‘Stoned?’
‘Four times. When preaching. But the Bible tells us this is not a new thing.’
Between Denis and Frank, there was no lack of fervour to see Zephaniah achieve martyrdom. Only Canon David appeared to regard the competition for converts with misgivings. David Bartlett and his wife, Marion, were missionaries of the old school with more than ninety years in Africa between them, he as priest, she as a surgeon. A frail, shy woman also well into her seventies, Marion’s contribution to African well-being was in fact the more tangible. When polio was still a dreaded disease, she had been the only surgeon in the bush performing a relatively simple operation to release contracted leg tendons in children. Many Tanzanians were only able to walk because of the skills of this small, unassuming woman. Yet with their simple devotion and faith, the Bartletts had become almost anachronisms.
They had retired once, to the West Riding of Yorkshire, until receiving an appeal to return for one last spell of service in Africa. ‘The people were ever so nice,’ Marion said. ‘But one hated the supermarkets.’
I TOOK MY leave of Zanzibar seated on the balcony of the Sultan’s palace, cooled by a breeze coming off the harbour below. It was called the People’s Palace now, a monument to the revolution, but few among the masses appeared interested in coming to gaze on the decadence of the past. There were more ghosts than visitors and that afternoon I had the place, in all its mournful tawdriness, to myself.
In 1964, as the revolutionaries stormed through the alleys of Stone Town, the last of the Omani sultans, the amiable Khalifa II, fled to his yacht out in the bay and escaped to Mombasa, and thence to exile in Bournemouth. The sultans had long since ceded their authority to Britain and, since the declaration of a protectorate over Zanzibar in 1890, had withdrawn to the shadows to enjoy the grace and favour of imperial servitude. They welcomed the pomp bestowed by an avuncular colonial regime, presenting themselves on ceremonial occasions in robes encrusted with CBEs, KCMGs and even, in the case of Khalifa, a GCMG, as well as lesser gewgaws and Omani daggers. Year had succeeded year in what a biographer of another contemporary monarch, George V, described as ‘benign verisimilitude’.
Most spirited of the lot was not a sultan, but a princess. Salme, a sister of Sultan Bargash, eloped with the local German agent and lived the rest of her life in Jena as his wife with the name Emily Ruete, bearing him numerous offspring. She died in 1924, having written poignantly about her double life. Her apartment aside, the mood of the palace was glum. One of Bargash’s favourite objects, a large grandfather clock, tolled ponderously beside a life-size oil painting of Sultan Hamid KCMG. The furniture was ornate, heavy, the antithesis of the Arab design virtues of lightness and simplicity. Most depressing of all were the Sultan’s living quarters, where a fine writing desk and chest stood beside a formica wardrobe and a cheap black dressing-table with chipped and peeling lacquer. Here the unmanned monarchs lay abed at night, listening to the Indian Ocean lapping among the dhows, all power and vigour gone.
The balcony, at least, was a grander theatre of Zanzibar’s decay. A polished blue sea slid away to three small islands glittering green and white. Down at the waterside palm trees brushed the whitewashed fortifications of the palace and the road curled past the honeyed walls of the Beit el-Ajab. For a moment it was possible to imagine the great jehazi down from Arabia, the clamour in the harbour as they were loaded with cloves and ivory, the whisper of the south-west monsoons; and to recall the words of James Elroy Flecker …
I have seen old ships sail like swans asleep
Beyond the village which men still call Tyre …
BAGAMOYO, THEY CALLED IT, which in Swahili means ‘lay down your heart’. The town, a dishevelled ruin of slow loveliness, lies at the beginning of the 800-mile Arab trade route to the Great Lakes. This was the terminus from which caravans set out for the interior, and where the returning journey ended before the crossing to Zanzibar. Lay down your heart, said the grateful porters, returned to family and home after months, years, away in the perilous interior. But the words might as easily have been spoken by the millions who passed here in chains, pausing perhaps to look back for the last time on their native land before the voyage into bondage.
A whitewashed plaque marked the place where the Nile quest began in earnest: ‘On 25 June 1857 Burton and Speke set out from near this site on their expedition to Lake Tanganyika.’ Having been brought across from Zanzibar in the Sultan’s corvette Artemise, with the consul Hamerton who came to bid them farewell, the Nile explorers haggled in the bazaar of Bagamoyo to find porters before a party of 132 set out on the march westwards into the fearful green void. Twenty-one months were to elapse before Burton and Speke saw the sea again, and by that time the seeds of a famous enmity, and a celebrated geographical feud, had been sowed.
The plaque was among the better preserved of Bagamoyo’s structures. A dirt road carved through a town composed of buildings similar to those of Zanzibar, but whereas the island’s flourishing tourist industry had led to a good deal of restoration, Bagamoyo was a forgotten backwater, overgrown with weeds and lichen. The avenues of spithoedea trees planted during colonial times held the crumbling town in an embrace of green foliage and flaming orange blossom. Among the old houses left standing, the carved doors were splintered and awry and the great latticed balconies sagged like drunks.
Most of these derelict hulks were not even inhabited. In its heyday Bagamoyo’s population had numbered about 5,000, including the Indian trader Sewa Haji, who built an empire on supplying the caravans and endowed Bagamoyo with fine buildings like the Customs House. There followed the Germans who built the fortress and Liku House, the old administration block. Now the Indians and Germans were gone and their old quarters were abandoned. Such profligacy is rare in Africa where squatters are apt to take up neglected property but here the Swahili folk preferred their own rudimentary huts.
I walked down the dirt road, grandly named India Street, to Liku House. It was another picturesque ruin, whitewash streaked with green mould, the shuttered windows hanging, broken and skewed, from their moorings. There was no plaque, but there could have been for Liku had a piquant place in the footnotes of imperial history. In December 1889, Henry Stanley – who had come a long way since finding Livingstone thirteen years before – emerged at Bagamoyo from the interior with a new prize. Emin Pasha was a protégé of General Gordon who made him governor of Equatoria in southern Sudan. After Gordon’s murder in Khartoum in 1885 during the Mahdist uprising, a campaign was raised to rescue his gallant lieutenant, cut off in the south. Nothing would do but that this enterprise should be led by Stanley, whose implacable resolve had earned him the African sobriquet, Bula Matari, or ‘Smasher of Rocks’.
In fact, Emin had no great need of rescue and was reluctant to leave. He was, indeed, one of nature’s ditherers; a slight, scholarly figure in glasses and fez, he could never decide whether he was Turkish or Egyptian, though he was actually born Eduard Schnitzer, a German Jew. Stanley, however, was not a man to be denied, still less after a hellish forced march through the Ituri rain-forest of the Congo in which he had lost two-thirds of his men to disease and desertion. So, after months of wriggling, Emin consented to leave and was finally brought to Bagamoyo as the last and most costly of the journalist/explorer’s great scoops. Crossing Africa from west to east had taken almost three years and cost more than 200 lives.
Once in Bagamoyo, at Liku House, a celebratory banquet was held in an upstairs room. After years of privation, there was to be no stinting and a German chef produced a feast of seafood, roasts and champagne. In the streets below, the Zanzibari porters held their own revels with drumming and dancing. Emin, having decided at last that he was pleased to have been rescued, gave a speech of thanks. Then he disappeared from the room. Some time later he was found lying outside in a pool of blood. Always shortsighted, he had fallen from the balcony in the dark and now, it appeared, was critically injured with a fractured skull.
Emin