The Writer and the World: Essays

by V. S. Naipaul

  “Everyone is here only for the money.” The cynicism has never been secret; it is now reinforced by anxiety. With this cynicism, in independent Zaire, the African can appear to be in complicity. He, too, wants “acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags”: the Mercedes, the fatter prostitutes, the sharp suit with matching handkerchief and cravat, the gold-rimmed glasses, the gold pen-and-pencil set, the big gold wristwatch on one hand and the gold bracelet on the other, the big belly that in a land of puny men speaks of wealth. But with this complicity and imitation there is something else: a resentment of the people imitated, the people now known as nostalgiques.

  Simon’s company, a big one, has been nationalized, and Simon is now the manager. (Expatriates continue to do the work, but this is only practical, and Simon doesn’t mind.) Why then does Simon, who has a background of bush, who is so young and successful, remember his former manager as a nostalgique? Well, one day the manager was looking through the pay sheets and he said, “Simon isn’t paying enough tax.”

  People like Simon (he has an official African name) are not easy to know—even Belgians who speak African languages say that. Simon only answers questions; he is incapable of generating anything like a conversation; because of his dignity, his new sense of the self, the world has closed up for him again; and he appears to be hiding. But his resentment of the former manager must have a deeper cause than the one he has given. And gradually it becomes apparent, from other replies he gives, from his belief in “authenticity,” from his dislike of foreign attitudes to African art (to him a living thing: he considers the Kinshasa museum an absurdity), from the secretive African arrangements of his domestic life (to which he returns in his motorcar), it gradually becomes apparent that Simon is adrift and nervous in this unreal world of imitation.

  It is with people like Simon, educated, moneymaking, that the visitor feels himself in the presence of vulnerability, dumbness, danger. Because their resentments, which appear to contradict their ambitions, and which they can never satisfactorily explain, can at any time be converted into a wish to wipe out and undo, an African nihilism, the rage of primitive men coming to themselves and finding that they have been fooled and affronted.

  A rebellion like this occurred after independence. It was led by Pierre Mulele, a former minister of education, who, after a long march through the country, camped at Stanleyville and established a reign of terror. Everyone who could read and write had been taken out to the little park and shot; everyone who wore a tie had been shot. These were the stories about Mulele that were circulating in neighbouring Uganda in 1966, nearly two years after the rebellion had been put down (Uganda itself about to crumble, its nihilistic leader already apparent: Amin, the commander of the petty army that had destroyed the Kabaka’s power). Nine thousand people are said to have died in Mulele’s rebellion. What did Mulele want? What was the purpose of the killings? The forty-year-old African who had spent some time in the United States laughed and said, “Nobody knows. He was against everything. He wanted to start again from the beginning.” There is only one, noncommittal line in Profils du Zaire about the Mulelist rebellion. But (unlike Lumumba) he gets a photograph, and it is a big one. It shows a smiling, gap-toothed African—in jacket and tie.

  To Joseph Conrad, Stanleyville—in 1890 the Stanley Falls station—was the heart of darkness. It was there, in Conrad’s story, that Kurtz reigned, the ivory agent degraded from idealism to savagery, taken back to the earliest ages of man, by wilderness, solitude and power, his house surrounded by impaled human heads. Seventy years later, at this bend in the river, something like Conrad’s fantasy came to pass. But the man with “the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear” was black, and not white; and he had been maddened not by contact with wilderness and primitivism, but with the civilization established by those pioneers who now lie on Mont Ngaliema, above the Kinshasa rapids.

  MOBUTU embodies these African contradictions and, by the grandeur of his kingship, appears to ennoble them. He is, for all his stylishness, the great African nihilist, though his way is not the way of blood. He is the man “young but palpitating with wisdom and dynamism”—this is from a University of Zaire publication—who, during the dark days of secessions and rebellions, “thought through to the heart of the problem” and arrived at his especial illumination: the need for “authenticity,” “I no longer have a borrowed conscience. I no longer have a borrowed soul. I no longer speak a borrowed language.” He will bring back ancestral ways and reverences; he will re-create that pure, logical world.

  “Our religion is based on a belief in God the creator and the worship of our ancestors.” This is what a minister told teachers the other day. “Our dead parents are living; it is they who protect us and intercede for us.” No need now for the Christian saints, or Christianity. Christ was the prophet of the Jews and he is dead. Mobutu is the prophet of the Africans. “This prophet rouses us from our torpor, and has delivered us from our mental alienation. He teaches us to love one another.” In public places the crucifix should be replaced by the image of the messiah, just as in China the portrait of Mao is honoured everywhere. And Mobutu’s glorious mother, Mama Yemo, should also be honoured, as the Holy Virgin was honoured.

  So Mobutism becomes the African way out. The dances and songs of Africa, so many of them religious in origin, are now officially known as séances d’animation and are made to serve the new cult; the dancers wear cloths stamped with Mobutu’s image. Old rituals, absorbed into the new, their setting now not the village but the television studio, the palace, the conference hall, appear to have been given fresh dignity. Africa awakes! And, in all things, Mobutu offers himself as the African substitute. At the end of January Mobutu told the Afro-American conference at Kinshasa (sponsored by the Ford and Carnegie foundations): “Karl Marx is a great thinker whom I respect.” But Marx wasn’t always right; he was wrong, for instance, about the beneficial effects of colonialism. “The teachings of Karl Marx were addressed to his society. The teachings of Mobutu are addressed to the people of Zaire.”

  In Africa such comparisons, when they are made, have to be unabashed: African needs are great. And Mobutism is so wrapped up in the glory of Mobutu’s kingship—the new palaces (the maharaja-style palace at Kisangani confiscated from Mr. Nasser, an old Indian settler), the presidential park at Mont Ngaliema (where Africans walk with foreigners on Sundays and pretend to be amused by the monkeys), the presidential domain at Nsele (open to faithful members of the party: and passengers on the steamer and the barges rush to look), the state visits abroad, intensively photographed, the miracle of the peace Mobutu has brought to the country, the near-absence of policemen in the towns—so glorious are the manifestations of Mobutu’s kingship, so good are the words of the king, who proclaims himself a friend of the poor and, as a cook’s son, one of the petit peuple, that all the contradictions of Africa appear to have been resolved and to have been turned into a kind of power.

  But the contradictions remain, and are now sometimes heightened. The newspapers carry articles about science and medicine. But a doctor, who now feels he can say that he cures “when God and the ancestors wish,” tells a newspaper that sterility is either hereditary or caused by a curse; and another newspaper gives publicity to a healer, a man made confident by the revolution, who has an infallible cure for piles, an “exclusive” secret given him by the ancestors. Agriculture must be modernized, the people must be fed better; but, in the name of authenticity, a doctor warns that babies should on no account be fed on imported foods; traditional foods, like caterpillars and green leaves, are best. The industrialized West is decadent and collapsing; Zaire must rid herself of the plagues of the consumer society, the egoism and individualism exported by industrial civilization. But in the year 2000, according to a university writer in Elima, Zaire might herself be booming, with great cities, a population of “probably” 71,933,851, and a prodigious manufacturing capacity. Western Europe will be in its “post-industrial” dec
adence; Russia, Eastern Europe and the Indian subcontinent will form one bloc; Arab oil will be exhausted; and Zaire (and Africa) should have her day, attracting investment from developed countries (obviously those not in decadence), importing factories whole.

  So the borrowed ideas—about colonialism and alienation, the consumer society and the decline of the West—are made to serve the African cult of authenticity; and the dream of an ancestral past restored is allied to a dream of a future of magical power. The confusion is not new, and is not peculiar to Zaire. Fantasies like this animated some slave revolts in the West Indies; and today, in Jamaica, at the university, there are people who feel that Negro redemption and Negro power can only come about through a return to African ways. The dead Duvalier of Haiti is admired for his Africanness; a writer speaks with unconscious irony of the Negro’s need for a “purifying” period of poverty (unwittingly echoing Duvalier’s “It is the destiny of the people of Haiti to suffer”); and there are people who, sufficiently far away from the slaughter ground of Uganda, find in Amin’s African nihilism a proof of African power.

  It is lunacy, despair. In the February 7th issue of Jeune Afrique—miraculously on sale in Kinshasa—a French African writer, Seydou Lamine, examines the contradictions of African fantasy and speaks of “the alibi of the past.” Mightn’t this talk of Africanness, he asks, be a “myth” which the “princes” of Africa now use to strengthen their own position? “For many, authenticity and Negroness [la négrité] are only words that stand for the despair and powerlessness of the man of Africa faced with the discouraging immensity of his underdevelopment.”

  And even Elima, considering the general corruption, the jobs not done, the breakdown of municipal administration in Kinshasa, the uncleared garbage, the canals not disinfected (though the taxis are, regularly, for the one-zaire fee), the vandalized public television sets and telephone booths, even Elima finds it hard on some days to blame the colonial past for these signs of egoism. “We are wrong to consider the word ‘underdevelopment’ only in its economic aspects. We have to understand that there is a type of underdevelopment that issues out of the habits of a people and their attitudes to life and society.”

  Mobutism, Elima suggests, will combat this “mental plague.” But it is no secret that, in spite of its talk of “man,” in spite of its lilting national anthem called the Zairoise (“Paix, justice et travail”), Mobutism honours only one man: the chief, the king. He alone has to be feared and loved. How—away from this worship—does a new attitude to life and society begin? Recently in Kinshasa a number of people were arrested for some reason and taken to Makala jail: lavatoryless concrete blocks behind a whitewashed wall, marked near the gateway DISCIPLINE AVANT TOUT. The people arrested couldn’t fit easily into the cell, and a Land-Rover was used to close the door. In the morning many were found crushed or suffocated.

  Not cruelty, just thoughtlessness: the visitor has to learn to accommodate himself to Zaire. The presidential domain at Nsele (where Muhammad Ali trained) is such a waste, at once extravagant and shoddy, with its over-furnished air-conditioned bungalows, its vast meeting halls, its VIP lounges (carpets, a fussiness of fringed Dralon, African art debased to furniture decoration). But Nsele can be looked at in another way. It speaks of the African need for African style and luxury; it speaks of the great African wound. The wound explains the harassment of foreign settlers, the nationalizations. But the nationalizations are petty and bogus; they have often turned out to be a form of pillage and are part of no creative plan; they are as short-sighted, self-wounding and nihilistic as they appear, a dismantling of what remains of the Belgian-created state. So the visitor swings from mood to mood, and one reaction cancels out another.

  Where, in Kinshasa, where so many people “shadow” jobs, and so many jobs are artificial and political, part of an artificial administration, where does the sense of responsibility, society, the state, begin? A city of two million, with almost no transport, with no industries (save for those assembly plants, sited, as in so many “developing” countries, on the road from the airport to the capital), a city detached from the rest of the country, existing only because the Belgians built it and today almost without a point. It doesn’t have to work; it can be allowed to look after itself. Already at night, a more enduring kind of bush life seems to return to central Kinshasa, when the watchmen (who also shadow their jobs: they will protect nothing) bar off their territory, using whatever industrial junk there is to hand, light fires on the broken pavements, cook their little messes and go to sleep. When it is hot the gutters smell; in the rain the streets are flooded. And the unregulated city spreads: meandering black rivulets of filth in unpaved alleys, middens beside the highways, children, discarded motorcar tyres, a multitude of little stalls, and everywhere, in free spaces, plantings of sugar-cane and maize: subsistence agriculture in the town, a remnant of bush life.

  But at the end of one highway there is the university. It is said to have gone down. But the students are bright and friendly. They have come from the bush, but already they can talk of Stendhal and Fanon; they have the enthusiasm of people to whom everything is new; and they feel, too, that with the economic collapse of the West (of which the newspapers talk every day) the tide is running Africa’s way. The enthusiasm deserves a better-equipped country. It seems possible that many of these students, awakening to ideas, history, a knowledge of injustice and a sense of their own dignity, will find themselves unsupported by their society, and can only awaken to pain. But no. For most there will be jobs in the government; and already they are Mobutists to a man. Already the African way ahead is known; already inquiry is restricted; and Mobutu himself has warned that the most alienated people in Zaire are the intellectuals.

  So Mobutism simplifies the world, the concept of responsibility and the state, and simplifies people. Zaire’s accession to power and glory has been made to appear so easy; the plundering of the inherited Belgian state has been so easy, the confiscations and nationalizations, the distribution of big shadow jobs. Creativity itself now begins to appear as something that might be looted, brought into being by decree.

  Zaire has her music and dance. To complete her glory, Zaire needs a literature; other African countries have literatures. The trouble, Elima says in a full-page Sunday article, is that far too many people who haven’t written a line and sometimes can’t even speak correctly have been going here and there and passing themselves off as Zairois writers, shaming the country. That will now stop; the bogus literary “circles” will be replaced by official literary “salons”; and they must set to work right away. In two months the president will be going to Paris. The whole world will be watching, and it is important that in these two months a work of Zairois literature be written and published. Other works should be produced for the Lagos Festival of Negro Arts at the end of the year. And it seems likely, from the tone of the Elima article, that it is Mobutu who has spoken.

  MOBUTU speaks all the time. He no longer speaks in French but in Lin-gala, the local lingua franca, and transistors take his words to the deep bush. He speaks as the chief, and the people listen. They laugh constantly, and they applaud. It has been Mobutu’s brilliant idea to give the people of Zaire what they have not had and what they have long needed: an African king. The king expresses all the dignity of his people; to possess a king is to share the king’s dignity. The individual’s responsibility—a possible source of despair, in the abjectness of Africa—is lessened. All that is required is obedience, and obedience is easy.

  Mobutu proclaims his simple origins. He is a citoyen like everyone else. And Mama Mobutu, Mobutu’s wife, loves the poor. She runs a centre for deprived girls, and they devote themselves to agriculture and to making medallions of the king, which the loyal will wear: there can never be too many images of Mobutu in Zaire. The king’s little magnanimities are cherished by a people little used to magnanimity. Many Zairois will tell you that a hospital steamer now serves the river villages. But it is where Mobutu appears to b
e most extravagant that he satisfies his people most. The king’s mother is to be honoured; and she was a simple woman of Africa. Pilgrimages are announced to places connected with the king’s life; and the disregarded bush of Africa becomes sacred again.

  The newspapers, diluting the language of Fanon and Mao, speak every day of the revolution and the radicalization of the revolution. But this is what the revolution is about: the kingship. In Zaire Mobutu is the news: his speeches, his receptions, the marches de soutien, the new appointments: court news. Actual events are small. The nationalization of a gaudy furniture shop in Kinshasa is big news, as is the revelation that there is no African on the board of a brewery. Anti-revolutionary activity, discovered by the “vigilance” of the people, has to do with crooked vendors in the market, an official using a government vehicle as a night taxi, someone else building a house where he shouldn’t, some drunken members of the youth wing of the party wrecking the party Volkswagen at Kisangani. There is no news in Zaire because there is little new activity. Copper continues to be mined; the big dam at Inga continues to be built. Airports are being extended or constructed everywhere, but this doesn’t mean that Air Zaire is booming: it is for the better policing of the country.

  What looked obvious on the first day, but was then blurred by the reasonable-sounding words, turns out to be true. The kingship of Mobutu has become its own end. The inherited modern state is being dismantled, but it isn’t important that the state should work. The bush works; the bush has always been self-sufficient. The administration, now the court, is something imposed, something unconnected with the true life of the country. The ideas of responsibility, the state and creativity are ideas brought by the visitor; they do not correspond, for all the mimicry of language, to African aspirations.