A Bend in the River (18 page)

And far from being his host and guide, I became the man who was led about. It wasn’t all that absurd. I had so little to show him. All the key points of the town I knew could be shown in a couple of hours, as I discovered when I drove him around later that morning.

There was the river, with a stretch of broken promenade near the docks. There were the docks themselves; the repair yards with open corrugated-iron sheds full of rusting pieces of machinery; and some way downriver the ruined cathedral, beautifully overgrown and looking antique, like something in Europe—but you could only look from the road, because the bush was too thick and the site was famous for its snakes. There were the scuffed squares with their defaced and statueless pedestals; the official buildings from the colonial time in avenues lined with palmiste trees; the lycée, with the decaying masks in the gun room (but that bored Indar); the van der Weyden and Mahesh’s Bigburger place, which were hardly things to show to a man who had been to Europe.

There were the
cités
and the squatters’ settlements (some of them I was driving into for the first time) with their hills of rubbish, their corrugated dusty lanes, and a lot of old tires lying in the dust. To me the rubbish hills and the tires were features of the
cités
and shanty towns. The spidery little children that we had here did wonderful somersaults off those tires, running, jumping on the tires, and then springing high in the air. But it was nearly noon. There were no children doing somersaults when we drove by; and I realized that (after a monument with nothing on it, and pedestals without statues) I was literally just showing Indar a lot of rubbish. I cut short the tour at that point. The rapids and the fishermen’s village—that had been incorporated into the State Domain; that he had already seen.

As we drove to the Domain—the intervening area, once empty, now filling up with the shacks of new arrivals from the villages: shacks which, in Indar’s company, I seemed to be seeing for the first time: the red ground between the shacks stained with rivulets of black or grey-green filth, maize and cassava planted in every free space—as we drove, Indar said, “How long did you say you’ve been living here?”

“Six years.”

“And you’ve shown me everything?”

What hadn’t I shown him? A few interiors of shops and houses and flats, the Hellenic Club—and the bars. But I wouldn’t have
shown him the bars. And really, looking at the place with his eyes, I was amazed at the little I had been living with. And I had stopped seeing so much. In spite of everything, I had thought of the town as a real town; I saw it now as an agglomeration of shack settlements. I thought I had been resisting the place. But I had only been living blind—like the people I knew, from whom in my heart of hearts I had thought myself different.

I hadn’t liked it when Indar had suggested that I was living like our community in the old days, not paying attention to what was going on. But he wasn’t so far wrong. He was talking about the Domain; and for us in the town the Domain had remained only a source of contracts. We knew little of the life there, and we hadn’t wanted to find out. We saw the Domain as part of the waste and foolishness of the country. But more importantly, we saw it as part of the President’s politics; and we didn’t want to become entangled with that.

We were aware of the new foreigners on the periphery of our town. They were not like the engineers and salesmen and artisans we knew, and we were a little nervous of them. The Domain people were like tourists, but they were not spenders—everything was found for them on the Domain. They were not interested in us; and we, thinking of them as protected people, looked upon them as people separate from the true life of the place, and for this reason not quite real, not as real as ourselves.

Without knowing it, and thinking all the time that we were keeping our heads down and being wise and protecting our interests, we had become like the Africans the President ruled. We were people who felt only the weight of the President’s power. The Domain had been created by the President; for reasons of his own he had called certain foreigners to live there. For us that was enough; it wasn’t for us to question or look too closely.

Sometimes, after Ferdinand had come to the town to see his mother during one of her shopping trips, I had driven him back to his hostel in the Domain. What I saw then was all that I knew, until Indar became my guide.

It was as Indar had said. He had a house in the Domain and he was a guest of the government. His house was carpeted and
furnished showroom style—twelve hand-carved dining chairs, upholstered chairs in fringed synthetic velvet in two colours in the sitting room, lamps, tables, air conditioners everywhere. The air conditioners were necessary. The Domain houses, naked in levelled land, were like grander concrete boxes, with roofs that didn’t project at all, so that at any hour of a bright day one wall, or two, got the full force of the sun. With the house there was also a boy, in the Domain servant costume—white shorts, white shirt and a white
jacket de boy
(instead of the apron of colonial days). It was the Domain style for people in Indar’s position. The style was the President’s. It was he who had decided on the costumes for the boys.

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?”