I know what he meant. Flying between international development conferences around the world, or hurrying from one meeting to the next along third-world roads in air-conditioned SUVs, I too often ask myself who it is I’m really helping. I too worry that my work may be perpetuating the very problems that it is supposedly there to solve.
We were seeking purity back then at Shotsford. We saw and loathed the blatant hypocrisy of our own class, its smug self-righteousness, the way it wallowed snout-deep in the trough of privilege even while it flattered itself it was the humble servant of the greater good, and we wanted to root that out from inside ourselves. You couldn’t have it both ways, that was our view, and I think deep down it’s my view still. (Sometimes, I swear, sitting at some middle class dinner table and listening to the conversation move from tongue-clucking at the xenophobia of ordinary English voters, to talk about how to get our kids into the schools where the middle class kids do well, my trigger finger still itches.) You couldn’t call yourself the enemy of capitalism if you remained one of its beneficiaries, that’s what Jules and I felt. You couldn’t be rich and enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
My parents and Jules’ were very comfortably off. They had big cars that purred, and big houses that women from small houses were paid to come in and clean. Self-centred teenagers though we were, we understood our complicity in all of that. We voluntarily attended the school they’d paid for. We bought our drugs and beer with the pocket money they provided. We lay dozing in our beds during the school holidays, while our parents’ cleaners hoovered the rooms around us. We knew the enemy was inside us as much as outside, and it seemed to us that only self-destructive violence was a powerful enough emetic to purge it. What better way was there of finally separating yourself from a thing than making it hate you, having it hunt you down and fling you into its prisons? We hadn’t heard of suicide bombing back then but, if we had, the thoroughness of the method would surely have appealed to us.
Purity was the thing. To destroy and to be pure. Anger is often a selfish emotion, the snarling of a dog that doesn’t want to share its bone, but our anger seemed to us to be selfless, for we would throw away everything to serve it: our futures, our place in society, the pride of our parents, material wealth, the respect of our fellow citizens.
It was mostly narcissism, of course. It was mostly our own oedipal anger, inflated to the size of the world by our adolescent egotism. I’ve seen the same thing in my daughter Jasmine, screaming into the faces of policemen on anti-capitalist marches, and then coming home to upgrade her smartphone and book herself one of those intercontinental holidays that she and her friends dignify as travelling.
•
A few years after the London bombings, I was driving a hired Range Rover across the Republic of Malawi in southern Africa. I’d been visiting a series of projects across the region and was now returning to Lilongwe, the capital, where I had a number of meetings scheduled with senior figures in various NGOs. After several weeks of lodging in sticky rooms with no air conditioning and only intermittent electric power, I was very much looking forward to a few nights in a hotel with regulated temperatures and proper beds before finishing my business in the country and returning to the UK.
The landscape I’d been driving through was flat, and not particular scenic. It was largely denuded of indigenous vegetation, and dotted untidily with sparse dry plots of maize and vegetables, and little clusters of huts, reminding me of a scalp from which the hair has not so much been cut or trimmed as pulled out in clumps. There were people everywhere. From the horizon behind me to the horizon ahead, a steady stream of pedestrians was trudging stoically along the edges of the road, often with bags of charcoal on their heads, or bundles of branches. Evidence of any kind of indigenous economic development was minimal. In the larger settlements I passed through, the most prominent buildings typically housed projects funded by international NGOs – Oxfam, Christian Aid, Médecins sans Frontières – whose logos succeeded one another on the signs by the roadside.
I was finding all this rather depressing. No doubt these projects were appreciated by the people that used them, and no doubt they provided a pretty good living to many people, including me, but the message they gave out was very clear: the people of this country cannot look after themselves. Back in the donor countries the message was the same: pathos-drenched fundraising ads depicted sweet but helpless Africans, waiting for rescue with big brown beseeching eyes. How many local initiatives had been stifled, I wondered, how much inward investment had been lost, by the steady drip-drip-drip of this message over the decades?
I pulled over at a petrol station by a crossroads, asked for my tank to be filled up and bought myself a Coke.
‘Mazungu! Mazungu!’ children called out excitedly, as I climbed out of my car.
I sighed. This is a generic name for white people that’s used across Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya and the whole Great Lakes area. I’m told the word originally meant something like ‘aimless wanderer’ and, at that particular moment, this actually felt about right. I was an aimless wanderer. I knew the road to Lilongwe, and the address of my hotel. I knew the time of my flight back to Heathrow. I knew where to send my expenses form when I got home. But I’d lost all sense of the purpose of my life.
There was a white plastic table outside the petrol station, with white chairs around it of the kind that people sometimes have in their gardens back in England. I took my Coke over there so I could sit down to drink it, and I also took a book I was reading, though I knew this wasn’t the kind of place that a mazungu could expect to be left in peace. The children gathered in a group, about ten yards away from me. There were five of them aged about six or seven, two of whom were carrying baby siblings on their hips, and of course they were all very smiley and sweet. Now they watched me intently, beaming with anticipation, as if they thought I might at any moment grow wings and fly, or take water and turn it into wine. I waved and smiled to them, which made them squeal and laugh, running away for a few yards in pretence of being alarmed, and then creeping back again.
Presently a beggar approached me. He had wild red eyes, wore rags like some kind of mad John the Baptist, and was tightly clutching two live swallows. They dangled from his fist by their wings in a trance of terror and pain, while he waved them angrily in front of my face. Deciding that the birds were hostages rather than objects for sale, I gave him a few pence to take them away somewhere and let them go, and pretended to myself that I didn’t know their wings would be too badly crushed for them to be able to fly.
‘Mazungu! Mazungu!’ the children called out again, completely untroubled either by the beggar in his rags or the suffering of his tiny captives. I waved at them again, and once more they laughed and squealed and ran. We seemed to be playing a sort of reverse version of Grandmother’s Footsteps, in which they ran when I looked at them, and stood still when I didn’t.
Two young men came up to me, both wearing beautifully pressed white shirts and immaculate black trousers, and asked if I minded them joining me. Inwardly I sighed, for over the years I had been approached by many immaculately shirted young men in places like this. After a period of polite conversation, I knew, they would ask for my email address. And then, sometime later, I’d receive courteous requests from them for money, often couched in pious terms: ‘I pray to Almighty God that you will be able to assist me in my hour of need.’ But I couldn’t very well stop them sitting on the seats, so I told them they were welcome, and then opened my book in the hope of discouraging conversation.
‘Excuse me, sir, might I ask if you are from England?’ asked one of the young men, after a few seconds.
I glanced up at him. He was the chunkier one of the two, with big awkward limbs, and cheeks piebald with vitiligo.
‘That’s right,’ I said, and returned to my book.
The little children watched in fascinated silence.
‘God willing, I hope one day to study in England,’ the young man said wistfully.
&nbs
p; I gave way to the inevitable and abandoned my attempt at reading. These young patronage-seekers were never anything other than polite, after all, and you could hardly blame them for trying to find a way out of a country with so little in the way of opportunities. I laid down my book, offered them both my hand, and asked them their names. The chunky one was called Godfrey. His more taciturn and more handsome friend was Joyous.
‘We both of us want to study in England,’ Godfrey went on. ‘Of course it’s very difficult for us, for until we’ve studied, how can we make money? It’s very difficult indeed.’ He sighed. ‘So we just hope that Almighty God will send help, and perhaps a friend in England, who might —’
‘May I ask what your book is about?’ asked Joyous. He seemed irritated by his companion’s fawning.
I handed him the book. It was a popular introduction to the science of climate change, a subject which I’d decided I ought to know more about. Joyous studied the cover for a moment – there was a photo of a crop of wheat that had been killed off by drought – flipped it over to read the back, then opened it at random to sample the contents. He had long lean fingers and I could see that he was an entirely different proposition from his companion: sharp, focused, full of energy, and not in the least deferential.
‘Climate change,’ he said. He had the most beautiful glossy panther-like skin. ‘Yes, I’ve heard of this. The world is getting warmer.’
‘That’s it.’
‘What does the book say about what will happen in this part of Africa?’
I hesitated. Malawi is one of the poorest and most densely populated countries in the world, without the mineral wealth of many African countries, and with precious little in the way of industry. Many villages have no electricity: you drive through them in the night and there are people sitting there in total darkness. Most of the country’s population live by subsistence farming, and almost all of its meagre export income comes from agricultural products like tobacco and tea.
‘The news isn’t good, I’m afraid,’ I said. ‘Global warming would probably mean a lot less rain round here, and a lot less certainty about when the rains will come.’
‘Then we’ll starve,’ Joyous stated flatly.
‘Why does God keep punishing us so much?’ Godfrey murmured. ‘I only wish we knew.’
‘Well, let’s just hope it doesn’t happen,’ I said.
Joyous flicked through pages, pausing to study pictures and diagrams.
‘And what does your book say is the cause of this problem?’ he asked, though it sounded to me as if he already knew.
‘Mainly the burning of oil and coal in the industrialised countries, over the last two centuries.’
I found a graph for him, showing the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere since the industrial revolution in Europe, and the corresponding increase in average temperatures. Joyous laughed.
‘So you people come here from America and Europe to instruct us how to improve our lives, but at the same time you are slowly killing us. Is that correct?’
‘Well, certainly not deliberately, but —’
‘When was it discovered that burning these things would cause this problem?’
Joyous was smiling in the way that some people do when they’re very angry. Godfrey giggled nervously, trying to catch my eye so he could defuse his friend’s alarming hostility.
‘Oh a long time ago. I think it was in —’
‘So, excuse me, sir, I don’t wish to be rude, but why do you say you don’t do it on purpose, if you know quite well what it is you’re doing?’
‘I guess that’s a —’
‘And when we are starving, will your countries apologise, and welcome us in?’
Some chance, I thought! Of course they wouldn’t. Joyous surely knew that as well as I did. On the contrary, the harder things became around the world, the more the relatively well-off would protect their own, the more they would roll out the razor wire, the more they would turn their victims into enemies against whom they must defend themselves.
I looked at my watch, then picked up my Coke bottle to return it to the cashier. People are particular about bottles in Malawi. Moulded glass is too valuable to waste.
‘I think the best thing,’ I said lamely as I stood up, ‘would be if we tried to prevent the problem in the —’
‘Excuse me,’ Joyous interrupted, ‘I can see you need to go, but could you please answer just one more question for me. If you’re killing us on purpose, why shouldn’t we come to your countries and kill you?’
Godfrey gave a shout of appalled laughter. The watching children’s eyes darted anxiously between Joyous’s face and mine. They were no longer smiling. They didn’t understand English, but they could see the tension.
‘Take no notice of my friend, sir,’ said Godfrey, giving Joyous a hearty slap on the back. ‘He’s always playing jokes.’
But that Joyous wasn’t joking could hardly have been more obvious. He was accusing me, just as I once sought to accuse the Shotsford House parents as they purred up the drive in their expensive cars. Joyous’s rage was uncompromised, though, unlike my own adolescent anger. The thing he wanted to fight wasn’t inside him, but truly out there in the world. He had no need to declare war on himself.
As I continued along the road, I wondered if this was a portent of things to come, for when a person has a new idea, they are hardly ever the only one. I felt ashamed, knowing that in the eyes of Joyous, I epitomised precisely the kind of hypocrisy that I myself used to despise. But, more than anything else, I felt envy and grief. Envy for the purity of that young man’s rage. Grief for the fire that Jules and I had sought, but never really found.
Roundabout
Two faces look out from a windscreen: Ralph’s on the passenger side, Eve’s above the wheel. They’re not speaking to each other. In fact they haven’t really spoken for this entire holiday. They’ve exchanged practical information when required, agreed on outings, sorted out meals, but there’s been no communication between them about themselves.
There’s a reason for this, which Ralph knows and Eve doesn’t. All she knows is that Ralph is absent – not unpleasant, not unhelpful, but simply absent – and that this absence is of a new quality. Something or someone beyond her field of view, some powerful gravitational force, is tugging his attention constantly away from her. When she asks Ralph a question and he answers, it’s as if a receptionist has been left in charge of his voice, quite polite most of the time and sometimes positively solicitous – as receptionists can be, when they sense that a caller is becoming annoyed – but never authentically Ralph.
‘There’s something on your mind,’ she says now. ‘Something you’re not telling me.’
He laughs, but it’s a laugh that’s been deliberately chosen from a range of options, as if from a set of dials or sliders: Volume 3, Warmth 1, Nonchalance 10. ‘As I keep saying, it’s just the usual stuff. Work worries. What’s going to be waiting for me when I go back on Monday. All of that.’
‘There’s something else.’
‘I need a weewee,’ says Lily’s voice from the back.
In the parked car, Ralph takes out his phone.
‘Ianthe, it’s me! I had to call. How are you?’ Even the simple word you is magical when he says it to her. ‘It seems so long. So long since I saw you last, so long before I see you again. Two whole days! I’m counting off the hours.’
As he listens to Ianthe’s reply, he peers out through the windscreen at the main entrance of a motorway service station.
‘Yes, I know,’ he says, his face a little crestfallen. ‘I know I must. But I really can’t do it now. Lily’s with us all the time. I’ll talk to Eve when we’re back home. Listen, I’d better go. We only stopped so Eve could take Lily in for a pee. They’ll be out in a minute. I can’t wait to be with you, Ianthe. I… Oh, here they are now. Sorry, my dearest, but I’ve got to go.’
Ralph’s face is impassive as he stares out at the road again, this time from the driver’s s
eat. Calamity lies ahead, he knows, but he’s oddly unmoved by it. All his usual loyalties are in abeyance, even his loyalty to his own future self. All his usual feelings are distant and muffled, as if behind soundproof padding. And if they do break through at all, he has simply to turn his mind to Ianthe – her smile when she sees him, the way she can’t help herself from touching him, the words she says, her throaty laugh – and everything else is subsumed at once into a surge of sublime longing. You, he thinks, you, and the hills beside the motorway seem to smoulder in her golden glow. Ianthe, he thinks, Ianthe, and even this banal river of cars seems suffused with meaning.
He glances in his mirror, flips the indicator downwards, pulls out past a cargo of shipping containers.
But I need to decide what to do, he tells himself, as he presses down the accelerator.
He knows there’s no way forward that doesn’t involve pain. He understands that once he’s told Eve what’s been going on, the golden trance will end. Eve and Lily are remote from him now, far away behind that soundproof padding, but once they know the truth, they’ll smash their way through, their own emotions far too powerful to be kept at bay. And even Ianthe will make new demands on him.
That’s already starting to happen, actually. Up to now, his desires and Ianthe’s have been so perfectly aligned, that to submit to hers has been to indulge his own. It’s been possible to be magnificently generous and greedily selfish both at the same time, to receive boundless gratitude for gratifying himself. But now, as he replays that snatched phone conversation in his mind, he can’t avoid the impatient edge in Ianthe’s voice. He called her for a heroin-like shot of numbing love, but she reproached him for keeping her waiting. And the reproach still stings, even though it’s him she says she longs for.
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