Travels with Myself and Another (18 page)

Now R. and W. King again enters my life; I regard that company as guardian angel and owe them, it, undying gratitude. The local manager, a fair slender young man, not at all C.’s type, called on me; very kind, indecisive, solemn. The problem was to rent a car to go farther north, to Waza, the game park, and to the hill villages of the Kirdis. I called on the game warden, large easygoing man whose house looks as if he was moving a collection of secondhand furniture either out or in; it occurs to me that the French do not
live
in these parts of Africa, no matter how long they actually do live here. They do not settle, take trouble, own, beautify; they do not send down roots. They are all going back one day to France.

The game warden had a panther, aged one and a half months, as a kitten. It was adorable, friendly, soft, cuddly, and with a blue eye that warned how dangerous this little house pet was going to become. In his dusty backyard, he has a small private zoo ranging from crocodiles to antelopes. The natives know he loves animals and bring them for sale.

The game warden said he was going to Waza himself tomorrow and would see me there, he sketched out a journey for me, and though I waited hopefully for him to offer me a ride, he did not do so. (C. was an exception.) Though polite and helpful, I doubt if the French are any cosier here than in France; hardly cosy to each other; and never ones to say come and have dinner, or come along on the trip.

January 30:
Half the day spent on acquiring a car. Finally, I had to take what I can get (three are available); a huge Citroën sedan, worth its weight in gold obviously. In the course of this hot and rather muddled dickering, I saw Garua: two short streets of shops and warehouses, and a native village enclosed behind high red adobe walls, with pointed thatched roofs showing above the wall. Very handsome and absolutely off limits. Natives sell vegetables, fruits, odds and ends, alongside this wall. The blacks here are a new kind, and a pleasure; the Fulbé (Fulani) is the predominant tribe; they are Moslems and must have Arab blood, judging from their features. They are a handsome race, with smaller noses and mouths and larger eyes than the coastal blacks. The men wear white, striped or coloured
djellibahs
and skull caps, the women wear a flowing
pagne,
like a sari, in brilliant printed cotton, with a gold ring through one nostril. The clothes that absolutely do not suit the blacks, and degrade them—as bad cheap copies are always degrading—are white western clothes. The only ones who look right in anything belonging to us are the boys and young men, naked except for ragged khaki shorts.

The river here is navigable during the rainy season and Garua is a port; the river is now a wide shallow stream flowing between sandbanks, very picture-book tropics. Peanuts and cotton are shipped from here. I spent some time at the R. and W. King office, listening to the peanut business being transacted. A notable (i.e. rich man) or chief arrives, very large and very stout (are these certain signs of wealth and power?), wearing wonderful garments—one chief looked like a miraculous male bride, in immense white embroidered robes and a beautiful turban, made of a fine white material with white design, which was the size of a pumpkin and intricately wrapped on his head. He had delicate hands, a voice of girlish softness and shyness, a café-au-lait face, and I took him to be about seventy years of age. He was in his forties, a chief and a member of parliament. These gentlemen sat down, in turn, and talked to the R. and W. King manager who adapted his manner to theirs; thus jocose with one, quiet and formal with another; but always in perfect humour and with no sign of impatience, seeming to enjoy the visit and the deal, as they did.

They were discussing the price of peanuts and the amount each notable would guarantee to have delivered to the R. and W. King warehouses. The price seemed to be open to discussion, and the amount (in tons, in what?) equally so. I inferred that these great men got the order; their underlings then went from village to village and collected and delivered the goods. I would like to know what the humble grower got out of the deal, finally; and how the workers (the wives) were rewarded, if at all. For the first time in my life, it occurred to me that there was glamour in business; previously I had only thought business was a dreary way to make money.

The R. and W. King warehouses covered sand dunes, mountains, of fresh shelled peanuts. Impossible to believe; the source of peanut butter, American childhood’s pet fattener. Peanuts look lovely in pale beige drifts like that, and smell lovely too. Blacks were sweeping the peanuts back up into a tighter space. The highest peanut-dune must have been twenty feet high. Being a trader now seems to me a romantic life. One of them told me about buying the pagnes, the printed dress material which comes in a regulation length, so that each dress, or sari, is a completed pattern with a border of solid colour around the design. It is necessary to know what next year’s fashion in pagnes will be. How this can be discovered, I am unable to guess. One year the black ladies will prefer blue to any other shade, or red or purple; it changes. Sometimes birds and leaves, sometimes flowers, sometimes a rather abstract design find more favour. The trader, who is an importer as well as exporter, has to be on his toes to lure the ladies’ fancy. What fun. Buying for Neimann Marcus or Selfridge’s, on the other hand, would seem to me a crashing bore.

I had to send a cable home, giving my future address; I feel that I have been far off and lost for months; you might think I was hiking through really darkest Africa in Livingstone’s time. The post office was crowded, as usual, and the black petty bureaucrats have adopted the French manner in post offices; to wit, nasty. They are just as rude as the French, whom one always wants to murder as they write away with their squeaking pens and pale ink, but they are far less efficient. Somewhere in the post office a white always lurks, tactful and rarely seen, to keep this inferior machinery running at all. The black clerk could not find out in what country London was located. I suggested
Grande Bretagne.
He was angry and said sullenly, “
Mais oui. Londres est très connu.”
Then he began to read slowly down the long long line of microscopic print, the names of all the countries in the world. I wanted to help, impatient, and again harassed by the smell of my black brethren all around me.

The King manager restrained me, with a smile, not a word. The unwritten law is not to offend by impatience, which impatience is the clearest possible way of saying: you are a fool. Impatience is the emotion that comes most easily and is hardest to govern. Also, one must not laugh at incompetence or bone-headedness; one must wait. Finally the clerk located London; it took forty-five minutes to send a cable of ten words.

Turning away from the counter, I nearly fell over a leper who was crouching by me on the floor, one stump of leg bound with a bloody bandage. He raised his hand for alms, a hand without fingers, a ridged stump, half healed, half bleeding. You stick a coin in a ridge, trying not to look or touch. It is tragic and revolting.
“Un lèpre,”
said the King manager.
“Il y en a toujours dans les bureaux de poste.”

By three o’clock in the afternoon, I was ready to go. An R. and W. King driver had produced a friend off the street to be my driver, no one knew him nor knew whether he could drive (we are casual hereabouts). He is a slender, fine-looking, fine-featured, pale brown Fulani youth, wearing a clean apricot-coloured djellibah and a little embroidered round orange cap. No painful body odour, too good to be true. The working of the Citroën, which I also do not know, was explained to him; he drove once round the block with the garage-owner; and we were off.

The road gave out almost immediately and became dust ruts and rocks. It was hot to begin with and got hotter. This is a different kind of heat: dry, and worse. Sweat evaporates quickly, my skin feels as if it were cracking, tight and scalded. After a while, the heat seems to come from inside.

Ibrahim is a good driver and reserved; he sits silent in front and chews a native gum, which he must swallow eventually; I have not seen him spit but occasionally have seen him gnaw off something invisible. I tried to make conversation; having thought he was seventeen, I learn that he is twenty-three, married, and has a child. That is all I can find out about him. I think he speaks very little French, aside from being a non-talker. We eat dust.

I do feel that I am in Africa now, and it is oppressive. The sky is higher here and a very pale blue, cloudless. One cannot see far distances (what am I dreaming of? visions from a mountain top?) but what one sees is arid emptiness, with dead yellow grass and some scrub trees. We pass native villages, walled with adobe or with rush mats, the pointed thatched roofs showing. (Are they walled to keep out wild animals at night?) Natives roam about near them, on the road, across this uninviting country. The adults are half naked, the children naked. From the rear it is impossible to tell a man and woman apart; equally tall, square-shouldered, narrow-hipped, shaved heads. The women wear a dirty dark-coloured sarong, the size of a small bath towel, the men are variously covered. Nose rings now appear; bullet heads, flat noses, big mouths; not Fulanis. The people are very thin, often with swollen bellies. Breasts are soon gone; the old women have perfectly flat pieces of skin hanging on their chests, sometimes there is nothing of a breast except a jutting nipple. Ruptured navels make their ugly bump on all the children’s bellies. Everyone has flat feet; so much for the myth, derived partly from Pocahontas, partly from Isadora Duncan, of bare feet, never cramped by shoes, growing beautiful and high-arched. On the other hand these people can walk on anything without pain and walk endlessly, which is again confusing. Perhaps, as in all else, Africans are different; I don’t recall that the shoeless Chinese peasants were flat-footed.

The children are charming and dark skin always looks more alive and healthier than white but as to features and body, no one could say this is a beautiful race. Still, they give an impression—which I cannot remember anywhere else on my travels—of being at ease, no that’s not right: of taking life by the minute as it comes, without anxiety. What am I trying to say? That, if they have enough to eat, I think they are much better off as they are than they will be if our civilization gets hold of them.

The sunset is red across an immense sky. The little mountains and huge massed boulders of volcanic rock are black against the light. Twinkling fires shine in the villages. Towards Marua, the rocks take on strange shapes—a great ape god, a Buddha—and there is no sound except the car and no one to be seen. I feel that man is a brief event on this continent; no place has ever felt older to me, less touched or affected by the human race. But the blacks and the wild animals belong here. In the mud huts that any rain will wash away, or behind their mat walls that any wind will knock down, the blacks have lasted and know their place in the land, and fit. No one else does; and I doubt if civilization, our kind, ever will.

January 31:
Last night, the R. and W. King young man (again different from my previous guardians; more like a charming Etonian who chose hardship) led me to the local inn; modern bucaroos, very fresh and swank. Brand new too, and I wonder what they are here for. A great pleasure, after that slum in Garua. The burning dry heat of the day is followed by a too cold night; this is not a climate in which you can win. It is also cold in the early morning; gets light at 6.15 a.m.

To note: it takes time, great determination and a lot of money to escape civilization. To note further: there, one is really alone. This has nothing to do with the familiar being alone—lighting on a hotel in a strange city or village in Europe, travelling by oneself, having no friends, working, reading, looking. This is solitude: the difference and distance between me and these blacks is too great to cross; it almost makes one feel blind and deaf, so complete is the isolation.

I bought an assortment (scant and untempting) of tinned foods, for Waza, where you feed yourself, and Ibrahim and I set off. The heat was now on the way to becoming intense, at about 9 a.m. We drove through the usual dust, over the usual road; but the Citroën is a beautifully sprung car and though I do not think its life will be long, it cushions one well. Driving is rather like riding a roller-coaster, hour after hour. Due to heat or dust or something, I am already getting blasé about the remote ancient life of these people in their villages. Nothing about them dismays me except their smell. Otherwise I regard them as right and at home—and a world apart, which I am no more apt to enter than I am apt to enter the domain of wild animals.

Around 1 p.m., we got to the back gate of the Waza game reserve. First sight, inside the park, was two Kirdi women, as tall as very tall men, looking like men except for the extraneous pendulous breasts, tattooed, tending goats. Then we began to see birds and animals; a great flock of crested cranes, all standing in the same way and facing the same direction, like a division at ease. After this, I got my first glimpse of giraffes; everything is not as foreseen. The giraffes here are pale, creamy, scarcely marked, and they move like shadows among the thorn trees. They are very shy and yet inquisitive. Above a thorn tree, a head turns towards the noise of the car; ears out, the large heavily lashed eyes bewildered, the mouth like the toothless old. They look the gentlest of animals and the strangest. Their kick, with the front feet, is apparently fatal, but is only used for self defence. Lions attack young giraffes. Judging from the glimpses I got of them, family life means a lot to giraffes. They have delicious gestures, rubbing their necks tenderly together, seeming to kiss; and the young ones run—in that adorable lolloping way—to Mum, when a noise disturbs them.

There were huge herds of antelope; don’t know their names; some with brown faces, some white and black. Male and female keep company. A family of warthogs, father, mother and three young, galloped across the road with their tails erect as radio antennae. They are very neatly formed and look like much bigger animals, like boar perhaps; except their smooth haunches are like toy horses. Now more giraffe and crushing heat. The animals move in the blazing midday sun to get water. One cannot see far; this is tree and brush country—not jungle, bush—a flat land, with a high pale blue burning sky.