A Way in the World (20 page)

The hotel, one of an international chain, was not very full. The air-conditioning was fierce, and the room I had was damp and musty, with a touch of rust on some bits of unprotected metal. I felt it hadn’t been occupied for some time. Everything was very expensive; the exchange rate was absurd. The bar and lounge and other public rooms were full of plain-clothes policemen in dark glasses, as though, in this already desolate place, their principal function was to catch out visitors.

I eventually got Phyllis’s friend on the telephone. He exclaimed when I gave Phyllis’s name. But then he became nervous; he became even more nervous when he heard where I was staying. He said he would telephone me back.

The hotel was silent. No one raised his voice. And I felt something of that stillness when some days later I went to an embassy lunch. The embassy building was really a government building of the colonial time; and the lunch to which I had been invited—a last-minute guest—was something of a local occasion.

In colonial days the head of the up-country Christian missions paid an annual official visit to the capital, and was received in some style by the governor. The lunch was an adaptation, or relic, of that colonial ceremony. There wasn’t a governor now: there was the ambassador of the former colonial power. And what had been the governor’s house was now the ambassador’s residence. As for the mission stations—the very words came from the turn of the century—they had gone through many transformations even in colonial times. The main station had become a medical centre, a hospital, a general training centre, a polytechnic. Its missionary
associations—which had become more ecumenical—were now underplayed, and the representative who came for the ceremony in the capital was, officially, the principal of the polytechnic. This year, for the first time, the principal was a black man; he was said to be a Baptist. This was the special little drama of the lunch.

We, the early arrivals, sat downstairs, in the loggia, amid the bougainvillaea. Everything had been swept and dusted that morning, but already everything, including the bougainvillaea, was dusty from the desertification. The sand was in the air. It fell fine all the time; it was something you felt below your shoes.

We were waiting for the principal. He was in the building, but he had arrived late, just an hour or so before, and he was upstairs getting ready. There had been some trouble earlier that morning, many kilometres away, with the rope-pulled ferry over some dwindling river. That had delayed him.

When thirty minutes or so later he came down the steps to the patio—from the room he had been given, the room the principal (and, before him, the chief missionary) had always been given—the smell of talcum powder preceded him. He was a big man, brown more than black, with a big, strongly modelled face with great ridges of cheekbones, a big, strong body, and big feet in big shoes. He was in an old and thin dark suit, sepia in patches from sunlight and wear and dry-cleaning fluid. He had been shaving; a dull white bloom—like the desert sand on the bougainvillaea—lay over the chin and cheeks he had been shaving very close.

He talked about the ferry and the bad road and the delay that morning. His words gave me a picture: the flat barge with the old Peugeot car, the shallow river issuing out of swamp, the morning heat-mist, the ferryman pulling on the slack rope or cable looped across the river, the principal standing tall and upright, and then the barge running aground.

The principal said, “Bad roads, primitive ferry. But these are the sacrifices we have to make for the next generation.”

A guest said, not wishing bad things to be said about Africa, “There are wonderful roads over the frontier.”

But that was like bad manners. The principal looked affronted. I thought there was something about his voice and manner and accent.

I said, “Has anyone told you, Principal? You have a West Indian accent.”

He said, with a curious gesture, in which I at once recognized the gestures of many people I knew in my childhood, “I am West Indian.”

His father had studied in London in the 1920s. He had become attracted to the Back-to-Africa views of Marcus Garvey and others; and he had done what many people had talked about but few had actually done. He had come out to West Africa, and had lived there until he died. All these years, this life in Africa!

Our hostess asked, “You would say that’s one reason why the Christian vocation came to you?”

The principal said, “I don’t know. We were Baptists in my family, but the reason why I wanted to go into the church was that when I was at school it seemed the only thing to do. I wanted to be like the men who taught me. The same is true for some black Roman Catholics I know. People of my background. I know an old West Indian man here who became a Roman Catholic priest. I asked him the same question you asked me. Just a few months ago. This old man said to me, ‘What else was there for me? The monastery was the only safe place I could see. And I thought it was nice. I thought they would send me to Ireland.’ That’s true for me too. It may be a vocation. I don’t know. I am a Baptist and a believer. But without colonialism I wouldn’t have had the vocation. I would have been another kind of believer. Let me say that too.”

Somebody said, “You’re talking like your president.”

The principal threw his big shoulders back and made a gesture with his open palms. And it was clear then that he was charged up, that he had come ready to speak for the regime, and ready to take on the criticisms of everyone at the table.

It wasn’t what we were expecting. We were expecting something quieter and more indirect, something that acknowledged the civility of the occasion, not something that imposed the silence of the hotel and the streets on us.

Someone said, “Do they still talk about the chiefs where you are?”

The principal said, “If they do, I haven’t heard it. Lebrun was right. The president was a prisoner of the
cheferie.
They were getting in the way of all his reforms. But the president didn’t know what would happen if he tried to take them on. Lebrun said very simply, ‘Take an axe to the root.’ Do it decisively, and they’ll all run. No more slavery, no more ritual murders, no more killing of wives and servants when a big chief dies. All the superstitions of feudalism wiped out in one blow. All the things that give Africa a bad name. ‘Take an axe to the root.’ I remember how the women and slaves used to run just before a big chief died. Everybody knew about it, but nobody talked about it. And that was exactly how the chiefs ran when the president brought in the people’s courts.” He made a West Indian gesture, to suggest flight, brushing one open palm glancingly off the other. “You were telling me about the good roads and the Lacoste shops and the lovely houses and the beach restaurants with cabarets and
bananes flambés
on the other side of the frontier. But the chiefs are still ruling there. The French are doing the job for them, but it is all for the chiefs. When something happens and the French go away, all of that feudal life will still just be there, waiting to terrorize people. Not here. You have the bad ferry, but you don’t have the chiefs now. The chiefs here used to
say that they spoke for the people. All right. So let them be tried by the people’s courts. That was the president’s idea.”

I wanted to hear more about the people’s courts.

The principal said, “Highest form of democracy.” And he fitted a West Indian gesture to his words: he raised his open palms just above the edge of the table and threw his shoulders far back—as though to make room for the significance of his words. It was like a choreographed movement: a backward sway suddenly arrested: the most elegant of the movements he had been making at the lunch table.

The gift of speech, the beautiful, timed gestures of hands and upper body, the easy dominance of the lunch table: this took me back. It took me back to Lebrun talking in the cramped Lebanese flat in Maida Vale. And I wondered whether Lebrun’s visit here some months before hadn’t revived certain rhythms of speech in the principal.

But perhaps not. Perhaps this gift of speech and movement went back further, had another parentage, I went back in memory to the solicitors’ clerks in the Red House in Port of Spain, searching for property titles in the big bound books of the Registrar-General’s Department. They sat at the mahogany desks in the high jalousied rooms of the Italianate building and they gossiped and gestured in their conspiratorial fashion, like people with secrets. Make-believe, but just a few years later there were to be the meetings in the Victorian colonial square across the street, where ideas of racial redemption were offered as a kind of sacrament. The passions of that sacrament were proving to be unassuageable, and were now beyond control.

This French West African colonial building where I was now, listening to the principal—long table in the arcaded loggia, tablecloth, glasses, flowers, the fine sand and dust gathering slowly on walls and plants and on the tiled floor—was like the one on the other side of the Atlantic where the clerks had gossiped in their spacious search room: Italianate
too, thick walls, with tall jalousied windows hinged at the top, propped open at the bottom just a little way to let in air and light and to give a view of the gardens outside, but to keep out the hot morning sun. Both buildings had been put up at about the same time, just after the turn of the century, at the zenith of empire.

The principal had grown up in Africa. But he had grown up with his father’s story and all the passions, from the other side of the ocean, of the Back-to-Africa movement. In the West Indies his body movements and the rhythms of his speech would have been considered African or black. Here, though, they made him recognizably a man apart.

At the lunch table he continued to talk, holding the attention of all and imposing silence on all: like a theatrical figure with his size and his faded dark suit, the white razor-bloom on his cheeks and chin, and the dusting of talcum powder around his collar: rocking with his big body from the waist up, and making gestures, at times like a dancer’s, with his open palms.

“The president hasn’t put his hand on anybody, whatever the propagandists say from across the frontier. It’s all been done by the people’s courts. They are the guardians of the country. Every street and every city block and every village has its own people’s court. That’s where the chiefs were tried. By their own people, the people who allegedly loved them. You can’t get a higher form of democracy than that.”

And then the principal began to look down at the table, began to go silent, gave up his body dance; and something began to happen to his face. It began to change. Like some actors who, at the end of a performance, continue for some time to have their face set in the role they have just taken, and then, almost visibly, begin to return to themselves, so the principal began to alter. He was like a man beginning to understand the nature of the embassy lunch, beginning to understand the dignity he represented; beginning to under
stand how old attitudes of survival had led him away from that dignity.

He went silent. He looked down at the tablecloth without seeming to see anything. He made no dancer’s movement, no gesture with his palms.

He was supposed to stay some days at the embassy, as his predecessors had done. But the principal didn’t stay. He left in the Peugeot soon after the lunch, and I heard later from my embassy hosts that he never came back. So with the first black principal a little colonial tradition fell away.

MY MEETING
with Phyllis’s friend took place in a café in the main square. It wasn’t easy to arrange. Twice he cried off; and he never wanted to come to the hotel. “Those people there don’t like me,” he said. So when at last we met it was in the old French colonial square. It was run-down, ghostly, with buildings no longer serving the purposes for which they had been built. The café, done in red, with folding red-painted metal chairs at metal tables, was between dingy shops with goods from the communist countries, things like tinned fruit from Vietnam.

In spite of the parked police vans, the area was dangerous with aggressive beggars and cripples and men, still young, who had been deliberately deformed as children. The first time I had gone there I had been mugged, near the newsstand with old newspapers from the communist countries. This had happened in the middle of the morning, coffee time, café-dawdling time. The French colonial square encouraged these ideas, but this was a ghost square: little traffic, no dawdlers. The muggers were a gang of youths and children, apparently beggars, appearing from nowhere, the children suddenly surrounding me and throwing themselves at my feet, turning up to me—as in a famine film clip—pleading, starving, pared-down African faces, plucking at the same time now at my shoe laces, now at my trousers, and appearing
to mimic the gestures of hunger and eating, as they had been trained to do by the beggar-master, going through their routine very fast, to confuse the foreign victim and distract his attention from the bigger and more skilled pickpockets.

But these criminals in the square were the only local people I had seen who behaved like free people. They moved about a lot, and they moved fast, whether whole or crippled, the crippled on wheeled boards, like wider skate-boards, or in little box carts, like home-made toys. They shouted and spoke loudly among themselves, as though they didn’t have to be as quiet as everybody else.

Their apparent leader was a young man both of whose legs had been cut off at mid-thigh. Flat round wooden pads two or three inches thick had been strapped on to the base of his stumps; these pads, more or less the diameter of his stumps, were further cushioned or shod with black discs of rubber or leather. When he walked, these thick stumps were all movement; but each step was small, a child’s step, and the torso above the busy stumps moved very slowly. The malevolence in the face of this half-destroyed man, his contempt for the world, was unsettling; and I wondered whether some religious or magical idea, of the dictator’s, about the powers of deformity wasn’t behind this licensed display in the square.