A Way in the World

by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

  The hate was in the newspapers, in the parliament, in the compound, in the university. It was open; it was licensed; it brought about no retaliation. Expatriates dealt in it to show their own commitment to the country. Some political people saw it as part of the business of building socialism, and gave it a doctrinal gloss.

  The Asian shops in the capital would have been drab enough with all the regulations about imports and foreign exchange. It didn’t take much to see that in the background there was a further constant plundering of the shopkeepers by officials, important men in the president’s party, blackmailers, and finance houses in England and elsewhere who were being used to get money out of the country. The shopkeepers, Hindu or Muslim, were stoical; this was the gift of both religions. They didn’t complain, and they wouldn’t have wanted to do so to outsiders. But the griefs of those shops, dark wooden or concrete boxes that attracted such hate, seemed a world away spiritually from the landscaped grounds of the compound and the even more splendid campus of the new university, which had been built with foreign aid and seemed to speak of foreign approval of what the president did.

  It was well known that in his early political days the president had been helped financially by some people in the Asian community. The president himself sometimes mentioned this when he attended certain ceremonial Asian occasions. I met one of those helpers one day. He was in his sixties, heavy, ill-looking, his active life in the past. He came of a merchant family who had migrated to East Africa at the turn of the century. Unusually, he had not gone into the family business. He was a lawyer. Perhaps because of this Separation from family ways, and his isolation, he had been marked, more than most Indians I had met in India or East Africa, by the racial cruelty of pre-war East Africa. (It was the distorted echo of that cruelty that had in the beginning disturbed me even in the revolutionary compound, in the conventions about houseboys, their uniforms, their quarters.) It had been especially hard for him in the pre-war years, when he had felt himself caught between the humiliations of colonial East Africa and colonial India. After the independence of India he had devoted himself to the East African cause. He had got to know the president when the president was a schoolboy, and already famous, already spoken of as a leader. He had always admired the president; even now he admired him.

  After he had talked of the excesses of the president’s rule—the cruelties in the villages, the harassment of the Asian community, the censorship of the press, the regimentation of the students in the university—the lawyer went back to talking of the qualities he had admired in the president. It was as though, in spite of everything he had said, he had reached a personal point of rest and reconciliation, and had a bright vision of the future. There were three or four British people like that on the compound, not old, and one or two with some family connection with Africa. They loved Africa for the landscape, the peoples, the mysteries of the religion, the animals, the spaces. They could live nowhere else, and they intended to stay, regardless of politics, as long as they were allowed.

  I thought it was to a point of rest like this that the Indian lawyer was taking me, that he was looking to a future beyond the current excesses of the president’s rule.

  I said to him, “But how are you going to spend the next few years?”

  He said with deliberation, “I will be doing everything I can every day to getting every shilling I possess out of the country.”

  The lawyer was not without his family and caste sense for the accumulation of wealth. But he had become far more than a man of his caste. The charitable impulses of his faith—connected with the idea of merit and the good life—had been converted by him into a lifelong political idealism. He knew very well that to do what he had said would be to waste the little life that remained to him. But he was speaking seriously. The situation in the country was just as bad as it appeared, and he was talking out of despair and the knowledge, hard to bear at his age, of his own futility.

  EDUCATION WAS free, and most of the students at the university were the first of their family or village to get higher education. They brought certain village habits to the campus. They could drink with a great, sullen seriousness for two or three days; and many of them did so when they got their monthly allowance from the government. They slept with their room lights on because they didn’t like sleeping in the dark. The students’ residential blocks blazed with electric light throughout the night, and a visitor might have thought that the students of this new African university were working night and day, to catch up.

  In fact, some of the students brought fresh and sharp minds to the university. It was at the university they learned to be dull, through the political training they received: learning about the president’s thought and the principles of his African socialism. It was as though they had been brought from their villages to the university to be re-initiated, retribalized, given new taboos and made narrowly obedient again. At the end the successful ones were fit and ready to serve the president and the state; and this was just as well, because there was for them no other way of earning a livelihood.

  This was the future they had to show themselves worthy of. They learned to walk out in a body during lectures given by visitors. Few of them could say why; all they knew was that the leader of their group had given a signal. This walking out on foreign lecturers was a form of aggression that got talked about by expatriates, and it appeared to corroborate an idea the tyranny promoted about itself: the country was moving fast under the president, but not fast enough for the students, who were getting impatient and angry, and pushing the president, almost against his will, into more revolutionary postures.

  The students constantly demonstrated. They demonstrated against South Africa and Rhodesia. They demonstrated against those African countries whose rulers were critical of the president. And more and more now they demonstrated against the local Asian community for sending money abroad and sucking the country dry. The government newspaper reported these demonstrations and at the same time ran editorials asking the students to show restraint; though I felt sometimes that the newspaper was reporting demonstrations that hadn’t taken place.

  Two or three years before, the president had invited a famous Hungarian economist down from London to advise on the socialist restructuring and unifying of the half colonial, half informal-African economy. Now the rumour began to go around that another foreign adviser was coming to look at ways of controlling the flow of money out of the country. Whenever he did radical or difficult things, or extended his own powers, the president didn’t like to appear to be acting on his own. He liked it to appear that he was only following good socialist precedent, and taking the advice of reputable people from reputable countries.

  Richard stopped me on a path in the compound one day. He said with his seeming smile, “Do you know a man called Blair? He’s coming here, to keep us all in order.”

  I could tell from Richard’s tone and the brightness in his eye that he was talking of the president’s new adviser.

  He bit on his empty ivory cigarette-holder, flipping it up and down and then up again. “He’s from your part of the world. The story is he went to school with you. Used to be a minister. Now is a kind of roving ambassador. Soon you’ll have no secrets.”

  And of course now I knew the name. Blair and I hadn’t gone to school together—that part of the story had been garbled. But his name was a name from the beginning of my adult life: for some months in 1949 we had both worked in a government department in the Red House in Port of Spain. I was playing at being a civil servant; he was entirely serious.

  I was an acting second-class clerk, a copyist, filling in time and earning a little money before going to England and Oxford on the scholarship I had won. He was a new senior clerk in the department, a tall and grave black man who had made his way up. He sometimes came and sat beside me at my table at the end of a morning or afternoon, to check and initial the certificates I had written out.

  He was more than ten years older than I, and in
Trinidad that difference in age was important. It meant he had been born in a darker time. His education hadn’t been as straightforward as mine. He came from a poor family in a far-off country area and he had made a late start. That late start had put him at a disadvantage in the educational system. He had had to go to rough elementary schools and then to “private” high schools run by people with the barest qualifications. He would always have been too old for the better schools, and he would never have had the clear vision of a way ahead that had been given to me at an early stage: elementary school, exhibition to a secondary school, scholarship to a university abroad. He would have always had to feel his way. And when, after all of this, he had entered the government service, just before the war, his prospects were still limited; the senior posts were reserved for English people.

  That had changed. He wasn’t thirty, but he was already a senior clerk, higher in the service than he could have imagined when he entered it. He intended to rise further: it was known that he was studying for an external London degree. And yet in the office I was seen as the man with the real future: Oxford, and a career in the wider world. Blair himself seemed to think so. He might have felt that in other circumstances his chances might have been more like mine, but he showed me no grudge. In Trinidad in the 1940s—before the full postwar opening up of the world for people, and while the society was still colonial—scholarship-winners received a special admiration; they were admired almost as much as cricketers. Blair offered me this admiration.

  And then over the years things had evened out for us. My life abroad, so brilliant to think about in the Red House in Port of Spain, had turned out to be hard and mean. My career had taken many years to get started. I had had to learn to write from scratch, almost in the way a man has to learn to walk and use his body again after a serious operation. And even then after ten years I couldn’t feel secure, worrying always about finding matter for the next book, and then the one after that.

  Whereas for Blair the world, so constricting when he had started, was soon to change dramatically. Even before I had published my first book, the new liberating politics of a Trinidad soon to be independent had come—with constant night meetings, like religious occasions, in the old British-Spanish colonial square next to the Red House—and Blair had been swept up to the heights, swept out of that government department where I had got to know him, swept out of that kind of government employment altogether, and into ministerial office: travel, ambassadorships, United Nations postings, and now this job for the president, reporting on the outflow of money. He had been born at the right time, after all.

  “SOON YOU’LL have no secrets,” Richard had said. He didn’t mean anything by that; he was just using words, to appear to be saying more than he had said. It was like his fixed smile, which wasn’t a smile at all. But this time he had drawn a little blood: he would have noticed that I was embarrassed by his news.

  I hadn’t met Blair since 1950, and I didn’t want to meet him now. I didn’t like the politics he had gone into. The almost religious exaltation of the early days of the black movement had given way very quickly to the simplest kind of racial politics. In Trinidad that meant anti-Indian politics and constant anti-Indian agitation; it was how the vote of the African majority was to be secured. Though I was no longer living in Trinidad, I was affected. I found when I met people I had known there, even people I had gone to school with, that the racial question couldn’t be ignored. There was a self-consciousness on both sides, a new falsity. And I found, with every visit I made to Trinidad, that I was more and more cut off from the past.

  The politics that supported Blair’s career were more than politics to me, and I didn’t like to think of him coming here, to this African country which thought of itself as revolutionary, to unsettle things further. I had got used to the unnatural-ness of compound life, with its semi-colonial formalities. The local Asian community, with a sense of clan and caste far stronger than anything we knew in Trinidad, never saw me as one of themselves, and I had found ways, as a man on my own, of detaching myself from the racial undercurrents of the place. I felt that with Blair here all that was going to change.

  I couldn’t say that I had really got to know Blair in 1949. I was very young, seventeen. I never met him outside the office, and in the office he revealed little of himself. He was a big man but he moved quietly, without disturbance, as though he didn’t want to draw attention to himself. His handwriting was very small and neat; it spoke of confidence, method, ambition. He was formal and always controlled. His thoughts often seemed far away, and I thought this was because of the studies he was doing at home for the London external degree. He didn’t drink with the others on pay-day after the office doors had been closed. He didn’t hang around after work. He wheeled his bicycle out of the bicycle-rack, lifted it down the Red House steps, and was off.

  He was considered an exemplary man and everyone in the office respected him. His correctness seemed to be part of his character, and the correctness was something he got from his background, which was special. He came from an all-African village community in the north-east of the island. For various reasons—remoteness, bad roads, the “witch-broom” blight that had destroyed cocoa estates, the Depression—the community had kept its separateness for some generations, and in the wreckage of the old estates they had developed a kind of gentle pastoral life. They were self-possessed and calm, without the scratchiness of black people elsewhere. They were famous for their honesty, their unlocked front doors, and they had good manners. They said “Good morning” or “Good afternoon” to strangers and expected to be greeted in the same way. They never spoke of a date to come without adding “please God”: “Next month, please God,” “Next Friday, please God.” They were slow, but they were thought of as good people and were liked for that reason.

  Blair would have been one of the first of the community to be educated, and the strange thing was that he seemed to come perfectly equipped for a civil service career. I used to think, being just out of school myself, and considering Blair’s correctness in the office, that the manners and attitudes of Blair’s slow, pastoral community had given him the demeanour of a school prefect, a head boy: someone subordinate, but on the side of authority. He had joined the civil service in the colonial time; he would have been ready then (like some of the older clerks) for a life of subordination; and in those early years he would have been just as correct as he was when I knew him, a newly appointed senior clerk for whom the world was opening up. Buried or submerged below the man I knew in 1949, and the later politician whom I didn’t know, was this calmer man from another age who wanted only to make his peace with the world and was willing to settle for what he could get.

  I don’t think Blair would have liked to be reminded of this earlier man. Though it would have been his instinctive feeling for authority, his acceptance of it and his sense of where it lay—together with his discovery of racial passion—that had pushed him into politics and kept him always close to power, while others came and went. His correctness didn’t leave him in his new career; he was trusted by his superiors and looked up to by others. The stories that were spread of his corruption (and might have been exaggerated) were of a piece with his past: he was the man who arranged things for more important people who wished to keep their noses clean.

  RICHARD HAD appeared to say that he was going to ask me to a dinner he was arranging for Blair. No invitation came, and it was through Moses Lubero, the compound fixer, and my own servant Andrew that I learned about Blair’s arrival. The houseboy whom Lubero assigned to Blair came from Andrew’s tribe and was possibly a close kinsman of Andrew’s. He hadn’t worked in the compound before, and Lubero had to get a permit for him to leave his village and come to work in the town. The place was full of regulations like this, which meant that at every stage there were people who had to get a little money.

  The new houseboy looked like Andrew, I thought, but was younger and smaller. He didn’t wear houseboy whites, like Lubero;
he followed Andrew and wore flared blue jeans. The jeans he wore were a little too big for him (they might have been Andrew’s) and he had to have big turn-ups. For a week or so he spent much time with Andrew in the small bungalow kitchen (getting crowded, with the driver there as well) and I believe Andrew was teaching him how to cook and generally do things. One morning I saw the new man go to a hibiscus shrub outside the bungalow and very carefully cut and strip a little twig. Andrew would have sent him out to do that and was no doubt keeping an eye on him at that moment: at lunchtime I saw two sections of the very twig sharpened to a point and stuck on either side of a piece of boiled corn. So I knew that one day soon Blair would come back to his bungalow or apartment from his discussions in the Ministry of Finance or wherever and start his lunch with boiled corn with hibiscus handles.

  At the end of the first month Andrew sold his bicycle to the new man, and Andrew (through Lubero, of course) bought another, better bicycle, which would have made him borrow a little more. So now the new man would come cycling up to my bungalow to be with Andrew. Sometimes he did so in the middle of the morning, and sometimes then Andrew would cycle away with him, no doubt to straighten out some disaster in Blair’s kitchen.

  Houseboys were free in the afternoon, and for two or three weeks Andrew and his kinsman spent some of this free time cycling about together in the compound. It was a form of celebration. They were showing off their new bicycles and happiness and style. The new man began to wear Andrew’s white-rimmed plastic shades. They were small for him, too, and the arms sloped high above his ears. Andrew two or three days later began to wear new wrap-round shades; and then, stealing a further march on the new man (who could do nothing to catch up until pay-day), he took to wearing a tie on these afternoon rides.

  They were doing it to be noticed, but when one afternoon I saw them cycling past, Andrew gave a smile, almost a laugh, which was at once an expression of pleasure and a way of saying that he knew the whole thing was quite ridiculous. Then immediately, for the benefit of his kinsman now, he tightened his mouth, looked ahead, and went serious again, and the two of them, very like one another, moved steadily away on the neat black-asphalted road with its whitewashed kerb, below the brilliant orange-and-yellow flowers of the tulip trees planted in colonial days, both of them pumping on the pedals in measured revolutions, the new man sitting on a saddle a little too high and straining to keep his feet on his pedals all the way down: celebrating their happiness and security and luck, Blair’s houseboy and mine, in the landscaped grounds of the compound which was like an echo of the oilfield compounds in Trinidad which both Blair and I had known only from the other side of the fence in 1949, when we were both at hopeful moments of our life, and when we felt that the world was beginning to change, though we could never then have seen the changes that were going to bring us here, to an African country that to us at the time was only a name.