Zamani: A haunted memoir of Tanzania

PART 1: HORIZONS

1. Departures and Arrivals

We’re flying east, out of darkness into light. Twenty thousand feet below it’s still night on the savannah, but here above the clouds it’s dawn. The plane banks and levels, and there it is. The mountain, so long a buried memory, materialises in the window, impossibly near. We drift alongside as it floats above rose-tinged clouds, its snowy summit glowing in the early morning sun. Not a memory but as real as rock, as magma from the earth’s core. All the years I’ve been away it’s been here, waiting.

Between the mountain and me there’s the gulf of years, but I’m the one that’s changed. Sitting in this plane, suspended between leaving and arriving, my whole life boils down to this—a woman staring out of a window, looking for confirmation that the past exists. It’s dropping behind us now as we drift eastwards, slowly falling out of sight, the way the present endlessly recedes into the past.

The last time I saw Kilimanjaro I was not quite seventeen and flying back to school in England, sick with misery and already longing for home. I had no idea that within six months my parents would be deported and it would be a lifetime before I made my way back here. In Swahili philosophy, Sasa, the present, and Zamani, the past, are inseparable; they swim together in the great sea of time. For twenty years I’ve lived on an island in the Caribbean, swimming in another sea. Now I’m diving deep into Zamani, but Sasa is the lifeline that will keep me from drowning. As strongly as the past pulls me down, I’m always aware of the ocean’s sparkling surface, the present. In coming back to Tanzania, the land of my birth, I hope I’m going forward, open to whatever I may meet, in my luggage a parcel of memories.

I grew up in Moshi, a small town on the plains at the foot of Kilimanjaro. During the day, when it was shrouded in cloud, life went on as if it wasn’t there. But in the evening the mountain would emerge shining and afloat on its raft of white. When it was hot and dry and everyone was irritable, sometimes our parents would take me and my sisters to Marangu, a magical place on the mountain, where it was always cool and green and everywhere you went there were streams and waterfalls and the emerald green of banana trees. The turning to Marangu was marked by an ancient baobab on the main road, so vast an entire family couldn’t get their arms around it. People said the first baobab had been uprooted by God for daring to complain about something and made to grow upside down with its roots in the air. A tree that size would be at least five hundred years old, my father said. Five hundred years of growing upside down, its branches buried, unable to see. You could live off its bark and the water it contained if you were lost in the savannah. And people were buried in the trunk sometimes, so spirits lived in it. Tree of life and death.

After the tree, the road climbed. The air became clearer and caressed your face, carrying the faintest hint of moisture to revive you after the dust and drought lower down. In Marangu, the two peaks, Kibo and Mawenzi, seemed lower, almost at eye-level. The drama of distance was replaced by the intimacy of connection, so that all the elements were redolent of the mountain—earth dark and rich, air cool and thin, water cold and sparkling like liquid sunlight.

Before the white man came the coastal people had known of the mountain for centuries as a mysterious place, populated by djinn. They called it the Land of Djagga, and though they made long perilous journeys there in search of elephant tusks and people to sell in the slave markets of Bagamoyo and Zanzibar, they regarded it with dread. Trudging across the endless plain, a winding caravan of merchants and pack animals, porters and guards would catch a glimpse of something impossibly white rising high on the horizon, and shiver. The wisps of vapour that clung to the peak were the visible sign of spirits.

Though the Chagga had lived there for hundreds of years, for a long time its upper reaches remained a mystery. People believed the mountain was a sacred site, inhabited by supernatural beings that caused death to those who approached. To the Chagga, it wasn’t even a single thing, but two peaks embodying distinct personalities. The name Kilimanjaro didn’t exist until slave and ivory traders from the coast started to pass that way and the name emerged out of different languages: kyaro, a kiChagga word for god, kilima, kiSwahili for little mountain. For a long time, white men from different places quarrelled over who owned it; eventually it became an icon, a sign for Africa itself. When Independence finally came to Tanganyika—as it was then—a local man was entrusted with carrying the Uhuru torch to the summit, where its flame was a beacon of freedom to the rest of Africa.

Staring out of the plane window, the mountain already out of sight, I wonder why this homecoming has taken so long. All my adult life I’ve written and taught about Africa without coming back to Tanzania; when I got a Commonwealth scholarship to study for a PhD, I chose Nigeria and lived there for five years. I’ve since been in many other countries on the continent, including Kenya—just next door. But I didn’t cross the border. Was I afraid of losing all I had so carefully stored in memory? That somehow the past that haunts me, with its peculiar feeling of groundedness in a certain time and space, would have ceased to exist?

In the Caribbean, ‘Back to Africa’ is a longed-for return to a site of myth, a place of origin beyond the reach of history. For the twenty years I’ve worked as a lecturer at the University of the West Indies, I’ve tried through literature and film to connect African descendants with the continent as it is today. I’ve organised a film festival, brought African directors to show their work and talk to local audiences, and created a dialogue between African and Caribbean filmmakers. For my students, who have never heard African languages or music, experienced its frantic cities or witnessed its contradictions, cinema is a portal to a lived reality. Now, it’s brought me here, far from the Black Atlantic, to the Zanzibar International Film Festival, to immerse myself in an Indian Ocean cultural world. To stand in the centuries-old Arab Fort in Stonetown listening to a taarab orchestra, eat the spicy food of the Swahili coast, walk with festival goers from all over Africa through narrow winding streets past crumbling palaces. Zanzibar is, for me, the bridge between memory and whatever this country has become in all the years it’s carried on without me.

The plane’s crossing the water between the city of Dar es Salaam and the islands of Zanzibar, which united with the Tanganyika mainland in 1964 under the new name, Tanzania. Since then, Zanzibar has become a fantasy destination for foreigners in search of the exotic; but I’m not looking for paradise. Beneath the thrum and hustle of today’s Tanzania, I’m pursuing a ghostly trail only I can see. That trail leads back to my parents, to their meeting and their fateful posting to Tanganyika in 1949. Before I am even born, the story starts there.

2. Off the shelf

When he emerged from two and a half years as a prisoner of war, Jock Bryce, five foot eleven, weighed 137 pounds (62 kilos). It was May 1945, the War had just ended and he was not yet twenty-four years old. When it started, he was eighteen and marked time getting a war-time degree at Oxford, until he was old enough to join the RAF in 1941. Jock’s perfect English enunciation, his public school and Oxford education, belied the fact that he was colonial to the core. His Scottish father, George, was a senior colonial administrator who had been posted successively to Ceylon, New Guinea, Malaya and Nigeria. His mother, Kitty, was Australian. In later years, she lived in a district of Adelaide called Stirling West, while George lived in Stirling, Scotland. Jock had been weaned on separation and distance.

At eighteen, Jock had one ambition—to get airborne and ‘do his part killing Germans’. He wrote to Kitty in Adelaide: ‘It is harder to receive than to give and I can’t have all these people dying for me.’ He had to wait till 1942 before his wish was granted and he was posted, still only twenty-one, to RAF Coastal Command in Malta, whose pilots had the job of patrolling the Mediterranean. They not only flew Beaufighter planes but were in control of all the offensive weaponry. This suited Jock, who had scant respect for the idea of a crew and liked to remark sardonically, ‘There’s only one thing stupider than a bomber pilot and that’s a fighter pilot.’

His first mission was flying a Beaufighter over a convoy to protect it from enemy attack. He was disgusted beyond measure when he was shot down on his first flight. Propelled by fury, he fought his way out of the cockpit as the plane sank at speed below the surface of the water. Picked up by an Italian ship, he survived a succession of prison camps, in both Italy and Germany, on Red Cross food parcels, letters from his mother and the companionship of his fellow POWs. One thing that especially sustained him was teaching people to play Bridge—and then beating them. Stakes were high: a single piece of Red Cross chocolate the highest ever. The killer instinct for cards and gambling that grew out of semi-starvation followed him into civilian life. When he was released two and a half years later, he had no idea what he wanted do for a career but knew he wanted to get married, and to whom. He wrote to Kitty that he wanted ‘a moll who thinks she has all the answers, who I can bludgeon to her knees’. There not being many women who fitted this description, he looked around meanwhile for a career that would guarantee him maximum freedom and went back to Oxford to read forestry.

Then he met his moll. In May 1949, he sent his mother a telegram: ‘Marrying a girl who is older, taller and heavier than I am.’ Anne stuck stubbornly to her claim to be five foot ten and three quarters (Jock was five eleven), but in her heels she topped him by an inch. Jock told his mother the part she herself had played in their meeting. While she and George were posted in Kuala Lumpur, Kitty had made friends with a couple called Marguerite and Malcom Macgregor. Their two boys were the first people their own age that Kitty’s children, Judy and Jock, met when they came to school in England. Though the elder son—also called Malcolm—was four years older than Jock, they became firm friends. When the War began, Malcolm joined the Navy as a doctor and was posted to a medical station in Tanga, on the Tanganyika coast. The job of looking after wounded troops was greatly eased by the presence of a number of female nursing auxiliaries (VADs), one of whom was Marigold. Marigold was upper-class and beautiful, with an irresistible charm that made you want to warm your hands at its flame. Malcolm was smitten from the moment he met her and they were married in India on his next posting. Conveniently for Jock, when the War ended, they chose to set up home in Warwickshire. He could catch a train in Oxford on a Friday evening, Malcom would meet him in Banbury and they’d be home in time for pre-dinner sherry.

Having become accustomed to viewing their guest room as his, Jock was put out on arriving one weekend by the news that another guest was expected. As he had arrived first, he moved into the spare bedroom before ownership could be contested. The other guest, when she arrived, had the sofa. Anne Millard turned out to be a friend of Marigold’s from Tanga, where she’d been posted to the WRNS with the job of decoding enemy communications. Tall she certainly was, but with a gentle grace and a smile that could illuminate a room. She also had a wicked wit to match his own. The family connection and Marigold’s friendship were enough to outweigh the fact that she was working for a Labour MP. Since the war she’d been secretary to Eddie Shackleton (son of the famous Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton), who had also served with RAF Coastal Command as an intelligence officer. Jock would have been impressed if he hadn’t been a High Tory. When he declared that feudalism was the best form of government for Britain, Anne sniffed and said, droit de seigneur was all right as long as you were the seigneur.

Given her credentials there didn’t seem any reason to delay. Jock went up to London and took Anne out to dinner a couple of times just to be sure. Three weeks after their first meeting, Anne was ironing a blouse when the phone rang and a voice like velvet came through the earpiece. When he asked her to marry him, she was so shocked she forgot about the blouse, and when she went back to it, the iron had burnt right through. Of her wartime boyfriends (among them Frank, who gave her a silver bracelet with their names inscribed in a heart; Creepie, who despite his name was very attractive; soulful George; Pete with the jaunty smile) many did not survive. Frank, whom she might have married, was killed early on. Later, many of the naval officers with whom she danced in Tanga were torpedoed at sea. A cardboard folder of typed poems written in her twenties contains as many about death as love. In one she laments:

Amidst the tragedy of fallen things

Dreams unfulfilled

And beating broken wings

This too must be a part—

This unhealed hurt

This numbing of my heart.

Despite this, a lot of her friends got married before the War ended. For people in their twenties who’d survived it, the War was a bond they shared. Besides, Jock was good-looking and made her laugh. He pretended to be cynical and liked to say outrageous things, but she could tell he’d had a hard time. Anne asked Marigold what she thought and her answer was, ‘Pure gold.’ So she cheerfully sacrificed the blouse.

Jock wrote to Kitty that he had proposed to Anne by offering to ‘take her off the shelf’. The War had been over for four years and Anne was twenty-eight. ‘I’m glad to say she had the good sense to accept,’ he went on. ‘I trust you’ll approve my choice, because I can’t marry anyone you don’t like.’ In fact, Kitty and Anne recognised each other as allies and were friends the moment they met in September 1949. Afterwards, Kitty wrote Anne a long and personal letter about her struggles with motherhood, her guilt and misgivings about the past. Her honesty cemented a close relationship with Anne: they were each other’s champions ever after.

‘I feel I must write to tell you of my gratitude that you have agreed to marry my son,’ Kitty began. ‘I have never felt so instantly drawn to any young thing as when you walked towards me in the restaurant in London, tall and graceful in your elegant New Look suit. As I sat watching you so bravely enduring Jock’s dancing, I was surprised by my depth of feeling and hardly dared hope you would really marry my darling Jock, who has had too much suffering in his short life. Your combined senses of humour seem a gift from Heaven and should make light of any difficulties you encounter. I know from personal experience that marriage is not an easy thing, but the ability to laugh at each other’s jokes goes a long way to smoothing rough edges. And Jock has some rough edges, despite my efforts to civilise him.’

It wasn’t, she told Anne, entirely his fault. Like all colonial wives in the 1920s, she’d had two choices. Having gone back to Adelaide to have both her children, did she then take them to a harsh tropical environment in Papua New Guinea where there was no suitable housing and rampant malaria, or leave them in Australia and go to join her husband? Kitty’s decision, to commit Judy aged three and Jock two to a children’s home in Melbourne, was one she continued to struggle with. Until the 1980s, Australia had a large network of such institutions, where many migrant, Aboriginal and white Australian children simply disappeared.

Kitty did what she thought best for her children, regularly spending weeks at sea travelling home to see them. When, on one of these visits, she discovered how miserable Jock was—the extent of deprivation, neglect, abuse and assault in children’s homes would only emerge much later, spelled out in a 2004 report titled Forgotten Australians—she withdrew them and took them back with her to New Guinea, then to Malaya. When Judy was eight and Jock seven, Kitty reluctantly sent them to boarding schools in Adelaide. She was sick at heart, ‘because’, she wrote to her own mother, ‘I shall be so wretched without them.’ When George was posted to Nigeria in 1930, for a few years she continued to spend eight weeks at sea getting to Australia. Eventually she decided she could cut down the distance by moving the children to England, only two weeks away.

So these two young Australians went, aged fourteen and thirteen, to English boarding schools. Kitty bought a cottage in rural Bedfordshire and in the holidays, as young teenagers, Jock and Judy stayed there by themselves and a woman in the village looked after them. Jock was unhappy at school but did well enough to get into Oxford, where, at the age of eighteen, he went to read medicine. But medicine was George’s choice, and one thing she would discover about Jock, Kitty warned Anne, was his resentment and anger at his father’s preoccupation with work and ignorance of his children’s needs. Even after he switched to study English, all he could think of was getting into the forces and joining in the War. He was especially keen on the RAF, because, he told his mother, of ‘the possibilities of speed and aerial antics leading straight up into the balmy blue, with, one hopes, a little killing to do when up there.’

Kitty left it to Anne to imagine what it must have meant, after all that training and having finally got to where he most wanted to be—at the controls of a fighter plane—to be shot down and imprisoned in such frightful conditions. For herself, she wouldn’t speak of her feelings during the two weeks between the telegram telling them he was lost and the news that he was alive and a prisoner of the Italians. Kitty had frequently thought that his early experiences—emotional deprivation, physical separation and institutional neglect—might have prepared him for what he encountered as a POW and helped him survive. It did not, however, soften him or make him any more amenable, and of this she wanted Anne to be aware. His forestry supervisor at Oxford reported that while he was unquestionably a man of intelligence and ability, he was also cynical and critical, and would show up best when working independently. His judgement that, ‘He is likely to be difficult under other conditions,’ was one, said Kitty, they would all do well to bear in mind.

‘This, my dear Anne,’ she concluded, ‘is the man you have agreed to marry. I tell you these things not, as I hope, to put you off, but because I trust to your strength of character and that spirit of yours that so appealed to me when we met. If you can overlook the rough edges, I venture to promise that you’ll have a husband of sterling worth. But then I am his mother.’

Anne wasn’t put off; they were married in October 1949. In the photograph taken as they emerge from the church, they stand shoulder to shoulder, gazing into each other’s eyes, and they’re laughing. He’s dark and dapper in morning suit with a carnation button-hole, she’s in a white 1940s wedding dress holding a cascade of roses in her left hand. He’s clasping her right hand in his left, and his customary sardonic humour has given way to a teasing hilarity, mirrored in her wide smile beneath her orange-blossom crown. What is he saying to make her smile like that? At this moment they are in perfect equipoise, inhaling a single breath.

Almost immediately afterwards, Jock heard from the Colonial Office that he was to join the Forest Department in Tanganyika, first posting the Rondo Plateau in the Southern Province. They were to leave in November. Anne knew something of Tanganyika, though a southern upcountry posting was going to be different from the northern coastal town where she’d been posted during the War. Jock, from reading the Annual Reports, kept at the Colonial Office, knew that the Southern Province was a territory of some 55,000 square miles—5,000 square miles larger than England but with a population of only a million—so remote it was excluded from the Forest Department until after the War, and since then, ‘just permitted to tick over’. Before the War, forestry had been mainly about exploitation and collection of revenue. Now, under the leadership of the visionary Chief Conservator, W.J. Eggeling, it was viewed as protecting natural resources through soil conservation and water control ‘for the betterment of the natives.’ It was hoped, through Colonial Development and Welfare aid, to introduce sound forest management and Jock was to be one of three forest officers charged with this mission in the Southern Province.

The Rondo Forest had been proclaimed a reserve under German rule in 1912, but no one knew the extent of it. Jock’s first job would be to map it on foot. After that, the idea was to allow judicious commercial logging alongside nurseries for reafforestation. According to Eggeling, author of the Annual Reports, ‘A forest officer’s time should be spent in the forests, not at an official desk.’ Jock’s sentiments precisely—what could be better? 32,000 acres of forest (an area the size of Manchester) to himself and under orders to get out there where no one could tell him what to do. The Chief Conservator’s summation: ‘Tanganyika may not be a place fit for kings, but it appears perfectly adequate for foresters to live in,’ gave Jock all the encouragement he needed.

Anne, meanwhile, less than a month after her wedding, was preparing to leave behind her friends and family and, once again, live in Tanganyika. On top of an annual salary of £620, they had been given a grant of £30 for equipment. Looking at the camp bed, chair, table and folding canvas bath, the mosquito net, mosquito boots and hurricane lamp, Anne tried to imagine herself in a tent in the bush. For the next three years, they would live with the hiss of the kerosene lantern as their only light source. They had to anticipate what else they would need miles from the nearest grocer or dress shop. Luckily, one of Anne’s wedding presents was a Singer sewing machine, and one of Jock’s a Phillips wireless they hoped would receive the BBC Overseas Service. Picking out books to take, Jock’s tended towards the history of Napoleon’s military campaigns, Anne’s in the direction of Romantic poetry. It would make for interesting conversation in the long evenings.

There were more personal, feminine, concerns. Needing a companion and advice, Anne thought of her sister Pam, but she was tied down in her Essex village with a toddler and a new-born. So she invited Marigold, who anyway was her closest friend and confidante (and no one had her dress sense) to spend a day in London and help her choose the right clothes for her new life. It was easier for Marigold, who had a nanny, to leave her new-born baby at home. In fact, it was an intense pleasure for them to have the day together in London. It was lovely to sit in a restaurant, just the two of them, and have a really good natter—something that marriage seemed to make so much harder.

‘Men,’ said Marigold, ‘never want to talk about the interesting things, it’s all the state of the world and the price of whisky.’ Anne agreed.

‘What about the price of nail polish and how many bottles to take for three years? And I won’t be able to pop into Boots the Chemist for sanitary towels and aspirin either.’

‘At least in the War we were all in it together and could borrow each other’s.’

‘I know. I feel as though I’m going to the ends of the earth with a man I hardly know and no girlfriends to advise me.’

‘At least you’ll get leave every three years,’ Marigold reminded Anne, ‘and next time you come you can share the spare room and won’t have to sleep on the sofa.’

Cheered by food and talk, they cruised the Oxford Street department stores, but, even though clothes rationing had been lifted in March, it was now late October, the shops were full of winter clothes and lightweight dresses were nowhere to be found. Then Marigold had a brainwave. ‘Let’s go to Liberty’s!’ she said, steering Anne towards Regent Street and the half-timbered black and white facade. In the fabric department, they found what they were looking for—exquisite floral-patterned lawn cottons that Anne loved on sight. She selected half a dozen and they spent time in the drapery section, looking at dress patterns. She bought a yard of white linen for contrasting collar and cuffs, bone buttons, a belt—Marigold knew a marvellous dressmaker who could make anything. By the time Anne waved her goodbye at Marylebone Station, it had, they agreed, been a thoroughly satisfactory day.

Anne would wear those cottons every day for three years, until their patterned flowers faded almost