God of Hunger Page 17

  Kostas Kokopoulos had no direct involvement with the procurement of the unique gemstone.

  He knew of it and had suggested its name. But it was Tanganyika and not Tanganite which he treasured, the more so after Theo’s death which caused him to think of politics as a state of emergency ; there was only so much time left to him to achieve his dreams of social reform. All his thoughts and energy were ever more channelled in support of the Teacher.

  Neither man gave thought to enriching themselves; as unique a thing in Africa as the gemstone which made fortunes for others.

  Not least beneficiary was the foreman on Kostas Kokopoulos’s farm. He went by the name of ‘Kicheche’ Kandowere or just Kicheche: the skunk.

  *

  Kandowere, a peasant by birth, never missed an opportunity to make a quick cent; he became a rich peasant, a kulak by any other name.

  He had direct access to K.K. and to his master’s house. And when the gemstones started to emerge, Kicheche offered his services to Misha’s agents. A place was needed to hide the stones en route for the wider world. Kicheche suggested the large ceramic pots on the verandah, each host to resplendent geraniums. Moreover he knew how to work the only working telephone in the vicinity. ‘Kingore Three’. That was the code of the only line, for miles around, to town which could then be connected to Misha’s place. Thus Kicheche became the first vital link in the gemstones’ journey to the coast and beyond. And no one beyond the estate would have suspected it.

  Kandowere and Kokopoulos went back a long time; well before the move to the coffee estate from Ndareda. There he was first employed as nanny to Theo and they became inseparable.

  *

  The sun dried fish that Misha traded on the coast were a by - product of the gemstone mines; the dynamite required to unearth them also brought fish to the surface of the sea. And uniforms onto the bodies of the security guards at the Teacher-President’s humble residence (he refused to live in State House ) and at the Dar-es-Salaam Sailing Club from whence Choco and the guards set out to sea in the Johansens’ motor launch and made for the impounded ship.

  It was a medium sized freighter on charter to Mr. V.J. Patel of Bombay and Dar-es-Salaam, registered in Pireas and owned by Raffa’s father.

  Raffa, was an occasional visitor to no. 41; occasionally attending weekend parties there.

  These were strange affairs. Or rather parties were strange occasions to the habitués of no. 41. This was because none of them had much experience of these events. There was music and drink, but what after that? People just stood around chatting. It all seemed so pointless as Phokion’s friend from Harlesden pointed out to him on the one occasion he attended. “You whities don’t know how to party. All you do is stand around and talk. I am off to a proper party, man.” And so he left, leaving the whities to talk.

  That night the discussion was about the assassination of JFK. The event never lost its impact on the brains of the youths who lived at Sinclair Road. Until that moment they felt young. After it, they and the world appeared to age.

  *

  Choco was thinking of his time at Sinclair Road as he approached the ship.

  The freighter looked at ease anchored alone out at sea within sight of the harbour. But its crew looked ill as Choco’s launch hove to.

  The head security guard called up for the stairs to be lowered and no one questioned his authority as the boarding party filed smartly onto the deck. As rehearsed at the boat club, the senior guard demanded of the first mate (the captain being held captive ashore) an escort to accompany him on his recce around the vessel.

  He then posted a colleague on the bridge and took with him the two others as escorts. In the manner of a security chief in an American movie who said nothing but saw everything through dark glasses; the very model of a brutal officer prowling out of his blood-bespattered interrogation room.

  The holds were not examined because officials had sealed them the previous day. And so, by a pre-arranged signal, simply a nod, Choco demanded a search of the crews’ quarters. By the end of the tour, his haul consisted of the contents of the officers’ mess, the galley and its store-room; alcohol alone amounted to fifty cases of white wine, as many again of red, a dozen or so bottles each of brandy, gin and scotch and a sizeable consignment of beer. All intended for Mr. Patel’s party at the house he had just completed at Oyster Bay; the top spot on the coast where the richest residents had been Greeks and whose splendid houses were now ambassadorial residences.

  It was the splendour house which alerted the authorities to Mr. Patel’s wealth, found to be made through illicit trade across the ocean. The green-veined and marble granite blocks facing the outer walls imported from an Indian quarry gave the game away; they signalled ostentation obscene for the times through which Dar-es-Salaam and the rest of the country was passing. And as for the great notice board declaring a ‘House fit for a prince constructed for Mr. V.J. Patel by the Singh Construction Company, proprietor, D.T. Singh and family. Architects: Gulam Hussein and Partners’, it gave the police a bonanza of clues. The unfortunates were rounded up for crass insensitivity to Party ideology. All went to jail. And all were bailed out by enormous sums paid to state officials outside the remit of the President’s office.

  The offending house was commandeered by the state as were all other houses then alienated from all ‘capitalists and landlords’ in the country. Each property was given an official number stencilled in black to the right or left of the main entrance.

  Choco’s parental home and his mother’s hotel were spared registration and remained in her possession.

  He kept his eyes and ear open for a place of his own, but houses passed into private habitation only for reasons of state; Choco was not yet part of the national interest. But it was not too long before he found favours in high places.

  He not only found alcohol aboard the freighter but also a great cache of 16 mm. film, mainly of the ‘adult’ variety, stored in the officers mess together with cinematic equipment: projector, sound system and screen. And it was with this equipe that he began to find friends amongst the top knobs. And to make a small fortune with which he eventually procured a house and car, thus becoming a member of the select few known by the ee polee as the wabenzi: owners of Mercedes Benz cars.

  He set up his film club in a dilapidated timber mill. Once inside, the clientele, drawn from amongst the new nomenklatura: young party members, apparatchiks to a man and to a man fond of a burlesque show to the accompaniment of drinks served at exorbitant prices by hostesses modelled on the Bunny Girls at the Playboy Club on Hyde Park Corner which Choco had frequented when favoured by a windfall payment through the protection racket he ran from his flat at no.41, Sinclair Road.

  *

  At Choco’s Playboy Club in Dar-es-Salaam, as at Hyde Park Corner, a roulette table did steady business whilst private booths did a bucking trade. But the business had a limited life since the derelict timber yard had been marked out as the site of the new railway station; the terminus of the Tanzam railway linking the port of Dar-es-Salaam to the copper belt in Zambia. This was to be built by ‘civilian labour’; contingents of China’s Peoples Liberation Army.

  The railway and its coastal and inland terminii were constructed by the Chinese just as the Armenian had predicted to Theo; China was making in-roads into Africa through large projects which the west refused to support

  Ostensibly, they were in Dar-es-Salaam because of the war in Rhodesia through which country Zambian copper could no longer pass for shipment out of the port Beira, itself under Frelimo siege in the same general war of liberation.

  It was, incidentally, also the war which was to kill Jozef at Kapiri Mposhi, planned as the Zambian terminus of the Tanzam railway. And it was the war which also impacted on the lives of others from Sinclair Road: Phokion, who had served in the army reserve, had left to a new life in South Africa. Here too came his youngest brother. The one decorated by Ian Smith. Decorated for having made several successful
contacts with the enemy; mainly Brother Nkomo’s and Comrade Bob’s militia men. He even tangled with the soldiers of the greatest of all vanquishers of white regimes, the greatest white hunter of them all: Mandela. It was well known in Salisbury that when Nelson Mandela disappeared from South Africa via Lobatsi on 11 January, 1962, he subjected himself to a crash course in the very latest techniques of guerrilla warfare at Kongwa, in Tanganyika.

 

  The former European school based in the town that was built for the ground nut scheme was now the not-so-secret training camp rebuilt after Jozef and his Selous Scouts had detonated the main hall.

  The same hall where Theo had been caned for disrupting the Sunday service by killing the iguana in the school church. Where the announcement was made of his expulsion for leading a Greek protest against the visiting prelate from Canterbury. Where Theo had sat at table with his best friend Nooshin, the Iraqi-Persian anomaly at Kongwa European School. Where the equally anomalous Choco, gang leader of the bunyus such as Zak and Adi, held court. Where the gorgeous Miss Lamb kept her distance in the kitchens. Where the hubbub of a hundred and more voices, first in English, then in various Bantu tongues, rose to a crescendo during a meal and fell away to absolute silence at a signal from the high-table. Headmaster had given way to Comrade Komanda who announced the arrival of the man who was Kongwa’s most notorious terrorist recruit and the man who was in time to eclipse the golden aura of Mahatma Gandhi’s hallowed image as the great emancipator, emerging out of the shadows of the underground resistance movement into the flashing lights of press cameras which recorded his trials and tribulations from imprisonment for the Rivonia conspiracy to release from Robben’s Island; universal images of the man who was, in freedom, to become the celebrity of celebrities.

  Nelson Mandela stood to address the ranks of his fellow freedom fighters seated in phalanxes at Spartan tables.

  He began by questioning the strategy of civil disobedience by which Apartheid had been challenged since its declaration in 1948. It was a policy which Gandhi had pioneered during his South African sojourn and perfected in his native India. However, the enemy at home was not the colonial master who eventually succumbed to the demands of an overwhelming crowd on the streets, be it in and around Trafalgar Square or along Sir Edwin Lutyen’s central parade in New Delhi.

  ‘No. Our enemy understands only one thing: the gun. As we understood, from the moment they shot us to death at Sharpeville. We shall avenge that and every other massacre of our people by threatening every Boer with eradication. No quarter given. No deals made. No surrender until final victory: the elimination of every last trace of white power from our country. Removal of the white-man from our land. Land of our people …. Returned to our people by the gun.’

  The hall erupted in cheers, shouts of ‘kill the Boer’, followed by an anthem composed in Kongwa: ‘Bring me my machine gun, ….’

  Mandela called for calm. And having signalled his acceptance of what ANC cadres had long trained for in secret, he ended by saying:

  “If there is to be guerrilla warfare I want to be able to stand and fight with you. With my people.’

  And so he trained for war. In Kongwa: successively, groundnut capital of Tanganyika, European school, and ANC military academy.

  Upon returning to South Africa Mandela was imprisoned, for the first time, on charges of leaving his country without a passport and for inciting his people to hunt Boers; it was whilst he was in jail that the ANC formed Umkhoto we Sizwe: Spear of the Nation. The Big Game hunt was on.

  *

  Contacts between white and black hunters were very rare split-second engagements in which the first to fire had the best chance of survival.

  It was also the case that the victor in one such engagement had not himself long to live.

  The trigger-happy hero of Salisbury, decorated by Ian Smith for eliminating the first ANC contingent to have crossed over the Zambezi (at the time, South Africa’s de facto northern border) from Kongwa, took his own life in the depths of his despair at ending up as white trash in Capetown; a despair he tried to alleviate by joining the political wing of very same organisation whose soldiers he had met and admired as equals on the field of battle. In South Africa he learnt to hate his own race for its indifference to his plight. He had risked his life for the sake of the white tribe’s future, yet time and again he was told that he had no prospects. His was the fate of many a soldier home from the war; feted in battle and forgotten in peace. Only such as they could understand that his switch in allegiance was not that of a turncoat nor even that of an opportunist.

  His first loyalty was to place; to Africa; to his birthright. He had and would again unquestioningly defend it against any attack; from abroad or from within; by black or by white. And when his position became indefensible, when he ran out of Africa in the long war which took him, a boy soldier from Arusha to veteran in Cape Town, he capitulated to death on his own terms.

  He was cremated with no comradely honours save the tears of his father falling onto his khaki shirt, marking it with medals of moist sorrow. Tears of inconsolable loss. Yet too few to hold to earth his son’s scattered ashes. Caught in the Cape khamsin, they were whipped out of sight; remnants of the ephemeral fiction that had been his life. As dust, he flew out to sea and out of Africa.

  *

  Through his network of contacts in Dar-es-Salaam Choco’s plight at having his club closed soon came to the Armenian’s notice. It was not long before the two met.

  The Armenian saw in him an enterprising young man and proposed to Choco that he forget the club and supply the prohibited goods directly, from Nairobi, to the homes of his clients in Dar-es-Salaam.

  Getting the alcohol across the border proved uncomplicated. It was a question of attaching an additional pick up truck to the safari convoys coming into the Serengeti from the Masai Mara; the Seronera Lodge served as a transfer point for the final leg to the coast. Choco set up a safari company and managed the operation through a Greek he had known from school. This chap was decapitated on his second outing when showing off to tourists by standing up in the open lead Land rover and waving to the clients in the big Bedfords. Not looking where the Landy was going he left his head in the branch of a tree which was skirted in matador style by the driver; ole.

  Another friend filled the gap: Bertie von Mateus, the scion of an aristocratic German family in East African exile. He took over with equal panache but he too was killed on the job.

  It was a life he very much preferred to the post that had been offered to him in Bonn where his pedigree was recognized at the West German Foreign Ministry. His parents pleaded with him to take up the offer so that he could make a career for himself in Europe rather than, as they saw it, waste his life in the African bush.

  *

  Bertie met his last clients in his parents’ absence; they had decided to stay in Germany on a permanent basis.

  He arranged two camps and a reception at the farm-house. Guns were cleaned and cleaned again. Land rover washed and washed once more. Driver in new uniform. Bertie in bespoke safari gear obtained in Nairobi; suit from Mr. Pandit and boots from Virji Velji. Only the hat was old. It was his dad’s Stetson with the leopard skin band. He was ready.

  Bertie realized he was to have an eventful safari the moment his clients disembarked at the farm’s air strip. “Call me Tex”, his arm outstretched in greeting, was accompanied by “Hi, I am Cindy.” Both were the size of baby hippos and both wore glasses with lenses so thick as to suggest near blindness, suggested again when both could not locate the step into the Land rover and had to be guided aboard by the bemused driver who placed, by hand, each leading pachidermous foot onto the platform and then jacked Tex and Cindy onto their seats with a hand under each hummocky buttock.

  “Gee thanks. We are all gonna have a great time together. Say what did you say your name was?” asked Tex of the driver handing him a ten dollar note.

  At the farm, over lunch, Jan discussed the
hunt. Top of the wish list was a buffalo head to hang over the fire place at their sporting ranch at Pagosa Springs, Colorado. ‘Its gotta be real big Jan, real big. We’ve got bison and moose in the cabin and this one will just have to look big. Right there above the fire. I wanya to know that were giving it pride of place, Jan. Cindy has set her heart on having it right there in the centre. Ain’t that right, honey? … Honey, ain’t that right?’, said Tex waiting for Cindy’s face to surface from her plate full of impala steak. Venturing no word of reply, she nodded her assent before returning her heightened redness of face to the plate. “I just wanya to find the mother of all Cape Buffalo for us Bert.”

  He did just that.

  There were two bulls on his land. They had crossed over the river the night before. ‘And, man, they are big. Huge. They have backs broader than this table and heads that would not get through the doors,” said Bertie pointing to the double doors through to the lounge – bar. ‘Yeesus, man. They will make you great trophies.’

  Next morning at daybreak plus two hours, allowing for more steak requested at breakfast, they set off towards the stream, a tributary of the Manyara, which dissected the game-park. Jan silently cursed their lateness because even by eight the day was stale. He noted that kudus had taken to the shade so there was little hope of seeing the buffalo out in the open. He instructed the driver to head straight for the grove of wild fig on the big bend of the stream. His hunch proved correct.