The Writer and the World: Essays

by V. S. Naipaul

  The boy brought the food. He looked pleased with himself. He was carrying six dishes on both arms, as though demonstrating French restaurant style to Andrée, who had been so French with him. She didn’t return his smile. She was looking hard and doubtfully at what he was doing. And then—as though doomed by Andrée’s stare to fulfil petit français ideas about African clumsiness—he dropped one of the six plates. It wasn’t one of ours. When, defeated and downcast, he came back to clean up the mess on the carpet, Andrée was eating the jambon and frites daintily. She left one piece of jambon on one side of her plate while she dealt with the other, and it seemed as though she wasn’t going to touch the piece of jambon she had put to one side. But at the end it had all gone—-frites, jambon, jelly.

  She talked again about her life in the Ivory Coast. She didn’t take taxis often, she said; they were too expensive. So altogether I was giving her a treat, and I decided to make it as good a treat as the restaurant allowed.

  I asked whether she would like cheese. Camembert, gruyère, she asked? I said yes. She said she loved camembert. Didn’t she like chèvre? Yes, but camembert was the delicacy; and it was something else that was expensive.

  She called the boy over, and in her firm way—showing him no compassion after his accident, ignoring and thereby killing the half-surliness with which he tried to fight back—she asked whether they had a variety of cheeses, a choice, a plateau. The boy said yes. He began to explain. She cut him short; she ordered him to bring the cheese board. He was recognizing her authority now; and when he brought the board she became very demure, as if rewarding his deference. She took just two little pieces of camembert, though for her plateau she could have had four times the quantity.

  She said the camembert was good. It wasn’t, really. I pressed her to have some dessert. She yielded; she called the boy and asked him to bring the tray with the desserts. She hadn’t been abroad, she said, going neatly, without hurry, at the pallid slice of apple tart she had chosen. She hadn’t even been to the neighbouring countries, Ghana, Liberia, Guinea. She didn’t have the money to travel.

  When the bill came she made a delicate attempt at paying, taking out her purse and opening it as though it contained a secret. I made her put the purse away. And then—French graces, West Indian mulatto graces, coming to her after the hotel parody of a French bourgeois lunch—she said she would like to visit me one day in my own country.

  We took a taxi back. Andrée said she wanted to get off at the church. But the church, on this occasion at least, was only a marker. Andrée’s widowed mother, who read cards, lived near the church, and lived alone, as a Frenchwoman should.

  Such solitude, in this bright African light, so like the light of Caribbean afternoons. But how far away home must have seemed to Andrée, who, after Guadeloupe and Paris, now had only the Ivory Coast!

  The highway curved on beside the lagoon, through a semi-diplomatic development zone, to the Forum Golf Hotel, opposite the half-developed golf course, where a few old, thick-trunked baobabs had been allowed to remain, reminders of tropical forest. In the garden of the hotel, around the swimming pool, with its artificial rocks, its hollow, plastic elephants, and its water chute, children played and the topless, breast-less women sunbathed. African guards in brown uniforms sat at various security points. The white sand of what looked like a beach had been artificially mounded up: the sand rested on a concrete base, which showed two or three feet high at the water’s edge. It was against this concrete that the tainted lagoon rocked. On this tainted water there grew a small, green, cabbage-like plant, with a root like a thin beard; and these water plants came together in sheltered places, in the lee of boats, or against sections of the concrete wall, to form little rocking carpets of living green.

  I found, in Introduction à la Drummologie, that Andrée was given a special mention by Mr. Niangoran-Bouah: she was the conscientious col-laboratrice of a difficult and obstinate patron. That made him sound attractive. And reading beyond the acknowledgements, I discovered that Mr. Niangoran-Bouah had indeed made up the word “drummologie.” Other words had been thought of—tamtamologie, tamtalogie, tambourinologie, tambourologie, tambologie, attangbanologie. But these words had been rejected because they seemed to stress the art of drum-beating rather than the study of the “talking drum” as a record of tribal history and tradition. The talking drum mimicked, and preserved, the actual words of old chants: these chants were documents of the African past. As much as the Ashanti weights, with their elements of art and mathematics, true knowledge of the talking drum gave to Africa the old civilization which Europeans and colonialists said didn’t exist. This was Mr. Niangoran-Bouah’s cause. This was the cause Andrée, from Guadeloupe and France, served.

  I TOLD ARLETTE, when we next met, that I had had great trouble with Andrée’s French. Arlette said she had worried about that. Andrée’s speech was difficult. Andrée was a little nervous, un peu nerveuse. But she was marvellous with her hands. She knitted and made tapestries. Her mother was a very good voyante. She read cards and always said interesting things.

  Arlette said that Andrée had married again in the Ivory Coast, after the break-up of her first marriage. Her second husband had gone mad. That had had an effect on Andrée’s health, and in fact Andrée’s mother, a former nurse, had come out to the Ivory Coast to look after Andrée. They didn’t live together. But they ate together: every day Andrée had lunch and supper with her mother.

  And it was only an hour or so later—this information about Andrée followed by other talk—that Arlette told me that Andrée’s second husband had gone mad when he was a political prisoner. He had been badly beaten.

  We were walking—Terry Shroeder with us—in the Hotel Ivoire. The Ivoire was more than a hotel. With its bars, restaurants, shops, an area for pin-ball machines, a bowling alley, a skating rink (temporarily defrosted and rejigged into a football field), the Ivoire was the extravagant, air-conditioned fairground of Abidjan. It was a place that people came of an evening to look at and walk in, down the long corridors, and the air-conditioning was so good that many people came dressed against the cold.

  Outside, in the warm, along the hotel drive, chasing cars as they arrived, there were prostitutes. So Arlette told me. (I had missed them; nobody had chased our car.) They were village girls, these prostitutes. More interesting—because it was practised as a sport, rather than out of real need—was student prostitution. Girls at the university didn’t sleep with boys at the university. They slept with men in the government, men who had big jobs and could make gifts suitable to a girl who was at the university. It was left to the Abidjan schoolgirls, the lycéennes, to sleep with the poor étudiants; and since an étudiant had only his grant, a lycéenne might have an arrangement with two or three étudiants at a time, sleeping with each once or twice a week, and collecting her accumulated gratuities at the end of the month.

  This kind of behaviour was acceptable because Africans believed in independence in relationships, Arlette said. They didn’t look for or expect sexual fidelity. Infidelity as a cause for divorce would be considered frivolous. In a marriage the most important relationship was the relationship between the families. And that was why West Indian women—like Andrée, and like Arlette herself—who married Ivorian men found themselves in trouble when they got to the Ivory Coast. The men simply said goodbye.

  Antillaises could be deceived in Paris. They could be dazzled by a man who said he came of a chief’s family and had so many slaves and servants—tant d’esclaves, tant de domestiques—at home. West Indian women, with their own idea of love, could find in an African’s declaration of love and even his offer of marriage things the man never intended. A West Indian woman in the Ivory Coast was without tribe or family; her African husband could, without guilt, say goodbye. If an Ivorian brought home a foreign wife his family chose an African wife for him and sent her to the house. If the African wife wasn’t accepted, the man’s family laid a curse on the man. And the man was so terrified of the
curse (so terrified, too, of poison) that he usually obeyed.

  This was Arlette’s story. To live in Africa, she said, was to have all one’s ideas and values questioned. And it was good, she added, for that to happen. So, as I had noticed before with Arlette, what seemed like criticism of Africa turned out not to be criticism at all. Arlette, in her own mind, had been re-educated and remade by Africa. Her solitude, as an expatriate, was different from Andrée ’s.

  5

  GIL SHERMAN, Terry Shroeder’s assistant, was arranging my trip to Yamoussoukro; and Gil wrote one day that he had found just the man to take me there. The man was Ibrahim Keita. He was the son of a political associate of the president’s in colonial times, and he was close to the president. The president wanted to see people playing golf in the Ivory Coast: Ibrahim Keita devoted himself to that cause. He was a keen player and was head of the Golf Federation. He was in charge of the famous golf course at Yamoussoukro. It was also said that he had been entrusted by the president with the general development of Yamoussoukro. He was just the man to show me round. He regularly drove up to Yamoussoukro in his very big and fast Mercedes.

  But when I met Ibrahim Keita at Gil Sherman’s, he didn’t seem to know that he was to take me to Yamoussoukro. He said nothing about it and in fact hardly spoke. French, rather than English, was his international language. He was a big, handsome man of perhaps forty, athletic (and that evening rather tired) from the golf; in colour and features he was a little like Sidney Poitier. His wife, Eileen, was equally reserved that evening. Ibrahim Keita was Muslim; and it is possible that Eileen’s reserve was a form of Muslim-African modesty. She was not African, in the strict sense of the word. She had been born in Ghana, but was of West Indian origin, with the family name of Busby: mulatto, middle-class, English-speaking, from the island of Barbados.

  Her brother was with her. He too had been born in Ghana, but now he lived in London. He was interested in journalism and African publishing, and was in the Ivory Coast on a short business trip. He was an attractive, bearded brown man, in his thirties. His manner was London and middle-class West Indian; he was bright and good-humoured and open. And it was with him that I talked for much of the evening.

  His family story was moving. It was in 1929 that his Barbadian father, after qualifying as a doctor in England, had decided to go and work in Africa. He would have been one of the earliest black professional men from the British West Indies. To someone like that in the 1920s every personal step ahead would have made sharper the feeling of racial deprivation. Slavery had been abolished in the British Empire in 1834; but in the British colonies of the West Indies—neglected, no longer of value—the racial attitudes of both black and white had hardly changed since then. A black professional man in the 1920s would have felt alone, even in his own community.

  Dr. Busby did what a number of black men like himself talked about but few actually did: he decided to go back to Africa, to serve Africa, though Africa itself was a colony. He went to the Gold Coast—British-ruled, next door to the French-ruled Ivory Coast—and he worked there until he died.

  The Gold Coast became independent Ghana in 1957. Nkrumah ruled, and fell. Now, twenty-five years after its independence, the state of Ghana was in ruins. And Dr. Busby’s children lived out of the country.

  I asked the young man, the doctor’s son, what he thought of events in Ghana. He gave an answer that wasn’t an answer. He said it was something the country had to go through. But in 1957—when the Ivory Coast had very little—Ghana was rich, with educated people, and institutions. How had that been squandered? Was it because of Nkrumah—the racialist-socialist ideology, the megalomania, the waste?

  The illogicality of the reply surprised me. Nkrumah was a man ahead of his time, young Busby said. Ahead? Busby said, “Have you read Nkrumah’s books? You should read his books.” So it was in the words rather than the deeds that the greatness of the man was to be found? Nkrumah, Busby said, had a continental African vision. He was infinitely more than a tribal leader. That continental vision came out in his books, which continued to be revolutionary; and that was why he had built so extravagantly after independence, bankrupting the country. And Nkrumah had done more than anyone for the dignity of black men all over the world. “Ask any black American,” Busby said.

  Gil Sherman was a black American. But he, perhaps diplomatically, didn’t hear (he was talking to Ibrahim Keita), and I didn’t ask him.

  The dignity of the black man—I wanted to pursue that with Busby. Wasn’t that an antiquated idea now? Africa was independent, the black islands of the Caribbean were independent. Weren’t there other things for black men to work for?

  Busby said, “Old ideas might turn out to be the best ideas.”

  He was a man of faith. He had only the consistency of his racial passion. He was loyal to his father’s cause; and after fifty years—though the world had changed—this cause had become like religion. Whatever were the disasters now, black Africa would win through. The world, he said, would still turn to Africa. Illiteracy was soon going to be a problem in England and other Western countries: the world would yet find virtue in African ways. He told an African story, which was like a fable, about a farming community and a boating community who despised one another but, through some ritualized arrangement that preserved the pride of both, yet managed to live together. This was the kind of solution Africa could offer the world.

  He lived in England. As a journalist and publisher, he needed England as a base. But this fact, large as it was, played no part in his view of things. I asked him what he wanted for Africa. He said he wanted development. But not the development of the Ivory Coast: he looked for a development which permitted Africans to keep their own soul. He couldn’t be more precise. Probably some political objection to capitalism prevented him from seeing how separate French and African ideas were in the Ivory Coast; probably he didn’t know how whole the world of Africa still was. Probably, too, the family cause had with him turned to an impossible, religious idea of a pure African way.

  He talked to Ibrahim Keita. It was about my trip to Yamoussoukro. And—through my own conversation with somebody else—I heard Keita say (now quite dazed with his golf fatigue) that when you were used to flying a 707 you couldn’t take a passenger in a Cessna. It was the first indication I had had that Keita knew about our projected trip to Yamoussoukro. And the message that was coming over was that Keita couldn’t take me. There was a problem about the tyres of the Mercedes, and there was apparently no question of a ride with him in the equivalent of a Cessna.

  It was a pity about the tyres, Busby said, indirectly giving me the bad news. Ibrahim was a terrific driver; in the Mercedes he could do the 150 miles in two hours. But the replacement tyres Ibrahim had got from Nigeria were not good. Special tyres were needed for a Mercedes of that class, and Ibrahim had had to send to Germany for them.

  They left—Ibrahim Keita, Eileen, and her brother. Gil Sherman said he would drive me himself to Yamoussoukro. And during what remained of the evening I heard more about the Mercedes and what nice people the Keitas were.

  Andrée, Arlette, young Busby—Africa had called them all, and each had his own Africa. Busby’s inherited cause was racial redemption. He needed his mystical faith in Africa. But it was a private cause, from another continent, another past, another way of looking and feeling. A man like Djédjé—my guide to the mysterious blazing house at Kilometre 17—still knew only about the gods and the tribes. Racially, Djédjé was an innocent.

  6

  THE SEVENTEENTH kilometre was on the auto-route to Yamoussoukro. It lay in the soft, ragged countryside beyond the “popular” African area of Adjamé, beyond the industrial zone. The taxi-driver was, according to Djédjé, the brother of the village chief we were going to see. And, in the half-country beyond the town proper, we stopped at a liquor shop to buy the bottle of whisky which, according to Djédjé, we would have to give the chief.

  The shop was a single, rough room. It was basic, e
ven chaste: a few shelves, a few bottles of a particular brand (like samples) on each shelf, a price-tag pinned to each shelf. The shopkeeper, a young man, sat indifferent and cool at a table that was bare except for a shallow, neat pile of old sheets of Fraternité Matin. We didn’t buy whisky. Djédjé chose a bottle of gin for 3,100 francs, between five and six pounds. The shopkeeper wrapped the bottle in a sheet of Fraternité Matin, and Djédjé took the bottle, very carefully.

  The land was soft, and the earth seemed stoneless. Trees were tall and scattered, and skeletal—coconuts and palms and the thick-trunked, stubby-branched baobabs. They didn’t make a low line of vegetation on the horizon; the eye found only these separate, skeletal, vertical forms.

  We turned off the auto-route into a red, unpaved lane, with green bush on either side. It looked as though we had at last got to pure countryside, but orange-coloured Abidjan taxis were bumping along the lane. And soon we passed metal sheds where bananas were stored. Kilometre 17 was not strictly a village; it was a settlement on the edge of Abidjan. There were no huts; there were only concrete houses. The road, now apparently following an old track, narrowed and twisted between mounds of garbage. But always there were the taxis.

  We drove through a banana plantation: the trees in rows, deep drainage canals between the plots of black earth, a protective blue plastic sack over each bunch of growing fruit, the blue a violent, unnatural colour. On other plots, where the trees had borne their fruit and had been cut down to brown stumps, new suckers were growing out of the soft banana trash: a glimpse of the careful agriculture which had made the Ivory Coast rich.