A Bend in the River (19 page)

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.

Indar said, “We are going to a party after dinner. It’s being 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.

Indar said, “This lovely lady is our hostess. Her name is Yvette.”

He bent over her and appeared to hold her in an embrace. It was a piece of pantomime. She playfully arched her back to receive his embrace, but his cheek barely brushed hers, he never touched her breast, and only the tips of his fingers rested on her back, on the silk blouse.

It was a house of the Domain, like Indar’s. But all the upholstered furniture had been cleared out of the sitting room and had been replaced by cushions and bolsters and African mats. Two or three reading lamps had been put on the floor, so that parts of the room were in darkness.

Yvette said, referring to the furniture, “The President has an exaggerated idea of the needs of Europeans. I’ve dumped all that velvety stuff in one of the bedrooms.”

Remembering what Indar had told me, I ignored the irony in her voice, and felt that she was speaking with privilege, the privilege of someone close to the President.

A number of people were already there. Indar followed Yvette deeper into the room, and I followed Indar.

Indar said, “How’s Raymond?”

Yvette said, “He’s working. He’ll look in later.”

We sat down all three next to a bookcase. Indar lounged against a bolster, a man at ease. I concentrated on the music. As so often when I was with Indar on the Domain, I was prepared only to watch and listen. And this was all new to me. I hadn’t been to a Domain party like this. And the atmosphere itself in that room was something I had never experienced before.

Two or three couples were dancing; I had visions of women’s legs. I had a vision especially of a girl in a green dress who sat on a straight-backed dining chair (one of the house set of twelve). I studied her knees, her legs, her ankles, her shoes. They were not particularly well made legs, but they had an effect on me. All my
adult life I had looked for release in the bars of the town. I knew only women who had to be paid for. The other side of the life of passion, of embraces freely given and received, I knew nothing of, and had begun to consider alien, something not for me. And so my satisfactions had only been brothel satisfactions, which hadn’t been satisfactions at all. I felt they had taken me further and further away from the true life of the senses and I feared they had made me incapable of that life.

I had never been in a room where men and women danced for mutual pleasure, and out of pleasure in one another’s company. Trembling expectation was in that girl’s heavy legs, the girl in the green dress. It was a new dress, loosely hemmed, not ironed into a crease, still suggesting the material as it had been measured out and bought. Later I saw her dancing, watched the movements of her legs, her shoes; and such a sweetness was released in me that I felt I had recovered a part of myself I had lost. I never looked at the girl’s face, and it was easy in the semi-gloom to let that remain unknown. I wanted to sink into the sweetness; I didn’t want anything to spoil the mood.

And the mood became sweeter. The music that was being played came to an end, and in the wonderfully lit room, blurred circles of light thrown onto the ceiling from the lamps on the floor, people stopped dancing. What next came on went straight to my heart—sad guitars, words, a song, an American girl singing “Barbara Allen.”

That voice! It needed no music; it hardly needed words. By itself it created the line of the melody; by itself it created a whole world of feeling. It is what people of our background look for in music and singing: feeling. It is what makes us shout
“Wa-wa!
Bravo!” and throw bank notes and gold at the feet of a singer. Listening to that voice, I felt the deepest part of myself awakening, the part that knew loss, homesickness, grief, and longed for love. And in that voice was the promise of a flowering for everyone who listened.