Well, that’s all for now. I’m so pleased to know you are doing well. I’ve missed my Zanzibar sister! Maybe I’ll visit you in America one day.
Love, Gabrielle
I read the letter and posted a note to Adnam before I could think. Gabrielle’s sensible advice had the opposite of its intended effect. It produced a headache of the Zanzibar chant in me: “It might have been the ... It might have been the ..the curse of never knowing for sure, that made me want to solve the puzzle much more than I wanted to be safe or sensible. The whole truth, just for once.
Ron is travelling too. He has not grown much on me with time, though I seem to have grown on him. It’s probably my fault. I’ve accepted his dinner invitations but nothing more, being not at all curious to discover whether his private parts are matched by his rather small nose or his rather large bottom. But he is easy to see because he persistently asks, and if I didn’t see him, I might see no one. Over dinner last week, now a chaste regular event that I secretly value for its conversation, he grinned at me and said, “You’ll never guess where I’m going for my vacation.”
“London?”
“No.”
I tried to think of where else Dickens had set his books and found I did not know. “Then I can’t guess.”
“Zanzibar.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes!”
He was delighted with himself. I, on the other hand, was angry. It was as if he had put his hand inside my clothing without my permission. I said, “You can’t just visit Zanzibar like ... New York.”
“But you can. There’s a Tanzania package. Three days at a game park, three for Mount Kilimanjaro and three for Zanzibar. The agent said it was a hot new destination.”
“It’s not a place for tourists.”
“I think you might be out of date, Marcella. He showed me pictures of new hotels on the beach. That’s all tourists need, hotels, sun and beaches. He said it was popular with gay tourists and that they always find the new smart places first. Do you think he thought I was one?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me. Why do you want to go there? That’s my home!”
For the first time, Ron realised I was genuinely upset and now looked hurt. “I thought you’d be interested to hear what it was like now. Aren’t you?”
“I wish I’d never told you I was from there.”
“It would be something in common.”
“Who said I wanted something in common? Did I say I wanted to be reminded of Zanzibar? I remember it well enough. I know its history. That’s where I want it to stay. As history.”
“Well, it’s too late now. I’ve already booked.”
In prison I did for myself and Zanzibar what my students have been doing for the necktie and the oboe, testing the depth of the shifting sand upon which I stood. Most recently there were the British and I doubt I have any of their blood. They never owned Zanzibar, just made it a Protectorate, protected it for the Omani Arab rulers. It seems I have lots of their blood. And since they mixed themselves up with the whole known world, I don’t know who else. According to the diary of a Zanzibar Arab princess who I like to consider my distant relation (she had a scandalous affair with a German diplomat, got pregnant and was smuggled to Europe in 1867), her father, the sultan, had seventy-five concubines, including all of the shades of Africa, Arabia, Persia and Europe. When any concubine gave birth he accepted the child and freed the mother from slavery. My Zanzibar mother could have been anything.
Then, before the Arab sultanate there were the Turks and before that the Portuguese—who I’ve got anyway on my Goan side. Marco Polo visited from Italy and lied about the island to make it more fabulous. The Zoroastrian Persians ruled for a time, and some Zanzibaris still claim their ancestry. A thousand years ago it was the regular destination of traders from Asia—the Malays, the Chinese and the Japanese, who tried to conquer it. That was after the native population had been overrun by Bantu tribes from Africa at about the time of Jesus, which was already after the Sabaeans and Himyarites from Arabia had made Zanzibar into the region’s Whiteley’s Department Store during King Solomon’s reign. The Romans were there too, and before them the Greeks. The Egyptians under the Pharaohs visited, so did the Phoenicians and the Jews, and even before then it was established as the Indian Ocean trading centre under the Chaldeans in the sixth century BC, building on the earlier importance given to Zanzibar by the Sumerians and Assyrians. I couldn’t go back beyond fifteen thousand BC, when, I learned, Zanzibar was inhabited by the people of the Heliolithic culture, that improbably embraced the coastal populations of the Mediterranean, India, China, Peru and Mexico, which would join me to everything I’m not already joined to, including America, just going to prove that nothing is separate,nothing fixed, and that migration is our natural state.
Now I’m starting to look at my Goan side, more restless even than the Arab. After the Portuguese converted us and detached us from our Hindu India, we seem to have gone everywhere. There was even a colony of prosperous, well-behaved Goans—accountants and lawyers, Mrs F’s nephew among them—in Haringey, north London, so respectable and striving that I did not for a minute
