The Middle Passage

by V. S. Naipaul

  The West Indian colonial situation is unique because the West Indies, in all their racial and social complexity, are so completely a creation of Empire that the withdrawal of Empire is almost without meaning. In such a situation nationalism is the only revitalizing force. I believe that, below the ebullience and bravado, a positive nationalism existed in British Guiana in 1953. This was the achievement of the Jagans and Mr Burnham and their colleagues, and it was destroyed by the suspension of the constitution in that year and – gratuitous humiliation – by the dispatch of troops. Colonial attitudes, so recently overcome, easily reasserted themselves. Under pressure, like the West Indians in London during the Notting Hill riots, the country split into its component parts; and the energy which, already gathered, ought to have gone towards an ordered and overdue social revolution was dissipated in racial rivalry, factional strife and simple fear, creating the confusion which is today more dangerous to Guiana than the alleged plot of 1953.

  It is the waste, the futility which is depressing. For when one thinks of Guiana one thinks of a country whose inadequate resources are strained in every way, a country whose geography imposes on it an administration and a programme of public works out of all proportion to its revenue and population. One thinks of the sea-wall, for ever being breached and repaired; the dikes made of mud for want of money; the dirt roads and their occasional experimental surfacing; the roads that are necessary but not yet made; the decadent railways (‘Three-fourths of the passenger rolling stock,’ says a matter-of-fact little note in the government paper on the Development Programme, ‘is old and nearing the point beyond which further repairs will be impossible’); the three overworked Dakotas and two Grumman seaplanes of British Guiana Airways. And one thinks of the streets of Albouystown, as crowded with children as a schoolyard during recess.

  * * *

  The middle-aged American with the surly rustic face was leaning against one of the gallery pillars of the ramshackle British Guiana Airways building at Atkinson Field. I guessed he was American because of his clothes. The straw hat and tight khaki trousers were distinctive; so were the spectacles. He also carried a camera and was chewing. His baggage lay around him in polythene sacks; whenever he moved he took the sacks with him. The precaution seemed excessive, for there were few people about, and we were all passengers for the Interior: half a dozen diamond prospectors, Doctor Talbot and myself. Dr Talbot was an old Interior ‘hand’ who was never so happy as when he was in the bush, drawing Amerindian teeth. His two or three pieces of baggage were tied with rope; he carried an umbrella – odd with his white panama hat – and a parcel of books which were mainly about doctors.

  We were going to Kamarang, in the south-west, near Mount Roraima, where the boundaries of British Guiana, Brazil and Venezuela meet. Kamarang was an Amerindian reservation which had recently been opened up. You still needed government permission to go there, though; and the prospectors were being allowed only to pass through on their way to the diamond fields.

  The Dakota flew in from the Rupununi, unloaded its cargo of sacked beef, and we went aboard. The American, refusing all assistance from the loader, strung and hung his various parcels and bags about himself and made his way shakily to the aircraft. Then with slow care he unstrung and unhung his parcels, stowed them at the back of the plane, chose a seat, dusted it with a handkerchief, sat down and concentrated on fastening his safety belt, chewing all the while, his deliberateness interrupted by abrupt little pouncing actions, like a man trying to swat a fly after eyeing it for some time.

  Within minutes we had cleared the coastal strip. We flew over Bartica and had a glimpse of the red road to the Potaro goldfields. We saw the innumerable forested islands which choked the Mazaruni River. And then it was forest, and forest. We ceased to look through the small oblong windows and just listened to the noise of the aircraft. The Negro prospector beside me was reading the Georgetown Chronicle. He caught me looking over his shoulder and passed the paper to me. The headline story on the front page was about the chaotic conditions in the Cuyuni mining area. The prospectors there were apparently without a doctor or an administrator and had to depend on the Venezuelan authorities. The story had been given to the Chronicle by a prospector called Agrippa, who was quoted as saying, ‘When a man gets chopped in a fight there is no doctor or police to look for him.’

  As abruptly as on the ride to the Rupununi, the mountains began. But here they were flat-topped, suggesting a plateau that had in parts subsided and crumbled, leaving sheer walls of grey stone like those of a giant’s castle, with neat excisions and neat towers, one quite square, many perfectly round; and down these walls ran thin lines of white water dissolving to spray. ‘Wondrous is this wallstone; broken by fate, the castles have decayed; the work of giants is crumbling.’ The academic text returned, unsummoned, after many years; but the Anglo-Saxon poet was speaking of the abandoned city of Bath, and this was the lost world of Conan Doyle.

  We prepared to land. I returned the Chronicle to its owner, who said, ‘So you remembered it, eh? I am Agrippa. Give the papers the story, man. Don’t play with these things.’

  Bill Seggar, the district commissioner, met us when we got off the plane. Dr Talbot was to spend the night in his house. The American and myself were to share a room in the rest house. Some Amerindian boys took our baggage there, and the American dutifully tipped each of them. While I arranged my parcels the American went out to the veranda; when I left the room he went in. We did not speak.

  The settlement at Kamarang Mouth lies about the airstrip, which is at the confluence of the Kamarang and Mazaruni rivers. From the rest-house veranda the view was of the black glassy Mazaruni just at the foot of the cliff, still water between walls of trees, reflected clearly on one side, darkly on the other, with blue flat-topped Mount Roraima far away at the end of the river. I walked down the cliff to the water’s edge. Three Amerindian girls sat whispering and giggling on a rock, the first smiling Amerindians I saw. Two giggling boys paddled past in a woodskin, which seemed to skid over the smooth dark water. It was like an illustration in a child’s book about children with difficult skills in remote lands.

  Below one of the unfinished wooden houses of the settlement I came upon three of the prospectors who had travelled with us on the plane. One was Indian; the other two were Negroes, one brown, one black. The Indian – I spotted a bottle of yellow peppersauce among his few belongings – was instantly loquacious; the brown Negro also spoke; but the black Negro remained silent and scarcely looked at me. Everyone knows about the prospectors or ‘pork-knockers’ of Guiana, and these men, recognizing me as an informed tourist, behaved like men with a reputation to live up to. The Indian told me he was a diver. I expressed the awe which I felt was expected. ‘Best way for a poor man to make a living,’ the speaking Negro said. The Indian talked about diving. Sometimes, he said, you could stay below water for half a day. ‘It depends on your consecution,’ the speaking Negro said. ‘A man with no consecution will have to come up after half an hour.’ I asked the speaking Negro whether he came from Georgetown. He became embarrassed; he said he came from ‘another territory’. This meant he was a small islander; I did not inquire further. Something flew to one of the rough wooden pillars and rested above my hand: it was a spider, carrying its large white disc of eggs below its abdomen. I said goodbye to the prospectors, while they settled down in their hammocks for the evening, the Mazaruni black below them, Roraima faint in the distance.

  Bill Seggar had invited me to dinner. He had invited the American as well, but the American, muttering something about not using up other people’s rations, had declined; and when I passed the rest house I had a glimpse of him in the kitchen veranda carefully opening tins from one of his polythene sacks. In Bill Seggar’s plain wooden house, well-stocked with books and magazines, and with Amerindian artifacts on the unpainted walls, Dr Talbot was reading. He had already drawn a number of teeth. Seggar called to me from the shower to have a drink. I took a lager from the refriger
ator – everything, I reminded myself guiltily, flown in from the coast – and Dr Talbot explained the Amerindian blowpipe, the black-tipped arrows and the bead-pouches, ‘worn today, alas, under their clothes’. Dr Talbot was a romantic. He distrusted mechanical progress of every sort and regretted the days when a journey to the Interior was indeed a journey to the Interior and not a joy-ride on a Dakota. He didn’t even care for outboard motors; we were going up the Kamarang next morning to the mission station at Paruima, on the Venezuelan border, in the mission launch, and he would have preferred to make the journey on horseback.

  We were joined by the tall, slim Portuguese pilot who on the next day was to fly out the prospectors to the diamond fields, in the cerise-coloured single-engined plane I had seen on the landing strip. The pilot didn’t like the prospectors staying in an Amerindian settlement longer than was necessary, and he told me that Dionysus, the Indian who had spoken to me about diving, had no chance of being taken to the diamond area. The very Dakota that had brought Dionysus from Georgetown had brought a message that he was not to be employed.

  Bill Seggar came out of the shower, and our dinner party was complete when Mr Europe, the Negro dispenser, came over from his dispensary across the landing strip. (Agrippa, Dionysus, Mr Europe: I didn’t believe these Kamarang names.) At Seggar’s large plain wooden table we talked, the bats squawking in the roof, of the problems of Guiana. Mr Europe spoke of race and slavery; he reminded us without rancour, that Amerindians hunted down runaway slaves; and we spoke of Amerindians.

  They told me of the effect of alcohol on the Amerindian: he vividly remembers insults and injustices many years old, which he had forgotten, and becomes homicidal. And I heard of the kanaima, the hired killer, the dread of all Amerindians. The kanaima is a dedicated person; he lives apart; he fasts before a murder, which is carried out in a horrible manner and involves a knotting of the victim’s intestines. The kanaima loses his power if he is ever known. He reveals himself therefore only to his victim. This is why in lonely places Amerindians prefer not to be alone, though even this is not safe, since – who knows? – your companion might be the kanaima. For the Amerindian, however, there is no escape from the kanaima, because kanaima is more than a killer: he is Death. Amerindians never die naturally: they are always killed by kanaima.

  There was a dog at the station, a powerful, beautiful animal that lived in constant terror. It was afraid of the dark, of insects and of every sudden movement. When the pilot and myself left Seggar’s house and made our way by the light of an electric torch to the rest house, the dog walked ahead, always keeping within the wavering light-ray, like an actor edging into an unsteady spotlight. In the rest house the dog rubbed against our legs for reassurance. The lights blinked three times – Seggar’s warning that he was turning off the current – and soon darkness fell over the station, and, with the running down of the motor, silence. Reluctantly, I left the dog; he had been frightened by a beetle and was lying between my feet.

  My American was sleeping under a mosquito net, which he had hung up on hoops and brackets brought in one of his polythene sacks. My bed had no mosquito net and I had only Seggar’s word that there were no mosquitoes. I was about to get into bed when I remembered that during the afternoon the American had opened his bed and examined it thoroughly. This memory of American caution now alarmed me. With unnecessary violence I pulled the bed open; and, creeping about as silently as I could, examined it with my torch.

  At seven in the morning the Paruima boatmen clomped up in their gumboots. The American, dressed, packed, his mosquito net dismantled, was still tying one of his polythene sacks, and he apologized to the boatmen for not being ready: he had got up only at half past six. I too was going on the boat. ‘If I hadda known you was going,’ the American said, speaking to me for the first time, ‘I would a woke you up.’ I jumped out of bed, threw some water over myself in the wash-room, had a cup of Nescafé, lukewarm because of my haste, and ran over to Seggar’s to get Dr Talbot. He was just sitting down to an elaborate breakfast, appeared to be in no hurry, and expressed strong disapproval of the American. I idled down to the river. The American was in the launch, quite alone, surrounded by his polythene sacks. I went back to the rest house and had a cup of cocoa, and then wandered over to the dispensary, where Mr Europe, who was also the postmaster, was dispensing Kamarang postmarks. Agrippa was with him and another prospector, elderly, bespectacled, schoolmasterly, who took out a glass vial and showed me the diamonds a lucky man might get: they were like bits of stone and glass and broken pencil points, and of the size of pencil points.

  At last we were ready. But the boat was leaving from the Kamarang side, and the American had to get out of the launch, where he had steadfastly remained all the while, and, without his parcels, make his way up the hill, across the landing strip and down to the Kamarang bank.

  We started. An Amerindian stood in the bow: later he sat on a paddle across the bow, and never moved. His stillness fascinated me and the fascination was made almost unendurable by the tedium of the boat journey: unchanging noise, unchanging river. For hour after hour I was to see that broad blue-jerseyed back directly in front of me, those unmoving gumboots, those hands pressing on the paddle. I took photographs of him; I sketched him; and I took more photographs. His duty was to warn of obstacles, particularly submerged tree trunks with which the river banks were littered. Either he or we were lucky: for the whole of the day he uttered not a single warning cry.

  The smooth water was black with warm brown undertones; the narrow river, with forest on either side, felt enclosed. Sometimes we passed Amerindians in their boats, fairer and more handsome than the Amerindians of the Rupununi. A moored woodskin or dug-out, and a rough path up the bank worn into brown dirt steps, indicated a home. A low goalpost-like structure made of tree branches marked a camping site. Birds, always in pairs, played about our boat: large grey birds and small ones with blue-black wings and white breasts. Dr Talbot said that when he first went up the Kamarang the grey birds stayed with the boat all the way. Now they flew a hundred yards or more ahead because the Amerindians shot them for sport. And, indeed, an Amerindian came from the stern with a rifle, his friends sighing and chattering with expectation, and the boat slowed down for him to take his position in the bow, in front of the unmoving lookout. He turned and smiled at us. ‘Pay no attention to him,’ Dr Talbot said irritably, turning away. ‘He is only doing it to show off.’

  So I paid no attention and tried instead to make some cocoa, using river water, which Dr Talbot said with almost proprietorial pride was quite pure. The American, who sat behind us, declined briefly: he didn’t want to use other people’s rations. Dr Talbot lost his cup while trying to scoop up some water from the river. However, cold cocoa was made – the river water was, one might say, vin arrosé in colour – and I was lifting my cup to my mouth when I heard the report of the rifle and spilled the cocoa down my shirt and trousers. The Amerindians sighed with disappointment: the bird had not been hit. Attempting to rinse out my cup afterwards, I lost it. At my back I heard the American blowing and sucking at a cup of hot coffee, from the Thermos he had prepared that morning. He was also eating dainty sandwiches from airsealed cellophane packets.

  At midday we stopped at a village which, deflating to one’s pretensions as a traveller, had neat houses of wood and corrugated iron. It was a branch of the Paruima Mission. The American took photographs, and with elaborate deviousness, which attracted a good deal of puzzled interest, attended to certain natural functions. The Amerindians bought cassava bread, white curling discs about two feet wide and half an inch thick, which they handled with extreme casualness, folding it and stuffing it into the corners of baskets. Dr Talbot bought a disc himself; it was brought down to the boat by a very small boy whom it half concealed. I tried a piece. It was hard and coarse, with a sour smell and almost no taste. The blue-jerseyed lookout had some meat between two of these bread boards. Delight was all over his face. He settled down on the paddle; someo
ne passed him an enamel plate of red-spotted rice, and with every mouthful of rice he ate a shard of cassava bread.

  Great brown and grey rocks, great broken boulders, rounded and carved, appeared now on the river banks. Sometimes they were square and huge and cracked: ruins, they seemed, of the fortifications of giants. And on these rocks, on soil just inches deep, the great trees of the forest grew, their roots spreading laterally, so that the soil seemed made of roots and the trees appeared to be growing out of nothing. Many trees had toppled into the river, their green and white and black trunks forming perfect Vs with their reflections, reflections which also created intricate patterns out of broken branches and the occasional isolated bare white stump. Lianas hung on the forest wall like a tangle of white cables, sometimes falling straight and continuing in their reflection. This was not the landscape for the camera: the tropical forest cannot be better suggested than by the steel engravings in the travel books of the last century.

  Presently we were lulled, Dr Talbot read a paperback novel I had never heard of. I took out my book, the Penguin edition of The Immoralist – it served me right, reading out of a sense of duty – and was immediately concerned about the possible impropriety of the title. For Dr Talbot had told me earlier of the prohibitions at the mission, in whose boat we were travelling: no cigarettes, no alcohol, no coffee, no tea, no pepper, no meat, no skin-fish, no singing or whistling of anything except hymns. We had already broken a few rules. The American had been taking coffee and I had steadily been taking whisky to offset the discomfort of my cocoa-damp clothes. I had also been smoking.