Vanishing Africa Pt 2 Ever since I could remember, my artist mother had pointed out to me the beauty of black people. She looked at them with the eyes of an artist and made me aware of the way they walked, the way they stood, the way they moved their hands and held their heads. I was now confronting it head on. Instinctively I knew exactly what I was looking for, my vision had been so totally influenced by my mother's words; what I did not know at the time was why I was taking the pictures I took. Once I got back to England the reaction to my work made me realise that I had captured, for the first time, an aspect of Africa which until then had been ignored - the sheer unadulterated beauty of its people. My efforts were richly rewarded by the unanimous worldwide recognition my book received. As I worked from dawn to dusk and well into the night, my senses were alive, and my eyes were filled with the changing lights and shapes of Africa. Time and again, as I travelled across the dusty continent, I would halt in front of immense vistas of golden grass, skies hung with billowing white clouds or streaked by thunder storms crashing from dramatic leaden skies. Each time I picked up my camera, I became aware of how much I had, until then, taken Africa's beauty and grandeur for granted. Having been born there, I was so much part of it. It was my camera that cast a new perspective over everything and started my love affair with Africa. During my two-year walkabout collecting my photographs I shed most of my colonial inhibitions. The whole experience was a revelation and I became a more tolerant person. It was a gentle unobtrusive progression and the final straw was a chance encounter in the sea with a beautiful young man off the East African coast. A fisherman, nineteen years old, completely illiterate, but an alluring creature of Africa's wild nature. I first saw him while I was lolling in the water one blistering midday, playing with my little girls. He appeared like a speck on the horizon, advancing in my direction. I followed his approach through half-shut eyes, without much interest. The speck grew larger until it took the shape of a tall, sturdy young man. Wearing only a diminutive faded loin cloth around his hips, he stopped a few feet from where I lay and looked down at me. The tattered straw hat was pulled low over his eyes, a worn coconut fibre basket at the end of a stick hung over one shoulder. I greeted him in Kiswahili and asked him the contents of his basket. 'Shells,' he said, dropping to his knees. As he laid them carefully in the sand beside me he looked up at me from beneath his hat. I saw the most beautiful golden-brown face set with dancing black eyes, the likes of which I had not seen before. The coastal people are a mixture of Arabs and Bantu and are not especially renowned for their height or beauty, but this man was an exception. He told me his name was Shahibu. He was long and sinewy and when he turned his head he arched his neck in a way which made him seem aloof and inaccessible. The skin of his face was smooth and silky and slightly moist; the colour of dark chocolate, it rippled in the sunlight. I wanted to touch it. His fine straight nose and delicate nostrils, his soft, slightly slanting, eyes were not typical of his tribe. He told me he lived in the nearby Watamu village and he invited me to have tea there with his family. I spent six weeks at the coast and saw Shahibu every day. He took us fishing and diving with him and hunted for shells with my girls. I later sailed with him and his four brothers in their dhow to the Arab town of Lamu and on to Kisingitini in the Bajun Island archipelago where I went to photograph the shy black-veiled Muslim women of the Indian Ocean coast. Shahibu had never left his village, he spoke no English and could not read or write, but he and my cook Kimuyu became a tightly knit team; without them I would never have been able to last as long as I did on this project. They relieved my solitude and the dark moods I fell into. Their gaiety and sense of adventure, their unquestioning and total loyalty, their concern for my well-being, turned the sometimes taxing undertaking into a manageable venture. I hired Shahibu initially as my assistant and then the relationship took an unexpected turn when he became my lover. He was sixteen years my junior. My encounter with Shahibu was another particularly important turning point in my African odyssey, for it banished the taint of racial discrimination which afflicted almost every white person living in Africa then and with which I had certainly grown up. One day I caught myself looking at him, not as a black man, but simply as a man. When we realised something was happening to us, something that had never happened before to either of us, we dared not admit to it. We played and frolicked and laughed and hid behind the false pretence of casual camaraderie. It worked as long as we both remained on neutral terrain, but when I sailed with him and his four brothers on their dhow for the Bajun islands I inadvertently trespassed onto his territory. The sea journey to Kisingitini lasted three days. My new African friends treated me with respectful courtesy and Shahibu was full of tender affections. Each night he unrolled my bedroll on the deck of the dhow and built a little overhead shelter above me with knotted kikois (African sarongs) which he tied to the sail ropes. His brothers slept at the other end of the boat, but he curled up on a mat at my feet. We never touched and kept our feelings to ourselves. That night in the tent we talked for the first time about the relationship between a man and a woman of different colour. I was very nervous but Shahibu remained calm. The glow from the hurricane lamp played on his face and naked chest and threw our shadows on the canvas above us. We sat on the floor and listened to the sea and the hot wind in the palm trees. A pink crab scuttled from beneath the tarpaulin trailing white sand grains in its wake. The jasmine blooms the women in the village had given us that evening lay scattered on the floor and filled the tent with their heady perfume. I thought of Lorenzo and how I had been brainwashed by my parents for so long. I remember wondering if black men made love the same way as white men did. I had never had these thoughts before. Excitement and confusion made me shiver as if I had a fever. That night I embarked on the most exciting love adventure of my life. It was to last for two years and was so natural, I wondered what all the fuss had been about. When it was time to head home I explained to Shahibu what it was like in my white world; the hostility, the resentment and the prejudice he might have to face. I spelled it out ruthlessly to him, for it was important he should understand. If we wanted to continue together it was not possible for him to share my life as I had his. But he did not listen, perhaps he did not understand, certainly he did not care, and insisted I take him with me. Young, impulsive and in love he only wanted to be with me wherever I went, regardless of the consequences. When we reached Naivasha he faced the first acid test when I entered my home through the front door and he went in with Kimuyu by the kitchen door. I sat in the drawing room with my parents, he sat in the servants' quarters with the house servants. The situation made me cringe, but there was nothing I could do about it. These were the conditions, I had explained to him, if we wanted to avoid instant banishment, for if my father had found out he would have shot Shahibu and probably me and then himself. In Naples, where he came from, crimes of passion and betrayal were a code of life. Wives and daughters are treated like the Madonna, to be revered but never touched, and certainly not by a black man. I had not forgotten how my father had chased Lorenzo out of the house before we were married, brandishing his duelling sword, because one afternoon he had caught him sitting on my bed reading a magazine with the door wide open. He was evicted for a week after a flamboyant Latino confrontation. The time I spent with Shahibu taught me many things. From him I learned the fundamental truths and values of life. Like the lion, the giraffe, the fever tree and the ochre warrior, Shahibu belonged to Africa. At one with him, I was at one with Africa, an experience which never repeated itself in sheer physical intensity. Making love to him, I felt, was making love to Africa. This was my love affair with Africa. What did Karen Blixen know about this, I wondered. And then one day many years later, long after we had gone our separate ways, I heard he had contracted Aids. He had abandoned his Muslim teachings and turned to drink after I left him to return to England for the publication of my book. He had hooked up with many white tourist women after me in an attempt to maintain the lifestyle I had introduced him to; he was unable to return to his simple life as a fisherman. He had been contaminated by my life, much like the white man had contaminated Africa. He never recovered and finally died of Aids in his village. He was thirty-five years old. VANISHING AFRICA 2 of 2    <--- previous FOREWARD | IN THE BEGINNING | VANISHING AFRICA | IN THE BOSOM OF MY FAMILY