LITMIR.BIZ

      THE DIRT ROAD FROM Dar es Salaam petered out at a hedge of bougainvillea. Off to one side lay the shell of a deserted hotel amid palm trees that hung darkly at the edge of the Indian Ocean like bats. Beyond the purple blossoms, on the verandah of a cottage, stood a tall, grizzled white man in a T-shirt, sarong and sandals made from car tyres. ‘And you must be Stephen,’ he said.

      He motioned to a seat on the verandah which looked out over the pale sea. A pot of pitch-like coffee was produced and served, in the Muslim manner, in tiny cups. He looked at me intently, a rather forbidding figure with the head of a patrician, a great beak of a nose, thinning white mane and beard, and watchful eyes. I felt apprehensive. My letters had gone unanswered and my presence was unbidden. Now I was expected to explain myself.

      I was interested, I said, in whites who had stayed on in Africa. I was starting a journey in the footsteps of the explorers, missionaries and settlers, along the routes of imperial advance and retreat, looking for those who had made their home in post-independence Africa, who had lived through coups and wars, and learnt to live with the corruption, the collapse of services and the generally miserable lot of the African citizen. In particular, I was interested in those who had faith in Africa and its people, and who believed it still had something to offer the world. And now that the last protective white laager had fallen, I was looking for lessons on how they might endure in South Africa.

      It sounded desperately earnest.

      ‘Well,’ he barked. ‘It helps to be a little mad.’

      I had heard of Daudi Ricardo long before the flight landed me that morning in Dar es Salaam. In Britain, where old district officers reminisced in their twilight on exotic human specimens who had crossed their paths, and in tales of post-colonial diehards, Daudi’s name had resonance. Once an English grandee, born David Ricardo, he had sacrificed everything on the pyre of Tanzania’s hopelessly inept experiment with socialism. Now in his seventies, he lived in genteel poverty in a shanty beside the beach twenty miles north of Dar es Salaam.

      A single large palm tree stood in front of the whitewashed cottage. I took in the interiors of two adjacent rooms. They were of incongruous, almost paradoxical, character: a bedroom of missionary simplicity; and a book-lined study with a roll-top desk and leather chair. The shelves contained a near-complete set of G. A. Henty novels in the original gold-embossed covers.

      ‘Meshack, more coffee,’ ordered Daudi.

      Once there had been a few other whites living in a ragged little colony at Kunduchi beach. But the major who used to see non-existent thieves in the dark and shout ‘I’ve got my artillery, Sir, and I won’t hesitate to use it’, had died, and the couple who smuggled birds and small creatures to foreign zoos had been forced to make a run for it. Daudi was the last mzungu at Kunduchi, sharing his roof with Meshack, a smiling-faced young man, his wife and their baby.

      In the days I spent there it became apparent that Daudi had a variety of roles. To Meshack, he was paterfamilias and opponent in hard-fought games of backgammon and Monopoly. To his neighbour, Saidi, he was friend and confidant. To most local folk he was simply the mzee, an ancient revered as sage and occasional benefactor.

      One evening, I related two stories about whites in South Africa.

      In 1686, a richly laden Dutch vessel, the Stavenisse, was wrecked off the south coast. For many months nothing was heard of the ship and it was concluded that it had gone down with all hands. Then, three years later, another ship called on this storm-blasted stretch of coast and found Stavenisse survivors, living contentedly among an African people. The Europeans returned to the tiny Dutch settlement at the Cape of Good Hope with elegiac accounts of life in an Eden among peaceful and generous folk, having left behind a Portuguese mariner, shipwrecked in the same place forty years earlier, who had acquired a wife and children and declined to leave his idyll. ‘He spoke only the African language, having forgotten everything else, his God included,’ wrote a would-be rescuer.

      Almost a hundred years later, in 1782, an East Indianman the Grosvenor was wrecked along the same stretch of coast on a return voyage from India. This time, however, the survivors were not welcomed. Out of 123 men, women and children to reach the shore, fewer than twenty eventually got back to the Cape, bearing harrowing tales of murder and persecution by pitiless savages.

      These two accounts represented for me a characteristic of the European experience of Africa: arcadia or inferno – it seemed always to be one or the other, as if the place chose to reveal only a benign face to some, and a malign aspect to others. Rarely had the world seen a more baleful side of Africa than now, over the horizon in Rwanda. Yet here was a modern equivalent of the shipwrecked mariner, loved and enfolded by a kinship network. His other family – his wife, Lady Barbara Montagu-Stuart Wortley, daughter of the Earl of Wortley, and children – lived in England.

      ‘Africa has been kind to me,’ he agreed. ‘I won’t be going back to England to die. My life is short now. I have cancerous waterworks. Collapsed recently and spent two days on the floor in the local hospital.’ I knew enough about Tanzanian hospitals to marvel that, in the face of this final test, he had not submitted to the National Health Service.

      The ambiguities were baffling: a white man who loved Henty, yet lived among blacks; a former settler serenely awaiting death in a land which old colonials saw as the final word in African failure. I asked him to start at the beginning.

      DAUDI’S ANCESTOR WAS David Ricardo, the nineteenth-century economist whose prosperity built Gatcombe Park in Gloucestershire. The family was famously well-connected. ‘I have an early memory of being given a hiding by George V. Grumpy old chap.

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