City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism (8 page)

Technology was on the march. In the 1950s, IBM launched its Fortran computer programming language. But the Russians made the biggest splash, firing their Sputnik satellite into orbit. That kicked off a space race and, a decade later, Americans were bounding on the surface of the moon.

Imagine, then, the surprises that greeted George Chapman when he arrived in Dubai in 1951. Chapman, an Englishman, soldiered in India during World War II and returned to Britain after the war. There, he found life gray and boring. England’s colonial empire was in collapse and the battered country focused on rebuilding itself. Chapman dreamed of returning to the East, where the days were bright and freighted with adventure. He couldn’t go back to India. The country was off-limits to Brits since having gained independence in 1947. But the company Chapman
interviewed with, a shipping firm called Gray Mackenzie, had an opening in Dubai. Chapman was in his twenties. He decided Dubai—a place he’d never heard of—sounded better than the dreary confines of London.

He sailed from England to Bahrain, where he transferred to an India-based steamship that hopped between the major towns in the Gulf. The ship was too big to land in Dubai, so it parked off neighboring Sharjah and hoisted its cargo of rice to a wooden sailing dhow. Chapman rode to the beach on the dhow, lying on a sack of rice until the dhow ground itself onto the sand and Chapman, a wiry red-haired man full of energy, leaped ashore. It was dark. He could see nothing beyond the beach and the sea and the few men around him.

An Englishman named John Hoffman collected Chapman in his Land Rover, the first such four-wheel drive in the Trucial Coast, where most travel was still done by camel or sailboat. Hoffman took Chapman bouncing over the empty dunes between Sharjah and Dubai. At some point that wasn’t marked by anything to see, Hoffman welcomed Chapman to Dubai.

Lurching into Dubai village, Chapman could see the orange light of kerosene lamps. The flickering glow revealed the ragged outlines of palm-thatch
barasti
shacks and adobe houses sprouting vents like oversized chimneys. Men in beards and rough turbans led camels through the sandy lanes. The air smelled of smoke and dung. Nearing the center of town, squares of bright light in two houses revealed the presence of electric bulbs. One was the oil company headquarters. The other was Chapman’s new home, the creekside office of Gray Mackenzie, known as the Beit Wakeel—the agent’s house.

Dubai in the 1950s was little different from how it was in 1850s. Nearby, Egypt was in the midst of its cinematic golden age. Beirut was a swank destination for the jet set. Iran was delving into nuclear power
¹
while its upper classes washed down caviar with iced vodka.

Dubai, by contrast, sat in darkness. Literally. At night the town gave off so little light that it couldn’t be seen by those aboard a plane flying overhead or a ship passing offshore. This primitive darkness became a problem for Gray Mackenzie. Every two weeks, a steamship called at Dubai. If it arrived at night, the ship’s pilot couldn’t find the town. So Chapman, one of six resident Europeans, had an idea. He climbed the flagpole mounted to the roof of his house and at the top he clamped a
light socket loaded with a 200-watt bulb, the brightest he could find. He fired up his gasoline-powered generator and turned on the beacon whenever a ship was due after dark.

“There were no other lights, no electricity in the place at all,” Chapman says in his Bur Dubai office, as sharp and energetic as ever, but now in his gray-haired eighties.

Chapman’s makeshift lighthouse allowed ships to anchor offshore and shift cargo to a shallow-draft barge. But to reach the town’s wharf, the barge had to find the creek entrance, a tidal wash whose mouth shifted after storms. At night, Chapman would send an
abra
rowboat to the creek mouth and pay the boatman to stand there like a lawn jockey, holding a kerosene lantern to mark the channel.

The town woke up by daylight. Dubai’s creek was as wide as London’s Thames, but far busier. Its turquoise water churned under a cavalcade of zigzagging boats and ships. Wooden dhows, with their upwardly raked prows, still powered themselves with dramatic triangular
lateen
sails, in use in Arabia since the sixth century. Sailors rounding the creek’s S-bends hurriedly pulled down the sail and worked it under the spar. Pilots navigated a thicket of
abras
, the two-oared ferries that carried passengers from one bank to another, with gulls wheeling and shore hands shouting in Farsi, Hindi, and Arabic.

Much of Dubai’s center was a clamorous Arabian souk. Alleys shaded by straw roofs let tiny beams of sunlight poke through the murk. The lanes were too narrow for cars, but donkey carts, camels, and even stray herds of goats could get inside, and it was by all accounts cacophonous. Shop owners sat crosslegged on the ground, offering customers a stool and tea. Men with daggers and rifles wandered, Iranians in their suit jackets and Omanis in their colored scarves. Roguish Bedouin from the desert, overconfident in their ragged cloaks, strutted like they owned the place. The Bedouin were the poorest of them all, but held themselves above town folk.

Butchers hacked at stringy goat carcasses and kicked up cascades of flies. Vendors piled dented cans of sardines and beans into pyramids. Meat scraps sizzled on the grill. Carpenters cobbled furniture from Indian lumber. Halfway down the souk, a bright passageway offered stairs to the creek, where the
abras
sat—just like today—with pilots yelling for passengers to choose a boat. Nearby, men built wooden dhows on the creek bank, sealing their hulls with fish oil.

Even then, Dubai’s merchants were scheming. Edward Henderson, a British oil executive, wrote of meeting a man who unlocked a ramshackle warehouse and showed him hundreds of new bicycles. Henderson scoffed at the possibility that robe-wearing Dubaians would ride bikes in a city without a paved road. The merchant explained Dubai’s budding reexport trade.
²

“My friend, of course I shall not sell them here,” he said. “One or two perhaps. I shall ship them into Pakistan. I got a similar number of Singer sewing machines off my hands in the same way.”

Dubai held only fifteen thousand people in those days, and Chapman reckons 60 percent of them were Iranians. Farsi was the language spoken most. Chapman liked the rough-and-tumble ways of the little port. Rifle shots rang out a few times a day, mostly just Bedouin potshots at sea birds. A stray bullet once flew through Chapman’s window and slammed into his dining room wall.

Life was good at the Beit Wakeel. The house’s generator allowed Chapman to run lights and a fan for a few hours each evening. It would be nearly a decade before Chapman or anyone else in Dubai would know the cooling breeze of an air conditioner—even though more than a million of them had been sold by 1953 in the United States.
³

The house’s toilet was another Western luxury: an oil drum cut in half with a crude wooden seat. Most Dubaians simply squatted over the creek—or above a pit in their yards. Not even the home of Dubai ruler Sheikh Saeed, his son Sheikh Rashid, and baby grandson Sheikh Mohammed had flush toilets. Going to the bathroom in Dubai could be dangerous. Privies were deep, open pits with bricks marking a foothold on either side. But Dubai’s sandy soil does not hold its shape well. Soaked cesspits sometimes caved in. Elderly Dubaians still tell of townspeople buried alive.

Then there was the heat. Despite the arid landscape, Dubai bastes in the sickening heat of the tropics, with smothering air and searing sunshine. It’s uncomfortable five months of the year. In July and August Dubai is a steam bath. It’s 95 degrees at midnight.

Nowadays the city air-conditions everything, even curbside bus
shelters. But before electricity arrived in the early 1960s, there was no escape. Most people took siestas between noon and 4:00 p.m., when businesses closed. Chapman took showers to cool off. He changed his shirt three times a day. But at sundown in Dubai, just as the air begins to cool, a bank of sea mist rolls in and drenches everything. It’s the curse of the Gulf.

“In one minute you’d go from being reasonably comfortable then you were soaking wet. There was no getting out of it,” Chapman says. “In the evening, you’d have a bath or shower and you could never dry yourself.”

Chapman tried sleeping on the roof, like the rest of Dubai. Most houses had sleeping platforms on the roof or in the yard, raised woven mats that could accommodate a family. But Chapman never got used to waking up soaked with dew. Bibiya Sharif, who lived a few houses down from Chapman in Bastakiya, says her family would sleep lined up on their broad verandah overlooking the creek. The older children took turns fanning the little ones to sleep.

In a hot place like Dubai, you learn the value of a cold drink. But almost no one in Dubai had ever seen ice or known the refreshment of an iced drink until an ice plant was built sometime around 1960. Chapman was lucky enough to have a kerosene-powered fridge that he shipped from Australia. It kept things cold, but only produced tiny amounts of ice. Chapman’s was one of perhaps two or three fridges in town.

Sharif ordered a kerosene fridge in the mid-1950s and waited six months for a ship to bring it. She froze bowls of water and distributed ice to neighbors who had never seen it. She showed them how to chip it into shards and jam them down the necks of their clay water jugs. “The neighbors used to kill each other to get at it,” says Sharif, now a vigorous seventy-two and a resident of Dubai’s fashionable Umm Suqeim section.

Until electricity arrived in the 1960s, most people in Dubai cooled water through the time-tested method of evaporation: Water in an earthenware jug or a goatskin would evaporate through the container’s pores, naturally cooling the liquid. Maryam Behnam, an Iranian diplomat who fled to Dubai after the revolution in Iran, collects the old jugs. She wandered her garden one steamy afternoon in May 2008, pointing to orange pots resembling the amphorae of ancient Greece. The jugs bear names according to size and shape, like
jalla
and
quzza
, names that now mean
nothing. Some are decorated with swirled patterns of dots. Behnam spent months in Dubai in the 1950s and 1960s with her family in Bastakiya and remembers the best cooling method was to wrap a clay jug in wet rope, then lower the filled jug into a well, where it would dangle in cool dampness. “After a few hours the water was icy cold,” she says.

To Behnam, who lives in a home jammed with carpets and furniture of her Iranian hometown of Bandar Lengeh, the pots are a reminder of a simpler time, when ladies gathered to sing the Quran, or her personal slave, Jameela, spent hours braiding her hair. “I cling to these old pots when I see them,” she says, caressing a bulbous terra-cotta jug shaped like a Gallo wine bottle.

Some Arab women in Dubai did a curious thing with their hair, caking it in a mixture of mud, henna, and incense and perhaps a bit of dung—at least, that was what Chapman thought. The mixture hardened like a helmet and stayed on for weeks. It was supposed to be good for the hair.

“The ladies used dung for their hair. They would rub big lumps of it in,” Chapman says, roaring with laughter at the memory. “If you passed a
barasti
and looked in you might see someone with their head all covered in dung. Apparently it had good qualities.”

Most people didn’t have soap, so they cleaned themselves with mud. Dubaians considered a special red oxide mud healthy for the scalp and good for hair growth. Problem was, the red mud was tough to rinse out, which wasted water. “It used to be torture, literal torture, to wash the hair,” Behnam says. Most people washed their hair once or twice a month. She bathed in a room with a floor drain, using a basin of water drawn from a ceramic urn. Slaves kept bathrooms stocked with water.

Drinking water was a big problem. It was easy enough to dig a well and find water, but most of it was salty. In the 1950s, the town had only a few wells with passable water. One was in Bur Dubai under a tree where the Astoria Hotel now stands. Another few sat near today’s Ramada Continental Hotel in Deira. Vendors loaded well water into drums, which they carried around town on donkey carts, selling it by the large tin measure. Chapman found it undrinkable, even for tea. He imported
barrels of Tigris River water from Iraq. He would unload a few drums for the sheikh and one for himself.

When a ship came in, thirsty men sometimes stormed the vessel, climbing the mooring ropes to get aboard and steal a precious drink of clean water. Chapman saw several fights, with crew members bludgeoning water-mad Dubaians with wrenches.

In the 1950s, if you wanted a bottle of whiskey or gin, you went to see Chapman, the only liquor vendor in town. He kept his hoard in a primitive storeroom under padlock and chain. Dubaians needed a license to buy drink, as is the case today. In those days the British political agent approved liquor permits, denying those with Muslim names. In the early 1950s, only twelve people in Dubai were licensed drinkers.

“People would come to me at midnight on Thursday. I’d go down and laboriously undo the chain. I’d sell them a bottle of whiskey for two-and-a-half rupees,” Chapman says with a laugh. “There wasn’t much money in it.” But liquor helped build Dubai. Sheikh Rashid was cobbling together a municipal government in the 1950s and needed revenue to pay salaries. His representative asked Chapman to agree to a 10 percent tax. “That’s a bad idea,” the Englishman replied. But he soon changed his mind and started sending the authorities 80 rupees a month. It was a pittance, but enough to fund one low-level salary. “We paid the wages for the first clerk in the municipality,” Chapman says. Liquor still funds Dubai’s government, but the tax has risen to 30 percent.

In 1950, 130 years after the British arrived, Western medicine finally reached Dubai in the form of the Al Maktoum Hospital. The tiny clinic sat in a fenced compound surrounded by dunes and gnarled scrub. Local Arab women refused to give birth there. Rumors said the doctor would cut open stomachs to take out the baby. Arabs bore children at home with help from an elderly midwife who was nearly blind. Infant mortality rates—and hygiene—were appalling.