The White Father

by Julian Mitchell

  “It didn’t help at all,” Mackenzie told Shrieve afterwards. “They all go to bed pretty early, so the curfew didn’t bother them, and when it came to the system of passes, we just didn’t have enough men to make it work effectively in the bush. As for catching the criminal oafs who started the fires …”

  “No problems like that with my people,” said Shrieve.

  “I dare say not,” said Mackenzie, stroking his jaw. “Your people’s problems start with independence, don’t they? There won’t be any problems for my lot then, because they’ll be running the show. And a pretty fine mess they’ll make of it, too.”

  “One mustn’t be cynical.”

  “It’s hard not to be. It’s all come too soon, Hugh. If we’d only had another ten years we might have brought on enough people to make a success of it. But there just aren’t the capable men yet.”

  It was a common enough complaint, indeed a standard one in all colonies about to become independent. Frequently half-true, it perhaps applied less in Shrieve’s colony than in others. The main tribes had reasonably efficient systems of organisation, and their leaders seemed ready to make the necessary compromises with each other to stop the country splitting apart. The British dictatorship would give way to the dictatorship of the various chiefs and princes in the provinces, while a coalition in the capital tried to maintain some form of loose national unity. Whether the result would be very much worse than what had gone on for eighty years, no one liked to guess. The capital was full of rumours.

  Mackenzie came over several times before Shrieve left, and the Ngulu chiefs seemed reluctantly to accept him, though they were acutely suspicious at first because his jeep was driven by a Luagabu. The notion of independence had reached the Ngulu in a very garbled form, and they believed it would be something like one of their festivals, with banquets and many bottles of Free. It proved impossible to get them to understand more than a glimmering of the true situation. When Shrieve tried patiently to explain that he was going away because their affairs required his presence in the white man’s big city many miles away, they looked cheerfully blank. Their concept of space was as limited as their concept of time, and there was no point in going into detail about aircraft and ships. Though they had seen pictures of the sea, some of them, they didn’t connect it in any way with their river. Shrieve hoped that they wouldn’t forget him in the two or three months he would be away.

  Mackenzie regarded them with the puzzled air of a bachelor uncle thrust suddenly into a children’s game.

  “Odd lot, your blokes,” he said to Shrieve as they went to the bungalow for some tea.

  “They’re all right,” said Shrieve.

  “Oh, don’t get me wrong. They’re charming, charming. But what the hell are they doing in the middle of the twentieth century? They ought to have died out long ago, surely. They’re too damned good to be true. Too good to survive.”

  “All the more reason that their survival should be insisted upon,” said Shrieve, squinting at the porch on which Amy was sitting and fanning herself. She was wearing, he was glad to see, a cotton blouse.

  “Oh, of course.” Mackenzie accepted it as automatically as Shrieve. He didn’t love his tribe, but his sense of duty was quite as strong as the next man’s. “Give me a rundown of all the things I mustn’t do, will you? I don’t want to blunder up against any of their superstitions.”

  “Well, to start with, do you have to bring a Luagabu driver with you? They don’t like the Luagabu.”

  “Not half as much as the Luagabu don’t like them,” said Mackenzie. “But I can’t drive about alone, Hugh, you know that. It’s not safe.”

  It was true. Although no Ngulu could be trusted at the wheel of a jeep, Shrieve always took one with him when he drove to the town. It was so easy to break an axle or get bogged down in a dry river bed. It wasn’t sensible to drive alone.

  “No,” he said, sighing, “I suppose you can’t. But I honestly think that’s going to be your biggest difficulty with them. What else? They don’t eat any kind of mushroom, God knows why. I once asked Amy to cook me a handful of what the guide says is a perfectly safe and particularly delicious species, and she threw that apron thing over her head—or she would have done if it had been big enough—and wouldn’t speak to me for two days. Oh, and don’t waste your time asking them why they do or don’t do a certain thing, because they’ll give you a different answer every time. I’ve been here over a dozen years and I still don’t understand half of what they’re up to. But then neither do they.”

  Amy rose graciously as they arrived and poured out tea. Watching her trying to behave like a white woman, Shrieve wished he had never taught her such garden party tricks. To have done so, he considered, reflected badly on his moral courage. Damn it, he liked her as she was, not giving a gauche imitation of a stage duchess. White visitors could think what they liked. But now it was too late. He had corrupted her.

  Mackenzie was as awkward as she, though, which was some consolation, and he blushed when she called him “My dear” as he left.

  “What’s going to happen to her while you’re away?” he said, the tic jerking away in his cheek.

  “She’s staying, of course, with the children.”

  “You’ve got yourself a real problem there, Hugh, haven’t you?”

  “I dare say I have,” said Shrieve vaguely.

  Mackenzie shrugged and got into his jeep. He liked Hugh Shrieve, but he felt rather sorry for him.

  *

  The spring festival went off with an abundance of good omens, as it always did. So many things could be interpreted as good omens that it was inevitable that there should be plenty. This year, too, the hunting party had returned with three antelopes, an excellent bag, especially as one of the beasts was almost young. The Ngulu used bows and finely sharpened arrows, and most of the art of their hunting lay in the stalking. But this magnificent animal, exclaimed the huntsmen, had been shot at a distance of fifty yards. The hunter responsible would certainly be made a chief at the next election, and many songs were sung about his exceptional feat. He was given the honour of cutting the throat of the sacrificial bull while the six chiefs held it down, and when he raised his bloody hands he was loudly applauded. (To have tied the bull, Shrieve guessed, would have been to remove an important ritual element of struggle.)

  The Ngulu believed that one of the most powerful gods was a huge bull who wandered about somewhere to the north, in the direction of the game reserve. It was because they held this god in such awe that they never drank cows’ milk or ate beef or veal. After the sacrifice, the bull’s carcase was sung around, decorated with reeds, and then taken on a solemn march round the village on the shoulders of the chiefs. Afterwards it was dragged into the long grass and left for hyenas and vultures. The skin was worn for a month by each chief in turn.

  The feast itself always tested Shrieve to the utmost. He didn’t like eating big meals, but he was expected to delight in all the tenderest pieces of antelope, more raw than cooked, and to take large helpings of the many side dishes of vegetables and fruit. There was a particularly nasty Nguluan couscous which he tried unsuccessfully to avoid, and there was a great deal of rough flour over everything which stuck in his teeth. But if the food appalled him, Shrieve enjoyed the stories that were told during the two or three hours of the feast. Anyone could get up and tell any story he liked about gods or men. These tales, like the songs, had their origin in an ancient though frail oral tradition, and because the Ngulu were never very clear about anything the basic themes appeared with many different variations. There was a story of a man and a lion, a story of a woman and a snake, a story of a man and a woman by a river. In all of them the actors were undetermined. You could sing the tale about your neighbour or about the god in whose honour you were feasting. The man with the lion turned up as the huntsman and the antelope: the story of the woman and the snake was told about Khamva’s sister and the bull-god in one of his transformations: the man and the woman by a river b
ecame a young couple by the place where the cattle were watered. It was this free association which made the Ngulu so popular with anthropologists and reduced to despair anyone who tried to record their religious beliefs according to any preconceived formula.

  After the feast there was dancing, which Shrieve watched happily for a while, hoping his digestion wasn’t going to let him down. Later, he would join them for his imitation of a giraffe, always received with acclamation. For the moment he felt definitely queasy. Amy was dancing gleefully in a line of women, with Dayu holding to the tails of her skirt and leaping out of the way when one of her mother’s feet came too close. There were two kinds of dance, the shuffling and the leaping. Shrieve never risked the leaping one, but the shuffle was quite easy. You swayed your hips rhythmically and pushed your feet backwards and forwards or sideways, keeping more or less on the same spot. Then you stopped swaying and did your animal imitation, before returning to the original shuffle. The music came from drums and shrill whistles. The Ngulu hadn’t discovered the art of making stops on their whistles, so the evening was filled with a monotonous piercing noise. Lacking tune and key, the noise was simply noise to European ears, including Shrieve’s, but the rhythms were compulsive and the noise had a literally stunning effect so that the eyes of the dancers became glazed and their movements automatic. Shrieve found the experience unpleasant after an hour, but for that hour he found it magical. The figures leaping and shuffling round a great fire seemed from a distance to take on the living qualities of the animals being imitated, and the drums and whistles were like the howling of hyenas and jackals, with the solemn tread of elephants beneath.

  Shrieve did his imitation of a giraffe, and the children, who stayed up all night during the festivals, laughed uproariously and followed him round the fire in elaborate parody. Exhausted, he flung himself down on the ground, and was immediately hauled to his feet and embraced by one of the chiefs. The Ngulu liked Shrieve, he liked them, everything would be good for the coming six months, omens abounded, and he could now take his formal leave and go to bed. His stomach seemed to have survived the dancing all right. He wouldn’t, he knew, see Amy for several hours, and when she did return she would demand the most vigorous conjugal affection. He retired to his bungalow to rest in preparation for the marathon loving to come. He was, he knew, as happy as he was ever likely to be.

  *

  Several weeks later Shrieve drove (for once alone) to the town from which the mail was sent out and left his jeep in the care of the Indian mechanic who ran the local garage. He expected, he said, to be back in three months. It was mid-June and beginning to be unpleasantly hot: it would be no hardship to spend the high summer in Europe.

  The Indian drove him and his baggage to the rough landing-strip outside the town where an Australian with a small plane ran an irregular service to and from the capital. The journey took three days by jeep, three and a half hours by air: the plane was old, and one day, no doubt, despite the loving attention it received from Garry Varner, it would either refuse to go up or else refuse to stay up. Meanwhile it gave good service.

  Varner was tinkering with it in his makeshift hangar, and he stretched out a large oily hand to welcome Shrieve.

  “Where have you been these last few weeks?” he said, wiping, too late, his hands on a rag.

  “Out in the bush where I belong,” said Shrieve.

  “No one belongs out there,” said Varner. A native of Sydney, he was continually surprised to find himself in Africa, miles from anything approaching a city, and quite content to run a dilapidated aeroplane over miles of scrub and dirt. Carrying the mail and odd passengers and occasional emergency supplies of Free wasn’t what he’d intended to do. He had had dreams of a fortune from modernising the internal transport systems of underdeveloped countries. He had had great ambitions, he had had energy. Now he was a lean man of forty with virtually no hair who fiddled about in an old plane all day long.

  “Come and have a beer,” he said.

  They went to his bungalow and drank several bottles. Shrieve was anxious to reach the capital, but Varner’s plane took off when Varner was ready, and Varner wasn’t usually ready till he had drunk four or five pints.

  “I suppose you’ll still be here when I come back,” said Shrieve as they discussed the future of the colony.

  “Might be, might not. If I don’t get out with the rest I’ll never get out at all, I dare say. Get stuck out here seeing no one all the year round, like you. Don’t know how you can stand it, tell the truth.”

  “I like it.”

  “Oh, balls, man,” said Varner. “No one really likes living a million miles from civilisation. We do it because we don’t know any better, that’s all.”

  “Not at all,” Shrieve protested. “I could easily get myself a job in London if I wanted one.”

  “I’d start looking, then. You won’t be here much longer whether you want to be or not.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I dunno. Go back to the home country, I suppose. I’ve got a bit of money saved up. But the wife made me leave, and she doesn’t want to go back. Maybe we’ll drift up towards Europe.”

  “You could try South America.”

  “I might, at that. But I’m dead scared of those Indians with blow-pipes and all. And those snakes that squeeze you to death. I wouldn’t care to crash in that jungle there. Don’t think I’d get out of that one alive.”

  “Why leave at all?” said Shrieve. “They’ll need you just as much after independence as they do now. Probably more. They’re begging mechanics to stay on, aren’t they? You could probably open a school of aeronautical engineering.”

  “Me?” said Varner. “I don’t even know the names of half the bits in the engine. I have to look them up in the book when I want to order new ones. You can’t run a school just telling people to watch. It’s all in my hands. I couldn’t teach.”

  “Oh, there’s always room for people like you, Garry. As long as you can tie two bits of string together and make them fly you’ll be happy. And there are people everywhere who want cheap local air travel. Why not Arabia, for instance?”

  “Don’t like Ay-rabs,” said Varner promptly. “They don’t treat their women right. Yashmaks and all.”

  “Well what about Thailand? There’s a nice place.”

  “No, it wouldn’t be the same, you know. The wife and I found this place and before we knew where we were we’d been here nearly ten years. So we decided we must like it, though we were blessed if we could see why. Now it’s our bit of bush, and we don’t want to leave it. Let the old natives do what they like, but leave me the pleasure of a little business doing nobody no harm, floating about the bush as the wish takes me. I don’t want to be bloody mucked about.” He glared out at the shimmering afternoon and said, “Have another beer, it’ll do you good.”

  Shrieve, who had had three, declined. “You ought to take a look at the map. There’s still plenty of open space about if you want to be a bushman. Try the Sahara.”

  “They’re unrolling new maps all over Africa,” said Varner with gloomy relish. “Who ever heard of Mali before? And all those places, they’re just empty, they say. A lot of tsetse, two or three donkeys, a pack of camels, and about one person every twenty-five miles. That’s not for me. I’ve grown too fond of my little bit of bush, that’s my trouble.”

  “It’s all our troubles,” said Shrieve. “Look, I would like to get to the capital tonight, if you’ve nothing else on.”

  “There’s plenty of time. The ship’s all ready. You haven’t a lot of baggage, I hope?”

  “A couple of cases—they’re not heavy.”

  “O.K., then. Give me half an hour and I’ll be with you.”

  “Right,” said Shrieve, getting up. “I’ll go and wander round the town a bit. They always expect me to bring home bits of African junk. I’ll go and see what’s available.”

  The town was small—one paved street and several unpaved alleys. In the middle was a bu
ilding in European style which housed the Post Office, the Chamber of Commerce, and the offices of the Administration. Shrieve ambled towards the market area, open stalls and a few shallow holes in the wall which were shops. He bought some trinkets for Aunt Grace’s grandchildren and an elaborately patterned blanket for her. There didn’t seem to be anything that would interest his father. Then he returned to the air-strip and joined Varner in one more beer for the road.

  “Nice day for a ride,” said Varner.

  They climbed into the plane and Varner revved the engine ferociously. Then they rolled to the end of the strip and took off, every strut groaning. They circled the town and headed east for the capital.

  “Bloody radio’s up to mud,” shouted Varner. “I hope we reach the control tower all right. Had to come down once without making contact at all. Furious they were.” He raised his voice still louder and screamed happily, “Bloody furious!”

  The noise was such that Shrieve could nod meaningfully and ignore the generally abusive comments from the cockpit. They flew quite low over the bush, occasional animals fleeing from the roar of the plane. From above it looked almost park-like, the trees well separated from one another and the land mostly flat. But, as Shrieve knew well enough, on the ground it looked quite different. The scrub was everywhere, and you were lucky if you could see more than a few hundred yards ahead. The sun filtered through the trees, leaving large pools of warmth and light, but where there were no trees it blazed mercilessly down as you pushed through the endless long grass.

  After a while they came to a small ridge of hills. With much groaning and grumbling the plane increased altitude, Varner glaring angrily at the instruments and urging the machine on with curses, like an Arab with a mule. Safely across the barrier, they looked down on the wide plain which led to the capital. Shrieve could make out the dusty tracks which appeared on the map as main roads. From above it all looked level and easy, but he knew the reason the journey took three days by jeep was that there were dry river-beds, slow rocky passages and many unexpected detours across the bush where the track had been washed away by the rains. A few clumps of huts indicated villages. This was the area of the Kwahi-Nuaphi, a nomadic people who based themselves on these villages for a month or two, then moved on, the villages remaining for the next group to drift into, like oases in the desert, available to all. What happened when two groups met no one quite knew, but they were basically an amiable people and conflicts were usually resolved without fighting. The Luagabu frontier lay in the small ridge the plane had just crossed. The Kwahi-Nuaphi were less advanced than the Luagabu, but about equal in numbers: they would have an important part to play in the new politics of the country, if only they could be found in the right place at the right time to vote. Their leaders would be at the constitutional conference.