I had seen this sort of thing done a thousand times in the cinema, but it was a very different thing in real life. I was properly frightened. I did my best not to show it. Then I raised both arms above my head. The bald man smiled. He thought it was a gesture of surrender.
Crack! Crack! Crack! All the guns behind me including the machine-gun opened up and bullets went whistling over our heads. The Germans jumped. They quite literally jumped. Even the bald man jumped. And so did I.
I lowered my hands. ‘There is no way you can get through,’ I said. ‘The first man who tries to go on from here will be shot. If all of you try, then all of you will be shot. Those are my orders. I have enough fire-power in there to stop a regiment.’
There was absolute silence. The bald man lowered his Luger and suddenly his whole attitude changed. He gave me an ugly forced smile and said softly, ‘Vy do you not let us through?’
‘Because we are at war with Germany,’ I said, ‘and you are all of German nationality, therefore you are the enemy.’
‘Vi are civilians,’ he said.
‘Maybe you are,’ I said. ‘But as soon as you get to Portuguese East, you’ll find your way back to the Fatherland and become soldiers. You are not going through.’
Suddenly he grabbed my arm and put his Luger to my chest. Then he raised his voice and screamed to my invisible troops in Swahili, ‘If you try to stop us I am going to shoot your officer!’
What came next happened very suddenly. There was the crack of a single rifle shot fired from the wood and the bald man
who was holding me took the bullet right through his face. It was a horrible sight. The Luger dropped on to the road and the bald man fell dead beside it.
All of us were shaken up, but I managed to pull myself together enough to say, ‘Come on, let us not have any more killings. Turn your vehicles round and follow our lead truck back to town. You will be well treated and the women and children will be allowed to go home.’
The crowd of men turned and walked sullenly back towards their cars.
‘Sergeant!’ I shouted and the Sergeant came out of the forest at the double. ‘Put the dead man in one of the trucks and take it to the head of the convoy,’ I said to him. ‘You go with the front truck and lead them all to the prison camp. I shall bring up the rear in the second truck.’
‘Very well, bwana,’ the Sergeant said.
And that was how we captured the German civilians in Dar es Salaam when the war broke out.
Mdisho of the Mwanumwezi
By the time we had seen the Germans safely into the prison camp and I had made my report, it was nearly midnight. I went off home to get a shower and some sleep. I was tired and dirty and I was feeling very unhappy about the killing of the bald-headed German. The Captain at the barracks had congratulated me and said it was exactly the right thing to do, but that didn’t help.
When I got home, I went straight upstairs and took off my clothes. I took a long shower, then I put on a pair of pyjamas and went downstairs again for a badly needed whisky and soda.
In the living-room I lay back in my armchair sipping the whisky and ruminating upon the strange events of the last thirty-six hours. The whisky felt good and I was slowly beginning to relax as the alcohol got into the blood-stream. Through the wide-open french windows I could hear the Indian Ocean pounding the cliffs below the house and as always when I sat in that chair, I turned my head a little in order to allow my eyes to rest upon my beautiful silver Arab sword that hung on the wall over the door. I nearly dropped my whisky. The sword was gone. The scabbard was still there but the sword itself was not in it.
I had bought my sword about a year before from the Captain of an Arab dhow in Dar es Salaam harbour. This Captain had sailed his old dhow clear across from Muscat to Africa on the north-east monsoon and the journey had taken him thirty-four days. I happened to be down in the harbour when she came sailing in and I gladly accepted the invitation of the Customs Officer to accompany him on board. That is where I found the sword and fell in love with it at first sight and bought it from the Captain on the spot for 500 shillings.
The sword was long and curved and the silver scabbard was wonderfully chased with an intricate design showing various phases in the life of the Prophet. The curved blade was over three feet in length and was as sharp as a well-honed chisel. My friends in Dar es Salaam who knew about such things told me it was almost certainly from the middle of the eighteenth century and should properly be in a museum.
I had carried my treasure back to the house and had handed it to Mdisho. ‘I want you to hang it on the wall over the door,’ I told him. ‘And I shall hold you responsible for seeing that the silver scabbard is always polished and the blade is wiped with an oily rag once a week to prevent it from rusting.’
Mdisho took the sword from me and examined it with reverence. Then he drew the blade from the scabbard and tested the edge with his thumb. ‘Ayee!’ he cried out. ‘What a weapon! I could win a war with this in my hand!’
And now I sat in my armchair in the living-room with my whisky, staring appalled at the empty scabbard.
‘Mdisho!’ I shouted. ‘Come here! Where is my sword?’ There was no answer. He was probably in bed. I got up and went out to the back of the house where the native quarters were. There was a half-moon in the sky and plenty of stars and I could see Piggy the cook squatting outside his hut with one of his wives.
‘Piggy,’ I said, ‘where is Mdisho?’
Piggy was old and wrinkled, and he was very good at making baked potato with crabmeat inside. He stood up when he saw me and his woman disappeared into the shadows.
‘Where is Mdisho?’ I said.
‘Mdisho went away early in the evening, bwana.’
‘Where to?’