The Writer and the World: Essays

by V. S. Naipaul

  Soon the settlements appear: the low thatched huts in scraped brown yards, thatch and walls the colour of the earth, the earth scraped bare for fear of snakes and soldier ants. Boys swim out to the steamer, their twice-weekly excitement; and regularly, to shouts, the trading dugouts come, are skilfully poled in alongside the moving steamer, moored, and taken miles downstream while the goods are unloaded, products of the bush: wicker chairs, mortars carved out of tree trunks, great enamel basins of pineapples. Because of the wars, or for some other reason, there are few men here, and the paddlers and traders are all women, or young girls.

  When the traders have sold, they buy. In the forward part of the steamer, beyond the second-class w.c.s, water always running off their steel floors, and in the narrow walk beside the cabins, among the defecating babies, the cooking and the washing and the vacant girls being intently deloused, in a damp smell of salted fish and excrement and oil and rust, and to the sound of gramophone records, there are stalls: razor blades, batteries, pills and capsules, soap, hypodermic syringes, cigarettes, pencils, copybooks, lengths of cloth. These are the products of the outside world that are needed; these are the goods for which such exertions are made. Their business over, the dugouts cast off, to paddle lightless upstream miles in the dark.

  There can be accidents (a passenger dugout joining the moving steamer was to be overturned on this journey, and some students returning from the bush to Kinshasa were to be lost); and at night the steamer’s searchlights constantly sweep the banks. Moths show white in the light; and on the water the Congo hyacinth shows white: a water plant that appeared on the upper Congo in 1956 and has since spread all the way down, treacherously beautiful, with thick lilylike green leaves and a pale-lilac flower like a wilder hyacinth. It seeds itself rapidly; it can form floating islands that attract other vegetation; it can foul the propellers of the steamer. If the steamers do not fail, if there are no more wars, it is the Congo hyacinth that may yet imprison the river people in the immemorial ways of the bush.

  In the morning there are new dugouts, fresh merchandise: basins of slugs in moist black earth, fresh fish, and monkeys, monkeys ready-smoked, boucané, charred little hulks, or freshly killed, grey or red monkeys, the tips of their tails slit, the slit skin of the tail tied round the neck, the monkeys bundled up and lifted in this way from the dugouts, by the tails, holdalls, portmanteaux, of dead monkeys. The excitement is great.

  Monkey is an African delicacy, and a monkey that fetches six zaires, twelve dollars, in Kinshasa can be bought on the river for three zaires.

  On the throbbing steel deck the monkeys can appear to be alive and breathing. The wind ruffles their fur; the faces of the red monkeys, falling this way and that, suggest deep contented sleep; their forepaws are loosely closed, sometimes stretched out before them. At the stern of the steamer, on the lower deck, a wood fire is lit and the cooking starts: the dead monkey held face down over the fire, the fur burned off. In the bow, among the goats and hens, there is a wet baby monkey, tightly tethered, somebody’s pet or somebody’s supper (and in the lifeboat there will appear the next day, as a kind of African joke, a monkey’s skull, picked clean and white).

  So day after day, through the halts at Bumbe, Lisala and Mbandaka—the two-storeyed Belgian colonial buildings, the ochre concrete walls, the white arches, the green or red corrugated-iron roofs—the steamer market goes on. On the riverbanks bamboo gives way to palms, their lower brown fronds brushing the yellow water. But there is no true forest. The tall trees are dead, and their trunks and bare branches stick out white above the low green bush. The lower vegetation is at times tattered, and sometimes opens out into grassy savanna land, blasted-looking and ghostly in the afternoon heat mist.

  The river widens; islands appear; but there is no solitude in this heart of Africa. Always there are the little brown settlements in scraped brown yards, the little plantings of maize or banana or sugar-cane about huts, the trading dugouts arriving beside the steamer to shouts. In the heat mist the sun, an hour before sunset, can appear round and orange, reflected in an orange band in the water muddy with laterite, the orange reflection broken only by the ripples from the bows of the steamer and the barges. Sometimes at sunset the water will turn violet below a violet sky.

  But it is a peopled wilderness. The land of this river basin is land used in the African way. It is burned, cultivated, abandoned. It looks desolate, but its riches and fruits are known; it is a wilderness, but one of monkeys. Bush and blasted trees disappear only towards Kinshasa. It is only after nine hundred miles that earth and laterite give way to igneous rocks, and the land, becoming hilly, with sharp indentations, grows smooth and bare, dark with vegetation only in its hollows.

  Plant today, reap tomorrow: this is what they say in Kisangani. But this vast green land, which can feed the continent, barely feeds itself. In Kinshasa the meat and even the vegetables have to be imported from other countries. Eggs and orange juice come from South Africa, in spite of hot official words; and powdered milk and bottled milk come from Europe. The bush is a way of life; and where the bush is so overwhelming, organized agriculture is an illogicality.

  The Belgians, in the last twenty years of their rule, tried to develop African agriculture, and failed. A girl on the steamer, a teacher, remembered the irrational attempt, and the floggings. Agriculture had to be “industrialized,” a writer said one day in Elima, but not in the way “the old colonialists and their disciples have preached.” The Belgians failed because they were too theoretical, too removed from the peasants, whom they considered “ignorant” and “irrational.” In Zaire, as in China, according to this writer, a sound agriculture could only be based on traditional methods. Machines were not necessary. They were not always suited to the soil; tractors, for instance, often made the soil infertile.

  Two days later there was another article in Elima. It was no secret, the writer said, that the agriculturists of the country cultivated only small areas and that their production was “minimal.” Modern machines had to be used: North Korean experts were coming to show the people how. And there was a large photograph of a tractor, a promise of the future.

  About agriculture, as about so many things, as about the principles of government itself, there is confusion. Everyone feels the great bush at his back. And the bush remains the bush, with its own logical life. Away from the mining areas and the decaying towns the land is as the Belgians found it and as they have left it.

  APERIRE TERRAM GENTIBUS: “To Open the Land to the Nations”: this is the motto, in raised granite, that survives over the defaced monument at Kinshasa railway station. The railway from the Atlantic, the steamer beyond the rapids at Kinshasa: this was how the Congo was opened up, and the monument was erected in 1948 to mark the first fifty years of the railway.

  But now the railway is used mainly for goods. Few visitors arrive at the little suburban-style station, still marked “Kinshasa Est,” and step out into the imperial glory of the two-lane boulevard that runs south of the river, just behind the docks. In the roundabout outside the station, the statue of King Albert I, uniformed, with sun helmet and sword (according to old postcards, which continue to be sold), has been taken down; the bronze plaques beside the plinth have been broken away, except for an upper fringe of what looks like banana leaves; the floodlamps have been smashed, the wiring apparatus pulled out and rusted; and all that remains of the monument are two tall brick pillars, like the pillars at the end of some abandoned Congolese Appian Way.

  In the station hall the timetable frames swivel empty and glassless on the metal pole. But in the station yard, past the open, unguarded doors, there is a true relic: an 1893 locomotive, the first used on the Congo railway. It stands on a bed of fresh gravel, amid croton plants and beside two traveller’s-trees. It is small, built for a narrow gauge, and looks quaint, with its low, slender boiler, tall funnel and its open cab; but it still appears whole. It is stamped No. 1 and in an oval cartouche carries one of the great names of the Belgian nin
eteenth-century industrial expansion: Société Anonyme John Cockerill—Seraing.

  Not many people in Kinshasa know about this locomotive; and perhaps it has survived because, like so many things of the Belgian past, it is now junk. Like the half-collapsed fork-lift truck on the platform of one of the goods sheds; like the other fork-lift truck in the yard, more thoroughly pillaged, and seemingly decomposed about its rusted forks, which lie in the dust like metal tusks. Like the one-wheel lawn mower in the park outside, which is now a piece of wasteland, overgrown where it has not been scuffed to dust. The lawn mower is in the possession of a little boy, and he, noticing the stranger’s interest, rights his machine and skilfully runs it on its one wheel through the dust, making the rusted blades whirr.

  The visitor nowadays arrives at the airport of Ndjili, some miles to the east of the city. Zaire is not yet a land for the casual traveller—the harassments, official and unofficial, are too many—and the visitor is usually either a businessman or, if he is black, a delegate (in national costume) to one of the many conferences that Zaire now hosts. From the airport one road leads to the city and the Intercontinental Hotel, past great green-and-yellow boards with Mobutu’s sayings in French and English, past the river (the slums of the cité indigène well to the south), past the Belgian-built villas in green gardens. A quiet six-lane highway runs twenty or thirty miles in the other direction, to the “presidential domain” of Nsele.

  Here, in what looks like a resort development, flashy but with hints of perishability, distinguished visitors stay or confer, and good members of the party are admitted to a taste of luxury. Muhammad Ali trained here last year; in January this year some North Korean acrobats and United Nations people were staying. There are air-conditioned bungalows, vast meeting halls, extravagant lounges, a swimming pool. There is also a model farm run by the Chinese. Nsele is in the style of the new presidency: one of the many grandiloquent official buildings, chief’s compounds, that have been set up in the derelict capital in recent years, at once an assertion of the power of the chief and of the primacy of Africa. In the new palace for visiting heads of state the baths are gold-plated: my informant was someone from another African country, who had stayed there.

  So the Belgian past recedes and is made to look as shabby as its defaced monuments. Elima gives half a page to the fifteen-day journey of the Equator subcommissioner to Bomongo; but Stanley, who pioneered the Congo route, who built the road from the port of Matadi to Kinshasa, has been dethroned. In the museum a great iron wheel from one of the wagons used on that road is preserved by the Belgian curator (and what labour that wheel speaks of); but Mount Stanley is now Mont Ngaliema, a presidential park; and the statue of Stanley that overlooked the rapids has been replaced by the statue of a tall anonymous tribesman with a spear. At the Hôtel des Chutes in Kisangani the town’s old name of Stanleyville survives on some pieces of crockery. The broken coffee cups are now used for sugar and powdered milk; when they go the name will have vanished.

  The Belgian past is being scrubbed out as the Arab past has been scrubbed out. The Arabs were the Belgians’ rivals in the eastern Congo; an Arab was once governor of the Stanley Falls station. But who now associates the Congo with a nineteenth-century Arab empire? A Batetela boy remembered that his ancestors were slave-catchers for the Arabs; they changed sides when the Belgians came and offered them places in their army. But that was long ago. The boy is now a student of psychology, on the lookout, like so many young Zairois, for some foreign scholarship; and the boy’s girl friend, of another tribe, people in the past considered enslavable, laughed at this story of slave trading.

  The bush grows fast over what were once great events or great disturbances. Bush has buried the towns the Arabs planned, the orchards they planted, as recently, during the post-independence troubles, bush buried the fashionable eastern suburbs of Stanleyville, near the Tshopo falls. The Belgian villas were abandoned; the Africans came first to squat and then to pillage, picking the villas clean of metal, wire, timber, bathtubs and lavatory bowls (both useful for soaking manioc in), leaving only ground-floor shells of brick and masonry. In 1975 some of the ruins still stand, and they look very old, like a tropical, overgrown Pompeii, cleared of its artifacts, with only the ruins of the Château de Venise night-club giving a clue to the cultural life of the vanished settlement.

  And it is surprising how, already, so little of Belgium remains in the minds of people. A man of forty—he had spent some years in the United States—told me that his father, who was born in 1900, remembered the Belgian rubber levy and the cutting off of hands. A woman said that her grandfather had brought white priests to the village to protect the villagers against harsh officials. But, ironically, the people who told these stories both might have been described as évolués. Most people under thirty, breaking out of the bush into teaching jobs and administrative jobs in Kinshasa, said they had heard nothing about the Belgians from their parents or grandparents.

  One man, a university teacher, said, “The Belgians gave us a state. Before the Belgians came we had no state.” Another man said he had heard from his grandfather only about the origins of the Bantu people: they wandered south from Lake Chad, crossed the river into an “empty” country, inhabited only by pygmies, “a primitive people,” whom they drove away into the deep forest. For most the past is a blank; and history begins with their own memories. Most record a village childhood, a school, and then—the shock of independence. To a man from Bandundu, the son of a “farmer,” and the first of his village to be educated, the new world came suddenly in 1960 with the arrival in his village of soldiers of the disintegrating Congolese army. “I saw soldiers for the first time then, and I was very frightened. They had no officers. They treated the women badly and killed some men. The soldiers were looking for white people.”

  In the colonial days, a headmaster told me, the school histories of the Congo began with the late-fifteenth-century Portuguese navigators, and then jumped to the nineteenth century, to the missionaries and the Arabs and the Belgians. African history, as it is now written, restores Africans to Africa, but it is no less opaque: a roll call of tribes, a mention of great kingdoms. So it is in Introduction à l’Histoire de l’Afrique Noire, published in Zaire last year. So it is in the official Profils du Zaire, which—ignoring Portuguese, missionaries and Arabs—jumps from the brief mention of mostly undated African kingdoms to the establishment of the Congo Free State. The tone is cool and legalistic. King Leopold II’s absolute powers are spoken of in just the same way as the powers of older African kings. Passion enters the story only with the events of independence.

  The past has vanished. Facts in a book cannot by themselves give people a sense of history. Where so little has changed, where bush and river are so overwhelming, another past is accessible, better answering African bewilderment and African religious beliefs: the past as le bon vieux temps de nos ancêtres.

  IN THE PRESIDENTIAL park at Mont Ngaliema, formerly Mount Stanley, where the guards wear decorative uniforms, and the gates are decorated with bronze plaques—the bad art of modern Africa: art that no longer serves a religious or magical purpose, attempts an alien repre-sentationalism and becomes mannered and meaningless, suggesting a double mimicry: African art imitating itself, imitating African-inspired Western art—on Mont Ngaliema there are some colonial graves of the 1890s.

  They have been gathered together in neat terraces and are screened by cypress and flamboyant. There, above the rapids—the brown river breaking white on the rocks but oddly static in appearance, the white crests never moving: an eternal level sound of water—the pioneers grandly lie. The simple professions recur: commis, agent commercial, chaudronnier [boilermaker], capitaine de steamboat, prêtre, s/officier de la Force Publique. Only Madame Bernard is sans profession. Not all were Belgians; some were Norwegians; one missionary was English.

  In one kind of imperialist writing these people are heroic. Joseph Conrad, in his passage through the Congo in 1890, just before those
burials began on Mont Ngaliema, saw otherwise. He saw people who were too simple for an outpost of progress, people who were part of the crowd at home, and dependent on that crowd, their strength in Africa, like the strength of the Romans in Britain, “an accident arising from the weakness of others,” their “conquest of the earth” unredeemed by an idea, “not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea.”

  “In a hundred years,” Conrad makes one of these simple people say in “An Outpost of Progress” (1897), “there will perhaps be a town here. Quays, and warehouses, and barracks, and—and—billiard-rooms. Civilization, my boy, and virtue—and all.” That civilization, so accurately defined, came; and then, like the villas at Stanleyville and the Château de Venise night-club, vanished. “Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags—rags that would fly off at the first good shake”: this is from the narrator of Heart of Darkness (1902). “No; you want a deliberate belief.”

  The people who come now—after the general flight—are like the people who came then. They offer goods, deals, technical skills, the same perishable civilization; they bring nothing else. They are not pioneers; they know they cannot stay. They fill the night-clubs (now with African names); they keep the prostitutes (now in African dress; foreign dress is outlawed for African women) busy around the Memling Hotel. So, encircled by Africa, now dangerous again, with threats of expulsion and confiscation, outpost civilization continues: at dinnertime in the Café de la Paix the two old men parade the young prostitutes they have picked up, girls of fourteen or fifteen. Old men: their last chance to feed on such young blood: Kinshasa may close down tomorrow.