The Return of Eva Perón, With the Killings in Trinidad

by V. S. Naipaul

  Mobutism, Elima suggests, will combat this “mental plague.” But it is no secret that, in spite of its talk of “man,” in spite of its lilting national anthem called the Zairoise (“Paix, justice et travail”), Mobutism honors only one man: the chief, the king. He alone has to be feared and loved. How—away from this worship—does a new attitude to life and society begin? Recently in Kinshasa a number of people were arrested for some reason and taken to Makala Jail: lavatoryless concrete blocks behind a whitewashed wall, marked near the gateway DISCIPLINE AVANT TOUT. The people arrested couldn’t fit easily into the cell, and a Land-Rover was used to close the door. In the morning many were found crushed or suffocated.

  Not cruelty, just thoughtlessness: the visitor has to learn to accommodate himself to Zaire. The presidential domain at Nsele (where Muhammad Ali trained) is such a waste, at once extravagant and shoddy, with its overfurnished air-conditioned bungalows, its vast meeting halls, its VIP lounges (carpets, a fussiness of fringed Dralon, African art debased to furniture decoration). But Nsele can be looked at in another way. It speaks of the African need for African style and luxury; it speaks of the great African wound. The wound explains the harrassment of foreign settlers, the nationalizations. But the nationalizations are petty and bogus; they have often turned out to be a form of pillage and are part of no creative plan; they are as shortsighted, self-wounding and nihilistic as they appear, a dismantling of what remains of the Belgian-created state. So the visitor swings from mood to mood, and one reaction cancels out another.

  Where, in Kinshasa, where so many people “shadow” jobs, and so many jobs are artificial and political, part of an artificial administration, where does the sense of responsibility, society, the state, begin? A city of two million, with almost no transport, with*no industries (save for those assembly plants, sited, as in so many “developing” countries, on the road from the airport to the capital), a city detached from the rest of the country, existing only because the Belgians built it and today almost without a point. It doesn’t have to work; it can be allowed to look after itself. Already at night, a more enduring kind of bush life seems to return to central Kinshasa, when the watchmen (who also shadow their jobs: they will protect nothing) bar off their territory, using whatever industrial junk there is to hand, light fires on the broken pavements, cook their little messes and go to sleep. When it is hot the gutters smell; in the rain the streets are flooded. And the unregulated city spreads: meandering black rivulets of filth in unpaved alleys, middens beside the highways, children, discarded motorcar tires, a multitude of little stalls, and everywhere, in free spaces, plantings of sugar cane and maize: subsistence agriculture in the town, a remnant of bush life.

  But at the end of one highway there is the university. It is said to have gone down. But the students are bright and friendly. They have come from the bush, but already they can talk of Stendhal and Fanon; they have the enthusiasm of people to whom everything is new; and they feel, too, that with the economic collapse of the West (of which the newspapers talk every day) the tide is running Africa’s way. The enthusiasm deserves a better-equipped country. It seems possible that many of these students, awakening to ideas, history, a knowledge of injustice and a sense of their own dignity, will find themselves unsupported by their society, and can only awaken to pain. But no. For most there will be jobs in the government; and already they are Mobutists to a man. Already the African way ahead is known; already inquiry is restricted; and Mobutu himself has warned that the most alienated people in Zaire are the intellectuals.

  So Mobutism simplifies the world, the concept of responsibility and the state, and simplifies people. Zaire’s accession to power and glory has been made to appear so easy; the plundering of the inherited Belgian state has been so easy, the confiscations and nationalizations, the distribution of big shadow jobs. Creativity itself now begins to appear as something that might be looted, brought into being by decree.

  Zaire has her music and dance. To complete her glory, Zaire needs a literature; other African countries have literatures. The trouble, Elima says in a full-page Sunday article, is that far too many people who haven’t written a line and sometimes can’t even speak correctly have been going here and there and passing themselves off as Zairois writers, shaming the country. That will now stop; the bogus literary “circles” will be replaced by official literary “salons”; and they must set to work right away. In two months the president will be going to Paris. The whole world will be watching, and it is important that in these two months a work of Zairois literature be written and published. Other works should be produced for the Lagos festival of Negro arts at the end of the year. And it seems likely, from the tone of the Elima article, that it is Mobutu who has spoken.

  Mobutu speaks all the time. He no longer speaks in French but in Lingala, the local lingua franca, and transistors take his words to the deep bush. He speaks as the chief, and the people listen. They laugh constantly, and they applaud. It has been Mobutu’s brilliant idea to give, the people of Zaire what they have not had and what they have long needed: an African king. The king expresses all the dignity of his people; to possess a king is to share the king’s dignity. The individual’s responsibility—a possible source of despair, in the abjectness of Africa—is lessened. All that is required is obedience, and obedience is easy.

  Mobuto proclaims his simple origins. He is a citoyen like everyone else. And Mama Mobutu, Mobutu’s wife, loves the poor. She runs a center for deprived girls, and they devote themselves to agriculture and to making medallions of the king, which the loyal will wear: there can never be too many images of Mobutu in Zaire. The king’s little magnanimities are cherished by a people little used to magnanimity. Many Zairois will tell you that a hospital steamer now serves the river villages. But it is where Mobutu appears to be most extravagant that he satisfies his people most. The king’s mother is to be honored; and she was a simple woman of Africa. Pilgrimages are announced to places connected with the king’s life; and the disregarded bush of Africa becomes sacred again.

  The newspapers, diluting the language of Fanon and Mao, speak every day of the revolution and the radicalization of the revolution. But this is what the revolution is about: the kingship. In Zaire Mobutu is the news: his speeches, his receptions, the marches de soutien, the new appointments: court news. Actual events are small. The nationalization of a gaudy furniture shop in Kinshasa is big news, as is the revelation that there is no African on the board of a brewery. Anti-revolutionary activity, discovered by the “vigilance” of the people, has to do with crooked vendors in the market, an official using a government vehicle as a night taxi, someone else building a house where he shouldn’t, some drunken members of the youth wing of the party wrecking the party Volkswagen at Kisangani. There is no news in Zaire because there is little new activity. Copper continues to be mined; the big dam at Inga continues to be built. Airports are being extended or constructed everywhere, but this doesn’t mean that Air Zaire is booming: it is for the better policing of the country.

  What looked obvious on the first day, but was then blurred by the reasonable-sounding words, turns out to be true. The kingship of Mobutu has become its own end. The inherited modern state is being dismantled, but it isn’t important that the state should work. The bush works; the bush has always been self-sufficient. The administration, now the court, is something imposed, something unconnected with the true life of the country. The ideas of responsibility, the state and creativity are ideas brought by the visitor; they do not correspond, for all the mimicry of language, to African aspirations.

  Mobutu’s peace and his kingship are great achievements. But the kingship is sterile. The cult of the king already swamps the intellectual advance of a people who have barely emerged. The intellectual confusions of authenticity, that now give such an illusion of power, close up the world again and point to a future greater despair. Mobutu’s power will inevitably be extinguished; but there can now be no going back on the principl
es of Mobutism. Mobutu has established the pattern for his successors; and they will find that African dependence is not less than it is now, nor the need for nihilistic assertion.

  To arrive at this sense of a country trapped and static, eternally vulnerable, is to begin to have something of the African sense of the void. It is to begin to fall, in the African way, into a dream of a past—the vacancy of river and forest, the hut in the brown yard, the dugout—when the dead ancestors watched and protected, and the enemies were only men.

  Conrad’s

  Darkness

  July 1974

  IT HAS TAKEN me a long time to come round to Conrad. And if I begin with an account of his difficulty, it is because I have to be true to my experience of him. I would find it hard to be detached about Conrad. He was, I suppose, the first modern writer I was introduced to. It was through my father. My father was a self-taught man, picking his way through a cultural confusion of which he was perhaps hardly aware and which I have only recently begun to understand; and he wished himself to be a writer. He read less for pleasure than for clues, hints and encouragement; and he introduced me to those writers he had come upon in his own search. Conrad was one of the earliest of these: Conrad the stylist, but more than that, Conrad the late starter, holding out hope to those who didn’t seem to be starting at all.

  I believe I was ten when Conrad was first read to me. It sounds alarming; but the story was “The Lagoon”; and the reading was a success. “The Lagoon” is perhaps the only story of Conrad’s that can be read to a child. It is very short, about fifteen pages. A forest-lined tropical river at dusk. The white man in the boat says, “We’ll spend the night in Arsat’s clearing.” The boat swings into a creek; the creek opens out into a lagoon. A lonely house on the shore; inside, a woman is dying. And during the night Arsat, the young man who is her lover, will tell how they both came there. It is a story of illicit love in another place, an abduction, a chase, the death of a brother, abandoned to the pursuers. What Arsat has to say should take no more than fifteen minutes; but romance is romance, and when Arsat’s story ends the dawn comes up; the early-morning breeze blows away the mist; the woman is dead. Arsat’s happiness, if it existed, has been flawed and brief; and now he will leave the lagoon and go back to his own place, to meet his fate. The white man, too, has to go. And the last picture is of Arsat, alone in his lagoon, looking “beyond the great light of a cloudless day into the darkness of a world of illusions.”

  In time the story of “The Lagoon” became blurred. But the sense of night and solitude and doom stayed with me, grafted, in my fantasy, to the South Sea or tropical island setting of the Sabu and Jon Hall films. I have, unwillingly, looked at “The Lagoon” again. There is a lot of Conrad in it—passion and the abyss, solitude and futility and the world of illusions—and I am not sure now that it isn’t the purest piece of fiction Conrad wrote. The brisk narrative, the precise pictorial writing, the setting of river and hidden lagoon, the nameless white visitor, the story during the night of love and loss, the death at daybreak: everything comes beautifully together. And if I say it is a pure piece of fiction, it is because the story speaks for itself; the writer does not come between his story and the reader.

  “The Lagoon” was parodied by Max Beerbohm in “A Christmas Garland.” Writers’ myths can depend on accidents like that. “The Lagoon,” as it happens, was the first short story Conrad wrote; and though later, when I read the parody, I was able to feel that I was in the know about Conrad, from my own point of view “The Lagoon” had been a cheat. Because I was never to find anything so strong and direct in Conrad again.

  There is a story, “Karain,” written not long after “The Lagoon.” It has the same Malayan setting and, as Conrad acknowledged, a similar motif. Karain, inspired by sudden sexual jealousy, kills the friend whose love quest he had promised to serve; and thereafter Karain is haunted by the ghost of the man he has killed. One day he meets a wise old man, to whom he confesses. The old man exorcises the ghost; and Karain, with the old man as his counsellor, becomes a warrior and a conqueror, a ruler. The old man dies; the ghost of the murdered friend returns to haunt Karain. He is immediately lost; his power and splendor are nothing; he swims out to the white men’s ship and asks them, unbelievers from another world, for help. They give him a charm: a Jubilee sixpence. The charm works; Karain becomes a man again.

  The story is, on the surface, a yarn about native superstition. But to Conrad it is much more; it is profounder, and more wonderful, than “The Lagoon”; and he is determined that its whole meaning should be grasped. All the suggestions that were implicit in “The Lagoon” are now spelled out. The white men have names; they talk, and act as a kind of chorus. So we are asked to contemplate the juxtaposition of two cultures, one open and without belief, one closed and ruled by old magic; one, “on the edge of outer darkness,” exploring the world, one imprisoned in a small part of it. But illusions are illusions, mirage is mirage. Isn’t London itself, the life of its streets, a mirage? “I see it. It is there; it pants, it runs; it rolls; it is strong and alive; it would smash you if you didn’t look out; but I’ll be hanged if it is yet as real to me as the other thing.” So, romantically and somewhat puzzlingly, the story ends.

  The simple yarn is made to carry a lot. It requires a more complex response than the plainer fiction of “The Lagoon.” Sensations—night and solitude and doom—are not enough; the writer wishes to involve us in more than his fantasy; we are required—the chorus or commentary requires us—to stand outside the facts of the story and contemplate the matter. The story has become a kind of parable. Nothing has been rigged, though, because nothing is being proved; only wonder is being awakened.

  In a preface to a later collection of stories Conrad wrote: “The romantic feeling of reality was in me an inborn faculty.” He hadn’t deliberately sought out romantic subjects; they had offered themselves to him:

  I have a natural right to [my subjects] because my past is very much my own. If their course lies out of the beaten path of organized social life, it is, perhaps, because I myself did in a sort break away from it early in obedience to an impulse which must have been very genuine since it has sustained me through all the dangers of disillusion. But that origin of my literary work was very far from giving a larger scope to my imagination. On the contrary, the mere fact of dealing with matters outside the general run of every day experience laid me under the obligation of a more scrupulous fidelity to the truth of my own sensations. The problem was to make unfamiliar things credible. To do that I had to create for them, to reproduce for them, to envelop them in their proper atmosphere of actuality. This was the hardest task of all and the most important, in view of that conscientious rendering of truth in thought and fact which has been always my aim.

  But the truths of that story, “Karain,” are difficult ones. The world of illusions, men as prisoners of their cultures, belief and unbelief: these are truths one has to be ready for, and perhaps half possess already, because the story does not carry them convincingly within itself. The suggestion that the life of London is as much a mirage as the timeless life of the Malayan archipelago is puzzling, because the two-page description of the London streets with which the story ends is too literal: blank faces, hansom cabs, omnibuses, girls “talking vivaciously,” “dirty men … discussing filthily,” a policeman. There isn’t anything in that catalogue that can persuade us that the life described is a mirage. Reality hasn’t fused with the writer’s fantasy. The concept of the mirage has to be applied; it is a matter of words, a disturbing caption to a fairly straight picture.

  I have considered this simple story at some length because it illustrates, in little, the difficulties I was to have with the major works. I felt with Conrad I wasn’t getting the point. Stories, simple in themselves, always seemed at some stage to elude me. And there were the words, the words that issued out of the writer’s need to be faithful to the truth of his own sensations. The words got in the way; they obs
cured. The Nigger of the Narcissus and Typhoon, famous books, were impenetrable.

  In 1896 the young H. G. Wells, in an otherwise kind review of An Outcast of the Islands, the book before The Nigger, wrote: “Mr Conrad is wordy; his story is not so much told as seen intermittently through a haze of sentences. He has still to learn the great half of his art, the art of leaving things unwritten.” Conrad wrote a friendly letter to Wells; but on the same day—the story is in Jocelyn Baines’s biography—he wrote to Edward Garnett: “Something brings the impression off—makes its effect. What? It can be nothing but the expression—the arrangement of words, the style.” It is, for a novelist, an astonishing definition of style. Because style in the novel, and perhaps in all prose, is more than an “arrangement of words”: it is an arrangement, even an orchestration, of perceptions, it is a matter of knowing where to put what. But Conrad aimed at fidelity. Fidelity required him to be explicit.

  It is this explicitness, this unwillingness to let the story speak for itself, this anxiety to draw all the mystery out of a straightforward situation, that leads to the mystification of Lord Jim. It isn’t always easy to know what is being explained. The story is usually held to be about honour. I feel myself that it is about the theme—much more delicate in 1900 than today—of the racial straggler. And, such is Conrad’s explicitness, both points of view can be supported by quotation.Lord Jim, however, is an imperialist book, and it may be that the two points of view are really one.