The Middle Passage

by V. S. Naipaul

  It was raining and the passengers stood among their boxes and baskets on a raised gallery. They were not a crowd one associated with British Guiana. Many of them were white; there were four Amerindians; and the pilot, a tall, plump man wearing a red shirt, was a European. The coast – sugarcane, irrigation ditches, workers’ houses, political rivalries, communism – was already far away. Under cheap black umbrellas, roughly painted B.G. AIRWAYS in huge letters, not to promote pride, one felt, but to prevent theft, we went out to the plane. There were no seats inside. A narrow metal ledge ran down either side of the plane; on this thin rubber cushions had been placed, linked one to the other and equipped with safety belts. The front of the plane was stuffed with cargo. I noticed cartons of beer, a bed, a sewing-machine and many bags of flour: everything in the interior, from safety pins to Land-Rovers, has to be flown in by these valiant Dakotas, at nine cents a pound.

  An elderly American sat next to me. He was very tall and had a stoop, but his enormous chest still suggested great power. If I had known that he was eighty-five, and that he was Ben Hart, one of the Rupununi pioneers and one of its famous characters, I would have paid him greater attention.* As it was, I was more interested in the four Amerindians who sat facing me. This was my first sight of these people, known fearfully to Trinidadians as ‘wild Indians’ and contemptuously referred to as ‘Bucks’ by coastland Guianese. The man was barefooted; he wore khaki trousers and a loose white shirt and held a handkerchief to his face. The two women stared at the floor. The small girl in a pink frock and broad-brimmed straw hat stared at the other passengers, but as soon as you caught her eye she pulled in her lower lip and looked down. They became animated only when, as we began to fly low over the savannah, the plane became suffocatingly hot, the ride grew bumpy, and some people were sick. Then the women smiled slyly at the other passengers and covered their mouths with their hands as though to hide giggles.

  Our first stop was in a field at a place called Good Hope, and it was like stepping out into another country, into the scene of a Western. The flat red land, dotted with tussocks of coarse grass, stretched away to pale blue-grey mountains. The sun was fierce and we sheltered under the wings of the plane. The plane comes to Good Hope once a fortnight, and everyone seemed to have come out to greet it. But they didn’t make up a crowd; and it was hard to see where they came from, for only one house was visible, apart from the collapsed hut next to the landing field. Nearly all of them must have walked, for there was only one Land-Rover, and this belonged to César Gorinsky, a formidably handsome Russian émigré who is reputed to be one of the richest settlers in the Rupununi. The Hollywood-Western atmosphere was greatly helped by the presence of a tall, rangy, barefooted man who looked like a film Texan, dressed like a film cowboy, and talked with an American accent. He turned out to be a German from Hamburg; he was Gorinsky’s assistant.

  Questions of nationality seemed unimportant in the setting which, though strange, was yet so familiar that the exotics were not the Amerindians whom I was seeing in quantity for the first time, but the two Negro policemen in smart black uniforms and bush hats. And this, too, was a singular reversal of the roles, this policing of Amerindians by Negroes: in the days of slavery the Amerindians were employed to hunt down runaway slaves. And now these policemen spoke to me of the Amerindians as of some primitive, unpredictable people, who needed to be watched.

  One of the policemen waved a hand. ‘Brazil over there, you know.’ The word clearly excited him. ‘One time they come over here, you know.’ He laughed. ‘But you know the English people and their land. We chase them back, man.’ Questions of nationality didn’t matter. Here the Negro policeman could speak of himself as English, and it seemed right. Everything on the other side of the border was Brazilian; everything on this side was English; and the English had no doubt which was superior.

  The adjective most often used to describe the interior of British Guiana is ‘vast’. ‘Vast’, too, are the natural resources; these are invariably ‘untapped’. The impression created is that forests have simply to be cut down for a wealthy new state to grow. In fact, a good deal of the untapped interior rests on infertile white sand, and the problem of reafforestation has yet to be solved. There is bauxite, but gold and diamonds are obtained only in small quantities.

  The Rupununi is typical of British Guiana. It is ‘savannah’, ‘grassland’, ‘cattle country’. Yet you can drive for a day without seeing a cow. The ground, in the dry season, when I saw it, is brown-red and hard and in parts composed of pure laterite. What looks like grass turns out to be sedge. Only cashew trees and mango trees flourish, occasional startling clumps of green, in this burning wasteland. And the sandpaper trees: stunted and gnarled, they have the appearance of carefully tended fruit trees, and are at times so evenly spaced that the savannah seems an endless orchard. But this is only Nature’s mimicry: the leaves of this tree have the abrasive quality of sandpaper. In between these trees there are the ant castles, conical structures of grey mud that are sometimes six feet high. Castles and bastard orchards, especially when seen on an incline, suggest that the land is fruitful and peopled. Each castle throws its black shadow like a primitive stone monument protected by a National Trust and one feels that in the next shallow valley a village will appear, an inn serving warm meals and cool drinks. But the road just goes on, past more ant castles and sandpaper trees. A grey colonnade of green-crowned palms marks the course of a stream; the blue-grey mountains bound the horizon. The illusion is past; one is really quite alone.

  Sometimes the savannah is on fire: an irregular slowly-moving line of low, broken flame that divides the land into two colours: brown-green on one side, black on the other. Hawks fly above the white smoke, waiting to pounce on the snakes and other creatures that escape across the fire-line. The fires are started by ranchers who wish to burn away the grass-choking sedge; and more indiscriminately, in defiance of the law, by Amerindians, who like to see the savannah burn; at times, I was told, whole mountains are on fire. After such a fire the savannah becomes truly lunar: a landscape in which curling copper leaves hang on gnarled, artificial-looking trees rising out of the black ground.

  In the valleys there is balata-bleeding and tobacco-growing, and this, together with the ranching, is enough to support a few people and to make some even rich, but scarcely sufficient to make the area valuable to the rest of the country as a whole. The Rupununi is not a land so much for the pioneer as for the romantic. The pioneer wants to see cities rise in the desert; the romantic wants to be left alone. The Rupununi settlers want to be left alone; though they depend on Georgetown, there is an unexpressed resentment at the desire of the government in Georgetown to administer the area – this administering of small, widely separated communities is a burden on a poor country – and relations between officials and settlers are not altogether easy.

  Some of this resentment is undoubtedly racial. Government officials, the police in particular, are Negroes; and in the Rupununi the Negro, the black man from the coast, is still a symbol of threat and terror: the runaway slave, once the enemy of the Amerindian and now his corrupter.

  In Trinidad there is no memory of slavery; in British Guiana it is hard to forget it. The very word ‘Negro’, because of its association with slavery, is resented by many black Guianese; the preferred word is ‘African’, which will cause deep offence in Trinidad. Everyone knows that Amerindians hunted down runaway slaves; it was something I heard again and again, from white and black; and on the Rupununi, and wherever one sees Amerindians, it is a chilling memory.*

  Lethem, the administrative centre, named after a former governor of the colony, is a tidy, rambling settlement of a few dozen concrete houses in the ugly Caribbean style set about corrugated red laterite roads. The ranchers speak of Lethem as a city and say it is overcrowded. At first this seems an affectation, an excess of the boy-scout spirit, but after a few days of travelling through the empty savannah you begin to feel yourself that Lethem is a city, with almost to
o many amenities. It has an airstrip, an abattoir, a hospital and an hotel, a power plant, a cricket ground – the hard Rupununi earth makes a good pitch – and a pavilion. On the airstrip next to the abattoir, the blue-grey mountains low in the distance, the Dakotas land and take off regularly in a flurry of red dust, bringing in supplies, taking out beef; the policemen stand unobtrusively by. Occasionally a small plane flies in from across the border and a Brazilian merchant or smuggler (the frontier is unpatrolled and knows no customs checks) jumps out, as from a taxi, with a suitcase, to wait perhaps for a day or two for the plane to Georgetown.

  Over the two-storeyed concrete residence of the district commissioner the Union Jack flies high enough to be visible to any Brazilian across the border. And the district commissioner, Neville Franker, a Guianese, was all that a district commissioner should be. His official manner was impeccable and reassuring; in private he was relaxed and entertaining and his conversation was edged with an agreeable cynicism. He was new to the area, and it was fitting that, playing that week in his first cricket match in the Rupununi, and going in first wicket down, he should be top-scorer with fifty-three. There could have been no more appropriate way in this part of the world for a district commissioner to call attention to his authority and no more appropriate way of showing the flag.

  The centre of life in Lethem is Teddy Melville’s hotel, which is at the end of the airstrip. ‘Hotel’ is too grand and cold a word for this establishment which looks like a large, rough dwelling-house that has been constructed with difficulty in the desert out of the plainest materials. ‘Inn’, with its suggestion of isolated shelter, welcome and warmth, is a better word. Here the tourist, moving about in comfort by plane and Land-Rover, can be flattered that he is a traveller. There is always room at this inn, if only a hammock on the concrete-floored, trellised veranda, and always food.

  The armchairs in the veranda are of local leather, and in the small dining room the antlered hatrack is hung with ropes and holsters. A friendly pig wanders in and out, hoovering the floor; and occasionally a baby anteater makes a shy appearance, edging shakily along the wall on column-like legs that look like those of a stuffed toy but conceal sharp curving claws which in the adult animal make it a match for the jaguar. There seem to be Melville boys everywhere, handsome, well-built, with light, elastic movements: the illusion of the ‘Western’ is strong. In the bar, where you drink excellent Brazilian beer at a dollar and thirty cents a litre, Portuguese (or Brazilian) is heard as often as English. This, like the Portuguese label (Industria Brasileira) on the unfamiliarly large beer bottle, is no illusion: Lethem is a frontier town.

  The New Year Dance is a big thing in Lethem. It takes place in the hotel, and hand-written bills stuck to the door of the bar said that there was to be a Brazilian band, which was coming all the way from Boa Vista, two rivers, five hard hours and eighty miles away. Lorry-loads of Brazilians were coming as well, for each of these frontier towns, Lethem and Boa Vista, enviously regards the other as a place of vice and adventure; it had already been whispered to me that Boa Vista had brothels.

  The Brazilians arrived in the middle of the afternoon and at once overran the hotel. The women besieged the bathroom, twittering and squawking; and when, hours later, it seemed, they had all repaired the ravages of the drive from Boa Vista, the bathroom was littered with tangles of hair and tufts of cotton wool. In the corridor there was an empty green-and-white carton, Leite de Rosas – perfume, I imagine – and Industria Brasileira, needless to say.

  I had heard that in the old days these frontier dances were rough affairs and sometimes ended in brawls. Things were quieter now and I felt that Lethem regretted its former reputation, though the dance was still not considered by some to be suitable for respectable women. The earliest dancers were Amerindian, with the respectable looking on with aloof indulgence, as though they didn’t know why they had bothered with the long drive, the stay in the bathroom and the Leite de Rosas.

  In the veranda, removed from the hubbub of the dance floor, I came upon a respectable Brazilian man and two respectable Brazilian women – Portuguese with a dash of Amerindian, like so many Brazilians in this part – sitting idly in Teddy Melville’s leather chairs. We attempted to talk. Attempted: they spoke Portuguese and knew little English, and I had only some Spanish. The man was an engineer. His wife, who had a grave, fine beauty, was a civil servant; his sister, unfortunately still unmarried, came from Belém and was spending some time with them. We exchanged addresses. They pressed me to visit Brazil, a great country. When I did so I was to come and see them. We wandered back to the dance floor, and separated.

  The Amerindian women danced dourly, looking down at the floor, concentrating on their steps, and seeming to ignore their partners. They brought their bare feet flat down on to the ground, in a slight stamping action. I did not find them attractive.

  I had tried hard to feel interest in the Amerindians as a whole, but had failed. I couldn’t read their faces; I couldn’t understand their language, and could never gauge at what level communication was possible. Among more complex peoples there are certain individuals who have the power to transmit to you their sense of defeat and purposelessness: emotional parasites who flourish by draining you of the vitality you preserve with difficulty. The Amerindians had this effect on me.

  My most depressing memory of the Rupununi is of the Amerindian village to which Franker took me one day. ‘NOTICE’, said a roughly written board outside. ‘WE DO NOT WANT ANY STRANGERS TO BE TRESPASSING ON THE VILLAGE, EXCEPTING THE PRIESTS, THE DOCTORS, AND THE DISTRICT COMMISSIONER, ORDERED BY THE VILLAGE CHIEF. FELIX.’ The notice was not government-inspired; its purpose was to protect the villagers from the importuning of certain politicians they weren’t going to vote for anyway. It was a small village of thatched huts and some rough wooden houses. The teacher, an Amerindian, lived in the largest wooden house, which was some distance from the village. And in another wooden house there was the school, empty now, but with maps and posters and time-tables on the walls, just like many other elementary schools. But this one led its pupils to nothing but confusion and self-contempt.

  Father Quigly, the Roman Catholic missionary, was passing through the village; he had spent the night in the school, and his hammock was still hung across the room. As he spoke to us, men and boys gathered around, some in the schoolroom, some in bright sunlight outside, the young interested and expectant, the old not looking, as though they felt they had to express their courtesy to the district commissioner and were doing so merely by being present.

  ‘Faustino,’ Father Quigly asked, ‘you want to go to Georgetown?’

  ‘Yes, Father,’ said a boy in grey flannel trousers.

  Yet what would Faustino, and others like him who were dissatisfied with their village and with their condition as Amerindians, do in Georgetown? There they would be objects of contempt; some might become traffic policemen; but that was all. Father Quigly thought they should be given more say in the country, some sort of semi-responsible protected employment by the government.

  Felix, the village chief, in whose name the bold sign barring strangers had been written, didn’t appear interested. While we spoke he sat slumped and round-shouldered on a bench, staring at the floor, his short legs, loosely trousered, dangling. Later in his trance-like way he took us to his hut. It was dark and dirty and dusty and disordered, like most Amerindians’ huts. The sight of exposed food in the midst of dust and mud has the same effect on me as the screech of chalk on a board; I could scarcely stay to admire the Wai-Wai grater – sharp bits of stone stuck into a board – which I had been told was a rare and desirable souvenir. I felt then that reverence for food – rules for its handling, interdictions – was one of the essentials of civilization.

  The music went on all through the night. I awoke intermittently to it: it was comforting, like the sound of rain; but there were also curious grunting noises such as one hears in Japanese films. And in the morning there was silence. The Brazilians, b
and and dancers, civil servant and engineer, had got into their lorries and had gone back to Boa Vista. There were empty beer bottles around the dance floor, in the veranda, in the road; and little groups of Amerindians were contentedly regarding the chaos to which they had contributed.

  In the dining room there was a new guest. He was a trader, Syrian by origin, who had come in by a small plane that morning, on the way to Georgetown. He tried over coffee to persuade me to become a trader and live in Brazil. I mentioned difficulties: with transport from Georgetown to Lethem at nine cents a pound, I said, trading couldn’t be very easy.

  ‘Whatsa trouble?’ he said. ‘You pay one dollar in Georgetown. So? So you pay another dollar for the transport. So you charge three dollars. Whatsa trouble?’

  In Boa Vista that week there was a fair of some sort – cattle or agriculture – and the Lethem officials had been invited. Hewson, the young English agricultural officer who wore correct khaki but went about barefooted by preference, was going with two of his assistants, and he agreed to take me along. We didn’t need passports to get into Brazil but we had to ford the Takutu River. It was less than a hundred yards across at the fording point, and sticks marked the route over the treacherous little sandbanks in which the Land-Rover would be trapped if it halted at all. When the Land-Rover began to sink and the water level rose, I tried to remember that the river was forded twice a week by the big lorry from Boa Vista.

  At last we made the bank. We were in Brazil. The ground carried no marks of difference, nothing to confirm that we were in Brazil. The savannah was as flat and bright and bare, the sky was as high, and the ground was as hard as on the other bank. The road stretched between bristling tussocks of coarse brown-green grass: two parallel white tracks separated by a strip of low, chassis-brushed vegetation. And as we penetrated deeper into Brazil I felt as a fact, what the maps had already told me, that the savannah was really Brazilian and the British Guianese portion of it trifling.