When the Going Was Good

by Evelyn Waugh

  That evening I sat with the Germans, gradually disentangling from their flow of sound an outline of their really remarkable careers. They had left school at Munich when they were eighteen and, together with a large number of boys of their year, had determined to seek their fortunes. Accordingly they had split up into pairs, made a solemn leavetaking, and scattered all over the globe. They had no money, their only assets being a sketchy knowledge of practical mechanics and, they said, a natural gift for languages. They had worked their way doing odd jobs at garages, through Spain and North Africa to Abyssinia, with the vague intention of some time reaching India. Two years before at Berbera they had heard that the Sultan of Lahej had just expelled his French engineer for dishonest practices; they had crossed the gulf on the chance of getting the job, had got it, and remained there ever since. They undertook every kind of work, from the mending of punctures in His Highness’s tyres to the construction of a ferro-concrete dam on the wadi and the irrigation of his entire estates. They had charge of the electric plant and the water-supply of the town; they mended the firearms of the palace guard; they drew up the plans and supervised the construction of all new buildings; they advised on the choice of agricultural machinery; with their own hands they installed the palace water-closet – the only thing of its kind in the whole of Southern Arabia. When not otherwise engaged, they put in their time patching up abandoned army lorries and converting them into motor-buses. Their only fear was that the sultan might take it into his head to procure an aeroplane; that, they felt, would almost certainly lead to trouble. Meanwhile they were as happy as the day was long; they would have to move on soon, however; it would not do to risk Stagnation of the Spirit.

  Sultan Achmed combined his gentler pursuits with the office of commander-in-chief of the army, and early next morning he was busy inspecting the guard of honour and inducing a high degree of uniformity in their equipment. Long before the Resident was due to arrive they were drawn up in the palace courtyard, arranged like strawberries on a coster’s barrow, with the most presentable to the fore. The chiefs had been arriving on horses and camels throughout the preceding afternoon, and had been quartered according to their rank in various houses about the town. They formed a very remarkable spectacle as they assembled among the fumed-oak furniture and plush upholstery of the sultan’s state drawing-room. No one except the Fadl family and their Ministers had attempted European dress. The chiefs from up-country wore their best and most brilliant robes, and in most cases jewelled swords of considerable antiquity. They talked very little to each other, but stood about awkwardly, waiting for the Resident’s entry, mutually suspicious, like small boys during the first half-hour of a children’s party. Most of them, in spite of interminable genealogies, lived, in their own homes, a life of almost squalid simplicity, and they were clearly overawed by the magnificence of Lahej; some from the remoter districts were barefooted and they trod the Brussels carpets with very uncertain steps; embarrassment gave them a pop-eyed look, quite unlike the keen, hawk faces of cinema sheiks. While we were waiting, I was introduced to each in turn, and through my interpreter had a few words with them, asking whether they had had a long journey and what the prospects were for the crops and grazing-land.

  As soon as the Aden party arrived we took our places in the council-room, and the chiefs were formally announced one after another in order of precedence; each in turn shook hands with the Resident and then sat down in the chair assigned to him. Some were at first too shy to go the whole length of the room, and tried to get away with little bows from the door; their companions, however, prodded them on, and they came lolloping up with downcast eyes to give very hurried greeting and then shoot for a chair. It was all very much like the prize-giving after village sports, with Sir Stewart as the squire’s wife and the Sultan of Lahej as the vicar, benevolently but firmly putting the tenants’ children through their paces. It was hard to believe that each of them could lead a troop of fighting men into the field and administer an ancient and intricate law to a people of perhaps fifteen hundred, perhaps twenty thousand souls.

  Speeches were made, a banquet was eaten; then, though the Durbar was only beginning, I drove back to Aden.

  I wish I could have stayed longer, but my time at Aden was up. The Explorateur Grandidier was due next day, sailing for Zanzibar. It was six weeks since I had had any mail; I had arranged for everything to be sent to Zanzibar. My plans for the future were still vague, but that tight-lipped young man at Harar had set me considering the idea of crossing Africa to the west coast. And so, what with one thing and another, I decided to move on.

  Everyone admitted that it was an unfortunate time to visit Zanzibar. Usually in the tropics, if one remarks on the temperature, the inhabitants assume an air of amused tolerance and say, ‘You find this hot? You ought to see what it’s like in such and such a month.’ But December in Zanzibar is recognized as a bad season.

  Throughout my stay I am obsessed by heat; I see everything through a mist, vilely distorted like those gross figures that loom at one through the steam of a Turkish bath.

  I live at the English Club. Every day, soon after dawn, I am awakened by the heat; I lie there under my mosquito-net, streaming with sweat, utterly exhausted; I take time summoning enough resolution to turn the pillow dry side up; a boy comes in with tea and a mango; I lie there uncovered for a little while, dreading the day. Everything has to be done very slowly. Presently I sit limply in a hip-bath of cold water; I know that before I am dry of the water I shall again be damp with sweat. I dress gradually. One wears long trousers, coat, shirt, socks, suspenders, bow tie, buckskin shoes, everything, in this town. Halfway through dressing I cover my head with eau-de-cologne and sit under the electric fan. I do this several times during the day. They are the tolerable moments. I go up to breakfast. A Goan steward offers me bacon and eggs, fish, marmalade. I eat only papai. I go up to the library and read local history. I try to smoke. The fan blows fragments of burning tobacco over my clothes; the bowl of the pipe is too hot to hold. Through the window a very slight breeze carries up from the streets a reek of cloves, copra, and rotten fruit. A ship has been in the night before. I send a boy to the bank to inquire after my mail; there is still nothing. I make notes about the history of Zanzibar; the ink runs in little puddles of sweat that fall on to the page; I leave hot thumb-prints on the history-book. The plates have all come loose and the fan scatters them about the library. Luncheon is early. I usually sit with a young official who is living at the club during his wife’s absence at home. I tease him by putting on an earnest manner and asking him for information which I know he will be unable to give me – ‘Are there any reciprocal rights at law between French subjects in Zanzibar and British subjects in Madagascar? Where, in the protectorate Budget, do the rents appear, paid for the sultan’s possessions on the mainland? What arrangement was made between the Italian Government and the sultan about the cession of the Somaliland littoral below the River Juba?’ – or questions which I know will embarrass him – ‘Were the commercial members of Council in favour of the loan from the Zanzibar Treasury to the Government of Kenya? Is it a fact that the sultan pays for his own postage account and the Resident does not; is it a fact that the sultan has money invested abroad which the administration want to trace?’ He is very patient and promises to ring up the solicitor-general that afternoon and get the facts I want. After luncheon I go to bed. At two-forty exactly, every afternoon, the warm little wind that has been blowing from the sea drops. The sudden augmentation of heat wakes me up. I have another bath. I cover my head with eau-de-cologne and sit under the fan. Tea. Sometimes I go to Benediction in the Cathedral, where it is cool. Sometimes my official takes me for a drive into the country, through acres of copra-palm and clove-trees and tidy little villages, each with police station and clinic. Sometimes I receive a call from a Turk whom I met on the ship coming here; he talks of the pleasures of Nice and the glories of Constantinople before the war; he wears close-cropped hair and a fez; he cannot
wear his fez in Nice, he tells me, because they take him for an Egyptian and charge him excessively for everything. We drink lemon squash together and plan a journey to the Hejaz. ‘We will ride and ride,’ he says, ‘until our knees are cut and bleeding.’ The warmth of my admiration for Armenians clearly shocks him, but he is too polite to say so. Instead, he tells me of splendid tortures inflicted on them by his relations.

  Dinner on the club terrace; it is a little cooler now; one can eat almost with pleasure. Often, in the evening, we go out for a drive or visit a ngoma. Once I went to the cinema, where, quite unlike Aden, the audience was wide awake – mainly composed of natives, shrieking hysterically at the eccentricities of two drunken Americans. The ngomas are interesting. They are Swahili dances, originally, no doubt, of ritual significance, but nowadays performed purely for recreation. Like most activities, native or immigrant, in Zanzibar, they are legalized, controlled, and licensed. A list is kept in the police station of their place and date; anyone may attend. Once or twice, teams of fine Negroes from the mainland made their appearance, and gave a performance more varied and theatrical. One dance we attended took place in absolute darkness; we were even asked to put out our cigars. It was, as far as we could see, a kind of blind-man’s-buff; a man stood in the centre enveloped in an enormous conical extinguisher made of thatched grass, while the rest of the company capered round him, making derisive cries, beating tins and challenging him to catch them. The tufted top of his hood could just be seen pitching and swaying across the sky. On another occasion a particularly good mainland party – from somewhere below Tanga I was told – brought a band of four or five tom-tom players. It was odd to see these men throwing back their heads and rolling their eyes and shoulders like trick drummers in a Paris orchestra.

  The only thing which does not appear to be under the benevolent eye of the administrator in Zanzibar is witchcraft, which is still practised surreptitiously on a very large scale. At one time, Zanzibar and Pemba – particularly the latter island – were the chief centres of black art on the whole coast, and novices would come from as far as the great lakes to graduate there. Even from Haiti, it is said, witch doctors will occasionally come to probe the deepest mysteries of voodoo. Nowadays everything is kept hidden from the Europeans, and even those who have spent most of their lives in the country have only now and then discovered hints of the wide, infinitely ramified cult which still flourishes below the surface. No one doubts, however, that it does flourish, and it seems appropriate that it should have its base here in this smug community.

  There are no problems at all in Zanzibar; such difficulties as there are are mere matters of the suitable adjustment of routine. The sultan is the model of all that a figurehead should be; a man of dignified bearing and reputable private life. He has no exclusively valid claim to his office; the British Government put him there, and they pay him a sufficient proportion of his revenue to enable him to live in a modest degree of personal comfort. The two main industries of the islands, cloves and copra, are thoroughly prosperous compared with any other form of agriculture on the East African coast. Law and order are better preserved than in many towns in the British Isles. The medical and hygienic services are admirable; miles of excellent roads have been made. The administration is self-supporting. The British Government takes nothing out of the island. Instead, we import large numbers of well-informed, wholly honest members of our unemployed middle-class to work fairly hard in the islanders’ interest for quite small wages. Gay, easily intelligible charts teach the Swahili peasants how best to avoid hookworm and elephantiasis. Instead of the cultured, rather decadent aristocracy of the Oman Arabs, we have given them a caste of just, soap-loving young men with public-school blazers. And these young men have made the place safe for the Indians.

  We came to establish a Christian civilization and we have come very near to establishing a Hindu one.

  The town is, I suppose, as good an example of Arabic eighteenth-century architecture as survives intact anywhere.

  In the time of Burton it must have been a city of great beauty and completeness. Now there is not a single Arab in any of the great Arab houses; there are, instead, counting houses full of Indian clerks or flats inhabited by cosy British families.

  I went to Pemba for two nights. It is all cloves, coconuts, and tarmac, very much like the interior of Zanzibar. On the night of my departure I witnessed a highly acrimonious dispute about the allotment of Christmas presents. My hosts were two elderly bachelors. They were giving a joint Christmas party to the European children of the island, and a fine heap of toys had arrived for them in the Halifa for distribution to their guests. They rehearsed the business with chairs for children. ‘This will do for So-and-So’s little boy,’ and ‘This for So-and-So’s girl,’ and ‘Have the So-and-So’s got two children or three?’ At first it was all very harmonious and Dickensian. Then suspicion of favouritism arose over the allocation of a particularly large, brightly painted indiarubber ball. ‘Mary--ought to have it; she’s a sweet little thing.’ ‘Peter--’s brother has just gone to school in England. He’s terribly lonely, poor kiddy.’ The ball was put first on one dump, then on the other; sometimes it rolled off and bounced between them. ‘Sweet little thing’ and ‘Lonely kiddy’ became battle-cries as the big ball was snatched backwards and forwards. It was an odd sight to see these two hot men struggling over the toy. Presently came the inevitable ‘All right. Do as you like. I wash my hands of the whole thing. I won’t come to the party.’ Renunciation was immediately mutual. There was a sudden reversal of the situation; each party tried to force the ball upon the other one’s candidate. I cautiously eschewed any attempts at arbitration. Finally peace was made. I forget on what terms, but, as far as I remember, the ball was given to a third child and all the other heaps were despoiled to compensate Mary and Peter. They certainly came very well out of the business. Later that evening I went back to the Halifa. Some of my new friends came to see me off. We woke up the Goan steward and persuaded him to make lemon squash for us. Then we wished one another a happy Christmas, for it was past midnight, and parted. Early next morning we sailed for Zanzibar, arriving at tea-time. My mail had not yet come.

  Christmas seemed very unreal, divorced from its usual Teutonic associations of yule logs, reindeer, and rum punch. A few of the Indian storekeepers in the main street had decked their windows with tinsel, crackers, and iridescent artificial snow; there was a homely crèche in the cathedral; beggars appeared with the commendation ‘Me velly Clistian boy’; there was a complete cessation of the little club life that had flourished before.

  Eventually the mail arrived, and I was able to leave for Kenya. I took an almost empty Italian liner. Her few passengers were nearly all restful people taking a few days’ holiday on the water. The best thing about this ship was a nice old cinematograph; the worst was a plague of small blackbeetles which overran the cabins and died in vast numbers in the baths. An English lady declared that she had been severely stung by one in the back of the neck. She and her husband were from Nairobi. It was the first time they had seen the sea since their arrival in the country eleven years before. The husband was a manufacturer of bricks. The trouble about his bricks, he said, was that they did not last very long; sometimes they crumbled away before they had been laid; but he was hopeful of introducing a new method before long.

  We stopped at Dar-es-Salaam. I visited the agent of the Belgian Congo and explained that I had an idea of returning to Europe by way of the west coast. He was sympathetic to the idea and told me of an air service running weekly between Albertville and Boma; the fare was negligible, the convenience extreme. He showed me a time-table of the flight. It was two years old. He had not yet received the new one, but, he assured me, I could be confident that any changes that might have been made would be changes for the better. I believed him.

  On the last day of the year we arrived at Mombasa, where my whole time was occupied with the immigration officers.

  But my ill temper gradually
cooled as the train, with periodic derailments (three, to be exact, between Mombasa and Nairobi) climbed up from the coast into the highlands. In the restaurant car that evening I sat opposite a young lady who was on her way to be married. She told me that she had worked for two years in Scotland Yard and that that had coarsened her mind; but since then she had refined it again in a bank at Dar-es-Salaam. She was glad to be getting married as it was impossible to obtain fresh butter in Dar-es-Salaam.

  I awoke during the night to draw up my blanket. It was a novel sensation, after so many weeks, not to be sweating. Next morning I changed from white drill to grey flannel. We arrived in Nairobi a little before lunch time. I took a taxi out to Muthaiga Club. There was no room for me there, but the secretary had been told of my coming and I found I was already a temporary member. In the bar were several people I had met in the Explorateur Grandidier, and some I knew in London. They were drinking pink gin in impressive quantities. Someone said, ‘You mustn’t think Kenya is always like this.’ I found myself involved in a luncheon party. We went on together to the Races. Someone gave me a cardboard disc to wear in my buttonhole; someone else, called Raymond, introduced me to a bookie and told me what horses to back. None of them won. When I offered the bookie some money he said in a rather sinister way, ‘Any friend of Mr de Trafford’s is a friend of mine. We’ll settle up at the end of the meeting.’