A Matter of Time

by Alex Capus

  On the left, a gap in the row of buildings disclosed a wide, palmfringed side street. Riiter, Wendt and Tellmann could now see that beyond the white facades of the administration buildings was a mass of one-storeyed mud huts, windowless wooden shacks and woven palmleaf huts. Naked children were running around in the steaming street, knots of women squatting on the ground, men walking along hand in hand. Soft singing and loud laughter could be heard, and the breeze was laden with interesting smells.

  ‘The native quarter,’ the Governor said with a smile. ‘A very mixed bunch, and here in Dar they outnumber us whites by ten to one. You really must undertake a guided tour before moving on, it’s quite safe nowadays.’

  Situated on the edge of the native quarter was the place of execution, with its row of five gibbets. Thereafter the avenue traversed the picturesque coconut grove that separated the harbour district from the government quarter. Since the Governor had relapsed into silence and the three new arrivals cautiously confined themselves to looking interested, Ada Schnee resumed the conversation once more. She drew attention to the luxuriant flower beds that bordered the road, which were enthusiastically tended by her black girls, and pointed to the beach on which she rode her horse every morning. Then she presented a report on the school of nursing she had founded, praised the diligence of its black trainees, whose services were badly needed by ailing plantation workers and wounded native soldiers, and put in a jocular word for the German East African toothbrushes which a missionary at Dodoma got his blacks to manufacture out of mule hair.

  ‘The toothbrushes are perfectly hygienic but a little on the harsh side - like so many things in Africa, as you’ll see for yourselves. For instance, the mango puree made by the Catholic nuns at Tabora tastes just like German plum puree - but a little sharper. The same goes for the malt beer manufactured by our local brewer, Herr Schulze, whose premises are just over there beyond those palm trees. It conforms to German standards of purity and tastes just like German beer - but a little more potent. If you find it too strong, try the honey beer brewed in their kitchens by nearly all the tavern-keepers in the country. There’s an abundance of the wild honey they use for it all over the bush. It’s only in the neighbourhood of the rubber plantations that the honey tastes bitter and is unsuitable for brewing.’

  The Governor’s wife prattled on and on. Anton Riiter was captivated by her easy, chatty tone and her effortless, self-possessed gaiety, which struck him as typically English. Being a North German, he was seldom capable of gaiety. If ever he did give way to it, he promptly lost control of himself, laughed too loudly, gesticulated too wildly, and started stammering from sheer exuberance - which always embarrassed him afterwards.

  Young Wendt studied the Governor’s wife with scientific curiosity as she laughingly recounted that many local brewers stole ships’ lifebelts

  and punched corks out of them for their bottles. Ada Schnee’s gait was relaxed and erect, her gestures were ladylike and restrained and her facial expressions perfectly attuned to the moment. She could roll her eyes in amusement without ever playing the buffoon; she could give a worried frown without arousing serious anxiety in the person she was talking to; and her smile could only be described as captivating. Hermann Wendt wondered if any muscle in her face ever twitched uncontrollably and what a man would have to do to elicit involuntary sounds from her lips.

  Rudolf Tellmann was also listening attentively to the Governor’s wife and noting her every word. All that puzzled him was that she could talk at such length about mango puree, honey beer and toothbrushes but utter not a word about her children. In his experience it was usually only a matter of time before a married woman steered the conversation round to her offspring. If the Governors wife failed to do so, it probably meant she was childless. Wondering what the reason for her childlessness could be, Tellmann unobtrusively watched her and her husband as they walked along companionably arm in arm. The cause might be either biological or psychological, who could tell? However, Tellmann thought it possible that, even at night, the couple might not be man and wife but only Governor and Governors lady.

  Situated beside the sea to the east of the palm grove, the government quarters whitewashed villas were surrounded by luxuriant gardens and broad, shady avenues. Reflected in the calm waters of the bay were the Roman Catholic and Lutheran churches. Then came the post office, the government hospital, and a palm-fringed square containing a bust of Kaiser Wilhelm. The Governor informed his guests that an askari band played the German national anthem there on Sundays - not badly, either - and that parades were held there on the Kaiser’s birthday and Sedan Day. A tall plinth at the end of another avenue of palms supported an over-life-size bust of Prince Otto von Bismarck, and stretching away beyond it was a magnificent, verdant park in whose midst the Governor’s residence loomed in oriental splendour. A lofty pergola supported by Moorish arches ran all round the building. Surmounting this was a spacious, shady veranda, and high above the overhanging roof fluttered

  the black-white-and-red standard adorned with the imperial eagle. A path strewn with seashells in lieu of gravel led from the main entrance to the beach. Crunching their way softly along it in single file were seven women wearing brown mammy cloths and balancing big wickerwork baskets filled with shells on their heads. The forged iron collars around their necks were linked together by rhythmically swinging chains that had chafed the skin over their collarbones raw. Their faces were set, their eyes dull and apathetic, their sores encrusted with black blowflies. They tipped out their baskets at a spot where the rain had washed the shells away, then set off for the beach once more.

  Governor Schnee noticed that his guests had seen them. ‘Female felons,’ he said with a rueful frown. ‘Duly convicted thieves, arsonists and smugglers. An awful business. One would sooner it wasn’t necessary.’ He conducted his guests up the steps and, with a gesture that seemed more apologetic than inviting, ushered them into the house, where they were engulfed in cool, welcome gloom. Meanwhile, he explained that putting the women in chains was an unfortunate necessity because the natives had proved impervious to any more civilized forms of punishment. Fines were futile because most blacks were completely destitute. One couldn’t simply lock them up, either, because they regarded incarceration as free board and lodging, not a punishment. He had abolished the flogging of women on humanitarian grounds, and hangings he ordered only when the law allowed of no other penalty. In most cases, therefore, chaining remained the only means of enforcing respect for the law, which it was his duty, as the colony’s supreme judicial authority, to uphold. A terrible sight, a shameful reminder of the supposedly long-abolished practice of slavery, and a disgrace in the eyes of any right-thinking person, but alas, the only effective penalty. Schnee paused in the doorway and turned to look at the seven women, who had got to the beach and were refilling their baskets with their bare hands.

  ‘My one real quarrel with the blacks,’ he said with surprising vehemence as he handed his gold sun helmet to a houseboy, ‘is that they compel me to do things I consider reprehensible, and that, as a human being, I’m denied the choice between good and evil. If I wish to avoid

  ruining myself and the colony entrusted to me by the Emperor, I’m daily faced with the compulsion to commit evil acts, and each one welds me a little more firmly to the role I’ve been assigned. That, gentlemen, is the fate of the colonial servant: forever having to decide, again and again, against death and in favour of self-contempt.’

  3

  The Kaiser's Birthday

  anton ruter, Hermann Wendt and Rudolf Tellmann remained in Dar-es-Salaam for seventeen days. Early on the morning of the eighteenth, the twelve askaris and two red-faced corporals who had greeted them on the landing stage paraded in front of the Hotel Kaiserhof. Then a closed carriage and four drew up outside and the Governor and his lady alighted from it. Arm in arm, they climbed the steps to the veranda where Ritter, Wendt and Tellmann were ready and waiting. Hotel porters had already conveyed their baggage
to the station. Ada Schnee enlivened the veranda with the scent of violets and her habitual gaiety. Having questioned the Papenburgers about the quality of their nights rest, their breakfast, the hotel staff and beds, she expressed confidence in the next few days’ weather, which promised to be hot but not unduly humid. Then she advised them to leave without delay because the locomotive had steam up and the Gotzen’s parts were safely stowed aboard the freight wagons. There was no danger that the train would depart without its only passengers, of course, but the sooner they left the pleasanter the journey.

  Although the sun was still hovering low over the ocean, its scorching heat might have been issuing from the open door of a blast furnace. The horses were lathered with sweat after their brief trot from the Governor’s residence to the hotel, and their nostrils were adorned with big blobs of foam. The Governor mopped his neck and cheeks with a handkerchief as he climbed into the carriage after his guests. His wife satisfied herself that everyone was comfortably seated. Then, when the carriage set off, she put her head out of the window and watched the palm trees glide past with a cheerful smile. The implication was that she would this time

  dispense with genteel conversation of her own accord, tactfully leaving the four men - who were clearly in a bad way - to their own devices. They were mutely grateful to her.

  It had been a late night. The reception held to mark the Kaisers birthday was the year’s most important function. Colonists had converged on Dar-es-Salaam from all corners of German East Africa. Thuringian cotton planters from Usambara, Bavarian rubber planters from Ukami, Holsteinian sisal growers from Mahenge, Swabian customs officials from Ujiji and Saxonian army officers from Tanga, Prussian missionaries from Bismarckburg and Hanoverian big-game hunters from Wasukuma, Rhenish ivory merchants from Kigali, Mecklenburgisch gold prospectors from Sekenke and shady adventurers of obscure descent and provenance - all had assembled in festively beflagged Bismarckplatz to watch the Imperial Defence Force on parade. The men wore uniform if entitled to do so, the ladies silk summer gowns over stiff whalebone corsets. After the last post had been sounded the askari band gave a concert under the baton of a pallid, malarial, alarmingly red-lipped lieutenant named Karl Ernst Goring. The Konigsberg, which was still lying at anchor in the bay, fired a 101-gun salute. Governor Schnee loudly delivered a speech that went echoing across the square, first in Swahili, then in German. Looking from a distance like a man in the prime of life, not prematurely aged at all, he raised his champagne glass, whereupon all present - colonists, native troops, Indian and Arab hangers-on, liveried servants - gave the Kaiser three cheers so rousing that they shook the palm fronds darkly silhouetted against the turquoise, orange and lilac evening sky. After the askaris had marched past a second time, the Governor accepted expressions of loyalty from the Sultan of Zanzibar and local dignitaries of Arab, Indian and African extraction. Then Ada Schnee made her annual, long-awaited appearance. She led a little Ngoni girl of around seven to the speakers platform. Attired in a muslin frock adorned with carnations, Ada’s black protegee recited the following lines in a voice of bell-like clarity and in purest Hanoverian German:

  The Kaiser is a much-loved man.

  Berlin is his abode,

  and if it weren’t so far away

  Id gladly take the road.

  What I would like to do there is offer him my hand, together with the loveliest flowers that ever grew on land, and say: ‘In love and loyalty I bring you this bouquet.’

  And then I’d swiftly turn and go and wend my homeward way.

  At nightfall, when the mosquitoes rose from the fields, the spectators went home and the soldiers retired to their barracks to empty their allotted dozen casks of honey beer in double-quick time. Torches and joss sticks were lit in Bismarckplatz and the ladies rubbed their faces, hands and ankles with oil of cloves. The band played Hail to Thee in Victor’s Crown and The Watch on the Rhine. There was champagne for all Europeans and another round of cheers for the Kaiser. The hour that followed presented smaller plantation owners and junior officials with an opportunity to put their cases in diplomatic language.

  ‘With the greatest respect, Herr Direktor, and pardon me for saying so, but customs proforma three-stroke-four is utterly useless from a practical point of view.’

  ‘Its high time you dispatched a punitive expedition against those Masai cattle thieves, Colonel. I implore you to do so.’

  ‘What did you say Ceylonese rubber stood at on Saturday?’ ‘Forty-three marks nine. The problem is, the Masai have always clung to the belief that all the cattle in the world are their property. If you live near them, they turn up on the doorstep and lay claim to yours!’

  ‘The Northern Line has been cut again because the termites have eaten away the sleepers from under the rails. Just imagine, tough German oak from the Black Forest, and they simply eat it away. We’ve had to

  take them out, all 300,000 of them, and ship them back to Hamburg for bitumenizing.’

  ‘When does the Windhoek put in?’

  ‘Next Saturday. But you know something? The creatures find sleepers even tastier when they’re bitumenized. There’s nothing for it, we shall have to go over to iron and concrete.’

  ‘If they don’t build a weatherproof road to Kipembawe before long, I’ll have to abandon my plantation.’

  ‘Honestly, the Masai are stark raving mad. Last year some of them seriously proposed to set off for England to take possession of their herds there.’

  ‘Overland?’

  ‘Tell me, is the road to Dorongo passable again?’

  While the men were discussing business their wives were exchanging the latest information about births, deaths and suspected cases of adultery, comparing the dresses of the other ladies present with their own, and surreptitiously castigating the Governor’s wife, whose gown was undeniably the most beautiful of all (just as it had been the previous year), for being an insufferably affected peahen. Just before ten o’clock the peahen went the rounds of the junior wives and thanked them most warmly for coming. This they rightly construed as an indication that it was time for them to leave. Having been humiliated in this manner, they had no alternative but to chivvy their slightly tipsy husbands out into the night, hissing with fury, and go home to bed, where they digested the latest gossip, nursed their hatred for the upper crust, and laid plans for their own admission to it.

  But the people who mattered - the big plantation owners and their wives, the prominent local businessmen, the senior colonial officials and their ladies, the officers of the Imperial Defence Force, the consuls of other colonial powers, and the three Papenburg shipwrights - accepted Ada Schnee’s invitation to join her at the three lavishly decorated banqueting tables that had been set up in a horseshoe in the garden of the governor’s residence. Pale summer gowns and white sharkskin suits promenaded amid the bougainvillea and hibiscus bushes and a lively

  hum of conversation could be heard. The veranda presented a view of the dark, glistening waters of the Indian Ocean. A cool breeze mitigated the oppressive heat and the dull, rhythmical roar of the waves came drifting up from the shimmering white beach. High above the roof of the mansion, palm trees swayed darkly beneath a sky aglitter with stars. Three suckling pigs were roasting on a spit, lilies glowed white in the gloom, and frogs were croaking in a nearby pool in the grounds. Herr Schulze used a big wooden mallet to tap two barrels of wheat beer brewed especially for the occasion.

  Seated side by side, Anton Riiter, Hermann Wendt and Rudolf Tellmann listened to the conversations going on around them, most of which concerned headlines from the world at large. Although newspapers were three or four weeks old by the time they reached Dar-es-Salaam, to plantation owners from remote provinces, who had grown accustomed to a time-lag of several months, they were like a glimpse of the future a glimpse they would have to atone for for months after returning to their plantations, because every item of news would seem dull and outof-date to them. This was how, that night in the Governors garden, the Pape
nburgers learned that all kinds of things had happened since their departure. An erupting Japanese volcano had killed 7000 people and destroyed 3000 buildings. In Russia, Maxim Gorki had been pardoned and permitted to return home after eight years in exile on Capri. In Australia three Benz automobiles had won the rooo-kilometre reliability run from Sydney to Melbourne. In Florence an interior decorator named Vincenzo Perugia had been arrested for stealing the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. And in London, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill had requested more money for the Royal Navy, in default of which Prussia would gain ascendancy over the worlds oceans.

  The dinner was good and ample. The gentlemen talked politics and economics, the ladies listened earnestly. Subjects discussed included the rubber crisis, the depressed state of the European money market and the new telegraph cable to Nairobi. Then, when the French, British and Belgian consuls had finally taken their leave, they got down to brass tacks and spoke of Germany’s awakening, the worldwide reputation

  of the German Empire, the German nations legitimate claim to more living space, the arrogance of the British and the high-handedness of the French. No reference was made to the Belgians, the colony’s neighbours to the west. The gentlemen were unanimous on one point in particular: a war between the European powers was imminent.

  This was stated with great vehemence by the captain of the auxiliary cruiser Mowe, Kapitanleutnant zur See Gustav von Zimmer, the scion of an impecunious but aristocratic family wTio had got himself transferred to the colony in the hope of more rapid promotion. ‘The situation is critical,’ he said, stroking his moustache, ‘ - extremely critical, in fact. Storm clouds are gathering on the horizon, tension is increasing. As I see it, armed conflict is inevitable - a law of nature, so to speak.’