“It was important to my little chief too. As he fell back into his old ways, he thought less of the beauty of my name, Phyllis, and of the beauty of my Guadeloupe French accent. The time came when he wanted to be rid of me. He wanted to do what his family wanted him to do, to marry a suitable woman of his tribe. He began to be violent, the little chief. He began to beat me, the soft little fellow with the gold. I remembered the foot-washing ceremony. And I didn’t have to be told now that I was in a country without law. The day actually came—it was as though someone were working magic on me—when I felt that if I stayed one more night in the country I would go mad. That was when I went to the airport and took a plane here. And to think that when I went against all my instincts and married him I thought I was making a deal with God.
“He’s very much on my mind now, if you want to know. I’ll tell you about something that happened about a month before you came here. The telephone rang very early one morning. In fact, when I woke up it felt like the middle of the night. It was a man’s voice on the phone, a French voice. The line wasn’t good. I thought it was a nuisance call. It does happen here. The voices are usually French. It makes me feel far from home, and very alone.
“I should have put the phone down right away, but luckily I didn’t. The call was from the police in Santos Dumont, and not from a man giving a bogus name. Santos-Dumont was an early aviator, and the French gave the name to a frontier post they established in the north. There are a certain number of French officers in the police here, and you have seen the French army barracks just outside the town.
“The officer spoke to me as though I was a member of the embassy, rather than a locally employed secretary. I didn’t put him right. He was very polite; I didn’t want to spoil that. He said he had with him in the police station someone from across the frontier. He gave the name of the little chief. He put him on the telephone. It was the little chief all right. His voice was squeaky with terror. He said things had gone very badly on the other side of the frontier. The president there had suddenly turned against him and all the rest of the cheferie. Somebody had told him the day before that he was to be arrested in the morning. He decided to run. He had been driving since the previous afternoon.
“ ‘Thank God for the Mercedes,’ he said, as though we were still together, and I still used the Mercedes. He had driven for hours on bad roads and dusty tracks and the car hadn’t broken down. In the middle of all of his trouble he was still proud of his car.
“He wasn’t absolutely out of danger. He could have been handed back. You know that over the frontier they are very Maoist and anti-French, and they don’t lose a chance of making propaganda in other African countries against the government here. However, I spoke to our ambassador, and he made a few telephone calls. He knew my story. The embassy more or less took the little chief under their protection. I drove up that afternoon to Santos Dumont with someone from the embassy to pick up the little chief.
“He was staying in a police building in a sealed room with an air-conditioning unit. It was very cold in the room. He was in a dirty peasant’s cloth and without his gold. Nothing shining on his skin. It was his idea of a disguise. The terror was still in his eyes.
“ ‘Me, me,’ he kept on saying. ‘A man of the cheferie—they were going to put me on the diète noire.’ You know about that famous black diet, don’t you? They put you in a cell without food or water and leave you to die. It’s what the president does to his enemies. I had heard about it when I was there. But I will tell you that it was another one of the things I heard about and didn’t believe in. I saw now, for the first time, that my little chief had always known about it. And I was shocked by that.
“Through the sealed window you could see the flat, hot countryside. Very strange. The trees, even when they were far away, didn’t bunch together. They were just standing one by one, like poles. The dust was like mist. It was the famous desertification people came to see and write reports about. It was what he had been driving through all night, and the Mercedes hadn’t broken down.
“He never asked me about myself. He never asked me how I had come to the strange country myself, or got my job or how I’d managed all these years. He never thanked me for taking his telephone call or arranging his asylum or driving down to see him. He expected me to treat him well. He was a chief, you see. He was full of his own sufferings and betrayal and his bravery in doing the long night drive. All the way up to the capital he complained like a child. He said his family had always supported the president. They had sent him to school and looked after him and his family. They had stood by him when the president had kicked out the French and there had been all that trouble. And then the president’s mind had been poisoned against the cheferie. Everyone knew who had done that. It was Lebrun, the antillais. Lebrun had bewitched the president. He had flattered him and turned his head. It was Lebrun, Lebrun—the little chief was obsessed with him.”
I had heard many things about Lebrun’s trip to French West Africa. But I hadn’t heard before that he had had any local political influence.
Phyllis said, “It is what people say. He was very angry when he left here, and I suppose when he went across the border they would have received him with open arms. They did a lot of anti-French propaganda with him.”
I said to Phyllis, “You said the little chief was on your mind.”
“With the help of the embassy we’ve been getting some of his money out from the country. We’ve arranged his papers, and he’s getting restless now. He’s forgotten some of his terror. He is talking of going to Paris. He’s got a lot of money there. And these past few days I’ve been thinking, ‘Yes, he’ll go to Paris now, and he’ll pick up some other woman and dazzle her with his chief’s talk and it’ll begin all over again.’ ”
THE TIME came for me to move on. The next stage of my journey was the dictatorship next door. This was the country Phyllis had come out to, the country that had kicked the French out, with all their aid and coopérants, and had, as some people said, gone back to bush.
So, without premeditation, I was following in the footsteps of Lebrun. Phyllis had names for me in the other country. There was someone there she especially wanted me to meet. This person, she said, would give me an idea of the true Africa, the Africa that the newspapers didn’t write about.
The day before I left she came to the hotel to say goodbye. We sat out on the terrace. A tourist feature had been made of the lagoon, which in the old days was famous for its mosquitoes and disease.
She said things she had said often before, about Africa, about the false ideas brought by black people from the West Indies and the United States. She was killing time, I could see. And then, just before she left, she did what she had come to do: she opened her handbag and gave me an envelope with banknotes. The money was for the man she wanted me to see. Life was hard for people over there, she said.
It was a roundabout journey. Political stresses had made a direct flight between the two neighbouring countries impossible. A plane to a neutral country to the north; a breakdown, a long wait at night in an open shed at the edge of an airfield, local police lounging with the passengers; traders in dingy gowns sitting on sacks of cheap rubber shoes and other goods; and then the shaky final trip to the dictatorship.
There were many policemen at the airport. It wasn’t a busy place. The arrival of this small plane was the big event of the morning, and the eyes of the idle officials glittered at the thought of the money to be made from the few people who had come in. It was a shed of an airport hall, with old, blown-up photographs of what must have been local scenes, relic of an earlier time of tourist promotion. I would have had trouble getting Phyllis’s money for her friend through—everything had to be declared, and some people were searched by customs officers trembling with excitement. But the man in front of me was detained so long—he was even taken off at one stage to a cubicle—that I was waved through by a senior officer anxious to close down the desks for the morning and go home.
/>
The climate was similar to the climate of the other place. But, strangely, the light and heat that were part of the life and excitement and crowd of the other place here felt, right away, like tropical or African torpor. The newish airport highway, unmaintained, and cracked in many places, ran through bare red earth. No villages were to be seen, only big boards with sayings of the president’s, and large signs, facing the highway, as though they were meant only for visitors: INCREASE PRODUCTION.
It was strange to think of Lebrun coming here with his daughter; and, in extreme old age, after having gone back on so many of his old views, being received with honour, and finding a kind of revolutionary fulfilment. INCREASE PRODUCTION—it was like coming across a little bit of the raw material, part of the facts and figures and tables, of one of Lebrun’s old communist articles, in which this kind of “production” was better than the other sort of wealth.
The hotel, one of an international chain, was not very full. The air-conditioning was fierce, and the room I had was damp and musty, with a touch of rust on some bits of unprotected metal. I felt it hadn’t been occupied for some time. Everything was very expensive; the exchange rate was absurd. The bar and lounge and other public rooms were full of plain-clothes policemen in dark glasses, as though, in this already desolate place, their principal function was to catch out visitors.
I eventually got Phyllis’s friend on the telephone. He exclaimed when I gave Phyllis’s name. But then he became nervous; he became even more nervous when he heard where I was staying. He said he would telephone me back.
The hotel was silent. No one raised his voice. And I felt something of that stillness when some days later I went to an embassy lunch. The embassy building was really a government building of the colonial time; and the lunch to which I had been invited—a last-minute guest—was something of a local occasion.
In colonial days the head of the up-country Christian missions paid an annual official visit to the capital, and was received in some style by the governor. The lunch was an adaptation, or relic, of that colonial ceremony. There wasn’t a governor now: there was the ambassador of the former colonial power. And what had been the governor’s house was now the ambassador’s residence. As for the mission stations—the very words came from the turn of the century—they had gone through many transformations even in colonial times. The main station had become a medical centre, a hospital, a general training centre, a polytechnic. Its missionary associations—which had become more ecumenical—were now underplayed, and the representative who came for the ceremony in the capital was, officially, the principal of the polytechnic. This year, for the first time, the principal was a black man; he was said to be a Baptist. This was the special little drama of the lunch.
We, the early arrivals, sat downstairs, in the loggia, amid the bougainvillaea. Everything had been swept and dusted that morning, but already everything, including the bougainvillaea, was dusty from the desertification. The sand was in the air. It fell fine all the time; it was something you felt below your shoes.
We were waiting for the principal. He was in the building, but he had arrived late, just an hour or so before, and he was upstairs getting ready. There had been some trouble earlier that morning, many kilometres away, with the rope-pulled ferry over some dwindling river. That had delayed him.
When thirty minutes or so later he came down the steps to the patio—from the room he had been given, the room the principal (and, before him, the chief missionary) had always been given—the smell of talcum powder preceded him. He was a big man, brown more than black, with a big, strongly modelled face with great ridges of cheekbones, a big, strong body, and big feet in big shoes. He was in an old and thin dark suit, sepia in patches from sunlight and wear and dry-cleaning fluid. He had been shaving; a dull white bloom—like the desert sand on the bougainvillaea—lay over the chin and cheeks he had been shaving very close.
He talked about the ferry and the bad road and the delay that morning. His words gave me a picture: the flat barge with the old Peugeot car, the shallow river issuing out of swamp, the morning heat-mist, the ferryman pulling on the slack rope or cable looped across the river, the principal standing tall and upright, and then the barge running aground.
The principal said, “Bad roads, primitive ferry. But these are the sacrifices we have to make for the next generation.”
A guest said, not wishing bad things to be said about Africa, “There are wonderful roads over the frontier.”
But that was like bad manners. The principal looked affronted. I thought there was something about his voice and manner and accent.
I said, “Has anyone told you, Principal? You have a West Indian accent.”
He said, with a curious gesture, in which I at once recognized the gestures of many people I knew in my childhood, “I am West Indian.”
His father had studied in London in the 1920s. He had become attracted to the Back-to-Africa views of Marcus Garvey and others; and he had done what many people had talked about but few had actually done. He had come out to West Africa, and had lived there until he died. All these years, this life in Africa!
Our hostess asked, “You would say that’s one reason why the Christian vocation came to you?”
The principal said, “I don’t know. We were Baptists in my family, but the reason why I wanted to go into the church was that when I was at school it seemed the only thing to do. I wanted to be like the men who taught me. The same is true for some black Roman Catholics I know. People of my background. I know an old West Indian man here who became a Roman Catholic priest. I asked him the same question you asked me. Just a few months ago. This old man said to me, ‘What else was there for me? The monastery was the only safe place I could see. And I thought it was nice. I thought they would send me to Ireland.’ That’s true for me too. It may be a vocation. I don’t know. I am a Baptist and a believer. But without colonialism I wouldn’t have had the vocation. I would have been another kind of believer. Let me say that too.”
Somebody said, “You’re talking like your president.”
The principal threw his big shoulders back and made a gesture with his open palms. And it was clear then that he was charged up, that he had come ready to speak for the regime, and ready to take on the criticisms of everyone at the table.
It wasn’t what we were expecting. We were expecting something quieter and more indirect, something that acknowledged the civility of the occasion, not something that imposed the silence of the hotel and the streets on us.
Someone said, “Do they still talk about the chiefs where you are?”
The principal said, “If they do, I haven’t heard it. Lebrun was right. The president was a prisoner of the cheferie. They were getting in the way of all his reforms. But the president didn’t know what would happen if he tried to take them on. Lebrun said very simply, ‘Take an axe to the root.’ Do it decisively, and they’ll all run. No more slavery, no more ritual murders, no more killing of wives and servants when a big chief dies. All the superstitions of feudalism wiped out in one blow. All the things that give Africa a bad name. ‘Take an axe to the root.’ I remember how the women and slaves used to run just before a big chief died. Everybody knew about it, but nobody talked about it. And that was exactly how the chiefs ran when the president brought in the people’s courts.” He made a West Indian gesture, to suggest flight, brushing one open palm glancingly off the other. “You were telling me about the good roads and the Lacoste shops and the lovely houses and the beach restaurants with cabarets and bananes flambés on the other side of the frontier. But the chiefs are still ruling there. The French are doing the job for them, but it is all for the chiefs. When something happens and the French go away, all of that feudal life will still just be there, waiting to terrorize people. Not here. You have the bad ferry, but you don’t have the chiefs now. The chiefs here used to say that they spoke for the people. All right. So let them be tried by the people’s courts. That was the president’s idea.”
I wanted to hear more about the people’s courts.
The principal said, “Highest form of democracy.” And he fitted a West Indian gesture to his words: he raised his open palms just above the edge of the table and threw his shoulders far back—as though to make room for the significance of his words. It was like a choreographed movement: a backward sway suddenly arrested: the most elegant of the movements he had been making at the lunch table.
The gift of speech, the beautiful, timed gestures of hands and upper body, the easy dominance of the lunch table: this took me back. It took me back to Lebrun talking in the cramped Lebanese flat in Maida Vale. And I wondered whether Lebrun’s visit here some months before hadn’t revived certain rhythms of speech in the principal.
But perhaps not. Perhaps this gift of speech and movement went back further, had another parentage, I went back in memory to the solicitors’ clerks in the Red House in Port of Spain, searching for property titles in the big bound books of the Registrar-General’s Department. They sat at the mahogany desks in the high jalousied rooms of the Italianate building and they gossiped and gestured in their conspiratorial fashion, like people with secrets. Make-believe, but just a few years later there were to be the meetings in the Victorian colonial square across the street, where ideas of racial redemption were offered as a kind of sacrament. The passions of that sacrament were proving to be unassuageable, and were now beyond control.
This French West African colonial building where I was now, listening to the principal—long table in the arcaded loggia, tablecloth, glasses, flowers, the fine sand and dust gathering slowly on walls and plants and on the tiled floor—was like the one on the other side of the Atlantic where the clerks had gossiped in their spacious search room: Italianate too, thick walls, with tall jalousied windows hinged at the top, propped open at the bottom just a little way to let in air and light and to give a view of the gardens outside, but to keep out the hot morning sun. Both buildings had been put up at about the same time, just after the turn of the century, at the zenith of empire.
A Way in the World Page 15