Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

  Begin with a stain in the ocean. Three hundred miles out to sea, off the west coast of Africa, the mark of a presence the immensity of seas has not been able to swallow. Mariners saw it in the age of exploration, when each voyage held the fear that a ship might sail off the edge of the world. They knew it was the stain of land; mountains had coloured it, the rotting verdure of forests, perhaps, the grass of plains. A massive land, a continent, giving rise to and feeding a river great enough to make a dent in the sea.

  The continent parts; the river opens a way in. Many journeys have beginnings flat and unworthy, but not this one.

  I stayed a day or two at a beach on the west coast of Africa at the river’s mouth. Though the water was salt to my tongue and the tides rose and withdrew, it was not the sea that lay below the ochre cliff. It was the Congo River. All the Atlantic Ocean, as far as I could see, was the Congo River. In the bright sun, the water glittered like a seal’s coat; under the heavy skies of the rainy season, it was quite black. When I swam in it, even in the evening, it was warmer than the warm air. I had read that the Congo, measured by its year-by-year flow, is the second greatest river in the world; now the conception of the dry fact flowed around me, a vast environment.

  Strange creatures live in the Congo River. From a small boat following the water maze of mangroves, with their cages of whitish roots set over a footing of black ooze, I saw the climbing fish perioph-thalmus. Pop-eyed, startled little creatures, they ran nimbly up the roots, but hobbled and flopped on the ooze. They are the colour of mud, they live in mud that is neither land nor water, and their lives span quietly the gasping transition that evolution made millennia ago, bringing life out of the sea. The manatee, a sea mammal with white breasts (the creature on which the fiction of the mermaid is based), is sometimes caught here.

  A slender spatula of land runs out from the mangroves at the shining gape of the river’s open mouth. On it is a strip of a town, so narrow that you can see through the gaps between the rows of coconut palms and the smart little villas to the water on the other side. There are no blocks of buildings; the only objects of height and bulk are the ocean-going ships moored off the jetty. This town is Banana, an old slave port and the oldest white settlement on the Congo. It looks like a bright prefab; no memory, here, of the ships that passed, heavy with human cargo, taking Africa to the rest of the world – a world that lived to see a new nation in Brazil, a Negro ‘problem’ in the United States, riots in London’s Notting Hill. I could not believe that those extraordinary beginnings could have been wiped out entirely, but all I could find was a neglected graveyard by the sea. Dutch, French, Portuguese, English and German names were on the headstones, and the earliest was dated 1861. Nobody stayed in Banana unless he died there; nobody built a house meant to last; there were no solid monuments to community pride among slave traders.

  Perhaps, while I am writing, the new past, so recent that it is almost the present, is disappearing without trace as the older one did. The white personnel from the Belgian naval base, and the comfortable hotel where Belgians from the stifling interior used to come to swim and lounge in the harlequin garb of resorts the world over – will there remain, soon, much sign of their passing?

  A few miles up the same – and only – coast road that led past the graveyard, there was a fishing village that was unaware not only of the past but even of the passing present. On swept sand under coconut and Elaeis palms the bamboo houses of the village had the special, satisfying neatness of fine basketwork; big nets checkered the shore and a flotilla of pirogues lay beached. Squat monsters of baobab trees, fat-limbed and baggy, sounded tuba notes here and there among the string ensemble of the palms. In the hollow trunk of one of the baobabs was a chicken house, reached by a little ladder. Two old men sat making nets in the sunlight sliced by the poles of palms. One was rolling the thread, using the reddish bark fibre taken from a baobab not ten feet away. A woman came out of a house and took in a basket of flame-coloured palm nuts, ready to be pounded for oil. Under the eaves of her house hung the family storage vessels, bunches of calabashes engraved with abstract designs. These people had none of the aesthetic deprivations I associate with poverty. They walked between classic pillars of palm, and no yesterday’s newspapers blew about their feet. They were living in a place so guileless and clean that it was like a state of grace.

  A fast motor launch took me in five hours from the West African Coast to the cataracts that kept the white man out of Central Africa for 300 years. The mangroves were left behind at once, the river continued so wide that the distant banks seemed to be slipping over the horizon, and islands appeared faintly as mirages and then came close, shapes extinguished beneath a dark cloth of creepers. The undersides of the clouds were lit by sunlight shaken glitteringly off the purplish-brown storm-coloured water that heaved past us. As we took the highway against the main current, far off, Africans moved quietly on the verges of the river, their slender pirogues threading the darkness of overhanging trees.

  Ocean liners come this way up the Congo to Matadi, the town at the foot of the cataracts, and it has the air of a nineteenth-century seaport. The steep, twisting streets that lead down to the docks are sailors’ streets; there is even a notice in the hotel: No parrots allowed. The Congo here looks as I was never to see it anywhere else. It has just emerged from the skelter and plunge 200 miles down a stairway of thirty-two cataracts in a total drop five times the height of Niagara Falls. It is all muscle, running deep between the high confines of granite hills, and straightening out in swaths from the terrible circular pull of whirlpools.

  I saw the rock of Diego Cão, naval officer and Gentleman of the Household to Dom João II, King of Portugal, who reached the mouth of the Congo in 1482. He set up a stone pillar on the southern point of the six-mile-wide mouth of the estuary, and so the river got its first European name, Rio de Padrão, the Pillar River. Diego Cão came back twice. On his third trip he sailed ninety-two miles up the river until he was turned back by impassable cataracts. He left an inscription carved on rock to show how far he had got; for more than three centuries this was the limit of the outside world’s knowledge of the river.

  On the face of volcanic rock above the powerfully disturbed waters of the first cataracts, a mile or two above Matadi, was the cross, the coat of arms of Dom João II of Portugal, and the names of Cão and his companions, cut in the beautiful lettering of an illuminated manuscript. The inscription had the sharp clarity of something freshly finished instead of nearly five centuries old.

  The place of the rock, where Diego Cão turned back, is a dark place. No earth is to be seen there; only great humps of grey-black rock, and, like rock come to life, tremendous baobabs (those anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, geomorphic living forms, always less tree than man or beast or stone) with their wrinkled flesh that looks as if it would cringe at a touch, their token disguise of brilliant leaves, and their mammalian fruit pendent from long cords. I took one in my hands; it was fully a foot and a half long and must have weighed five pounds. The light-green velour skin was fuzzy as a peach. There came to me, through my hand, all the queerness of the continent, in the strange feel of that heavy-hanging fruit.

  There is a road bypassing the cataracts that once barred the way into equatorial Africa, and a railway. Without that railway, Stanley said, all the wealth of Africa behind the cataracts was not worth ‘a two-shilling piece’. Stanley himself hacked and dragged his way on foot, sometimes following hippopotamus trails, over the hills and through gallery forests – the dense tunnels of green that cover water courses. The black men dubbed him – with grim admiration, since many of their number died portering for him – Bula Matari, ‘Breaker of Rocks’. But it is easy, now, to come upon the splendid sight of Stanley Pool (Pool Malebo), the 360-square-mile river-lake above the cataracts, and the beginning of a million square miles of accessible river basin.

  On the south bank of the Pool is Léopoldville (Kinshasa), one of the
few real cities in Africa, if one of the most troubled, where last year the splendid celebrations of Congolese Independence Day gave way at once to riots and political chaos. Ever since the first agitation for independence, in 1959, there have been riots from time to time, and worse, the fear of riots all the time. When trouble does come, city people white and black flee in their thousands across Stanley Pool to Brazzaville until things cool down again. Brazzaville stands on the north bank, the capital of another Congo Republic, a slightly senior and entirely peaceful independent black state that was formerly part of French Equatorial Africa.

  Many big airlines alight here, beside Stanley Pool, at Léo or Brazza, migrant birds always on their way to somewhere else; they bring the world thus far, with their thin filaments of communication they touch thus lightly upon the vast and lazy confidence of the great river that opens an eye of dazzling light beneath them as they take off and go away; the river that carries with ease the entire commerce of the deep Africa through which it is the only highway.

  The Pool has always been the point where all the trade of the river, and that of the interior that comes down the river, logically converges, and life there since ancient times must have been a little different from that of the rest of the river. Life on either side of the Pool today is dominated by the presence of the new African – the young men with Belafonte cuts and narrow trousers. One sits behind a teller’s chromium bars in an air-conditioned bank, another may only sell lottery tickets in the streets, but they are all évolué – for good – from the old African, who sold his land and, as it turned out, his way of life to the white man for a few bottles of gin and some bolts of cloth.

  On the south bank, Léopoldville’s Congolese cities of 360,000 people shuttle with vitality night and day, while the ‘white’ city – no longer segregated by anything except old usage, new fears and the black man’s poverty – is dead after the shops shut. On the eve of independence, 21,000 white people were living there; it is difficult to get a figure for those who live there now, for of the numbers who fled last year, some have quietly come back, and of course there is the shifting population of United Nations personnel.

  The bloody foundering of the new state naturally has focused attention on what the Congolese have not got: not a single doctor or lawyer among them and not so much understanding of democracy as you might hope to find in an election of officers of a sports club. These are not sneers but facts. When you go about Léopoldville among the Congolese, you are reminded that if there are no Congolese doctors or lawyers, it is nevertheless also a fact before your eyes that the fishermen and warriors that Stanley encountered eighty-one years ago have become clerks, laboratory technicians, ships’ captains and skilled workers. They also reveal an aptitude for spending hours talking politics, reading party newspapers and drinking beer – a way of passing time that is characteristic of some of the most civilised cities in the world, and that has been the beginning of many a man’s political education. They stood small chance of making a success of governing themselves when independence fell into their clamouring hands; now they may have to pick their way through years of near-anarchy before they defeat tribalism, evade or survive foreign domination, and learn, a tragically hard way, how to run a modern state.

  The city Congolese have the roaring capacity for enjoyment that looks as if it is going to be one of the pleasanter characteristics of the new African states. Dancing begins in the open-air cafés at two o’clock in the heat of a Sunday afternoon, only a few hours after the last cha-cha-cha of Saturday night has ended, and the influence of the weekend hangs over well into Monday, even in these lean times.

  On a Monday morning I visited the Léopoldville market, that colossal exchange of goods, gossip and sometimes hard words. Two or three thousand vendors, mostly women, were selling fruit, vegetables, miles of mammy cloth as dazzling as the patterns you see in your own eyelids; patent medicines and nail varnish, and also several things you would never think of, such as chunks of smoked hippo meat and piles of dried caterpillars sold by the newspaper poke. At least five thousand people were buying there. Lost among them, I understood for the first time the concept of the values of the market-place. For it was clear that these people were not just doing their shopping; they were expressing the metropolitan need to be seen at the theatre, the city instinct of participation that fills the galleries of houses of parliament and the foyers of fashionable hotels. They had come to hear what was going on in their world, and what a man’s reputation was worth at current prices.

  When I emerged from this vociferous and confident press, the Congolese taxi driver who drove me away remarked, ‘Ah, it’s a pity that you saw it on such a quiet day. No one comes to market on a Monday – all too tired after the weekend. You should have come on a Friday, when it’s full of people.’

  The Congo crosses the Equator twice in its 2,900-mile length, and it is the only river system in the world whose main stream flows through both northern and southern hemispheres. Some of its tributaries are on one, some on the other side of the Equator. This means that the river benefits from both rainy seasons – April to October from the north, and October to April from the south – and instead of rising and falling annually, it has two moderate highs and two lows each year. It does not flood, and though navigation in times of low water is sometimes tricky, it is always possible.

  The Congo is shorter than the Nile, the Ob, the Yangtze and the Mississippi–Missouri system, but only the Amazon exceeds it in volume of water discharged into the sea. Its hydraulic energy is estimated at a sixth of the world’s potential, and there are a thousand known species of fish in its waters.

  From Stanley Pool the Congo opens a way more than a thousand miles, without a man-made lock or a natural obstacle, through the centre of Africa. It leads to what Joseph Conrad called the heart of darkness; the least-known, most subjectively described depths of the continent where men have always feared to meet the dark places of their own souls.

  No bridge crosses the river in all this distance. No road offers an alternate way for more than short stretches, and these always lead back to the river. The river alone cleaves the forests and reveals, in its shining light, the life there. Sometimes, for hours, there is no break in the wall of forest. Sometimes, beyond an open stretch of papyrus, a group of palms stands like animals arrested in attitudes of attention. One morning crowds of pale-green butterflies with black lacy frames and veinings to their wings came to settle on the burning metal of the jeeps that were tethered to the barge in front of our boat.

  This boat – the Gouverneur Moulaert – pushed a whole caravan: two barges and another boat, the Ngwaka, for third-class passengers – mostly black. The pace, night and day, was six miles an hour; a little more than the pace of a man. We were never out of touch with the life of the shore. All day long, pirogues paddled out to hitch up alongside our bulky complex, and the people came aboard to sell dried fish and palm or banana wine to the passengers of the Ngwaka. Two huge catfish, each with a mouth big enough to take a man’s head, were lugged aboard for sale to the crew, and once a basket of smoked crocodile feet was casually handed up. For the wilderness was inhabited everywhere, though it often seemed empty to our eyes, accustomed to landscapes where, even if few people are to be seen, there are evidences of men having made their mark in the way the country looks. These people, slipping out of the forest into the sight of the river, didn’t obtrude; their flimsy huts, roofed with the fronds that the forest can abundantly spare, lay far down among the humus litter at the forest’s feet; their manioc and bananas were merely patches of vegetation a little differently organised from the rest of the wilderness.

  There were many peoples, of course. Every day we saw different faces turned to us from the visiting pirogues. North of the Equator, tattooing was no longer a matter of misplaced vaccination scratches. There were patterns of serrated nicks that sometimes made a bold second pair of eyebrows; there were round engravings like beauty patches on women’s cheeks. On some faces the
distortion was beautiful; they were formalised into sculpture in flesh. On the faces of the old, artifice had given way to nature, and the imposed face was broken up by the patient triumph of wrinkles.

  Our water caravan did not halt for the first night and day, but in the small hours of the second night I was awakened by the sudden stillness of the engines. There were muffled cries in the air; I got up and went on deck. Out of the darkness and dark warmth the two great spotlights of our boat hastily framed a stage setting. A few palm trees were the only props. Before them, on the twenty feet or so of water between our caravan and the shore, black pirogues moved, silent and busy. The third-class ship ahead of ours glowed with light as if it were afire; everyone aboard was up, and life was going on purposefully. I saw the whole scene as if I had carried a lantern into a cave. Once, twice, the non-existent land showed the incredible sight of the lights of a car, carving through it and away. The calls of men and women traders graceful as shades in some watery level of a Dantesque Lethe, came to me as the caravan began to move away. The pirogues showed tiny candle halos of orange light; there was silence. Then a long cry: ‘Ivoire!’

  By daylight, these ports of call were signalled by a mile or two of bank tamed by occupation; the red-brick buildings of a mission set back on a grassy slope, a palm-oil refinery or coffee-plantation headquarters. As well as the river people, and the workers from the refinery village, whatever white people there were always came down to the shore to survey us across the water: an old priest with a freshly combed, yellow-stained beard hanging to his waist, a couple of jolly-looking missionaries in cotton frocks, a Portuguese trader’s wife, with sad, splendid eyes and a moustache, who never waved back.

  At Coquilhatville (Mbandaka), exactly on the Equator, I went ashore for the first time. It was a small modern town with its main street set along the river, and an air of great isolation. There is a magnificent botanical garden there, with trees and plants from the jungles of the Amazon as well as nearly all known varieties native to tropical Africa. The Belgian director was still there, then, a happy misogynist living alone with a cat. He opened his penknife and cut me a spray of three cattleya orchids from the baskets blooming on his open verandah. When I got back to the boat, I found that cargo was still being loaded, so I put the orchids into a mug and crossed the road from the dock to the main street again, where I had noticed the Musée de l’Équateur housed in a little old building. Striped wasps droned inside, tokening the peculiar resistance of the Equatorial forest to the preservation of material things; but if heat and damp threatened to invade the fetish figures and the carved utensils behind glass, it did not matter, because they were all in everyday use in the region, with the exception, perhaps, of a coffin, about twelve feet long, in the form of a man. It was an expression of rigor mortis in wood – angular, stern and dyed red. The face was tattooed, and in the crook of the left arm there was a small figure representing the dead man’s wife. But I was told that people in that part of the country usually bury their dead in ant heaps, and certainly I never saw a cemetery near any village along the river.