Herein lies the attractiveness of ethnic agitation: its ease and accessibility. The Other is visible, everyone can recognize and remember his image. One doesn’t have to read books, think, discuss: it is enough just to look.
On Zanzibar, this racial dichotomy, increasingly fraught, is created on the one hand by the ruling Arabs (20 percent of the population), and on the other by their subjects, black Africans from the island and the continent—small farmers and fishermen, an indeterminate and fluid mass of laborers, house servants, donkey drivers, porters.
These tensions mount at the very moment when the Arab world and black Africa are both setting out on their respective roads to independence. What does this mean on Zanzibar? The Arabs are saying, We want independence (meaning: we want to stay in power). The Africans are saying the same thing: we want independence. But they imbue this slogan with another meaning: because we are the majority, power should be transferred into our hands.
Those are the states and the essence of the conflict. And the British then add fuel to the fire. Because they have good relations with sultans of the Persian Gulf (from whom the sultan of Zanzibar traces his descent), and because they fear an Africa in revolt, they announce that Zanzibar is part of the Arab world, not of the African, and by granting it independence they simultaneously ratify Arab power. The African party—the Afro-Shirazi Party, whose leader is Abeid Karume—protests against this, but it protests legally, observing the law, because although it consitutes the opposition, it is a parliamentary opposition.
Meantime, a young man from Uganda turns up in Zanzibar—John Okello. He has just turned twenty-five. As is frequently the case in Africa, he has, or he pretends to have, many professions—he is a stonecutter, a bricklayer, a house painter. A semi-illiterate, but endowed with charisma, a self-made man with a sense of mission. He is animated by several simple ideas, which come to him as he is cutting stone or laying bricks:
These thoughts so absorb and consume him that he has to spend a lot of time alone in the forest, because it is only there that he can fully surrender to them. At the same time, already a year prior to Zanzibar’s independence, Okello single-handedly begins organizing his underground army. Driving around the island, through villages and towns, he sets up divisions, which in the end will number more than three thousand. Their education begins immediately. For some, this consists of training in the use of bows and arrows, knives, sticks, and spears. Other divisions practice fighting with axes, machetes, chains, and hammers. Additional courses include instruction in wrestling, boxing, and throwing stones.
On the eve of the uprising Okello appoints himself field marshal and gives the rank of army general to several of his closest aides, most of them plantation workers and former policemen.
Three hours after Prince Philip, in the name of Queen Elizabeth, transfers Zanzibar into Arab hands, Field Marshal John Okello makes his move, and in the course of a single night seizes power on Zanzibar.
Before noon, Felix, Arnold, and I drive with our escort to the field marshal’s headquarters. The courtyard of an Arab house is teeming with people. The women are cooking cassava and vegetables over fires, roasting chickens and lamb kebabs. Our guides push us through the crowd, which parts unwillingly and eyes us with suspicion but also with some curiosity: in these hours, all the white people are in hiding. In a large oriental foyer, on an ebony armchair, sits Okello, smoking a cigarette. He has very dark skin, and a massive head with heavy features. He is wearing a policeman’s cap: his units had seized the police storehouses and found some rifles and uniforms inside. A piece of blue fabric is tied around the band of his cap (I don’t know what the color signifies). Okello seems absent, as if he is in shock; he appears not to see us. People are crowding in around him, pushing, shoving, everyone is saying something, gesticulating; the disorder is cosmic, and no one is trying to control it. A conversation, of course, is out of the question. At this point, we are after only one thing: that he give us permission to remain on the island. Our guides address him. Okello nods his consent. A moment later, something occurs to him, and he decides to accompany us out. He throws an old rifle over his shoulder and grabs another in his hand. With his first hand he first adjusts the pistol stuck in his belt, then picks up another one. Thus armed to the teeth, he pushes us ahead of him and out into the courtyard, as if to our own execution.
One of the symptoms of the illness consuming me is a constant, exhausting fever. It flares up in the evening, and then I have the odd sensation that it is my bones that are radiating this high temperature. As if someone had replaced the bone marrow with high-resistance metal coils and hooked them up to an electric current. The coils become white-hot, and the entire skeleton, engulfed in an invisible, internal fire, burns.
It is impossible to sleep. On evenings like this in Dar es Salaam, I lie in my room and watch the lizards hunting. Those that usually prowl around the apartment are small, extremely animated, with a pale gray or brick-colored skin. Graceful, agile, they scurry effortlessly over the walls and ceiling. They never move at a considered, calm pace. First they stand motionless, paralyzed—then, suddenly, they dash off, reach some goal known only to themselves, and again freeze. Only by their rapidly pulsating abdomens can you tell that this sprint, this flinging of their bodies at an invisible finish line, has so exhausted them that it is now absolutely necessary for them to catch their breath, rest, and regain their strength—before the next lightning-fast run.
They begin hunting in the evening, after the lights have been turned on in the room. The objects of their interest and attack are various types of insects: flies, beetles, moths, dragonflies, and, most important, mosquitoes. The lizards appear suddenly, as if someone had sling-shot them onto the walls. They look around without moving their heads: their eyes are capable of 180-degree rotation within their sockets, like the telescopes of astronomers, thanks to which they can see everything both in front of and behind them.
A lizard has suddenly spotted a mosquito. It sets off in that direction. The mosquito sees the danger, starts up, and begins escape maneuvers. Interestingly it never flees downward, into the abyss above the floorboards, but rises into the air, circles nervously and angrily, and then, spiraling upward, lands on the ceiling. It doesn’t yet see, and it certainly does not understand, that this decision will have fatal consquences. For once it has attached itself to the ceiling, and its head is hanging down, it becomes disoriented, confused. As a result, instead of swiftly removing itself from the field of danger—which the ceiling represents—it behaves as if it had fallen into a hopeless trap.
Now the lizard can rejoice and lick its chops; victory is at hand. It takes nothing for granted, however—it remains focused, alert, and determined. It jumps onto the ceiling and begins to make smaller and smaller orbits around the mosquito, running all the while. Magic must play some role here, or witchcraft, or hypnosis, for the mosquito, although it could save itself simply by fleeing into empty space where no predator could reach it, permits itself to be encircled tighter and tighter by the lizard, which moves in its usual rhythm: a jump, then immobility; a jump, then immobility. The moment comes when the mosquito notices with terror that it has no more room to maneuver, that the lizard is close upon it, and this realization only stuns and disables it further, until, utterly resigned and defeated, it lets itself be swallowed without putting up the slightest resistance.
All attempts to befriend the lizards are futile. They are highly distrustful and skittish creatures, walking (or rather, scampering) along their own paths. This failure of ours also has a certain metaphorical value: individuals can live together, under one roof, without ever understanding one another, with no common language whatsoever.
On Zanzibar I cannot watch the forays of the lizards, because power is shut off every evening and I must wait patiently in the darkness for daylight. These long and empty hours, spent drowsily awaiting the break of day, are difficult.
Yesterday at dawn (which is never pale here, but instantly colorful, purple, fiery) the peal of a small bell resounded in the street. At first distant and muffled, it drew nearer and nearer, becoming clear, strong, and high-pitched. I looked out the window. An Arab was making his way down the narrow street—a vendor of hot coffee. He had on the embroidered cap Muslims wear, and a loose white djellabah. In one hand he carried a conical metal pot with a spout and in the other a basket full of porcelain cups.
The drinking of morning coffee is an age-old ritual here, with which—along with prayers—Muslims begin their day. The bell of the coffee seller, who each day at dawn walks up and down the streets of his district, is their traditional alarm clock. They jump up and wait in front of their houses, until the man bearing the fresh, strong, aromatic brew appears. The morning’s first cup is an occasion of greetings and salutations, of mutual assurances that the night passed happily, and of expressions of faith that this promises to be—Allah willing—a good day.
When we first arrived here, there was no coffee seller. And now, barely five days later, he was back: life was resuming its old course, normality and dailiness were returning. It is a beautiful and heartening thing, this obstinate, heroic human striving for normality, this almost instinctive searching for it—no matter what. Ordinary people here treat political cataclysms—coups d’état, military takeovers, revolutions, and wars—as phenomena belonging to the realm of nature. They approach them with exactly the same apathetic resignation and fatalism as they would a tempest. One can do nothing about them; one must simply wait them out, hiding under the roof, peering out from time to time to observe the sky—has the lightning ceased, are the clouds departing? If yes, then one can step outside once again and resume that which was momentarily interrupted—work, a journey, sitting in the sun.
The return to normal is relatively easy in Africa, and can even be accomplished quite rapidly. Because so much here is makeshift, impermanent, light, and shabby, it is possible instantly to destroy a village, a field, or a road—and just as quickly to rebuild them.
We usually went to the post office before noon to send our dispatches. There were already ten of us, for seven more foreign correspondents had been allowed in. The small post office building, adorned with arabesques, had a history: great travelers—Livingstone and Stanley, Burton and Speke, Cameron and Thomson—had sent their telegrams from here. The teleprinters inside reminded me of those long-ago days. Their exposed innards, with all their little wheels, cogs, gears, and levers, looked like the mechanisms of the huge old clocks in the towers of medieval city halls.
John, from UPI, a tall and eternally perplexed-looking blond-haired fellow, grabbed his head after reading the telegram he had just received. As we left the post office, he took me aside and showed me the alarming piece of paper. His editors were informing him that military revolts had erupted overnight in Kenya, Tanganyika, and Uganda, and that he must get to those countries at once. “At once!” John exclaimed. “At once, but how?”
The news was startling. Army coups! It looked serious, although we had no details. Barely a week ago—Zanzibar. Today already, the whole of East Africa! Clearly, the continent was entering a period of disturbances, revolts, takeovers. And we, the residents of the Zanzibar Hotel, now had a new problem: how to leave here? A longer stay made no sense in any event—Okello’s people would not let us travel beyond the town and into the countryside, where battles had raged earlier and, apparently, many were being held prisoner. As for the town itself it was peaceful, sleepy; the days passed uneventfully.
We had a meeting after returning to the hotel, during which John informed everyone about his telegram. We all wanted to get back to the mainland, but no one knew how. Zanzibar was still cut off from the rest of the world. To make matters worse, it looked as if the locals, still afraid of intervention, were holding us hostage. Karume, the only one who could help us, was elusive, spending most of his time at the airport, and of late he hadn’t been seen there, either.
There was really only one possibility: to try the sea route. Someone read in a guidebook that it is seventy-five kilometers from here to Dar es Salaam. It is a pleasant journey by ship—but where do we get a ship? A boat was out of the question. We couldn’t take the local boat owners into our confidence, because, even supposing they were still alive, they would be either in jail, or afraid to help, or they might inform against us. And the greatest danger of all was that Field Marshal Okello’s inexperienced, casually recruited people, scattered as they now were along the entire coastline, would begin shooting were they to spot a boat—after all, no one really controlled them.
As we were conferring, a messenger brought a new telegram together with our mail. His editors were once again ordering John to act quickly: the military had already seized airports and government buildings, and the prime ministers of the three countries had disappeared; perhaps they were in hiding, but it was uncertain if they were still alive. We listened to this sensational bulletin in helplessness and anger. Our little conference came to nothing. There was only one thing to do: wait.
The two Englishmen—Peter from Reuters and Aidan from Radio Tanganyika—had gone to look for their compatriots in the city, hoping with their help to find some way out. When they returned near evening they called another meeting. They had found an elderly Englishman who had decided to leave at the earliest opportunity and wanted to sell a motorboat in good condition. “The boat is moored nearby, in the port, in a secluded, out-of-the-way bay. He will take us there in the evening, along side paths and under cover of darkness. Hidden in the boat, we will wait until late at night, until the guards fall asleep. The Englishman, an old colonialist, said: ‘A negro is a negro. Be what may, he has to sleep.’ When midnight passes, we will start the motor and begin our escape. The nights are so dark now, that even if they did try to shoot, it is doubtful they could hit us.”