This Side Jordan (25 page)

Here he was now.

‘Nice to see you again, Johnnie.’

Cameron wore a light suit of some wrinkleproof material, the type of suit sold by tropical outfitters in Bond Street. He had probably picked that shade of grey because it matched the sincere grey of his glasses’ frame. Johnnie became conscious of his own clothes – limp sweat-pocked shirt with the sleeves rolled up; khaki trousers clumsily sewn by a local tailor and badly pressed by Whiskey with a charcoal iron.

‘Two more, Kwaku,’ he called, half angrily, and the old man appeared on the stoep, bearing in arthritic hands the tray of bottles and glasses.

‘I expect you’re wondering why I’ve come out again so soon,’ Cameron said briskly. ‘I’ll go directly to the point, Johnnie. First of all, the pilot scheme we agreed upon. I realized afterwards, of course, that boys from secondary schools simply wouldn’t do. If we had more time to train them, yes. But as it is, we’ve got to go further up. I mean the university here – that’s where the real administrative potential exists. We’ve been trying to do things on the cheap. We can’t think in those terms any more.’

Openmouthed, Johnnie gazed at the other man.

‘From now on,’ Cameron was saying, ‘our thinking must be on a larger scale. That brings up the second and most important point. I’ve put the case before the Board –’

He paused. He poured out his beer and took a quick sip.

‘It’s all arranged,’ Cameron said, and his voice was almost brusque in his mannerly attempt to be casual in triumph. ‘James is going to be retired right away. That’s one reason for my trip – I have to tell him. Bedford, of course, will be going – perhaps you’ve heard. I shall come out here and manage the Textile Branch myself, at least until after Independence. I managed Textiles in Lagos, you know, for quite some time before I got the partnership. It’ll be a temporary measure – I shan’t stay indefinitely. I’ll tell you quite frankly, Johnnie, once things have been organized here, I’ve been promised a senior partnership when Mr. Bright retires next year. You can see, then, that I’ll need an assistant, a man who can learn quickly, who can help with the Africanization programme, and to whom I can ultimately hand over.’

He broke off and smiled.

‘Will you do it, Johnnie?’ Cameron asked.

Johnnie gaped at him. Assistant manager, with the prospect of becoming manager within a year. It would be meteoric, compared with the Firm’s past policies. But things happened quickly nowadays. The time of the twenty-year period of virtual apprenticeship was over.

Johnnie felt vaguely that he ought to observe a decent interval of deliberation. But it would be pointless to pretend there was any real question at all.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Certainly I will.’

‘Good,’ Cameron said. ‘I knew you would. Another thing, Johnnie. I’m not particularly worried about your short experience in Africa, but when you take over from me, you’ll need a right-hand man, someone who knows the country inside out. I’ve found just the chap. An African. I knew him at the London School of Economics. I went back a few years ago,
you know, and got my degree. He’s an odd sort of fellow, but rather brilliant in his way. Bit of luck, really, my knowing him. That was where I was this morning – seeing him. The way I visualize it, the three of us will work in close co-operation over this Africanization business. You, myself, and Victor.’

Johnnie blinked.

‘Who? Who did you say?’

‘Victor Edusei.’

Johnnie threw back his head and laughed. So this was Victor’s informant in London. No wonder the African had been so amused, so smug, that first time.

‘That’s strange,’ Cameron said. ‘Victor did the same thing. He said he wasn’t much interested in textiles, but nevertheless it was the only job in the country that would tempt him. But he wouldn’t say why. He told me you’d met. What did you think of him?’

‘I may as well admit it – I didn’t like him.’

‘Well, it was mutual, as no doubt you know. But I don’t give a damn whether you like each other or not. All I want to know is – can you work together?’

Johnnie hesitated.

‘I think so,’ he said finally. ‘We’ll watch each other like hawks, but perhaps that won’t be such a bad idea. One thing about him – he doesn’t put on an act. At least you know where you stand with a person like that.’

‘Yes,’ Cameron said. ‘That’s precisely what he had to say about you.’

Johnnie drove back to the office alone. He parked his car and walked along the street to Allkirk, Moore & Bright’s old building, the building that had stood since the year of the last Ashanti War.

He walked past Mandiram’s, and suddenly he stopped.

Cora was in there. She was dressed in yellow, and on her jaundiced face was an expression of hopeless longing. She stood at the brocade counter, and her hands quivered over a bolt of rich blue.

Johnnie looked quickly away. Then he crossed the street, so she would not see him.

That afternoon, Johnnie and Miranda left the baby in the care of Whiskey’s young wife while they drove out to Sakumono beach. They walked along the sand, past a grove of palms, a sacred grove. A few old fishing boats rested on the shore near the palms. They were grey and cracked, husks of fishing boats, like shells cast off by sea creatures. Beside them, the women of the village waited with their headpans for the evening boats to ride the wild breakers, bringing the day’s catch to shore.

Miranda walked close to the fetish huts, little hives of woven straw, concealing their power and their fear from the casual eye.

Johnnie watched her. She would never know what was inside the huts, what collection of bones or tangled hair or freak sea-spine comprised their godhead. They were tightly tied at the top of the hive, sealed off as their worshippers were sealed, defying curiosity.

The green ragged leaves of the coconut palms rustled and whispered, ancient untranslatable voices.

But there was another voice on the wind. In the nearby fishing village, a young man was singing a highlife, a new song.

N
athaniel lifted his son up and took him onto the stoep. In front of the house the city sprawled, lax-limbed, like a giant fisherman tired after work, like a giant cocoa-picker tired after work. The houses sprawled yellow-brown along the shore, and it was not yet night. The lamps were not lighted yet, and the night drums had only begun. The women at their stalls were still selling hot kenkey balls and peeled oranges. There was a smell of sweet food frying on charcoal burners. The mammy-lorries honked their horns, the city’s voice.

And beyond the city, the plains. And beyond the plains, the forest. And beyond the forest, the desert.

‘Aya!’ he cried. ‘Shall we call him Joshua? That’s a good name, isn’t it?’

‘He has his names already,’ she said, smiling.

‘But Joshua – that’s a good name.’

‘All right,’ she said, ‘if you want it.’

Nathaniel held the baby up again, high in his arms.

‘See – ’ he said, ‘yours, Joshua.’

– Someone saw it. Someone crossed that River and won that battle. Someone took that city and made it his.

‘You’ll know what to do with it, boy, won’t you?’ he said softly, pleadingly. ‘You’ll know how to make it work. You’ll know how to make it all go well.’

The baby began to cry. Aya shouted that it was feeding time and did he want the baby to catch a chill out there anyway?

Nathaniel adjusted his glasses and walked indoors, the child held clumsily in his arms. He felt a little self-conscious, even in front of his wife, and wondered why he let himself be carried away.

Aya took the baby and put him to her breast. Nathaniel got out the new curriculum and picked up his pen. But he could not concentrate on the work.

He glanced at his son, and the name kept beating through his mind like all the drums of Ghana.

– Joshua, Joshua, Joshua. I beg you. Cross Jordan, Joshua.

THE END

M
argaret Laurence completed the first full draft of
This Side Jordan
, a highly topical novel about Africans and Europeans in the Gold Coast, in 1957 – the year the colony gained independence as Ghana – and it was published in 1960. Thus we look at it now through two dense and different screens of events: Laurence’s own later achievement in the cycle of Canadian novels that began with the publication of
The Stone Angel
in 1964; and the changes that have taken place in Africa since 1957 and have forced us to reconsider what Laurence herself described as “the predominantly optimistic outlook of many Africans and many western liberals in the late 1950s and early 1960s,” an outlook she saw reflected in her books on Africa.

This Side Jordan
was the first work – and in many ways a tentative one – of a major literary career, and also a book that, if we see it as merely topical, deals with events long superseded. But, unlike many such apprentice books reflecting a lost past, it is a novel that continues to be read in its own right and not merely because of Laurence’s later and better-known
books. And there are excellent reasons for its tenacious survival when so many novels inspired by the breakup of the British Empire are already forgotten.
This Side Jordan
remains important for two reasons: for its peculiar insights into the changes going on in the outlook of Africans during the 1950s and in their relation to the Europeans; and for its relationship to Laurence’s other writings.

This Side Jordan
was Laurence’s first published book, though some of the short stories about Africa that were collected in
The Tomorrow-Tamer
(1963) had already appeared. With the latter collection, and
The Prophet’s Camel Bell
(1963), arguably the best travel book ever written by a Canadian, it forms a closely knit group projecting the seven years of experience, in Somaliland and in Ghana – experience of strange places and of her own often unexpected reactions to them – that really started Laurence off as a writer. She had indeed been writing since her teens, but in Africa took place the happy conjunction of time to spare and an environment that from the beginning engaged her imagination. As she herself observed, “I was fortunate in going to Africa when I did – in my early twenties – because for some years I was so fascinated by the African scene that I was prevented from writing an autobiographical first novel.”

Laurence used her African experiences and first impressions so intensively and with such empathetic imagination that, by the time in the early 1960s when she turned to her mythical Canadian community of Manawaka, she no longer had the sense of a need to write about the continent that had once so commandingly preoccupied her, and none of the major characters in her Canadian novels is shown as having been anywhere near Africa. Yet, though the experience of Africa itself seems to have become encapsulated in Laurence’s
memory, the links between
This Side Jordan
and the later novels are in a formal way very clear.

This Side Jordan
not merely took the place of a thinly disguised fictional autobiography as its writer’s opening book. It also showed itself as something more than a mere apprentice’s exercise by the audacity with which it handled the vital conjunction in the mid-twentieth century of the African tribal consciousness and the European rational and individualized consciousness.

In appearance at least,
This Side Jordan
is a realistic third-person novel, a “well-made” book rather neatly arranged around an African couple, Nathaniel and Aya Amegbe, and an English couple, Johnnie and Miranda Kestoe. The place is the Gold Coast capital of Accra, and the time is the eve of independence; with a touch of rather obvious symbolism, Aya and Miranda have children in time to anticipate the birth of the new state.

The appearance of a deliberately integrated structure is deceptive, as the reader begins to anticipate when he finds his attention engaged by individual scenes – a market, a night club, a noisy religious procession – which are richly evoked and at times divert one’s attention from the flow of the narrative to admire the local colour on the way. And in fact, as Laurence herself has stated, she wrote the novel in a series of episodes, beginning with the final scenes, and only after a great deal of writing did she see the novel as a whole and realize that there was a natural order to it.

Laurence had already, it seems, adopted the practice that she developed in her later novels of conceiving the characters first and allowing the action to take its shape from their
inter
action. In fact, though the novel is told by an anonymous narrator, we actually see everything through the alternating
viewpoints of the two leading male characters, and we observe the other people in the novel, however important they may be, through their eyes; the pattern of alternating chapters, devoted to African and European points of view respectively, is perhaps somewhat mechanical in effect, but nonetheless effective in a novel where the theme of opposing cultures is dominant and the issues, at that moment in colonial history, are clear and straightforward.

This Side Jordan
departs from the orthodox third-person novel in developing the interior monologue in a way that anticipated Laurence’s richly varied experimental renderings of awareness and memory in the books of the Manawaka cycle. Later on, in an address, “Gadgetry or Growing: Form and Voice in the Novel” (1969), Laurence expressed doubts about the effectiveness of what she had done in
This Side Jordan
.

The African chapters not only have authenticity. They carry conviction in a surprising way when one considers that Laurence lived only five years in Ghana, and, while she was there, mingled mainly with Africans who were already largely
Europeanized. The crucial passages in these interior monologues are those in which Nathaniel’s tribal myths – those of his ancestors and his own early childhood – clash with the Christian myths and values imposed on him from the time he went to mission school as a small boy. In this sense Nathaniel is the type of the educated African at the end of the colonial era in the late 1950s.

What is especially interesting is that Laurence does not attempt to treat tribal beliefs as rationally comprehensible concepts; rather she materializes them as visions and voices in what seems to be a bicameral mind in the process of detachment from the world of myth.

One can get a sense of Laurence’s intuitive originality by reading
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
, a controversial book in which Julian Jaynes traces the rise of rationality in the ancient world through the breakdown of the myth-making mentality, a change he attributes to the influence of massive external catastrophes impinging on ancient myth-dominated cultures. But Jaynes did not publish his book until 1978. Laurence was already putting forward similar ideas two decades before him in her portrayal of Nathaniel Amegbe struggling with the voices of myth and custom that echo in his mind as he makes his way through a world irrevocably changing under the influence of colonialism and its aftermath.

This Side Jordan
is a brilliant imaginative grasping of what must indeed have been going on in terms of changing awareness in the minds of many Africans of this period. In terms of Laurence’s work as a whole, it takes on importance as the first of her explorations of the various uses of the interior monologue as a means of giving fictional form to the way our
minds work as they mingle memory and present perception in the great tapestry of the retrospective consciousness.

This Side Jordan
was the best of a number of novels published during the 1960s by Canadians who had lived and served in West Africa, and it can still be read as a valuable fictional document of the times. But, more than that, Laurence carried out the unusual feat of writing a vividly topical novel that would turn, as time went on, into what seems now a valid work of historical fiction. This, I think, is because she wrote about people – both Europeans and Africans – who remembered the past vividly and lived the present fully, but who also looked to the future that has been unfolding in Africa since the book’s publication. Some of them – mainly Africans – looked to the future with a naive optimism, and some were still too trapped in tradition to look anywhere but into the past; others, particularly the older European merchants, anticipated with dread the collapse of the paternalistic establishment they had created. Yet others, less naive, saw the future in more realistic terms, like the ruthlessly climbing young Englishman, Johnnie Kestoe, who sees in the rapidly changing course of events the setting for his own career, and Victor Edusei, the realistic and English-educated African journalist, who utters to Nathaniel a prophecy in which we see Laurence in the late 1950s foreseeing with remarkable accuracy the course that events in Ghana and so many other of the liberated African states would take once these countries gained their independence.

Of course one does not count political foresight among the necessary virtues of a novelist. But, taken with Laurence’s evident understanding of the role of myth and custom in primitive societies, its presence does indicate the kind of many-sided sensitivity to the total nature of a community that makes for successful social realist fiction. In this and other ways.
This Side Jordan
is not only the first chronologically of Laurence’s novels but also a book that, despite all the vast differences in setting and action, anticipated almost all that Laurence eventually achieved in her Manawaka novels.