged. ‘Please go to 500 feet.’

‘I told you, British,’ said Visser. ‘No water here.’ There were no wells for miles due to the porous volcanic rock. Everybody knew. And in the remote event of the drill striking water – what then? It would be salty or full of fluorine, you could be sure of that. At 460 feet, no water, and Dad said they were broke. What they would do with no money and no water, they didn’t know. It might have come to an end, but that day a car drove up and out got a man my father had known from Arabia. The visitor announced that the Arab farmers my father had worked with had raised the sum of two thousand pounds for him as a present after he had retired. To my mother’s horror, Dad said he could not accept the gift, saying the farmers should use it for their own irrigation works back in Arabia. The man said, ‘That is what they want you to do with it. They say that wherever you have gone, water has followed. And it’s time for you to find water with this money yourself.’

The next day drilling resumed. The work went on, day after day, until one morning there was an enormous spurt of water. A geyser exploded from the well hole. Clear water spouted in a fountain 160 feet into the air. The water spilled down onto the dry land. It flooded the plain in front of the hill like a flash flood. It gushed at fifteen hundred gallons an hour. There was neither telephone nor radio for miles, but that afternoon Flor Visser drove up in his old Ford truck and parked in front of the fountain of water. He switched off the engine and sat there for hours, staring at the water flooding down and no doubt thinking about the fifty years he had stayed on the arid plains where it had been so hard to make a life. Dad installed a wellhead that nodded like a huge bird. When the borehole was not pumping, strange humming noises came from the subterranean pipe. It was the thrumming of great Kilimanjaro’s volcanic innards. The geyser settled down to a flow of eleven hundred gallons an hour. The water was both fresh and pure.

Our neighbours were the Maasai tribal people and their beloved herds of cattle. Dad knew them well, traded stock at their bomas, but also played a cat and mouse game with them when they raided his cattle or poached his scarce grazing. From the top of the hill behind the house, he could see where the Maasai were on the plain, since plumes of dust followed their herds. He would then saddle up his horse and gallop after them like John Wayne with loud ‘Yehahs!’ The Maasai scattered in all directions, their red shuka togas flapping. If it was after dusk, Dad stalked them by moonlight and fired his rifle in the air to stampede the cattle off the property. Once a lion killed forty Maasai cattle. It also took Dad’s best big grey bull, so he hunted it down, shot it dead and kept the skin for evermore. A crowd of warriors appeared at the house and danced in front of the skin as it hung stretched out and caked with salt. They were in their full regalia of shields, assegai spears and ochre body paint. In a straight line they danced, stamping their feet, kicking up the dust, toasting ‘Bwana Harti’ and his deed.

Nearby there was a colony of Afrikaner smallholders, who had trekked up from South Africa after the second Boer war to escape the British and settle in German East Africa. They had been led by one of the Malan generals and the families were Pretorius, Van Venter, Lemmer, Visser, Van Rooyen and Bekker. In the Great War, they switched sides to help the British when Jan Smuts came up to attack the German East Africa commander Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck in 1916. Pretorius, a scout and hunter, caused havoc for the Germans at Longido when he used lion fat to spook their penned horses. They were picture-book peasants, with blond, barefoot sons, old men with bright red noses and matrons with huge, fat arms. They sat on the stoeps of their whitewashed houses, stirring sheep fat with ladles to make soap, as geese and Muscovy ducks waddled about the gardens. Their church doubled as a school and grace was recited over meals at long tables under blue-blossomed jacaranda trees. They ate giraffe-meat sausages and stew made from sheep feet and pig trotters with the hair still on. ‘You must beat the kaffirs. Else how will you get them to work property, eh?’ one of the mamas told Mother. ‘Beat them, Mrs Hartley. You British don’t know anything about Africans!’ Yet the Boers were themselves Africans, and grew up side-by-side with black children from whom they were inseparable. And everybody knew that old man Pretorius, father of the blue-eyed policeman Jerry, and another boy who drove his truck over the escarpment and was killed in Manyara, lived with his black mistress in a separate house from where his wife stayed in the next-door building, which looked like a railway station. And one of the teenage girls, Katrina, had fallen in love with an African boy and become pregnant by him.

My parents prospered and in time they bought Sarel du Toit’s place, Kisimiri, also known as the Top Farm, 7,000 feet up on the slopes of Meru. It was a white mansion with pillars and Dutch gables and a living room that was 99 feet long with big windows overlooking the plains to Kilimanjaro. The steep mountain slopes were carpeted in white pyrethrum flowers and the farm ran a fine herd of Jersey dairy cattle. Mother made butter in a big, hand-driven churn for sale to Europeans in Arusha. She also sold clarified butter, ghee, which was so popular among the Asians that they gave chase when they saw her car coming into town. And the skimmed milk and buttermilk were used for the farm workers’ rations. Nothing went to waste in those days.

My parents didn’t think too much about making money for its own sake, but years later they would muse that while living in this paradise they might also have become rich. Dad went into partnership with a friend, Peter Besse, a son of the great French tycoon Antonin Besse from Aden. Together they built the biggest ranching company in Tanganyika. They were beef barons who ran thousands of head of cattle, leased grazing from the slopes of Kilimanjaro to the coastal plains towards the ocean. With his profits, my father kept on reinvesting, buying land.

‘Your husband doesn’t just love Africa,’ a friend once told my mother. ‘He intends to own it.’

Ways of life can change gradually, or overnight. The end of British rule came in 1961. Black rule under the new president, Julius Nyerere, was intolerable to the Afrikaner settlers. En masse, they got back in their jalopies and bumped back south from where they had trekked up nearly six decades before. Visser and his wife crashed and died on the way, while old man De Wet had a heart attack two days after leaving the slopes of Meru, where he’d been raised. Many years later, as apartheid collapsed, some of the survivors joined the ranks of the white supremacist Eugene Terreblanche and his AWB brownshirts. They have never stopped running.

Meanwhile Nyerere flirted with the North Koreans, Chinese and Russians. In 1967, the president decreed a programme of African socialism. When it came down to brass tacks, this vague philosophy – promoted mainly by Nyerere himself in a series of slim volumes – was less a creed than a way of justifying national theft and vandalism, which in turn led to destitution across the board. The socialists began nationalizing white farms without any coherent plan of what should happen to the properties after they had been expropriated. Government men arrived and ordered Europeans out. The Lundgrens were given thirty minutes notice to leave a farm where they had lived for three decades. In contrast, the von Trutschlers were imprisoned in their house for days with no food but for the eggs the local peasant woman smuggled to them. Settlers’ bank accounts were frozen and they were allowed to pack only what they could transport on their one-way trip into exile. Some had been on their farms all their lives. They left behind workers, family graves, their possessions – all they had worked for and all they had loved.

Dad saw the way things were going and negotiated to sell his cattle and sheep to the state for cheap. He had done everything he could to avoid politics. At independence, he was not among the vociferous whites who rejected black rule. But nor did he join the Capricorn Society, which aimed to promote good relations between blacks and whites. ‘I don’t need to have little arranged meetings to learn how to get on with Africans,’ he said. His skill as a rancher was well known, and for this reason the government offered him the job of running all the expropriated ranches grouped in one big block. He stayed on and was allowed to live in his home as part of the deal. Beyond the farm’s borders, the transformation of the country was swift. All businesses were nationalized, from big factories to bicycle workshops. Peasants, nomads and hunter-gatherers alike were herded into collectivized ‘Ujamaa’ villages.

Meanwhile on the farm itself things began to quickly go wrong. A poacher named Hassan Jessa led patrols of policemen onto the land and machine-gunned wildlife, which they loaded onto Bedford trucks and sold to butchers in Arusha. Government officials and their Soviet, Chinese or Swedish foreign guests became frequent visitors to the farm, which they claimed was a showcase for socialist development. Not a week went by without a plume of dust appearing on the plains, heralding the approach of a convoy of expensive cars. Men with soft hands and collarless safari suits, the fashion inspired by Nyerere’s recent visits to North Korea, invited themselves into the home and demanded tours of the ranch, with big luncheons to follow. Dad could do nothing. He amused himself by greeting delegations and taking them off for marathon walks in the hot sun and dust to show them the cattle, the sheep, the spray races, the crushes and the farm buildings. He earnestly described the agricultural operations in detail, bringing the officials back home for a frugal lunch only when the sun was low in the sky. Once, leading a busload of dumpy Russians, he exclaimed, ‘Look! Lion spoor. Look’s like quite a large male and it’s only a couple of hours old.’ At this the Russians turned tail, puffing and wheezing at a swift pace back to their buses.

Nyerere’s disciples in his Revolutionary Party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi, were literally consuming the farm. The president declared that all workers should stand up for their rights, which in many parts of Tanzania resulted in labourers beating up their bosses, then looting their businesses. It all got to be too much when the money needed to run the farm was pilfered from the state ranching corporation. My father decided he had seen enough and so he resigned. The last night we were on the farm, a night I don’t remember because I was old enough only to crawl, two lions began roaring at the bottom of the hill. They kept it up until dawn. The Maasai said the animals had come to say goodbye, before the cars were packed up and the family drove away. We camped for one last night between the farm and the border with Kenya. Mum said it was a terrible time. My miserable brothers Richard and Kim and sister Bryony sat with their backs to the fire and against a strong wind blowing dust across the land.

‘I cried,’ my mother always told me. ‘And Dad cried too, the first time I had seen him cry since his mother died.’

‘The sequel to all this is so unpleasant to write about that I will try and put it on record and sort it out later,’ my father wrote as an old man. ‘It is something disastrous for that beautiful place and the land up on Meru and the house, and our improvements, and everything else. It needs a lot of careful thought.’ He never did write about it anymore, but he pondered what had happened long and hard. Nyerere’s policies collapsed and his books are read no longer. On the farm, what had been a small family business became a Scandinavian-funded aid project, staffed by expatriate experts on salaries paid in Oslo who drove around in gleaming white vehicles. And in time the aid project failed, as schemes of this kind in Africa tend to almost without exception.

Growing up, the loss of my family’s paradise was a festering wound, even though I had no personal memory of the thing that hurt me. I grew up feeling that I had been born too late to be part of our greatest adventure. And things were no longer as they had been in the family, down to the smallest detail. Dad never took me riding or deep-sea fishing. Instead I looked at snapshots of my elder brothers proudly holding up their catch. ‘That white vase,’ Mum said of an empty receptacle: ‘I used to fill it with sprays of purple agapanthus every day.’

The last I heard, an old caretaker and a gang of bats lived in the house on Firesticks Hill, the place of my first memory, and the roof leaked. The stock is lost, eaten, stolen or sold. Poachers have wiped out the wildlife. The elephants, the ostriches and the bullfrogs – the ‘elphanes’, ‘arse-stretches’ and ‘oggy goggies’, as we call them to this day in our intimate family vocabulary of childhood words – are gone. The trees have been hacked down for charcoal to supply the towns. The borehole machinery broke and stopped pumping eleven hundred gallons of clean water a day and the land returned to being a dry desert. My father’s beautiful horses, the ones he had imported from Arabia, with their centuries-old Bedu bloodlines, bolted their stables and ran feral across the plains between the mountains. For years afterwards, people encountered them, cantering like mustangs. Lions took some, while local peasants captured some of the others, either to eat them or put to them to work pulling carts like donkeys. Up on the slopes of Meru, squatters hamstrung the dairy cows, uprooted the pyrethrum, chopped down the big trees and replaced it all with fields of marijuana. They occupied the house and made fires on the parquet floors. They tore the tiles off the roof and ripped out the doors and windows, which they carried off to adorn mud huts. They didn’t manage to tear down the walls and pillars, and from down below on the plains I myself have seen the ruins gleam brightly like a beacon against the slopes of the mountain.

My father was not the type of man to give up and turn his back on Africa. Nor did he stay in order to retreat into bitterness, as had so many Europeans who found their hopes and dreams dashed but found it was too late for them to start again elsewhere. Instead, he embarked on a dramatic new direction. Having been a colonial officer, then a rancher, he now became a development aid worker himself, ultimately in the same game as the Scandinavian experts who had occupied the ranch on Kilimanjaro. The difference with my father was that he truly was an expert after more than forty years of working in Africa, his adopted home. And so he threw himself into working in the most remote areas of the continent he could find, assisting nomads with the husbandry of livestock and peasants with the growing of crops.

In my first coherent memories that run in sequence, in full-colour as it seems, I am often in the back of a four-wheel-drive among clanking kettles, piles of rations and dust, bumping across some drought-blasted plain. I am in camp where wild-haired men squat by the fire and chat with my father about rain and camels. I make my bed out in the open under the stars, or am woken in a village hut by bleating goats or mission hymns, or in a shabby border-town hotel with bare electric bulbs and blue gloss walls.

‘We’re like a tribe of mechanized nomads,’ says my mother. To hear this makes me happy. We are like gypsies, living out an adventure in Africa.

The problem was that we couldn’t always be on the road with Dad. The ways were dangerous. In Eritrea, Dad lost fifteen of his team to landmine explosions on the roads and it was typical of him that he used this as an excuse to dispense with vehicles in favour of trekking cross-country with pack mules. If only I had been old enough to join him. What walks we might have had together.

Instead, our new way of life was filled with goodbyes and absences and flights with my mother to see him wherever he was. These were long journeys with endless waits in airports. Our fellow passengers were often the new Soviet or Chinese officials who had appeared with Africa’s liberation from its European masters. I remember asking a group of men – my mother tells me they were Soviets – to read a story from my Disney comic book. They peered at the pages, looked worried and shook their heads.

We’d arrive in hot and sticky capitals and have to wait for Dad while he was traced out in his wilderness with his livestock and nomads. In Mogadishu, Somalia, we were invariably confined to whichever hotel compound we were checked into due to the upheavals outside. We stayed at the Croce del Sud, known as the Sweaty Crotch. Nearby was the Shebelle, a.ka. the Scratchy Belly. The city erupted in anti-Western riots when Apollo 11 landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon and the mosque preachers declared that it was either American lies or blasphemy.

Soon after the moon landings, the Somali president was assassinated and the army took over. Each afternoon I’d watch from the Sweaty Crotch as soldiers goose-stepped down the street. Many years later I worked out that this was when the dictator president Mohamed Siad Barre had seized power in a coup d’état. During one parade, while my mother and sister were out shopping at the bazaar, I filled a soda bottle from the tap, went back to the room’s balcony and emptied the contents onto the heads of the spectators below. The consequences were dire, for within a few minutes there were loud voices and a hammering at the door. I hid in the bathtub until Mother returned, when she had to promise a group of irate men that I had not pissed on them.

Finally we’d be summoned to desert reunions with my father. These trips survive in my mind only as a jumble of images like one of our heat- and dust-damaged family films. We flew for hours and so slowly that we could see the shadow of the Dakota propeller aircraft on the scrub below. On landing at a Somali airfield I broke loose from my mother and burrowed between the sandal-shod brown legs of men in turbans and women in flowing robes. I knew I would recognize him because he would be the only white man in the crowd. But how was I to behave when I met my father? How warmly would Dad kiss Mum and did they still love each other? And what was this strange life my father lived, among such fierce people?

On Sundays in Somalia, the cooks used to hack the chickens’ heads off with loud bismillahs, then allowed the headless bodies to dance about behind the kitchen. I have a sequence of other disjointed memories: of mosquito larvae in our table water, flexing like red commas magnified in the distorted bowl of the jug; playing Ping-Pong with pasty-faced Chinese commissars in the local hotel; the bleeding toes I got from barefoot soccer with the tough Somali boys; my brother Kim and I on Lido Beach, where camels were slaughtered so that guts lay in bluish puddles on the coral sand; the northern Somali highlands, on a mountain called Ga’an Libah, the Lion’s Fist, where Kim and I tried and failed to rescue a goat from our lunch table; a cave of prehistoric paintings of red handprints and herds of eland stalked by cats and men with alien heads. Once I stood on the banks of a dry riverbed, feeling wind on my face, hearing a rumble, then seeing a wall of brown water explode from around the corner as the flash flood approached.

Another time we visited Dad in a big white Arab fort on the Indian Ocean. His housemates were American hippies, young men and women my mother now tells me were from the Peace Corps. Dad wore a bandana, grew his hair down to his shoulders and listened to Led Zeppelin. He was learning yoga and at dusk he practised his asanas on the flat roof while looking out over the sea. It was the end of the 1960s, Timothy Leary was urging the world to ‘turn on, tune in, and drop out’, and Dad was sixty-two years old.

After Somalia came Ethiopia. In the summer that I was first taken to see my father there, rumours had been circulating of starvation among the peasants outside the capital, Addis Ababa. My teenage sister Bryony was with him, and together they filled the car with loaves of bread and Arabian dates packed in baskets. On the road to Bati, they found thousands of Oromo peasants whose crops had withered in drought and highland frost. When my sister stood at the back of the truck tossing out the bread and dates, the hungry mob rioted. After Bati, they drove down into the Rift Valley and Denkalia. The local Afar nomads, normally tough enough to inhabit the hottest and most inhospitable place on earth, were dying too, since their livestock was gone. A tragedy was unfolding due to all the usual causes: civil war, overpopulation and misuse of the land and rivers in the name of modern development.

On the edge of the Danakil Depression, the dead and dying all around him, Dad sat down and wrote a message, which he handed to a runner, who took it to the nearest post office for cabling to Addis Ababa. This was before the days when African famines were the news stories they are today. There were no rock concerts, T-shirts or advertisements in the paper. But with that message, news of what was happening soon reached Europe. A BBC team flew to Bati and their TV film exposed the truth. When the pictures were shown in Addis Ababa, it helped the tide of revolution that toppled the medieval dictatorship of Emperor Haile Selassie. Back on the plains of Bati Dad sat down by himself. ‘The camps lie broken down on hill and plain, / Skulls, bones and horns remain,’ he wrote. ‘No shouts, no songs of fighting, or of love, / But from the bare thorn tree above, / So sadly calls the mourning dove.’ ‘…Was this your ravaged land, / The work of God, or was it Man’s own hand?’ For me this just about sums up what happened all over Africa in the twentieth century.

The Addis Ababa I remember was, as usual, a place of waiting for days in a dark, smelly hotel. The TV broadcast almost back-to-back episodes of Sesame Street. In short slots between the programmes, the revolutionaries who had taken over the TV station showed footage of the emperor feeding his lapdogs fillet steak interspersed with images of stick figures, crying babies with distended bellies, flies cramming into their eyes and mouths. After a few minutes of this, the programming would return to Sesame Street.

In the square outside the hotel was a black stone statue of the Lion of Judah, the symbol of Abyssinia’s emperors. At the foot of it I found a boy, my age, with his hands out begging.

‘I am hungry,’ the boy whimpered. I tried not to look at him. ‘I have not eaten for three days.’

Even today I can picture the boy’s grimace and his outstretched hand. As we moved away a shout went up from the seething pedestrians at street level below the black lion’s statue. People were looking up. At the summit of a high building was a young man and I saw that he had a flag wrapped around his shoulders. He jumped. The flag flapped like a parachute that refused to open as he fell to the pavement. I heard a big sigh and a crowd formed where the man had landed, as figures in uniform appeared at the top of the building. These images fed my dreams of monsters: the starving boy, the man with the flag, the emperor’s dogs eating minced steak and the horrid Big Bird and the Muppets of Sesame Street.

When I look back now I also see us as the disaster family. I had only just learned to write when I sent my father this letter: ‘Dear Dad we had a good holidays. Come home now love from aidan xx.’ But family holidays were really only trips to accompany my father on an assignment to where the latest human catastrophes were being staged. I recall we went on a fishing trip to the Bale Mountains in southern Ethiopia. Dad vanished, while we caught amazing trout in a highland landscape of giant lobelias and fragrant African heathers. My father would join us some days and at night he told me not to wander too far from the tents in camp. The local hyenas had gained a taste for human flesh because there had been so many bodies scattered in the district and live infants were being carried off.

It was hard to know exactly where, or what, we could call home. Almost wherever we went, the newly free Africans warned my parents that for people of our sort the writing was on the wall. They associated us with an imperialist past they wanted to put behind them. Instead, they found we stubbornly refused to leave. Kenya was the one exception in all of East Africa. We had much to be thankful for as Europeans in Kenya. The founding president Jomo Kenyatta could have kicked us out or robbed us like Nyerere. He might have been inclined to do so, since we had imprisoned him during the Mau Mau rebellion prior to independence. Instead he waved an olive branch. At a rally of whites in the Rift Valley town of Nakuru in 1964 he had said: ‘We are going to forget the past and look to the future. I have suffered imprisonment and detention; but that is gone, and I am not going to remember it. Let us join hands and work for the benefit of Kenya…’ I was born a year after he made that announcement, and as I grew up all races lived alongside one another.

My parents at last found a family base on Kenya’s coast, south of the Swahili village of Malindi, on the white sandy beach near Leopard Point, so named because a column of dead black coral like a cat’s head stood out on the reef at the southern end. My mother oversaw the building of a small house, with walls of coral and a roof of makuti thatch made of coconut-palm fronds knotted on open mangrove pole rafters. Inside were Zanzibar chests, BaZinza tribal stools, David Shepherd prints of Aden, Bukhara carpets my father had haggled from dhow nakhoda captains at Mombasa’s Kilindini harbour, and cedar beds slung with rawhide thongs of oryx and zebra skins. The bathrooms and verandas were scattered with shells, fragments of coral, and Indian Ocean flotsam and jetsam. The cement floor was black and cool underfoot. Charo, our house servant, polished them each day with two halves of a fibrous coconut, then wrapped rags around his feet and buffed the surfaces until they shone like obsidian. At night we sat outside and gazed up at the blanket of stars. On the rare occasions he was home, Dad pointed up to the constellations that guided ships’ captains and Arab caravans, or the stars of the Africans, who used the constellations to tell them when to plant or harvest their crops.

Before I was old enough to read the books in my father’s library, kept off on a side veranda that served as his office, I knew each by their pictures, weight and smell. I remember the portrait of Burton’s scarred face, which so attracted me in the signed copy of First Footsteps in East Africa. Livingstone reminded me of my father, but I recoiled at the odour of Stanley’s In Darkest Africa and the man himself resembled a cruel schoolmaster in a silly hat. There was Joseph Thomson’s Through Masai-Land with the engraving of the author, his black-powder gun and helmet being tossed by a giant buffalo; Frederick Courteney Selous’s A Hunter’s Wanderings in Africa, the spine repaired with a heavy needle and thread, with a kudu head embossed in gold on the red cover; Captain Stigand’s The Land of Zinj, eaten into a honeycomb by white ants; the spewing volcanoes of Duke Adolphus Frederick of Mecklenburg’s In the Heart of Africa; the bugs in G. D. Hale Carpenter’s A Naturalist on Lake Victoria; the slaughtered lions laid out in J. H. Patterson’s The Man-Eaters of Tsavo; and the pygmies, tattooed warriors and men with filed teeth in Sir Harry Johnston’s The Uganda Protectorate.

Mum gave us each something to plant in the garden. My eldest brother Richard’s tree was a bombax, with a knobbly trunk that grew ever so slowly. Kim planted a Norfolk pine with crazy branches inside the circle of hibiscus next to the house. Bryony’s was a frangipani, fragrant and delicate. Dad scattered the seedpods of a Red Sea saltbush that grew into blue-grey fleshy clumps along the high-water mark. Mum loved her Adenium desert roses. This plant had a few plump branches that produced pinkish or dark, red blooms above ground. But like a vegetable iceberg, underground was a massive, tuberous bulb. Much later I, too, was given a tree. I can’t recall what it was except that it was dubbed the ‘whacker’ plant because Dad ripped it up to give me a thrashing with it on the only occasion he ever beat me.

At the north end of the beach was the sandy pool, where I learned to swim at eighteen months with my armbands on, bum in the air and my eyes open underwater. When I was older I joined my brother Kim and went out with the fishermen, who taught us the names for all the fish, shells and corals. Fragments of blue ceramic and celadon washed in with every tide, reminders of Chinese traders from six centuries before. On the southern end of the village bay stood a pillar dedicated to the Holy Ghost, erected by Vasco da Gama, who had sailed from here to India in 1498. Below the beachfront mosque, surrounded by tall phallus-shaped tombs of forgotten notables, townspeople haggled over the day’s catch. In the labyrinth of houses of coral and mud and wattle lived a rich mix of cultures from all over the Indian Ocean. Bajuni fishermen, Giriamas in grass skirts balancing pots and banana branches on their heads. The ironmonger was a Hadhramauti who served ginger tea and did not let my mother pay for bags of nails. Our tailoring was done by a bearded Bohra, who had a row of men working on foot-pedalled Singers outside his shop. The newsagent was a Pakistani we called Frankenstein, because his teeth were brown from chewing betel nut. There was Archie Ritchie, an old game warden who wore a lilac-breasted roller bird on his shoulder, and his wife, Queenie, whom the village Arabs called ‘the Queen’; Terence Adamson, who had had half his jaw torn off by one of his brother George’s lions, and who taught me how to divine for water with a forked stick; Laly, who took us snorkelling; Max, a German-Irish Baron, who was captured on the Eastern Front and survived years in Siberia as a POW, when snow blew in through his cell window; Max’s wife, Anna, a Seychellois beauty whose first husband had been killed by a charging elephant; Gigi, a singer at the Dhow Nightclub, famous for her rendition of ‘Malaika’, the most famous Swahili pop song, about a man too poor to marry his girl; Gigi’s boyfriend Knut, a Dane who had been a circus clown and could walk a straight line on his hands but not his legs when he was drunk. And there was Marujin, a Catalonian marquesa whom I held in awe. She wore heavy silver bracelets up each arm that click-clacked as she glided barefoot through her dark, cool house. On the walls were tantric designs and she had a huge copper tray piled with the ivory, smooth fragments of cowrie shells. For hours I listened to her speak as she sat cross-legged on her veranda.

‘One thing we know is that we’re not Europeans. We know that, but we’re also not Africans. What we are, I don’t know, but we’re not Europeans…’ Marujin said the mind was the ‘lunatic in the house’, the cricket in the cage relentlessly chirping ‘tchya-ko, tchya-ko, tchya-ko’. She said anything we learned came to us spontaneously, when the mind was still and serene.

As a small boy I had a string of fevers, but my parents were offhand about medical treatment. My mother had seen the inside of hospitals only to give birth and I grew up, barefoot and in shorts, to believe Dad’s superstitions that visiting a doctor might make an illness more critical rather than cure it. At home our first-aid box had been stocked with Mercurochrome, antiseptic powder, universal Chinese eye ointment, a few stuck-together bandages, and a blue bottle of milk of magnesia. Aspirins were rare, while antibiotics were banned. Home cures and local remedies were warmly approved of: hot cooking oil for earache, hot brine for a stomach ache and a poultice of pawpaw and honey for jigger worm boils, cuts, thorns or sea urchin spines in our feet. If we had fever Mum plucked leaves from the neem trees in our garden for hot infusions. When Charo suffered a stroke that paralysed one side of his body, Dad took him to a witch doctor who buried him alive for half an hour, with very positive effects. For me, only malaria had led to a visit to the dreaded Dr Zoltan Rossinger, a Viennese Jew who had escaped Hitler. The doctor charged Africans nothing and all others the normal price – except for Germans, from whom he demanded double.

My brother Kim and I spent a lot of my time with an old man named Mohamed. Polio had stunted one of Mohamed’s legs, which dangled useless and childlike, and he eked out a pittance hawking shells to the growing number of white tourists. He sat all day long on his coconut mat in town, resplendent among the mother-of-pearl of nautiluses, triton conches and the pink, pouting lips of spider shells. We sat cross-legged listening to him, as he told us stories about storms on the ocean, dugongs and the Glory of the Seas, rarest among all shells. As he spoke he paused to expertly spit quids of red betel nut juice for dramatic emphasis, or roll a fresh nut into a pan leaf and tuck it into his cheek to chew.

Some days, he would take us down to the beach where fishermen caulked their careened boats while buyers haggled over beached shark carcasses. The sand glittered with mica. It was the same beach from which Mohamed’s slave ancestors had been herded aboard dhows bound for Arabia. On land, he lurched about on crutches but out on the ocean from his outrigger canoe he flipped into the sea and swam like a merman. We used to hand-line in the waters beyond Vasco da Gama’s pillar, staring into the water, yanking the line, hoping for brilliant reef fish to bite. Mohamed tied his line to a horny big toe and dozed off, springing alert at the slightest nibble.

Once my brother pulled out a fish with a domed forehead and a sailfin. Mohamed gave it his Swahili name, filusi, fine to eat and very special. In English it is the coryphene. In Spanish it is more beautifully known as the dorado, meaning ‘gilded’, because of its iridescent gold flanks. Mohamed seized hold of the fish and told us to watch closely. As the dorado suffocated its pigment, sheathed with a patina of stippled green, was transfigured for a brief instant like a beam of sunshine on a church mosaic. Mohamed held the fish as its strength drained away. With it, the light in the dorado’s brilliance faded. When the process was complete, Mohamed picked up his knife and sliced open her belly, removed the guts and tossed the body to the bottom of the canoe, where it turned the colour of tarnished lead.

My mother decided it was time for us to be educated outside Africa with its revolutions and wars. My siblings were taken out of their Kenya schools. I remember the time they first left by plane to go to boarding school in England. They had to swap their African uniforms of gingham shirts and khaki shorts for thick socks and grey felt blazers that made them look cold even before they were out of the equatorial sunshine. They went on ahead to Europe and my mother followed with me. We settled on a small hill farm in Devon. It was a rugged, pagan spot: a thatched longhouse of whitewashed cob, a great barn with timbers like a ship, views over Dartmoor, oak and elm woods, blackthorn hedges, clover pastures, a millpond and a stream, granite troughs and rookeries. This was modern England, but our neighbour on one side still ploughed with horses, stooked his hay with a pitchfork and was unable to write apart from sign his name on a bank cheque. On the other side of us was the poet Ted Hughes. After we met him one day in the fields, Mum said he ‘looked like a man who has been struck by lightning’.

We had sheep, cattle, horses and a black dog called Bruce. My eldest brother Richard attempted rearing pigs but he grew to know each porker by name so he couldn’t face sending them to the butcher. I kept ducks and chickens, goats, rabbits and guinea pigs. Lambing started when it was still cold and muddy in spring as the first crocuses poked through the snow. May carpeted the wood floor with bluebells. In summer wildflowers dusted the meadows and we fished for trout in the little streams and the pond. Richard helped Mum run the farm. He ploughed and harvested and made hay, helped by a labourer who had a hook where his hand should have been. Richard was so strong he could pitchfork a bale of straw high onto a trailer. In autumn we had fights throwing apples and harvested bags of them for delivery to Mr Inch, the cider maker who said he threw in a rat to improve the flavour of his brew. In winter, it rained a great deal but some mornings you’d wake up and it was sparkling sunshine, with the entire landscape covered with hoarfrost or snow.

Richard was dispatched to a school in Scotland, where it was felt that he might grow up tough doing outward-bound courses, mountain rescue and skiing. My sister Bryony went to where Mum and Granny had both been educated. Kim attended a school in Berkshire where boys wore First World War navy uniforms, complete with brass buttons, whitened belts and spit-and-polished boots. So began our long separation from both Dad and Africa, the years of being knocked into shape on a rainy little island. It is impossible to exaggerate the effect that British schools had on my siblings. They had been raised in wild liberty and happiness. They were now rootless and appeared exotic to the local children. They were confronted by petty, brutal school discipline and the unfamiliar British class system. Already from an unorthodox background, the counterculture of the sixties and seventies swept them off their feet and they were always climbing over walls to abscond for parties in London.

I remember Richard with shoulder-length hair and sideburns, a sheepskin coat and flares. He came home with languid, older girlfriends and freaks in clapped-out cars. I recall fighting over the gramophone when I wanted to play my record of ‘Elephants on Parade’ from The Jungle Book instead of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway To Heaven’. Bryony had big eyelashes and puppy fat and she wore lime-green and bright yellow miniskirts and knee-length boots. For a time she lived in a bedsit above a coin-operated laundrette off Elgin Crescent in London. Later, Kim got into disco and grew an Afro.

I remember my first day at school, aged six, when I held my mother’s hand and walked up the gravel driveway, past the big stone pillars topped by griffons at the school gates. In front of us was the Victorian Gothic edifice of Ravenswood, on the edge of Exmoor. I looked up at Mum and said, ‘I’m not going to cry…’

The headmaster invited us into his study and asked us to sit down. ‘You are most welcome to Ravenswood. Do you have any questions?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am told that the planet Pluto has vanished. Could you please explain why?’

Mum went back to Africa to see my father and sent me postcards of elephants and landscapes with colourful stamps. I used to stare into those pictures for hours at a time and long for home in Kenya. School was a hard place to which I became completely adapted. The terms unfolded into years and I recall friends and times that were happy. Still, the memories of Ravenswood and its cold dormitories, with names like Drake and Ivanhoe, still get me like the chilblains.

When Mum was overseas, I’d visit my grandparents and Grandpa sympathized with me about school because he’d hated it too. He joked that if I survived Ravenswood I’d be able to easily deal with being a POW, if there was ever another war, or as a convict if I ever did anything wrong. It’s true I never felt I had to put on such a tough act as I did there. In the playground we played chicken, seeing how close a knife could be thrown at our feet without flinching. The masters beat us regularly but we didn’t much care. We’d stuff sheets of blotting paper down our Y-fronts – to absorb the impact – and after a thrashing show off our welt-reddened bare bums to our classmates. The food was inedible but one couldn’t ‘get down’ until one had finished one’s plate. When I went home for the first time, Mum asked me what we were given to eat. ‘Munched-up meat and hardened potatoes,’ I told her. We had greyish fish that floated in scum; mashed orange swede; pickled purplish beetroot; toad-in-the-hole and semolina and tapioca pudding.

We were the first generation after the end of the British Empire, but in geography class our ageing school atlases still showed large parts of the world coloured red. The masters were mostly ex-military or police types like our geography teacher, an Indian Army major who reminisced about ‘when I was in the Punjab’. To our delight, he ran our class like his old regiment and barked out parade-ground commands in Hindi. He could throw a piece of chalk with deadly accuracy across the classroom at a daydreaming boy. And if you got an answer wrong he’d yell ‘balderdash!’.

I quickly learned about Britain by watching television when my mother took me home to the farm in Devon. We had no TV in Kenya, but so much of what the boys talked about at Ravenswood came from kids’ shows and sport on the box. I watched it to find common ground with my peers, among whom one needed to be able to speak and act like Scoobie Doo and Mutley the Dog. The programme I genuinely liked most was The Magic Roundabout. After that came the news. My mother insisted on watching this and so I would stick around because once in front of the box it was hard to unglue my eyes.

I remember one news night very clearly. The pictures were of troops on the move, refugees, rice paddies and palm trees. A young American soldier was crying. ‘I want to go home. I want to go home.’ My mother looked cross and said, ‘They’re always so emotional. The British never behaved like that.’

‘Maybe they’re scared,’ I remember saying.

‘Of course they’re scared,’ Mum said. ‘But you should never show it.’

A reporter did a piece to camera, speaking into a big handheld microphone. A roar suddenly grew audible. The camera lurched away from the correspondent and zoomed in across the paddies to get a shot of a fighter jet plunging into the earth a mile away. The shot held for a few seconds, the sound of the impact explosion distorted above the muffled shouts off camera. The reporter came back in frame and resumed his story as a column of black smoke rose from the crash site behind him. From that moment on, I think my bags were packed and I was ready for a life in news.

My father took little active interest in my schooling and he seldom read my end-of-term reports. But once he visited me at school to deliver a lecture about the Danakil Depression, which became amazingly detailed about the Afar and their livestock in the deserts along the Red Sea coast. On that occasion, I suppose my African background was so exotic to my peers that a child said to me after Dad had driven away, ‘That wasn’t your father!’

I promised the boy that he was.

‘How can that be?’ the boy jeered. ‘He’s very old. And anyway, I thought your father came from Africa.’ I replied that he did.

‘Well then, why isn’t he a black man?’

At the end of term, I longed to break up like any other boy, anxious to leave that dungeon for a spell. In summer or sometimes at Christmas, I’d fly home to Kenya on a special BOAC flight packed with schoolchildren called the Lollipop Special. Down at the beach house, I’d kick off my squeaky black shoes and socks and feel the sand between my toes again.

At thirteen I went up to Sherborne School, in Dorset. The town was Saxon, built on a scire burne, a clear stream; the school had been founded by the boy king Edward VI, and for generations it had fed the ranks of England’s soldiers and administrators. In my memory, I seem to have spent a large amount of time in church. During the sermons in the Abbey, I’d gaze up at the old flags that hung in lines above our pews, Union Jacks and regimental colours torn by cannonballs and stained by battles in the four corners of Britain’s empire. I filed out of chapel a thousand times with the organ striking up Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. As I descended the steps I’d look up at the walls of names memorializing all the school’s Old Boys who had been killed in the succession of wars, always bringing my eyes to rest on one, Cowan, whom my mother had known in Burma.

As a teenager, I spiked my hair and bleached it with peroxide, and learned to smoke, drink snakebite and take poppers and speed. I quickly found the Africans again at Sherborne and together with two Nigerian brothers I formed a rock band. Our keyboardist was from the Cayman Islands. The Nigerians played drums and lead guitar. At first we called ourselves Vic Virus and the Exploding Parasites. Our lyrics were cascades of punk nihilism fused with a Commonwealth beat. We wanted our music to have a message, so we changed our band name to The Starving Millions. At our only concert, I came on stage wrapped head to foot in red ink-soaked hospital bandages and sang about world poverty.

Out in Africa, I think my father grew lonely and perhaps felt burdened by the responsibility of a family from which he was separated for so much of the time. On the rare occasions I saw him in England or Africa, he never took me in hand. He wasn’t one to dispense fatherly advice, nor to listen to fears or dreams. He could have had authority over me, if only he had wanted to. He was a stranger to me, though I was in awe of his greatness. It was my mother who laid down the rules and did all the bringing up. Dad paid the bills and came home once in a blue moon. When he was with me he wasn’t much good at football, cards or games. I never went with him to a museum and rarely to the cinema, which in Malindi had films projected into a big white wall under the stars.

The year my puberty kicked in, I was a bomb primed to go off. I had grown to be happy in England. That summer, I spent my days playing in the fields and along the streams with boys from the neighbouring farms. My skin was as brown as an impala’s. At home I had persuaded a girl named Alice to take her breasts out and let me kiss them while we played in the hay barn. In school dormitory that summer term, we had run about the sloped rooftops naked, and cut lead from the guttering.

My confidence that all was well was shattered one day when I found my mother by herself in the kitchen weeping. At first she would not tell me what was wrong. She stopped crying, but over the coming days, she sank into a state of depression, sitting alone in her darkened room for hours at a time. She stopped taking care of the house or cooking meals. I recall foraging in the larder myself. My mother’s moods took on a frightening pattern. She was fine in the morning. By eleven o’clock she become listless. If I spoke to her, she didn’t answer. If she bothered to reply at all, she spoke slowly and her voice had a disembodied, metallic tone. Instead of disciplining me if I misbehaved, she became sarcastic. Her face sagged. On her rare shopping trips, she would buy several bottles of Martini.

For nearly a year I had not seen my father, who was in Ethiopia. By now I was used to his absence. Our Father who art in Africa. But now Mum told me Dad had taken an Ethiopian mistress.

Mother said that before they were married, she knew the wife of another man who used to look at Dad ‘like a snake’. There had been others, some situations embarrassing, most of them absurd. In most cases my mother had handled the problem with style.

‘He’s been doing it for years,’ she shrugged.

It reminded me of the story of my aunt Gertrude, wife of my father’s favourite uncle Ernest Hartley. When they lived in Calcutta, Gertie learned about Ernest’s constant philandering with other women. Being a Catholic, divorce was not an option and perhaps she loved him enough not to leave him, but she did not let his behaviour go unpunished. One evening she held a lavish dinner party and when Ernest entered the room he realized all the female guests were the married women with whom he had had his affairs.

In my father’s case, though, what was much worse on this occasion was that he had fathered a child with his Ethiopian girlfriend.

I panicked. Would this mean that my father would leave us, that we’d lose our home in Devon? Would I have to leave school? I imagined my mother having to struggle to care for us with no money. Worst of all, I worried that we would never return to Africa. We would be condemned to a life with no exits in cold, grey England. I knew I had to protect my mother, but I didn’t know how. I felt guilty that I could not do something to help her. I began hating both of my parents for ending my childhood in this way. I had expected an adolescence as carefree and irresponsible as those of my elder siblings. But suddenly the limelight was snatched away from me. I remember thinking the family had become a TV soap opera. My mother would fly into a terrible rage if ever even the word ‘Ethiopia’ was mentioned. For months I did not want to see my father ever again. At the same time I was terrified that this might come to be true. I pictured the Ethiopian as more beautiful than I could imagine in the real world. How else could my father have left my beautiful mother? There were times when I could not believe that he had been disloyal. But my mother showed me proof, in the form of letters written to lawyers in Addis Ababa.

The next time I did see him, it was back at the Kenya coast. I can’t express how awkward it was. I remember we were walking together down the beach. Those evening walks to Leopard Point in the monsoon breeze almost always succeeded in blowing away anxiety. Our minds were distracted by the fish in the coral pools, the flotsam and jetsam along the high-tide mark, or the plovers and ghost crabs lurking about their holes on the wide, white arc of rippled sand. But this evening was different and the heated quarrels of the day did not vanish but instead formed a heavy silence between us. My father strode out in the way he normally did: shoulders back, chest out, arms swinging. He was no longer a young man, but he was still much stronger than me.

Along the way we met a neighbour out strolling with her dogs. We stopped to talk, and the woman spoke proudly about how her children were doing in their studies, travels, marriage plans. At this, Dad grabbed my brother and I each by the shoulder and declared, ‘These are my useless sons.’ I wanted to fight him. Right there on the beach, I sized him up and considered my chances. We were both shirtless and we stood facing each other when I spoke to him. ‘One day, I’ll be stronger than you.’

For that, he dragged me halfway up the path from the beach to the house, pulled the ‘whacker’ plant out of the ground and thrashed me with it. For a time I hated my father, and I jeered at him for being ‘a dirty old man’. But instead of ending our relationship, his failings became the first reason we’d ever had for intimacy. At the age of fifteen, I saw that he was full of faults and in many ways a failure. He became a great deal more human thanks to the absurdity of his position, and as a result of this we had our first real conversations. My mother remained the head of the house and our figure of authority, while I became friends with my father.

Our first family reunion for about a decade took place on Dad’s birthday in 1980. We camped at Lake Naivasha, in Kenya’s Rift Valley, and the whole family fought all weekend. Mum called it the Third World War Weekend. Dad must have suffered confusion about what best to do about his two families, but he capitulated completely to my mother. They were reunited. I remember Mum going around the house, inscribing every book with both his and her names. The farm in Devon was sold and Mum moved back to Kenya. In time the entire crisis blew over; my parents returned to being a double act as they had always been, on the road, like mechanized gypsies.

On my mother’s insistence, Dad took us along on some of his long road trips, so that many of my school holidays were spent on magical safaris along dusty red roads into deserts and forests. Along the way my father’s fascination with the people and places of Africa rubbed off on me. He frequently pointed out of the car window at trees or hills and after hours of driving he would break into singing Slim Dusty’s ‘The Pub With No Beer’, weaving the car from side to side on the corrugated dusty track. Around the campfire at night he continually spoke of the future, of his ambitions and hopes and schemes with the energy of a young, idealistic man.

‘Come, my friends!’ he’d boom, with a raised glass of red wine in one hand, a raw onion or hunk of cheese in the other, commanding silence while he recited his favourite lines of Tennyson, ‘’Tis not too late to seek a newer world!’

He missed what Africa had once been. When we drove through sprawling towns he would describe how a few decades before this had been a savannah of swaying grass teeming with game. But the environmental destruction was still taking place, before our very eyes. At sixteen I remember visiting the Cherangani Hills in western Kenya, where the forest was so thick the sunlight barely pierced the canopy of mighty trees to the track along which we drove. A few months later we passed down the same road and for miles around the trees had been felled and burned and the view was bruised, eroding earth to the distant horizon.

After sixty years in the continent, my father had come to believe that the Europeans had committed an unforgivable error by sweeping away the traditional culture and economy that Africans had evolved over centuries. The nomad who valued nothing more than his cattle stayed on the move because he knew that to settle would mean death. And yet wherever we went, we saw the new independent African governments, backed by white ‘development experts’, repeating the mistakes of the long past colonial rulers, forcing the nomads into sedentary lives, to put up fences, live in tin huts, to swap their magnificent beads and togas for the cast-offs and ragged clothes of the ‘civilized’ West. The missionaries did their damage too and one Sunday I recall arriving in a northern Kenyan hamlet where nomads were gathering in the hope of food handouts from the foreigners, having lost most of their livestock to drought. As they trekked in the American Baptists’ overseers were handing out polyester trousers and T-shirts with slogans that were meaningless to their wearers. Some of the proud warriors were stalking around in flowery blue plastic bath caps. The missionaries had surrounded the village with loudspeakers rigged up onto tall poles and when it came time for a church service the sermon was broadcast at full volume, so that no matter where the nomads were, they would be harangued and cajoled to convert to Christianity and turn their backs on their past lives in return for the food and clothes they were receiving.

For all my father’s enthusiasm his attempts to assist people by enhancing, rather than destroying, their traditions were almost certainly in vain. What he showed me on those road trips had more of an effect on me than anything I learned at school. I had witnessed real injustices, poverty, the arrogance of power, the ignorance of the foreigners, the obliteration of proud cultures and beautiful landscapes.

I should have become an Englishman after sixteen years of education. Instead I was like a homing pigeon. After three happy years at Oxford, I went to the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), formerly a famous training ground for those who wanted to make their lives elsewhere, and now a hotbed of dissidents from the Third World. I set off for Africa almost on the day I had graduated with my Master’s. I hitched down through Europe and met a friend in Cairo. We did Egypt the whole summer: ruins, bazaars and beaches, all fuelled by arak, across-the-counter diazepam and hashish from vendors down in the souk who sold bitten-off measures spat out onto balanced scales. Before I headed south we took a taxi out to Giza, where we dodged the tourist police and gully-gully men and clambered up the great limestone blocks of the Mycerinus pyramid. We reached the summit and there among the graffiti of generations I scratched my name next to another one etched in copperplate. Pickard. Perhaps he had been one of Napoleon’s soldiers, but Pickard had also been my grandmother’s maiden name. Had we been here before? From the top of that monument, 4,500 years old, we watched the sun sink into the desert. A hot wind whipped over the pyramid’s stones with the roar of myriad voices. Darkness fell. The tungsten lights of the son et lumière show flipped on, illuminating us like prisoners in a gaol break for the audience of package-tour holidaymakers. We descended the dark side of the tomb, sliding from one block to the next, scared of slipping and dashing our brains out on the fall down.

I took a train to Aswan, where I embarked on a ferry across the lake to Wadi Halfa and from there on up the Nile by steamer. Lashed alongside the boat, port and starboard, were barges, so that we became a sailing village of backpackers, Sudanese, livestock, market goods, and kiosks serving foul beans and tea. The crew were constantly drunk on arak. When they weren’t under the influence, they assembled to pray on the flat roof of the boat five times daily, leaving the vessel to churn on unguided. It was the dry season upriver in East Africa and we ran aground for hours at a time on sandbanks. I sat on the deck enclosed in mosquito mesh, daydreaming. We continued southwards past little sailboats and fellahin and desert hills dotted with acacias and the Nubian ruins at Meroë. At Dongola I disembarked and took a market truck to Khartoum across a desert called the Belly of Rocks and out there the Milky Way was clearer than I remembered seeing it since I was a child.

On the journey I sat next to a very black man in a brilliant white turban. He touched me on the arm and said, ‘From here on my friend, this is Africa…’

He asked me where I came from. Without pausing I proudly said, ‘Here. Africa is where I was born.’ He smiled.

One evening I lay on my bed in some fleapit village hotel on the Nile riverbanks, woozy from the last of my Cairo supply of diazepam. A song was playing on the radio downstairs in the hotel café. It wafted up the dirty concrete stairs and under the door to where I lay. The hubbub of men’s voices fogged the Arabic lyrics, but as I sweated on my bed and listened I distinctly heard the words:

Hopeless journey, hopeless journey,

Nothing but a

Hopeless, hopeless, hopeless journey…

When I was growing up, my father only gave me a few pieces of advice. I asked him where I should live, what I should do.

‘Make your life somewhere else other than Africa, a place where there’s lots of space,’ he wrote in a letter to me. I asked where he had in mind.

‘Canada,’ he replied. My father was a colonial settler, who had been searching for new frontiers his whole life.

I was looking for a home, not a Canada. And the only home I had ever really had was as a boy in Africa. The memory of that time still had a compelling power over me. As an adult it came back to me in sounds, colours and smells: a mango’s diesel taste, the smell of dust after rain, and the sounds of a picking guitar on the radio. A lost time when the sun shone, before life grew complicated.

My father’s second piece of advice was that he thought I should ‘never work for anybody except yourself’. This contradicted everything he had done himself and indeed whatever my ancestors had done, which involved selfless service to monarch and country. In previous generations I might have served in the empire’s army and fought a string of rebellious potentates, or enrolled as a colonial officer to be posted to a remote station, or struck out as a pioneer. But however much I might dream of my opportunities in Africa, this was the 1980s – not the 1880s – and if I wanted to have the same adventures in East Africa as a European, I had few choices about what I might do. I could run safaris for tourists into the ever smaller areas of bush to show them dwindling herds of wildlife. I could be a pilot, flying anything from contraband to oil prospectors into unmarked dirt airstrips. I might become a missionary or a humanitarian aid worker, which was often the best-paid option. Or I might be able to run a small business manufacturing something like car parts in the industrial areas of Nairobi, Dar or Kampala. I could pursue any of these activities just as long as I didn’t make so much money that I would attract the envy of a politician. I should also keep my mouth shut about the steady decline of the nation going on around me. Since I would live under a brutal dictatorship just about wherever I lived in Africa – and on account of my white skin, which disqualified me from participating in the politics of my own homeland – I must be blind to the corruption, killings and general misrule. Alternatively, I might become a journalist and confront these things head on, which is what I decided to do.

As the descendants of soldiers and farmers I never heard my parents express an opinion either good or bad about journalists. The only relative of mine who became a foreign correspondent was Donald Wise, my raffish first cousin, once removed. South African-born Don was captured by the Japanese in Singapore during the Second World War. He was a POW in Changi jail and worked on the Burma railway, where seven thousand men died. After the war he tracked communists in Malaya, then settled in Nairobi, where he wrote for the Daily Express and, later, the Daily Mirror. Don was my stuff of legend. He had done it all, from covering the big stories – Mau Mau, Biafra, Katanga, Idi Amin’s Uganda, Aden, Cyprus, Vietnam – to hanging out with Hemingway, whom he tracked down after the author had survived a plane crash on a hunting safari. Don had a sense of humour and energy that was so well loved that colleagues said the effect of his arrival on a story, sporting a splendid moustache and impeccably dressed however grim the dateline, was like that of a champagne cork being popped. In the days when news dispatches carried a proper dateline, identifying both the place and the day from which the report was filed, Don traversed the Congo to the Atlantic port of Banana and carefully timed his story so that it would read ‘Banana, Sunday’.

On graduating from the School of Oriental and African Studies in 1988, I had watched some of my friends enter careers in which their sole aim was to make lots of money. Others vanished on adventures. I had renewed my love of Africa’s history and began to plot my return to my homeland. I telephoned Michael Holman, the Africa editor of the Financial Times. He called me into his office overlooking Blackfriars Bridge on the Thames and I came away feeling I had met my mentor. Michael was a white Zimbabwean and a respected elder in the world of African journalism. He had stood trial for refusing to serve in Ian Smith’s white military during the Rhodesian civil war and afterwards had fled to Zambia, where he began to work for the FT. From there he moved to London, but he had never lost his dedication to Africa.

‘You have a one in ten chance of making a living out of it,’ Michael told me that day. ‘If you do, you won’t have to prove yourself in any other way.’

‘What happens then?’ I asked.

‘One day, you get to be me,’ he replied, gesturing at his cubicle office with its window looking out at the diagonal rain of England.

He gave me a short briefing and within half an hour I had been appointed a stringer for the FT. In the jargon of the news world, being a stringer meant I had a loose loyalty to the newspaper as their ‘man on the ground’, though the organization would pay me only for what was published, per thousand words. I had wanted a job that would get me home to Kenya, which was also the hub for the East Africa press corps. But Michael told me there was already a correspondent in Nairobi, so he offered me a spot in neighbouring Tanzania.