And in the strange world of the Domain Indar appeared to be well regarded. Part of this regard was due to the “outfit” to which he belonged. He couldn’t quite explain to me what the outfit was that sent him on African tours—or I might have been too naïve to understand. But a number of people on the Domain seemed to belong to outfits that were as mysterious; and they looked upon Indar not as a man of our community or a refugee from the coast, but as one of themselves. It was all a little extraordinary to me.
These were the new-style foreigners whom we, in the town, had seen arriving for some time past. We had seen them putting on African clothes; we had noticed their gaiety, so unlike our own caution; their happiness with everything they found. And we had considered them parasites and half dangerous, serving some hidden cause of the President’s, people we had to be careful with.
But now, being with them in the Domain, which in every way was their resort, and being admitted so easily to their life, their world of bungalows and air conditioners and holiday ease, catching in their educated talk the names of famous cities, I swung the other way and began to see how shut in and shabby and stagnant we in the town would have seemed to them. I began to get some sense of the social excitements of life on the Domain, of people associating in a new way, being more open, less concerned with enemies and danger, more ready to be interested and entertained, looking for the human worth of the other man. On the Domain they had their own way of talking about people and events; they were in touch with the world. To be with them was to have a sense of adventure.
I thought of my own life and Metty’s; of Shoba and Mahesh and their overheated privacy; of the Italians and Greeks—especially the Greeks—bottled up and tense with their family concerns and their nervousness of Africa and Africans. There was hardly anything new there. So to travel those few miles between the town and the Domain was always to make some adjustment, to assume a new attitude, and each time almost to see another country. I was ashamed of myself for the new judgments I found myself making on my friends Shoba and Mahesh, who had done so much for me for so many years, and with whom I had felt so safe. But I couldn’t help those thoughts. I was tilting the other way, to the life of the Domain, as I saw it in the company of Indar.
I was aware, in the Domain, that I belonged to the other world. When I met people with Indar I found I had little to say. There were times when I thought that I might be letting him down. But there seemed to be no such thought in his head. He introduced me round as a friend of his family’s from the coast, a member of his community. He didn’t only want me to witness his success with the people of the Domain; he seemed to want me to share it as well. It was his way of rewarding me for my admiration, and I saw a delicacy in him that I had never seen on the coast. His manners were like a form of consideration; and however small the occasion, his manners never failed. They were the manners of an impresario, a little bit. But it was also his old family style; it was as though he had needed security and admiration to bring it out again. In the artificiality of the Domain he had found his perfect setting.
We in the town could offer Indar nothing like the regard and the social excitements he enjoyed at the Domain; we could scarcely appreciate what he enjoyed there. With our cynicism, created by years of insecurity, how did we look on men? We judged the salesmen in the van der Weyden by the companies they represented, their ability to offer us concessions. Knowing such men, having access to the services they offered, and being flattered by them that we were not ordinary customers paying the full price or having to take our place in the queue, we thought we had mastered the world; and we saw those salesmen and representatives as men of power who had to be courted. We judged traders by their coups, the contracts they landed, the agencies they picked up.
It was the same with Africans. We judged them by their ability, as army men or officials in the customs or policemen, to do us services; and that was how they also judged themselves. You could spot the powerful in Mahesh’s Bigburger place. They, sharing in our boom, and no longer as shoddy as they once were, wore gold as much as possible—gold-rimmed glasses, gold rings, gold pen-and-pencil sets, gold watches with solid gold wristlets. Among ourselves we scoffed at the vulgarity and pathos of that African lust for gold. Gold—how could it alter the man, who was only an African? But we wanted gold ourselves; and we regularly paid tribute to the Africans who wore gold.
Our ideas of men were simple; Africa was a place where we had to survive. But in the Domain it was different. There they could scoff at trade and gold, because in the magical atmosphere of the Domain, among the avenues and new houses, another Africa had been created. In the Domain, Africans—the young men at the polytechnic—were romantic. They were not always present at the parties or gatherings; but the whole life of the Domain was built around them. In the town “African” could be a word of abuse or disregard; in the Domain it was a bigger word. An “African” there was a new man whom everybody was busy making, a man about to inherit—the important man that years before, at the lycée, Ferdinand had seen himself as.
In the town, when they were at the lycée, Ferdinand and his friends—certainly his friends—were still close to village ways. When they were off duty, not at the lycée or with people like myself, they had merged into the African life of the town. Ferdinand and Metty—or Ferdinand and any African boy—could become friends because they had so much in common. But in the Domain there was no question of confusing Ferdinand and his friends with the white-uniformed servants.
Ferdinand and his friends had a clear idea of who they were and what was expected of them. They were young men on government scholarships; they would soon become administrative cadets in the capital, serving the President. The Domain was the President’s creation; and in the Domain they were in the presence of foreigners who had a high idea of the new Africa. Even I, in the Domain, began to feel a little of the romance of that idea.
So foreigners and Africans acted and reacted on one another, and everyone became locked in an idea of glory and newness. Everywhere the President’s photograph looked down at us. In the town, in our shops and in government buildings, it was just the photograph of the President, the ruler, something that had to be there. In the Domain the glory of the President brushed off onto all his new Africans.
And they were bright, those young men. I had remembered them as little tricksters, pertinacious but foolish, with only a kind of village cunning; and I had assumed that for them studying meant only cramming. Like other people in the town, I believed that degree courses had been scaled down or altered for Africans. It was possible; they did go in for certain subjects—international relations, political science, anthropology. But those young men had sharp minds and spoke wonderfully—and in French, not the patois. They had developed fast. Just a few years before, Ferdinand had been incapable of grasping the idea of Africa. That wasn’t so now. The magazines about African affairs—even the semi-bogus, subsidized ones from Europe—and the newspapers, though censored, had spread new ideas, knowledge, new attitudes.
Indar took me one evening to one of his seminars, in a lecture room in the big polytechnic building. The seminar was not part of any course. It was an extra, and was described on the door as an exercise in English-speaking. But more must have been expected from Indar. Most of the desks were taken. Ferdinand was there, in a little group of his own.
The biscuit-coloured walls of the lecture room were bare except for a photograph of the President—not in army uniform, but in a chief’s leopard-skin cap, a short-sleeved jacket and a polka-dotted cravat. Indar, sitting below this photograph, began to speak, easily, about the other parts of Africa he had visited, and the young men were fascinated. Their innocence and eagerness were astonishing. In spite of the wars and coups they were hearing about, Africa was still to them the new continent, and they behaved as though Indar felt like them, was almost one of them. The language exercise turned into a discussion about Africa, and I could feel polytechnic topics, lecture topics, coming to the surface.
Some of the questions were dynamite; but Indar was very good, always calm, never surprised. He was like a philosopher; he tried to get the young men to examine the words they were using.
They talked for a while about the coup in Uganda, and about the tribal and religious differences there. Then they began to talk more generally about religion in Africa.
There was some movement in the group around Ferdinand. And Ferdinand—not unaware of me—stood up and asked, “Would the honourable visitor state whether he feels that Africans have been depersonalized by Christianity?”
Indar did what he had done before. He restated the question. He said, “I suppose you are really asking whether Africa can be served by a religion which is not African. Is Islam an African religion? Do you feel that Africans have been depersonalized by that?”
Ferdinand didn’t reply. It was as in the old days—he hadn’t thought beyond a certain point.
Indar said, “Well, I suppose you can say that Islam has become an African religion. It has been on the continent for a very long time. And you can say the same for the Coptic Christians. I don’t know—perhaps you might feel that those people have been so depersonalized by those religions that they are out of touch with Africa. Would you say that? Or would you say they are Africans of a special sort?”
Ferdinand said, “The honourable visitor knows very well the kind of Christianity I mean. He is trying to confuse the issue. He knows about the low status of African religion, and he knows very well that this is a direct question to him about the relevance or otherwise of African religion. The visitor is a gentleman sympathetic to Africa who has travelled. He can advise us. That is why we ask.”
A number of desk lids were banged in approval.
Indar said, “To answer that question you must allow me to ask you one. You are students. You are not villagers. You cannot pretend you are. You will soon be serving your President and his government in different capacities. You are men of the modern world. Do you need African religion? Or are you being sentimental about it? Are you nervous of losing it? Or do you feel you have to hold on to it just because it’s yours?”
Ferdinand’s eyes went hard. He banged the lid of his desk and stood up. “You are asking a complicated question.”
And “complicated,” among these students, was clearly a word of disapproval.
Indar said, “You are forgetting. I didn’t raise the question. You raised it, and I merely asked for information.”
That restored order, put an end to the banging of the desk lids. It made Ferdinand friendly again, and he remained friendly for the rest of the seminar. He went to Indar at the end, when the boys in the jackets de boy pushed in chromium-plated trolleys and began serving coffee and sweet biscuits (part of the style the President had decreed for the Domain).
I said to Ferdinand, “You’ve been heckling my friend.”
He said, “I wouldn’t have done it if I had known he was your friend.”
Indar said, “What are your own feelings about African religion?”
Ferdinand said, “I don’t know. That’s why I asked. It is not an easy question for me.”
Later, when Indar and I left the polytechnic building to walk back to his house, Indar said, “He’s pretty impressive. He’s your marchande’s son? That explains it. He’s got that little extra background.”
In the asphalted space outside the polytechnic building the flag was floodlit. Slender lamp standards lifted fluorescent arms down both sides of the main avenue; and the avenue was also lit with lights at grass level, like an airport runway. Some of the bulbs had been broken and grass had grown tall around the fittings.
I said, “His mother’s also a magician.”
Indar said, “You can’t be too careful. They were tough tonight, but they didn’t ask the really difficult question. Do you know what that is? Whether Africans are peasants. It’s a nonsense question, but big battles are fought about that one. Whatever you say you get into trouble. You see why my outfit is needed. Unless we can get them thinking, and give them real ideas instead of just politics and principles, these young men will keep our world in turmoil for the next half century.”
I thought how far we had both come, to talk about Africa like this. We had even learned to take African magic seriously. It hadn’t been like that on the coast. But as we talked that evening about the seminar, I began to wonder whether Indar and I weren’t fooling ourselves and whether we weren’t allowing the Africa we talked about to become too different from the Africa we knew. Ferdinand didn’t want to lose touch with the spirits; he was nervous of being on his own. That had been at the back of his question. We all understood his anxiety; but it was as though, at the seminar, everyone had been ashamed, or fearful, of referring to it directly. The discussion had been full of words of another kind, about religion and history. It was like that on the Domain; Africa there was a special place.
I wondered, too, about Indar. How had he arrived at his new attitudes? I had thought of him, since the coast, as a hater of Africa. He had lost a lot; I didn’t think he had forgiven. Yet he flourished on the Domain; it was his setting.
I was less “complicated”; I belonged to the town. And to leave the Domain and drive back to the town, to see the shacks, acres and acres of them, the rubbish mounds, to feel the presence of the river and the forest all around (more than landscaping now), to see the ragged groups outside the drinking booths, the squatters’ cooking fires on the pavements in the centre of the town—to do that drive back was to return to the Africa I knew. It was to climb down from the exaltation of the Domain, to grasp reality again. Did Indar believe in the Africa of words? Did anyone on the Domain believe? Wasn’t the truth what we in the town lived with—the salesmen’s chat in the van der Weyden and the bars, the photographs of the President in government offices and in our shops, the army barracks in the converted palace of the man of our community?
Indar said, “Does one believe in anything? Does it matter?”
There was a ritual I went through whenever I had to clear a difficult consignment through the customs. I filled in the declaration form, folded it over five hundred francs, and handed it to the official in charge. He would—as soon as he had got his subordinates out of the room (and they of course knew why they had been asked to leave the room)—check the notes with his eyes alone. The notes would then be taken; the entries on the form would be studied with exaggerated care; and soon he would say, “C’est bien, Mis’ Salim. Vous êtes en ordre.” Neither he nor I would refer to the bank notes. We would talk only about the details on the declaration form, which, correctly filled, correctly approved, would remain as proof of both our correctness. Yet what had lain at the heart of the transaction would be passed over in silence, and would leave no trace in the records.
So, in my talks with Indar about Africa—the purpose of his outfit, the Domain, his anxieties about imported doctrines, the danger to Africa of its very newness, first ideas being caught most securely by new minds as sticky as adhesive tape—I felt that between us lay some dishonesty, or just an omission, some blank, around which we both had to walk carefully. That omission was our own past, the smashed life of our community. Indar had referred to that at our first meeting that morning in the shop. He said that he had learned to trample on the past. In the beginning it had been like trampling on a garden; later it had become like walking on ground.
I became confused myself. The Domain was a hoax. But at the same time it was real, because it was full of serious men (and a few women). Was there a truth outside men? Didn’t men make the truth for themselves? Everything men did or made became real. So I moved between the Domain and the town. It was always reassuring to return to the town I knew, to get away from that Africa of words and ideas as it existed on the Domain (and from which, often, Africans were physically absent). But the Domain, and the glory and the social excitements of the life there, always called me back.
8
Indar said, “We are going to a party after dinner. It’s b
eing given by Yvette. Do you know her? Her husband, Raymond, keeps a low profile, but he runs the whole show here. The President, or the Big Man, as you call him, sent him down here to keep an eye on things. He’s the Big Man’s white man. In all these places there’s someone like that. Raymond’s a historian. They say the President reads everything he writes. That’s the story anyway. Raymond knows more about the country than anyone on earth.”
I had never heard of Raymond. The President I had seen only in photographs—first in army uniform, then in the stylish short-sleeved jacket and cravat, and then with his leopard-skin chief’s cap and his carved stick, emblem of his chieftaincy—and it had never occurred to me that he might be a reader. What Indar told me brought the President closer. At the same time it showed me how far away I, and people like me, were from the seat of power. Considering myself from that distance, I saw how small and vulnerable we were; and it didn’t seem quite real that, dressed as I was, I should be strolling across the Domain after dinner to meet people in direct touch with the great. It was strange, but I no longer felt oppressed by the country, the forest and the waters and the remote peoples: I felt myself above it all, considering it from this new angle of the powerful.
From what Indar had said I had expected that Raymond and Yvette would be middle-aged. But the lady—in black slacks in some shiny material—who came to meet us after the white-jacketed boy had let us in was young, in her late twenties, near my own age. That was the first surprise. The second was that she was barefooted, feet white and beautiful and finely made. I looked at her feet before I considered her face and her blouse, black silk, embroidered round the low-cut collar—expensive stuff, not the sort of goods you could get in our town.
A Bend in the River Page 14
