A Stranger at My Table. Ivo de Figueiredo

      This is Dad. A boy with a wide, open gaze and the whole world running through his young body. In this he resembles his birthplace Stone Town, the city of stone that occupies the natural peninsula in West Zanzibar. With the ocean on both sides, it looks across the island in one direction and the African mainland in the other. It is a city crammed with churches, with Hindu temples and mosques, yet its silhouette is not dominated by showy spires or minarets, but by the simple, whitewashed houses that lie cheek by jowl, forming a labyrinth of alleys and squares. The effect from a distance is of absolute unity and harmony, despite the fact that the architecture here is so diverse, influenced by the Swahilis, the Portuguese, the Arabs, the Indians and British in that order. Only upon entering the city can you see the contribution each ethnic group has made; from the elegantly carved doors, originally Swahili but elaborated upon later by Arab and Indian craftsmen, to the once unadorned outside walls, now graced with decorative balconies, a sure sign that a house belonged to an Indian merchant.

      A unique place in the world, Zanzibar also is the whole world in one place, and this was even truer in Dad’s time. The slaves were long gone, and European explorers no longer came here to prepare for their daring expeditions into the heart of Africa. But in and between these houses people of every shade of brown and black, and a few whites, lived out their lives. In the narrow alleyways, in the fruit market and the bazaars, there were coffee merchants who walked along clanking their bowls, women in black with their faces covered, majestic Ceylonese merchants in white robes and hair tied up in a knot, distinguished Arabs, and African porters who came running up from the harbor carrying cases and bags suspended from long bamboo canes. A few years earlier you might have encountered the sultan himself, reclining on soft cushions in an ornate sedan chair, surrounded by servants in livery, sedan carriers and runners, yelling, “Make way! Make way!” Nowadays the sultan sat in the back seat of a large, black car. When it appeared on one of the few roads wide enough to take such a vehicle, there was no choice but to stand respectfully aside.

      And everywhere, the fragrance of cloves from the warehouses down by the harbor, newly arrived from Pemba, and from the hamali-carts carrying clove-balls through the streets; with the old women who walked behind them and swept up any cloves that fell onto the ground, sifting them and gathering them in canvas bags as they went.

      One of the small boys who stood aside for the sultan was Dad. Yet despite his having described this to us, I’ve never really given it much thought, never fleshed out the image. Dad and the Sultan of Zanzibar. Sitting in school he could see the ocean through his classroom window. St. Joseph Convent School occupied a large building that was so close to the shore that in storms the waves crashed against its walls. Far beyond the horizon to the northwest, beyond the vast continent of Africa, lay Portugal, Great Britain, Europe. From his desk it was 7,712 km to our Swiss-style chalet in Langesund, Norway. In the opposite direction, a slightly shorter distance away of 4,513 km, lay Saligão in Goa, India, the little village that my great-grandfather Aleixo Mariano de Figueiredo had left in order to seek his fortune in East Africa at the close of the 19th century.

      Dad’s classroom did not face East, but West. Although this almost certainly meant nothing to him. He simply was where he was. After school he played in Victoria Gardens, or ran carefree in shorts and bare feet in the sand. Whenever Dad reminisced about his childhood in Zanzibar, it was this he’d choose to describe. Running in the sand, happy. Always happy.

      I’d sometimes think: If he was so much happier there than he was with us, here at home, why didn’t he just go back?

      Occasionally, passenger boats would arrive in Zanzibar harbor packed with tourists. For Europeans, the island seemed plucked out of A Thousand and One Nights. To wander through Stone Town was for them like stepping into an exotic paradise of their own imagining. In reality, the town was neither as exotic nor as old as visitors might believe. The buildings might give the impression of being centuries old, but most were erected in the last half of the 19th century. It was its decay that gave the city its timeless aura. Several of the grander buildings were designed by the British architect, John Sinclair, based on his notions of oriental architecture. The Peace Memorial Museum in Victoria Gardens, Beit el Amani, for example, designed by Sinclair after World War I, has an undeniably oriental air, with its dome and arabesque windows, but it has little to do with the island’s traditions. Sinclair took inspiration from the entire eastern world; a hint of the Arab, a dash of the Byzantine, according to whim. In that sense, Dad grew up like a film-extra in a European orientalist vision, a picturesque dark-skinned urchin running around the streets, the kind of kid whom travel writers described to spice up their books, and tourists were so keen to photograph.

      When they fished out their cameras to snap a picture of Dad, or asked him to pose alongside his playmates, it was because they saw him as an exotic motif.

      But was that how Dad saw himself? Did he see himself mirrored in these European camera lenses as the native? Or did he identify himself with the photographer – with the European? What went through his mind as he saw the tourists board the boat again, chattering away in his own mother tongue, about all the incredible things they’d seen? He would eventually realize what he was; that while the blood in his veins was Indian, many of the thoughts that whirled around in his head were European. And while his skin was dark, it was clad in western clothes. But wasn’t his blood the same – pure and red – just like everybody else’s? Wasn’t he complete and whole? Just like Sinclair’s buildings, an alloy of various cultures and beliefs, similar to everything on this island that had been fused together over the centuries?

      The truth is that my father could feel as whole as he liked, but it was an entirely different matter what other people thought about him; from the farmers in the fields to the British in their offices, or the sultan in his palace. Or indeed, whether the grinding wheel of history – which has continually divided peoples and driven them from one land to the next in the hope of a better life or in flight from a worse fate – would even spare a place for someone like him.

      Why didn’t he go back?

      Because his allotted place was repeatedly taken from him. The lawn in Victoria Gardens in Zanzibar where he’d sat with his open gaze. And later, the pink housing block in Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika, and later still the low modernist house in the Goan district of Pangani in Nairobi, Kenya, where he moved before his childhood was spent. Dad had so many homelands, but when the time came and he was living in the Norwegian countryside with my mother and my brothers and me, all these homelands had vanished, were wiped off the map. The only homeland he had left was the land of his forefathers, Goa, on the west coast of India, the village of Saligão, a place he had never seen and knew only in his dreams.

      HE WAS ONCE MY WHOLE WORLD, my horizon, and it never occurred to me that his world was other than mine. I was from Langesund. I was Norwegian and so was Dad, even if he did speak rather oddly and called sausages “pilser” instead of “pølser” and occasionally broke into English. Sometimes he’d be gone for a few days and come home with a suitcase filled with spices and foods. The highlight being when he brought out a packet of papadums and dropped them one by one into a pan of sizzling oil. When they’d puffed up, big and crisp, he shared them out between us as we sat around a steaming pot of curry on the table – but just one half each, since he’d have to go all the way to London to get more.

      Occasionally people would arrive at our house who were most definitely not Norwegian. They’d be standing there suddenly in the kitchen;