Arriving within earshot of such a house, Edu and his kinsmen stop and call out:
“Hodi!”
It means, in effect: “May I come in?” In these neighborhoods the doors are always open, if they exist at all, but one cannot just walk in without asking, so this
“Hodi!”
can be heard from quite a distance. If someone is inside, he answers,
“Karibu!”
This means: “Please come in. Greetings.” And Edu walks in.
Now begins the interminable litany of greetings. It is simultaneously a period of reconnaissance: both sides are trying to establish their precise degree of kinship. Concentrated and serious, they enter the primevally thick and tangled forest of genealogical trees that is each clan and tribal community. It is impossible for an outsider to make heads or tails of it, but for Edu and his companions, this is a critical moment of the meeting. A close cousin can be a great help, whereas a distant one—significantly less so. But even in this second instance, they will not go away empty-handed. Without a doubt, they will find a corner under the roof here. There will always be a little room for them on the floor—an important consideration, since despite the warm climate it is difficult to sleep outside, in the yard, where one is tormented by mosquitoes, by spiders, earwigs, and various other tropical insects.
The next day will be Edu’s first in the city. And despite the fact that this is a new environment for him, a new world, he doesn’t create a sensation walking down the streets of Kariakoo. It is different with me. If I venture far from downtown, deep into the remote back alleys of this neighborhood, small children run away at the sight of me as fast as their legs can carry them, and hide in the corners. And with reason: whenever they get into some mischief, their mothers tell them: “You had better be good, or else the
mzungu
will eat you!” (
Mzungu
is Swahili for the white man, the European.)
Once, I was telling some children in Warsaw about Africa. A small boy stood up and asked, “And did you see many cannibals?” He did not know that when an African returns to Kariakoo from Europe and describes London, Paris, and other cities inhabited by
mzungu,
his African contemporary might also get up and ask: “And did you see many cannibals there?”
Zanzibar
I
was driving west—from Nairobi to Kampala. It was early Sunday morning, and the road, running over creased, hilly land, was empty. On the asphalt ahead of me, the rays of the sun created lakes of light, glistening, vibrating. As I approached, the light would vanish, the asphalt would be gray for a moment, then turn to black, but soon the next lake would flame up, and the next. The journey was being transformed into a cruise through a realm of radiant waters, abruptly igniting and dying out, like strobe lights in a crazed discotheque. Both sides of the road were lushly green—forests of eucalyptus, large plantations of the Tea and Bond Co. Here and there among the cypress and cedars one caught a glimpse of an Englishman’s white farmhouse. Suddenly, far, far away, at the farthest visible point on the highway, I spotted a glowing sphere, which grew rapidly and drew closer. I barely managed to move to the shoulder of the road when a column of cars and motorcycles sped past, at its center a black Mercedes carrying Jomo Kenyatta. Kenyatta was seldom in his prime minister’s office in Nairobi, preferring to spend most of his time in Gatundu, a private residence 160 kilometers from the capital. His favorite pastime was watching dance troupes from various Kenyan tribes, who arrived there to sweeten their leader’s days. Despite the noise of the drums, the pipes, and the shouts of the dancers, Kenyatta would fall asleep in his armchair, reviving only when the dancers tiptoed out after their performance and silence descended.
But Kenyatta here, now? On a Sunday morning? His motorcade rushing at such breakneck speed? Something extraordinary must have happened.
Without hesitating, I turned around and followed the convoy. A quarter of an hour later we were in the capital. The cars pulled up to the prime minister’s office—a modern, twelve-story structure on City Square in downtown Nairobi—but the police barred my way and I had to stop. I was left alone on the empty street, with no one in sight from whom to get information. In any event, it didn’t look as if anything was happening in Nairobi itself: the city was slumbering, in a Sunday torpor, deserted.
It occurred to me that it might be a good idea to drop by Felix’s place—he might know something. Felix Naggar was the bureau chief of Agence France Presse in East Africa. He lived in a villa in Ridgeways, an exclusive, hyperelegant Nairobi neighborhood. Felix was an institution. He knew everything, and his net of informers stretched from Mozambique to the Sudan, from the Congo to Madagascar. He himself rarely stepped outside his house. He was either supervising his cooks—he had the best kitchen in all of Africa—or sitting in front of the fireplace reading crime novels. In his mouth he held a cigar. He never removed it—unless it was just for a moment, in order to swallow a bite of baked lobster or taste a spoonful of pistachio sorbet. Every now and then the phone would ring. Naggar would pick up the receiver, scribble something down on a bit of paper, and walk to the other end of the house, where his aides sat at teleprinters (they were the most handsome young Indians he could find in Africa). He would dictate to them the text of the telegram, fluently, with no hesitations or corrections, then return either to the kitchen, where he would stir something in the pots, or before the fireplace, to continue reading.
I found him now sitting in the armchair, as usual, with a cigar and a crime novel.
“Felix!” I shouted from the threshhold. “Something is happening, because Kenyatta just returned to Nairobi!” And I told him about the government motorcade I had encountered on my way to Uganda. Naggar ran to the phone and started dialing everywhere. I turned on his radio. It was a Zenith, a shortwave receiver, phenomenal—I had been dreaming about one for years. It picked up several hundred stations, even shipboard transmissions. At first all I could hear were broadcasts of masses, Sunday sermons, and organ music. Commercials, programs in unintelligible languages, the calls of muezzins. Then, suddenly, through the noise and static, a barely audible voice came through: “. . . the tyranny of the sultan of Zanzibar has ended once and for all . . . the governments of bloodsuckers, which . . . signed, general headquarters of the revolution, the field marshall . . .”
More noise and static, then the loose, flowing words and rhythms of the fashionable band, Mount Kenya. That was it, but we now knew the most important thing: a coup in Zanzibar! It must have happened last night. That’s why Kenyatta had returned in such haste to Nairobi. The revolt could spread to Kenya, to all of East Africa. It could transform it into another Algeria, another Congo. But at this moment, for us—for Felix and for me—there was but one issue: to get to Zanzibar.
We began by calling East African Airways. The first flight to Zanzibar, they informed us, is on Monday. We booked places. An hour later, however, they called us back to say that the airport in Zanzibar had been closed and all flights canceled. What now? How do we get there? There was an evening flight to Dar es Salaam. From there, it’s not far to the island: forty kilometers across the water. We had no choice; we decided to fly to Dar and set out from there for Zanzibar. As we were figuring all this out, the rest of Nairobi’s foreign correspondents arrived at Felix’s house. There were forty of us. Americans, Englishmen, Germans, Russians, Italians. We all decided to take the same plane.
In Dar es Salaam we took over the Imperial Hotel, an old building with a spectacular veranda, from which the bay is visible. Rocking on its waters was the white yacht of the sultan of Zanzibar. The young sultan—Seyyid Jamshid bin Abdulla bin Harub bin Thwain bin Said—had escaped on this yacht, leaving behind the palace, the treasury, and his red Rolls-Royce. The crew of the yacht tell us about the great carnage overtaking the island. Blood is flowing in the streets. The rabble are looting, raping, setting fire to houses. No one is safe.
For the time being, Zanzibar is cut off from the world. Their radio announces every hour that any airplane attempting to land on the island will be shot down. And any approaching boat or ship will be sunk. They are sending out these warnings, we reason, because they must be afraid of intervention. We sit around listening to the communiqués, condemned to idleness and interminable waiting. In the morning, we receive news that British warships are sailing toward Zanzibar. Tom, from Reuters, is rubbing his hands in anticipation, convinced that he will be transported aboard ship by helicopter and will land on the island with the first division of the marines. All of us can think of one thing only: how can we get to Zanzibar? I have the fewest options, because I have no money. In cases of revolutions, coups, and wars, the large agencies don’t worry about expenditures. They pay whatever is necessary to obtain firsthand information. The correspondent from AP, AFP, or the BBC charters a plane or a ship, or purchases a car that he will need for only several hours—anything to get to where the action is. I stood no chance on such a playing field; I could only hope for some opportunity, for a stroke of luck.
At noon, a fisherman’s boat pulled up near our hotel. Aboard were several American journalists, their faces burned lobster red by the sun. They had tried to reach Zanzibar that morning, their boat was already close, when those onshore started shooting at them, bullets flying so thick and fast that they had to give up and turn around. The sea route was closed.
After lunch I drove to the airport to see what was happening there. The terminal was full of journalists, piles of cameras and suitcases everywhere. Many of the reporters were dozing in armchairs, others were drinking beer at the bar, sweaty, exhausted by the heat, tropically disheveled. The plane for Cairo departed, and it grew quiet all around. A herd of cows walked slowly across the runway. Other than that, there was no sign of life in this hot, dead space, this desolate emptiness at the end of the world.
I was thinking of returning to town when suddenly Naggar appeared, stopped me, and took me aside. Although we were alone in this place, he looked around to make sure no one could hear him, and, speaking in a whisper, mysteriously, he said that he and Arnold (a cameraman from NBC) had hired a small plane and paid a pilot to fly them to Zanzibar. They couldn’t get going, however, because the airport there was still closed. They had just come from the air traffic control tower, and had spoken to the one at the airport on Zanzibar, asking if they would be allowed to land. No, they were told; they would be fired upon if they tried.
Relating all this, Naggar was nervous. I noticed that he threw away a barely lit cigar and quickly pulled out another one.
“What do you think?” he said. “What can we do?”
“What sort of plane is it?” I asked.
“A Cessna,” he answered. “A four-seater.”
“Felix,” I said, “if I manage to secure permission to land, will you take me for free?”
“Of course!” He agreed instantly.
“Good. I need one hour.”
As I was saying all this, I was aware I was bluffing (though it turned out later not to have been a complete bluff). I jumped in the car and raced back to town.
In the very center of Dar es Salaam, halfway along Independence Avenue, stands a four-story, poured-concrete building encircled with balconies: the New Africa Hotel. There is a large terrace on the roof, with a long bar and several tables. All of Africa conspires here these days. Here gather the fugitives, refugees, and emigrants from various parts of the continent. One can spot sitting at one table Mondlane from Mozambique, Kaunda from Zambia, Mugabe from Rhodesia. At another—Karume from Zanzibar, Chisiza from Malawi, Nujoma from Namibia, etc. Tanganyika is the first independent country in these parts, so people from all the colonies flock here. In the evening, when it grows cooler and a refreshing breeze blows in from the sea, the terrace fills with people discussing, planning courses of action, calculating their strengths and assessing their chances. It becomes a command center, a temporary captain’s bridge. We, the correspondents, come by here frequently, to pick up something. We already know all the leaders, we know who is worth sidling up to. We know that the cheerful, open Mondlane talks willingly, and that the mysterious, closed Chisiza won’t even part his lips.
On the terrace one could always hear music coming from below. Two floors down, Henryk Subotnik, from Lodz, Poland, ran the Paradise nightclub. When World War II broke out, Subotnik found himself in the Soviet Union, and then, by way of Iran, reached Mombasa by ship. Here he fell ill with malaria, and instead of joining the Second Polish Army Corps in Italy, under the command of General Wladyslaw Anders, he stayed in Tanganyika.
His club is always jammed, crowded, and noisy. Customers are drawn here by the charms of the chocolate-colored Miriam, a beautiful stripper from the distant Seychelles. For a show-stopper she has a special way of peeling and eating a banana.
“Did you know, Mr. Henryk,” I asked Subotnik, whom I just happened to find at the bar, “that there is turmoil on Zanzibar?”
“Do I know!?” he exclaimed with surprise. “I know everything!”
“Mr. Henryk,” I asked again, “do you think that Karume is over there?”
Abeid Karume was the leader of Zanzibar’s Afro-Shirazi Party. Although this party, representing the island’s black African population, won a majority in the last elections, the government was formed by an Arab minority party supported by London—the Zanzibar Nationalist Party. The Africans, outraged by this fact, organized a revolt and abolished Arab rule. That is what had just transpired two days ago.
“Is Karume there?!” Subotnik laughed in such a way that I knew one thing for certain: he was there.
And that is all I needed.
I returned to the airport. Dodging about with Felix so that no one could make out where we were headed, we reached the control tower. Felix asked one of those on duty to connect us by telephone with the tower at the airport in Zanzibar. When a voice answered on the other end, I took the receiver and asked to speak to Karume. He wasn’t there, but was expected at any minute. I put down the receiver and we decided to wait. A quarter of an hour later, the telephone rang. I recognized Karume’s thundering, hoarse voice. For twenty years he had sailed the world as an ordinary sailor, and now, even if he was speaking into someone’s ear, he thundered as loudly as if he were trying to outshout the roar of a stormy ocean.
“Abeid,” I said, “we have a small plane here, and there are three of us: an American, a Frenchman, and myself. We wanted to fly to you. Is it possible? We won’t write any dirt, I promise you that. I swear—no lies. Could you arrange for them not to shoot us down as we land?”
A long silence ensued, and then I heard his voice again. We had permission, he said, and we would be met at the airport. We ran to the plane, and moments later were airborne, over the sea. I was sitting next to the pilot, Felix and Arnold in the back. The cabin was silent. Yes, we were happy that we had succeeded in getting through the blockade, and that we would be the first ones on the island, but at the same time we didn’t know what, actually, awaited us.
On the one hand, experience had taught me that situations of crisis appear more dire and dangerous from a distance than they do up close. Our imaginations hungrily and greedily absorb every tiny bit of sensational news, the slightest portent of peril, the faintest whiff of gunpowder, and instantly inflate these signs to monstrous, paralyzing proportions. On the other hand, however, I also knew something about those moments when calm, deep waters begin to churn and bubble into general chaos, confusion, frantic anarchy. During social explosions, it is easy to perish by accident, because someone didn’t hear something fully or didn’t notice something in time. On such days, the accidental is king; it becomes history’s true determinant and master.
Less than an hour’s flying time, and we are approaching the airport. Zanzibar: the old Arab town, like a brooch skillfully sculpted out of white stone, and further on forests of coconut palms, enormous, branching clove trees, and fields of corn and cassava, all of it framed by the brilliant sandy beach punctuated by aquamarine inlets in which bob flotillas of fishermen’s boats.