God of Hunger Read online

  *

  In many ways the cosmopolitan KK was truly representative of it. Born a Greek under Ottoman rule, he went to a college in Damascus run by German monks whose language and ways he took to heart and mind. He took advantage of the education on offer. He read widely adding to his chosen science, philosophy and theology. His intellectual interests migrated, gradually exchanging religious belief for an equally religious interest in political ideology enhanced by a keen interest in language and history; by the time he left college he was fluently a German, Arab, Frenchman, Russian, Anglo-American and a Turk. He found no difficulty in acquiring this multiplicity of cultures. What taxed his brain was the duality of modern knowledge, materialistic and spiritual, and its inherent contradictions. These the young man would resolve in time. And time was on the side of the philosopher within. But not of the man of action, without.

  A new world was fast in the making and the speed of change required rapid decisiveness for anyone wishing to take advantage of the possibilities on offer. Intelligence was all and KK was well positioned to read the runes as supplied to him courtesy of the mistress to the Chief Political Officer in Cairo.

 

  *

  Cairo and New Delhi were the centres of British power in the East and traffic between the two was reaching saturation point in 1919. Lines were becoming blurred. How far did Cairo’s remit run? To Afghanistan? No, that belonged to the India Office. But what of the former German Territories in East Africa, soon to be renamed Tanganyika Territory?

  Dar-es-Salaam, or, Haven of Peace a name which captured KK’s imagination the moment he read it, was long a bone of contention between sets of British officials. For strategic reasons the War Office wanted a say over the entire crescent from the mouth of the Ruvama, north to the headwaters of the Litani, Jordan, Tigris and Euphrates and the litoral around the Arabian Peninsula; the entire sweep of land and water was seen as vital for the protection of Egypt and therefore of India.

  Ever since the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, Cairo’s contingent of British civil servants was on a par in numbers to New Delhi’s, the most precious jewel in Britain’s imperial crown. But which of the two British bureaucracies was to administer the territories becoming available East Africa?

  In his reports from Kabul, the British Minister appealed for advice about this very question about which Lady X told KK.

  The third of many more Afghan wars was taking its bloody course when a certain ‘Professor’ Barkatullah was mentioned in dispatches:

  ‘He is a native of Bhopal, Central India. Worked as teacher of Hindustani in Tokyo until expelled by the Japanese. Moved to America where he let no opportunity pass of vilifying our rule in India. Claims to be a German subject and German diplomatic agent in Kabul. Holds a German passport issued at Dar-es-Salaam. Was Foreign Minister in the provisional government of India formed in Berlin and led by Mahendra Pratap. Now ‘Head of Afghan delegation in Moscow’, presently in Tashkent seeking Soviet aid from Chicherin. (Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs).’

  The ‘Professor’ was now back in Dar-es-Salaam, was calling for a Jihad against the British throughout the Orient. Loud echoes were being voiced in Egypt and in India. Moreover, in his call for a general Muslim uprising, the ‘Professor’ was being encouraged by Moscow. Was East Africa to go red?

 

  Ever since the success of the Bolsheviks in taking over the Russian state there came a call from Lenin and his henchmen for the end of colonialism. Persians, Turks, Arabs and Indians were encouraged to overthrow ‘the imperialist robbers and enslavers’ of their countries. All secret treaties involving Tsarist Russia as an ally of Britain and France in the Great War, including the Sykes-Picot agreement which over the Middle East between Imperial Russia, Britain and France, were made public. The planned partition of Turkey and Persia was denounced and Constantinople, which was to be taken into Tsarist care, was declared ‘a Muslim city for all time’.

  ‘All Russian Congresses of Communist Organizations’ were convened to mobilize Muslim opinion throughout the East against Great Britain whose forces were still in the field in support of the Whites in the Caucasus and in Central Asia. This meant that the Middle East became, in 1919, the theatre of an all but undeclared ‘cold’ war, a cold war between Britain and the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic. And, as the Persian revolution of 1906 and the ‘Young Turk’ revolt of 1908 had already shown, the Middle East was potentially the most vulnerable point of British imperial power; nationalism was in the air. The palace revolution in Kabul and the Third Afghan war in the spring of 1919 gave renewed cause for concern. And as though all this was not enough, Cairo had from May of that year to deal with the redefinition of territory formerly held by the Ottoman Empire.

  Kokopoulos had up to the minute information paper on many these subjects. But it was fragmentary. He was particularly interested in the news about Tanganyika which he had decided on a whim that it was the country for him. His relationship with Lady X had run its course. And of this and of his intention to leave he informed his employer, who, try as he might, could not convince KK to remain in Cairo. He did nevertheless welcome his ambitious young manager’s recommended strategy as set out in The Final Report, 13 August, 1919, by J.K. Kokopoulos to the President of the Board of the Hellenic Enterprise Company in Alexandria concerning business potential in the Middle East and East Africa:

  Sir, It is my privilege to send you my final report before beginning my journey up the Nile to East Africa. Your kindness in providing me with letters of introduction is greatly appreciated and I can only hope to return your kindness when settled at my destination.

  Regarding developments about which I have, to the best of my ability, kept you informed, I wish here to present in summary form, matters, which, in my view, are vital to your interests. ….’

  The report concluded with a recommendation to invest in the ports of Dar-es-Salaam and Alexandretta.

  Explaining how Dar-es-salaam was becoming strategically important he offered his services as agent to the Hellenic Enterprise Company in a place little developed which would require enormous quantities of cement for construction of the modern port and the closest manufactory of cement was in Cairo and owned by the HEC.

  With regard to Alexandretta, he argued, that the port was destined to be the answer to the troubled question of access to the markets of the new Middle East, especially in the case of Mesopotamia to which, by sea the obstacles were: ‘(1) the distance from European markets; (2) the unhealthiness of the Persian Gulf; (3) the dues of the Suez Canal. Nothing can change the first; the British are not likely to modify greatly the second and third. And for these reasons engineers are much preoccupied with schemes for giving to Mesopotamia direct access by pipe and railways to a Mediterranean port.’

  ‘So far as I can learn, the subject as a whole has so far been very imperfectly studied. I am not sure that, as regards pipe lines, it has been studied at all. A great deal, indeed, is known and much has been done with the Baghdad Railway; and its eastern section - if it were connected with Alexandretta, and the port of Alexandretta were improved and modernised - would provide the natural outlet to the commerce of Northern Mesopotamia.’

  ‘The wars fought by the British have exhausted them economically; Ee Englezi eene denekiethes (the English are empty vessels). The Americans are not interested in our region. The French are and have every intention of making money here. I would advise an early visit to Alexandretta which must stand the best chance of becoming the port to service the railhead and pipeline east. Your capital, Mr. President, would in my humble opinion be best invested in the French zone. …’

  ‘On this subject, I am confident of my intelligence.’

  ‘I remain, your ever faithful Servant,

  J.K. Kokopoulos, Deputy Head of the Intelligence Unit, HEC.

  *

  Handing the paper to the Company Secretary in person, KK spent his last night in Cairo at the Greek Club. No one there, apart fr
om his boss and his lover, who remained behind at the room they shared, knew of his imminent departure from Egypt.

  Under the influence of heightened delight at the thought of leaving, he divulged to a friend, Armenis, whom he had met in the course of business dealings, his inner most thoughts.

  Both secretly despised the Cairene establishment and shared the belief that a revolution on the model of Lenin’s should and would take the city, but that until it did, there was money to be made in the Middle East.

  Armenis was doing very well in the oil trade. He had a finger dipped in the oil of Mosul and another in the new drillings in Persia and he encouraged KK to join him in his business as a broker. To no avail. KK wanted to farm and was going south to East Africa.

  He had earlier thought he would try farming in Palestine where there was much fertile land to be had with fewer restrictions than in Syria or Mesopotamia. But he had not counted on the rapid move into the country by Zionist interests who had the capital to buy up land from the Arabs at a premium he could not afford.

  He talked openly to Armenis of his despair of what was happening in Palestine and of his pro-Arab sympathies. Fluent in Arabic he knew just how the Jews were perceived by Arabs and knew, from his reading of telegrams, well before they did, how, in his words ‘they were mezethes (entrée dishes) at the Zionist feast.’ He spoke also of his deep resentment of the Anti- Hellenism amongst certain leading Zionists and within the British Foreign Office which then vehemently opposed the expansion of Greek territory east into Thrace and into the Anatolian sanjak of Smyrna.

  Wound up in anger, KK divulged to Armenis the contents of a telegram which had that day been copied to Cairo from the British Charge d’Affaires in Prague.

  David Trietsch, a prominent Jewish Zionist, had proposed Jewish colonization of Cyprus, arguing ‘that many people in England regard Cyprus as a doubtful asset. If, however, by means of Jewish immigration and colonisation the country could soon be made to flourish again it would become a most valuable possession, and by the same course the Jewish and the Moslem populations combined could in a short time outnumber the “so-called Greeks” and bring the anti-British propaganda to a standstill.’

  This touched a raw nerve. Nothing raised Greek emotions more than ‘The Cyprus Question’, To Keepree-a-ko. Kokopoulos now well oiled, ranted:

  ‘If only the Germans had won the war! With their backing we would have got all we wanted from a weak Ottoman Empire open to dictates from Berlin which would also have put paid to Zionist dreams. Damn the Evrei and damn the British.’

  Armenis looked at KK with shock and surprise. Never had he witnessed his friend break into drunken babble.

  Wishing to steady him, Armenis asked, ‘So, tell me, what you are going to do?’

  The question helped KK regain his balance.

  ‘There are great possibilities in German East Africa. Greeks have lived there under German rule for a long time. This new place …. Tanganyika may now be under British mandate, but the English presence is only nominal. Fundamentally the country is Germano-Arabic in its ways. Ways which suit me best. And there is land to be had from the new masters. I go to Dar-es-Salaam to make my fortune in East Africa.’

  *

  KK said goodbye to El Misr (Cairo) by visiting three of its most beautiful Mosques: the Gamia Sultan Hasan, the Gamia Rifaiyeh and the Gamia Emir Kijmas el-Ishaki. He read their Holy calligraphy and spoke to as many of their Holy men as he could find; all marvelled at his command of the highest refinements of the holy language.

  Taking leave of this greatest of Arab cities, also the largest in Africa, Kokopoulos boarded the train to Aswan, 552 miles and sixteen hours away. He wanted to see the dam at the head of the First Cataract whose completion in 1912 he emulated in a scale model across one of the many furrows on the Argenti estate when he was still in Hios.

  The dam was a dream come true to the amateur engineer. One and a half miles long, it held back six million tons of water affecting the level of the river as far as the Second Cataract at Wadi Halfa, 210 miles to the south of Aswan and inundating many villages. Was the human cost of construction worth it? To this question Kokopoulos gave the reply of an emphatic yes. An answer that was to trouble his mind when he and his labourers were forcibly evicted from his first farm in Tanganyika, though even then he never doubted that humans had to be sacrificed in the cause of ‘progress’. KK marvelled at great schemes. And here in Aswan a chain of five locks at the dam’s western end allowed through the steamer in which he continued his journey after many days of feasting his eyes on the dam of his young dreams. Yet there was one more to be seen of which he had only learnt about when at Port Sudan to which he had done a detour by rail from Wadi Halfa. Close to the principal port of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan was a settlement of West Africans at Takroorie. This settlement, a racial anomaly, sufficiently interested the amateur anthropologist in Kokopoulos to make the detour. The inhabitants of Takroorie were indeed from West Africa. A moving population of pilgrims to Mecca across the Red Sea. The pilgrims worked in Port Sudan for about a year to pay for the next stage of their journey of devotion. Their village was built around a desert oasis, with waterhole and palm trees under which Kokopoulos learnt of the development of new works of irrigation at the mouth of the Gash which lay on the railway from Port Sudan to Khartoum, 500 miles away. That project was another he had to see.

  First, the train ascended a range of volcanic mountains through a long succession of narrow valleys inhabited by the Hadendowa and their flocks. These were the people who wore their hair in original Afro-style and who were referred to in Baedeker as ‘Fuzzy-Wuzzies’ whom Kokopoulos sought out when he paused a day at Halya Junction on the water-shed dividing the Nile from the Red Sea. After Halya he stopped at Kassala on the River Gash at the upper end of the Atbara basin which was being developed for agriculture in a manner Kokopoulos wanted to study in case he could apply what he saw in Tanganyika.

  The Gash which rises in Eritrea and flows through the Abyssinian highlands had, over millennia deposited a huge delta of silt, 10 to 20 miles in width, where it entered the Sudanese plains. Kokopoulos discovered that the river ended 90 miles north of Kassala where, what water remained, drained into the desert. He was told that during nine months of the year the river dried up as did the plain. But after the floods which take place in the ninety days from July to October, the fertility of the soil, rich with the goodness of Ethiopia, is phenomenal. Kokopoulos learnt that Sudanese engineers had just completed a channel to regularize the lower Gash. From this channel the water was led across the central fertile delta by a series of canals controlled by sluice gates. Irrigation was effected by discharging the flow from these canals through subsidiary channels. The areas selected for cultivation received one year’s flooding in every three, in a system of rotation. Cotton, which takes six months to mature, could be grown in a single flooding.

  His mind brimming over with matters agricultural, he took a detour from Atbara junction along the loop line to the ruins of Napata which re-occurred in his other dream; that of becoming an archaeologist.

  *

  About the ninth century, B.C., the Ethiopian city of Napata, near Karima on the Dongola bend of the Nile, reached its apogee. Kokopoulos also knew that the royal capital then moved to Meroe which became a centre of great wealth and rich culture and which flourished well into the seventh century, yielding to archaeologists Egyptian, Greek, Meroitic and Roman objects of great refinement, the best of which, from the royal baths, Kokopoulos saw in the museum in Khartoum. But first he walked down the ancient streets to the ruins of the Temple of the Sun, seen whole by Herodotus. Kokopoulos then journeyed to Naqa, inland from Meroe near the country palace of Musauwarat. Naqa struck him as the most perfect ruins in the Sudan to whose capital, Khartoum he next travelled.

  “The longest kiss in history.” That is how the confluence of the Blue with the White Niles is described in Arabic literature and Kokopoulos stood for hours admiring this act of l
ove which gave life to Egypt.

  The merging waters surrounded by desert re-affirmed his view of history; man at the mercy of the Gods of Hunger.

  *

  Later that day Kokopoulos crossed over to Omdurman by boat as the new seven-span bridge was still being constructed.

  Omdurman. The place of slaughter. Where the banners of Islam declared the first jihad against the infidel British imperialists. Kokopoulos paid homage to the Mahdi whose tomb was in ruins and visited the house of the Khalifa Abdullahi which had become a museum for Mahdia and other historical relics. He then crossed over again to Khartoum, saw the plaque at the spot where Gordon fell and caught the steamer to Juba via Kosti.

  Could the latter have been named after a Greek? Konstantinos, Kostas (its diminutive …), Kostakis, Kostaki, Kosti? Perhaps so. As it happened, a Greek of that name traded in antiquities from a small shop in the centre of town. His most prized item was a large fragment of a frieze depicting Meroitic lasciviousness. Kokopoulos had seen the series of images from which it came in the Royal Baths at Meroe. He described these to his compatriot before heading south again to Lake Victoria.

  After resting at Kampala, he took the train to Mombassa on the Kenya coast. This was Swahili country where his knowledge of Arabic helped him to find a dhow which took him south to Dar-es-Salaam.